Sep 20-27, 2017
Back to the ‘Point: The New Pornographers, Dan Deacon and dozens of other Alternative/Indie acts invade Cincinnati for the 2017 MidPoint Music Festival
Morning News: Council presses city on cancer concerns at CPD District 5; FC Cincinnati fans want priority in tight county budget
Good morning Cincy. Let’s get right to it. Six officers under the age of 60 who have worked at Cincinnati Police Department’s District 5 headquarters on Ludlow Avenue have died of cancer in the past two years, and several more have been diagnosed with forms of the disease. Following a new diagnosis for an employee…
Sound Advice: Beth Hart (Sept. 30)
A good many people became aware of Beth Hart six years ago when her profile was significantly raised, first through her 2011 appearance on renowned guitarist Joe Bonamassa’s Dust Bowl album and their subsequent duet album, Don’t Explain. The following year, she released the Introducing Beth Hart EP — a misnomer if ever there was one — and the full-length My California to…
Deters-DeWine internship flap under review by secret judicial panel
A request for an investigation of Ohio Supreme Court Justice Pat DeWine’s pursuit of a summer internship for a son in the office of Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters is threading through the state’s judicial bureaucracy. Ohio State Sen. Cecil Thomas, D-North Avondale, authored the complaint. CityBeat reported last month that Deters had given an…
Library officials apologize for detention of protester
Officials with the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County today apologized for detaining and banning a patron who was protesting a plan to decommission the north building of the library’s downtown campus. Critics of that plan, which could result in the sale of the north building of its downtown campus, say library brass are…
Breaking Down a Barrier to Justice
Political bipartisanship was in full bloom Monday morning when Democrats and Republicans at the state and local levels joined hands to christen a Hamilton County office to help people navigate the sometimes impassable judicial system. The county's new Help Center, which opens Tuesday at 8 a.m. on the first floor of the courthouse, went from…
Honor the National Anthem by Playing It Less
Now that National Football League players (and even some owners) have rebuked Donald Trump and other hardline conservatives, establishing by the sheer force of numbers their right to dignified protest during the national anthem, let’s move to another anthem-related issue. Why, for anyone’s sake, do we choose to perform the anthem at every U.S. sports…
Noon News: Local groups push Portman on ACA repeal; Cranley joins Clifton Market
Hey Cincy. Here are some quick news things to get your week started. Progressive groups and local elected officials will hold a news conference today at 12:30 p.m. today outside the downtown office of U.S. Sen. Rob Portman to try and convince the Republican to vote against a bill to repeal and replace the Affordable…
What Went Wrong at the Alms?
For the last three decades, 76-year-old Aaron Jamison has lived in The Alms, a sprawling former luxury hotel at 2525 Victory Parkway. He and his late wife moved there in the 1980s, right around the time the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development signed a contract to provide Housing Assistance Payments for its low…
Stage Door: Tragic Tales of Fire, News and Music
Know Theatre opens its production of Jacqueline Goldfinger’s The Arsonists tonight. This rolling world premiere is the story of a father/daughter team that burns things in the Florida Everglades. When a job goes bad, she has to come to terms with her father’s departure. It’s a Southern Gothic fable loosely inspired by the ancient Greek tale of…
Morning News: Last day to hear WNKU; how will Portman vote on ACA repeal?
Hello Cincy. It’s the first day of fall! Do you feel it? No, me either. Let me break down some news for you as I sweat onto my keyboard. Another day, another controversial development deal involving city land. The potential sale of city-owned land in Oakley to some prominent developers is off after questions arose…
Mixed-media artist Swoon’s mid-career retrospective opens at the Contemporary Arts Center
“There’s so many different ways that art can function,” says internationally recognized street artist and sculptor Caledonia Curry — better known as Swoon — in a one-on-one preview of her mid-career survey at the Contemporary Arts Center. “In some ways, the role of art is to bring things to consciousness that aren’t conscious — to…
Suck the Honey inhabits the dark side of a broken relationship on ‘All Hail Having Failed’
Having Lucas Frazier on a project is the Sad Housekeeping Seal of Approval. His dour lyrical musings and gothic Rock/Americana musical onslaught helped define The Dukes Are Dead as the area's grimly joyful princes of Hard Rock, and his subsequent band, Pop Goes the Evil, offered a slightly more nuanced and artier yet still immensely…
Your Weekend To Do List (Sept. 22-24)
FRIDAY 22 COMEDY: LISA LANDRY “I’m dating again,” comedian Lisa Landry tells an audience. “But I have very bad taste in men. I pray a lot to keep the dicks away. I probably could get a medical marijuana card because I have PTSD because I date men.” The Louisiana native got divorced a few years…
Morning News: Cuts at the Enquirer; state lawmakers mull ‘stand your ground’ law
Hello Cincy. Let’s get up to date on the news real quick. The Cincinnati Enquirer has laid off four members of its editorial staff, including its last remaining arts reporter. Classical music reporter Janelle Gelfand was let go Tuesday, just weeks before the reopening of Music Hall — a story she’s been covering for years.…
Burfict epitomizes NFL’s existential crisis
We may not have the greatest sports teams here in Cincinnati, but we do a pretty decent job attracting attention with them. Starting Oct. 1 at Cleveland, our 50th-anniversary Bengals — despite a horrible start that’s expected to reach 0-3 at Green Bay this weekend — will be poised to bring us national notice, and…
What a Week! Sept. 13-19
WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 13 This week’s Apple Event included a first look at upcoming iPhone models, tech news and other Apple announcements and a $3,000 pink jacket. Rolling out this fall are the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and (iGuess we’re just skipping the iPhone 9 and going straight to 10) “iPhone X,” symbolic of the…
Council, mayoral candidates make pitch to preservationists
The city’s two mayoral candidates and more than a dozen City Council hopefuls crammed together in front a standing-room-only audience last night at the newly renovated Memorial Hall to talk historic preservation. From the get-go, the event was defined by the increasingly bitter mayoral battle between Democrats Mayor John Cranley and his challenger, Cincinnati City…
Both Sides of Wallace Shawn
Wallace Shawn is a curious case. The 73-year-old native (and still) New Yorker is best known for his character actor turns in enduring mainstream movies like The Princess Bride and Clueless — a distinctive, amusing presence marked by his diminutive size and high-pitched speaking voice. He’ll be one of the many film and TV stars at this weekend’s Cincinnati…
Murder, motive and memories in ‘The Sinner’
What’s more terrifying: a cold, calculated murder by an evil villain or an unsuspecting woman who snaps sans motive to commit a heinous crime? Based on the novel by Petra Hammesfahr, The Sinner (Series Finale, 10 p.m. Wednesday, USA Network) poses this question when the unassuming Cora Tannetti (Jessica Biel) attacks a stranger, unprovoked. The mystery, then,…
The best films at this year’s Toronto Film Festival
At the just-concluded Toronto International Film Festival, which presents many movies destined to be factors in the end-of-year awards, every major title jockeys for attention. Film journalists converge from around the world to start critical conversations about their worth that will last until the Academy Awards presentation in early March 2018. However that plays out,…
Fire and Folk Tunes: ‘The Arsonists’ at Know
Know Theatre’s Tamara Winters is staging the company’s next production, the rolling world premiere of Jacqueline Goldfinger’s The Arsonists. She says the play, which opens Friday (and runs through Oct. 14), “is about how hard it can be to let go of what we cling to for survival, when it’s no longer helping us survive.” She…
Finding architecture’s soul in ‘Columbus’
If you’re interested in architecture, you may know that Columbus, Ind. — a small city just 90 miles west of Cincinnati — is one of America’s most important showcases for Modernist buildings. That, in itself, makes Columbus special. But now, a new movie called Columbus — a dramatic film, not a documentary — finds an even deeper…
After a stint in Los Angeles, Doom/Hard Rock duo Castle now calls the road home
“Liz can only remember the lyrics when she’s onstage,” says Castle guitarist Mat Davis with a laugh. “She blocks them out any other time.” Vocalist Elizabeth Blackwell, who serves double duty as Castle’s bassist, can be forgiven for momentarily drawing a blank when asked the specific wording of a lyric from Castle’s latest album, last…
PREVIEW: Cincinnati artists at MidPoint Music Festival 2017
The MidPoint Music Festival has changed a lot over the past decade and a half, but its dedication to supporting local artists hasn’t wavered. The festival comes to downtown Cincinnati this Saturday and Sunday in its latest incarnation — with two stages at Taft Theatre and two at the neighboring Cincinnati Masonic Center — once…
Incubator kitchen yields Velveteen Chocolate
Sherri Prentiss loves chocolate. The vice president of marketing for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra has taken her fondness for cacao, cocoa and their resultant confections and turned it into a pretty sweet side business called Velveteen Chocolate. A lifelong chocolate fan, Prentiss began to indulge her sweet tooth in a more serious way last year,…
The Audience Whisperer
Dan Deacon’s dense electronic soundscapes are not subtle. The longtime Baltimore (by way of Long Island, N.Y.) resident’s music teems with buzzing synths and maximalist beats, his processed yet oddly humanizing voice complementing instead of cutting through the mix. Deacon’s breakthrough album, 2007’s Spiderman of the Rings, ushered in a one-man sonic kaleidoscope — it moves…
With Friends Like These
For the more deeply involved Indie Rock fan, Filthy Friends is a supergroup of sorts; relatively big names paired with relatively obscure names to create a versatile but intentionally unassuming band. Guitarist/lead vocalist Corin Tucker, still on hiatus from Sleater-Kinney, insists that Filthy Friends isn’t merely a busman’s holiday from the group’s other musical interests,…
Tech Support
It’s no secret that mainstream Pop has shifted away from organic, guitar-oriented sounds to music that features synthesizers, electronic tones and programmed rhythms. With their latest album, Whiteout Conditions, The New Pornographers have fully embraced this sonic setting for their otherwise rather traditionally rooted style of Pop music. But singer/guitarist A.C. Newman says the new sound…
Darker Side of the Moon
The delirious success that Walk the Moon has experienced since the 2010 release of I Want! I Want! and its infectious and brilliantly videographed single “Anna Sun” has been mind boggling, to say the very least. The Cincinnati quartet — vocalist/keyboardist Nick Petricca, guitarist/vocalist Eli Maiman, bassist Kevin Ray and drummer Sean Waugaman — traveled around the…
Six reasons to not simply go for the headliners at this year’s MidPoint Music Festival
The process of putting together the MidPoint Music Festival guide is a monster task for us here at the ol’ CityBeat. A few all-nighters — writing and editing the blurbs on every act performing at the festival — have more than once taken their toll on our mood/sanity over the past decade and a half. But, much…
Morning News: City pushes back against CPD captain’s lawsuit; UC eyes master plan for uptown campus
Hello all. Let’s talk news. City of Cincinnati officials are pushing back against a lawsuit by a Cincinnati Police captain alleging improper use of federal and state funds for the city’s 911 center and cronyism in the way city contracts are vetted by a third-party company. City Solicitor Paula Boggs Muething says the suit by…
Minimum Gauge: Society devolves to where ‘insane clowns’ represent moral high ground
HOT: Down with (Certain) Clowns On Sept. 16, news networks spent much of the day covering three rallies — one supporting Confederate statues in Virginia, one in Washington, D.C. protesting people being mean to Donald Trump and another in the nation’s capitol advocating for fans of Detroit Horror Rap duo Insane Clown Posse. It says…
Sound Advice: Lizz Wright (Sept. 23)
Like most Gospel singers, Lizz Wright’s career was seeded in the church; her father and mother were her church’s minister and musical director and she sang and played piano for her congregation at an early age. And like most Gospel singers, as she was becoming active in sacred music, she also developed a fascination in…
Sound Advice: Sylvan Esso with Helado Negro (Sept. 21)
Electro Indie Pop duo Sylvan Esso burst onto the scene via “Coffee,” an addictive, impressive textural tune about the best liquid humans have ever concocted. Or is it about the allure of physical interaction? Or both? The brainchild of North Carolina-based singer Amelia Meath and producer/electronic programmer Nick Sanborn, “Coffee” appeared on the duo’s 2014…
Sound Advice: Tank and the Bangas with Sweet Crude (Sept. 21)
There may be no more telling factoid about Tank and the Bangas that this: The New Orleans band’s sophomore album was 2014’s The Big Bang Theory: Live at Gasa Gasa, a sure indication that, regardless of the energetic excellence of its 2013 debut, Thinktank, no studio can contain the raucous adrenaline rush of the live…
Hyde Park’s Cork & Cap is Raising the Wine Bar
Even though it’s a Cincinnati neighborhood, Hyde Park feels like the suburbs to me. The chain restaurants in nearby shopping centers, some of which are technically in Norwood, make the area feel relatively homogenous. An exception to this vibe does exist in and adjacent to Hyde Park Square, an area that has an urban-village feel,…
A Fund for All Occasions
Under Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters, a criminal forfeiture fund statutorily intended for law enforcement expenses and drug abuse prevention has been tapped regularly for mundane purchases and, on two occasions, sketchy consulting contracts that Deters won’t discuss. • Since the beginning of 2015, the prosecutor’s office has spent about $200,000 on real estate consulting…
