Morning News and Stuff
Hey, Cincy! I can only hope you're recovering a long weekend of sun and hot dogs. As you recover from your hangover and sunburns, you can catch up on today's headlines. • City Manager Harry Black hits the one year mark working for the city today. To celebrate, Mayor John Cranley would like to give…
Leftovers: What We Ate This Weekend
Each week CityBeat staffers, dining writers and the occasional intern tell you what they ate this weekend. We're not always proud — or trendy — but we definitely spend at least some money on food. Ilene Ross: The BF and I had a super busy weekend in the kitchen putting up tomatoes and okra — he’s a…
Where to Shop: Staff Picks
Cincinnati's best shopping and service destinations as selected by CityBeat staff. BEST HAND-TIED BOUQUETS It’s refreshing both literally and figuratively that floral arranging has transitioned from a tightly puckered ’80s roses-and-baby’s-breath-equal-high-class-fancy philosophy to something organic, ethereal and loose, utilizing herbs, wildflowers and natural branches (see Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Saipua). Locally, Una Floral is bringing a breath of fresh air to…
Stage Door
There’s a lot more coming next week, once we get past Labor Day, but right now there’s just one theater locally with a production onstage. That’s the Covedale Center for the Performing Arts. Artistic Director Tim Perrino has been reminding everyone that just because Cincinnati Landmark Productions has opened the Incline Theatre, don’t think that…
Your Weekend To Do List (9/4-9/6)
FRIDAY Dig your savage soul with BARRENCE WHITFIELD & THE SAVAGES Barrence Whitfield & the Savages have had more lives than a Buddhist cat. They recorded two brilliant albums in the early ’80s, broke up in 1986 and reunited in 2010, resulting in three exceptional albums — 2011’s Savage Kings (on Cincinnati’s Shake It label),…
Morning News and Stuff
Good morning all. Here’s the news today as we head into the long Labor Day weekend. I’ll be brief so we can all get there a little quicker, eh? Cincinnati City Councilman and former Cincinnati Police officer Wendell Young says Police Chief Jeffrey Blackwell has become a distraction and should move on. Young has until…
Donald Trump Is Great Summer Copy
The Donald is the perfect antidote to perennial August news doldrums. He’s more than a rude Clown Prince; Trump speaks for the aspirations, suspicions, frustrations and anger of millions of Americans. An Oracle? A Cassandra? So far, Trump lacks mythic power, but his utterances won’t fade while most Americans can’t share the 1 percent’s ostentatious…
I Just Can’t Get Enough
The big pop news this week comes courtesy of the VMAs, which can best be summed up in Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award-winner Kanye West’s words: “I don’t understand it, bro!” Host Miley Cyrus successfully freed her nipple on live TV (we all knew that was coming), called Snoop Dogg her “mammy” and ended the…
Morning News and Stuff
Good morning all. Here’s what’s happening in the news today. Cincinnati’s Fraternal Order of Police is set to cast a vote of no confidence regarding CPD Chief Jeffrey Blackwell, according to union leadership. Union President Kathy Harrell is convening the Sept. 14 meeting to address what she says are issues around low morale, staffing and…
A Walk in the Woods
Ken Kwapis (He’s Just Not That Into You) takes the reins of this adaptation of author Bill Bryson’s book about returning to the United States after two decades in England and deciding to reconnect by hiking the Appalachian Trail with an old friend (Nick Nolte). Robert Redford plays Bryson, with an eclectic cast — Emma…
The Transporter Refueled
Godfather of The Transporter franchise, co-writer and producer Luc Besson, faces an unusual challenge with The Transporter Refueled, the latest installment in the series. Despite the huge shadow he casts, can he and his creative offspring survive the loss of the recognizable face (Jason Statham) of the franchise? Rebooting ain’t easy, but the focus for…
Mistress America
Indie filmmaker Noah Baumbach continues his run with contemporary screwball queen Greta Gerwig — following her anchoring supporting turn in Greenberg and then her whirling dervish lead role in Frances Ha — partnering to co-write about the zany misadventures of Tracy (Lola Kirke), a literary-minded college freshman adrift in New York City who latches onto…
Meru
Mount Meru stands as a silent monolith that challenges climbers from all over the world. Directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin capture the obsessiveness and epic struggles of three elite climbers (one of whom happens to be Chin) attempting to scale what is considered to be the most complicated and dangerous peak in the…
Music: Dierks Bentley
R iser, the latest album from Dierks Bentley, is being lauded for its collection of mid-tempo tunes and ballads that finds the Country singer digging deeper emotionally than ever before — a direction inspired largely by the death of his father two years ago and the recent birth of his first son. For an artist…
Event: Riverfest
It’s almost Labor Day, and here in Cincinnati that only means one thing: Riverfest featuring the WEBN (and now Western & Southern-branded) fireworks, the ultimate way to celebrate the end of summer. It’s a tradition that began more than 30 years ago when the radio station treated the Tristate to a fireworks display to celebrate…
Event: Rubber Duck Regatta
On your mark, get set … float! On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of yellow rubber ducks will race on the Ohio River before Riverfest. The 21st-annual Rubber Duck Regatta benefits the Freestore Foodbank’s efforts to end hunger in the Cincinnati area: Buy a duck, feed a child. First prize wins a new car. 3 p.m.…
Event: See Cincinnati
“See Cincinnati” is Washington Park’s Labor Day staycation destination featuring a series of concerts and tours highlighting the best of the Queen City. Musical acts Jess Lamb, Johnny Walker, Gospel singer Jonathan Dunn and more will play the park’s main stage, which will temporarily transform into The King Records Legacy Stage. And a series of…
Art: Drunk Art History 102 at Live-In Gallery
If you’re a fan of the show Drunk History and have a soft spot for art history, you might have found the Holy Grail in Live-In Gallery’s second-annual Drunk Art History night. The gallery assigns participants a subject to research while imbibing, and they plan a live presentation for fellow partygoers. Audience members eat, drink…
Event: Freddie Mercury: The Resurrection
Sure, it’s Labor Day Weekend, and almost everyone in the Midwest will probably be grilling burgers on some type of lake. But if you like the odd and unique more than the traditional, fear not — it’s also Freddie Mercury’s birthday weekend, and Northside Yacht Club is throwing a party (with a free champagne toast)…
Event: The Mini Microcinema Closing
The Mini Microcinema — an experimental film experience produced in partnership with People’s Liberty — has been more than just a popular success. It has inspired Cincinnati film buffs to seek out the possibilities for a more savvy, sophisticated and varied film-exhibition environment than is now available here. Programmer C. Jacqueline Wood closes out the…
Event: McMicken FreeSpace Grand Opening
A first-of-its-kind community infoshop for books, zines and events opened two years ago in Northside. It’s now reopening at a new location in Brighton Saturday and expanding its breadth of public services. Formerly known as SoapBox Books and Zines, the newly named McMicken FreeSpace will serve as Cincinnati’s only activist hub and “solidarity center,” where…
Sports: AVP Cincinnati Open
Get a sneak peek of Olympic-level athletes before the Summer 2016 games at the Association of Volleyball Professionals’ Cincinnati Open. The AVP Pro Beach Volleyball Tour is the nation’s foremost beach volleyball tournament, and Cincinnati is the sixth of seven stops. See the best U.S. players all weekend — Kerri Walsh Jennings, April Ross, Casey…
Music: The World is a Beautiful Place & I am No Longer Afraid to Die
The free MidPoint Indie Summer shows on Fountain Square are ending with a bang, as diverse Connecticut-spawned rockers The World is a Beautiful Place & I am No Longer Afraid to Die play the last concert of the season this week. The band emerged in 2009 and boasts an expansive, unpredictable sound that incorporates numerous…
Comedy: Sean Donnelly
Comedian Sean Donnelly did not expect to perform stand-up on a full-time basis. “It was more of a situational thing where I figured I’m doing well enough and don’t have to go back to the day job,” Donnelly says. ”There’s no romantic thing where I got a badge or a star saying that I’m a…
Onstage: A Chorus Line
The dancers who back up Broadway productions are called “gypsies.” They lead anonymous lives, but they’re passionate, dedicated performers. They got their star turn in A Chorus Line, a 1975 show about a group of performers competing for spots in the company of a new production. The show was based on composites of real people,…
Lit: Kim Harrison
It’s a sultry, late-August afternoon and the acclaimed, wildly popular New York Times-bestselling author Kim Harrison is explaining why she decided to cross over into a new literary genre by writing the highly anticipated sci-fi thriller The Drafter, the first of The Peri Reed Chronicles trilogy. Harrison is sipping an iced tea outside her home…
The Swami of Ludlow, Kentucky
The first thing you notice when walking into Second Sight Spirits artisan distillery in Ludlow, Kentucky is the smell: rum. Like two renegade pirates, founders Rick Couch and Carus Waggoner have staked their claim in this little town since their grand opening in April. The two friends met in high school in Hebron in the…
A Fryed Idea
O ver-the-Rhine currently houses a late-night walk-up taco window in the form of Gomez Salsa (now open daily for lunch and Sunday brunch) and a couple spots for late-night pizza, but what if it’s 1 a.m. and you’re craving a different type of food from a window? Soon, OTR — and Cincinnati — will get…
Fall TV Preview
Labor Day weekend means two things for television viewers — basically none of your shows are on this week, but Fall TV is right around the corner! The Mindy Project (Season Premiere, Sept. 15, Hulu) – When Fox cancelled Mindy after last season, the timing could not have been worse for fans. How can we…
From ‘Mistress America’ to Majority Rule
Snagging an interview with a rising star, a sure-to-be It-Girl player like Lola Kirke, is definitely a catch-as-catch-can proposition. Kirke comes from a family that includes papa Simon, the former drummer for Bad Company and Free; mama Lorraine, a vintage boutique shop owner (her store Geminola supplied outfits for HBO’s Sex and the City); and…
Kim Harrison: Making Memories and Connections
It’s a sultry, late-August afternoon and the acclaimed, wildly popular New York Times-bestselling author Kim Harrison is explaining why she decided to cross over into a new literary genre by writing the highly anticipated sci-fi thriller The Drafter, the first of The Peri Reed Chronicles trilogy. Harrison is sipping an iced tea outside her home…
Morning News and Stuff
Hey hey all. Here’s what’s happening in the city and beyond this morning. The company making Cincinnati’s streetcars, CAF USA, will be adding extra shifts at its manufacturing facility in New York in order to avoid being any later on delivering the vehicles. CAF originally told the city that the cars would be delivered by…
Activist Hub Reopens, Expands in Brighton
A first-of-its-kind community infoshop for books, zines and events opened two years ago in Northside. It’s now reopening at a new location in Brighton Saturday and expanding its breadth of public services. Formerly known as SoapBox Books and Zines, the newly named McMicken FreeSpace will serve as Cincinnati’s only activist hub and “solidarity center,” where…
Power Down — and Prepare for Bliss
For the past two Septembers I’ve written columns about theater etiquette. In 2013, my headline was “Behave Yourself,” and last year I updated it to “Behave Yourself 2.0.” Please don’t think me old-fashioned, but it’s time for another reminder — I’m not the only one concerned about this. Rude behavior has become a headline topic…
Kings, Toys and Rube Goldberg
N ina M. Wells, a 32-year-old photographer from Madisonville, had a creative idea she wanted to act on but lacked the money to do so: fill a gallery with her portraits of African-American males sitting on a throne and wearing a bejeweled gold crown. Julia Fischer, a 35-year-old toy designer/video-design studio employee from Covington, noticed…
Kentucky County Clerk Still Refusing Same-Sex Marriage Licenses
The county clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky who has refused to issue marriage licenses since the Supreme Court made same-sex marriage the law of the land earlier this summer is still refusing to do so, citing her religious beliefs. County Clerk Kim Davis is standing her ground even after the nation’s highest court on Aug.…
Executive Session Charter Amendment Chances Dim
Mayor John Cranley Aug. 26 vetoed a proposed amendment to the city’s charter that would allow Cincinnati City Council to meet in executive session about specific topics. The amendment was one of five proposed by the nonpartisan Charter Review Task Force. Other proposals — including one eliminating the so-called mayoral “pocket veto” and another allowing…
Mixed Messages
A s University of Cincinnati students began filing onto campus to start classes this week, a battle was raging over a program run by the UC Women’s Center designed to aid sexual assault survivors. The debate — signaled by public meetings, a protest and a flurry of social media posts — centered around the role…
When Business Goes
Ginger Dawson is an iconic woman for more reasons than her aesthetic, though her blunt bangs, her from-a-bottle-henna-red hair and her penchant for black and/or retro clothes aligns her more readily to the equally iconic Punk designer Vivienne Westwood than to the “genteel” antiques mall proprietress she, ahem, once was. Ginger’s Duck Creek Antique Mall,…
Worst Week Ever! Sept. 2-8
ResponsibleOhio Debuts Weird Weed Mascot Named 'Buddie' It’s easy to debate the merits of a collection of rich people suggesting that Ohio should give them the keys to a billion-dollar industry that will no doubt pump tax dollars and weed smoke throughout the land once it is inevitably legalized. (First question: Wouldn’t Bearcats players from…
Keeping it Fresh
This year marks Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati’s 30th anniversary. It was launched in 1986 to support local professional artists, driven by strong faith in the transformative power of the arts to create sustainable communities. Its founders, David A. White III and Jeff Seibert, pulled together a corps of local actors and aspiring theater professionals and assembled…
Music: Jackson Browne
Conventional wisdom, which is always a dangerous thing, says that Jackson Browne lost his command of the zeitgeist — and his status as a Top-40 hitmaker and album-oriented Rock hero — with 1983’s Lawyers in Love album (and its single of the same name). Coming after one of his biggest Rock hits to date, the…
Sound Advice: Jackson Browne
Conventional wisdom, which is always a dangerous thing, says that Jackson Browne lost his command of the zeitgeist — and his status as a Top-40 hitmaker and album-oriented Rock hero — with 1983’s Lawyers in Love album (and its single of the same name). Coming after one of his biggest Rock hits to date, the…
Music: Tribal Seeds
Live Reggae music still exists in the U.S. and in Cincinnati, though it is not as prevalent as it once was. In the ’70s and ’80s, live music schedules in town were rife with rub-a-dub jams by both locally and regionally based groups, as well as bands straight out of Jamaica. Like the Blues, Reggae…
Sound Advice: Tribal Seeds with The Expanders and Arise Roots
Live Reggae music still exists in the U.S. and in Cincinnati, though it is not as prevalent as it once was. In the ’70s and ’80s, live music schedules in town were rife with rub-a-dub jams by both locally and regionally based groups, as well as bands straight out of Jamaica. Like the Blues, Reggae…
Music: Nashville Pussy
Nashville: the capital of Tennessee and the state’s second-largest city, which is widely and deservedly known as Music City. Pussy: a cat, a willow, a desired destination. Put them together, and you get either a hooker doing business in the fourth-largest city in the southeastern United States or the sound of a musical chainsaw shredding…
Sound Advice: Nashville Pussy with Valient Thorr and Moonbow
Nashville: the capital of Tennessee and the state’s second-largest city, which is widely and deservedly known as Music City. Pussy: a cat, a willow, a desired destination. Put them together, and you get either a hooker doing business in the fourth-largest city in the southeastern United States or the sound of a musical chainsaw shredding…
Music: Barrence Whitfield & the Savages
Barrence Whitfield & the Savages have had more lives than a Buddhist cat. They recorded two brilliant albums in the early ’80s, broke up in 1986 and reunited in 2010, resulting in three exceptional albums — 2011’s Savage Kings (on Cincinnati’s Shake It label), 2013’s acclaimed Dig Thy Savage Soul and their latest, Under the…
Sound Advice: Barrence Whitfield & the Savages with All-Seeing Eyes
Barrence Whitfield & the Savages have had more lives than a Buddhist cat. They recorded two brilliant albums in the early ’80s, broke up in 1986 and reunited in 2010, resulting in three exceptional albums — 2011’s Savage Kings (on Cincinnati’s Shake It label), 2013’s acclaimed Dig Thy Savage Soul and their latest, Under the…
The Sundresses Triumph on New ‘This Machine Kills’
One of Cincinnati’s finest bands, The Sundresses, is returning to the record-store shelves this week with a new album, This Machine Kills. The band hosts a free album release concert Saturday at MOTR Pub (1345 Main St., Over-the-Rhine, motrpub.com), joined by Lexington, Ky.’s excellent Ancient Warfare. Showtime is 10 p.m. The Sundresses’ blistering live show…
Not-So-Easy ‘Riser’
R iser, the latest album from Dierks Bentley, is being lauded for its collection of mid-tempo tunes and ballads that finds the Country singer digging deeper emotionally than ever before — a direction inspired largely by the death of his father two years ago and the recent birth of his first son. For an artist…
Kanye For President
HOT: Kanye For President Kanye West got on stage at the clusterfuck that was this year’s MTV Video Music Awards to accept his Video Vanguard Award (basically the program’s lifetime achievement honor) and delivered a meandering speech during which he seemed to go off in a million directions, barely made sense or followed through with…
Onstage: Luna Gale
Ensemble Theatre doesn’t pull any punches with the opener for its 30th season. Artistic director D. Lynn Meyers is passionate about shows that tell us about the world in which we live, and Luna Gale is a tough but necessary reminder about how hard it is to do the right thing. Annie Fitzpatrick turns in…
Attractions: Fall Floral Show at Krohn
The Krohn Conservatory’s fall floral show — A Bevy of Blossoms and A Flock of Flowers — will be in bloom for two months this fall, starting Saturday. The show celebrates the best of fall flora with various displays, a full room of chrysanthemums, discussions and activities. Browse table displays of autumn plants and learn…
Event: Ohio Renaissance Festival
The Ohio Renaissance Festival is back and bringing fall weekends filled with costumes, turkey legs, mulled mead, jousting, games, glass-blowing demonstrations, choirs, crafts and tarot readings inside a 30-acre, recreated 16th-century village. This weekend is opening weekend, so tickets for adults are buy-one-get-one, and kids under 12 get in free. Be sure to check the…
