The Urbanophile Blog Loves Our Assets
Urban analyst Aaron M. Renn is a consultant, speaker, writer and blogger on a mission to "help America's cities thrive and find sustainable success in the 21st century." His popular blog, The Urbanophile, examines different cities and explores a variety of urban planning topics, including innovative strategies for urban success. Aaron recently posted a lovely…
Events: Second Sundays in OTR: Dog Days
Remember those lonely Friday nights when your dog was the only company that kept you from opening a bottle of vodka and turning on a Phil Collins album? Here’s an opportunity to reward your four legged buddy for saving your pride and dignity. Second Sunday in OTR will host “Dog Days in OTR” as a…
Music: The Dopamines
Since The Dopamines got serious about spreading their Pop/Punk message to the wider world, the Cincinnati trio has notched some impressive accomplishments: their Soap and Lampshades EP and eponymous full-length in 2008, a trio of split 7-inches, Cincinnati Entertainment Award nominations and a relentless out-of-town touring ethic. Their excellent sophomore full-length, Expect the Worst, is…
Art: Bruce Riley at Miller Gallery
In Bruce Riley’s new exhibition of paintings at Miller Gallery, Organic Figuration, layers of watermedia and resin compress whole worlds into deep, churning events. Drips, pours, sprays and stains of pigment and medium coalesce into utterly organic forms as if blown in from a freak storm or plucked from Riley’s garden just outside his studio…
Onstage: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)
While the Cincy Fringe Festival marches on this week, don’t lose track of a show at Cincinnati Shakespeare that became a hit with a launch at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1987, the granddaddy of all Fringe fests. The show was created by the Reduced Shakespeare Company, who moved it to London, where it had…
Riding the Rail to … Redemption?
“Did you know that Cincinnati has an abandoned subway system?” That question kickstarts Cincinnati’s Abandoned Subway, a documented journey into the city’s mythic past that runs directly into our congested present highway loops and teasingly branches off onto alternative visions for Cincinnati’s future, a paradoxical place that could, based on Mark Twain’s famous quote, still…
MidPoint Indie Summer Series Featuring Neon Indian, Wild Nothing, The Minor Leagues and for algnernon
Last Friday marked the kick-off of the free MidPoint Indie Summer series on Fountain Square, a jammed-pack affair headlined by Scottish Indie Pop troupe Camera Obscura. It also marked the first time you could purchase tickets for the MidPoint Music Festival (Sept. 23-25). While they last, MidPoint three-day passes are available at all MidPoint Indie…
Whiskey Daredevils
If you remember The Cowslingers, you’ll recall a carousing, careening group of Country-fried, Punkabilly ass kickers from Ohio’s North Shore sporting a wicked sense of humor and a freewheeling allegiance to every genre they touched. When the Slingers called it a day after nine albums in as many years, frontman Greg Miller, his bassist brother…
Events: Dirdnl Und Trachtenball
The Cincinnati Donauschwaben Society invites Germans and non-Germans alike to their Dirdnl Trachtenball, a dinner and dance aimed at preserving and celebrating German language and cultural heritage. Dinner begins at 6 p.m. and will include roast pork with all the trimmings, homemade dessert and coffee. Dancing will follow at 7:30 p.m. with live musical accompaniment by…
Ferrari’s Little Italy (Review)
For many of us, Italian food is synonymous with love and comfort. A steaming plate of pasta with a hunk of crusty bread to mop up a rich tomato sauce is like a hug from Mom and a rustling of the hair from Dad. As the adage goes, however, everything in moderation. Sometimes love can…
Dance: Choreographers Without Companies
The French Apache tango; one Appalachian family’s migration from Kentucky to Hamilton, Ohio; musical chairs, telephone and tag; a woman’s broken heart; a soloist pitted again nine other dancers … these are just a few of the choreographic ideas tossed around during this weekend’s “Choreographers Without Companies,” presented by Contemporary Dance Theater. By tradition, new…
Events: Passport to Beer
Hamilton County Parks District’s Passport to Beer event wants you to “Taste the Unexpected,” which should be interesting as one expects to taste beer at a beer tasting event. But perhaps their collection of over 25 summertime lagers, ales and porters from around the world will be infused with more than fermented grains and hops?…
Film: Cincinnati’s Abandoned Subway
“Did you know that Cincinnati has an abandoned subway system?” That question kickstarts Cincinnati’s Abandoned Subway, a documented journey into the city’s mythic past that runs directly into our congested present highway loops and teasingly branches off onto alternative visions for Cincinnati’s future, a paradoxical place that could, based on Mark Twain’s famous quote, still…
Events: RoeblingFest
Constructed in 1866, the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge was used as an architectural prototype for the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. Maybe you never knew it by name, but you’re probably familiar with the local landmark. Perhaps you have crossed it on your way to a Reds or Bengals game, caught a glimpse of…
Play It Forward Fundraiser
The Blue Wisp Jazz Club hosts a benefit show for the local Play It Forward organization at 8 p.m. Sunday. PIF was set up to “assist Greater Cincinnati musicians and their families in times of catastrophic need,” offering financial support to artists, many of whom have no health insurance. Check out a discussion of the…
Music: Ellery
It’s an old truism that great pain informs great art, but with the new Ellery album, This Isn’t Over Yet, it seems the inverse is true. Last year, following a particularly productive writing period, Ellery’s married brain trust, Tasha and Justin Golden, hit the studio with renowned producer Malcolm Burn to begin their fourth full-length…
Art: Silent Testimony at Architectural Foundation
Besides being one of Cincinnati's most important arts patrons, Alice Weston is also a photographer. And her series Silent Testimony: Photographs by Alice Weston of Ohio's Native American Earthworks is getting a showing this month from Saturday until June 30 at the Architectural Foundation of Cincinnati, 127 W. Ninth St., Downtown. It's open by appointment;…
Events: Councours d’Elegance
The 33rd annual Concours d’ Elegance vintage car show transforms Cincinnati’s historic Ault Park into a showcase lot for more than 200 collector vehicles belonging to over a dozen distinct classes. Originally held at the estate of Bill and Helen Williams in Cincinnati, the Concours d’ Elegance was based on the famous Pebble Beach Concours…
Art: Images Chasing Titles at Collector’s Art Group
Watercolors aren’t what you thought they were, particularly when Sam Hollingsworth puts brush to paper. His show at Collector's Art Group, Images Chasing Titles, ditches the usual watercolorist’s subject matter for surrealist takes that combine ice cream cones and blue moons, a “Midsummer Night’s Dream” that finds him in a Mason jar and the fireflies…
Comedy: Larry Reeb
“My style’s kind of one-liners like the old guys, like Rodney Dangerfield,” says comedian “Uncle” Larry Reeb, “but I’m more twisted and sicker than that, and that comes more from George Carlin. It’s kind of a combination of those two. The “Uncle” handle came years ago, when after a joke he quickly added the tag…
Events: DAAP Fashion Show and After-Party
Hundreds of up-and-coming designers' latest trends will hit the runway in Cincinnati's finest fashion show. This annual show is part of the end-of-the-year, college-wide exhibition including designs from DAAP students, who are collaborating with Macy's to produce a professionally modeled, choreographed and lighted fashion show. Not only will patrons be able to spectate the future…
Events: Italianfest
Don’t have a trace of Italian in you? Fuhgetaboutit! Celebrate Italian heritage anyway at the 18th annual Italianfest. The Southeast Tourism Society pegs this festival at one of the top 20 to check out this month. This weekend will be crammed with history, live music and, of course, lots of delicious Italian food. Be sure…
Country Throwdown Tour Recap
The Country Throwdown Tour wraps up in a few weeks. By all accounts it has been a success, drawing large crowds and little, if any, controversy. We caught up with Emily West, Heidi Newfield, Sean Patrick McGraw, Sarah Buxton & Jedd Hughes while they were on tour to get inside their heads.—- In January 2010,…
Silence Is Not Goldens for Ellery
It’s an old truism that great pain informs great art, but with the new Ellery album, This Isn’t Over Yet, it seems the inverse is true. Last year, following a particularly productive writing period, Ellery’s married brain trust, Tasha and Justin Golden, hit the studio with renowned producer Malcolm Burn to begin their fourth full-length…
Ain’t That Good News
Critic's Pick There is something supremely liberating about knowing that, of all the many people around the world, at the instant you’re attending Ain’t That Good News you most certainly are the only one having that exact experience. You must be, because there's no show quite like it. Not just in the Cincy Fringe or…
The Dopamines (Profile)
Since The Dopamines got serious about spreading their Pop/Punk message to the wider world, the Cincinnati trio has notched some impressive accomplishments: their Soap and Lampshades EP and eponymous full-length in 2008, a trio of split 7-inches, Cincinnati Entertainment Award nominations and a relentless out-of-town touring ethic. Their excellent sophomore full-length, Expect the Worst, is…
La France (Review)
War films detailing the loneliness, camaraderie, fears and moral questionings experienced by those in battle and on the home front are nothing new. Their modus operandi have almost devolved into templates. French filmmaker Serge Bozon’s La France is no exception in that regard, but a series of jaw-dropping surprises transform the film into a wartime…
Salem! The Musical
Hanging somewhere in the theatrical ether, ripe as a preteen suicide in a colonial barn loft, is a hysterical musical parody of the Salem witch trials. This be not it. From Chicago’s Annoyance Theatre comes an aggressively feministic, foul-mouthed, fitfully funny chronicle focused on a few key players in the Salem saga — the Reverend…
Conflicts of Interest, Transparency and the Media
When is disclosure of potential or real conflicts of interest sufficient? Or, put another way, when is the absence of disclosure an ethical issue for journalists? This question of transparency provoked an attack on the World Health Organization’s recommendations on how governments should cope with the then-impending H1N1 pandemic. For cincinnatibeacon.com blogger Jason Haap, it’s…
Marmaduke (Review)
The family-friendly comic-strip canine gets his own live-action romp, and with Owen Wilson providing the voice Marmaduke seeks to bite off a bit of hipster credibility. But does Wilson have any coolness left after Marley & Me? The answer is a resounding “no,” because as big as Marmaduke the dog might be, he and the…
Killers (Review)
Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl beat Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz in the summer race to the Mr. & Mrs. Smith box-office derby, but Killers, with Tom Selleck in a supporting role as Heigl’s nebbishly over-protective father, feels like a pilot for a 1980s television series rather than a would-be summer action comedy. Heigl has…
Fringe Fest Hits Home Stretch
Week 2 of the 2010 Cincy Fringe Festival begins tonight, and several shows are wrapping up already, so get out and see something while you can. CityBeat critics have now posted reviews for 25 of the 29 productions on the Fringe schedule; see all the reviews (plus info on Visual Fringe and Film Fringe) here.—-…
Harold
Critic's Pick “There’s a lot of different ways to tell his story. Here’s how I tell it.” I felt like a kid again, sitting around a campfire with someone spinning scary stories, one on top of the other. That’s what Harold is all about, the third iteration of excellent Fringe shows from Four Humors Theater.…
Sophie’s Dream
Some shows are almost critic-proof, not because they're good but because the creators are so nice and so talented that it would seem evil to say anything negative about them. Sophie’s Dream, the brain-child of Serenity Fisher, who plays and sings and wrote the script, falls into this category. This is a show in which…
The Water Draft
I’m an aging Baby Boomer who often questions authority. (Exhibit A: I write for CityBeat.) There’s hardly a topic I don’t think warrants deeper exploration and, Lord knows, I can imagine many ways our city could be better managed. The Cincy Fringe Festival is an appropriate venue to raise such matters because a lot of…
Tantric Acting at the Holiday Inn
Critic's Pick We Fringe regulars have been at the Dayton Holiday Inn before. Possibly in the Wilbur Room … or maybe it was the Orville Room? Whatever, in the Wilbur Room this time around Finite Number of Monkeys Productions, who gave us The Success Show in the 2009 Fringe, reveals plans for a wonderfully wacky…
The Global Lovers
In a program statement e.E. Charlton-Trujillo, the director of local poet Rhonda Pettit’s The Global Lovers, has written: “I wanted to create a visually compelling, sensory bombastic performance that didn’t pull punches.” My ever reliable Webster’s Dictionary defines “bombastic" as “given to bombast” and “bombast” as “pretentious inflated speech or writing.” Bingo! Charlton-Trujillo achieved her…
A Short Lecture of a Different Time
A year ago Karim Muasher was part of the group Giant Bird that came to the 2009 Cincy Fringe to tell the story of the Empire of Feathers, a mythic world in which a quest was undertaken to find a rare bird. This time around, Muasher is back in a solo piece to tell a…
A Night of Well-Adjusted Ladies
Critic's Pick After seven years, people who still don’t totally understand what the Cincy Fringe Festival is all about should make plans to see A Night of Well Adjusted Ladies, the perfect example of what’s right and fun about Fringe theater. There are more produced, glossier shows in the lineup, to be sure. There are…
Music: Kelly Thomas and the Hayseed Tabernacle Choir
Singer/songwriter Kelly Thomas isn’t particularly religious, but an element of spirituality motivates her. Early church/ vacation Bible school experiences comprise the bulk of her structured religious experiences, combined with a childhood penchant toward performing in public. But when she considers the creation of her new collaborative Gospel album, Gone Home by the Hayseed Tabernacle Choir,…
Movies: Film Fringe
Film Fringe features six films screening in conjunction with the theater-based Cincy Fringe Festival, which runs June 1-12. The films diverge in style and subject matter and include such titles as Brian Brinker’s Hour of the Dinosaur: A Talk with D.J. Chuck, a documentary about local Internet radio D.J. Chuck Mattingly; Eric Risher’s Through Fox’s…
Safety in Numbers
If movement serves as language, then the Space Movement Project, a Chicago-based modern dance collective, displays fluency in its Cincy Fringe debut, Safety in Numbers. The six women dance a lot throughout the piece, and their movement vocabulary proved extensive; I recall only a few recurring motifs. I was surprised that different company members had…
Cyrano
Critic's Pick Our first impression is that of a makeshift performance. A black curtain is strung between aluminum poles, actors are rifling through a large plastic box of props, as well as putting on various costume pieces. When one actor complains about some sweat pants, another one says: “But they look good on you.” We'll…
Nevermore
Critic's Pick Is poetry just for English majors? Nevermore says no, that playgoers can tune into iambic verse just fine. (Shakespeare was onto that, too.) Although writer/director Amy Pettinella plays the feminine role in this two-character piece, she gives the best lines to her co-actor, Russell McGee. No surprise: He’s playing Edgar Allan Poe, no…
Blue Collar Diaries
Critic's Pick During most of the swift, sweet hour that Blue Collar Diaries fills, playwright-performer Michelle Myers Berg beckons to us to step inside her memory and look around. She invites us to study and regard verbal snapshots of a dozen or so people who loomed large in the poor but secure childhood she lived…
Just Say Know
The utterly raw nature of a Fringe production can be its greatest and most exciting asset. And that can be its biggest and sometimes insurmountable challenge. In the case of Just Say Know, it’s a little bit of both. The fact that one person, a Louisville comedian known simply as De Blenniss wrote it, staged…
Splice (Review)
What starts out as a promising sci-fi thriller loses vital steam in an underwhelming third-act climax evidently affected by budgetary limits. Co-writer/director Vincenzo Natali (Cube) leisurely develops the characters of romantically linked biochemists Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley), whose DNA-splicing experiments are under threat of losing funding. Elsa's desire to have a child…
Get Him to the Greek (Review)
Successful “spin-off” TV shows have given a showcase to fully fleshed-out second bananas. But a cinematic scene-stealing supporting comedic character often works precisely because there isn't any attempt to provide more depth; the character exists to steal a few scenes, and nothing more. That's why taking Steve Carrell's blundering anchorman from Bruce Almighty and making…
Aftershock! An Event!
To use Hollywood parlance, which tends to describe new scripts in terms of two previous and familiar films, Aftershock! An Event! is every ’70s disaster flick (Earthquake, Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno) meets The Naked Gun. Based on a series of improvised rehearsals, the folks at Fake Bacon Productions have patched together a show that might…
Lit: David Simon at Mercantile Library
Writer/producer David Simon is the featured speaker at the Mercantile Library's annual Harriet Beecher Stowe Lecture. This year's theme is "Writing to Change the World." Simon is best known as the creator of the highly acclaimed HBO series The Wire and is a Baltimore-based author, journalist and writer-producer for television, specializing in criminal justice and…
Soul Juice
Critic's Pick “It’s a hit! A palpable hit!” Judging by audience reaction, that’s how I would have to characterize the performance of Soul Juice by Devil’s Deuce that I attended. Josiah Pratt (Dylan Shelton) and Ruth Gardener (Annie Kalahurka) are newly minted born-again Christians whom God has sent on a mission: to convert the audience…
The Finkles’ Theater Show
Critic's Pick Meet the Finkles: Carl and Wanda, plus Tinkles Sprinkles, the cutest kitty you’ll ever see outside of a kindergarten production of Cats. They’re theater lovers, just like you. And tonight, for the first (and probably last) time, the Finkles are going to put on a whole darn show, right here at Know Theater,…
The End Is Near
Thursday was a lovely June evening when I set out walking south from my house near Main Street to Below Zero Lounge for Casey Scott Leach’s performance piece The End Is Near. After arriving and climbing the stairs to the large second floor performance space, I found a variety of chairs in front of a…
MidPoint Tickets on Sale TODAY
This evening is the kick-off of the free MidPoint Indie Summer series on Fountain Square — starting at 7 p.m. with The Trouble with Boys and also featuring Paper Airplane, The Love Language and Camera Obscura — and it’s also the first time you can buy tickets for this September’s MidPoint Music Festival … at…
Fringe Is Off and Running
The first two nights of Cincy Fringe Festival 2010 are in the books. Reviews of the seven shows that opened last night are now posted on CityBeat's Fringe home page, and a photo gallery from Tuesday night's kick-off party is here. Get out and enjoy Fringe. Get the full schedule and ticket info at the…
Local Dems Select Leader Tonight
(**UPDATE: Tim Burke was reelected to another two-year term as chairman in a 198-64 vote, or 75.6 percent of ballots cast to Tolliver's 24.4 percent.) The Hamilton County Democratic Party’s central committee will meet this evening to decide whether to replace the party’s longtime chairman. Darren Tolliver, the party’s treasurer, is challenging incumbent Tim Burke.—-…
Helping Ohio’s Farm Animals
At the request of readers, here is some information about how to become involved in the petition effort to establish standards for the treatment of farm animals in Ohio. Several people requested the information after reading an article in last week’s CityBeat about the effort to collect enough signatures to get the Ohio Livestock Care…
The Council
The Performance Gallery has built a reputation for creating works (they're the only group to have a presence in Cincy Fringe for each of the festival’s seven years) that are passionate and experimental and that manage to succeed on the edges of what a theater normally delivers. Yet this year’s entry, The Council, scripted by…
Aberrant Reflections on the Barbarism of You and I
Critic's Pick Watching the Artemis Exchange troupe in performance at this year’s Fringe is little like learning that some Nobel scientist can also write sonnets with Shakespeare or tap dance with Astaire or do close-up magic with Doug Henning. The group’s 2009 offering, Perfectly Wonderful Evening, won awards and serious applause for the way in…
Fraze Craze
In Kettering just outside of Dayton, Fraze Pavilion has been offering a more intimate “outdoor amphitheater” alternative to the area’s more arena-sized sheds for the past 19 years. Bringing a theater concert experience to the great outdoors, Fraze has consistently built quality summer schedules largely featuring Oldies and Classic Rock acts (with cover and tribute…
Dreaming of Dreamgirls
In a summer season that’s pretty sparse on theater, Broadway in Cincinnati is giving us a major shot of glam starting on June 8 when Dreamgirls sashays into town. Maybe you saw the big-screen version in 2006 (Jennifer Hudson won an Academy Award as big-voiced Effie White), but Dreamgirls actually got its start on Broadway…
The Long Way Home
Even by casual Fringe Festival standards, director Kevin Crowley’s staging of playwright Roger Collins’ The Long Way Home is a long way from ready to take stage. Mostly it’s a mess, and mostly the faults proceed from neither the words nor the players. Collins’ script takes a hard though hardly realistic look at Iraq war…
That One Show
Pones Inc.’s oddly titled That One Show might be described most simply as an interactive documentary on the topic of dance. I say "oddly titled" because one might expect some mention or suggestion of dance therein. Perhaps the ambiguity might draw people in? I mean, it's a fun, memorable title. But I digress … Originally…
Hotly Contested
House Minority Leader John Boehner isn’t well-liked by most Americans. A nationwide poll this spring found the droopy-eyed Republican from West Chester had a staggering 64 percent unfavorable rating. Maybe it’s because of his tendency to have a cynical sneer and deadpan delivery that screams, “Even I don’t really believe what I’m saying.” But only…
Medea
Critic's Pick Director Michael Burke of paperStrangers performance group uses a cast of six and two life-sized puppet dolls in this intense, befeathered, modern-flavored restaging of Medea, the 2,400-year-old Greek drama by Euripides in which a vengeful woman horribly murders her own children. As the title character, protagonist Melissa Fenton is of course very tightly…
A Brief History of Petty Crime
Critic's Pick A pack of gum, a can of grapefruit juice, a pair of baby booties hand-knitted by Granny — these are the modest spoils of Jimmy Hogg’s A Brief History of Petty Crime, one of four Cincy Fringe solo shows assigned to the small platform stage at Media Bridges. The unassuming title, no-frills setting…
Of People and Not Things
Critic's Pick This show was supposed to start at 9:15 p.m. on the Fringe’s opening night. Some diddling with sound equipment (which didn’t play a part in the performance I watched) delayed Of People and Not Things for another 10 minutes, and I was irritated — it was late on a Wednesday evening, and the…
Cole’s Replacement: 14th-Place Finisher?
As Laketa Cole prepares to leave Cincinnati City Council for a state government job, sources say she’s settled on Wendell Young as her replacement. Multiple sources at City Hall and within the Democratic Party are talking about Young’s apparent selection and expressing surprise because he has ran unsuccessfully in three City Council elections and finished…
The Gospel According to Kelly Thomas
Singer/songwriter Kelly Thomas isn’t particularly religious, but an element of spirituality motivates her. Early church/ vacation Bible school experiences comprise the bulk of her structured religious experiences, combined with a childhood penchant toward performing in public. But when she considers the creation of her new collaborative Gospel album, Gone Home by the Hayseed Tabernacle Choir,…
Michael Peterson [White House Inn]
These days, if you happen to get an unsolicited job offer just as you’re starting to worry because your current gig is coming to an unexpected end, you have good luck. That or you’ve impressed the right person somewhere along the way. That’s what happened to Chef Michael Peterson of the White House Inn upon…
Law Dog, B-Ball and Twitter
[HOT] Law Doggers Proponents of Arizona’s “tougher” immigration law have defended their stance by yelling, “Have you even read the law!” As if having an opinion on a law is completely invalid if one hasn’t read the entire legal mumbo-jumbo that the majority of citizens are incapable of understanding anyway. Taking a cue from the…
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Review)
You can be forgiven for momentarily thinking that the latest production from Disney’s adaptation maestro Jerry Bruckheimer might have come from a theme-park ride — no, that’s the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise — or that it's based on the wild escapades of an explorer trying to lay his hands on a magical artifact (a…
David Simon’s Total Immersion
David Simon’s The Wire garnered nearly unprecedented critical praise — by the end of its five-season run on HBO, some were calling it the best show to ever grace television — but drew a fraction of the audience of the cable outlet’s other series Sex and the City and The Sopranos. To its credit, HBO…
3CDC Offers to Move Drop Inn Center
Each year thousands of Cincinnati residents wonder where they’re going to sleep each night. Now an offer to restructure and potentially move the city’s largest homeless shelter has many questioning if the offer is sufficient to meet those needs. The Cincinnati Center City Development Corp. (3CDC) recently made an offer to help move the 250-bed…
May 26-31: Worst Week Ever!
WEDNESDAY MAY 26 Most people return home after a nice dinner at a restaurant such as, say, The Cheesecake Factory feeling pretty good about themselves (they have stuff other than cheesecake). According to USA Today, these people would feel less awesome about their decision/lifestyle if somebody had pointed out before the meal that certain dishes…
Finney’s Tantrum Costs Taxpayers
For all of his frequent talk about cutting taxes and limiting the size of government, uber-conservative Chris Finney keeps costing area taxpayers more money. Finney, an attorney who lives in Anderson Township, is a leader of the Coalition Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes (COAST) and also has served several other political causes in the…
Parenthood
My daughter had a birthday last week and my son last month. With both firmly now in their twenties and lives of their own, I don’t see them together that much anymore. That’s why I like it when those birthdays roll around. It means we’ll do dinner somewhere. It means we’ll be together. When they…
Gilmore Ponds Interpretive Preserve Hike
Key At-A-Glance Information Length: 2.4 milesConfiguration: LoopDifficulty: EasyScenery: Wetlands, ponds, marshes, and meadowsExposure: Sun and shadeTraffic: ModerateTrail Surface: Soil, access road, mowed path, and deckingHiking Time: 2 hours (includes time at the observation blind and decks)Driving Distance: 30 minutes northwest of CincinnatiSeason: Year-round, though spring rains may flood portions of the trailsAccess: Sunrise-sunsetMaps: USGS Greenhills;…
Roxanne Qualls and Christ Hospital
[WINNER] ROXANNE QUALLS: The city of Cincinnati has been avoiding dealing with problems in its pension fund account for municipal workers for years. The Retirement System account is underfunded with a long-term shortfall estimated at $2 billion, caused mostly by soaring health care costs and a declining pool of active workers to pay into the…
Ernesto Neto Allow Dancing At the CAC
The Contemporary Arts Center had to delay its Ernesto Neto: Dancing Allowed show — originally scheduled for last March — as part of its various budgetary restraints. It opened May 22, along with Pat Steir’s painting installation Water & Stone, and we can be glad the CAC didn’t have to cancel it. It once again…
Makers’ Dozen
There is the charming Zombie Marge, lovable Little Lulu as Little Voodoo, a campy look at local self-styled “superhero” ShadowHare and Sports Illustrated swimsuit models as zombies. It is irreverent, whimsical, edgy, sweet, gross and just plain silly. Hey, it’s a comic book. Twelve-Way With Cheese is a comic anthology featuring a dozen Greater Cincinnati…
Taste This: Energy Drinks
Everyone wants to be skinnier, smarter, happier. But the best/least most of us hope for is to just stay awake, which probably explains the popularity of energy drinks — and coffee, cocaine and meth, for that matter. After marveling at the over-saturation of energy drinks on the market for years, I finally decided to taste…
