How I am Voting on the UA School Levy (Issue 43) and Why - by Colin Gawel

November 5, 2017 Colin Gawel

Editor's note: To those of you new to Pencilstorm, we mostly shy away from political commentary as the world already has too much of it and takes precious time away from our debate about who belongs in the rock n roll hall of fame. However, as a citizen with a family and small business in Upper Arlington, I do go on the record before every election day. You can agree or disagree or whatever, but this is where I stand. - Colin Gawel

I'm not going to get into numbers. To me, that is irrelevant. I've read all the stuff and yes, building and fixing the Upper Arlington Schools is going to cost money. A lot of money. It's going to cost you and it's going to cost me. There is no way around that fact because accomplishing great things takes sacrifice. Nothing worth doing comes easy.

Sacrifice is the key word. Somebody built the original schools before us. And the roads. And the sewage and the power grid. And the parks, pools, tennis courts, and the libraries. And half the sidewalks. That took sacrifice.

Recently, I was up late and caught the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan on some random channel. Charging out of the boats into machine gun fire on D-Day was sacrifice. First responders charging up into the World Trade centers on 9/11 was sacrifice. We are quick to praise Americans who sacrifice for the greater good but when the time comes for us to do our part do we answer the call? Or do we just sing the National Anthem and wave mini flags at the 4th of July Parade?

Or more specifically, do I answer the call?

Yes, the extra money is a bite. But I welcome and accept the opportunity to give something back to a community that has been so good to me and my family. I am ready to roll up my sleeves and chip in a little extra for a project that would benefit the kids of Upper Arlington for the rest of my lifetime. I've never been asked to storm a beach or charge into a burning building so this is my chance to stretch out of my comfort zone and contribute to a greater good.

Imagine one day standing in front of that glorious, new Upper Arlington High School and looking around at your neighbors and saying "It was hard, but we did this together." Seriously, imagine how amazing that would be. The legacy that would live in the community.

We have a chance to make history on November 7th. Real history with real buildings and real kids. I say we take it. It's a little scary no doubt, but I'll help you if you help me. We can do this together. It just takes a little mental toughness. A little grit. A little teamwork. It takes sacrifice. Please join me in voting "yes" on Issue 43 and I'll see you standing in front of that new high school one day. - Colin G.

Colin Gawel plays in the band Watershed and is the owner of Colin's Coffee. He is the founder of Pencilstorm and his favorite two records are Dream Police and Darkness on the Edge of Town. You can read about his life in the book Hitless Wonder.

Pencilstorm U.A. Council Summary: All The Interviews and Question Rationale

November 5, 2017 Wal Ozello

As promised, here is a compilation of all the Pencilstorm interviews with Upper Arlington City Council candidates, as well as an interview with Superintendent Paul Imhoff about Issue 43. As a reminder, we published responses unedited.

In addition, it's come to our attention that Pencilstorm was recently quoted in attack ads circulating in Upper Arlington. Pencilstorm had no involvement with these ads, nor were we aware of them before distribution. We disapprove of these negative attack ads.

Pencilstorm is an independent new source. We do not endorse any individual city council candidate and we wish all of them good luck on November 7.

ISSUE 43
Interview with Superintendent Paul Imhoff about Issue 43.

UA CITY COUNCIL INTERVIEWS - WHY PENCILSTORM ASKED THESE QUESTIONS

Our intent was to ask questions more specific to Upper Arlington. We had some discussions with other voters and reviewed various posts on Facebook. We also wanted to keep it short and simple. Here’s why we settled on the questions we did.

If the election were today, would you vote for or against the school levy and why?
While the city council has no jurisdiction over the schools or school board, this levy could have an impact on city finances. If the levy doesn’t pass and the school system makes job cuts, this will mean less income tax collected by the city since the Schools are the number one employer in Upper Arlington. If the levy does pass, residents will incur a large tax increase which may impact the Council’s ability to generate new taxes in the future, not to mention the infrastructure, traffic and construction that the city will need to deal with. Both the Schools and City pull from the same tax base. In the 2017 Community Survey conducted by the city, 21% of the respondents cited “School Infrastructure and Facilities are Aging” as the most important problem facing Upper Arlington and 14% responded with “High Taxes.” This question was asked to see how the candidate view the importance of the school system to the City of Upper Arlington both fiscally and as an attractor to new citizens.

What qualifies you to be on Upper Arlington City Council?
Just like a job interview, we wanted to know what life and professional experiences the candidate has so they can make the tough decisions they’ll face in the upcoming years.

If you had a magic wand and an unlimited budget, what infrastructure project you would implement?
There’s a finite city budget and we can’t pay for everything everyone wants. We can have endless debate about what’s the best way to spend our money. Instead, this question was intended to understand what infrastructure project the candidate is most passionate about.

Looking around Central Ohio, give an example of a community you think is doing it right and one that’s doing it wrong. What could Upper Arlington could learn from both?
You grow and improve by learning from others. This question was designed to see if the candidate was looking at other communities in Central Ohio to understand if there were things we could implement here or pitfalls to avoid.

At Pencilstorm, we all have a love of music. In that vein, what's your favorite album and why?
Music is a great way to make an emotional and human connection. This question was designed to get to know the candidate beyond the issues and if any of them had a passion for a particular album, artist, genre of music, etc.

Below are links of each of the Upper Arlington City Council Candidates to their individual blog:

Francis “Kip” Greenhill

Michele Hoyle

Jim Lynch

Lowell Toms

Pencilstorm also encourages you to watch the Livestream of Leadership UA's October 19 event with all eight city council candidates and school board candidates, as well as Google the candidate names and visit their websites.

Thanks to the community for their interest in our blog. Local UA Politics coverage provided by Wal Ozello. You can email him at Pencilstormstory@gmail.com or try to catch him at Colin's Coffee.

Cindy Sherman at the Wex: Her Camera Always Lies - by Anne Marie

October 23, 2017 AnneMarie LaBue

Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life, an exhibit featuring more than 100 works by the artist spanning more than four decades, opened September 16 and runs through December 31 at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The Cindy Sherman exhibit is the grand finale to a spectacular year in which every artist featured in the Wex galleries was a woman, and each exhibit outshone the next. If you think you’ve never heard of Cindy Sherman, you may be aware of her without realizing it. In the past few decades, she and her work have achieved iconic status. I last saw a Cindy Sherman exhibit years ago at the MoMA in NYC and it was the talk of the town. So, my Cbus friends, I hope that you appreciate how incredibly lucky we are that Sherri Geldin and her fellow magicians at the Wex have managed to procure this show for Columbus. NYC does not get this show. Columbus is the only stop outside of the inaugural show at The Broad in LA and you will not regret working a viewing into your entertainment schedule before 2017 draws to a close.

When you go, I would highly recommend that you take advantage of one of the free docent-led tours that the Wex offers on occasion (call to confirm dates and times) and can be scheduled at other times for groups of 8 or more. That’s what my friends and I did recently and our docent - lovely retired Barrington Elementary librarian Carol, and docent-in-training, Medieval Art History student Izzy - could not have been any more knowledgeable or engaging. Before we knew it, more than an hour and a half had flown by and I had to call the restaurant to push back our dinner reservations at Trillium down the street. But I digress......

We began our tour in front of a giant full wall-sized selfie of Cindy. We decided this particular self-portrait of the artist is unusual in that it is unadulterated. No image-altering makeup, costumes, prosthetics. She sits in what appears to be in an urban bar setting looking steadily off to…? But even though this looks like the real Cindy Sherman, is that who we are supposed to be seeing, or is she supposed to represent someone else, a larger identity? And so the questions begin: Who is Cindy Sherman? What does she want us to see in her art? She stars in all of her photos but claims that they aren’t autobiographical. She has been willing to accept that much of her art is an examination of gender and identity but resists defining herself as a feminist.

Here’s what I know about Sherman (courtesy of Wikipedia and some other quick internet research): Cynthia Morris "Cindy" Sherman was born January 19, 1954 in NJ. She attended college at SUNY Buffalo from 1972-1976. In 1983, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, the first of numerous honors to follow including a MacArthur Fellowship. In 1982, with Sherman still in her twenties, Eli and Edye Broad began with uncanny prescience to amass the world’s largest collection of her art. It’s much of that collection, on loan to the Wex, that makes the current exhibit possible.

Our next stop was a bit of a strange one and I have to thank our docents for encouraging us to make it. We pondered the entry wall painted with the exhibition title at the base of the stairs. We looked at the title - Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life - painted in pale blue and framed in pale pink, the colors typically reserved for baby showers, for representing gender. We decided this is a signal for us to watch for Sherman playing with stereotypical ideas of gender, and with that we dove into the main exhibit starting with one of her latest works from 2016 - Sherman a la Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, part of her recent series of aging starlets, likely as she confronts her own aging now that she’s in her early 60s, within the context of an industry notorious for discarding actresses as they age.

After a quick stop at some of her very early work, we moved on to Untitled Film Stills (1977-80) from when Sherman moved to NYC from Buffalo at the age of 23. In these, she uses makeup, costumes and scenery to present herself as popular stereotypes of generic Hollywood stars and other women. The pictures look so real that at first you struggle to place which film they are from. Even though your brain knows that every picture in the exhibit is Sherman, she is so skilled at the art of deception that you get pulled in. Our group decided that the picture below looks like a young Liz Taylor-type caught in a tryst.

Although she occupies both sides of the camera, Sherman thinks of herself as an artist, not a photographer. For her, and for the viewer, the art is in the transformation and the transformation is intended to make us think about the pervasive influence of history, advertising, cinema and the media on identity and particularly female identity. Nowhere else was this more powerfully evident to me than in the Centerfolds. Artforum magazine commissioned Sherman to create a series of centerfolds. She did, but rather than looking erotic or sexy, hers look scared, hunted and victimized and the magazine rejected them.

I haven’t even scratched the surface here. So much to see! Did I mention that you can see pictures that I swore were Sherman as Courtney Love and Hillary Clinton, but they weren't? Did I mention that you can watch Sherman's 1997 horror movie, Office Killer starring Molly Ringwald, Carol Kane and Jeanne Tripplehorn which, if you bring the kids, is in a separate viewing room along with Sherman as a mutilated hermaphrodite sex doll? Or that there’s a free audio guide with celebrity commentary by Miss Sixteen Candles herself and John Waters (which I didn’t listen to on my first visit but will on my next)?

You just gotta get to the Wex! - AML

#allwomenallyear #theWex #leapintotheWex #womenattheWex #theWexrocks #cindysherman

Pencilstorm Interview: Bob Foulk for UA Council

October 22, 2017 Wal Ozello

There are eight candidates running for four seats on Upper Arlington City Council. Pencilstorm asked each of the candidates five specific questions centered around issues that impacted Upper Arlington residents and questions that were being raised by fellow voters. Pencilstorm will be posting their complete and unedited answers individually throughout October and reposting all their answers together in the first week of November.

We have no answers from Bob Foulk to our questionnaire.

I reached out to Bob on two occasions asking for his participation. After the initial email request, he first called me, and then emailed the following response:

I believe I expressed well in our phone conversation that the questions posed by Pencilstorm were either inappropriate or irrelevant to the real task that will be confronted by anybody elected to our city council. You should have asked what I would do if I won the Ohio Lottery or whether I voted for Don or Hillary in 2016 as well.

If there exists a true journalistic goal of informing voters then you should be asking questions that are relevant to the hard, mostly fiscal-based decisions and priorities that will confront those elected in the next four years and beyond. There are good questions to be asked, and the League of Women Voters, Dispatch, and This Week News have asked them. You should follow their lead.

But being either inappropriate or largely irrelevant to the office sought aside from qualifications, your questions are not worthy of response. I’ll need to take the time to stop by and ask Colin about how these came about.

Sincerely,
Bob Foulk

After series began to run, I followed up and offered him another opportunity to respond. He declined again. I did the same with the other candidate who passed on forum, Omar Ganoom. Once again, we just print exactly what the candidates sent us with no editing and no comment from Pencilstorm whatsoever. - Wal Ozello

As a reminder, here are the questions we sent to all eight city council candidates:

If the election were today, would you vote for or against the school levy and why?

What qualifies you to be on Upper Arlington City Council?

If you had a magic wand and an unlimited budget, what infrastructure project you would implement?

Looking around Central Ohio, give an example of a community you think is doing it right and one that’s doing it wrong. What could Upper Arlington could learn from both?

At Pencilstorm, we all have a love of music. In that vein, what's your favorite album and why?

Pencilstorm is an independent news source and does not endorse any individual candidate. In the coming days, we'll be resposting all the responses we've received in one blog, along with rationale behind why we asked what we did.

Local UA Politics coverage provided by Wal Ozello. You can email him at Pencilstormstory@gmail.com or try to catch him at Colin's Coffee.

Check out coverage of all the candidates we've received responses from by clicking here.

Pencilstorm Interview: Omar Ganoom for UA Council

October 21, 2017 Wal Ozello

We have no answers from Omar Ganoom to our questionnaire.

I reached out to Omar multiple times asking for his participation. After the initial email request, he called me and was critical of two of the questions. I never received a written response.