Real Life, Real Live

Lightning flashed through the curtained front window of the loft-like performance space. After days of outages that left thousands without power for up to a week, it was raining...

Opening Volley

The only thing worse than someone who doesn’t care about how they look is someone who truly cares about style … and is going about it horribly wrong. I’m the second...

Teen Spirit

It’s Day Two of ComFest 2011, and Bob Dawson has inadvertently positioned himself as the nucleus of the largest impromptu party of the day. At the center of an atomized mass...2

Rock.0

Everyone likes live music. But getting your friends to slip into that sweet spot in the Venn diagram overlapping live and local has long been a difficult task. For those in...

Organ Grinder

The growling, husky voice that belongs to Tony Monaco carries all the cool and late night wisdom that you would expect from a 53-year-old jazz lifer. He’s been plying his...

Shake, Rattle, & Soul

Time has an interesting effect on cultural trends – add a little and it’s passé and hardly worth more than a disdainful sideways glance. Add a couple decades or so,...22

Tunnel Vision

Ask any kid what they want to be when they grow up, and you can expect the usual battery of responses: fireman, astronaut, teacher – or whatever other generic job title their...

She’s Crafty

Esther Hall is used to finding creative inspiration in the most unlikely of locales. As she puts my thick thumbs to use fashioning cute little hairclips in her Grandview...

Act II

They say that you should write what you know, and that is exactly what singer/actor/cancer survivor Alex Kip is doing. Diagnosed with lymphoma his senior year as a theatre...

Art Wire

Columbus Public Art: Finding Time Performance Drawing by Nikhil Chopra Downtown www.columbuspublicart.com Describing what former OSU student Nikhil Chopra does is difficult....1

Gallery Space: The Voice of Hope

“I always like to be adventurous,” says Ecuadorian artist Jose Bastidas of his decision to move to Columbus more than 10 years ago. Living in New York, a city he “fell in...

The Columbusonian

Here Comes the Sun

I have no way of knowing whether or not the tides will have turned in the heat department by the time this column hits the stands. For all I know, temperatures have skyrocketed...

Opening Volley

Beer and I go way back, like any self-respecting Ohio-born man of German heritage. I had my first beer when I was a freshman in high school. A cute girl at a party shoved a...

Road Trippin’

Even though the “I gotta get outta here” battle cry is usually reserved for Columbus’ winter months, there’s plenty to explore beyond the I-270 border this...

Gallery Space: Go with the Flow

Quick, what’s the most versatile artistic medium you can think of? You guessed it: medical-grade beeswax. You’re so smart, (614) reader. If somehow you’re unfamiliar with...

Art Wire

Finding Time: Grazing Columbus Public Art North Bank Park www.columbuspublicart.com It’s unfortunate the Columbus brain trust ran away from the “Cowtown” nickname; lost...

Hollywood to Hillsboro

He might be the second most famous standup comic to say, ‘f*ck it,’ and move to an Ohio farm (after Dave Chappelle), but Drew Hastings is the more eccentric of the...2

The New Hook

There’s plenty of good to say about the indie-rock-and-gospel-pop cascade put forth by Columbus’ Tin Armor. Still, the foursome of John Umland, Matt Umland, Matt O’Conke...

Into the Woods

As a kid, Alan Saunders liked scaring his friends in the woods behind his home in Delaware. “I was 10 and we were charging our friends 10 cents to walk through the woods,”...

Parting Shot: The Endless Days of...

I’ve always been under the distinct impression that the summers of my youth took place in the 1950s. In reality, they took place in the ’80s and early ’90s, but again, for...

Still Tril

Mark Titus’s ‘About the Author’ note on the Amazon.com page that sells his first book sums it up best: “His blog (clubtrillion.blogspot.com) has recorded over 3.6...

Kings of the Nightlife

The “Musicians Wanted” Craigslist page reads like a digital version of the old corkboard tacked to the walls of neighborhood record stores and guitar shops. Between...