MidPoint Around Town
The 2009 MidPoint Music Festival starts in 48 hours (from the time I'm writing this). Be sure to keep your eyes pealed on all local media these next few days (not just CityBeat, like you all usually do, right?), as MidPoint gets featured on local TV, blogs, newspaper and radio outlets. Fox19 has been promoting…
Thursday Pick: Deke Dickerson
Born in Missouri, Rockabilly/Roots hero Deke Dickerson started out playing in a Surf band in his teens, and that sound is still evident in some of his music. But he's since become a darling of the Roots music movement. In the early ’90s Dickerson moved to L.A. and formed a popular “Hillbilly” duo. By the…
MPMF 2008 [Photos]
THURSDAY FRIDAY SATURDAY
Week 3 – Jim Ledbetter
You were under a lot of pressure tonight. What advice would you give other athletes who want to keep cool in extreme sports such as Bengals Football Bolo Toss? Drink a lot of Bud Light. Is there anyone who you would like to thank who may have played a small role in your victory tonight?…
Lit: InkTank
On Final Friday at Ink Tank, you can catch the warm-up for Northern Kentucky University’s Saturday conference, “Voices from the Hills: A Celebration of Appalachian Writers.” Major Appalachian poets and writers will read their work in Ink Tank’s friendly domain, beginning at 7:30 p.m. Doors open at 7 p.m., with refreshments available and the Book…
Thursday Pick: Watson Park
When I step into Reality Tuesdays, a Covington coffee joint, I scan the room for “band signs” — tattoos, Chucks, skate shoes, black clothes, wrecked hair or wicked t-shirts, the usual dead giveaways. Then I see two guys huddling in a booth — early twenties, whispering about sound systems. Bingo. Watson Park. Drummer Nate Staggs…
Saturday Pick: Annie & the Beekeepers
There are many reasons for me to loathe the Berklee College of Music. The institution of sonic higher learning in Boston is guilty of the following two atrocities: The school stole my best friend in my junior year of high school, making my senior year far less exciting, and it was also tacitly responsible for…
Saturday Pick: Chairlift
For Chairlift, the experimental-tinged, ethereal Folk Pop trio that will be rocking the "Topic Design Tent" at Grammer’s Saturday as part of MidPoint Music Festival, it’s been a fast rise upward. Just four years ago, Chairlift — then a collection of undergraduates at University of Colorado at Boulder — was playing at a garage party…
Art: Hoplessly Devoted at Creative Gallery
Molly Donnermeyer’s Hopelessly Devoted has had a quelling influence on the mood around Creative Gallery. Along with collages on paper and a series of new photographs, Donnermeyer creates intriguing installations in the space’s window displays that hearken back equally to Jannis Kounellis or Petah Coyne-style sculpture or the ornate window displays of stores like Anthropologie.…
Onstage: A Joyful Noise
Local theaters are shedding some light on music this month. Ensemble Theatre just finished its run of the fascinating 33 Variations, in which Beethoven is a central character. Coming soon at the Cincinnati Playhouse is Victoria Musica, about a cellist who might or might not be a fraud. But right now, Mariemont Players is offering…
Art: Weston Art Gallery
In the Weston’s first exhibitions of its season, Ryan Mulligan, Casey Riordan Millard and Michael Sharber reinforce the overt qualities of fantasy and illustration in one another’s work, while also calling attention to more understated emo-aesthetics and pseudo-spirituality. Ryan Mulligan’s seriously funny installation I’ll Just Ask Dad is being shown in the Weston’s street-level space.…
Friday Pick: The Lions Rampant
The fact that Cincinnati, despite its size, feels like a place where everybody knows your name is a really charming quality … until you run into three guys at IGA when you’re in sweatpants buying tampons and Pepto. It also makes it difficult to interview people. I recently sat down with Stuart MacKenzie from The…
Saturday Pick: You, You’re Awesome
We laugh, stepping carefully, heading into the dark basement of Northside hangout The Comet. Scattered red lights glow, hanging from the low ceiling. Ghostly “after-dance-party” feel. The smell of booze seeps from the floor and walls. We walk across a slanted, shady floor. The air, hot and stale, like a young band’s practice space. Our…
Music: MidPoint Music Festival Friday
The 2009 MidPoint Music Festival continues with Day 2 on 24 stages in downtown, Over-the-Rhine and Newport. Most showcases begin at 8 p.m. (Grammer's acts begin at 6:30) — cover charges apply at each venue, or you can skip the lines by grabbing a three-day wristband for $29 (available at the door at each venue).…
Them Glorious Bastards
Erika Wennerstrom’s stuff might be jammed into an apartment in Austin, Texas, but Cincinnati will always be home for her and The Heartless Bastards. It’s been nearly two years since she dismantled the original Bastards after her personal break-up with bassist Mike Lamping and relocated to Texas. “I think it was a good move for…
Saturday Pick: The Rosewood Thieves
“Classic Rock” is a tough label for a band to endure. It implies all music under this subcategory of mainstream Rock is defined by antique characteristics, making it somehow irrelevant to the modern iTunes lexicon. Granted, most musicians burdened with “Classic Rock” status rarely release new albums (and when they do, it serves to make…
Music: MidPoint Music Festival Kicks Off
The 2009 MidPoint Music Festival kicks off today with a free show at 5-7 p.m. on Fountain Square featuring The Young Republic from Nashville and Shayna Zaid & the Catch from New York City. Both of those bands play later in the evening at one of the club showcases (The Young Republic at Blue Wisp…
Talking Shop
After a one-year absence in 2008, the MidPoint Music Festival has brought back the daytime “music conference,” with useful panels and discussions about a range of topics of interest to all types of independent musicians. All panels are Saturday afternoon, so pace yourself Friday night — the first two are at the Garfield Suites Hotel,…
Saturday Pick: Micachu & the Shapes
Never describe hard-to-categorize music as “experimental.” You’ll end up sounding like a haughty connoisseur of dulcet mysteries or a Wikipedia enthusiast, neither of which is exemplary. As a culture, we want to lump exceptional people, ideas and innovations into categories that are as unexceptional as they are unimaginative: Great films become “masterpieces,” bold people “legendary”…
Lectures: Digital Hub Non-Conference
Returning for another year, the Digital Hub Initiative brings the 2009 Digital Hub NON-Conference back to the Cincinnati Hyatt and promises to be bigger and better than last year. The NON-Conference is about supporting our region as “The Hub of ‘All Things Digital’” in advertising, design, marketing, communications and public relations. This two-day non-conference for…
Comedy: Kyle Grooms
“I like my comedy to make you think and laugh at the same time,” Kyle Grooms says. “I like it to be real. I like it to have some kind of focus.” Grooms originally got into comedy as a hobby. After a few years he realized he was good at it and left his job…
First Streetcar Open House Tonight
The city of Cincinnati starts hosting a series of 10 open houses tonight to provide information on the proposed streetcar line connecting the downtown riverfront, Over-the-Rhine and the Uptown area around UC. City staff will be on hand to answer questions about the line’s economic benefits, costs and route. There is no formal presentation. Tonight's…
Visual Evidence: Lions Rampant & Sundresses
As we prepare for the musical tsunami that is the MidPoint Music Festival, we thought we'd take a breather and let you watch some video (kind of like that teacher you had who would show "topic-appropriate" movies to the class when he was suffering from a hangover/mental breakdown). Two MidPoint bands have brand-spankin' new music…
Sorority Row (Review)
Everyone who has asked me about this movie refers to it as a remake (of The House on Sorority Row), and while it is, this Row is all about mashing up I Know What You Did Last Summer with Scream, two franchises that weren’t asking for this kind of treatment. The catty sorority sisters on…
I Can Do Bad All By Myself (Review)
I Can Do Bad All By Myself features R&B greats Gladys Knight and Mary J. Blige for soundtrack considerations, Taraji P. Henson for the requisite nod towards serious acting credibility and, of course, Tyler Perry for the inevitable dose of cross-dressing big-mama-styled humor and down-home folksiness. The story works overtime on fusing these pieces together…
It Might Get Loud (Review)
Director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) brings together Rock music legends Jimmy Page and U2’s The Edge with The White Stripes’ Jack White for an eventful behind-the-scenes look at how these great musicians communicate with each other and create music. Impromptu jam sessions and individual strolls down memory lane reveal the guitarists’ childlike passion for…
Jennifer’s Body (Review)
Jennifer (Megan Fox) is the beautiful cheerleader that every guy, popular or otherwise, wants to bed, while Needy (Amanda Seyfried) is the smart girl in the glasses and sensible outfits who tags along with her cool friend. Girlfight, director Karyn Kusama’s debut back in 2000, explored similar themes with a gritty eye for the real-life…
The Informant (Review)
Conventional wisdom recognizes that The Informant is a breezy take on the case of Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), a whistleblower from the early ’90s who ratted out his global agribusiness firm to the federal government as part of a price-fixing investigation, while embezzling millions of dollars and lying through his teeth like a bad hairpiece…
Lorna’s Silence (Review)
Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne craft an evocative story about Lorna, a young Albanian woman (played flawlessly in a break-out performance by Kosovo-born Arta Dobroshi) in cahoots with Fabio, a Belgian mobster, to make money so she can open a snack bar with her boyfriend. Lorna suffers through a fraud marriage to Claudy (well played by…
Onstage: My Fair Lady
A revival of the evergreen, ever-lilting, ever-intelligent Alan Lerner-Frederick Loewe 1956 musical My Fair Lady closes out the 2009 summer season on Showboat Majestic under Tim Perrino’s direction. Much is brightly energetic and cleverly staged, though occasionally ragged in execution on the postage stamp stage, especially the Embassy Ball scene that ends Act I on…
Onstage: The Lion in Winter
Imagine the result if Noel Coward had written King Lear. Imagine the savagery that families reserve for their most bitter internecine battles but verbalized in the lilting, wit-lit language of drawing-room comedy. That’s the effect of The Lion in Winter, the James Goldman script that stumbled on Broadway in 1966 but has since become a…
My Fair Lady (Review)
OK, the musical about schizophrenia, Next to Normal, that’s running on Broadway was nominated for some Tony Awards. In the 1940s, Kurt Weill’s Lady in the Dark (about psychoanalysis) ran for 500 performances. The 2008 Cincinnati Fringe Festival included a musical celebrating calculus and mathematical formulae called, appropriately enough, Calculus: The Musical, which Know Theatre…
Yates: Stop Automatic Overdraft Protection
State Rep. Tyrone Yates (D-Cincinnati), plans to introduce legislation in the Ohio House soon that he said would help shield bank customers from excessive fees. Under his proposal, banks doing business in Ohio would be prohibited from automatically enrolling customers in debit card overdraft protection programs without first giving them the right to opt-out of…
Lions Rampant Video Trailer and Party Info
BABES! Party. 10 p.m. Saturday. 401 Scott St. in Covington. Watch the new video for "Lights On!" Watch The Lions Rampant play. Dance to music from DJ Iceburg. BYOB, people. Read my interview with the Lions' Stuart Mackenzie here.
Stage Door: Excellent “33 Variations” Wraps Up
A show that's likely to be considered one of the best of the 2009-2010 season is just about over. This weekend offers the final performances of Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati's production of 33 Variations. The intriguing play by Moisés Kaufman is about Katherine Brandt, a musicologist who tries to understand what motivated Beethoven to compose…
New Single From Buffalo Killers
Cincinnati vintage Psych Pop/Rock trio Buffalo Killers are prepping a new album that is currently scheduled for release by the end of the year. In the meantime, the group is releasing a new single ("Huma Bird" backed with "Spend My Last Breath"), which is available for download at all major online retailers and will be…
CityBeat Podcast 26: Biking Ohio
This week's episode is an audio recording of a 311-mile bicycle tour along the Ohio-to-Erie Trail, from Cleveland to Cincinnati. The Ohio-to Erie Trail is a network of regional, off-road trails in Ohio that's more than three-quarters complete. The leg near Cincinnati runs 78 miles and is paved over an old railroad line. Near Cleveland,…
U.S. Crime: Mr. Deters, Please Take Note
Released Monday, the FBI’s annual crime report for last year further underscores the fact that imposing capital punishment on criminals doesn’t act as a deterrent to homicides. The report, Crime in the United States 2008, reveals that in 13 of the 14 states that didn’t have the death penalty last year, the murder rate was…
Foreseeable Future
Fantasy football drafts. Tailgating. Running your mouth. There are many great aspects to this narrow season between face-melting heat and bone-chilling cold called we call Autumn. In many ways sports come to mind when mentally tallying the good things about fall. What Thanksgiving would be complete without you and your weakarmed relatives throwing wobbly passes…
Berding Gets Blacked Out
It was an all-around bad week recently for Cincinnati City Councilman Jeff Berding. As most political junkies know, Berding was unendorsed by the local Democratic Party after a long history of opposing initiatives proposed by Mayor Mark Mallory and other Democrats on City Council and criticizing them on radio and TV. But even Berding’s day…
Eating Peanuts Downtown
Dear Maija, So I was at the Reds game the other night and this 50-year-old lady sitting in front of me bent over to pick up a deshelled peanut from the ground. When she did this it showed off her lace thong. She then proceeded to eat the peanut that had just been sitting on…
Low Dough Shows
I keep reading that the tight economy is loosening, but those unemployment figures continue to creep upward and I’m sure there are people out there who would like to attend theater but feel they can’t afford it. So let me spread the word that there are ways to get a theater fix without maxing out…
The ‘Silly Season’ Is Upon Us
Some British guy once started a great novel with the memorable turn of words, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” That phrase perfectly captures the feelings of most political reporters as autumn approaches, especially those in Greater Cincinnati. Most people might think political junkies — whether writers or concerned…
Cumin (Review)
Cumin Eclectic Cuisine is an East Side hideaway I’d heard good things about but hadn’t visited until their recent menu change was announced. A stop confirmed all the positive predictions: Cumin is indeed chic, eclectic, fun and flavorful. The “flavorful” springs from multiple ethnic heritages and a vivid passion for fresh food. Cumin’s co-owners are…
Sept. 9-15: Worst Week Ever!
WEDNESDAY SEPT. 9 Anyone who has ever been caught by their parents stealing stuff from a store knows how much it sucks when they drag you back in there to apologize and give back the Skittles. U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson (R-South Carolina) knows this type of embarrassment, only he doesn’t have a shiny wrapper and…
Farm Report, Cobain and A Very Bondage Christmas
[HOT] FARM REPORT We here at Mini Gauge love a good prank. We’re seriously bummed about the proliferation of caller ID because we can no longer telephone our editor at 4 a.m. and tell him we’re a leader of a right-wing conservative group planning a “Tea Party” in his backyard. But those with more initiative…
Swine Flu Goes to College
Maybe mom’s constant advice about always washing your hands isn’t so annoying after all. College students typically have a lot on their mind around this time of year. With the 2009 fall quarter already underway at Xavier University (XU) and beginning next week at the University of Cincinnati (UC), most students are in clutch mode…
50 Cool Things [The Fall Event Guide]
The fall might be the only time of year when the weather starts getting cooler, but people in Cincinnati spend the entire year being totally cool. Here’s a list of 50 reasons* why the Queen City is cooler than ever this fall. *In no particular order. Be cool, man! 1/ Cool Bikes: Cincinnati has a…
Schmidt, Farmer, Heimlich and Smitherman
[LOSER] JEAN SCHMIDT: Poor Jean, she just can’t seem to keep herself off our list. Just a week after her embarrassing testimony in an Ohio Elections Commission complaint she filed against an opponent, the sour-looking congresswoman drew nationwide scorn for an incident caught on video by Think Progress. At a Sept. 5 Tea Party in…
The Year of the Comeback?
In honor of our Cool Issue and fall preview, we wanted to take a look at some of the local-music-centric things happening in the pre-winter months. As it turns out, a theme this year could be “The Comeback,” as several artists (some from way back and others from more recently) and a late ’90s/early ’00s…
Cool/Uncool
New TV shows Danny: Um, I’m really smart and artsy so I don’t even own a TV. Just kidding! I have a giant HD TV with like 1,000 channels. If you don’t watch 30 Rock you’re so, so stupid. Maija: Last season I caught up on LOST so now I can watch it with my…
Hip Hop (Un)Scene: Turn My Headphones Up
Suge Knight used to whoop an engineer’s ass if he rewound the tapes too far during the recording sessions of 2Pac’s All Eyez on Me. Kind of extreme. And most likely not the most conducive working atmosphere for an engineer. One thing I tried to stress in my last column was the importance of knowing…
Money, Bad Luck and Terror in Toronto
TORONTO — The worldwide economic recession and the retrenching — or, in some cases, evaporation — of movie studios and distributors has clearly impacted the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Word is that nearly half of the festival’s 300-plus films are still looking for distributors. A quick glance at the lineup also reveals far…
Country Club Going Cross Country
When I visited Country Club in the West End last week, it was bustling even though no other visitors were in the art gallery. Christian Strike, its owner, was too busy at his computer to talk. His Iconoclast Editions, an ancillary company headquartered in the West End gallery, had just that day issued a new,…
Sit or Spin IV: Trentin
Late on July 1, I was folding clothes at the Laundromat when my mom called, and I complained that there were no stories that night. It was quiet. Too quiet. I sat on top of a folding table, my feet dangling, when Mom and I got on the topic of kids. I told Mom that…
Twisted Sisters Cafe (Lunch Review)
I love sandwiches. I’ve long felt that they’re perfect in many ways, especially as a lunch food: They’re hand-held, often incorporate all the food groups and can contain damn near any combination of ingredients you can think up. The only thing that limits the possibilities of a sandwich is the chef’s imagination. We learned this…
Cooler than Cincinnati?
Usually when September rolls around, I spend my time prepping an opening at Carl Solway Gallery and anticipating all the new fall exhibitions in town. This year, I’m also preparing for my move back to Brooklyn. While everyone knows New York is a cool town full of art, I’m not ready to admit that it’s…
Justice Plays for Justice
Northern Kentucky Blues singer/songwriter/guitarist Jon Justice is one of the many musicians featured on the new compilation CD, Forgotten But Not Gone, a benefit project for two charities dedicated to assisting those displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Justice and his band are joined by some elite company — Marty Stuart, Delbert McClinton, SteveEarle, Tony Joe White,…
