MidPoint Wraps Up
On Sept. 25, the MidPoint Music Festival closed out its successful third year, living up to the promise of "bigger and better." The festival — which featured over 250 unsigned artists from Greater Cincinnati and all over the continent — drew around 40,000 music fans to Downtown's Main Street entertainment district (up from 25,000 last…
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop
Woodrow J. Hinton "It's been a long, long time coming, but I know a change is gonna come" — Sam Cooke I should feel some sense of vindication at seeing the cover of this month's XXL Magazine. Guest edited by the hugely successful comedian/social critic Dave Chappelle, the issue features a roundtable discussion between Chappelle…
Music: The Highs and Lows at MidPoint
For this year's MidPoint Music Festival — which took place in the Main Street area of Over-the-Rhine and Downtown Sept. 23-25 — CityBeat deployed a battalion of writers (OK, just three) to report back on what they saw, heard and felt. Call it our "unreal-time" blog. Here's what we came up with: · Out of…
News: The Other Minority
David Sorcher Vicki Whitewolf and Dutch Mader say Columbus' arrival in North America isn't celebrated by everyone. Columbus Day is the most controversial American holiday. For most citizens, Oct. 11 is a chance to celebrate the country's "discovery" by Europeans. But for many American Indians in Greater Cincinnati, the date marks an event to be…
Cover Story: Keys to Uncomfortable Living
Sean Hughes/photopresse.com Have there been mistakes? Absolutely. Miscues? Certainly. False starts, errors in judgment, misunderstandings, failures, tailchasing, inadequacies, ineptitudes, sloth, cowardice? Yes, all those. Many times over. And that's just my day so far — the nasty, treacherous, deeply potholed washboard of a road that stretches from the beginning of this paragraph to precisely-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y ……
Chrissy Gardner – Sinamatic
Chrissy Gardner – Sinamatic · Sheryl Crow — Greatest Hits What can I say about this album besides I have every song on the individual CDs, and yet I still bought the greatest hits because I wanted to be able to listen to my favorites without all the others. She seems so real, and that's…
I Spy a bad word
Dear Readers: The resident word freak at public radio's The Next Big Thing — the lovely and talented Erin McKean — regularly challenges writers to use words that might otherwise disappear into obsolescence. In awe of my success at injecting santorum into the sexual lexicon, McKean invited little ol' me on the program and asked…
News to Use
Making Cents of Discount Clothing Three female Bangladeshi garment workers speak about their working and economic conditions at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Gallagher Student Center Theater at Xavier University. The average garment worker in Bangladesh earns 13-18 cents an hour working up to 14 hours a day. The clothes are then sold as discount…
Upcoming concerts with Dan Bern and Steve Kimock Band
Dan Bern Dan Bern Thursday · Southgate House Not every artist who has a beef with the current administration is joining an organized tour to affect a change (see feature story, page 35). Some are taking this year's election battle to the road on their own. Take Dan Bern, for instance. The tour for his…
King of Swing
The presidential campaign between President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry continues to tighten, heating up with the first televised debate on Thursday. Politics, from attack ads to campaign stops, are in the Cincinnati air. In Swing State Central, it's hard to remember a time before Bush's knowing smirk and Kerry's competitive grin. Over…
Fifth Chakra: Throat
This column is part of a series to help understand the Chakra System, the seven energy centers in the body. An overview of each can be viewed at citybeat.com or cincyoga.com. Sanskrit Name: Vishuddha Location: Located it the neck, throat, jaw and mouth area. It governs the vocal cords, bronchial apparatus, lungs and metabolism. Through…
The (Un)Invisible Man
JoCardo Edward Ralston is a beautiful man. His triangulated identity — sexuality, race and size — swirl and tangle in a morass of emotion and memory. JoCardo is an Other, an out-sized large, biracial gay man striving to be and live freely of the thin, white and ostensibly heterosexual mores mooring us to the oppressive…
Don’t Let This Happen to You
Sean Hughes/photopresse.com Covering their assets: Billionaires for Bush (L-R) Cliff Jenkins and Jesse Tendler only want four more years. Nov. 2 rolls around, and you awaken full of excitement at the prospect of voting for regime change in the White House and an end to discrimination against gays and lesbians in Cincinnati. You go to…
Cover Story: Who’s Zoomin’ Who?
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with myself over dinner at a midtown bistro. Being the same person, we arrived simultaneously and were seated together at a table for one. While savoring a vegetarian ragout baked and served inside the stomach of a giant panda, the discourse was lively, reminiscing about favorite childhood…
Bio Hazardous
Reprinted with permission from the program for TempoTantrum, An Evening of Multiform Movement and Dance, presented at the Armour® Potted Meat Perform-ing Arts Center, Sept. 24-26, 2004. Choreographer Biographies Leah Tardwehring has been dancing all her life, beginning in the womb, where sonograms revealed that she wasn't merely kicking but high-kicking. She took her first…
Cover Story: Blue Highway
Ryan Greis I'm sitting in my rusty Corolla across from the entrance to the Whispering Palms trailer park that I have, until just this moment, called home. My black 1984 Fender D'Aquisto is belted in across the back seat and my stage clothes are hanging above it on one of those wardrobe bars that seem…
A Picasso premieres
Playwright Jeffrey Hatcher says, "There's something about a locked-room play. I like the idea of the pressure, and that the time of the play equals real time." Hatcher's new script, A PICASSO (in its regional premiere beginning this week at the CINCINNATI PLAYHOUSE), puts the renowned artist, a bohemian iconoclast, into an interrogation session by…
College Football Goes Around in Circle
Jerry Dowling The people who bring us college football aren't known as original thinkers, which makes it all the more humorous that we should frequently wonder what they're thinking. But we can credit them for this: If they're worried that college football is too big, they're doing a fine job of minimizing it. We're seeing…
Exodus
Mullane's is apparently serving their last supper on Thursday. According to owner Audrey Cobb, "Our business has been steadily declining since April 2001." While lunches are "pretty reasonable," dinners are spotty at best, leaving Mullane's in the dwindling pond that other small, downtown businesses — particularly restaurants that depend on the higher ticket evening sales…
MPMF
Build Real Diversity Events like the MidPoint Music Festival are great and great for Cincinnati (MidPoint preview, issue of Sept. 22-28). But I didn't go, and most of my friends didn't either. I think it's important that people know why. Looking through the list of bands and their genres, I saw almost 100 percent Rock,…
Locals Only: : Them ‘Bones
Quick. Name a Jazz trombonist. Now name two. I can name but two besides Marc Fields. Hard bopper J.J. Johnson and also-bopping Delfeayo Marsalis are book-ended slide players, perhaps the world's best-known and most readily identifiable trombonists. They are connected across generations by Johnson's transference of the sounds of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie to…
Puttin’ Out the Bone
Oh, man. What a bunch: Mike Allen, Rebecca Collins and Joe Deters. Let's have fun and take them one by one. · Rebecca Collins. It's hard to work up sympathy for her. She claims that, as an intern and then as assistant prosecutor, she freely bopped her boss on government property and on the clock…
Cover Story: Somewhere Between Red and Orange
I was having breakfast when the authorities burst into my apartment. "Robert W—," the official in charge said, "you will please to come with us." His manner was so utterly threatening, it's possible I only imagined the Teutonic affectation in his sentence construction. "May I at least finish my cereal?" I inquired, indicating the bowl…
Stand By Your (Real) Man
My children have reached an age when I feel it's time for them to pay more attention to local and national news and politics. This goes beyond simply providing them with regular editions of CityBeat. I've always encouraged my kids to think critically about the world around them and have tried to introduce them to…
