http://www.citybeat.com/cincinnati/ Despite a few lapses, Loveland spot a wonderful addition to suburban dining scene Ghostly snow devils swirl around the darkness of Loveland Avenue West, but a steamy window with "Tano" scrawled across it glows with a homey, diffuse light, beckoning us out of the cold. Inside, we find a warm space filled with convivial guests for whom the holiday season is still in full swing. It will be fun to see how Tano Bistro evolves as the seasons change, but for now it's a great place to shelter from the cold.]]> Feb. 9 • The Mad Hatter A lot of Punk bands' political activism extends as far as sporting a stylishly ripped Che Guevera T-shirt, but Strike Anywhere is not a band that wears its politics on (or as) its sleeves. You'd be hard pressed to find a more informed and literate group of guys playing political, social and cultural manifestos at skin-blistering volume.]]> Kim Flora's large-scale encaustic paintings embrace turbulence and chaos One of the last artists to benefit from Cincinnati's city-funded art grant program is Kim Flora. In 2008, she was awarded $6,000 to support the creation of the large-scale encaustic paintings that grace her exhibition 'Personal Vistas,' opening Feb. 5 at PAC Gallery in East Walnut Hills.]]> Ohio law hampers ex-felon's job search Jasen Burwinkel, 27, could be like any number of job seekers in the Tristate, except for one thing: His record includes a theft conviction, a crime for which he served about three months in jail. "It hurts every time I come back from an interview, because they say, 'You have a theft? No job.'" About 650,000 people are released from prison each year in the U.S., and many advocacy groups are pushing for more lenient expungement laws for non-violent offenders as a way to help them gain employment and avoid becoming repeat offenders.]]> Opening this Friday at the Weston Gallery in downtown’s Aronoff Center for the Arts are three solo projects: Alice Pixley Young’s Nightfall, Steve Zieverink’s Live Station, and paintings and wall drawings by Rick Mallette. While Young’s installations deal with nostalgia and memory, Zieverink’s creative process takes into account our ever-progressing technologies and how these new frontiers affect not just aesthetics but biology, personal identity and other basic building blocks of the human experience. Through Feb. 28.]]> Cincinnati World Cinema is back with LunaFest, a collection of 10 short films “by women filmmakers, for women and the men who care about them.” The fest presents multi-genre offerings from across the globe in styles and subject matter that range from amusing to affecting. LunaFest’s two screenings — 7:30 p.m. Feb. 9 and 10 at the Carnegie in Covington — will also include post-screening discussions.]]> The National Underground Railway Freedom Center’s Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America opened last week and is up through May 31. Convinced that no good can come of ignoring or forgetting this shameful aspect of American history — some 5,000 murderous, illegal lynchings, mostly of African-American males, from 1882 to 1968 — the Center has taken a traveling show that sometimes elicited anger in earlier venues and hopes to make it a means of furthering understanding rather than undermining it.]]> Romantic melodrama piles on the schmaltz Lasse Hallstrom's adaptation of the Nicholas Sparks novel 'Dear John' places his usual relationship melodrama against the topical backdrop of wartime service. Sparks' stories are known for sentimental and soap-lite scripting, but Hallstrom's marks the first time that, as a critic, I came to understand the pejorative meaning of "chick flick." Grade: D-. ]]> A lot of Punk bands’ political activism extends as far as sporting a stylishly ripped Che Guevera T-shirt, but Strike Anywhere isn't a band that wears its politics on (or as) its sleeves. You'd be hard pressed to find a more informed and literate group of guys playing political, social and cultural manifestos at skin-blistering volume with a melodic punch for fans that they hope to educate every bit as much as entertain. They play The Mad Hatter.]]> A pivotal decade in photography explodes at Cincinnati Art Museum It's hard for our generation to imagine controversy over color photography. In a day and age when many art schools have shut down their traditional black-and-white darkrooms in favor of going digital, color is simply taken for granted. The Cincinnati Art Museum's 'Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970–1980,' which opens Friday, explores that groundbreaking decade, when landmark exhibitions by several artists changed the face of art photography forever.]]>