This year marks the second anniversary of Cincinnati’s Crafty Supermarket Holiday Show,
a gathering of more than 50 local crafters, artists and designers
making it easy to find those special gifts for all your holiday
shopping.
We don’t need to spend a lot of time explaining to you, dear CityBeat
reader, that John Kasich is not cool. You’re obviously a smart, cool
and very attractive person if you’re reading our Cool Issue fall
preview, while Kasich is a stuffy Republican who thinks it’s cool to
sell bridges to private companies. “Look everybody! A toll booth! Cool!”
In 1999, a young Ohio State alum named
John Kasich was featured in a newspaper article about his potential run
for President of the United States. Nothing out of the ordinary there.
But what was a bit strange, in hindsight, was the way the paper (the San Francisco Chronicle, no less) described this young buck looking to become the most powerful man on the planet.
I’m pretty sure that Gov. John Kasich has
more important things to think about than his favorite restaurant. But
it is clear that Kasich thinks that Bob Evans is pretty damned cool.
During his campaign last year, it was reported that Kasich staffers had
to set all Bob Evans locations into the GPS devices in campaign cars,
although one staffer noted that it really wasn’t necessary since Kasich
knew where they all were located anyway.
College football season is already upon
us, but what many sports fans often fail to realize is that college
basketball is just around the corner. With 10 more weeks of University
of Cincinnati football scheduled to overlap the school’s November
basketball exhibition games, it’s safe to say that this fall is going to
involve watching many, many athletic competitions.
Smarmy, round-shouldered and sporting a
haircut that makes his head look just a little asymmetrical, Ohio Gov.
John Kasich cuts a striking pose in his weekly video addresses. Checking these out
gets you close to the Governor’s mansion in that way that Facebook gets
you close to your friends — that is to say, very and not at all.
There’s a lot to be celebrated about
Cincinnati’s varied theater scene, but one of the coolest aspects might
not be immediately obvious: Cincinnati Shakespeare Company’s stock in
trade is shows that were written four centuries ago. So how is that
cool? Well, let me count the ways. Let’s consider actors, plays and
outreach.
Michael Griffith’s singular new novel, Trophy, opens with this succinct sentence: “Vada Prickett is a corpse.” What follows is not nearly as blunt or immediately discernible — a wild, meta-licious ride rife with puns, crafty word play, digressions, metaphors, tangents and puzzles, all of which eventually lead back to Vada, a 29-year-old “Hose Associate” at a car wash in South Carolina.
The usual narrative of America’s Dust Bowl years goes something like this: Midwestern farmers, driven by greed, recklessly and ignorantly wrecked the land to such a point that it became worthless. They essentially ate themselves to death. But Raj Patel, author of "The Value of Nothing," says it wasn’t some innate, every-man-for-himself style of greed that raped the land; it was the dominant capitalist construct that was to blame.
University of Cincinnati owns an important video sculpture by the man who basically created multimedia art, Nam June Paik. But don’t expect to see Cinci-Mix, which was commissioned in 1996 for an interior wall in then-new Aronoff Center for Design and Art. Because the old-school components — 18 stacked rear-projection monitors playing laser-discs — started breaking down, the College of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning (DAAP) had to put the piece in storage in 2007.