CityBeat | Feb. 28, 2018 by Cincinnati CityBeat

CINCINNATI’S NEWS AND ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY | FEB. 28–MARCH 6, 2018 | FREE

Local nonprofit Circle Tail is changing lives with its service canines, all at no cost to the individual

GOOD DOG B Y

E M I LY

B E G L E Y

LEt LOvE RuLE tOuR Ta ftTh e at re.org

w/ mELANIE FIONA & twEEt

ON SALE

6/6 FRIDAY!

PUBLISHER

TONY FR ANK EDITOR IN CHIEF

M AIJA ZUMMO

MUSIC EDITOR

MIK E BREEN

ARTS & CULTURE EDITOR

VOL. 24 | ISSUE 14 ON THE COVER: SERVICE DOG IN TR AINING. PHOTO: H AILE Y BOLLINGER

STE VEN ROSEN NE WS EDITOR

NICK SWA RT SELL

DIGITAL MEDIA EDITOR / STAFF PHOTOGR APHER

H AILE Y BOLLINGER

COPY EDITOR

M ACK ENZIE M ANLE Y

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

THE ATER: RICK PENDER

FILM: T T STERN-ENZI VISUAL ARTS: K ATHY SCHWA RT Z DINING CRITIC: PA M A MITCHELL CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

ANNE A RENSTEIN, CASE Y A RNOLD, BRIAN BAK ER, JEFF BE Y ER, JACK BRENNAN, STEPHEN NOVOTNI, BRIAN CROSS, H AYLE Y DAY, JANE DURRELL, JASON GA RGANO, AUSTIN GAYLE, MCK ENZIE GR AH A M, K ATIE HOLOCHER, BEN L. K AUFM AN, DEIRDRE K AY E, JOHN J. K ELLY, JOHN L ASK ER, H A RPER LEE, M ADGE M A RIL, ANNE MITCHELL, TA MER A LENZ MUENTE, M A RK PAINTER, SE AN PE TERS, RODGER PILLE, GA RIN PIRNIA, SELENA REDER, ILENE ROSS, M A RIA SEDA-REEDER, LE YL A SHOKOOHE, BRENNA SMITH, ISA AC THORN, K ATHY VALIN, K ATHY Y. WILSON, P.F. WILSON EDITORIAL INTERNS

MCK ENZIE ESK RIDGE, JUDE NOEL, Z ACH PERRIN CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGR APHERS

The L argesT seLecTion of hemp on The pL aneT

Now opeN iN Northside! F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

nor hsiDe norT 4179 Hamilton Ave. 513-569-0420 o’BrY r onV rY on iLLe 2034 Madison Rd. 513-871-HEMP

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

sharonV haron iLLe haronV 11353 Lebanon Rd. 513-524-HEMP

www.hemptations.com

DaYT a on aYT 548 Wilmington Ave. 937-991-1015

h e m p, Va p e & s m o k e h a B e r D a s h e r Y

VOICES 04 NEWS 09 COVER STORY 12 STUFF TO DO 17 ARTS & CULTURE 20 FOOD & DRINK 27 MUSIC 30 CLASSIFIEDS 35

SCOT T DIT TGEN, JESSE FOX, PHIL HEIDENREICH, KHOI NGUYEN, BRIT TANY THORNTON, CATIE VIOX PHOTOGR APHY INTERNS

K ELLIE COLEM AN MEGAN WADDEL

ADVERTISING DIRECTOR

JOSH SCHULER

SALES ACCOUNT MANAGERS

CORY HODGE, DAN R ADANK AD TR AFFIC COORDINATOR

K ANE KITCHEN

OFFICE ADMINISTR ATOR

SA M ANTH A JOHNSTON E VENT DIRECTOR

ALLIE M A RTIN

E VENT & MARKE TING COORDINATOR

CH ANELL K A RR

MARKE TING & E VENT TE AM

DANIELLE HALE, RYAN HENGES, COURTNE Y HOELLE, H ALE Y MOLONE Y, MEG SCHOT T CIRCUL ATION MANAGER

STE VE FERGUSON

DISTRIBUTION TE AM

CIT Y BE AT | 811 R ACE ST., FIF TH FLOOR, CINCINNATI, OH 4 5202 PHONE: 513-665- 4700 | FA X: 513-665- 4 368 | CIT Y BE AT.COM PRINTED ON RECYCLED PAPER WITH SOY-BASED INKS PLE ASE RECYCLE THIS NE WSPAPER! THANKS :)

RICK CA RROL, DENNIS CONOVER, ASHLE Y DAVIS, DOUG DRENNAN, JERRY ENNIS, TERRENCE E VANS, L AWRENCE EDWA RD HOOVER III, LORI MORGAN, JOAN POWERS, TOM SAND, MICH A EL SWANGO EUCLID MEDIA GROUP

CHIEF E XECUTIVE OFFICER

ANDRE W ZELM AN

CHIEF OPER ATING OFFICERS

CHRIS K E ATING, MICH A EL WAGNER VP OF DIGITAL SERVICES

STACY VOLHEIN

© 2018 | CityBeat is a registered trademark of CityBeat Communications, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written permission. CityBeat covers news, public issues, arts and entertainment of interest to readers in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. The views expressed in these pages do not necessarily represent those of the publishers. One copy per person of the current issue is free; additional copies, including back issues up to one year, are available at our offices for $1 each.

CRE ATIVE DIRECTOR

TOM CA RLSON

DIGITAL OPER ATIONS COORDINATOR

JAIME MONZON

SENIOR MARKE TING AND E VENTS DIRECTOR

Subscriptions: $70 for six months, $130 for one year (delivered via first–class mail).

CASSANDR A YA RDNI

Advertising Deadline: Display advertising, 12 p.m. Wednesday before publication; Classified advertising, 5 p.m. Thursday before publication.

W W W.EUCLIDMEDIAGROUP.COM

Warehousing Services: Harris Motor Express, 4261 Crawford Street, Cincinnati, OH 45223.

F E B . 2 8 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

| C I T Y B E AT. C O M

LETTERS Thoughts on March for Our Lives Greg Beckman: Let’s create more gun free zones for the criminals to hone their skills. Mary Aguilera: It better be inclusive of all victims of gun violence. Black brothers and sisters have been dying for years, they need justice too. Victoria Garland: Australia did it and Scotland did it. There are ways to work this problem. Wake up Americans!! Michael Branscum: With all the positive results from tougher laws in other areas I’m not sure the public is ready for even more laws to put an abrupt end to anything else. Look at the drug war... extremely tough laws. Billions spent enforcing them and record breaking overdose deaths. Jane Shoenberger: Our country has always taken “baby steps” forward when enough people make their voices heard. The gun violence in the US is appalling. Common sense measures like background checks do not infringe on anyone’s rights to have weapons. Why does the average person need or want an AR? If you are hunting with it.... you need another hobby! If it is a macho thing...time to consider how you would feel if your child, or loved one was murdered with one. Comments posted on facebook.com/cincinnaticitybeat in response to the Feb. 21 post, “Locals will organize a Cincinnati ‘March for Our Lives’ event on March 24, the same day activists and survivors of the Parkland mass shooting plan to march on Washington, D.C. to demand tighter restrictions on guns.”

CONTACT US ONLINE CityBeat.com FACEBOOK @CincinnatiCityBeat TWITTER @CityBeatCincy @CityBeat_Eats @CityBeatMusic INSTAGRAM @CityBeatCincy SNAPCHAT @CityBeatCincy VOICEMAIL 513-665-4700 SNAIL MAIL 811 Race St., Fifth Floor Cincinnati, OH 45202 EMAIL Feedback/Letters/ Info/Questions: letters@citybeat.com News tips: nswartsell@citybeat.com Music Listings: mbreen@citybeat.com Event Listings: calendar@citybeat.com Dining News/Events: eats@citybeat.com Advertise: sales@citybeat.com Billing: billing@citybeat.com

Broadway in Cincy’s Big Year spottedpineapple: SO EXCITED!!!!!! sari.small: This is a great schedule! 513roses: @erinreneekelley–plan on going to all of these with me

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

PHOTO: JOAN MARCUS

Comments posted on instagram.com/citybeatcincy in response to the Feb. 20 post, “Hamilton is finally coming to Cincinnati... in 2019. Broadway in Cincinnati has announced its 2018-2019 season at the Aronoff Center of the Arts, featuring six shows: the long-awaited Hamilton, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Rent, Fiddler on the Roof, Miss Saigon and Dear Evan Hansen.”

Staff: first initial of first name followed by last name@citybeat.com

F E B . 2 8 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

| C I T Y B E AT. C O M

WHAT A WEEK! BY T.C. B R I T TO N

Guzzling some pinot noir may result in a red-stained wine mouth, but according to a recent study, drinking wine can actually protect your teeth and gums. As if we needed another reason to hit the bottle. New research out of Spain suggests that the antioxidants in wine destroy mouth bacteria and prevent plaque, cavities and other disease from sticking to the gums. That’s not just great for mouth health, but for the whole body since those kind of diseases can spread and are linked to scary stuff like cancer and heart disease. This antioxidant is so good at preventing shit from sticking to gum tissue, researchers predict we may see some wine-inspired toothpaste, mouthwash and gum on the market soon. Until then, we say just go straight to the source and drink your way to a positive dental appointment. In other news, a young cashier recently referred to my purchase of two bottles of wine as “buying in bulk.” Suffice it to say, my oral hygiene is on point.

Kylie Jenner Took Down Snapchat with a Casual Tweet

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

Everyone knows the Kardashian-Jenners boast a pretty powerful social media influence. They make bank promoting products to their millions of followers, whether they’re hawking their own makeup and clothing lines or Instagram garbage like detox teas and waist trainers. And it’s not just Kris and Ko. making money — a rogue tweet could have potentially serious effects on other people’s pocketbooks. And we’re not talking thousands or even millions of dollars; in the case of Kylie Jenner’s recent musings on Snapchat, she cost the company billions. It’s not like she was even condemning the app. Last week she simply tweeted, “sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me... ugh

this is so sad.” And boom — shares in the publicly traded company dropped by 7.2 percent — that’s $1.3 billion of Snapchat’s market value gone. There hasn’t been so much riding on a tweet since — oh, wait, the President just tweeted.

KFC Runs Out of Chicken, Apologizes For the FCK-Up

A bunch of KFC restaurants in the U.K. had to shut down last week when several locations did not receive their chicken shipments. Cue the jokes about a chicken restaurant running out of chicken — and is it even chicken they’re serving?! Apparently Brits really love them some Southern-fried goodness, because the news really got some folks’ knickers in a twist. One member of the British parliament even claimed that he received multiple calls about the chicken shortage. Thankfully(?) almost all 900 restaurants are back up and running Of course, since having a witty corporate marketing presence is all the rage, KFC jumped at the chance to poke fun at themselves. They made a page on their site where the hungry masses could find the closest open location. They posted all about it on social media, complete with a carefully crafted hashtag, #Where’sMyChicken. They even took out full-page ads apologizing for the shipping delay complete with an empty bucket of chicken emblazoned with “FCK.” Aren’t they so twee? Worst part of this entire story is that this is the third mention of the fried chicken chain in this column in a month. Send help!

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

Final Olympics Hot Takes

And like that, the 2018 Winter Olympic Games were over. Team U.S.A. came in fourth place behind Norway, Germany and Canada, with 23 total medals and 9 golds. Great job!

06 P H O T O : B R U C E T U R N E R / C R E AT I V E C O M M O N S

Who run the Games? Girls. Women won 12 of the U.S. medals (five of which were gold), topping the male athletes for the first time in 20 years. At 17 years old, Chloe Kim, the American snowboarder who won gold in the halfpipe, is the youngest gold medalist ever in the history of the event. At 33, bronze-winning Alpine skier Lindsey Vonn is now the oldest Olympic female alpine medalist (a sentence that makes me throw up in my mouth a little). Czech skier and snowboarder Ester Ledecka became the fi rst woman to win two gold medals in two sports in a single Winter Olympics (whew). NBC even covered more minutes of women’s competitions than men’s U.S. men’s curling surprised with a gold-medal win over Sweden. Kirstie Alley tried to talk some shit on the sport and everyone from the team to Mr. T and Aaron Rodgers came for her. Stick to Scientology and Jenny Craig, Kirstie — curling is our thing now! In what may be the polar opposite of winning Olympic gold, Canadian skicrosser Dave Duncan, along with his wife and manager, were arrested after drunkenly trying to steal a Hummer outside a South Korean bar. At least one person was passed out in the car when police pulled them over. Choices. A minor moment that stuck with me: A Hungarian ice skater rocked out to AC/ DC in an airbrushed leather vest for her number, knowing full well that the judges and icy queens Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir would clock her. Hero. A streaker interrupted the 1,000-meter speed skating event wearing only a pink tutu and a monkey sock (not on his foot) bringing a beautiful message of peace and love (written on his chest). Turns out he’s a professional who’s streaked hundreds of times in 22 countries. Hero! Of course, the games could not come to a close without one last appearance of Pita Taufatofua’s oiled up torso. The Tongan athlete who competed in taekwondo during the last Summer Games and trained in cross-country skiing for this one, returned shirtless and shiny for the closing ceremony Sunday. While he did not win a medal in his event (he actually placed 114th out of 119 skiers, ouch), he did give the people what they want and you have to respect that. HERO! Contact T.C. Britton: letters@citybeat.com

This Week in Questionable Decisions… P H O T O : T R I P B / C R E AT I V E C O M M O N S

Good News for Winos

1. A flight from Dubai to Amsterdam had to make an emergency landing in Vienna thanks to a gassy passenger who reportedly refused to stop farting. Always think twice about stopping at Taco Bell on your way to the airport. 2. Jay-Z spent more than $90K at a Manhattan lounge this week, all on his own uber-pricey Ace of Spades champagne. But he also dropped a hefty tip: $11,100. 3. Florida lawmakers refused to consider a ban on assault weapons this week but did discuss a bill that declares porn a public health risk. Oh, and they voted to put “In god we trust” signs in schools. 4. Young Thug would like to be called all-caps SEX now, thankyouverymuch. 5. Apparently everyone in the terriblelooking movie I Feel Pretty is getting surprise-married to randos. Days after Amy Schumer got hitched to her boyfriend of three months, Emily Ratajkowski made things official with her man of a few weeks. But the most questionable decision was the orange Carmen Sandiego number she selected in lieu of a wedding dress. 6. Dolce & Gabbana sent drones down the runway instead of models for a handbag show during Milan Fashion Week. The future is now! 7. Speaking of FASHUN, Justin Bieber appears to be filing documents to start a clothing line. 8. A Texas woman purposefully pooped her pants in a cop car in an attempt to hide drug evidence during her arrest. It did not work. 9. The NRA used a Parks and Recreation Leslie Knope gif on Twitter, which is dumb considering the fictional character definitely would not support the organization — and it turns out the actress that portrayed her doesn’t either. Cast and crew from the show clapped back, with one writer relaying, “Amy isn’t on twitter, but she texted me a message: ‘Can you tweet the NRA for me and tell them I said fuck off?’ ”

ON SECOND THOUGHT

The Second Amendment and Mass Shootings BY B EN L . K AU F M A N

“With an estimated 300 million firearms in this country and the freedom to buy more, there is no way to stop mass shootings.”

Read us on your phone when you’re at the bar by yourself.

detachable magazines. Congress refused to renew the 10-year ban in 2004. Pages A12-A13 in the Feb. 21 New York Times document NRA donations made to senators and representatives. • Allow local authorities to seize guns from people deemed mentally or emotionally dangerous. A judge would decide whether this would be temporary or permanent. • Resist calls to expand background checks to include men and women who allegedly suffer emotional or mental illness. This could stigmatize individuals unjustly and make unrealistic demands on mental health professionals. • Reconsider calls to arm teachers. Students could be in greater danger if teachers respond to an active shooter by firing their own guns. Police have more firearms training than most teachers but miss a great many shots under stress. Those bullets go somewhere. • Arming teachers, coaches or school administrators could require them to shoot a student or former student. • Armed school guards offer a false sense of security. Schools are so large today that the likelihood of any officer being able to stop a shooter anywhere on campus is remote. My take on all of this? In this election year, only foolish Republican representatives and senators would bet their seats on Trump’s latest tweets about gun control. Morever, Republicans know students will return to class and outrage will fade; it always does. By November, the NRA’s ability to muster GOP votes and target campaign donations will matter more.

Contact Ben L. Kaufman: letters@citybeat.com

the all-new

.com

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

role of the news media in this fraught reality, here are some useful insights and ideas that I’ve read or heard since the latest high school massacre. • Leave the Second Amendment alone. It isn’t absolute. It allows for gun regulation. • Contrary to Trump’s serial lies about Democrats taking away the Second Amendment, this Supreme Court isn’t going to allow that. • Effective efforts for reducing gun violence are likelier to come from states rather than Congress or the federal departments and agencies. • Regulate private gun sales nationally. This “gun show” loophole skips background checks. • Mandate a national 10-day waiting period for any just-purchased gun. Only someone with murderous intent would be in a bigger hurry. • Raise the national minimum age to purchase any shotgun or rifle from 18 to 21. That’s already the age for handgun purchases. • Set a national standard for how many guns and high-capacity magazines anyone may buy in a given period; use background checks to control that limit. • Restrict the size and sale of largecapacity detachable rifle magazines. We’ve seen their contribution to lethality in recent mass shootings and killings. • Restrict the sale of such assault-style rifles as M16 and AK-47 clones. It’s been done before but Congress allowed that law to expire. True assault rifles — and other fully automatic weapons —are already restricted by federal laws. • Defining what an assault-style rifle is will be contentious. So will any debate over the maximum number of rounds any new detachable magazine may hold. Ten is a popular suggestion. Friends who hunt deer and wild boar don’t need 30 rounds to bring home dinner. • Ban the national sale of “bump stocks” that allow semi-automatic rifles to fire almost as rapidly as full automatics. The ATF is studying whether it has this authority. Trump’s order to the Justice Department to ban bump stocks only assures years of delay in courts. Confiscation probably is a non-starter in our legal and cultural environment. • Resist the urge to criminalize guns that were legal when they were purchased. • Fealty to the NRA and its membervoters could prevent legislators from banning the sale of assault-style rifles or their

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

t’s been decades since I fired an assault rifle. It was the standard weapon of the South African Defense Force. Intimidating. I was more at home with the British STEN, a World War II submachine gun. Mine, I was told, was made in the colonial Rhodesian railways machine shop. That was a keeper. The South African rifle’s magazine held 20 cartridges; the STEN, 32 rounds. Each could fire single shots or bursts on full automatic. STEN is an acronym using the first letters of the last names of the Brits who designed the gun — Major Reginald V. Shepherd and Harold Turpin — and “EN” for Enfield, the arms manufacturer. AK-47 was named for Mikhail Kalashnikov, its Soviet designer. The AR-18, designed by California’s ArmaLite, was famously used by the Irish Republican Army and lauded in their famous taunt, “God made Catholics but ArmaLite made us equal.” My assault rifle and STEN were appropriate to their time and place. I mention that as background for my impatience with the reporting of mass shootings in our country. An assault rifle is a long weapon, typically fired from the shoulder; think AR-15 or AK-47. A submachine gun is a stubby, handheld weapon with a short barrel; think UZI or Tommy gun. Debate on reducing gun violence requires clear language in the news media; careless or willfully ignorant journalists promote blather, hyperbole and paranoia. Demonizing the Second Amendment, AR-15 or the NRA doesn’t help. Politicians worsen this with self-serving misstatements, guesswork and duplicity. Amplifying their perfidy is stenographic reporting without the wit to challenge the wildest and dumbest assertions. Continued news media repetition of “bans” reflects this mindlessness. So does stoking gun owners’ fears with talk of “confiscation,” “world government,” “globalism,” “Zionist plots,” etc. Our renewed debate is about more than school violence. The CDC says more than 33,000 people are shot to death annually, most of them suicides by handguns. Few criminals carry rifles or shotguns; handguns are used to kill the vast majority of the approximately 11,000 homicide victims each year. With an estimated 300 million firearms in this country and the freedom to buy more, there is no way to stop mass shootings (defined as four or more victims). Tinkering with the federal background check system won’t end mass shootings and I’m not optimistic about the Republican Congress adopting anything likely to reduce gun violence in an election year. Still, despite my pessimism about the

CELEBRATION!

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

March 28 • 5:30-9 pm • The Phoenix

tickets on SalE NOw! bestofcincinnati.com

NEWS Transit Turbulence SORTA faces deficits, financial scrutiny, internal tension and activists demanding a boost for the region’s faltering bus system BY N I C K SWA R T S E L L

Buses pull into Government Square in downtown Cincinnati PH OTO: NIC K SWARTSELL

comes to job accessibility via public transit, including regional neighbors Louisville, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Columbus and Pittsburgh, as well as cities like Denver and Austin, Texas. The financial strains have caused tensions within SORTA. Trustees voted on Feb. 20 to approve mediation between the president of the city’s chapter of the Amalgamated Transit Union, Troy Miller, and the general manager and CEO of the city’s Metro bus service, Dwight Ferrell, over ongoing issues. “We’re trying to come up with a solution that brings the relationship between administration and the union so they both agree,” board member Maurice Brown told attendees at SORTA’s board meeting. The board has tapped the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service to do that mediation, and a first session was scheduled for Feb. 26. “They’ll put together a program, or several, to begin repairing and then healing, in a sense, the relationship between management and the union.” Miller says that a shortage of drivers and aging buses are causing low morale and driver fatigue, and that Metro leadership is wasting money via high employee turnover. But Ferrell disputes that the bus service is wasting funds and cites Metro’s CONTINUES ON PAGE 11

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

take time, and in the interim, this system might fail.” Metro faces a $150 million budget deficit over the next decade — and that money is needed just to keep bus service at status quo. An independent report released by consultants AECOM last year found Metro would need at least $1 billion in upgrades over the next 10 years to make it more functional and get more residents to the region’s jobs. In addition to a potential tax levy, SORTA’s board is mulling raising Metro fares by 15 cents to $1.90 per ride. That fare increase would take place in June next year and would be the first since 2009. Cincinnati City Council would need to approve that hike, something some council members have balked at. Metro has also reduced or eliminated several routes, and could do so again in the future. That’s going in the wrong direction, transit advocates say. A 2015 study of Metro’s reach commissioned by the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber, the Urban Land Institute and other organizations found that only 23 percent of jobs in the city are easily reachable by public transit. Many others take more than 90 minutes to reach by bus. And about 40 percent of jobs in the city — about 75,000 — aren’t reachable by transit at all. All told, the city ranks lower than 11 other peer cities when it

Transit advocates have framed the levy as a solution to a tough set of realities for Metro: Cincinnati is in an especially tightfisted state when it comes to transit, and the region’s transit authority is one of just a few that doesn’t rely on funds from the county around it. Ohio ranks among the lowest spenders of public dollars per capita on transit. In 2015, Ohio, the nation’s seventh-most populous state, spent just 63 cents per person on public transit. In contrast, every other one of the nation’s 10 most-populous states spends dollars, not cents, per capita. Making the situation more difficult, Hamilton County hasn’t paid for transit since the city’s earnings tax was tapped to fund buses in 1973, though Cuyahoga, Franklin and six other Ohio counties pitch in for their transit authorities. “Unfortunately, in the state of Ohio and in this region, transit is woefully underfunded,” said Sierra Club Ohio Transportation Policy Coordinator Nathan Alley. “We need to do something to fix that. Generally, we don’t like sales taxes. We believe they’re regressive. However, in this instance we need something in the short term and we need it now. That seems to be our best bet. We’re fully in support of the idea of a regional compact to address public transportation on a multi-county and multistate level. But building such a system will

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

he small conference room in downtown Cincinnati where the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority holds its board meetings was standing room only as bus riders and transit activists piled in on Feb. 20. They had come to push the board to ask voters for a sales tax levy in November so that the city’s Metro bus system — which faces big coming deficits, a shortage of drivers, more than 100 aging buses and other challenges — can be shored up and expanded. Normally, their requests would be preaching to the choir. After all, the board voted to go forward with a sales tax boost, amount to be determined, last year. But recent events have thrown some uncertainty into the mix. Last month the Hamilton County Commission, led by tax-levy-opponent Democrat Todd Portune, appointed six new board members to SORTA’s governing body, and more new city appointees are on the way. Meanwhile, SORTA’s new board must navigate new scrutiny around its finances as well as tension between the transit agency’s management and its union. Activists with the Better Bus Coalition and other groups are keeping the pressure on the newcomers and say the time is now to greatly increase Metro’s spending. The bus service faces huge coming budget deficits, and could face service reductions without more revenue, even as studies show it doesn’t currently connect residents to many of the region’s jobs. “We must improve this system with everyone in mind,” Coalition member Mark Samaan told the board. “Let’s focus on the core of our service — people who currently ride and people who used to ride but now cannot because the service no longer works for them, people who would see major life and financial benefit from expanded bus services. I ask you to respect the voters and ask them to make a decision this November on a sales tax levy.”

CITY DESK

Alms, Other Affordable Housing Could Have New Owners Soon BY N I C K SWA R T S EL L

Apartment complexes offering hundreds of units of affordable housing that were in danger of closure due to neglect could have new owners very soon, according to City of Cincinnati documents. Seven buildings owned by New Jerseybased PE Holdings, including the Alms Hill Apartments in Walnut Hills, the Burton Apartments in Avondale and others in North Avondale and Westwood, were placed in receivership by Hamilton County Common Pleas Court Judge Beth Meyer in 2016 after horrific conditions including leaks, non-functioning heat, insect infestations and other problems came to light at the buildings. In one case, at the Burton in Avondale, a roof collapsed after a heavy rain. Those conditions moved the City of Cincinnati to ask a court to strip control of the buildings, and their U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development rent subsidy payments, from PE Holdings. Indianapolis developer Milhaus, the court-appointed receiver, wrote in a letter this month to Cincinnati City Councilman Christopher Smitherman, the chairman of the Law and Public Safety Committee that pushed for the receivership, that the buildings are close to being purchased by companies that look likely to continue their use as affordable housing.

Survey Finds City Board Appointments May Not Be Representative

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

BY N I C K SWA R T S EL L

If you follow Cincinnati politics, you know that various city and regional boards and commissions have been in the white-hot political spotlight over the past couple years. But who are these board appointees? A new, voluntary survey by the city sheds a little light. Though not an exhaustive study of every appointee the city sends to more than 60 boards, respondents to the survey were more wealthy, more likely to be white and more likely to be male than the city as a whole. The city administered the survey, first proposed in a motion by Cincinnati City Councilman Chris Seelbach back in June last year, between Jan. 8 and Feb. 12. One hundred

BY N I C K SWA R T S EL L

New York-based Related Affordable LLC is interested in purchasing the Alms, Burton, Entowne Manor, Founders Home and Georgia Morris Apartments. Another purchaser, American Community Developers, is considering the purchase of the remaining properties, Reids Valley View Manor and Shelton Gardens Apartments. The deals aren’t finalized, and are subject to court approval. The buyers would also need to get the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to transfer contracts for rent subsidies to them from the previous owners. However, Milhaus expressed optimism that the sales are on the right track and wrote that they expect the deals to be complete by the end of February. “It is certainly possible that we will be unable to negotiate the terms of a final agreement with one or both of the buyers, or that one or both of the buyers might elect not to go forward after completing their due diligence, but we are working expeditiously toward the goal of selling the properties and are optimistic that the buyers will sign acceptable agreements and proceed to closing,” Milhaus President Alexandra Jackiw wrote in the letter. “Both Related Affordable and ACD have excellent reputations as developers of affordable housing.”

of the 228 city appointees have responded so far, according to a memo from City Manager Harry Black. Given that sample size, the margin of error for the survey is roughly 6 percent. Assuming the survey is representative, here’s how city board appointments stack up: • More than 45 percent of appointees in the survey make more than $200,000 a year, and another 40 percent make more than $75,000 a year. About 10 percent of city appointees answering the survey make less than $49,000 a year. Cincinnati’s median household income is $34,629 a year, according to Census data. • About 65 percent of appointees identify as male and 35 percent as female. Cincinnati is about 52 percent female and 48 percent male. • More than 70 percent of appointees who responded to the survey by the city are white, while less than 30 percent are black. Cincinnati

Cincinnati to Get “March for Our Lives” Event

Last year, a legal battle erupted over the Alms after HUD attempted to pull its rent subsidies from the property over its condition, despite the fact that Milhaus had spent more than $700,000 on repairs at the 200-unit apartment building. PE bought the building in 2013. That year, then-Cincinnati Community and Economic Development Director Michael Cervay met with other city officials and representatives from the company. After the meeting, Cervay fired off a letter to HUD asking the federal government to keep the company from buying the properties. “It was made clear to the participants in that meeting that the new owners have no intention of investing in our neighborhoods through the purchase of this portfolio,” Cervay wrote to HUD in April that year. “(PE Holding’s representative) stated that there are no plans for capital improvements or rehabilitation, a dialogue with the neighborhoods, nor their own new residents regarding what is needed to preserve these buildings.” That red flag proved both prescient and ineffective. HUD gave the purchase the green light, and two years later city code inspectors found horrendous conditions in the Alms and several other buildings PE Holdings had purchased.

is about 51 percent white and 43 percent black, Census data suggests. • The majority of appointees — more than 90 percent — identify as heterosexual. A small percentage did not specify their sexual preference. • Most of those appointed to boards and commissions by the mayor or city manager — 80 percent — work in Cincinnati, according to the survey. About one-third of all appointees who responded to the survey live in Clifton, Hyde Park, Kennedy Heights, Mount Lookout, North Avondale or somewhere in Northern Kentucky. A number of factors unrelated to age, race, gender and income go in to choosing board appointments, depending on the board and the role it plays in overseeing various institutions. Expertise and experience in financial oversight or special knowledge in a specific field is often prioritized, with the city touting the particular credentials of various appointees from

previous work or volunteering experience. Board memberships are generally unpaid volunteer positions. Cincinnati City Council approves appointments made by the city — a practice that in the past hasn’t resulted in much scrutiny, but which could change given recent political dustups. Many, for example, have pushed for a regular, dayto-day bus rider to be at least one of the city’s seven appointments to SORTA’s 13-member board. That’s a step toward a currently unfulfilled requirement under city legislation passed in 2008 that calls for three regular bus riders on the board. But even that is complicated. Mayor John Cranley’s most recent SORTA appointee, Rayshon Mack, is a regular bus rider. Council turned down his appointment — an exceedingly rare situation — citing Mack’s tone on social media.

Cincinnatians will join in on a series of marches springing up across the country organized by activists and survivors of the Feb. 14 mass shooting that killed 17 people at a school in Parkland, Fla. Debate has swirled once again around gun control following a steady drumbeat of tragedies across the country. So far this year, there have been 17 school shootings nationally. Gun control advocates, including march organizers, say tougher gun laws are needed to make it more difficult to obtain firearms. But many Second Amendment groups say that will infringe on gun owners’ rights and won’t prevent mass shootings. The main March for Our Lives event will take place March 24 in Washington, D.C., but others will take place the same day in cities across the country including Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis and Detroit. Cincinnati’s event, hosted by local groups United We Stand and the Young Feminists Coalition, will take place at a yet-to-be announced location downtown at 11 a.m. The march will proceed to the downtown Cincinnati office of U.S. Sen. Rob Portman. Portman, a Republican and vocal proponent of Second Amendment rights, has consistently voted against gun control legislation. That’s earned him an endorsement — and $3.06 million in direct and indirect campaign support since 1990 — from the National Rifle Association. Accused Parkland gunman Nikolas Cruz was able to legally obtain the rifle he used in kill 17 people even though he had a history of disciplinary issues. In recent years, authorities had been alerted about alarming social media posts he made about shootings and violence. Teachers and counselors have described Cruz as an unpredictable individual who was suffering from depression and other mental illness. Conservative politicians and Second Amendment groups, including those in Ohio, say tighter gun laws won’t keep those like Cruz bent on killing from getting firearms, and that the focus should be on mental health, not law-abiding gun owners. Activists like Emma Gonzales, a Parkland student, disagree. “This is not just a mental health issue,” Gonzales said. “He wouldn’t have harmed that many students with a knife.” Cincinnatians will get a chance to voice their views next month. Some students aren’t waiting. A few local schools, including Walnut Hills High School, saw student walkouts last week in protest of political inaction on the issue of gun violence.

FROM PAGE 09

looming budget deficits, which he says are caused by increasing costs and lack of state and other funding. SORTA’s previous board in 2017 voted to put a sales tax levy on this year’s Hamilton County ballot to improve Metro’s funding. The amount of that levy has yet to be decided, but could range between .5 and 1 percent — the most it can ask voters for without approval from the Hamilton County Commission. At the higher end of that tax increase, Metro says users could expect vastly improved bus service, with more frequency on key routes, longer operating hours and even bus rapid transit in the city’s core. Then, earlier this month, Hamilton County Commissioners replaced six members of the 13-member board (the City of Cincinnati appoints the other seven) after their terms expired. There are some concerns that the new board won’t be as amenable to the tax levy — Portune, who picked the appointees, has asked SORTA to reconsider its ask as he works on a plan to establish a larger regional transit system encompassing eight counties’ municipalities in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. Fellow Democrat commissioner Denise Driehaus says that opposition to the tax levy wasn’t a condition for her vote for new appointees Blake Ethridge, Robert Harris,

Thaddeus Hoffmeister, Allen Freeman, Pete McLinden and Kathleen Wyenandt. The tax levy debate comes as SORTA’s financial house has received more scrutiny of late. Earlier this month, the transit authority revealed that an audit found an extra $8 million tucked away in its bank account that wasn’t committed to other uses. SORTA put $4 million of that money in reserves and used the rest to activate $11 million in federal matching funds to purchase replacements for 20 aging buses. The transit agency’s finances will get still more attention in the months before the potential ballot initiative. Several months ago, SORTA asked the Cincinnati Business Committee to do an audit of its finances. The CBC, made up of executives from the city’s biggest companies like General Electric and Procter & Gamble, has hired accountancy giant Ernst & Young to perform that four-month audit that will dive into SORTA’s expenditures and revenue sources. “We’re thrilled to do it,” Board Chair Kreg Keesee said. “This has been in the works for several months and isn’t a reaction to anything that has happened recently. It’s going to be an important step toward moving forward with this discussion around a future funding model. We know our current model is somewhat unsustainable. It’s critical to make sure our house is in order.”

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

| C I T Y B E AT. C O M

ifteen years ago, Kathleen Putman, a dog groomer of more than 40 years, was living in Dallas and in the midst of training for a triathlon. She was riding her bike to work on a brisk September morning when she was struck by a car, leaving her with a torn aorta, a broken hip and shoulder and a subdural hematoma — a collection of blood outside her brain. “I had multiple serious injuries,” she says. “They told my family that if I survived, I would be a quadriplegic. But the spinal chord injury was probably less severe than the head injury.” Today, Putman walks with two canes and continues to work with a physical therapist. As she recalls the accident, she strokes the head of her service dog, a 3-year-old yellow Lab/golden retriever mix named Rani she was paired with through local nonprofit Circle Tail. “Having had dogs all my life, I thought, ‘Man, I should really get a service dog,’ ” she says. Based in Pleasant Plain, Ohio, Circle Tail provides hearing and service dogs to dozens of people like Putman living with disabilities, all at no cost to the individual. It is accredited by Assistance Dogs International, a coalition of organizations that establishes and promotes standards for the training and acquisition of service dogs. Dogs are trained to work alongside their owners both in public spaces as well as in the home. It’s a group effort between Circle Tail, foster families and a prison program in which inmates work with dogs to teach them the skills necessary to become a service animal. Since they were paired more than a year ago, Rani has helped Putman with everyday tasks like opening doors and picking up items she’s dropped — even things as small and slippery as her credit card. Rani also wears a special harness with a rubber handle that helps Putman go from a sitting position in her wheelchair to a standing position with her canes. Jennifer Kiblinger, Circle Tail’s president and a volunteer with the organization since 1999, has witnessed the unbreakable bonds formed between Circle Tail dogs and their owners time and time again. She slips a lead on a golden retriever-in-training named Cephei as she discusses her experiences. “People ask, ‘Well, don’t you get attached?’ ” she says. “Yeah, you get attached, but you let them go because you see how they change lives.”

Local nonprofit Circle Tail is changing lives with its service canines, all at no cost to the individual

good dog

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

A NEW DIRECTION

Circle Tail was established in 1997 by Marlys Staley, who worked as a physical therapist specializing in burn and wound care for 18 years. She was inspired to change careers after touring a training center for guide dogs in Florida, which compelled her to apply her background to a brand-new profession: training service dogs. “With my physical therapy background, that made the most sense, because I was used to helping people become more active and mobile and help them with their function,” Staley says. “This would be just a different way to help them function more independently.” Circle Tail’s first facility was a barn on Staley’s Pleasant Plain property, where she had lived for three years before conceptualizing the organization. Today, the property boasts a training and education center completed in January 2009 that includes a 7,200-square-foot area with classrooms, facilities for obedience and agility training, grooming accommodations and even CONTINUES ON PAGE 14

B Y E M I LY B E G L E Y

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

PHOTO: HAILEY BOLLINGER

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

Volunteers help train potential service dogs at Circle Tail’s facility in Pleasant Plain, Ohio

Dogs at the training facility learn everything from basic obedience to advanced service dog skills to assist those with a variety of disabilities.

Circle Tail founder Marlys Staley with her Irish wolfhound Gage.

PHOTO: HAILEY BOLLINGER

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

FROM PAGE 12

a small dog supply shop. Staley still lives onsite with her German shepherds Tica and Kiva and 11-month-old Irish wolf wolfhound Gage. The very first Circle Tail dogs came from various local shelters, and those that didn’t meet the qualifications for becoming service dogs were adopted out. Staley says about 4,000 have been adopted throughout the organization’s history. Today, however, fewer and fewer viable service dogs can be found in shelters, largely thanks to new spay and neuter laws and the widespread implementation of microchips, which help many animals that wind up in shelters find their way back home. Dogs and puppies are now primarily obtained through donations from families

and breeders. “What we’re looking for are dogs that are confident but listen, social but not too social — they’re going to pay attention to their person,” Kiblinger says. “One of the biggest things is we want them to want to work.”

PRISON PUPS Dogs in training rotate between Circle Tail, foster families and Circle Tail’s prison program, which currently works with two Ohio women’s facilities: the Dayton Correctional Institution and Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville. About 15 dogs are housed at both Dayton Correctional and the Ohio Reformatory for Women at a time, Staley says. Established in 1998, the prison program pairs dogs with inmates, who are responsible for all of the dogs’ physical and emotional needs, from feeding and exercise to grooming and training. “We train the inmates to train the dogs,” Kiblinger says. “The dogs sleep in their cells with them, they’re crated, they have their meals, everything. The inmate handlers teach the dogs everything from basic obedience and house manners to advanced service dog skills.” Staley adds, “(The prisons) have everything — they have

“People ask, ‘Well, don’t you get attached?’ Yeah, you get attached, but you let them go because you see how they change lives,” says Circle Tail President Jennifer Kiblinger.

wheelchairs and walkers, they have light switches on the walls the dogs are allowed to use, they have ropes on their doors so the dogs can pull open the doors. I kind of think of it as a college campus, because the ladies live in dorm housing, but then they do other things during the day so that the dogs are moving around doing stuff and out exercising and playing.” When the inmates are out of their dorms, they take the dogs with them to meetings, school and even to the gym, allowing them to be exposed to various locations and scenarios. After participating in the prison program, dogs move on to a foster family, with whom they learn to apply the skills they learned in prison to real-world situations. This is when a dog’s skill set is refined and critically assessed as they work alongside fosters in their home and public places. “(The inmates) teach everything from your basic obedience to advanced obedience for service skills,” Staley says. “Our fosters tend to do more of just reinforcing those skills.”

ASSESSING A SKILL SET One of the biggest challenges Circle Tail faces is pairing an individual with his or her ideal service animal. “A dog can have all the right skills and just not click with the person,” Kiblinger says. “And it’s not like they’re partnered and then, poof, they’re working.”

Dogs are typically placed with their owners when the animal is between 1 to 2 years of age, and establishing a bond between a person and his or her new service animal is an essential part of the placement process. For some dogs, becoming a service animal is simply not meant to be. “Circle Tail’s mission is fulfilling the dog’s purpose — finding the right job for the dog,” Kiblinger says. “If it’s not a service dog, it’s not a service dog.” Kiblinger refers to a golden retriever named River — one of her favorite dogs to come through Circle Tail — who wasn’t quite right for a service dog, but became the canine ambassador for the city of Pittsburgh, working alongside Mayor Bill Peduto in his office. “As a Bengals fan, it pains me,” she says, laughing. “But he is so happy and loved. That was a case where he knew all his commands, could have been partnered, but it was just like, ‘This isn’t what he wants to do. He wants to be everybody’s friend.’ ” Staley says one of the biggest factors Circle Tail looks for while training service dogs is confidence, which takes factors like shyness, fearfulness and excitability into account. Dogs must also be able to seamlessly do tasks like getting in and out of a car and wearing a service vest. “You really are expecting a lot of a dog to be able to go into the different venues that a service dog can and be totally focused on their handler and leave things on the

Not all dogs will pass the test.

Circle Tail is accredited by Assistance Dogs International, which establishes standards for the training and acquisition of service animals.

PHOTO: HAILEY BOLLINGER

A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN

“It’s liberating, because I do anything anybody else can do,” says Amy Hoh of her partnership with her service dog, Suela.

plus you take shots during the day,” Hoh says. “It was enough that sometimes it would cause me to plummet, and I’m a dangerous diabetic because I have no symptoms. I don’t walk, so I don’t know I have low blood sugar; if you walked, you’d be dizzy. “I’ve tested a couple of times when I’ve been low, and when I’m low, which is anything below 80, I’d blow in her face, and I’d command her to bump my leg. … She knows that when I’m low, she’s supposed to bump me in the leg and get my attention.”

GETTING INVOLVED

Circle Tail’s Dinner, Art & Wine For Canines takes place 6-10 p.m. Saturday at Receptions Loveland (10681 LovelandMadeira Road). Tickets are $70 each or $125 per pair. To learn more about Circle Tail and to get involved, visit circletail.org.

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

Circle Tail is always looking for volunteers to help them continue to achieve their mission. Staley emphasizes the critical role foster families play in preparing a dog to become a service animal — currently, the organization only has 10. Potential fosters are required to attend obedience training at Circle Tail and follow its training, manners and socialization guidelines. The organization is hosting its eighthannual Dinner, Art & Wine for Canines event 6-10 p.m. Saturday at Receptions Loveland, which includes a meet-and-greet with service dogs in training, silent and live auctions, food, wine and raffle prizes. New this year is Maura, a particularly

artistic service dog who will create works of art throughout the event, with all proceeds from her paintings supporting Circle Tail. It’s a night aimed at educating the public about Circle Tail and its mission as well as celebrating the many individuals the organization — and its dogs — have touched. “It’s liberating, because I do anything anybody else can do,” Hoh says of her partnership with Suela. “It’s liberating because I don’t have to ask somebody to get my pen if I drop it. She does it. “Each dog kind of has their superpower. Hers is loving on people and making them forget about their troubles.”

Throughout its 21-year history, Circle Tail has paired approximately 100 service dogs with individuals with disabilities. The majority of these dogs are Labrador retrievers, golden retrievers and German shepherds, although temperament — not breed — is the most important factor analyzed by the organization. Amy Hoh’s service dog Suela, for example, is a black-and-silver cross between a Labrador and Catahoula leopard dog. Suela is Hoh’s second service dog from Circle Tail; her first, a German shepherd named Cortez, passed away at the age of 11. Hoh was paired with Suela three years

ago, and right away, she noticed something special about her new partner. “She is just this sweet soul,” Hoh says. “One of the things I realized early on about her, and one of our first adventures out, was to an emergency room. I had cellulitis in my legs… and it was a particularly busy night in the ER because they were working on a wreck where there was a 17-year-old who was likely going to lose his life. “The parents were crying, the doctors and nurses were crying, and everybody was upset. And I noticed an unrest in my dog. We hadn’t been together that long — we’d been together two weeks when I started to notice this in her. She knows when someone’s anxious, or feeling upset, and she wants to make them feel better.” Hoh is diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease, or chronic lymphocytic thyroiditis, an autoimmune disorder that causes the immune system to turn against the body’s own tissue. Hoh is confined to a wheelchair and also struggles with diabetes. Suela helps Hoh with everyday tasks like carrying groceries inside, loading and unloading the washer and dryer and closing Hoh’s garage door (via a tennis ball tied to a string). She is also trained to bring Hoh the remote control to her television — even if it’s currently in the hands of her husband. Suela is also instrumental in monitoring her owner’s diabetes. “They started me on a new medication where you take one injection a week,

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

floor alone and not be startled by people screaming or kids running up. It’s just a lot for a dog,” Staley says. Individuals with disabilities interested in being paired with a Circle Tail dog are required to complete 60 hours of training at the organization’s training center, which includes visits to Circle Tail before, during and after they are matched. The humans must also pass several tests for a minimum of three years after acquiring their animal, including the AKC Canine Good Citizen Test, a skills test, and a Public Access Test provided by Assistance Dogs International. These tests help ensure an individual has control over his or her dog and that the dog exhibits good behavior that is unobtrusive to the public.

16 C I T Y B E AT. C O M

| F E B . 2 8 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

STUFF TO DO WEDNESDAY 28

ATTRACTIONS: A Garden of Pure Imagination at the Krohn Conservatory Spring is arriving early this year at Krohn Conservatory with the Garden of Pure Imagination exhibit. Bursting with the brightest tulips, daffodils, hydrangeas and hyacinths, the kid-friendly space serves as the perfect bridge between the rest of our chilly days and mid-March sunshine. Tapping into its inner-Willy Wonka, the conservatory’s colorful landscape comes sprinkled with artificial cotton candy, M&Ms and beyond. While the visual appeal of these bright rainbow-colored plants are reason enough to wander in, the scent of spring is too sweet to miss. Through March 11. $4 adults; $2 kids 5-17; free 4 and under. Krohn Conservatory, 950 Eden Park Drive, Mount Adams, cincinnatiparks.com. — MCKENZIE ESKRIDGE

THURSDAY 01

Be Here Now

Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Mount Adams (through March 11)

PH OTO: PR OVID ED BY T H E CYC LO N ES

leader whose world is turned upside down by the devious, manipulative lieutenant Iago, played by founding company member Nicholas Rose. It’s the first of Shakespeare’s great tragedies to be staged at Cincy Shakes’ new theater theater. See Curtain Call on page 21 for more. Through March 24. $55 adults; $51 seniors; $31 students. Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, 1195 Elm St., Over-the-Rhine, cincyshakes.com. — RICK PENDER

SATURDAY 03

MUSIC: Indie Folk group The Oh Hellos bring gutlevel joy to the 20th Century Theater. See Sound Advice on page 32. EVENT: AlivenArts new National Women’s History Month Festival spans three weekends and includes poetry, music, visual art, film and more. See feature on page 22. EVENT: Circle Tail provides service dogs to those with disabilities, at no cost to the individual. The organization’s annual Dinner, Art &

Wine For Canines fundraiser takes place Saturday at Receptions Loveland. See cover story on page 12. EVENT: Bockfest Tours With the arrival of the annual Bockfest celebration comes some unique looks at Cincinnati’s brewing history via limited-time tours. This year’s walking tours include Mishaps, Malfeasance and Murder; Brushes and Beer; Dr. Morgan’s Hangover Relief Tour; and Below Bockfest. The intriguingly named Mishaps, Malfeasance and Murder Tour explores the “dark side” of beer brewing, with a 90-minute jaunt to historic sites and into subterranean lagering tunnels while guides relate true tales of corruption, accidents and murder related to Cincy’s brewing past. Brushes and Beer celebrates public art along the Brewing Heritage Trail, including beer-related murals and hidden ghost signs from the city’s pre-Prohibition days. Dr. Morgan’s Hangover Relief Tour offers a walking tour of OTR, led by historian Mike Morgan. Learn about

the city’s pre-Prohibition past, the recent rebirth of our brewing scene and the story of Bockfest while exploring the lagering cellars underneath Washington Platform and the Gerke lagering cellars. Finally, Below Bockfest is a shorter, 60-minute tour through the lagering tunnels underneath Bockfest Hall, with stories of beer drinkers, beer makers and beer barons. Be warned: Many of these tours sell out. Mishaps, Malfeasance and Murder, Brushes and Beer and Dr. Morgan’s Hangover Relief Tour are offered Saturday and Sunday; Below Bockfest is offered Friday and Saturday. Tickets are $20-$25 and include a complimentary beer. Tours leave from Bockfest Hall, 1621 Moore St., Over-the-Rhine, bockfest.com. — MAIJA ZUMMO EVENT: Not So Classical: The Story Of Love Combining short musical compositions, film vignettes and heady philosophical concepts, the Constella Festival’s concluding production is the brainchild of fest

founder Tatiana Berman and filmmaker David Donnelly. The unique, genre-bending experience will explore love through the lenses of sound, science, history and emotions, supplemented by an art gallery that features the collaborative work of couples. Valentine’s Day may have come and gone, but for those that still believe in love, Not So Classical is here to bring human bonds back into the forefront of your mind. 7:30 p.m. Thursday. $25-$45. Memorial Hall, 1225 Elm St., Over-theRhine, memorialhallotr.com. — JUDE NOEL EVENT: Cyclones Pucks & Pups Night and Wiener Dog Race Who let the dogs out? Baha Men, we found the culprits: Cincinnati Cyclones will host a wiener dog race on the ice during game intermission on Saturday to let canines battle it out for some bragging rights. For all those wiener parents confident your dog can give the rest a run for their money, spots may still be available for you to CONTINUES ON PAGE 18

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

ONSTAGE:

ONSTAGE: Othello Although Shakespeare’s tragic tale of insecurity, trust and betrayal is more than four centuries old, guest director Christopher V. Edwards says Othello has “a contemporary soul.” His production is set in a modern world that is “technologically and digitally capable, where war is the norm and not the exception… where political and economic interests often outweigh ethical or moral concerns.” Guest actor William Oliver Watkins is the successful military

The Cyclones’ Pups & Pucks wiener dog race

Ongoing Shows

FRIDAY 02

ART: It’s a Beautiful Mess and Not To Scale at The Carnegie The Carnegie in Covington will host opening receptions for two new exhibitions: Not To Scale, an offsite participatory exploration and activation of Covington’s Eastside neighborhood, created by artists Anissa Lewis and Mary Clare Rietz; and It’s a Beautiful Mess, curated by artist Krista Gregory in the Rotunda Gallery. The latter focuses on the way in which artists translate their studio practice into the traditional gallery setting, and the former provides documentation of the performances and installations by Covington residents to create ongoing conversations about access to resources in the surrounding area. Opening reception 5-8 p.m. Friday. Through April 29. Free admission. The Carnegie, 1028 Scott Blvd., Covington, Ky., thecarnegie.com. — MARIA SEDA-REEDER

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

EVENT: Drink and Draw: Zine Make and Swap Take advantage of free art supplies and ample alcohol to let your creative spirit run wild. This March’s “Drink and Draw” event at the Contemporary Arts Center will give local artists a chance to chat while creating personal ’zines — handmade booklets of stories and drawings that can be easily traded with pals. The CAC will provide the space, and organizers in charge of the Cincinnati Art Book Fair will be on hand to provide advice and guidance. This event isn’t so

much of a class as it is an experimentation with new forms of expression. Let your thoughts flow onto the page, feed it into a Xerox machine and surprise your loved ones with a readable peek into your soul. 6-8 p.m. Thursday. Free. Contemporary Arts Center, 44 E. Sixth St., Downtown, contemporaryartscenter.org. — JUDE NOEL

27 Years of Live Stand-Up Comedy in Cincinnati!

Show Times

Wed / Thur / Sun 8:00 - 18+ Friday 7:30 & 10:00 - 18+ Saturday 7:30 & 10:00 - 21+ Andy Woodhull

Tom Simmons

March 1 - 4

March 8 - 11

Just 15 minutes from downtown in Mongtomery! 3 Pool Tables • Large Patio

Next Door to Go Bananas

Cheap Drinks Fridays - DJ Diamond Saturdays - Live Band

W W W.GOBANANASCOMEDY.COM 8410 Market Place Ln.

513.984.9288

Like us on Facebook

FROM PAGE 17

sign up. In honor of “Pups & Pucks” night at the Cyclones, dogs of all breeds are welcome to sit with their human families in a designated section and cheer on their fellow species members. Every dog must arrive with a completed waiver, available online. Ironically (or intentionally), the dachshund race also falls on John Morrell Dollar Hotdog Night. 7:30 p.m. Saturday. $15-$27.50 advance; $17-29.50 day of; $5 dogs. U.S. Bank Arena, 100 Broadway St., Downtown, cycloneshockey.com. — MCKENZIE ESKRIDGE EVENT: Bockfest Goat Rodeo Scavenger Hunt Queen City Exchange will be hosting this year’s Bockfest Goat Rodeo Scavenger Hunt. Gather a group of up to six people and compete for some swag provided by Christian Moerlein Brewing Co. Teams will make their

way through downtown and OTR hotspots on the hunt for prizes. Bockfest is the three-day long celebration that rings in spring and celebrates bock beer; Queen City Exchange is one of 26 official venues hosting celebrations along a designated shuttle route. Festival celebrations begin on Friday and continue throughout the weekend. Come to QCE on Saturday to join the hunt. 1-4 p.m. Saturday. Free admission. Queen City Exchange, 32 W. Court St., Downtown, facebook.com/queencityexchange. — ZACHARY PERRIN

SUNDAY 04

MUSIC: Bodeans ply their brand of Roots Rock at the 20th Century Theater. See Sound Advice on page 32. EVENT: Bockfeast Dinner Bockfest turns into Bockfeast on Sunday afternoon with this special Germaninspired buffet dinner. The

meal includes rotisserie chicken, a Brew City Sausage sampler, homemade sides, dessert and bock beer. It coincides with the family-friendly Continental Sunday, a throwback to the Cincinnati of the 1800s, with authentic entertainment from German-American societies, German food and beer specials and a breweriana exhibit. There will also be the return of the ever-popular Bock Bloody Mary Bar, featuring Grandma Debbie’s homemade mix and a ton of garnishes. Bockfeast starts at noon Sunday. $35 presale only; includes dinner and a beer. Bockfest Hall, 1621 Moore St., Over-theRhine, bockfest.com. — MAIJA ZUMMO EVENT: Channel Your Flannel at Streetside Brewery Calling all lumberjacks and plaid enthusiasts: it’s time to “Channel Your Flannel” for the animals. Streetside PHOTO: PROVIDED

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

SAVE THE DATE!

MAY 23RD, 5:30-8:30 PM NEWPORT ON THE LEVEE Tickets On Sale Now! WWW.CITYBEATTICKETS.COM/EVENTS/51818093/MARGARITA-MADNESS

FRIDAY 02 COMEDY: Donnell Rawlings Though he never had a burning desire to become a stand-up comedian, Donnell Rawlings says people that he grew up with wouldn’t be surprised that he became a comic. “I was funny, but I never had the ambition to do it. If we went to a party and everyone wanted to hear the story about, say, jumping the fence to go swimming late at night, there would be 10 people in the room that could tell it, but everyone wanted me to tell it,” he says. Rawlings had thoughts of being an architect, but reconsidered when he realized he would have to spend a lot more time in school. After a stint in the U.S. military, he was weeks away from becoming a Washington, D.C. police officer. “I started going to these open mic comedy nights, just with friends, to play around and have fun watching the comedians. I was a heckler, got dared to go on stage and that was it. Lights out.” 7:30 and 10 p.m. Friday; 7 and 10 p.m. Saturday. $20. Liberty Funny Bone, 7518 Bales St., Liberty Township, liberty.funnybone.com. — P.F. WILSON

PHOTO: STEVE HAMPTON AND THE BREWERY DISTRICT

FRIDAY 02

EVENT: Bockfest Germanic heritage and craft beer: you’d be hard-pressed to find a devoted Cincinnatian who hasn’t been touched by either of these cultural cornerstones. Kicking off with an annual parade — populated by goats pulling kegs, goat-shaped floats and folks clad in lederhosen and monk’s robes — Bockfest weekend celebrates Overthe-Rhine’s core tenets of serving up good eats and (of course) bock beer, plus the coming of spring. Catch a Yugos gig at the Woodward Theater. Walk the Brewing Heritage Trail. Compete in the Bocklympics. Now’s your chance to party like a bockstar. Cincinnati’s weirdest parade kicks off 6 p.m. Friday in front of Arnold’s Bar and Grill (210 E. Eighth St., Downtown) and ends at Bockfest Hall, where festivities continue through Sunday evening. Friday-Sunday. Free admission. Bockfest Hall, 1621 Moore St., Over-the-Rhine, bockfest.com — JUDE NOEL

TUESDAY 06

LIT: Min Jin Lee discusses her novel Pachinko, which spans nearly 100 years in the life of a Korean family, at the Mercantile Library. See interview on page 23.

YOUR WEEKEND TO DO LIST: LOCAL.CITYBEAT.COM

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

MUSIC: Judah & The Lion brings a blend of Nu-Folk, Hip Hop and radio-friendly

MUSIC: Screaming Females New Jersey’s Screaming Females’ origins date back to the New Jersey high school days of singer/ guitarist Marissa Paternoster and bassist King Mike, when they began playing together and forging their consistently evolving Punk-based sound. When the trio (which also features drummer Jarrett Dougherty) signed with Don Giovanni

MONDAY 05

Rock to Bogart’s. See Sound Advice on page 33.

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

Brewery and nonprofit Save The Animals Foundation are hosting this event to raise money for the over 600 cats and dogs currently being taken care of by the volunteers at STAF. There will be a photobooth and raffle and a part of proceeds from drink sales will go to the organization. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday. Free admission. Streetside Brewery, 4003 Eastern Ave., Columbia Tusculum, facebook.com/streetsidebrewery book.com/streetsidebrewery. — ZACHARY PERRIN

Records in 2009, the label reissued the group’s first two self-released albums. The band is now on its seventh LP, having just released the much anticipated All at Once on Feb. 23. The album has already received positive coverage from Stereogum, Rolling Stone and NPR, which said All at Once features “sonic adventures that are fuzzy, quiet, expansive and… cathartically poppy.” The album is another powerhouse showcase for Screaming Females’ guiding force — Paternoster‘s colossal, magnetic voice — as well as the group’s increasingly effective songwriting and unwavering intensity. Now in its 13th year, the group regularly tops each great album with another even greater one, and All at Once is the best example of that feat yet. 8:30 p.m. Monday. $10. Northside Yacht Club, 4227 Spring Grove Ave., Northside, northsideyachtclub. com. — MIKE BREEN

ARTS & CULTURE Playhouse Announces its 2018-19 Schedule KJ Sanchez’s long-awaited play about King Records gets its world premiere in November BY R I C K PEN D ER

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

ssembling a season for the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park is no easy task. Artistic Director Blake Robison has concocted his seventh season balancing the interests of many diverse audiences — veteran theatergoers and newbies, lovers of the classics, people who yearn for new works, families seeking multi-generational entertainment and more. In particular, Robison continues to champion women playwrights. Of the nine productions so far announced for the 201819 subscription season (a 10th was not yet set by this story’s deadline), five-and-a-half of them are scripts by women, including two world premieres. That high percentage has Robison feeling proud. “It’s important that we’re telling everybody’s stories,” he says. One of those, a production in the Shelterhouse, will be the world premiere of Cincinnati King (Nov. 3-Dec. 23) by KJ Sanchez, a Playhouse associate artist who has staged numerous productions over the past several seasons. She will direct the show she’s assembled, culled from hundreds of interviews about Cincinnati’s revolutionary music label King Records and its hard-driving owner Syd Nathan. The show shares stories about the studio’s many hits, including “The Twist,” “Blues Stay Away from Me,” “Fever” and “Need Your Love So Bad.” In 2013, Sanchez began work on this project — conducting interviews with people connected to King Records. There was a public reading of an early draft in August of that year. A stage concert reading was performed in Washington Park in May 2015, in connection with Cincinnati’s Fringe Festival and 3CDC’s OTR Performs series. Most recently, the Playhouse held a workshop of the play in New York City in September 2017. Among the other female playwrights who will have scripts produced at the Playhouse is Lauren Gunderson. For the 201718 season, she was the most frequently produced playwright (other than Shakespeare) at American theaters. She already has a track record at the Playhouse, debuting The Revolutionists in 2016. The prolific writer recently partnered with Margot Melcon to create Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley (Oct. 13-Nov. 10). Robison, who will direct the production on the Marx

mainstage, calls this one “a leap of imagination.” It’s the story of studious Mary Bennet, one of four sisters of the heroine of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet. Mary is the dutiful middle daughter, but in this sequel she dreams of a new path, beyond the company of books and her piano. It’s a romantic comedy that will appeal to Austen fans and more. Actually, all of the announced shows on the Playhouse’s Shelterhouse stage next season will be works by women, starting with Jen Silverman’s The Roommate (Sept. 21-Oct. 21). Her play All the Roads Home premiered at the Playhouse in 2017; The Roommate was launched at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville in 2015. It’s a wickedly funny comedy about a recent divorcée who fills her empty home with an intriguing and perhaps dangerous woman with a lot of secrets. Audrey Cefaly’s The Last Wide Open (Feb. 9-March 10, 2019) is another world premiere at the Shelterhouse. This up-andcoming writer from Washington, D.C. has spun a story about a romance between a waitress and an Italian immigrant. Robison will stage the new work, still in development. He says Cefaly has “an empathy for characters from the other side of the tracks or who have made it through the school of hard knocks.” The Shelterhouse will be the venue for the Playhouse’s first production by a Native American writer. Larissa FastHorse’s The Thanksgiving Play (March 23-April 21) is a satirical comedy about liberal artists trying to devise a culturally sensitive Thanksgiving play for elementary schools. It turns into an amusing send-up of over-zealous PC behavior. In the female tally, Robison counts a “half” because the season includes the mainstage production of the musical In the Heights (Jan. 19-Feb. 17, 2019) with a book by Quiara Alegría Hudes. It was a 2008 Tony Award winner. Her betterknown writing partner was Lin-Manuel Miranda. He conceived, composed and wrote lyrics for In the Heights before Hamilton (its national tour lands in Cincinnati just a few days after the Playhouse production closes). In the Heights’ Hip Hop, Latinflavored score, with lots of high-energy choreography, portrays the lives and stories of people in the vibrant, tight-knit

Audrey Cefaly’s The Last Wide Open will have its world premiere at the Shelterhouse. PH OTO: TO NY ARR AS MITH /ARR AS MITH & A S S O C I AT E S

Hispanic-American New York neighborhood of Washington Heights. “The Playhouse can bring this sort of national-level Latino talent that otherwise you’d have to go to New York to see,” says Robison. Another musical — on a very different subject — will finish the Marx season: You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown (April 20-May 18, 2019), which brings the Peanuts comic-strip gang to life onstage. The production will use actors doubling as musicians, including Nick Cearley (Seymour in the 2017 Playhouse production of Little Shop of Horrors Horrors) as Linus. The Marx mainstage season opener, an adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery (Sept. 1-29), will feature Barbara Chisholm as the nightmarish “Number One Fan” who holds a romance novelist hostage. It will be quite a change of pace for the actress who portrayed down-to-earth newspaper columnist Erma Bombeck at the Playhouse in 2017. Last but far from least, the Playhouse will present August Wilson’s Two Trains Running (March 2-30, 2019), one of the 10 plays in the legendary writer’s American Century Cycle, this one set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District in 1969 against the backdrop of urban renewal and the civil rights movement. This isn’t the show’s local premiere (Know Theatre presented it in an Over-theRhine church basement in 2004), but with Timothy Douglas directing, it’s sure to be memorable. He’s one of the foremost interpreters of Wilson’s plays; Playhouse audiences appreciated his excellent production

Barbara Chisholm is the hostage taker in Misery. Misery PH OTO: TO NY ARR AS MITH /ARR AS MITH & A S S O C I AT E S

of Jitney in 2016. (It’s worth noting that Cincinnati Shakespeare Company will present Wilson’s Fences early in 2019.) Two more “extras” complete the Playhouse’s 59th season: the 28th presentation of A Christmas Carol (Nov. 21-Dec. 29) and a limited engagement from Chicago’s Second City, It’s Not You, It’s Me (Jan. 10-27, 2019).

CURTAIN CALL

Two Plays, Two Views of ‘Othello’ BY R I C K PEN D ER

William Oliver Watkins and Courtney Lucien in Cincy Shakes’ production of Othello PHOTO: MIKKI SCHAFFNER PHOTOGRAPHY

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

Contact Rick Pender: rpender@citybeat.com

or opportunity because they were judged by appearance, background or education,” Phillips says. “I love the idea that there’s a personal side to this story that everybody universally can get behind.” Both Othello and Red Velvet seem likely to be catalysts for much-needed conversations about racism and bias in today’s world. Another aspect of these parallel productions is worth noting. Actors’ Equity Association, the union for more than 50,000 theater actors and stage managers across the U.S., has released a study ranking Cincinnati among the top 10 places for live theater in the nation because of the number of Equity members employed. The report combined Cincinnati and Louisville as one locale, especially because of two prominent regional theaters, the Playhouse in the Park and Actors Theatre of Louisville. But it’s not just large theaters that give us this noteworthy status: Ensemble Theatre’s cast of nine for Red Velvet includes six members of Actors Equity. Another 11 Equity members constitute almost the entire cast of Cincy Shakes’ Othello, including a New York professional, William Oliver Watkins, as Othello. Watkins is a Cincinnati native who graduated from the city’s School for Creative and Performing Arts, a K-12 magnet school. “Steady, high-quality performances are being performed by hundreds of professional actors and stage managers in Cincinnati, Louisville and the surrounding areas,” says Mary McColl, Equity’s executive director. “This report shows Kentucky and Ohio theatergoers that exciting performances on the live stage by professional actors may not be so far away.” In fact, the simultaneous productions of Othello and Red Velvet just two blocks apart significantly illustrates the quality of local professional theater.

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

Two Cincinnati theaters are engaged in an inventive collaboration. Let’s start with Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, now settled in its new Over-the-Rhine theater. This Friday begins its staging of Othello (running through March 24), Shakespeare’s great tragedy about a bold military man driven to madness and murder by Iago, his scheming lieutenant who manipulates the newly married general into believing his sweet wife has deceived him. It’s an action-packed story full of danger and intrigue, and it has overtones of racism that still resonate after four centuries: Othello is referred to as a Moor, a dark-skinned man from North Africa. “This is a play that speaks to a national conversation that we’re having right now about inequality and bias,” says Cincy Shakes’ Producing Artistic Director Brian Isaac Phillips. “Othello is a classic work that deals with these very timely issues and also explores the universal themes of insecurity, trust and betrayal.” Christopher V. Edwards, guest director for Othello, says he has set his production in contemporary Venice, a place that’s “technologically and digitally capable, where war is the norm and not the exception. It is a nation with the responsibility of a superpower, where political and economic interests often outweigh ethical or moral concerns.” While Cincy Shakes demonstrates Othello’s relevance to the present, Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati — in its recently renovated Over-the-Rhine space — will concurrently stage Red Velvet (March 6-31), a new play about the first AfricanAmerican actor to play Othello in London in 1833. Lolita Chakrabarti’s script tells the story of Ira Aldridge, an ambitious and charismatic actor from New York City who stepped in to play Othello when legendary actor Edmund Kean fell ill onstage and died not long after. Many of the members of Kean’s acting company opposed this replacement and, although audiences flocked to see Aldridge perform at London’s Covent Garden, critics were savagely and shockingly dismissive of his performance and proffered horrifying racist judgments about him, even as the city was rife with unrest regarding the abolition of slavery across the British Empire. Aldridge’s London performance was cut short due to this wave of prejudiced negativity, and he never returned to perform there. (In the 1840s and 1850s, he toured throughout Europe where his acting talent was heralded and appreciated.) These two local productions offer a remarkable opportunity to compare two men who are outsiders, the victims of deep-seated discrimination. ETC’s Artistic Director D. Lynn Meyers recruited Cincy Shakes’ Phillips to stage Red Velvet. “Everybody can think of a moment in their life where they were denied access

CLASSICAL MUSIC

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

WANTS YOU TO WIN STUFF!

BARENAKED LADIES

JUNE 23 | PNC PAVILION

Visit CityBeat.com/win-stuff to enter for a chance to win tickets to this upcoming show!

A Fest for Women’s History Month BY A N N E A R EN S T EI N

With March being National Women’s History Month, local AlivenArts is producing a new festival devoted to women whose talents enliven the local and regional arts scene. The organization has the goal of engaging the community via arts education, performances and experiences. Last year, its founder Rachel Kramer attended LUNAFEST — the national women’s traveling film festival — and was inspired to produce this first National Women’s History Month Festival. “For all the progress that’s been made in recognizing women artists, there’s still a huge chasm when it comes to visibility,” Kramer says. “Our goal is not only to help promote local artists but also to inspire women of all ages to participate in the arts. One of the best ways to convey women’s history is through artistic expression.” The festival she has started offers five events spanning three weekends. They feature poetry, instrumental and vocal music, visual art and films all created and/ or performed by women. A $40 pass covers all events, including the opening and closing receptions; tickets for individual events are also available. Filiae Mundi (or “daughters of the world”), the kick-off event on Saturday, is a sing-in for high-school girls. The daylong workshop culminates in a public performance at 2:30 p.m. at the Community Matters sanctuary in Lower Price Hill. The program features works by women composers and singers and will be led by guest conductors Robyn Lana, Lisa Peters and Dr. Catherine Roma. On Sunday, Dr. Brenda Portman performs a 4 p.m. concert of works by women composers at the Hyde Park Community Methodist Church, where she is resident organist. Portman has recorded several CDs that feature contemporary works, including her own compositions. A daylong street festival dubbed “The Artistry of Women” is set for March 10 at Community Matters — Saint Michael Street by the sanctuary will be closed. It features a variety of free activities, a marketplace and food trucks. Its schedule includes poetry events involving Cincinnati Poet Laureate Pauletta Hansel and a noontime coffeehouse concert devoted to women singer/songwriters and dedicated to the late Therese Edell, a Cincinnati native whose 1977 recording From Women’s Faces is considered a classic in women’s music. At the street festival, MUSE Cincinnati’s Women’s Choir will present two 45-minute concerts led by Music Director Jillian Harrison-Jones. (There is an admission charge for those performances.) On March 17, Dr. Tammy Kernodle will speak at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Walnut Hills on women’s roles in the civil rights movement, particularly as they were expressed through song. Dr.

Rachel Kramer founded the women’s festival. PHOTO: PROVIDED

Kernodle is a professor of musicology at Miami University and an authority on African-American women musicians. Her talk is titled “Tryin’ Times: Black Women, Soul and Narratives of Resistance in the Age of Black Power” and will look at songs by Aretha Franklin, the Staple Singers, Roberta Flack and Nina Simone. The festival concludes on March 18 at Hebrew Union College in Clifton with a LUNAFEST film screening, followed by a closing reception and MUSE performance. The festival is also designed to highlight someone who will receive proceeds from the festival’s events. This year’s recipient is MUSE. The award carries an obligation to pay it forward; the choral group plans to do that with a concert at a women’s prison near Dayton. It’s an ambitious undertaking but Kramer is unfazed by logistical challenges. She served as MUSE’s accompanist and associate director for 18 years and as educational program manager for Baldwin Piano Co. Last year, she created AlivenArts as an “arts collaborative incubator,” she says. “Our goal is to make connections and to increase access to the benefits of the arts, whether they’re the audience, the participants or patrons,” she says. “Cincinnati has one of the most diverse and thriving arts scenes anywhere, especially for a city this size. It can only get better as more people get involved.” The AlivenArts National Women’s History Month Festival runs Saturday-March 18. For a detailed schedule and more information, visit alivenarts.org.

LIT

Min Jin Lee Discusses Novel ‘Pachinko’ Here BY J U DY G EO R G E

Author Min Jin Lee PHOTO: ELENA SIEBERT

the all-new

.com

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

Min Jin Lee will discuss Pachinko at 6 p.m. Tuesday at the Mercantile Library (414 Walnut St., Downtown). To RSVP, call 513-621-0717 or email reservations@ mercantilelibrary.com.

Read us on your phone when you’re at the bar by yourself.

Korean boy, it stunned her. “My teachers and librarians showed me great kindness and enormous compassion when I was younger,” Lee says. “We lived in a poor neighborhood and didn’t have any money. I got to Yale because so many teachers pushed me along.” After her first draft, Lee almost abandoned Pachinko. That version was set in 1980s Tokyo, but when she returned to the manuscript, she realized that she had to go back much further to show what it meant to be a Korean person in Japan. In 1910, Japan formally annexed Korea, making every citizen a subject of the Japanese emperor until 1945. Thousands of Koreans immigrated to Japan in that period, many of them farmers with no claim to the land they once owned. The Korean-Japanese population still dominates the pachinko industry today. “A lot of Japanese don’t like to admit that they work there,” Lee says. “They see it as something dirty that Koreans do.” To Lee, pachinko is a metaphor for the lives of Koreans in Japan. “Pachinko tilts toward the house, like every gambling situation,” she says. “I felt Koreans in Japan were doing something really interesting and difficult with their lives, which was to continue to persist in the face of great adversity. “They were playing a rigged game. They were not unaware of the capriciousness of fate, yet they were continuing.”

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

When Min Jin Lee was a college student, she heard a talk by an American missionary who worked with Korean people in Japan. It left a deep impression. “He told the story of a 13-year-old KoreanJapanese boy who climbed to the top of his apartment building, jumped off and died,” she says. “His parents were shocked. They went through his personal things and found his middle-school yearbook. His Japanese classmates had written, ‘Go back to where you belong. You smell like kimchi. Die. Die. Die.’ ” That lecture eventually led to her novel Pachinko, a book that spans nearly 100 years in the life of a Korean family. It was one of four best-fiction finalists in 2017’s National Book Awards. On Tuesday, Lee will read from and discuss Pachinko at the Mercantile Library. It’s free and open to the public. “History is a subject that I care about intensely,” Lee says. “And one of the things that I’m always coming up against is how much history we don’t have of people who don’t leave records. And that means most of us.” “Even if you love history, you realize how limited the lenses are and just how few pages are given to people who are poor, illiterate and disenfranchised,” she continues. “And yet, most of history really is about all of us.” The fictional family at the center of Pachinko grapples with the difficulties many transplanted people face: ethnic bias rooted in centuries of conflict, a desire to assimilate, fear of rejection and economic hardship. For Koreans in Japan, one route to economic betterment was pachinko. “Pachinko is a $203 billion dollar industry and a cornerstone of the Japanese economy,” Lee says. “It’s a vertical pinball game that’s gambling for adults; it’s not for children. Pachinko parlors are on every street corner and every train station.” One of 11 Japanese people plays pachinko regularly, she notes, and $203 billion is twice the revenue of the Japanese export auto industry. “Pachinko is seen as something that is very low class,” Lee adds. While the gambling that accompanies pachinko is illegal, the game itself is not. Unlike the 13-year-old boy she heard about in college, Lee didn’t experience ethnic cruelty growing up. Born in Seoul, she came to the United States when she was 7-years-old, landing in Queens, N.Y. “My father was 40 when he came to America,” she says. “He is a war refugee from North Korea. He came here because he believed there would be another war and he didn’t want to lose his family again.” Her parents started out operating a news kiosk in Manhattan and eventually entered the wholesale costume-jewelry business. When she heard the story of the

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

(High) Humans of New York BY JAC K ER N

On the surface, High Maintenance (11 p.m. Fridays, HBO) is a comedy that follows a friendly bike-riding pot dealer. But at its core, the show is truly a portrait of New York life — for people who happen to use marijuana (and even many who don’t). The brainchild of Ben Sinclair (who stars as the unnamed, weed-delivery “guy”) and Katja Blichfeld, High Maintenance started Ben Sinclair is “The Guy” on HBO’s High Maintenance. as a Vimeo web series, with nearly 20 super-short P H OTO : DAV I D R U S S E L L episodes airing between 2012 and 2015. In its online iteration, and its first season on HBO in slacker stoner. And what type of “client” is 2016, the show followed a predictable she going to meet, anyway? model: Each episode explored a different A potential home buyer, it turns out. The client that “The Guy” encounters. would-be burnout here is actually a husBut this current, second TV season has tling realtor with her own property-purtaken a distinct turn. It’s as if the lens is chasing ambitions. It immediately bashes pulling back, allowing viewers to see more the lazy weed-smoker stereotype. But High of what’s going on with the varied charMaintenance doesn’t preach about pot. It acters we meet, giving us some additional features productive people who indulge in context. We’ll linger with some characters an after-work toke the way many enjoy a for a while before The Guy even shows up. glass of wine, as well as the goofy weirdos And speaking of him, we’ve also been getwho are attached to their bongs. ting a glimpse into the life of our mysteriIn that same episode, we move on to a ous dealer, too. group of textbook Brooklyn hipsters who Ironically, he plays a very small role in check several stereotypical boxes. A couple the season’s opener. “Globo” takes place residing in a communal living-space hit in the immediate aftermath of some the renter’s jackpot when they are selected unknown catastrophic event. Could it be by the affordable housing lottery and move along the lines of 9/11? Maybe it would be to a luxe apartment in a classy neighbormore accurate to compare the feeling to hood. But swanky subsidized housing isn’t 11/9, the day after the 2016 election? Whattotally what it’s cracked up to be when ever it is, this tragedy has cast a figurative you’re excluded from many of the buildcloud over the city, where we watch folks ing’s amenities because of your status. try to cope in various — and often hilariWhen they try to sneak into the off-limous — ways. its sauna, they’re caught by security and a One man on a weight-loss journey highly questionable bitch-fit ensues that struggles to craft an appropriate fitnessleaves the renters reeking of entitlement. related social media post and serves as the High Maintenance is kind to its characters, sole attendee of a workout class. Meanbut it also presents them in a raw, honest while, a group of lovers remains disconway that does not always reflect well on nected from the hectic world around them. It makes them feel all the more real. them, only to be blindsided by the news And the shining star character of High when The Guy delivers some smoke — and Maintenance is Sinclair’s enigmatic ganja some much needed phone chargers. We guy. You pick up details about his life here see trauma through the eyes of countless and there — last season we learned he is characters from all walks of life in a way divorced — but really don’t get much of that’s ambiguous, yet poignantly so very his story. One recent episode, “Scromple,” New York City. follows him closely after a bike-related Another major issue in the Big Apple injury lands him in the hospital; we meet is housing, and in High Maintenance we his ex-wife, who, it turns out, he’s technisee everything from swanky lofts and cally still married to. The imaginative ways chic brownstones to tiny studios shared this series explores the human experience between a group of roomies. One episode, are on full display here. It’s silly, emotional “Namaste,” opens with Danielle Brooks and thought-provoking all at once. (Orange Is the New Black, Master of None None) High Maintenance was just renewed for playing a woman buying weed from a third season, and I can’t wait to see how another Guy. She gets an unexpected text the show continues to evolve for many to from “a client” and pulls herself together come. before running out the door. Pot-smoker Contact Jac Kern: @jackern cliches come to mind: the disorganized

FILM

Frail, Shimmering Love in ‘Annihilation’ BY T T S T ER N - EN ZI

The state of love in science-fiction films is a curiously fragile thing — as Alex Garland’s new Annihilation shows so very well. In this film, love is a human ideal under attack by looming threats from beyond. An audio analogy would be the epically sublime soundscape from the 1980s, “Moments in Love” by the Art of Noise, with its near symphonic mix of beats and collected noise accompanied by the ethereal chant of the title. Over its 10-plus minute runtime, the song is less about erotic or romantic communion than the escalating tension in a fearful heart. Writer-director Garland (Ex Ex Machina Machina) starts Annihilation, his adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s bestselling novel, with a foreboding interrogation that, upon further consideration, feels like a stunningly intimate confessional about how love (and

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

| C I T Y B E AT. C O M

But Garland refuses to let us linger in their dreamy moments of love. Instead he teases us, almost immediately with hints of fissures in their relationship: Lena’s fraught exchange with a colleague (David Gyasi) speaks of a forbidden, shameful intimacy, and her fragmented final time with Kane before he leaves reveals that neither apparently gets to express all of the things they might wish to say to one another. In these scenes, Garland operates with an economy and sense of emotional longing reminiscent of Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris. There, Chris Kelvin (George Clooney), a civilian psychologist, drifts through life in a bit of a fugue state until given the chance to head off to investigate strange happenings on a space station orbiting the mysterious planet Solaris. Upon arrival, Chris encounters his deceased wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone) and must determine how to deal with her reappearance. For all the love and passion the two shared, Chris blames himself for her suicide and sees her return as either a sign or a second chance. But the other members of the team on the space station know better. Annihilation posits Lena in a similar situation. There are clear signals along the way that past teams have Natalie Portman leads a team into The Shimmer in Annihilation either been killed by the amazing DNAP H O T O : C O U R T E S Y PA R A M O U N T P I C T U R E S A N D S K Y D A N C E spliced creations that have sprung up all life on the planet) has been murdered; in The Shimmer or the individuals have all that’s left is to determine why this horlost their grip on reality and turned on one rific misdeed took place. another. What is The Shimmer doing to Lomax (Benedict Wong) questions Lena these obviously damaged people? (Natalie Portman) about her participation Lena wants to save what she can of her in an expedition that obviously went awry. relationship with Kane and seek a degree Lena is a biologist — with military experiof absolution for her faithlessness in his ence — enlisted by Dr. Ventress (Jennifer absence. But the question emerges as to Jason Leigh, brittle and aloof) to join an allwhether or not she (and Kane) will even be female team of explorers (Gina Rodriguez, the same people they were before entering Tuva Novotny and Tessa Thompson) venThe Shimmer. Will their past moments of turing into a field known as The Shimmer. love or betrayal matter anymore? It’s an expanding zone whose source was However, Garland knows better than to apparently ground zero for a mysterious bog us down in a romantic mire. He has alien infiltration. skillfully crafted a science-based fantasy Kept under wraps, a partnership with speculative musings and otherbetween the scientific and military comworldly horrors. munities has sent a number of units in to There isn’t necessarily an intention ascertain what is going on in this mutatto scare us with the kind of physical ing region. But no one has returned, until mutations you might expect from David Lena’s husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) someCronenberg, or twist us in temporal knots how wanders home and doesn’t appear to like Denis Villeneuve did in Arrival. But be quite himself. Annihilation titillates the eyes of adrenaIn flashbacks just prior to his mission line junkies while also appealing to the into The Shimmer, Kane and Lena appear flawed hearts of lovers. (Now showing) (R) to be one of those picture-perfect couples. Grade: A

BECOME A CULINARY TOURIST IN YOUR OWN CITY!

PA RT IC IPATI NG RE STAU RA NT S

EXPERIENCE THE CUISINE THAT DEFINES THE ART OF DINING IN GREATER CINCINNATI WITH $25 AND $35 THREECOURSE PRIX-FIXE MENUS FROM THE CITY’S BEST RESTAURANTS.

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

Select dining destinations will feature specially curated lunch and dinner menus for one or two guests (excluding tax, gratuity and beverages).

ril 1 6 -2 2, 2018

The Anchor OTR Banana Leaf Modern Thai Bella’s Restaurant Lo veland Boi Na Braza Bonefish Grill Bravo! Cucina Italiana BrewRiver GastroPub Brio Tuscan Grill Brown Dog Cafe Butcher and Barrel The Capital Grille Chart House Cinque Ristorante Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurant Court Street Lobster Bar Eddie Merlot’s Embers Restaurant FIRE at RiverCenter Firebirds Wood Fired Grill Golden Lamb Restaura nt & Inn Jag’s Steak & Seafood Kaze OTR Matt The Miller’s Tavern McCormick & Schmick Seafood & Steaks ’s The Melting Pot The Mercer OTR Metropole Mitchell’s Fish Marke t Moerlein Lager House Montgomery Inn Morton’s the Steakho use The National Exempla r Palomino Parkers Blue Ash Tavern Pompilios The Presidents Room Primavista Prime Cincinnati Ruth’s Chris Steak Ho use Seasons 52 Somm Wine Bar Stone Creek Dining Co mpany TRIO Bistro We Olive & Wine Bar ...and more to be announ ced!

GREATERCINCINNATIRESTAURANTWEEK.COM

FOOD & DRINK Braised beef short ribs, a beet salad and brûléed apple pie “slab”

Beyond the Marketplace

PHOTO: HAILEY BOLLINGER

The New American-style Kitchen 1883 is Kroger’s first venture in sit-down dining BY L E Y L A S H O KO O H E

FIND MORE RESTAURANT NEWS AND REVIEWS AT CITYBEAT.COM/ FOOD-DRINK

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

beets, oranges, cilantro, Lexington, Ky.’s Boone Creek goat cheese and pumpkin seeds. I did expect the beets to be a bit more plentiful, but overall it was a winner. My friends thought so, too. For dessert, my gal pals and I split the Brûléed Apple Pie “Slab” ($6), which was akin to an open-faced apple cobbler, served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. It was a bit too doughy. Other dessert options include ice cream, sorbet and fried chocolate chip cookie dough. After your meal at Kitchen 1883, if you’re thinking that you’d like to traipse over to Kroger and pick up the ingredients to make the same dish at home, you’re currently out of luck — but that option may soon be on the horizon. In the meantime, the grocer offers prepared meal kits in their stores, similar to mail-order Blue Apron offerings, called Prep+Pared. And this month, Kroger just opened a culinary innovation center, where Bushelman says he works alongside the Kitchen 1883 culinary team (including Jay Denham and Lisa Kagan) testing out recipes to bring to the restaurant. “We want to innovate and grow Kroger and be a leader in food creativity and development. The first thing that pops in my head is Kitchen 1883. We want to be the best,” he says.

other beer cheeses I’ve consumed, but still had the right tang and flavor. I stuck with water, which was refilled often (a welcome surprise), but the wine list was extensive and beer options were local and varied. “If we’re going to grow the concept, we should be 70 percent concept and 30 percent local, not just (regarding the) ingredients but also the taste of your guests in that region,” Bushelman says, ticking off locally sourced options on the menu, which include honey from Owensboro, Ky., Weisenberger Mill grits (available on the brunch menu) from central Kentucky and produce from the Cincinnati-based 80 Acres Farms. “What they eat in New England’s not going to be what they enjoy in Kentucky.” Maybe not, but my friend ordered the beer-battered cod ($13) — made in-house, also with Braxton beer — and it’s a distinct winner in any region. It was crispy and crunchy on the outside, perfectly flaky on the inside and served with french fries and a generously filled ramekin of remoulade. I also ordered a beet salad ($11) and was surprised by the massive quantity. Bushelman says there’s now an option to add a protein to the salad offerings, which elevates them to full-on entrée status, but I wasn’t made aware of this when I went — probably because I ordered my entrée and salad at the same time. No big deal. There’s also a half-portion, which I didn’t know about, but in this instance, I didn’t particularly care. (Super hungry.) The salad comes with roasted and cubed

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

rowing up in a household filled with complex and flavorful ethnic cuisine (Persian and Italian), American food, for me, has been fairly synonymous with mashed potatoes, some kind of meat offering, warm sauces and a smattering of vegetables. When I’m most hungry and least Kitchen 1883 motivated, I gravitate 9003 US Highway 42, toward dishes like these; Union, Ky., ones I don’t have to think 859-334-9450, too hard about when kitchen1883.com. ordering because I have Hours: 11 a.m.-9 p.m. a good approximation of Monday-Thursday; 11 what I’m going to get. a.m.-10 p.m. Friday; Kitchen 1883 lives up 10 a.m.-10 p.m. Satto its “New American Bushelman could walk urday; 10 a.m.-9 p.m. comfort food” concept by next door to Kroger and Sunday. taking the guesswork out select fresh meat or vegetaof any dish for the conbles (“Occasionally if I run sumer, and leaving them short on a tomato, I might with a nice, pleasantly full go over to Kroger and feeling. pick one out,” he admits), but restaurants I stopped by Kitchen 1883 in Union, Ky. necessitate certain food providers. on a drizzly Saturday evening in February On this particular Saturday, I was with two girlfriends in tow. The restaurant unbelievably hungry. I had only consumed is sandwiched between a Kroger supera small, late breakfast, so I was looking formarket and a Kroger liquor store. This ward to digging into Kitchen 1883’s options might seem strange unless you know that — and stealing a few bites from my friends. Kitchen 1883 is the grocery chain’s first The restaurant’s online menu features foray into sit-down casual dining. In fact, a prominent picture of some meat-andit’s one of the first grocery-chain-affiliated mashed-potato dish, and I correctly restaurants in the country. Fun fact: It’s assumed it was the braised beef short ribs named after the year Kroger founder Bar($18) with horseradish smashed potatoes ney Kroger opened his first store. and blistered carrots; I followed my eyes Opened in November, Kitchen 1883 is with my stomach and ordered it. distinctly its own business. The separation The short ribs were very tender, falling of the restaurant from the neighboring apart with the slightest abrasion of my Kroger is so distinct that Kitchen 1883’s fork, and I devoured the entire plate. (Not food is sourced from a completely separate literally the plate. I wasn’t that hungry.) entity — a restaurant-grade food provider. The horseradish potatoes were sharp but This is a point executive chef Christopher complementary, the carrots kind of superBushelman (formerly of Incline Public fluous, but I liked their varied colors, and House) makes clear. the pan sauce was the perfect consistency. “We always say Kroger has associates and I’m getting ahead of myself, though. their employees and customers (but) we First, we ordered the pretzel bites and have team members and guests instead beer cheese appetizer ($6) and our smiling of customers,” Bushelman says. “We want server brought them out posthaste, much that mentality of, ‘We’re in the hospitality to our delight. The bites were perfect — not business of serving food and drinks and too doughy, not too tough, crisp on the good times.’ ” outside and with a cholesterol-friendly I found this reasoning intriguing as a amount of salt. The beer cheese was made restaurant layperson. I would assume that with Braxton beer. It was a bit runnier than

THE DISH

Now featuring deals from:

ngo

we s t e r n Ta c o

5 •$

her

for $ 45

Dja

lo:

odern J

er ewel

•$

Foo die

ouch

e r f or $ 20

nn’s

car ousel •

r 13

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

BY M A I JA Z U M M O

Feb. 22 was National Margarita Day, a celebration that is oddly in February instead of, like, say, summer but definitely still acceptable. We decided to commemorate the “holiday” by creating a downtown Margarita Crawl so we could a) drink during work and b) self-promote the fact that tickets Margs from Bakersfield, Lalo, Taqueria Mercado, Nada and Taco Bell for our Margarita Madness event (May PHOTO: HAILEY BOLLINGER 23 at Newport on the Levee) are on sale. Or: The Margarita Tower. Ok. This is 101 End result is: We drank some margaritas ounces of margarita in a gigantic tube for from five establishments in a row and you $54. It exists, if you need it. 100 E. Eighth St., can, too — on any day! Whether it’s Donut Downtown, tmercadocincy.com. Day, Corn Dog Day or just a Wednesday.

Stop 1: Bakersfield

Stop 4: Nada

Try: The seasonal Grapefruit Margarita. Traditionally, a margarita is made with tequila, triple sec and lime juice and can be served frozen or on the rocks — generally with a salted rim. From there, you can riff on the blend by adding different fruits or flavors or sugars; whatever you want, really. Bakersfield’s seasonal grapefruit cocktail blends the concept of a Paloma with a margarita, minus the fizz — Olmeca Altos Plata tequila, velvet falernum, agave, bitters, grapefruit and lime. It’s fresh, with a bite, and not super sweet. You can definitely drink more than one. Or: The off-menu Skinny. It’s like the house margarita but made with fresh lime juice and no simple syrup (to cut the calories). We made it spicy for $1 more and did not regret it. 1213 Vine St., Over-theRhine, bakersfieldtacos.com.

Try: The Nadarita is a dangerously drinkable mix of el Jimador tequila, house curaçao, agave and fresh lime. The house curaçao takes the craft up a notch with a blend of clove, vanilla, brandy and vodka. Or: The off-menu Pink Grapefruit Sorbet marg. It’s the same base as the Nadarita, but with added pink grapefruit sorbet. It’s refreshing and pretty. 600 Walnut St., Downtown, eatdrinknada.com.

Stop 2: Lalo Try: The Smoky Mezcal Margarita. It is awesome. Made with Oaxacan Wahaka mezcal and a house sour mix, it’s served in a salt-rimmed glass and tastes like peaty Scotch and a summer campfire. Or: The house margarita: el Jimador Blanco, sour mix, triple sec and a splash of orange juice, served on the rocks. The addition of orange juice takes it to a real citrus level, like a mimosa marg. Make it spicy or add strawberry, peach, mango or raspberry flavor (if you’re feeling wild). 709 Main St., Downtown, lalocincinnati.com.

Stop 3: Taqueria Mercado

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

nl y

$10

•

Do this Downtown Margarita Crawl

Log into our website for the full list:

CINCINNATI.ALTPERKS.COM Facebook/ T w i T Ter: @perkopoL is

Try: Can’t go wrong with a classic. Head to the bar and order a “Randal-rita,” named after bartender Randal. He makes his marg with tequila, agave, fresh-squeezed lime and triple sec. It’s a super solid mix served in a fun cocktail glass with a salted rim. They also infuse their own jalapeño and pineapple tequilas in house. Fancy.

Stop 5: Taco Bell Cantina Try: A twisted Baja Blast freeze. Taco Bell Cantina is an amped-up version of the late-night fast-food favorite because they serve alcohol. Along with beer and wine, they also have freezes — what are essentially ICEEs — that you can “twist” by adding your choice of vodka, rum or tequila. A twisted Baja Blast tastes like the soda — teal-ish? — but with added alcohol, it’s like an extra-credit Blast. You get some bubbly carbonation, caffeine and a ton of sugar. Also pairs well with a Crunchwrap Supreme. Also might make you feel like a garbage person who hates their body, but in a FUN way. Or: We also tried the Cantina Margarita blend, twisted with tequila, and did not love it. Try it and see what you think. At $5.99, it’s basically all-day happy hour at the Cantina. 580 Walnut St., Downtown, tacobell.com.

Bonus: Mita’s Try: The house margarita. Chef Jose Salazar’s Spanish/Latin American tapas joint lends a real authentic vibe to its marg, made with blanco tequila, triple sec and lime, served on the rocks. Fresh. Good. Or: El Luchador. This cocktail kicks it up a notch with aged tequila, ginger, citrus, jalapeño and triple sec. It’s spicy and a little peppery, thanks to the ginger. 501 Race St., Downtown, mitas.co.

CLASSES & EVENTS WEDNESDAY 28

Wine Essentials with Revel OTR — Guided by Alex Sena, Revel’s head winemaker, learn about the most popular wine regions and grapes, how to taste wine, the basics of pairing, tips for serving wine at home and more. 6-8:30 p.m. $45. Revel OTR, 111 E. 12th St., Over-the-Rhine, tablespooncookingco.com. Botany and Brews at Krohn — Citrus is the star during this evening of botany and beer. The event includes a talk, tour and tasting with a citrus theme. There will be shandy beers, appetizers and entertaining historical accounts of fruit. 5:30-7:30 p.m. $15. Krohn Conservatory 1501 Eden Park Drive, Eden Park, cincinnatiparks. com.

THURSDAY 01

The Tapping of the Bocks — Head to Arnold’s, the official starting point for the annual Bockfest parade, to sample 17 different ceremoniously tapped bock beers. The beer list includes Christian Moerlein Emancipator Dopplebock, MadTree’s Bockaveli, Rhinegeist’s Vincent Van Goats, Fifty West’s Road Bock and many more. Includes live music. 8 p.m. Free admission. Arnold’s Bar and Grill, 210 E. Eighth St., Downtown, facebook. com/arnoldsbar.

FRIDAY 02

Malt House Taproom. Then the drinking goes on all weekend with keg tappings, bloody mary bars, dinners and assorted food vendors around Bockfest Hall. 6 p.m. parade Friday; 5 p.m. Bock Bockfest Hall opens. Bockfest Hall, 1621 Moore St., Overthe-Rhine, bockfest.com. Bockfest Fish Fry at Old St. Mary’s — The annual Old St. Mary’s Bockfest fish fry will be held along the Bockfest parade route and feature sandwiches, sides and drinks. 5 p.m. until it’s gone. Old St. Mary’s, 123 E. 13th St., Over-theRhine, oldstmarys.org. The Pony OTR Fish Fry — Every Friday during Lent head to The Pony for fried fish, served with fries and coleslaw for only $4. The Pony OTR, 1346 Main St., Over-the-Rhine, 513-954-8415. Fabulous Fish Friday at Bridgetown Finer Meats — Home of Fabulous Fish Friday and a biggerthan-the-bread giant fish sandwich. Menu also includes lobster bisque, lobster mac and cheese, Big John’s shrimp boat, famous green beans, homemade tartar sauce and coleslaw. 11 a.m.-6:30 p.m. Fridays through Easter. Bridgetown Finer Meats, 6135 Bridgetown Road, Bridgetown, bridgetownfinermeats.com. All Saints Fish Fry — Go for the fish tacos and stay for the beer. Fried cod, grilled salmon or tilapia, fish tacos, pizza, fries (sweet potato available) coleslaw, baked potatoes, mac and cheese. And to finish it off: Beer and wine. 5 p.m. Fridays through March 23. All Saints Church, 8939 Montgomery Road, Kenwood, allsaints.cc.

St. Catharine of Siena Westwood Fish Fry — “Cod and God.” This fry features baked cod dinners, cheese ravioli dinners, homemade mozzarella and sundried tomato and cheese pizzas, fried fish with coleslaw, shrimp baskets and homemade desserts served by the St. Catharine Girl Scouts. 5-7:30 p.m. March 2 and March 9. Free admission. 2848 Fischer Place, Westwood, thecatholictelegraph.com. Saint Boniface Northside Fish Fry — Grab fried or baked cod, fried shrimp, cheese pizza, stewed tomatoes, french fries and more to go or eat in. 5-7 p.m. Fridays through March 23. $9 adults; $5 kids. St. Boniface School, 4305 Pitts St., Northside, stbonifacecincinnati.com.

bonbonerie.com

Dinner 5 off 2ndEntree

$ 00

$5 Off Carryout Entree. Good Only at Ambar India. Only 2 Coupons Per Party, Per Table. Expires 3/28/18

Lunch 3 off 2ndEntree

$ 00 Voted BEST INDIAN for 16 Years

350 Ludlow Ave • 513-281-7000

$3 Off Carryout Entree. Good Only at Ambar India. Only 2 Coupons Per Party, Per Table. Expires 3/28/18

Saint Francis Seraph Church Fish Fry — Join in the Bockfest celebration with a fish fry at the Christian Moerlein Malt House Taproom. Grab a craft beer and fish sandwich while listening to live music. 5:30-9 p.m. Fridays through March 23. 1621 Moore St., Overthe-Rhine, facebook.com/ SFSChurch.

SATURDAY 03

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

Dinner, Art & Wine for Canines — Help raise money for Circle Tail, a local nonprofit that provides service dogs to those in need for no charge. This fundraiser features a buffet dinner, wine tasting and a wine/beer bar throughout the evening, plus raffle prizes, auctions and meetand-greets with service dogs in training. 6-10 p.m. $70; $125 per pair; $440 for a table of eight. Receptions Loveland, 10681 LovelandMadeira Road, Loveland, circletail.org.

Mary, Queen of Heaven — Offered every Friday during Lent, the church boasts a huge menu of fried Icelandic cod including their signature Holy Haddock sandwich. Sides include fries, mac and cheese, coleslaw, green beans and more. And the “Codfather,” aka John Geisen,

the CEO of Izzy’s, dresses in Mafioso gear and carries a huge stuffed cod around the fry for cherished photo ops. 4-8 4-8 p.m. Fridays dur during Lent. Mary, Queen of Heaven, 1150 Donaldson Highway, Erlanger, Ky., mqhparish.com.

Someone You Know May Need a Birthday Cake

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

Bockfest — Definitely one of Cincinnati’s weirder festivals. Bockfest is back for its 26th year as Cincinnati’s flagship three-day festival celebrating the coming of spring plus Over-the-Rhine’s brewing heritage and bock beer. For those who are unfamiliar with bock beer, it’s generally stronger than your typical lager with a robust malt character and a dark amber hue with little to no hops. Bockfest kicks off 6 p.m. Friday with its famed goat- and keg-led parade, which starts in front of Arnold’s on Eighth Street downtown and heads up Main Street to Bockfest Hall at the Christian Moerlein

Most classes and events require registration and classes frequently sell out.

MUSIC Keep Moving Forward Cincinnati rockers The Grove keep things fresh for their audience and themselves BY N I C K G R E V ER

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

high school band is often a person’s first foray into fulfilling their Rock & Roll dreams. And the members tend to make up for lack of skill, organization or natural aptitude with pure excitement. At least for about a year or two before the band inevitably implodes. But what if the band doesn’t give up? What if the musicians keep at it, keep growing their catalog of songs, play any gig they can, expand their talents and creative experimentation with hopes of making music that was just as passionate as those early halcyon days, but backed by technical proficiency? That’s the scenario behind Cincinnati-based quartet The Grove. The history of vocalist/guitarist Adam Forsthoefel, drummer Jeff Voegele, keys/ vocalist Matt Forsthoefel and bassist Stefan Games can be traced back to the hallways of Archbishop McNicholas High School in Anderson Township, where Adam and Voegele met freshman year and became fast friends. The two had been playing their respective instruments for years and bonded almost immediately over, among other things, a love of playing music. However, sometimes the ideas that are right in front of you are the hardest to see. “It took until senior for us to realize we should jam, so eventually Jeff and I formed a project (called) SomeDaze, with a ‘z’ because we were edgy like that,” Adam says. The project continued through the end of high school with regular area gigs. Even going to different colleges didn’t keep the duo down — Voegele would take frequent trips up to Athens, Ohio to join Adam and a band to play house parties, often for hours at a time… or at least until Athens’ finest decided the fun was over. “It was like, ‘We’re going to play ’til the cops come.’ Our payment was a case of beer and a place to lock our stuff up in the house,” Adam says. Voegele adds, “I think we definitely increased our skill level during that time because we would just play for hours.” Those early shows helped the band find its initial sound, a mix of traditional Rock

The Grove PHOTO: MESA SERIK ALI

& Roll structures, bluesy guitar work and heartfelt vocals, but things really kicked into gear when Voegele transferred to Ohio University and joined Adam in Athens. The musicians got serious and their goals came into clearer focus. Three of the four band members lived together in a house on Grosvenor Street, the name of which gave the group its new name. “I would say that was the birth of The Grove, when we signed our lease and were excited to live together,” Adam says. “We’re going to live together and hang out and jam a lot. I think that’s where a lot of our writing for that first album came together. At that house — that’s where we gained chemistry as a band.” Now that The Grove had a new name, a new house and a new drive to improve, the band dived into performing live as much as possible. The house shows coupled with weekly, multi-hour long sets at Athens’ Red Brick Tavern helped the group hone its conventionally arranged Rock & Roll style. But that status quo was shaken up when Adam came home during a school break to discover that his little brother, Matt, had learned piano. “I sat down at the piano one day and went on YouTube and learned some songs and instantly fell in love with playing, so I played around the house,” Matt says. “Adam came home for break one year and he heard me playing and was like, ‘Wow!

You’re pretty good; you should play with us some time.’ So I went up to OU a couple times, played a couple house parties with them, a couple bar gigs.” Matt became a full member of The Grove shortly thereafter and quickly put his own touch on the band’s established sound. Bringing synths into the equation has allowed the quartet to expand its output and experimentation. The guys have never been complacent with their music. After almost 10 years, keeping things fresh is the key to keeping their interest and talents dialed in. “I think our sound has changed significantly since we’ve started and I think it’s going to keep changing because that’s what makes it fun. If it doesn’t keep changing I don’t think we’ll keep playing,” Adam says. The Grove has evolved from the triedand-true four-chord Rock trope into an amalgamation of Blues, Electronica, Jam music and just about any other guitardriven influence you can imagine. Adam’s soulful guitar playing and down-to-earth lyricism coupled with the new tools provided by his brother’s keys have enabled the band to explore avenues never imagined back in the college bar days. It has also provided the band with the opportunity to release two full-length albums and an EP, with another full-length in the works (it’s tentatively slated for

release this summer). Each release has maintained a stylistic thread that frays out into myriad sounds. This desire to keep things fresh correlates directly to the stage as well. The quartet is used to competing with DJs for a crowd’s attention and has crafted a live show that is chock full of exemplary musicianship but doesn’t get lost in the weeds of technique for technique’s sake. “Every show you hear us play is going to have a level of improv. Always,” Adam says. “We never play the same song the same way; a lot of the parts will be similar but it won’t be 100 percent (the same).” Pairing the improv with a catalog that’s nearly a decade in the making has allowed The Grove to keep pushing forward and continually earn new fans, but it’s also kept the quartet excited about making music. Ultimately, they’re a group of guys that started a band for all the right reasons and never lost sight of that fact. And that’s what makes their first near-decade of history seem like it could be just the beginning. The Grove presents its third-annual Rock ’n Revival for a Cure concert on March 10 at the Southgate House Revival. The benefit for the John Forsthoefel for Glioblastoma Research Fund also features Green Light Morning, 500 Miles to Memphis and other local acts. More info: thegroveband.com or southgatehouse.com.

SPILL IT

Noah Smith Readies Anticipated ‘Long Cut’ BY M I K E B R EEN

BY M I K E B R EE N

Spanish Unity for Free Speech In a move the current criticismaverse U.S. leadership would love, Hip Hop artist Valtonyc was recently sentenced to three and a half years in prison for lyrics the Spanish Supreme Court decided defamed the country’s royal family and glorified terrorism. Among other songs used in the trial, “La TuerKa Rap” included the line, “The situation worries me quite a bit, how to support two families: mine, and the royal one.” Many of the songs rally against corruption and reference historical uprisings in the country. Spain’s concert industry united to show support for the MC, with 30 music fests and 70 other venues jointly announcing they were symbolically “booking” him, calling his jailing “a flagrant infringement of the right of freedom of expression.”

JBM PROMOTIONS presents MeMorial hall

1225 Elm St. • Cincinnati, OH 45202

shelby lynne March 2nd @ 8pm

iris dement with sam baker May 4th @ 8pm

20th Century theater 3 02 1 M a d i s o n Ro a d , C i n c i n n a t i , O h i o

bodeans

March 4th @ 8pm

jd mcpherson April 10th @ 8pm

Southgate houSe revival 111 E. 6th St. • Newport, KY 41071

david bromberg quintet April 11th @ 8pm

www.jbmpromotions.com • facebook.com/jbmpromotions

U2 Podcast Turns to R.E.M. After spending three-plus years on the career of U2 (culminating with a U2 guest appearance), comedy podcast king Scott Aukerman (Comedy Bang! Bang!) and actor Adam Scott (Parks and Recreation) have rebranded their U Talkin’ U2 To Me? podcast as R U Talkin’ R.E.M. Re: Me? The duo’s goofy chemistry makes for ridiculous fun and a hilarious listen, but their deep passion for and knowledge of U2’s music shined through the silliness on the previous podcast. So far, the same is true of the R.E.M. version, though superfans might need a minute to adjust to the pair’s sometimes absurdist comedy stylings (calm down, nerd — they know the singer’s name is not Michael Stipe& and the guitarist is not Peter Dollar Bill).

Nazi Tactics Backfire

all local dr afts cr aft beer menu nk y’s original bourbon bar

liv e m us i c march 1 shiny & the spoon march 2 the t wo bees

(from the newbees)

(859) 5 81-3 0 65 p o m pi li o s .co m 6 0 0 wa s h i n g to n av e . n e w p o r t, k y

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

Norwegian Black Metal has long courted controversy with purposefully shocking connections to Satanism, but racism and white supremacy were never a widely reported part of the shtick. But now the group Taake’s use of Nazi symbolism (their singer painted a swastika on his chest in 2007) and questionable lyrics is coming back to haunt them. After activists pointed out the group’s problematic actions, some U.S. venues that booked Taake canceled shows, while opener King Dude left the tour. Part of the group’s response was on a “But some of my best friends are Jewish!” level — they said they’d performed in Israel.

fe aturing

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

Exceptionally talented Greater Cincinnati based Country singer/ songwriter Noah Smith has seemed ready to take his career up a big notch for a while now. On March 9, Smith takes another giant step in that direction with the release of his first full-length studio album, Long Cut. The University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music grad (who scored a Cincinnati Entertainment Award in the Singer/Songwriter category last year and has been nominated in several other CEA categories) will host an early release party for hometown fans Saturday at Southgate House Revival (111 E. Sixth St., Newport, Ky., southgatehouse.com). Cincinnati Blues/Pop singer/songwriter Matt Waters Noah Smith’s Long Cut opens the all-ages show at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10 in advance. PHOTO: PROVIDED Smith and his band have been working on Long Cut over the continued with the formation of a full past couple of years in between regular band, Freedom Nicole Moore & The Electour dates throughout the Midwest and tric Moon, featuring John Raptis (lead guiSouth. Since he started, Smith — who tar), James Wiley-Benes (keyboards), Fred cites influences as wide-ranging as Johnny Brackmann (percussion) and Christopher Cash, Alan Jackson, Taking Back Sunday Sweeney (bass). The group just released and Death Cab for Cutie — has spent a its official recorded debut, “Everytime,” a lot of time working on his writing and sensual slow-burner featuring twilightrecording skills in Nashville, Tenn. But, as glimmering keys and guitars and some he recently explained during an appearspectacular ear-grabbing melodies that ance on the Lost on the River podcast from should go a long way in garnering hordes Herzog Music (listen at herzogmusic.com), of new fans and building anticipation for Long Cut was crafted in Cincinnati. more new material (an EP is in the works). “We did (the whole record) here in Cin“Everytime” is available now on major cinnati,” Smith said. “Went to Nashville… platforms like Spotify and through learned a lot, still learning a lot — still writfreedomnicolemoore.bandcamp.com. For ing a ton down there. But me and my guitar more info on the band, visit fnmtem.com. player (John McGuire) both graduated from (CCM and are) audio engineers. He’s New Wussy LP Announced got a studio and I have a studio, so we just One of Cincinnati’s greatest musical said, ‘Let’s do the thing.’ We were excited exports, Wussy Wussy, is gearing up for a new to make it happen here.” album. What Heaven is Like is the rockers’ Long Cut will be available on Spotify and seventh full-length release, coming on iTunes, where you can pre-order the album the heels of its most acclaimed effort yet, now and receive an instant download of 2016’s Forever Sounds. The album is again the title track. For further info — including being released through the Cincinnatidetails on pre-order bundles that include based Shake It Records label, as well as CDs, vinyl, shirts and more — visit Damnably Records in the U.K. Wussy kicks noahsmithmusic.com. off its tour for the album on May 24 with Electric Moon Rises dates throughout the U.K. and in Germany, Freedom Nicole Moore has risen through Switzerland and the Netherlands. the local music ranks over the past couple On Feb. 26 via the popular music site of years, singing background vocals with Stereogum, Wussy debuted the album’s artists like Indie Folk/Rock band Royal first single, “Gloria,” which co-frontperson Holland and Neo R&B sensation JSPH, Lisa Walker tells the site was inspired by developing as a solo singer/songwriter and the TV series Fargo and Broad City. Those playing shows with acts like Chastity Belt, preordering What Heaven is Like through Jacob Banks and Leggy. As those résumé wussy.bandcamp.com (including the bullet-points suggest, Moore’s music hovlimited-edition vinyl version) receive “Gloers around the spheres of Modern Soul and ria” immediately. Indie Pop and Rock, buoyed by her warm Contact Mike Breen: mbreen@citybeat and enchanting vocals. and @CityBeatMusic Moore’s organic creative growth has

MINIMUM GAUGE

SOUND ADVICE The Oh Hellos

Live Music

1345 main st motrpub.com

no cover

Wednesday 2/28 Burning Caravan 8-11

wed 28

the lovers kate barnette

Thursday 3/1

thu 1

left lane cruiser toon town

Fri 2

harlequins, joesph

The Andrea Cefalo Quartet 8-12

s at 3

passeport

saTurday 3/3

sun 4

fycus, oak house

mon 5

comedy game show

tue 6

writer’s night w/ dave

Todd Hepburn & Friends 8-11

Friday 3/2

The Joe Policastro Trio (from Chicago) 8-12 cocktaiLs

firepLaces

Wed. - Fri. open @ 4pm | Sat. open @ 6pm 125 West Fourth st. | CinCinnati, ohio 45202

www.BromwellsHarthLounge.com

859.431.2201

truth serum:

free live music open for lunch

111 E 6th St Newport, KY 41071

1404 main st (513) 345-7981

TICKETS AVAILABLE AT THE SOUTHGATE HOUSE LOUNGE OR TICKETFLY.COM

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

2/28 - simo, brass owl; adam lee: february artist in residence

3 /2

the yugos

carriers, kiD esp

3/1 - Huntsmen, livid; casH o’riley 3/2 - roots of a rebellion, elementree livity project, tHe cliftones; ona, calumet; patrick coman 3/3 - noaH smitH record release w/ matt waters; kyle cook (of matcHbox twenty); frontier, isle of eigHt, blueprints & elements 3/4 - kevin devine, billy wallace, saraH gail davis 3/7 - propagandHi, iron cHic, la armada 3/8 - aaron lee tasjan, t dylan leblanc; william matHeny, frontier folk nebraska 3/9 - Hackensaw boys; tHe dollyrots w/ vice tricks; Hank erwin

WWW. SOU T H G A T EH O US E.C O M

3/4

anna wise

maDison mcferrin, zenizen

3/8

ben sollee & kentucky native mipso

3/9

Dawg yawp this pine box buy tickets at motr or woodwardtheater.com

Saturday • 20th Century Theater

On the Bandcamp page for Eurus, the new EP from Texas-based The Oh Hellos, one fan writes, “Listen for the Leitmotifs. Who else puts Leitmotifs in their music?” That the group — founded and led by duo Tyler and Maggie Heath — has people referencing The Oh Hellos a phrase more commonly P H OTO : FAC E B O O K .C O M / T H EO H H E L LO S H E L LO S associated with Classical compositions and operas The Avett Brothers or The Head and the (the word itself dates back Heart. There are also more bluntly Pop-orito the 17th century and refers to musical ented hooks that could draw in the masses themes and phrases — melodic, rhythmic that love The Lumineers and their ilk. or otherwise — that are repeated throughLast year, Paste did a 100 best Indie Folk out a piece of music) perfectly sums up the albums list spotlighting the breadth of that depth of its smart but accessible music. nebulous descriptor, and perhaps it actuThere are moments of intensely wellally is fitting for The Oh Hellos, in that the thought-out complexity, but they don’t group represents the huge amount of overblaringly scream, “I have a Master of Music lapping “genres within the genre,” almost in Composition from the Boston Conserall at once. While that might make it seem vatory at Berklee!” Or perhaps they do like their music is a chaotic mélange, it’s (though it’s more of a knowing nod), in the anything but. The harmonious grace that way in which that aspect is so incredibly imbues Eurus is the most brilliant recurwell worked into the overall sound. rent theme of all. (Mike Breen) Just as characterizing The Oh Hellos’ music as simply “Indie Rock” or “Indie BoDeans with Tolan Shaw Folk” is reductive, describing the intricaSunday • 20th Century Theater cies risks taking away from the gut-level joy and emotional weight that emanates Thirty-plus years on from their clasfrom it. While jaw-dropping opener “O sic debut, Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams, Sleeper” sounds like it could have been BoDeans are still plying their brand of transcribed from a rich, winding orchesRoots Rock all over America. With the exit tral piece, augmented with lyrics, harmoof co-founder Sammy Llanas in 2011, Kurt nies and different instrumentation (like Neumann, songwriter, lead singer and the guitars, a drum kit and a few “fiddles” in last-standing original BoDean, leads the the strings mix), there are also songs like current incarnation of the band. the title track, which is presented in a more Hailing from Waukesha, Wisc., BoDeans traditional “Pop song” manner, though is made a big splash with their seminal 1987 no less memorable or alluring. And, yes, debut, which was produced by T Bone Burthe EP’s seven tracks are threaded together nett. The band fused rootsy twang, tight with recurrent melodic themes, giving harmonies and quality songwriting to it a symphonic cohesiveness that makes spark a budding career that included writit all the more impactful as a whole, yet ing hits, contributing to soundtracks and — thanks to those strong contemporary songwriting skills — easily dissectible for playlisting or airplay. The Oh Hellos’ music is the best of many worlds. The layered gang vocals and sky-kissed melodies create a soaring ebullience à la Arcade Fire or Polyphonic Spree. The less extroverted writing recalls the gentler majesty of artists like Sufjan Stevens, Beirut or Fleet Foxes. The “Americana instrumentation” (banjos, accordion, etc.) gives the music a rootsy sheen that might BoDeans perk up the ears of fans of PHOTO: PROVIDED

Future Sounds Sawyer Brown – March 31, JACK Casino Wyclef Jean – April 8, OTR Live Todd Rundgren’s Utopia – May 10, Taft Theatre Black Moth Super Rainbow – June 14, Urban Artifact Jason Isbell – July 18, PNC Pavilion Radiohead – July 25, U.S. Bank Arena Dispatch – Sept. 16, PNC Pavilion

Judah & the Lion

Metallica – Jan. 30, U.S. Bank Arena

P H OTO : FAC E B O O K .C O M /J U DA H A N DT H E L I O N

Judah & the Lion with Tall Heights and Colony House Monday • Bogart’s

| C I T Y B E AT. C O M

The mainstream resurgence of Nu-Folk and banjo music can be traced to the rise of The Avett Brothers, who found widespread success about 10 years ago. Wild, raw and (at times) oh-so-sad, it was a perfect storm of what a younger audience needed from Bluegrass — what it already was and what it had not yet become. From there it was only a quick leap to finding the likes of Old Crow Medicine Show, which

got new life breathed into its gig thanks in part to what was happening across the pond. In the mid-’00s, a contemporary Folk resurgence took off in the U.K. with artists like Laura Marling, who called on influences like Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez. Her former backing band would go on to form Mumford & Sons, a quartet that seemed to worship all things Old Crow Medicine Show. The scenes fed each other and would go on to massive mainstream popularity, while also influencing a host of up-and-coming new acts. Enter Judah & the Lion. Formed in Nashville in 2011, the group is everything riders of the last Nu-Folk wave want to hate. But it’s hard to flip the radio station when Judah & the Lion’s big hit “Take it All Back” comes on, with those twangy banjo solos calling out and teasingly whispering, “Hey, girl. I might sound like your favorite band — the one that sounds like Coldplay now.” Except Judah & the Lion doesn’t. In an attempt to do something different, there’s rapping in the mix, making it occasionally sound like Mumford & Sons covering a Walmart-censored Eminem track. That might sound hateful, but the truth is that there’s just not enough to hate. At the end of the song, it’s like most of the other stuff of the radio: Made to appease the masses. Last year, the genre-mixing group issued an expanded version of 2016’s breakthrough Folk Hop N’ Roll featuring new songs, including the most recent single, “Suit and Jacket.” The band’s music relies heavily on the same constant buildup and anthem-like excitement you’ll find at an Imagine Dragons show. That means that however you feel about gratuitous banjo, Judah & the Lion’s time at Bogart’s should be pretty raucous. (Deirdre Kaye)

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

opening for U2. Two decades later, Burnett came back to produce the BoDeans’ 2008 record Still, a worthy return to their earthy charms. If a music tastemaker extraordinaire like Burnett deigns to produce a few of your records, you know you’ve got something going on. Like any band able to last so long, BoDeans’ music has evolved with many subtle and not so subtle changes. From their opening Roots salvo in the ’80s to the more mainstream Pop/Rock sheen of mid-’90s hit “Closer to Fine” to their consistent melodic, heartland blend over the years, BoDeans continue to release quality music, including last year’s Thirteen. On the album’s plaintive, acoustic opener, “My Hometown,” Neumann’s pleading vocals set the stage for another strong clutch of songs. Llanas’ reedy voice and harmonies are missed, but Neumann’s hushed delivery within the melancholy Pop of “Here Somehow” and the subdued defiance of middle age on “Maggie’s Bar” resonate. The chorus — “It’s closing time but I’m still here” — could be an inspirational mantra for BoDeans’ career. (Gregory Gaston)

LISTINGS

CityBeat’s music listings are free. Send info to Mike Breen at mbreen@citybeat.com. Listings are subject to change. See CityBeat.com for full music listings and all club locations. H is CityBeat staff’s stamp of approval.

WEDNESDAY 28

ARNOLD’S BAR AND GRILL - Todd Hepburn. 7 p.m. Blues/Jazz/Various. Free. BOGART’S - The Borderline Something. 8 p.m. Rock. $10.

BREWRIVER GASTROPUB - Old Green Eyes & BBG. 9 p.m. Jazz. Free. BROMWELL’S HÄRTH LOUNGE - Burning Caravan. 8 p.m. Gypsy Jazz. Free. KNOTTY PINE - Dallas Moore. 10 p.m. Country. Free. MILLER’S FILL INN - Ladies Night Karaoke with DJ Rob. 9 p.m. Various. Free. MOTR PUB - The Lovers with Kat Barnette. 9:30 p.m. Americana/Soul/Rock/Various. Free. SONNY’S ALL JAZZ LOUNGE - Karaoke. 7 p.m. Various. Free.

SOUTHGATE HOUSE REVIVAL (LOUNGE) - Adam Lee. 9:30 p.m. Pop/ Rock/Various. Free. SOUTHGATE HOUSE REVIVAL (REVIVAL ROOM) - SIMO with Brass Owl. 8 p.m. Rock/Soul/ Blues/Experimental. $15.

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

| C I T Y B E AT. C O M

URBAN ARTIFACT - In the Pines with Radattack and Perfect Vagabond. 9 p.m. AltRock.

FRIDAY 02

ARNOLD’S BAR AND GRILL - Chelsea Ford and the Trouble. 9 p.m. Americana. Free. BLUE NOTE HARRISON Charlie Farley. 8 p.m. Rap/ Country/Rock. $15, $20 day of show.

JEFF RUBY’S STEAKHOUSE - Grace Lincoln Band. 8 p.m. Soul/R&B. Free. JIM AND JACK’S ON THE RIVER - Whiskey Town. 9 p.m. Country. Free.

THURSDAY 01

MOTR PUB - Left Land Cruiser with Toon Town. 10 p.m. Blues Rock. Free. SCHWARTZ’S POINT JAZZ & ACOUSTIC CLUB - Phil DeGreg with Jon Massey. 9 p.m. Jazz. Cover. SOUTHGATE HOUSE REVIVAL (LOUNGE) - Cash O’Riley. 9:30 p.m. Free. SOUTHGATE HOUSE

MADISON LIVE - Daniel In Stereo with Jane Decker and Room For Zero. 8 p.m. Alt/Rock/Pop. $10, $12 day of show.

MADISON LIVE - Madison Theater Band Challenge Semi-Finals with Beyond The Titans, Carpool Tunnel, Kelby, Kenton Lands Band, Kyla Mainous, The High Plains Drifter, Whiskey River and Freak Mythology. 7 p.m. Various. $10.

MEMORIAL HALL Shelby Lynne. 8 p.m. Country/Roots/Rock/Various. $25-$50.

MOTR PUB - The Harlequins and Joesph. 10 p.m. Indie Rock. Free.

BROMWELL’S HÄRTH LOUNGE - Joe Policastro Trio. 8 p.m. Jazz. Free. THE GREENWICH - Greg Abate. 9 p.m. Jazz. $10.

PLAIN FOLK CAFE - The Tadcasters. 7:30 p.m. Bluegrass. Free.

JAG’S STEAK AND SEAFOOD - The Good Hooks Band. 9 p.m. Rock/Dance/ Various. $5.

SCHWARTZ’S POINT JAZZ & ACOUSTIC CLUB - Carlos Vargas-Ortiz Trio. 9 p.m. Jazz. Cover.

JIM AND JACK’S ON THE RIVER - GenX. 9 p.m. Rock. Free.

SILVERTON CAFE - Sonny Moorman Group. 9 p.m. Blues. Free.

THE GREENWICH - Rollins Davis Band featuring Deborah Hunter. 9 p.m. Jazz/R&B. $5. JAG’S STEAK AND SEAFOOD - 3 PIece Revival. 9 p.m. Rock/Various. $5.

tribute. Cover.

PEECOX ERLANGER Saving Stimpy. 9:30 p.m. Rock. $5.

SOUTHGATE HOUSE REVIVAL (REVIVAL ROOM) - Ona with Calumet. 9 p.m. Indie Rock. $8.

LIVE! AT THE LUDLOW GARAGE - VoicePlay. 8:30 p.m. Pop. $25-$50.

MEMORIAL HALL Ladysmith Black Mambazo. 8 p.m. World/African. $26-$42.

MVP BAR & GRILLE Ekoostik Hookah. 8 p.m. Rock/Roots/Jam/Various. Cover.

SOUTHGATE HOUSE REVIVAL (LOUNGE) - Patrick Coman. 9:30 p.m. Americana/Rock/Various. Free.

KNOTTY PINE - Final Order. 10 p.m. Rock. Cover.

THE GREENWICH - Samantha Carlson Quartet. 8:30 p.m. Jazz. $5.

BROMWELL’S HÄRTH LOUNGE - Andrea Cefalo, Napoleon Maddox, Phillip Burkhead and Peter Gemus. 8 p.m. Jazz. Free.

URBAN ARTIFACT - Blue Wisp Big Band. 8:30 p.m. Big Band Jazz. $10.

BROMWELL’S HÄRTH LOUNGE - Todd Hepburn and Friends. 8 p.m. Various. Free.

REVIVAL (SANCTUARY) Huntsmen and Livid. 8 p.m. Rock. $8.

SOUTHGATE HOUSE REVIVAL (SANCTUARY) - Roots of a Rebellion, Elementree Livity Project and The Cliftones. 9 p.m. Reggae/Various. $12.

SYMPHONY HOTEL & RESTAURANT - Philip Paul Trio. 8 p.m. Jazz. Free. TAFT’S ALE HOUSE “Bands & Brews: Benefitting Cincinnati Children’s” with Clark Jenkins Trio. 8 p.m. Rock/Various. URBAN ARTIFACT - Bellowing Pines, Sungaze and Useless Fox. 9 p.m. AltRock/Various.

WOODWARD THEATER - The Yugos, Carriers and Kid ESP. 8 p.m. Indie Rock. $8, $10 day of show.

SATURDAY 03

20TH CENTURY THEATER - The Oh Hellos. 8 p.m. Indie/Folk/Rock. $18, $20 day of show.

ARNOLD’S BAR AND GRILL - Cincinnati Dancing Pigs. 9 p.m. Americana/Jug band. Free. THE AVENUE EVENT CENTER - Skally. 10 p.m. Hip Hop. $30-$50. BLUE NOTE HARRISON Panama. 8 p.m. Van Halen

KNOTTY PINE - Lt. Dan’s New Legs. 10 p.m. Pop/ Dance/Hip Hop/Various. Cover. LIVE! AT THE LUDLOW GARAGE - Laith Al-Saadi. 8:30 p.m. Blues/Soul/Rock. $15-$40. THE MAD FROG - Bubba Sparxxx with Los Ghost and more. 8 p.m. Hip Hop. $10, $15 day of show.

MADISON LIVE Smoke Healer with Wooper Creek Mafia, Crooked Rook and Moonbow. 8 p.m. Hard Rock. $10, $12 day of show.

REVEL OTR URBAN WINERY - Jayme Shaye (album release show) with Freedom Nicole Moore and E-Will. 5:30 p.m. R&B RICK’S TAVERN - The Menus. 10 p.m. Rock/Pop/ Dance/Various. Cover.

SCHWARTZ’S POINT JAZZ & ACOUSTIC CLUB - Josh Kline and Ben Tweedt. 9 p.m. Jazz. Cover.

SOUTHGATE HOUSE REVIVAL (REVIVAL ROOM) - Kevin Devine. 8 p.m. Indie/Alternative/Acoustic/Rock. $14.

ROSELAWN LIVE Too Short. 10 p.m. Hip Hop. $30-$50.

SOUTHGATE HOUSE REVIVAL (LOUNGE) Frontier, Isle of Eight and Blueprints and Elements. 9:30 p.m. Indie Rock. Free. SOUTHGATE HOUSE REVIVAL (REVIVAL ROOM) - Kyle Cook. 8 p.m. Rock. $12. SOUTHGATE HOUSE REVIVAL (SANCTUARY) - Noah Smith with Matt Waters. 8 p.m. Country. $10-$30. THOMPSON HOUSE - 16 South and Vince Lavagna. 8 p.m. Roots Rock. $10.

SUNDAY 04

MVP BAR & GRILLE Trailer Park Floosies. 9 p.m. Pop/Rock/Hip Hop/Rap/ Country/Various. Free.

NORTHSIDE YACHT CLUB - Veronica Grim and the Heavy Hearts with The Rattletraps and Cougar Ace. 9 p.m. Country/Roots/ Blues/Rockabilly/Rock. OCTAVE - Jerry’s Little Band. 9 p.m. Rock/Jam/ Grateful Dead. Cover. PEECOX ERLANGER Saving Stimpy. 9:30 p.m. Rock. $5.

PLAIN FOLK CAFE Ma Crow and Co. 7:30 p.m. Bluegrass. Free.

SONNY’S ALL BLUES LOUNGE - Blues jam session featuring Sonny’s All Blues Band. 8 p.m. Blues. Free. SONNY’S ALL JAZZ LOUNGE - The Art of Jazz featuring the music of Art Blakey. 8 p.m. Jazz. Free.

MADISON THEATER Madison Theater Band Challenge Semi-Finals with The Matildas, Highway Republic, North Bend, Over The Years, Someday Morning, Stranger, The Yolo Band and Vibrant Fiction. 7 p.m. Various. $10. MOTR PUB - Passeport. 10 p.m. Alt/Electronic/Pop/Rock. Free.

Free.

URBAN ARTIFACT Boytoy, Leggy and Black Planet. 9 p.m. Indie/ Rock/Pop/Various. Free.

WESTSIDE VENUE Mourning Aftur. 6 p.m. Rock. Cover.

URBAN ARTIFACT - Fritz Pape’s Drone Marathon. 6 p.m. Drone/Various.

WOODWARD THEATER - Madison McFerrin, Anna Wise and Zenizen. 7 p.m. Soul/R&B. $8, $10 day of show.

MONDAY 05

BOGART’S - Judah & the Lion. 8 p.m. AltRock.

$31.

INCLINE LOUNGE AT THE CELESTIAL - Tom Schneider. 6 p.m. Jazz. Free. KNOTTY PINE - Pete DeNuzio. 9 p.m. Acoustic. Free. MCCAULY’S PUB - Open Jam with Sonny Moorman. 7 p.m. Blues/Various. Free.

MEMORIAL HALL - I’m With Her with Andrew Combs. 8 p.m. Folk//Pop. $32.50-$52.50.

TUESDAY 06

20TH CENTURY THEATER - BoDeans with Tolan Shaw. 8 p.m. Roots/ Rock. $30-$35. GALLAGHER STUDENT CENTER THEATRE - Jason Moran and The Bandwagon. 7 p.m. Jazz. $35-$40. THE GREENWICH - Greg Chako & Unity featuring Sandy Suskind. 3 p.m. Jazz. $12 (includes food). MANSION HILL TAVERN Open Jam with Deb Ohlinger. 6 p.m. Various. Free. MOTR PUB - Fycus with Oak House. 8 p.m. AltRock. Free. THE SKELETON ROOT Noah Wootherspoon and Jessi Bair. 2 p.m. Americana.

NORTHSIDE YACHT CLUB - Screaming Females. 9:30 p.m. Indie/ Punk. $10.

ARNOLD’S BAR AND GRILL - John Redell. 7 p.m. Blues. Free. CROW’S NEST - Open Mic Night. 8 p.m. Various. Free. MOTR PUB - Writer’s Night. 9 p.m. Open mic/Various. Free.

MVP BAR & GRILLE Stu Hamm with Kevin Fox and Jeff Workman. 7:30 a.m. Rock. $5, $7 day of show. NORTHSIDE TAVERN - The Qtet. 9:30 p.m. Funk/Rock/ jazz/Fusion/Various. Free.

PUZZLE Across

CLASSIFIEDS

BY B R EN DA N E M M E T T Q U I G L E Y

HELP WANTED

Down

25. Feminine 29. ___ Taylor (clothing store) 31. Stories follow them 32. Salmon variety 33. Disables a security camera, perhaps 35. 1983 arcade eater 36. With 46-Down, Ryan Goslingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s better half 37. â&#x20AC;&#x153;After the break,â&#x20AC;? in TV lingo 38. Wars of the Roses monarch 40. WWII commander also known

as â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Desert Foxâ&#x20AC;? 41. Web forumsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; ancestor 42. Long, narrow inlet 44. â&#x20AC;&#x153;___ of the Jediâ&#x20AC;? 45. Hard pressed? 46. See 36-Down 49. Mournful bell toll 51. Composed 53. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Shaneâ&#x20AC;? star Alan 54. Loud explosion 57. Monkey house spot

â&#x20AC;˘ Maintain ownership of the sales cycle from first contact through maintenance â&#x20AC;˘ Meet and exceed monthly, quarterly and annual sales goals

58. Was on a November ticket

L AST WEEKâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S ANSWERS:

( ' ( 1 6 , ( 7 ( 0 $ 5 &

/ $ < ' 6 $ 2 6 / 8 * % 5 $ 2 0 3 ( $ & 6 7 8 ( ( $ 1 6 7 ( 1 ( ' 2 ' 6

7 ( 6 7 6 , 7 (

7 0 $ $ ' ( 1 / 2 1 * & + $ / & 2 ' * ( 8 6 0 1 7 6 $ ( $ 7 + 5 5 5 $ / ( $ 1 6 / $ 7 ) 5 ( 6 , 0 * 2 1 < 2 1

+ ( $ / 6

, ' 6 $ <

( / ( 1 $

: ( 1 ' 7

& $ 2 ' * 2

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

0 $ 5 9 * 5 ( ( 0 ( 6 + ( 6 7 $ 0 / $ 0 ( , 5 $ 1 & 2 1 7 ( 7 $ * $ - $ 5 % 2 6 ( ' , 6 7 8 1 ( $ / 6 '

ADULT RELAXING BODY RUB Discreet. Experienced. Mon - Fri, 10am-8pm; SatSun,12pm-5pm. No blocked calls or text messages. (513) 478-0278 by appt.

1. AAA playerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s goal, with â&#x20AC;&#x153;Theâ&#x20AC;? 2. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t you see Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m busy?â&#x20AC;? 3. Townies 4. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I know everything!â&#x20AC;? 5. Wikis alternatives 6. RNâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s room 7. Word said with a finger snap 8. Bright aquarium fish 9. Thirsty dog, say 10. Household util. 11. Shawnee chief in the War of 1812 12. Piano, slangily 13. Magnetic induction units 18. Opens up at the dentist 22. Comic Barinholtz on â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Mindy Projectâ&#x20AC;? 24. Grains in breakfast cereals

debt 61. Fairway obstacle 62. Big name in chocolate 63. Like verbose writing 64. Parts of bread often the last to be eaten

ADVERTISING ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE Cincinnati CityBeat has served the Greater Cincinnati area for 22 years with cultural and political reporting, entertainment previews, food and drink reviews, events coverage and much more. Today, we are a diverse media entity, serving our clients needs via digital, print, ecommerce, social and experience-based marketing solutions. Our Account Executives are key members of a dedicated team, focused on mutual success for our clients and our business. If the following sounds like you, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d love to speak with you: â&#x20AC;˘ You are energetic, outgoing and passionate â&#x20AC;˘ You live with integrity â&#x20AC;˘ You are fearless and welcome challenges â&#x20AC;˘ You have a track record of getting to the decision maker â&#x20AC;˘ You conduct yourself with professionalism in person, in writing and over the phone Essential Duties and Responsibilities â&#x20AC;˘ Aggressively prospect develop and close new business via a variety of sources â&#x20AC;˘ Work cohesively with prospects and clients to discover their needs and recommend our best solutions

Compensation: â&#x20AC;˘ Base salary + commission + Bonus â&#x20AC;˘ Paid Vacation/PTO â&#x20AC;˘ 401(k) â&#x20AC;˘ More Basic Requirements â&#x20AC;˘ Excellent written & verbal communication skills â&#x20AC;˘ Excellent attention to detail and follow through â&#x20AC;˘ Proficient with Microsoft Office â&#x20AC;˘ 1-2 Years sales experience preferred Email resume and cover letter to: sales@citybeat.com No Phone Calls, Please.

F E B . 2 8 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

1. Actress Kunis 5. Dictatorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s order 9. â&#x20AC;&#x153;___ Goâ&#x20AC;? (â&#x20AC;&#x153;Frozenâ&#x20AC;? showstopper) 14. Years of Spanish class 15. Have a sore spot? 16. OTC analgesic 17. Weightlifter working on his legs? 19. Wild West legend ___ Bill 20. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Audacity of Hopeâ&#x20AC;? family 21. Weightlifter working on his biceps? 23. NBA executive Pat 24. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Tyger! Tyger! burning brightâ&#x20AC;? poet 26. Lost GI 27. Feast day figs. 28. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Pretty Little Liarsâ&#x20AC;? writer Shepard 30. Gets the word out? 32. Country with a territory that uses polar bear-shaped license plates 34. In medias ___ 35. Weightlifter who is working on his presses? 38. Abbr. for a king or queen 39. Utensils used with pastas 40. Fix a drink order with a bad head 43. Record label for Big Star 44. Setting for a posterized picture 47. ___ rampage (tearing) 48. Some turban wearers 50. â&#x20AC;&#x153;To know my deed, ___ best not know myselfâ&#x20AC;?: Macbeth 52. Weightlifter who lifts barbells to his shoulders? 54. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Big Eyesâ&#x20AC;? director 55. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Dude!â&#x20AC;? 56. Weightlifter who keeps track of how much he lifts? 59. Carefully avoid 60. Student ___

WEIGHTLIFTERS

THE DRAMATIC RHYTHMS EXPERIENCE

by email only. Phone calls will not be accepted. sferguson@citybeat.com

Band of Pirates/Roja/Dramatic Rhythms@THE MOCKBEE 3/3/18 Live Music & Dance! Doors at 7:30pm. 18+ Only. $15

DELIVERY CONTRACTORS NEEDED

NIGHT GARDEN RECORDING STUDIO

CityBeat needs contractors to deliver CityBeat every Wednesday between 9am and 3pm. Qualifi ed candidates must have appropriate vehicle, insurance for that vehicle and understand that they are contracted to deliver that route every Wednesday. CityBeat drivers are paid per stop and make $14.00 to $16.00 per hr. after fuel expense. Please reply by email and leave your day and evening phone numbers. Please reply

Seamless integration of the best digital gear and classics from the analog era including 2” 24 track. Wide variety of classic microphones, mic pre-amps, hardware effects and dynamics, many popular plugins and accurate synchronization between DAW and 2” 24 track. Large live room and 3 isolation rooms. All for an unbelievable rate. Event/Show sound, lighting and video production services available as well. Call or email Steve for additional info and gear list; (513) 368-7770 or (513) 729-2786 or sferguson. productions@gmail.com.

NOW REOPENED

Tohi

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

F E B . 2 8 – M A R C H 6 , 2 0 18

thelodgeky.com

Cincinnati’s Only Hemp Spa, Tea House, and Boutique Massage • Facials • Waxing • detox Sauna Mani/pedi • tea House • Smoothie Bar • Hemp Boutique

942 HatcH St. • Mt adaMS 513-421-8644 • toHiSpa.coM

DISSOLVE YOUR MARRIAGE

Dissolution: An amicable end to marriage. Easier on your heart. Easier on your wallet. Starting at $500 plus court costs. 12 Hour Turnaround.

810 Sycamore St. 4th Fl, Cincinnati, OH 45202

513.651.9666