News: Greening Greenhills
Potterhill Homes Potterhill Homes and the village of Greenhills are touting this LEED demonstration home as the future of "green building." Going green is an easy thing to fake because many people think being environmentally responsible begins and ends with recycling plastic water bottles. Green as a PR stunt doesn't fly in the Village…
Music: Dirty Secret About a Gem
Donovan Sith The Panderers Fourteen months ago, a handy man named Scott Wynn was rehabbing a field house in rural Indiana. The phone rang as he was pulling up a toilet. Timing, they say, is everything. It was Pete McNeal (current Mike Doughty/former Cake drummer) calling to say that he and Dave Wilder (Macy…
Art: Review: From Winslow Homer to Edward Hopper
Taft Museum of Art Thomas Hart Benton "Lassoing Horses" is part of the Taft Museum's exhibition of watercolor masterpieces. From Winslow Homer to Edward Hopper: American Watercolor Masterpieces from the Brooklyn Museum, now on view at the Taft, is a pleasure from start to finish. Despite the title (thought up by a marketing department…
Onstage: Review: This Is How It Goes
Mark Byron (L-R) Michael Monks, Jeff Carpenter and Jennifer Owen star in Ovation Theatre's This Is How It Goes. The narrator of Ovation Theatre Company's current production, Neil LaBute's This Is How It Goes, is very upfront. In the opening minutes, he nervously confesses, "I may end up being an unreliable narrator." That's a warning…
Punk and beyond with CincyPunk Fest VII
The Lions Rampant are among the many local bands playing CincyPunk Fest VII this weekend. CincyPunk Fest has become one of the most consistently great music festivals to come out of the area. Part of it is the fest's evolution, as the "Punk" in the show's name is becoming as all-encompassing as the genre's music…
Music: Sharpening the Point
LPK designed the new MidPoint logo. The 2008 MidPoint Music Festival will feature several tweaks of its original concept, as CityBeat begins to firm up plans for its first year producing the annual event. For the first time, signed touring acts will be included in the MidPoint lineup Sept. 25-27. The majority of MidPoint performers…
Music: Fantastic Planet
Suicide Squeeze Records Minus The Bear Minus The Bear drummer Erin Tate is tired of talking about the group's reputation for bringing humor to its music. Back on the group's early albums — the 2002 full-length Highly Refined Pirates and the EPs Bands Like It When You Yell 'Yar' at Them and They Make…
Onstage: Even Paranoids Need Love
It would be easiest to dismiss Tracy Letts' 1996 play Bug as a sitcom on HELL-TV. Sleazy motel room. Crack-smoking, vodka-swilling cocktail waitress Agnes, her beauty fading as her life unravels. Abusive, possessive ex-con, ex-husband Goss. Lesbian best buddy R.C., who's suffering girlfriend troubles. Puzzling Dr. Sweet who might be a mad psychiatrist from a…
A Tribute to Exceptional People
On Sunday evening I was driving along Springdale Road in Colerain Township, and a white Montgomery fire truck passed me. Moments later, at the corner of Thompson Road and Springdale, I saw another truck, I think from Forest Park, pull out of the Colerain Township firehouse. Fully aware of what happened on April 4 on…
Spin the Bottle
It was the summer after sixth grade. A typical dog day in Cincinnati — the land was parched, yellow and thirsty; I swore I could hear the grass make sucking sounds. All around, dry lips were cracking. But I could still make a mean spit bubble. Relief from the heat came when my second cousin,…
Cover Story: The Next Step
Sean Hughes The Oxford International Film Festival returns this weekend for its second year. A brief search courtesy of the Internet Movie Database gives readers a sketch of the historic highlights of the Sundance Film Festival, which assumed that name in 1991, although its first incarnation can be traced back to 1978, when the…
Sound Advice: : Cursive and Carolina Chocolate Drops
Cursive Cursive with Capgun Coup Wednesday
This Week in Wellness
Whole Foods (former location of Wild Oats) is hosting an Earth Day celebration with home composting lessons and more on green living. Free. Noon-3 p.m. April 12. 2693 Edmondson Road, Norwood, 513-531-8015. Park + Vine teams up with Best Computing Services to collect and recycle old computer-related equipment. Computers are disassembled and recycled or rebuilt…
News: Force to Be Reckoned With
Sean Hughes Attorney Alphonse Gerhardstein says he's trying to "help make sure that governments follow the rules." A prominent civil rights attorney has filed a federal lawsuit against Hamilton County and Sheriff Simon Leis Jr. over an incident last summer when a corrections officer fired three pepperball rounds point blank at the chest of…
The Hands of Orlac (Kino)
The Hands of Orlac 1924, Not Rated The 1924 psychological horror silent The Hands of Orlac isn't director Robert Weine and actor Conrad Veidt's best known collaboration — that honor belongs to their pioneering piece of film history, 1920's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — but it's a classic nonetheless. The story is familiar:…
Thank You for Presenting the Truth
Thank you for the ¨Bare-Bones Criminal Justice news article (issue of April 2). Im an educated black man from the East Coast and am very aware of the great divide between justice for the poor and people of color. Im sorry to say that Margo Pierces article presented nothing new for me but am glad…
Diner: Review: Chalk
Joe Lamb Chalk Chalk Food + Wine is the second Jean-Robert Restaurant Group endeavor on Greenup Street in Covington. Situated just two doors up from Greenup Café in the space formerly occupied by Pho Paris, it shares the informal, neighborhood style that I love. My first visit to Chalk was during Restaurant Week. It…
Where Birds (Occasionally) Fly
Indigenous to the wilds of West Norwood, The Speckled Bird Caf233 (1766 Mills Ave., 513-841-BIRD) is nestled on the corner of Carter and Mills. With its patchwork plumage of red brick, baby blue and chartreuse — and the appliqué of a Speckled Bird staring down from the heavens — it's hard to miss this place,…
Service As Spirituality
I participated in a service-learning program for teens a couple of years ago that's worth revisiting. Having had a baby since then, I do a lot less of this sort of stuff than I would like to, but I consider it something that truly enriched my life. I hope it was just as useful to…
Another seven days of fake construction, real border fences and helping bad kids
It's worth it WEDNESDAY APRIL 2 Local politicians and business leaders participated in a classic white collar ritual today, digging with golden shovels at the site of the future Banks project to symbolize the beginning of construction. According to The Enquirer, Gov. Ted Strickland gave the project a nearly Biblical status, saying, "This is…
Dear Judge: Keep It Real
Did Judge Bernat just have a bad day? Local Republicans are crying foul about the public backlash against a judge's decision to impose a $1 million bond for a suspect accused of stealing $21.64. The facts, however, don't support the GOP spin machine's claims in defending the judge. Hamilton County Municipal Court Judge Richard…
How to Be Hip Guilt-Free
I had another one of those weeks when threads of different conversations and chance meetings and passed-along news articles twist around each other and form a string of an idea. Last week's CityBeat previewed the MusicNOW Festival, a four-day celebration of avant garde Rock/Jazz/Chamber music organized by Bryce Dessner. He's the hometown-boy-done-good who moved to…
Comedian Auggie Smith, short films at NKU, emerging fiction writers, Children’s Theatre, Everything Pets Expo and much more
Kelly Link Author Kelly Link WEDNESDAY 4/09 MUSIC: CURSIVE makes great drama and great art at Below Zero Lounge in what is CityBeat's MidPoint Music Festival announcement party. See Sound Advice preview here. ONSTAGE: BUG, truly ugly art, opens at the New Stage Collective. See Tom McElfresh's review here. ONSTAGE: BARE: THE MUSICAL, heir…
Art: Review: Daniel Libeskind
CAC Photos, video, and a large "enclosure" illustrate Daniel Libeskind's Denver Art Museum project. Three years ago, while taking in the view from my high-rise hotel room in downtown Denver, my eyes stopped at a striking structure more like a sculpture than a building. The unfinished amalgamation of jutting angles and sloped walls would…
Reds Might Be on the Verge of Something Big
Jerry Dowling After watching the Reds for a week, we could be onto the start of something big, remembering that the path is long between the start and something big. But the start of something big is a start — six or seven starts, actually — and that's something good. Only Reds fans could…
The Action of Art: You should have been there
When I seek out new recommendations for music from the more knowledgeable, I'm often regaled with accounts of obscure live hybrids of music and art taking place in hip scenes across the world. One might read about an unadvertised performance by Cocorosie in Deitch Projects or gothic performance pieces by Terence Koh in Los Angeles,…
Robyn Hitchcock: Sex, Food, Death … And Insects (A&E)
Robyn Hitchcock: Sex, Food, Death … And Insects 2007, Not Rated This hour-long documentary, originally aired on the Sundance Channel, allows longtime British singer/songwriter Robyn Hitchcock to show the sources for the eccentric worldview that has led to such truly wonderful, skewed compositions as "If You Were a Priest," "Uncorrected Personality Traits," "The Man…
Film: Review: Street Kings
20th Century Fox Men in blue: John Corbett, Amaury Nolasco, Jay Mohr, Keanu Reeves and Forest Whitaker in Street Kings. Based on James Ellroy's novel, Street Kings is set in Los Angeles' blood-soaked streets, traversed by widowed LAPD Detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) whose carte blanche methods of obliterating suspects with his service revolver…
Cover Story: Full Throttle
Thinkfilm Academy Award nominee Ellen Page stars in the Canadian film The Tracey Fragments, which is part of the 2008 Oxford International Film Festival. You can't help but think of Kris Kristofferson's song "The Pilgrim, Chapter 33" when you talk to Canadian director Bruce McDonald. The filmmaker seems a lot like the men Kristofferson…
Locals Only: : Greg Mahan
Jeanine Boutiere Greg Mahan When Greg Mahan mentions that eight years have passed since his solo debut, shock and disbelief seem to follow. "I'll talk to other musicians and friends, and they're like, 'Has it been eight years? No way!' " Mahan says over lunch at the West Chester Izzy's. "They can't imagine it.…
Radiant City (Koch Lorber)
Radiant City 2006, Unrated Writers/directors Gary Burns and Jim Brown make use of their distinct backgrounds (Burns is a surrealist filmmaker, while Brown is a journalist) to upend our notions of suburbia. Radiant City travels into the wilds of new suburban enclaves with their cocoon-like homes and super-strip-malls that leave families disconnected from others…
Grammer’s
Emily Maxwell Although revitalization and development in Over-the-Rhine finally seem to be making significant progress, some things will never change. In the case of the reopening of Grammer's, this is a good thing. While new condos, schools, shopping and dining flock to historic Over-the-Rhine, Grammer's remains persistently rooted to the past. Owners Martin and…
How the media treat papal visits, whistleblowers, sex workers and foreign elections
Religion is hot news because Pope Benedict XVI is coming to the United States next week. He'll be accompanied by a deluge of news media cliches and ignorance about the papacy, his relations with Catholics and non-Catholics and just about anything else that can be attributed to or blamed on the bishop of Rome. That…
