New Bikeway Proposal Could Cost Additional $110,000
T he city’s cost of a long-planned piece of cycling infrastructure could more than double if City Council approves a motion Vice Mayor David Mann planned to introduce on April 23. Mayor John Cranley successfully paused the Central Parkway Bikeway Project for public discourse in response to a handful of business owners and residents taking…
Savor the Season and Chef Competition at Gorman Heritage Farm
Evendale's Gorman Heritage Farm — a real, working farm — welcomes spring with their second Savor the Season: Farm to Fork Celebration. From 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Saturday, May 3, the 122-acre farm (in partnership with Slow Food Cincinnati) will be abuzz with educational and immersive opportunities to learn and taste what spring has to offer. Locavore chefs, like…
Gypsy (Review)
Gypsy, a great musical from 1959, has a score by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a script by Arthur Laurents. It’s the true story of burlesque stripper Gypsy Rose Lee (she preferred the label “ecdysiast”), who grew up as a tomboy in the 1920s, overshadowed by her pretty sister June and constantly badgered…
Other People’s Money (Review)
New Edgecliff Theatre (NET) brands itself as “Cincinnati’s Actors Theatre” for good reason. Their current offering of Other People’s Money at Fifth Third Bank Theater at downtown’s Aronoff Center shows off strong Cincinnati actors in this still-relevant play about corporate raiders versus small town America. Written by businessman-turned-playwright Jerry Sterner, the 1989 play ran for…
Stage Door: Weekend Theater Picks
There are several good theater choices south of the Ohio River this weekend. The theater (and dance) program at Northern Kentucky University presents a truly varied array of programming — this season has included a play by Orson Welles, the legendary musical South Pacific, Shakespeare's As You Like It and more. The academic year's final…
Q&A with Rajiv Satyal
Comedian Rajiv Satyal was born and bred in Cincinnati — Fairfield to be exact. He’s gone from being an intern on Capitol Hill to brand manager at Procter & Gamble to full-time comedian living in Los Angeles. Satyal has worked with Dave Chappelle, Kevin James, Tim (the tool man) Allen, Kevin Nealon and Russell Peters.…
HalfCut Beer Cafe Grand Opening Friday
HalfCut Beer Café invites beer lovers to take their taste buds on an explosive journey as they celebrate their opening to the public April 18th. The cafe — on Walnut Street in Over-the-Rhine, attached to the new taco shop Gomez Salsa — will offer growlers to-go plus beers to sample and drink in-store. Customers walk…
Know Theatre Announces 2014 Fringe Festival Lineup
This evening at its Jackson Street headquarters in Over-the-Rhine, Know Theatre of Cincinnati revealed the lineup for the 11th annual Cincinnati Fringe Festival to a crowd of nearly 100 enthusiastic supporters and performers. The two-week festival begins Tuesday, May 27, with the CityBeat Fringe Kick-Off Party; it winds up 12 days later on Saturday, June…
Contemporary Arts Center Launches Redesigned Website
The Contemporary Arts Center marks its 75th anniversary with the launch of its newly redesigned website, contemporaryartscenter.org. By adding a timeline and a list of exhibits dating back to 1939, the updated site highlights some of the museum’s most notable attractions through videos and interactive learning. The historical timeline depicts an honest look at what…
Seven Cool RSD Vinyl Releases
There are always a lot of great limited-edition vinyl releases issued on Record Store Day, which returns this Saturday for its annual celebration of independent record sellers. Below are some of our favorites. For the full list of Record Store Day (RSD) exclusives (vinyl and otherwise), visit recordstoreday.com. (Note: Because there are a ton of…
Where to Find Vinyl in Cincinnati
You can currently find vinyl records everywhere from yard sales and thrift shops to Target. But if you’re looking to support local independent record stores (especially as we approach this Saturday’s international Record Store Day), here are a few of the area shops with wax (new and/or used) in stock. Another Part of the Forest…
Wax Dealer
It’s a warm spring afternoon in Northside as Steve Schmoll sits behind the counter at Black Plastic, the vinyl-only record store he opened on Hamilton Avenue in October 2012. “It’s kind of all I know,” Schmoll says when asked why he wanted to open a place of his own. The modest space is dominated, front…
I Just Can’t Get Enough
Senior prom is a special milestone for many American teens, but even traditions as old as school dances change over time. Intimate one-on-one dates have given way to group dates and attending as friends. Flip-flops and cutout cocktail dresses replaced the overdone evening look for many girls. And now a southern-fried specialty is getting in…
The All-Spin Zones
It’s the last Tuesday night of March at HD Beans & Brews Café on the Silverton/Kennedy Heights border, and a small crowd is attending Vinyl Night Cincinnati’s (VNC) monthly gathering. (Full disclosure: This author is a co-founder of VNC.) Vinyl Night Cincinnati has been meeting here for almost four years. All vinyl nights — select evenings…
The ‘Q’ Stands for ‘Quality’
Jim Bosken is a keen businessman and comes by it honestly. His father, Edward Bosken, was a printer by trade when he started Queen City Album in the early ’50s, recognizing the opportunity to capitalize on the burgeoning popularity of the 12-inch LP (short for “long play”) just as 78s (10-inch records that play at…
Still Spinning
If you set a Google alert for “vinyl sales,” be prepared — you’re going to get dinged a few times a day. The music (and other) press often can’t seem to make heads or tails of the “vinyl resurgence,” but they sure like to try, pumping out stories about the increasing popularity of buying music…
CORV Local Food Guide Release Party Tonight
The annual Central Ohio River Valley (CORV) Local Food Guide celebrates its release (find one inside this week’s CityBeat) and upcoming Earth Day with a party at Om Eco Café on Ludlow in Clifton. The CORV guide is a very complete directory of area food resources that connects residents of Greater Cincinnati, Southwest Ohio, Southeast…
Arnold’s Taps Great Lakes Cherry Vanilla Edmund Fitzgerald for Autism
Arnold’s has partnered with Great Lakes Brewing Company and Neltner Small Batch to host a fundraiser for autism, #BeerAutismHope. Great Lakes will be tapping a cask-conditioned firkin of their fabled, impossible-to-find and extremely delicious Cherry Vanilla Edmund Fitzgerald Porter. For each pint sold, a dollar will be donated to Lance’s Room, a charity to fund…
Free MidPoint Indie Summer Shows Announced
Although some days it might seem like the summer of 2014 might be canceled (80 degrees to snowfall in two days?!), we have it on good authority that it will carry on as scheduled. The first good sign that consistent warmth is on its way is the announcement of the lineup for this year’s MidPoint…
Let the Good Times Roll
F or Eddie Spaghetti, it all started with The Knack’s “My Sharona.” In this instance, “it” means two things: Spaghetti’s infatuation with Rock & Roll and, by proxy, Supersuckers, the raucous outfit he’s spent his adult life leading. “When I heard that song, I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to do this. This is…
Deer Tick with The Hold Steady
Deer Tick frontman John McCauley is a notorious rabble-rouser, the kind of guy who uses The Replacements’ Bob Stinson-era hijinks as a guide to making drunken, ramshackle Rock & Roll. (Deer Tick has also covered Nirvana songs a lot, even billing themselves as Deervana and playing all-Nirvana sets, which led to McCauley recently playing with…
Sol Cat
On the final night of last year’s MidPoint Music Festival extravaganza, an old man dropped into The Drinkery to grab a beer, catch his breath and absorb a few minutes of Sol Cat’s soulful Psych/Dance/Pop, which had reminded him at least a little of Walk the Moon’s similarly adrenalized output. He’d expected an out-of-town show…
Miss Shevaughn & Yuma Wray with Shoot Out the Lights and Quiet Hollers
The fan base that Miss Shevaughn & Yuma Wray have accumulated over the past three years must look like a random demographic sampling from the U.S. census. The psychedelically rootsy Americana duo-turned-quartet’s broadly diverse sonic profile is every bit as wide as their appeal, as tendrils of contemporary Blues, electric Folk, atmospheric Pop and jarringly…
Jimbo Mathus with Lonesome Jared and The Heart Attacks
Long before Pokey LaFarge, Dustbowl Revival, The Wiyos, The Lazybirds and others fueled the current early Jazz, Jump Blues and Roots Rock revival, Squirrel Nut Zippers had it all going on back in the ’90s, bringing a Punk attitude to their ’30s Swing/Blues/Jug-band jams. At the height of their popularity, the Zips performed on national…
Sidewalk Chalk with The Almighty Get Down
Sidewalk Chalk's just-released second album, Leaves, opens with a live clip in which frontdude/rapper Rico Sisney and frontlady/singer Maggie Vagle ask a crowd to shout out the Hip Hop crew's name on the count of three. It's a fitting intro, for this Chicago octet is, first and foremost, interested in interaction, about stirring minds and moving…
MidPoint Indie Summer Concerts Announced
The first good sign that consistent warmth is on its way is the announcement of the lineup for this year’s MidPoint Indie Summer series at downtown’s Fountain Square. The concerts are part of the Square’s free PNC Summer Music Series, which showcases different types of music (played mostly by local acts) five days a week.…
Under the Skin
Fans of Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, Birth) will certainly cheer for this pairing of the maverick visionary and Scarlett Johansson that explores the arrival of an alien preying upon the underclass in Scotland. By all accounts the film, a festival circuit player last year, creates an unsettling vibe, leaving audiences to question the nature of…
Transcendence
Long-time cinematographer Wally Pfister (Christopher Nolan partner from Memento through The Dark Knight Rises, The Italian Job and Moneyball) takes the helm for the first time with Transcendence, a science-fiction thriller about a scientist (Johnny Depp) facing a terminal illness who offers himself up as a test case for his grand experiment; he uploads his…
Le Week-End
This idiosyncratic gem from last year’s Toronto International Film Festival from writer Hanif Kureishi and director Roger Michell (the filmmaking duo behind The Mother and Venus) felt like a fully realized backstory for an episode that was edited out of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Nick (Jim Broadbent) and Meg (Lindsay Duncan), a British couple…
Joe
Indie wunderkind director David Gordon Green (George Washington) tackles a reclamation project of sorts by casting Nicolas Cage as the titular figure, an ex-con with a righteous hot temper who befriends a teenager (Tye Sheridan, a rising talent from The Tree of Life and Mud) struggling to protect his mother and sister from his abusive…
Heaven Is for Real
Randall Wallace, the writer behind Braveheart and Pearl Harbor and director of We Were Soldiers and Secretariat, goes multi-hyphenate on Heaven is for Real, the story of a father (Greg Kinnear) struggling to hold his family together after his young son (Connor Corum) survives a near-death experience and returns to life with an unexpected, and…
A Haunted House 2
No matter what the production listings say, A Haunted House 2 is a Marlon Wayans movie and the budding franchise will rise and fall based on the comic energy and will of Wayans, along with the audience’s willingness to step up to the box office and pay for the ride. After confronting his ex’s demons,…
Ernest & Célestine
By now my well-documented aversion to animated features has been duly noted, but there’s something about this adaptation of Gabrielle Vincent’s book from directors Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar (A Town Called Panic) and Benjamin Renner (A Mouse’s Tale) that lightly tickles my fancy. It could be the sentimental charms of a story about the…
Bears
Coinciding with Earth Day celebrations, Disneynature sneaks in this documentary about a family of Alaskan bears teaching the young cubs important lessons for survival. Directors Alastair Fothergill and Keith Scholey edit a solid and engaging narrative out of years’ worth of footage and draft John C. Reilly to give voice to the tale. Bears aims…
‘Silicon Valley’ Delivers Smart Nerd Humor
Move over, Sheldon. The Big Bang Theory may have helped popularize or mainstream “nerd culture,” but Silicon Valley (10 p.m. Sundays, HBO) keeps it real with sharp wit, spot-on tech references and just a touch of social awkwardness — the makings of any true geek. And it’s no wonder — co-creator/-writer/-director Mike Judge (Office Space,…
Critical Lessons From an After-School Film Club
For the past eight-plus years, I have been facilitating an evolving after-school program that began quite innocently with me subbing in for my CityBeat colleague Kathy Y. Wilson. She had been commissioned by the now-defunct nonprofit writing collective InkTank to develop a series for Lighthouse Youth Crisis Center participants to introduce them to writing as…
Canada’s Funniest Criminals Balance Genius and Dimwit
Trailer Park Boys is a mockumentary/sitcom that explores the meaning of life through a comedic ensemble of drunken, perpetually stoned reprobates. In other words, it’s quite relatable. Having signed an exclusive deal with Netflix, the boys — Ricky, Julian, Bubbles and the rest of fictitious Sunnyvale Trailer Park’s inhabitants — have revived their greasy antics…
Know to Announce 2014 Fringe Lineup Tonight
This evening at its Jackson Street headquarters in Over-the-Rhine, Know Theatre of Cincinnati will announce the lineup for the 11th annual Cincinnati Fringe Festival. The two-week festival begins on Tuesday, May 27, with the CityBeat Fringe Kick-Off Party, and continues through Saturday, June 7, presenting 33 productions — 17 plays, two musicals, seven solo performers,…
China’s Last Emperors Wore Some Cool Threads
Have you seen the emperor’s old clothes at the Taft Museum of Art? With apologies to Hans Christian Andersen’s cautionary tale of vanity, the naked truth remains that we’re judged by our dress. The imperial robes in Threads of Heaven: Silken Legacy of China’s Last Dynasty are laden with symbols of status as well…
The Formula at Covington’s Carnegie Is Working
Last Sunday I spent a pleasant afternoon at the Carnegie in Covington watching an old theatrical chestnut, Mary Chase’s Harvey. It’s a beloved show from long ago, winner of the 1945 Pulitzer Prize, best remembered today as a 1950 movie starring Jimmy Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd, an affable man whose family and friends fret…
Garden Karma
F or garden visionary Chris Smyth, sustainability coordinator of neighborhood nonprofit Price Hill Will (PHW), an empty yard is more than a patch of dirt. It’s a blank canvas. It’s a start for a sustainable lifestyle and a place for education and transformation to blossom within a neighborhood. It may seem audacious to say a…
Forgotten Population
E ach week Ohio Justice and Policy Center (OJPC) Executive Director David Singleton visits the Dayton Correctional Institute (DCI). He feels his presence is making a difference — hearing voices that would have otherwise remained silent. He speaks candidly about one of his clients, a woman serving 17 years after shooting her former police officer…
Vinyl Solution
N orth Carolina’s Holy Ghost Tent Revival shimmies and shakes like a mashed-up Squirrel Nut Zippers and DeVotchKa. Nashville’s Modoc exudes a thunderous Hard Rock-meets-Americana vibe, like Aerosmith arm wrestling with Marah. Lexington, Ky.’s Matt Duncan makes ’70s-influenced Dance Pop, smartly nodding in the soulful direction of Mayer Hawthorne. Chicago’s Scattered Trees sway to the…
