May 25 – Jun 1, 2016
Local Color: 2016 Fringe Offers Sure Signs of Hometown Creativity
Morning News and Stuff
Hey all. Hope your Memorial Day weekend was grand. Mine involved bicycles, friends from near and far, brunch, puppies, beers and big sales on outdoor gear. So, yeah, basically everything that’s good in life. Sometimes, the news is about everything that’s not so good in life. You’ve almost certainly already heard about the tragic death…
Your Weekend To-Do List
FRIDAY EVENT: FURRY FRIENDS FESTIVAL The Furry Friends Festival is a dog-gone good time for pups and their people at Washington Park. Pet-friendly vendors will coalesce on the green, offering everything from dog food and accessories to toys and photography services. Share a plate of Eli’s BBQ with your pooch and imbibe craft beers from…
Dennison Vote Delayed
After a nearly four-hour meeting, Cincinnati's Historic Conservation Board adjourned this afternoon without voting on Columbia REI, LLC's application to tear down the historic Dennison building downtown at 716-718 Main St. That application has caused controversy. Columbia, owned by the powerful Joseph family, says it would be too expensive to save the building and would…
Effort to Preserve 300 Units of OTR Affordable Housing Unveiled
Over-the-Rhine will see improvements on 300 units of affordable housing, many as part of mixed-income developments, according to a new plan. The effort by Model Group, 3CDC and Over the Rhine Community Housing would rehabilitate affordable housing at eight sites, many under contracts with the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The city could chip…
What to Eat and Drink at Taste of Cincinnati
Practice your plate-balancing and Porta-Potty hovering skills: It’s Taste of Cincinnati weekend. As the nation’s longest-running culinary arts festival, Taste of Cincinnati ain’t always fancy, but it certainly is fun. More than 500,000 people will descend on downtown over this coming Memorial Day Weekend to eat, drink and make a mess of Fifth Street. More…
Morning News and Stuff
Good morning, Cincy! A lot is happening around the city so let's get straight to the headlines. • An off-duty Cincinnati police officer fatally shot a man suspected of robbing a Madisonville bank yesterday afternoon. CPD Chief Eliot Isaac confirmed that the still-unnamed CPD officer fired two shots at 20-year-old Terry Frost in the Fifth…
A Bigger Splash
There is a delicious thrill in watching a completely dialed-in performer tackle a truly larger-than-life character, one of those outsized personalities that can dominate a story, crowding out others, even the presumed protagonists. Ralph Fiennes has been twice nominated for Academy Awards, but even as the Nazi camp commandant in Schindler’s List, a role requiring…
Alice Through the Looking Glass
This Tim Burton-produced affair from director James Bobin (the helmer in charge of the two recent Muppet big-screen reinventions) certainly has the feel of a trippy Burton fantasy, not to mention the presences of Burton stalwarts Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter (as the Mad Hatter and Iracebeth, respectively). Yet, for all the stylistic flourishes,…
Contemporary Arts Center Announces 2016-17 Season
The Contemporary Arts Center announced its 2016-17 exhibition season last evening during a special presentation to its Board of Trustees and media. At the same time, it also previewed several performances scheduled for that same season. (There may still be another art exhibition added.)The biggest takeaways from the announcement are that the CAC is striving…
Summer TV Preview
Outcast (Series Premiere, 10 p.m. June 3, Cinemax) – Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman adapts another one of his graphic novels for television with this horror-drama starring Patrick Fugit. Kyle Barnes (Fugit) has faced demonic possession his whole life. After joining forces with a reverend who has demons of his own, the two search for…
Loving the Familiar in ‘The Lobster’
Early on in Yorgos Lanthimos’ new release, The Lobster, set in a curiously ordinary dystopian future where maintaining social order means controlling human relationships, David (Colin Farrell) finds himself stranded when his wife leaves him for someone else. This break in the pairing doesn’t bode well for David. He’s forced, according to the laws of…
‘Future Science’: The Stupidest Version of Smart
Ask the comedians behind Future Science what their sketch comedy show is like, and they will each answer along the lines of “structured chaos.” Dressed in lab coats, high school friends Karl Spaeth and Logan Lautzenheiser, along with buds Andy Gasper and Chris Weir, present their absurdist satire in an original hour-long themed show at…
Carl Solway Exhibit Draws Generations Together
Though she’s the youngest of three artists showing at Carl Solway Gallery, Elsa Hansen possesses the wisdom of an old soul. The Louisville resident combines the tradition of cross-stitch, the 8-bit imagery of video games and popular icons of both her millennial generation and yesteryear to provide quirky commentaries. Like the Solway Gallery, Hansen is…
Cappies Provide Recognition and Appreciation
Two weeks ago, I mentioned the Cappies, the awards program for high school performers and critics that involves nearly two dozen area schools from Ohio and Northern Kentucky. Their annual gala will be the evening of May 27 at the Aronoff Center. This is a great program for high school kids involved in the arts…
Poetic Justice
O n the ides of April, despite a forgivingly warm day, it seemed that the entirety of Cincinnati’s poetry scene cloistered itself in the Mercantile Library to witness the inauguration of Cincinnati’s first poet laureate, Pauletta Hansel. It went how you would expect, albeit with a few surprises — at one point a bird dove…
Summertime-Favorite Brews
Memorial Day marks the return of the summer season (it’s when pools open!), and local breweries have re-released some of their summertime favorites, like MadTree’s Sol Drifter, Rhinegeist’s Puma Pils, Fifty West’s Tastee Whip ice cream ale, Fibonacci’s Lemon Zingibeer pale ale and Mt. Carmel’s Hibiscus Blueberry. May and June are also prime beer fest…
Community in the Kitchen
R achel DesRochers knows a little something about being in the kitchen. In 2010 she started vegan graham cracker company Grateful Grahams out of her home kitchen as an example to her then-infant daughter that anything is possible with the right mindset. Within three years she had outgrown the space and started the Northern Kentucky…
After some deal-making, CPS and Preschool Promise will ask voters to fund universal preschool
Cincinnati’s childhood poverty rate is among the worst in the country. But if voters approve, the Queen City could be the first to try an ambitious effort to alleviate some of the earliest obstacles that poverty creates and lift up the next generation. Proponents of the Preschool Promise initiative have been planning for two years…
Worst Week Ever! May 18-24
Oklahoma Politicians Make National News for Reasons You Would Have Guessed Oklahoma is a state that people tend not to talk about. Whether it’s because passing through that state on the way to somewhere else sucks or because Oklahoma City stole the Seattle Supersonics — or some combination of both — is up for the…
Media Musings From Cincinnati and Beyond
St. Louis County prosecutors finally dropped phony charges against two reporters covering unrest two years ago in Ferguson, Mo. In exchange, the reporters promised not to sue the cops. One of the journalists, Ryan Reilly, however, said they might have pled out if their legal bills weren’t paid by their employers, Huffington Post and the…
Morning News and Stuff
Good morning all. Here’s what’s going on in the world today. The city of Cincinnati has officially announced an opening date for the city’s streetcar. The transit project running through Over-the-Rhine and downtown will take its first passengers Sept. 9, beginning with an opening ceremony at some point mid-day. The project, which has been fraught…
Local Color
T he 2016 Cincinnati Fringe Festival (No. 13, in case you’re counting) will bring a big splash of local color. These days we’re urged to buy locally manufactured products and eat in restaurants that feature locally produced food. If you’re adherent to this “locavore” mindset, this year’s Fringe, May 31-June 11, will be right up…
Music: Blank Range
Sounding like a soulful Midwest Psych Folk mash-up of Blitzen Trapper and Pavement if they’d all been steered by a love of Dylan and The Band’s Basement Tapes, Nashville, Tenn. quintet Blank Range — vocalist Jonathon Childers (who sports a “Seger Rules” tattoo), guitarist/vocalist Grant Gustafson, keyboardist Jonathan Rainville, bassist Taylor Zachry and drummer Matt…
Music: The Cave Singers
The state of the music “business” continues to evolve and fracture in ways that make HBO’s Vinyl, which lavishly presents the decadent record industry of the 1970s, look like something out of the stone age — or an unintentionally hilarious satire. The last few weeks alone have given us a bounty of unexpected releases — from…
Sound Advice: The Cave Singers and Blank Range
The state of the music “business” continues to evolve and fracture in ways that make HBO’s Vinyl, which lavishly presents the decadent record industry of the 1970s, look like something out of the stone age — or an unintentionally hilarious satire. The last few weeks alone have given us a bounty of unexpected releases — from…
Music: Yoni & Geti
While Yoni Wolf of Why? and Serengeti toured together, the pair envisioned a detailed and thematic story, a tale of fated and doomed love between Garage Rock aspirant Davy and his long-suffering wife Maddy, and the spiraling descent of Davy’s road debauchery and Maddy’s shifting roles between mother of two, cocktail waitress and unfaithful wife.…
Sound Advice: Yoni & Geti with The Yugos, Lazy Heart and Chief Boldface
Five years ago, while brothers Yoni and Josiah Wolf were hip-deep in the process of making their eventual 2012 releases as Why? — the Sod in the Seed EP and their fourth full-length, Mumps, Etc. — younger brother Yoni was just coming off his first collaboration with David Cohn, an Alternative Hip Hop artist known…
Music: Will Hoge
Will Hoge is one of those talented singer/songwriters who should be bigger than he is in the music world. Bruce Springsteen is a fan, as is Vince Gill and many other top artists. Hoge’s journey through the miasma that is the Nashville music business has been inconsistent, despite the fact that his original music —…
Sound Advice: Will Hoge with Jason White
Will Hoge is one of those talented singer/songwriters who should be bigger than he is in the music world. Bruce Springsteen is a fan, as is Vince Gill and many other top artists. Hoge’s journey through the miasma that is the Nashville music business has been inconsistent, despite the fact that his original music —…
Area Festivals Provide Holiday Weekend Soundtrack
Led by Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist since 1989, the longevity of one of Cincinnati’s most successful bands, Over the Rhine, is fueled by a loyal base of fans, which has made it possible for the duo to make a living touring and releasing albums for more than a quarter of a century. Those fans…
Krystal, Clear
K rystal Peterson’s story has all the elements of a compelling movie — success at an early age, a fall from that lofty pedestal, the realization of a true path, the struggle to actualize that path and a satisfying resolution. Peterson’s ostensible happy ending, her debut album Spell with her new Blues/R&B/Pop group, the Queen…
Eminem Sells Bricks
HOT: Eminem Sells Bricks Eminem decided to celebrate the 16th birthday of The Marshall Mathers LP, a random anniversary that deserves the kind of weird release the rapper delivered — a reissue of the album on cassette in packages that include a brick from his childhood home and dog tags made from wood from the…
