Late on July 1, I was folding clothes at the Laundromat when my mom called, and I complained that there were no stories that night. It was quiet. Too quiet. I sat on top of a folding table, my feet dangling, when Mom and I got on the topic of kids. I told Mom that I wanted to adopt a little boy. “If I had a girl, I might send her back,” I joked.  

There are few exhibition spaces in Cincinnati as dependable and consistent in quality as Aisle Gallery. Its current exhibition, Almost Certain, features two series of abstract paintings by Jeffrey Cortland Jones and Paige Williams. Remarkably, this is the seventh time these two painters have shown together.   

Charlie Kaufman takes things to a whole new level in Synecdoche, New York, an acutely dour metaphysical mind-fuck of a movie with Philip Seymour Hoffman playing an emotionally battered theater director in modern-day Manhattan.  

Painter Lauren Wells says, “self-investiga tion is a bi-product of my painting process.” Through her work, she tries to better under stand the motivations behind the external self. “Typically, my stern gaze becomes the focus,” she says.