Dec 21-28, 2016
The Jewel in the Crown: After an $11 million restoration, Memorial Hall seeks its place in the city’s new arts district
Morning News: Cranley emails to Chicago mayor draw controversy; Wasson Way to start construction in June; potential last-minute wrangling in Ohio General Assembly
Good morning all. Hope you had a good holiday and your New Years plans are shaping up nicely. Here’s some quick news for you. Contention around the firing last year of then-Cincinnati Police Chief Jeffrey Blackwell flared up again over the weekend after emails from the records of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel showed correspondence between…
Stage Door: Unexpected Guests and Wrapping up Details
When I was a kid (back in the 1950s) a short opera with a Christmas theme was broadcast on TV for several Christmas Eves: Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors. It was the first television opera, an unusual holiday item, serious and uplifting without the usual treacle or commercialism that seep into Christmas…
A religion reporter recalls Christmas controversies
In a ghastly repeat of campaign coverage, too many national news media are obsessing over momentarily sensational trivia among Donald Trump appointees. Meanwhile, antisemites, segregationists, white supremacists, misogynists and anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ activists are joyfully linking under the media-sanitized “alt-right” banner as triumphant GOP niche voters. Enabled by the internet and social media, their alternative…
Kiss 2016 Goodbye
Let’s not beat around the bush here: 2016 sucked. From gut-wrenching celebrity deaths and the presidential election to a certain gorilla who shall not be named, anticipation for the New Year is particularly great. Thankfully, Cincinnati has no shortage of ways to count down the year’s final seconds. Raise your glass, kiss 2016 goodbye and…
Your Merry Long Weekend To Do List (Dec. 22-26)
THURSDAY 22 EVENT: THURSDAY ART PLAY: WINTER WONDERLAND With the holidays pending and winter weather keeping families with little ones stuck inside, the Contemporary Arts Center invites parents with children ages 3 to 6 and their caregivers to join in on some winter-themed art-making activities during Thursday Art Play. Ice painting, igloo-fort building and indoor…
Local congregations mull protection for the undocumented in the age of Trump
As a child 35 years ago, Salvador Leavitt-Alcantara stood with his brother just off a runway at the El Salvador International Airport, trying to glimpse their mother boarding a nearby plane and desperately imagining an earthquake that would keep her from flying away. “The earthquake never came,” he says. “The airplane door closed, and it…
What a Week! Dec. 14-20
WEDNESDAY, DEC. 14 At this point in the final weeks of the life test that is 2016, everyone should hold their babies close (in the immortal words of the late Patsy Ramsey. RIP. Sorry, there are just so many JonBenét specials on lately.) because this year is not holding back in the icon-stealing department. In…
Hounded by creditors, former lawyer Chesley is selling his $8 million digs
Fending off a $25 million civil judgment the last two years, the well-known former lawyer Stan Chesley is now trying to sell his 21,000-square-foot chateau in Indian Hill. Chesley, who retired from practicing law in 2013 after being disbarred by the Kentucky Supreme Court, insists he’s not selling to pay off debts. “We’re looking to…
Holiday Watchlist
Holiday movies and TV specials have become as much a part of seasonal traditions as gift giving, tree decorating and politically charged arguments across the dinner table. From Christmas movie marathons to New Year’s Eve events, your TV can get you through the entire holiday season. 25 Days of Christmas (Daily through Dec. 25, Freeform)…
Why I can’t go ga-ga for ‘La La Land’
I’ve never considered myself a contrarian. There’s no need to go against the grain just for the sake of doing so. If you find yourself taking a stand that places you in opposition to the consensus, then I believe said stand should be based on reasoned principle or, in the case of what I do…
The Growth of ‘The Guineveres’
“It’s so surreal,” author Sarah Domet says when asked about the fact that her debut novel, The Guineveres, is now out in the world for all to experience. “You labor and labor and labor in this solitary confinement for so long, and then suddenly it’s here and people are reading it.” More than a decade…
CAM opens reinstalled African Art Gallery
The Cincinnati Art Museum recently opened its reinstalled African Art gallery, which features a wide sampling of diverse objects from the museum’s Steckelmann Collection. It’s a prized holding of more than 1,300 objects that the museum purchased from the Indiana-raised African adventurer/explorer and arts patron Carl Steckelmann in 1890. The museum first displayed the collection…
Stage and screen merge in ‘Event Cinema’
In 2010, I attended a digital presentation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet at The Carnegie in Covington. It came from London’s National Theatre and starred British actor Rory Kinnear. It was my first experience with “event cinema.” Around the same time, New York City’s Metropolitan Opera made news with HD transmissions of its Saturday afternoon performances to cineplexes…
The Carnegie showcases a massive survey of stripped-down style from Edie Harper and Tony Dotson
The Carnegie is currently presenting two solo exhibits, each to give a deserving Cincinnati artist time alone in the spotlight. But sometimes 1 + 1 = 3. By pairing Tony Dotson with the late Edie Harper, exhibitions director Matt Distel has created a super-sized — and super-enjoyable — look at stripped-down visual language, with more than 300…
Best Bites of 2016
CityBeat’s staff of underpaid but relatively well-fed dining writers spend their year eating, drinking and reporting back on Cincinnati’s latest restaurants, food trends and au courant culinary wizardry to either mildly entertain you or help you decide where to eat dinner. And as this year comes to a close, we asked our dedicated reviewers to list…
Sound Advice: Erika Wennerstrom with Jesse Ebaugh and The Tender Things and Molly Sullivan (Dec. 23)
Dayton, Ohio native Erika Wennerstrom is looking to the future. For nearly 15 years, the singer/songwriter/guitarist has kept busy building the career of the band she formed in Cincinnati in the early ’00s, Heartless Bastards. She’s led the band through five widely acclaimed albums (three for Fat Possum Records and a pair for well-distributed Partisan…
Sound Advice: Vandaveer (Dec. 27)
In late September, if you happened to be strolling around the paying stages at this year’s all-outdoors MidPoint Music Festival on the Cincinnati event’s final day, you might have been lucky enough to catch Vandaveer’s late afternoon set on the WNKU stage. You would have witnessed an exceptionally muscular and diverse Indie Folk quintet equally…
Local Holiday Tunes for Christmas
Though it will probably not be played at anyone’s family gathering (because of the Insane Clown Posse and King Diamond tracks), for the past week I’ve been slowly building a wonderful and strange playlist of atypical holiday music. While using Spotify, I was able to (on my more expansive playlist, which featured "not weird" stuff…
Keep an eye (and ear) on adventurous Cincinnati musician Jennifer Simone in 2017
Before she begins her set, 24-year-old Jennifer Simone lights a stick of incense. The smoke curls around her as she sits on the floor of the stage surrounded by empty brass dishes, frog-shaped instruments and noisemakers of various shapes and sizes, waiting for the right moment to begin. Her first song starts with a single…
After an $11 million restoration, Memorial Hall seeks its place in the city’s new arts district
As the manager of Over-the-Rhine’s Memorial Hall, Joshua Steele has had plenty of time during the just-completed $11.2 million restoration of the 108-year-old building to ponder one of its most mysterious and eclectic features. Constructed on Elm Street for use by the Grand Army of the Republic — a fraternal group for Union veterans of…
