Event: Bikes in Bloom
Take a drive through Milford in the next few weeks to see bikes used as garden art instead of transportation. Bicycles and tricycles will be adorned with flowers and plants during Milford’s fourth annual Bikes in Bloom event. In this garden art project, business and residents decorate bicycles for a fun, colorful challenge. The entries…
Art: The Moon Show
This Saturday semantics gallery in Brighton hosts the opening of a show curated by the new artist collective Near*By. It’s called The Moon Show: A Visual Exposé of the U.S. Apollo 11 Moon Landing, and it uses the “alleged” first moon landing (there are those conspiracy buffs who say it was a hoax) to have…
Music: Glue
Indie Hip Hop supergroup Glue hasn’t performed in more than five years, but on Friday two-thirds of the crew will reassemble for a Glue reunion show in Northside. Glue began in the early ’00s as a long-distance recording project/collaboration between New Hampshire-based MC Adeem, Chicago producer Maker and Cincinnati’s djdq of legendary local turntablist group…
Comedy: Dan St. Germain
It’s not a matter of figuring out where you’ve seen Dan St. Germain before, it’s more like where haven’t you seen him. He has appeared on Comedy Central, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Best Week Ever, John Oliver’s New York Stand-up Show, The Electric Company(!) and loads more. He’s currently developing a series for Fox.…
Literary: Greg Iles
Mississippi-based author Greg Iles nearly died in car wreck during the initial writing of his new novel, Natchez Burning, an experience that couldn’t help but make its way into the finished book. That harrowing event was preceded by the death of his father. “I realized life was too short to pull any punches,” Iles said…
Onstage: Hello, Dolly!
Cincinnati Landmark Productions no longer presents a summer season on board the Showboat Majestic, but fear not: They’ve scheduled a season of shows at the Covedale Center that are the kind of fare Showboat audiences have loved for more than two decades. The season opens with Jerry Herman’s Hello, Dolly!, the classic story of Dolly…
Event: Kehinde Wiley Documentary Film Screening at 21c
Portraitist Kehinde Wiley’s paintings of contemporary persons of color in classical poses reflect his desire to deliberately place this group within the context of traditional Western painting. Wiley, who grew up in South Central Los Angeles during the late ’80s and studied painting at Yale, has shown his work all over the world and will…
X Men: Days of Future Past
Bryan Singer returns to the driver’s seat of the X-Men film franchise after surrendering the wheel to Brett Ratner for X-Men: The Last Stand and watching Matthew Vaughan reset the course drift with the snazzy prequel X-Men: First Class. Singer’s new installment — Days of Future Past — intends to tweak the bumpy continuity ride for the franchise by utilizing the unstable…
The Immigrant
Co-writer (along with Ric Menello) and director James Gray (Little Odessa) employs the timeless aura that surrounds Marion Cotillard in this tale set on the decidedly mean streets of early 20th century Manhattan as a young woman (Cotillard), fresh off the boat and separated from her ill sister, who ends up falling prey to an…
Blended
Blended marks the third pairing of Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore, following The Wedding Singer and 50 First Dates, and this time, they find themselves going all Brady Bunch on us. Jim (Sandler) and Lauren (Barrymore) flame out on a horrible first date, go their separate ways, but then wind up sharing a resort adventure vacation together, along with their combined…
Chef
While I’m not sure many filmgoers this weekend will pick up on the delicious bit of counter-programming going on at their local theaters, those in the know should savor the appetizing idea of pitting this somewhat smaller (in terms of scale and scope) Jon Favreau release casting the writer, director and star as a successful…
Belle
Belle, the new film from Amma Asante (A Way of Life), traversed the festival circuit and gained a fortuitous release date, coinciding with the spectacularly public shaming of Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling at the hands of his one-time mistress V. Stiviano, a bi-racial woman who taped (or arranged the taping of) a private…
REVIEW: Alice in Chains at Horseshoe Casino Cincinnati
The gods of Rock must have known that Alice In Chains was in town on Saturday, May 17 as the area around the Horseshoe Casino was dreary, cloudy and cold. It’s as if they transplanted a little bit of Seattle into downtown Cincinnati for much of the day. Luckily the rain held off for the…
Your Weekend To Do List: 5/16-5/18
The Contemporary Arts Center turns 75 this year and she’s looking as good as ever! Celebrate the CAC’s long history of pushing Cincinnati along the cutting edge with an epic birthday bash tonight. The festivities start at the CAC’s former location in the Mercantile Center with dinner and silent and live auctions from 6-9 p.m.…
Lineups for Fountain Square, Washington Park Music Series
When the lineups for the every-Friday MidPoint Indie Summer concerts on Fountain Square were announced, showcasing a solid lineup of local and touring Indie Rock acts, a colleague in Charlotte, N.C., Jeff Hahne, bemoaned his own city’s lackluster “outdoor free music” offerings. Writing on the blog of the city’s Creative Loafing weekly, he said he…
Stage Door: Cat-and-Mouse Games at the Playhouse
You really can't go wrong with a show at the Cincinnati Playhouse this weekend. I gave both productions Critic's Picks. The North Pool, on the Shelterhouse stage through June 1, is a taut dialogue between a suspicious high school vice principal and a wary student of Middle Eastern descent. (CityBeat review here.) It takes a…
I Just Can’t Get Enough
Throughout history, people have often said they can remember many details about where they were when they heard monumental news: the moon landing or JFK’s assassination, for example. So it is likely we’ll recount to our children and grandchildren what we were doing when we learned of the most recent Great American Tragedy: The Solange-Beyoncé-Jay…
Raphaela Platow on the CAC’s 2008-2009 Maria Lassnig Show
When I interviewed Raphaela Platow, the Contemporary Arts Center’s director/chief curator, several weeks ago for this week’s CityBeat story about the institution’s 75th anniversary, I asked about some of the highlights of her tenure. One was the 2008-2009 exhibition of abstracted and intense figurative paintings by then-octogenarian Austrian painter Maria Lassnig, who was little known…
Music Television Lives?
HOT: Music Television Lives Outside of Austin City Limits and re-runs of the U.K.’s Later … Jools Holland, American television really lacks any solid live music shows. A glimmer of hope came with the recent announcement that The Roots’ Questlove will executive produce a new musical performance show on VH1 that sounds like a twist on…
More MidPoint Music Fest Performers Announced
Last week we broke the news that Cincinnati music greats The Afghan Whigs would be one of the headliners of this year’s MidPoint Music Festival, which returns to the clubs and venues of Over-the-Rhine and downtown Sept. 25-27. This week, a new batch of performers has been announced. (CityBeat owns and operates MPMF.) Real Estate,…
After All This Time
Rodney Crowell’s visit to Cincinnati this week might seem to be just a routine return of an “old hand” Roots-music singer/songwriter — his first solo album, Ain’t Living Long Like This, was released in 1978. But there are some dramatic new developments in Crowell’s long career. The record he released last year with Emmylou Harris,…
Alice in Chains
Has it really been nearly a quarter century since Alice in Chains broke Seattle’s mainstream Grunge seal with “Man in the Box”? A lot has changed since that bluesy, metalized wail dominated Rock radio, the most obvious being the 2002 death of singer Layne Staley, whose drug issues long hampered the band’s evolution. In fact, 1992’s…
French Horn Rebellion with Hey Champ
How best to describe the lush danceable laptop Hip Pop/Indie Rock of French Horn Rebellion? If you’re known by the company you keep, the Milwaukee-raised/Brooklyn-based duo — comprised of brothers David and Robert Perlick-Molinari — is rubbing elbows with the right kind of people, including Savoir Adore, Nini Fabi (HAERTS), Ghost Beach, MGMT and a…
Beautiful Objects, Amazing Environment
Peggy Crawford didn’t know the group she helped found in 1939 — Cincinnati’s Modern Art Society — would become so long-lived or vital. It is now the Contemporary Arts Center, which on Friday is celebrating its 75th anniversary. “I feel great about it,” says Crawford today from Santa Fe, N.M., where she lives in retirement…
Matt Pryor with Blue Of Colors, Bob Nanna, Mark Rose and JT Woodruff
Matt Pryor maintains a creative pace that would give the most hyperactive Type A personality an inferiority complex. The vocalist/guitarist started off in the Ska/Punk band Secret Decoder Ring two decades ago. When that band dissolved in 1995, he formed The Get Up Kids with the Pope brothers and Jim Suptic from fellow Kansas City…
Cincinnati Screams for Creamy Whip
If you grew up in Cincinnati — or even in the Midwest — you know that when your favorite neighborhood creamy whip opens its doors warm weather is finally here to stay (fingers crossed). If Cincinnati hasn’t always been your scene, here’s a quick translation for anyone wondering, “What the F#*$ is creamy whip?” While…
Maury’s Tiny Cove (Feature)
I n 1949, Maury Bibent took over a tavern called Tolles Tiny Cove on Hamilton Road in Cheviot. Back then, the Cove was a small one-room bar, but Bibent purchased the two adjacent buildings, expanded the premises and renamed it Maury’s Tiny Cove. Sixty-five years later, the iconic Cheviot steakhouse still flourishes in this West…
FCC’s Latest Network Neutrality Proposal Not Fair to Consumers
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is proposing new rules for the Internet that have significant implications for how all of us access and pay for content online. Under the FCC’s proposal, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) would be allowed to negotiate with content providers to collect a fee for faster delivery. For instance, popular movie service…
Potty Mouth with Fleabite
Potty Mouth features four ladies (guitarist Ali Donohue, bassist Ally Einbinder, drummer Victoria Mandanas and singer/guitarist Abby Weems) who call Northampton, Mass., home, which makes sense — the band’s full-length debut, last year’s Hell Bent, sounds like it hails from the same place that spawned Dinosaur Jr., with noisy, interlocking guitars evoking a distinctly early-’90s…
The Show
The modern concert-going experience sucks. It is true I am older (49); that I have some health issues that preclude a perfect time every time (diabetes, a right foot wracked by mending nerves); and that I have a low threshold for drunkenness or rudeness. The anticipation to see live music still exists, as does the…
No Images = No Stories
It’s taken almost a month for the story of hundreds of kidnapped Nigerian school girls to gain a foothold in the American news media. But with belated promises of aid by President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, editors finally have images and content they can grasp: Obama and Kerry. In Washington. Days…
Voting Rights Redux
T he process of voting any and all bums out of office should they prove unfit for the high honor of governance is a staple of American democracy — just like the various pieces of legislation that eventually allowed women and minorities to participate in the voting process. Yet nearly 50 years after the Voting…
of Montreal with Dream Tiger and The Nightbeast
Founded in the ’90s in Athens, Ga., and guided by the mad-genius Avant Pop songwriting instincts of Kevin Barnes, of Montreal is one of the more compelling Indie acts going. From its early Beatles-esque offerings and its slanted, kaleidoscopic Disco Pop to the band’s most recent effort, the more “live band” Rock of Lousy with…
More Artists Announced for MidPoint Music Festival
A new batch of over 20 artists has been announced for this year’s MidPoint Music Festival, which returns to the clubs and venues of Over-the-Rhine and Downtown Sept. 25-27. The following acts join The Afghan Whigs, who were announced last week as the Washington Park headliners on Sept. 26, at 2014’s MPMF. Real Estate New…
Million Dollar Arm
From the unveiling of the first trailer for Million Dollar Arm, the movie has set up all sorts of pitch-based comparisons; the most obvious being Jerry Maguire meets Slumdog Millionaire. A down-on-his-luck sports agent (Jon Hamm) convinces a big money investor to support the crazy idea of scouting India’s cricket scene for a major league…
Godzilla
The biggest big screen monster of them all, Godzilla, gets another reboot — this time from director Gareth Edwards (Monsters), and it appears that the movie gives the origin story a subtle twist. Science-gone-wrong not only creates fantastic and malevolent creatures, it is deployed in an effort to destroy them but proves futile, which means…
God’s Pocket
The first “read” of God’s Pocket, the feature-film directing debut of actor John Slattery (best known for his Emmy-nominated acting on Mad Men) is that the narrative’s working class criminality contains a metaphor for the inner-working life within Hollywood where there are no secrets, only things people decide to not talk about. Mickey (Philip Seymour…
Summer TV Preview
The long-awaited summer is upon us, and with it comes new series and seasons of shows worth checking out between beach vacations and barbecues. Crossbones (Series Premiere, 10 p.m. May 30, NBC) – John Malkovich plays Blackbeard. That’s all you need to know. Halt and Catch Fire (Series Premiere, 10 p.m. June 1, AMC) –…
Dirty Pretty Decisions Drive ‘Locke’
Back in 2002, Joel Schumacher and Colin Farrell captured a startling mix of old school terror with a new sensibility in the mainstream-friendly Phone Booth. Farrell’s smooth-talking protagonist was a stereotypically sleazy operator, with a loving wife and a would-be woman on the side, who crossed paths with an anonymous trickster offering him the chance…
The Corpse Exhibition
Since our botched invasion and futile occupation of Iraq, there have been several excellent accounts of this costly, deadly debacle —unfortunately all written from the perspective of American and other Western-based writers. Finally, we have the opportunity to see these years of terror and death through the eyes of an Iraqi with Hassan Blasim’s bold…
To Rise Again At A Decent Hour
While it may indeed be an urban folk tale that dentists have a higher rate of suicide than other professions, there’s no doubt that, like pimpin’, dentistry ain’t easy. As Joshua Ferris begins his side-splittingly funny and introspective novel To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, “The mouth is a strange place.” And he’s right…
Comedian Kathleen Madigan Works Hard, Plays Nice
“Everyone in my family is pretty funny,” says comedian Kathleen Madigan, “but I don’t think we think of it as funny; it’s just the way we are. My sister married this guy whose family is German, and that’s when I realized we’re funny — because they are not funny. He would start telling a story,…
Community Theaters: We’ve Gotta Crow
Since I write about theater for CityBeat, I see lots of productions around town, mostly by our fine professional and semiprofessional companies. I don’t have the bandwidth nor does CityBeat have enough space to write often about community theaters — groups of volunteers who produce and perform in shows, often for audiences in a specific…
Year of the Snake
“S ometimes it’s hard to explain what we do because it’s still evolving,” says Philip Valois, designer and co-founder of Reptiles+Rainbows, a multidisciplinary design studio he began in early 2013 with designer, art director and life partner, Carla Morales. Valois and Morales operate out of their Oakley home where they’ve lived since 2006, when…
