Going to the Store
I'm not sure what this is, but my friend Mark shared it on Facebook, declaring that "the world must see this." After watching it, I'm inclined to agree. —- Here's the info provided on this bro's Vimeo page: This is a short I made for the final episode of "Everything," an anthology series at Channel101.…
Good Afternoon, World!
The Tea Party is super duper pissed after Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa (not that Jimmy Hoffa!) called on union supporters unhappy with congressional Republicans to “take these son-of-a-bitches out.” The Tea Party Express called the comments “inexcusable,” saying the comments amounted to “a call for violence on peaceful Tea Party members.”—- President Obama declares he’s…
Morning News and Stuff
Vice President Joe Biden visited Cincinnati during the Labor Day Weekend, arguing that organized labor and the American middle class are under the most direct assault in generations, while local Republicans enjoyed the fireworks for their irony. Video here. —- NPR offers this explanation of President Obama's best hope for explaining the job crisis to…
Shark Night 3D
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Bride Flight
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Apollo 18
Exploiting the found footage trend (triggered by The Blair Witch Project on through the recent Paranormal Activity series) that has carved out a niche in the horror-thriller genre, Apollo 18 documents the story of a 1974 lost lunar mission. Two American astronauts (Warren Christie and Lloyd Owen) pilot a probe to the moon with a…
Morning News and Stuff
Does a teacher make more money than you? A goddam teacher?!? Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel says the state's new database of public employee salaries is meant to bring greater transparency to the state government, not to rile people up before November's vote to repeal SB5.—- The state of Ohio is all set to announce deals…
‘Scarface’ Back in Theaters Tonight
Brian DePalma's Scarface hits Blu-ray for the first time on Sept. 6. In celebration of its release, Universal Studios is screening the movie 7:30 tonight in selected multiplexes across the country, including locally at AMC, Springdale 18 and Regal Deerfield.—- An homage to Howard Hawks 1932 original, DePalma's Oliver Stone-penned version garnered mixed reviews during…
Farewells and Final Fantasies
I moved to Cincinnati a little over eight years ago. Now I’m moving to Chicago to return to academia and to give myself a much-needed span of time to turn inward and concentrate on improving my art and my writing. During my Cincinnati years, I began to exercise my public identities as a writer, an…
The Cars – Move Like This
The New Cars project featuring Todd Rundgren in 2005 was a slight return for the surviving participants of the vaunted New Wave/Synth Pop icons, The Cars, but it was clearly dependent on the fans’ ability to accept Rundgren’s strong creative presence, a distinctive flavor that was almost more suggestive of his work than theirs. Move…
Sweep Relief
Bill Alletzhauser is pathologically busy with The Hiders, his acclaimed Roots Rock band with a trio of well-received releases. It seems natural to wonder why he doubled his band responsibilities and joined fellow Cincinnati band The Sweep. “Probably something bad that happened in my childhood,” Alletzhauser says as we huddle around the liquor table in…
A Winning Season
Cincinnati’s Riverfest fireworks once fired the starting gun for local theater, but already several theaters have shows onstage. This week Cincinnati’s major theaters open their first productions of 2011-2012, launching a fall offering an unusual number of award-winning shows. The Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park cranks things up on the Marx Theatre stage with a…
Brian Andres and The Afro-Cuban Jazz Cartel
Although Brian Andres has been based in San Francisco for the past dozen years, he is a son of Cincinnati. His love of rhythm came to the forefront during his Queen City childhood when he suddenly developed an overwhelming desire to turn everything in his parents’ home into a makeshift drum kit. With the purchase…
Expansion Plans in a Recession
“I've had the opportunity to learn patience,” says Tod Swormstedt, founder of the American Sign Museum. He’s talking about a problem that other Cincinnati arts organizations and supporters of planned festivals, theater renovations and other projects have to share — how to raise money as the Great Recession grinds on. Funding for the Sign Museum…
Assessing the Season
T he summer movie season shows us, more than any other time of year, how supremely good and how horribly bad the medium can be. This summer gave us some good, a few mediocre and several downright awful options. But no matter how asggravating it can be to look back on the summer that was,…
Moon High
Hailing from Ohio’s esteemed state capitol, Moon High is not your typical Folk/Pop quartet. They sell buttons on their website, moonhighmusic.com, but the images are not self-promotional depictions of their non-smiling, photo-composited faces from the cover of their excellent sophomore album, Six Suns. Instead, the images are of four of Jupiter’s moons. Moon High’s music…
Rock the Bells featuring Raekwon
One of the best things to ever happen to live Hip Hop was the creation of Rock The Bells. Founded by promotions company Guerilla Union, which had collaborated with Cypress Hill on their annual multi-act Smokeout concert, Rock The Bells began as a single-day music festival in Southern California in 2004, headlined by Wu-Tang Clan…
Classic Sounds and New Twists
This year’s classical music season promises more than the predictable lineup of Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms, as fledgling ensembles continue to offer edgy programming, top performers mix it up, a new music festival debuts and even the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (CSO) ventures into the world of new music. In the absence of a full-time music…
Win Win
Stories about real people dealing with real situations are an endangered species in a contemporary American moviemaking landscape dominated by lowest-common-denominator teen-oriented fare and creativity-deficient sequels. Writer/director Tom McCarthy is doing his best to fight against this development. A Yale-trained actor, McCarthy turned to filmmaking in part because the types of movies he wanted to…
Bayou Fish Bar (Review)
The building located at 527 York Street in Newport has not been kind to its recent restaurant tenants. Since Mokka moved a few years ago, this address has been home to NuVo and Pinky Sue’s Smoke House, both of which disappeared quickly after arrival. There is now another new restaurant hoping to break this string…
Closing the (Political) Salon
If Cincinnati were Paris, Ellen Bierhorst would be its Gertrude Stein. In July the 71-year-old psychotherapist-poet ended her Lloyd House Salon, a gathering in Clifton where some of the city's most engaged citizens grappled with local leaders and each other about politics, art, life and death. Open to anyone and any topic, the salon convened…
Manchester Orchestra – Simple Math
Over the past seven years, Manchester Orchestra has evolved from post-high school baroque Emo Pop naifs to a viscerally muscular, Southern modern Rock force. The band’s 2009 album, Mean Everything to Nothing, drew comparisons to a pair of Southern Rock geneticists, Kings of Leon and Bobby Bare Jr., with shades of The Shins’ subtlety and…
And the Award Goes to …
Almost exactly a year ago, I excitedly announced in this column that a merger had been agreed upon to bring together Cincinnati’s two theater awards programs, the 14-year-old CEAs established by CityBeat in 1997, and the newer Acclaim Awards, launched by The Cincinnati Enquirer in 2004. In my Sept. 1, 2010, column I recalled a…
MidPoint Summer Over, Fall Fest Countdown Begins
This Friday, the PNC Summer Music Series — the umbrella title for all of the almost-daily free concerts on Fountain Square throughout the summer — concludes with the last MidPoint Indie Summer Series concert at 7 p.m. If you haven’t checked the lineups since the start of the summer, you might not have noticed that…
‘Open to the New’
What is “new music” within the classical music genre? Philip Glass’ Cello Concerto, which receives its world premiere at the Cincinnati Symphony next year? CCM composer Michael Fiday’s “9 Haiku” for flute and piano performed last year by concert:nova? Leonard Bernstein’s 1937 Trio Sonata that gets its first local performance by the Morgenstern Trio in…
Little Covington Stories
I’ve been living in Covington for a few weeks now. I’m still feeling my way around the area. As a writer, I keep a notebook of interesting things I see or memorable conversations I have. I’ve compiled some little Covington stories to share with you. Cat Poop and Green Flies: One of the tenants who…
N. Kentucky Community Action Comission
An overlook at how the Community Action Commission helps the community.
August 24-30: Worst Week Ever!
WEDNESDAY AUG. 24 Most people know what it’s like to run into someone you know at a place you’re embarrassed to be, thus exposing something weird about you that you had been trying to hide (frozen pizza aisle, any department in TJMaxx, in line by yourself to see a romantic comedy, etc.). Steve Chabot today…
Streetcars Help Fuel Job Growth in Seattle
H ere’s something that the backward-thinking Luddites who oppose Cincinnati’s planned streetcar system won’t tell you: A plan to convert a rundown part of Seattle into a district targeted to attracting the so-called “creative class” has worked better than expected — and the success partially is due to a new streetcar system. Danny Westneat, a…
From Far-Flung Realms to Greatest Hits
The fall season’s museum show that has attracted the most advance interest — because of its ambitiousness and its timeliness — is the Contemporary Art Center’s Realms of Intimacy: Miniaturist Practice from Pakistan, which opens Sept. 23 and continues until an as-yet-not-finalized January date. If ever a country needed a better, more generous understanding in…
Hot Moves, Fresh Directions
Summer is winding down just as the dance season is heating up! This fall brings a host of delights from longtime companies as well as new directions for the local dance scene. Kicking off Cincinnati Ballet’s season with a bang once again is the eagerly anticipated annual Kaplan New Works Series Sept. 8-18 at the…
Denise Driehaus and Archbishop Schnurr
[WINNER] P.G. SITTENFELD: The first-time candidate for Cincinnati City Council currently leads the pack in campaign fundraising, partially thanks to his family’s impressive connections. But the young Democrat is putting that money to good use by helping ensure that any city voter who wants an absentee ballot will receive one. After the Hamilton County Board…
Elvin Bishop – Raisin’ Hell Revue
Elvin Bishop has enjoyed a nearly 50-year career in music at every possible level — from apprentice to veteran Blues master Little Smoky Smothers and Blues groundbreaker as co-founder of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band to crossover Pop success (with “Fooled Around and Fell in Love”) and various degrees of roadhouse fame and commercial obscurity.…
Helping Change Students’ Lives
Sometimes it seems like everything Bill Burwinkel touches turns to gold, and he's hoping that some of his Midas touch rubs off on low-income students in the Greater Cincinnati area. The Price Hill resident and entrepreneur is a big believer in giving back to the community. With his Adopt-a-Class Foundation, he's not only challenging students…
Taste This: SPAM
In some ways, SPAM is the Paris Hilton of the supermarket. It’s always there, it’s a perpetual punchline, everybody knows its name and no one really knows why it’s so popular. SPAM’s moments in contemporary pop culture have been mocking — it’s the name given to all the “junk” in our email, while a silly…
The Debt
John Madden, the Academy Award-nominated director of Shakespeare in Love, delves into the tricky landscape of the post-Holocaust world in The Debt, which explores the consequences of actions taken by a three-man team of Mossad agents in 1965, charged with extracting a notorious Nazi doctor lurking in East Germany under a false name and identity…
Squeeze the Day for 8/31
Music Tonight: Say goodbye to August tonight with some classic Hip Hop at Bogart's, one of many recent and upcoming Hip Hop shows from the longstanding Corryville concert venue. Rock the Bells began seven years ago as a stand-alone Hip Hop festival in California, but today the brand has been expanded to included RTB package…
Morning News and Stuff
George Clooney's Cincinnati-set film, The Ides of March, opened the Venice Film Festival to at least a couple lukewarm reviews. This mope said it “starts out with crusading zeal, but feels a little commercial for an opening night slot at the Venice film festival,” while this pretentious bastard said “Ryan Gosling is back to his…
