Oy Vey Ayvazian!: Rogue Machine’s Heaviest Drama Yet

 

Rogue Machine, which earned the Best Season Ovation Award for 2017, is known for pushing the theatrical envelope with edgy, often hard-hitting shows. These hot potato topics range from Western colonialism in Africa in Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs to racism at home in Mexican Day, Dutch Masters and One Night in Miami to contemporary anti-fascism in Daytona to psycho-sexual angst in bled for the household truth and Cock, et al.

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But with its world premiere of 100 Aprils Rogue Machine is tackling its heaviest topic yet: Genocide. Playwright/co-star Leslie Ayvazian's one-acter takes a deep dive into the 1915 ethnic cleansing of Armenians and the trans-generational PTSD that is passed down to its characters in a 1982 psychiatric ward of a hospital. Well, it’s not exactly a musical comedy - in dramatizing the mass murder of Armenians 100 Aprils is unrelentingly depressing.

 

LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT Theater Review

The Bristol Old Vic Production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a masterful rendition of Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece about the human condition. The British cast is led by the venerable thesp Jeremy Irons, who won an Oscar for 1990’s Reversal of Fortune, and Lesley Manville, who was Academy Award-nominated this year for portraying Daniel Day-Lewis’ sadistic sister in Phantom Thread.

 

The approximately three and a half hour two-acter is the stuff of Greek tragedy and Shakespearian drama, as it follows the descent of the Tyrone family into the long night of the soul. All of the onstage action is set at the Tyrones’ coastal cottage in Connecticut, where the fog rolls in and out as a foghorn sounds in the background. (Ask not for whom the foghorn tolls - it tolls for thee!) Joining James (Irons) and Mary Tyrone (Manville) are their sons, James Jr. (Rory Keenan, who has appeared often at Dublin’s fabled Abbey Theatre) and Edmund (Matthew Beard), who proceed to tear one another - and their selves - to pieces, like birds of prey in a familial feeding frenzy over faults and flaws, real or imagined.

 

Jim Crow Supremes Enshrine Voter Lynch Law and May Have Stolen the 2018 Election for Trump's GOP

The US Supreme Court (by the usual 5-4) has certified Ohio’s Jim Crow stripping of more than a million mostly black and Hispanic citizens from the 2018 voter registration rolls. Unless the Democrats effectively respond, a GOP victory in the 2018 mid-term election may be a done deal.

The decision approves Ohio’s race-based assault on the right to vote. Secretary of State Jon Husted has been stripping citizens who don’t vote in consecutive federal elections. His office mailed some 1.5 million queries to registered voters. He got back fewer than 300,000 responses – and then stripped some 1.2 million voters from the computer files.

Husted (now running for lieutenant governor) says he’s sent voters a notice after they skip a single federal election. If they don’t vote or respond in the next four years, they lose their ballot.

Court documents confirm that those eliminated are mostly urban blacks and Hispanics in mostly Democratic districts. Voters in rural Republican districts are often not queried, and their registration rolls are not stripped.

Quotable Quotes About Psychiatric Pseudoscience

Most of the following quotes come from the article entitled “Psychiatry: Science or Fraud?” Please read the original article at:http://chemtrailsgeelong.com/psy-fraud.html

 

"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." -- Thomas Jefferson
"Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing." -- John Stuart Mill

 

The World According to Seymour Hersh

By David Swanson
Seymour Hersh’s new memoir, Reporter: A Memoir, occasionally notes the failure of the exposure of wrong-doing to result in accountability or policy reforms. That’s the closest the book generally comes to touching on any motivation behind Hersh’s work related to ending war or torture or any other evil. The exception is the bit about Hersh’s time working for Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign. In 1960, in Chapter 3, Hersh joins the U.S. Army without one word as to why. In Chapter 14 he self-censors the story of President Richard Nixon seriously assaulting the First Lady because Hersh thought it was a story unrelated to public policy. Wasn’t allowing Nixon to remain in office and unindicted related to public policy?

Franklin County Green Party Monthly Meeting

White man with goatee and dark hair in green shirt holding a mic at the podium

Tuesday, June 12, 2018, 6:00 PM Open meeting of the Central Committee, 7:00 PM Public meeting with guest speaker
Guest Speaker: Brett Joseph, Green Party candidate for Ohio lieutenant governor
Brett will discuss Green Party key talking points related to economic revitalization and sustainability. He’ll address how the seemingly favorable jobs report is misleading and doesn’t tell the whole story. He will talk about how to present the Green Party message of unity around common values while also offering a powerful and transformative challenge to the dysfunctional status quo.
Northwood Building, 2231 N. High St., Room 100
Parking available behind the building in “R” spaces.
fcgreenparty@gmail.com
Donate to the Franklin County Green Party!

A Call to Corrective Arms

Lots of white handled thick marker pens all in a row making squiggly lines of different colors

While crossing High Street at Graceland Boulevard in Clintonville the other day, I noticed a bumper sticker stuck to one of the light poles. It read “Fluoride: There is poison in the tap water” with a link to the ultra-conservative, white supremacist site InfoWars.

Though I know it’s nearly impossible to have political ubiquity in a neighborhood as large as Clintonville, one doesn’t expect to see InfoWars stickers peppering a neighborhood that probably went overwhelmingly to Hillary in the last presidential election. It’s much more common to see yard signs with slogans like “hate has no home here” and “no matter where you are from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor” in six different languages. While the anti-fluoride sticker is among the more benign of InfoWars’ stances, it’s still jarring to see.

I thought about what a thing like that said about my neighborhood and how someone who’s perhaps not versed in media literacy might see it and decide to check out the website. And how the internet is full of rabbit holes for one to fall down.

Less than a Month …to Protect our Water

Blue background with partial photo of small child holding a glass of water and words Safe water for our kids, Columbus no place for Frack Waste

Drink Water? Breathe air? Depend on safe soil? Then this urgent message is for you.

Central Ohioans have less than a month to protect our water, air and soil from the fracking waste passing through our watershed. According to industry spokespersons, this “brine” poses little danger to those of us living downstream.

Citing state-of-the-art technology of its injection wells, they boast of their ability to direct millions of gallons of the toxic and radioactive waste safely through our watershed to a final resting place miles underground. Common sense argues that over time injections wells leak and liquids migrate. It also recognizes that the massive volume of Ohio’s fracking waste cannot be safely disposed of anywhere, and certainly not in our watershed, our city’s most precious resource upon which we depend for our very survival.

“Google Should Not Be In The Business Of War”: Understanding the Weaponization of Artificial Intelligence

By Marc Eliot Stein, World BEYOND War

Columbus Community Pride 2018: Marsha P. Johnson Day

Photo of black woman smiling with her hand by her cheek and lots of white flowers in her hair

Monday, June 11, 6-8pm, The Vanderelli Room, 218 McDowell St.

Pride started as a riot — and Marsha P. Johnson, legendary Black trans activist and elder, was there to see it through. Marsha worked throughout her life to protect and support transgender youth and sex workers, building S.T.A.R. [Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries] to serve and house her community. She wasn’t about white-washed and exclusive gay “movements” — and neither are we.

Marsha’s work paved the way for Black trans organizers today — and her politics are at the root of Columbus Community Pride. Join us on Monday, June 11, at the Vanderelli Room, for a celebration of Marsha. Learn about her legacy and impact, and work alongside community members to create a collaborative art project.

This is an all-ages event; families (including chosen family) are encouraged!

This event will feature:

• Art and information about Marsha’s life and contributions

• A talk and discussion of Marsha’s legacy

• A collaborative, community collage to celebrate what Marsha means to us today — QTIPOC especially are encouraged to contribute!

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