CityBeat | April 4, 2018

CINCINNATI’S NEWS AND ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY | APRIL 4–10, 2018 | FREE

As the opioid crisis rages, a look inside one court’s attempts to repair the families left in its wake

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LETTERS Pension Cuts and Protests in Kentucky Greg Langland: The real question is — how did he get voted into office?

Jacob Selvia: By being a carpet-bagging yankee GOP turd, which of course the pseudo-yankees in Northern Kentucky don’t hardly mind anyway.

Nolan Void: About 27% of eligible voters showed up on Election Day. Jay Jones: I wonder what this guy will do after he’s booted from office??

CONTACT US ONLINE CityBeat.com FACEBOOK @CincinnatiCityBeat TWITTER

Joe Redden: Maybe he can work for you and image machines?

@CityBeatCincy @CityBeat_Eats @CityBeatMusic

Jay Jones: Ha, I can offer him a better pension plan. lol (that’s actually horribly tragic and not funny at all)

@CityBeatCincy

Comments posted on Facebook.com/CityBeatCincy in response to the March 30 post, “Kentucky teachers protest pension cuts: After Kentucky lawmakers slid last-minute cuts to teachers’ pensions into a piece of water treatment legislation last night, educators in the Bluegrass State are protesting.”

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WHAT A WEEK!

BY T.C. B R I T TO N

Bunny Love

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Local costumer Jonn Schenz returned to Washington, D.C., Monday to provide the bunny costumes for the White House Easter Egg roll for the 38th time. The trio of rabbit suits could be seen as the First Family hosted an estimated 30,000 guests at the 140th event. You might remember a lot of buzz surrounding the Egg Roll last year: It seemed to be planned last-minute, with few details emerging until the day of.

Meanwhile, old photos surfaced of thenWhite House press secretary Sean Spicer sporting the bunny suit back in 2008.

(Secret Service and staffers often don the suits for security reasons.) The Spicy Bunny was made all the more iconic when Melissa McCarthy portrayed him on Saturday Night Live. How times have changed!

And what’s better than the Easter Bunny? A gay bunny who’s trolling Mike Pence. Here’s the story: The vice president has a pet rabbit with an A+ punny name — Marlon Bundo. Pence’s daughter and wife/“mother” wrote a children’s book about him called Marlon Bundo’s Day in the Life of the Vice President President, wherein the furry guy shares a day in the life with the veep. When John Oliver got wind of this, he decided to toy with Pence’s straight-as-anarrow sensibilities by writing his own book about the rabbit, A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, where in the furry guy falls in love with another furry guy in a tale of good ole gay bunny love. All proceeds appropriately went to the Trevor Project and AIDS United. Oliver even got an all-star cast to record the audio version, including RuPaul, Jim Parsons, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, John Lithgow, Ellie Kemper and Jack McBrayer.

It quickly became the No. 1 bestseller on Amazon — effectively crushing the Pencepenned book’s numbers. Will & Grace showrunner Max Mutchnick might have had something to do with that: He bought a copy for every elementary school library in Pence’s home state of Indiana. A Day in the Life is currently sold out, but Oliver announced that they’re printing more copies, so Pence can keep clutching his pearls at the idea of THE CHILDREN being exposed to boy-on-boy bunny romance.

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April Fools!

Easter and April Fools’ Day collided Sunday, resulting in many Jesus-themed pranks (was that just my household?). It provided an eggcellent hopportunity (sorry) for parents to trick their kids — think junk-filled Easter eggs and baskets, fruits and veggies masked as foil-wrapped candy and Easter egg hunts where someone “forgot” to hide any eggs. Because there’s nothing more satisfying than pranking children on the Lord’s Day. NBC pulled off a true miracle with its outstanding live production of Jesus Christ Superstar with John Legend and Sara

Bareilles. We thought it would fall under joke territory because usually those live shows are a hot mess, but this was just plain hot!

Loads of brands got in on the April Fools’ fun, too. PornHub became HornHub, with a channel devoted to brass instruments; Burger King teased a new chocolate Whopper; Netflix announced its acquisition of Seth Rogen’s “personal autonomy” (but don’t they actually own Adam Sandler’s life rights?); Kit-Kat unveiled a soap product; and Jägermeister debuted an ointment aptly called Jäger Balm.

But it was Mother Nature that had the last laugh that night, essentially saying, “Oh, you thought spring was finally here?

April Fools!” as the Tri-state got sprinkled by an inch or two of snow. That sight had me crying more than the countless children who are consistently terrified by dead-eyed mall Easter bunnies.

Biteyoncé

Tiffany Haddish just can’t stop spilling details about the time she met Beyoncé.

(But who could blame her?) In case you missed it: The Girls Trip breakout star attended a Jay-Z concert after-party back in December, where she met Queen B and posted a selfie to prove it. (“Strike one,” notes the Knowles-Carter Secrecy Security Force.) Then in February, Haddish started to elaborate on her royal encounter, saying that some famous-type lady was hitting on Jay. Tiff offered to smack a bitch, but she says Bey told her not to worry about it and

just enjoy the party.

The details just keep trickling out of Haddish, because now she’s saying that certain someone — whose identity she will not reveal — who was chatting up Jay was on drugs and she bit Beyoncé’s face. Several fellow celebs weighed in saying they did or didn’t know whodunnit while average nobodies tried to crack the case by doing a social media deep-dive of the night in question. Even Ryan Murphy jokingly announced that he’d cover the story in a future season of American Crime Story: Who Bit Beyoncé? All signs point to Love & Basketball actress Sanaa Lathan as the culprit. Meanwhile, Haddish claims she will no longer speak of the incident and she probably shouldn’t have made a peep to begin with because she signed a non-disclosure agreement.

Now, Jay and Bey are famously private people… for a couple that reveals some of the most intimate details of their relationship in song and video while living in the public eye. So they’re probably not too keen on all this chatter — hence the NDA. Haddish better be careful, before she’s name-checked in Beyoncé’s next album as “Becky with the big mouth.”

Reboot Rundown

With the Roseanne revival boasting a whopping 18 million viewers during last week’s premiere, more reboots seem to be oozing out of the woodwork. Netflix debuts its take on Lost in Space April 13. Entertainment Weekly says a third installment of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure will soon be in the works. Amazon is adapting A League of Their Own into a TV series. Charmed is on its way back to screens with a new trio of sisters. And while it’s not a straight reboot, The Golden Girls has inspired a new series about a group of older gay men called Silver Foxes. Everything old is new again!

Contact T.C. Britton: letters@citybeat.com PHOTO: ABC

This Week in Questionable Decisions…

1. Speaking of Roseanne, Trump won’t STFU about it. He called the show’s leading lady and supporter to congratulate her on the ratings this week.

2. Hot Trend Alert! Some people are getting ring finger dermal piercings instead of wearing traditional wedding rings.

3. Sonic will serve pickle juice slushies this summer.

4. SpiceJet female cabin crew members alleged they were stripsearched and touched inappropriately at an Indian airport, while the curiously named airline claimed they were just subjected to random pat-downs to deter theft.

5. A man was banned from a British Columbia hotel after leaving a suitcase full of pepperoni in his room and returning to find dozens of seagulls munching and trashing the suite.

6. The “affluenza teen” Ethan Couch is back on these streets after serving 720 days in jail for violating his probation.

7. Kraft single-style ketchup slices are a thing now.

8. A waiter in Canada fired for being rude to a customer is suing the restaurant for discrimination, says he’s not rude, he’s French!

9. Trashy Brit rag The Sun reported on a couple who got married — that happen to be a trans man and a trans woman — “Tran and Wife.”

10. Tyra Banks admitted she got a nose job years ago… but only because her bones were growing and itchy!

11. The Sharknado franchise is ending… but not until after a sixth installment this summer!

12. T-Pain opened (the fake) Wiscansin University, offering courses like Accounting for Strippers and Introduction to F.B.G.M. (fuck bitches get money).

EDITORIAL

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From Elegy to Celebration: An Urban Appalachian’s Mindful Migration

BY EL I S SA YA N C E Y, M S ED

was better than those characters in Deliverance, the in-bred mountain people with rotted grins and vacant stares. Appalachians were in turns ignorant and scary, and I wanted nothing to do with them.

But I now understand that I did have much in common with them, starting with my mom’s daily phone calls with Aunt Gertrude — and Aunt Georgia, and Aunt Mildred. Those conversations warmed my mom like a soft quilt made from generations of rich, familiar fabrics.

Her ease with people went beyond family. She could elicit the best and most intimate stories from anyone, from elderly neighbors to cashiers. And she had great stories of her own, though I had to beg her to share them. Stories of helping raise her sister Mildred’s daughter, of working in a retrofitted factory in California during World War II after my dad shipped overseas, of the father she idolized and the mother she lost too soon.

But I spent most of my youth embarrassed by her easy way with the world, her insistence on talking with clerks and neighbors, hanging on to their stories and remembering details that continually surprised them weeks and months later. I would try to pull her away, urging her to hurry, and bristle when she stubbornly ignored me and turned back to hear their stories.

It wasn’t until years later that I came to see the value of being “stubborn” in my own life as a journalist and teacher. And how much I learned simply by listening to my mom have conversations with her family and the hundreds of people she met in her life. It wasn’t until years later that I came to understand that the second half of my mother’s mantra was just as powerful as the first. And it wasn’t until years later that I felt a sense of comfort and confidence in calling myself an Urban Appalachian.

The shift in accepting where my family came from began when I volunteered at a “last chance” high school down by the river.

I worked with a smart 16-year-old who was living on his own after a short stint in juvenile detention. He was a thoughtful young man with a big heart and a love of poetry.

We worked on algebra and calculus, and I prayed every week when I came back, he would still be in class, ready for our session.

Then one day he wasn’t.

I learned he had been arrested for shoplifting and was headed to prison. Not long after, I enrolled in graduate school to become a teacher full-time, determined to support and give voice to students like him.

After graduate school, I volunteered at

a GED program in East Price Hill. My students were working multiple jobs, taking care of their children and spending hours on study prep guides and practice tests.

Nearly all of them talked just like my mom during those daily Aunt Gertrude calls.

My revelations about my heritage were more like slow-burning candles than light bulbs, illuminated through narratives where switching a word here or there made all the difference. Replace “stubborn” with “determined,” “strong” or “resilient.”

Replace “uneducated” with “hard-working.” Replace “poor” with “family-focused.”

Replace “hillbilly” with “rooted.”

Slowly, I replaced the media stereotypes I believed defined me with the actual

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

“Certainly, I was better than those characters in Deliverance, the in-bred mountain people with rotted grins and vacant stares.” people I knew in Norwood, East Price Hill and beyond.

Certainly, not all Appalachians — rural, urban or otherwise — embody only the culture’s strengths. Nor, importantly, are they all white, poor and uneducated. I learned to recognize that my stubbornness is born of my Appalachian heritage and see it as the result of generations of survival tactics as much as pride. I also learned to use that stubbornness to root out stories other journalists failed to see and find answers to questions others never thought to ask.

Today I revere the stories of the people — my people — who are buried on mountaintops, even in death protecting the land from the coal companies that would destroy them. And today, I’m proud to play a part in rewriting the media narratives that made hillbillies ripe for elegies instead of celebration.

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Writer, editor, educator and communications consultant Elissa Yancey is participating in the Appalachian Studies Association Conference, sponsored by the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition, an organization with roots in the East Price Hill GED Center she describes. The conference will be held in locations throughout Greater Cincinnati from April 5-8. Find details and register at uacvoice.org.

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very time I heard my mom start her daily call with my Aunt Gertrude, I cringed. Within seconds, my mom’s voice — usually crisp, clear and accentfree — slowed to the kind of drawl people heard (and mocked) on Beverly Hillbillies.

On days when I was home to hear the call, I cranked up the volume on The Price is Right so I wouldn’t have to listen to her talk — and talk and talk — in that voice. I wouldn’t have to hear her drawl on about tragedies and triumphs of cousins I’d never met, of the grandparents I’d never known and of food I most certainly did not want to eat. And it was an accent that I associated more and more with what I saw in the media.

In the early 1970s, reruns of Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction and first runs of Hee Haw regularly brought hillbilly stereotypes into our living room. At best naïve, and at worst mentally inferior to their big-city peers, the media-defined hillbillies were cheap-laugh sacrificial lambs with bad teeth and an inexplicable predilection for outhouses. Surely, I thought, my family had nothing in common with those people, people who laughed too loud and swore as much by nonsensical old wives’ tales as they did by their bibles.

We were different, or so I convinced myself, even though most of my highschool peers had family “down home.” A place I imagined as some unnamed, undeveloped town in Kentucky from which their parents had escaped. But on weekends, after their dads clocked out of work at Norwood’s General Motors’ plant (now transformed into a maze of strip malls and medical offices), my classmates seemed excited to leave town and visit “mamaw” and “papaw,” terms of endearment as foreign to me as the thought of getting a Trans Am for my 16th birthday.

My family didn’t take trips “down home.”

My mother, the youngest of 14, graduated high school at 16 and not long after moved, by herself, from the southeastern mountains of Kentucky to Norwood. She met my dad, an only child, during his last year at Norwood High School. I was their sixth and final child and by the time I was born, my mom’s parents were long dead and her surviving siblings and most of her cousins had also migrated north, leaving Letcher County for better jobs in Ohio and Illinois.

Today, when I think back to my cringing when I heard the accent and my constant questioning of her: “Why do you talk so funny when you talk with your sisters?” I recognize I was a snob. And perhaps worse yet, I believed the stereotypes of people from Appalachia I saw in the media more than I believed in my mother. Though I repeated my mom’s stubborn mantra, “No one is better than you, and you aren’t better than anyone else,” I focused on the first part of the phrase more as it helped me fight near-crippling shyness. Certainly, I

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NEWS City Hall Unsettled Is the current impasse on Plum Street a result of structural issues, strong personalities, racial strife — or all of the above?

BY N I C K SWA R T S EL L

C

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incinnati has seen a chaotic few weeks as Mayor John Cranley, City Manager Harry Black and city council all wrangle over whether Black keeps his job and how much he should walk away with if he leaves.

The situation has led to multiple standoffs between the mayor, who wants Black gone, and city council, which must approve Black’s firing.

The mood has been tense, to put it lightly.

“This is the worst I’ve ever seen,” says Cincinnati City Councilman David Mann, who has served a cumulative 23 years in City Hall. Other long-term Cincinnati politics watchers agree: We’ve reached an unprecedented stalemate — one that remained unresolved at press time.

But how did we get here? Various players in the drama, as well as outside observers, have different explanations for the mess.

Some pin it on the city’s charter. They say we need to change Cincinnati’s system of government, which has since 1999 run under a modified city council/city manager structure that some say effectively creates two chief executives for the city.

Others like Mann say the current trouble is relational, not structural, and has to do with the mayor and city manager’s strong personalities. Until one of them leaves, it will be impossible to go back to business as usual, they say.

Still others, however, say that racial tensions within the Cincinnati Police Department have sparked the tumult, and that CPD is where structural changes are needed.

Is there any one answer, or is Cincinnati’s current impasse the perfect storm of multiple issues coming to the fore at the same time? Let’s take a look at the factors.

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It’s the Charter Forty-seven of America’s 100 largest cities, including the five largest, have a so-called “strong mayor” system in which the mayor serves as the city’s chief executive. Another 46 function under a city manager/city council system, including major cities like Phoenix, San Antonio and Dallas. In that system, the city manager carries most executive powers.

Cincinnati is one of six U.S. cities using some form of hybrid arrangement with elements of both city manager and strong mayor systems.

Cincinnati arrived at its current

governmental structure via a winding path. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the political machine of Republican George “Boss” Cox dominated City Hall.

The well-connected Cincinnati bar owner and political fixer, along with his cronies, used vote buying and political bullying to basically decide who ran the city.

Cincinnati City Council But his methods proved chambers less effective with the middle-class residents of PH OTO: NIC K SWARTSELL recently annexed suburbs, and his candidate for mayor lost in 1905. That empowered a reform movement in the city that, of over 5,000 employees and a total budget among other changes, created the position greater than $1.5 billion,” the committee of a professional city manager appointed says in a statement about the stalemate. by council and sealed off from political “An organization this size — a conglomconsiderations. eration of many distinct lines of business About 90 years after Cox left the stage, (public works, parks, recreation, police, some in the city were unhappy with the fire, transportation and engineering, slow pace and bickering of the city’s public health) — should be managed by a government. In the 1990s, a group named professional, not a politician.”

Build Cincinnati, led by Republican Chip The committee touts changes to the Gerhardt, wanted to make City Hall more charter recommended in 2015 that would decisive by creating a stronger mayor. have given council the power to initiate Efforts to bring a strong mayor system the hiring and firing of the city manager, to Cincinnati ended in a compromise among other changes. Those recommenthat voters approved in 1999 — the city dations, which emerged through a Charter manager position stayed, but the mayor Reform Task Force run by then-Councilbecame a directly elected figure with man Kevin Flynn — never made it to a power to veto council legislation and to set ballot for voters to approve after Cranley council’s agenda. The mayor also, pivotthreatened to veto them. ally, became the person responsible for It’s the Relationships hiring and firing the city manager — with Others believe that the current problem council’s approval. has to do with the players, not the rules of Those changes, some argue, have the game. muddled Cincinnati’s political situation.

Former Vice Mayor Mann has served In 2015, now-Vice Mayor Christopher under all three arrangements of the Smitherman floated the idea of putting a mayoral system Cincinnati has had in ballot initiative up for voters to switch the place — from the time prior to 1987 when city to the strong mayor system. That’s an councilmembers elected the mayor to the idea he’s returned to on occasion, includtime when the top vote-getter on council ing recently during the tumultuous battle became mayor to the current, directly between Black and Cranley. elected mayor.

“What’s confusing for the voter is that In all three systems, Mann says, probthey don’t know who is running the city,” lems pop up, stalemates happen and Smitherman said following a March 19 tempers flare.

Cincinnati City Council meeting. “I think “If the players are dysfunctional, it’s the voters have to decide.” going to be dysfunctional,” he says.

Cincinnati’s Charter Committee says Mann waves away concerns about the the city’s form of government doesn’t need city’s charter. In reality, he says, the powradical changes, but does need tweaks. ers afforded the mayor aren’t that much “Cincinnati government has a workforce

more than what you’d have under any city council/city manager style of government.

Mann opposes efforts to move the city to a strong mayor system, though.

“I do think, and this is something (the mayor) doesn’t agree with me on, that there is tremendous advantage to having a city manager,” he says. “They start without preexisting relationships that can get in the way of good governance.”

But that, Mann says, requires a good relationship between the mayor and city manager.

Both Cranley and Black have reputations as strong-willed, hard-headed operators. At a former job as chief financial officer of Richmond, Va., Black was known as “the mayor’s pitbull” for his aggressive style of management.

Black grew up in Park Heights, Baltimore, a rough neighborhood that he says bred toughness and tenacity.

“I believe my life experiences have been what they have been to prepare me for this moment,” Black said at the most recent city council meeting, referring to his upbringing.

Critics say he’s taken that focus too far, however. Black is the subject of multiple federal lawsuits against the city alleging he engaged in intimidation and aggressive behavior toward city employees. Cranley says there are roughly a dozen employees who have complained about Black’s behavior.

The mayor, of course, is not known to be a pushover either. He’s gone over Black’s head to negotiate pay raises for some city employees, including political allies with the police and firefighter’s unions.

He negotiated severance packages with Black before consulting council about the city manager’s departure. And he’s been heavily involved in economic development deals handed out by the city — turf usually reserved for a city executive.

Does the charter afford the mayor those executive powers? They’re gray areas, and ones that Cranley has used successfully to get big wins — sometimes at Black’s expense.

Put two tenacious and driven officials on the same turf and eventually, you get a fight.

In this case, that battle has led to some revelations from Cranley about Black — that he and several high-ranking Cincinnati police officials visited a strip club during a city trip in 2016, for example — and promises that more are on the way.

The ugly fight won’t end, Mann says, until Cranley or Black leaves. Since Cranley was recently reelected by popular vote, Mann thinks Black is the one who needs to go.

It’s Race Some councilmembers and community activists suggest the root of the current problem isn’t in City Hall at all, but instead involves racial tensions within the city’s police department.

Cranley denies that his move to oust Black has anything to do with recent controversies at CPD. But his request for the

city manager’s resignation came just after Black fired Assistant Police Chief David Bailey. Bailey, according to reports from Police Chief Eliot Isaac, had been insubordinate and unwilling to go along with elements of the city’s historic police reforms aimed at erasing race-based disparities.

The former assistant chief is also named in a gender discrimination complaint filed

by CPD Lt. Bridget Bardua, which alleges that Bailey and others have racial animus toward Chief Isaac, who is black.

Just before he was asked to resign, Black said publicly that a “rogue element” within CPD was working to undermine Isaac.

That’s far from the only point of tension.

Black has feuded with the Fraternal Order of Police, including during a late-night phone call to President Dan Hils last year over the latter’s move to delay testimony before a police accountability board from two officers accused of racial profiling and use of excessive force. Black accused Hils of trying to undermine the city’s Collaborative Agreement.

Cranley says that Black’s behavior, as evidenced by the lawsuits against the city, is the reason for his dismissal — not his differences with some in CPD. But others are skeptical.

African-American leaders, including former Mayor Dwight Tillery, the Cincinnati NAACP and other groups have rallied behind Black and against Cranley. Those

groups and their supporters have crowded into council chambers during meetings to criticize Cranley, something the mayor has shrugged off as “political games.”

But some councilmembers take the situation more seriously.

“People have to understand this situation is bigger than City Manager Harry Black,” Councilwoman Tamaya Dennard says.

“This is also about the culture of the Cincinnati Police Department that treats black officers different than white officers and an unwillingness by our city government to address it. There are also people within our police department who don’t want to be a part of the Collaborative Agreement.”

Others critics of Cranley agree, saying that Black is just another example of a black official getting bad treatment in City Hall. Those opposed to Black’s dismissal have brought up former CPD Chief Jeffrey Blackwell, whose 2015 firing caused similar controversy.

“I have seen black leaders taken down one after the other,” Councilmember Chris Seelbach said at a March 28 council meeting. “The issue of race is a big one in this equation. If we ignore that, we ignore a big part of it.”

Fixing the problem On March 29, council voted to approve a measure that would award Black an eightmonth severance package worth roughly

$174,000 in pay and benefits. That’s the amount stipulated in Black’s contract. Five Democrats on council opposed an earlier, higher severance package of $423,000 worked out between Black and Cranley.

Black seems unlikely to accept the latest deal, but he has until April 30 to decide.

The five council Democrats opposed to Black’s earlier severance called for an independent counsel to investigate the rift between Black and Cranley, as well as a probe into racial friction within CPD. The council majority seems unlikely to vote to fire Black outright until that investigation happens.

“The way forward will involve fact finding… but it must also include each of us — Council members, the Mayor, and the City Manager — working with black leaders, community representatives, and residents not just to deescalate tensions but to really listen and to work on the issues they raise,” Councilman Greg Landsman said in a statement posted on Facebook.

Others, however, say it’s time to move on, and that rooting through all the allegations and accusations won’t heal the relationship between the mayor and city manager.

“If we do that, we’re going to spend a lot of money,” Mann says of an investigation.

“Once we do all that, what do we have? The mayor and city manager will still have a poor relationship.”

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CITY DESK

Kentucky Teachers Protest Pension Cuts

BY M C K EN ZI E ES K R I D G E

School was out for all of Kentucky’s 120 counties on April 2 as protests continued over cuts to state pensions for educators.

Some schools closed after teachers called in sick. Other districts decided to close to allow teachers to rally. Some others were on spring break.

Teachers from a number of schools, including some in Northern Kentucky, rallied at the state capital in Frankfort decrying a recent bill passed at the last minute reducing retirement benefits.

Conservatives running the Kentucky General Assembly late March 29 passed pension reform measures tucked away last-minute into Senate Bill 151 — a piece of sewage water treatment legislation.

While the full details of the 291-page bill are still being combed through, the new policies will essentially make the

already unappealing financial prospects of public educators even gloomier. Instead of entering a traditional pension plan, new teachers will sign on to a hybrid deal that is part-pension, part-401(k). The bill also takes away future teachers inviolable contract, meaning that the benefits they start with can be changed at any time without their say. It also prevents teachers from calculating unused sick days into their pension benefits and cuts death benefits by $5,000 for spouses.

According to Republican House Member John “Bam” Carney, who introduced the bill and is a public school teacher himself, the changes will save $300 million over the course of 30 years. That sounds like a lot, but it’s barely a drop in the bucket considering Kentucky’s public retirement system has $41 billion in unfunded liabilities.

FCC Might Not Be Done with West End

The West End PH OTO: NIC K SWARTSELL

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BY N I C K SWA R T S EL L

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Despite missed deadlines and ongoing drama, the prospect of a stadium for FC Cincinnati in the West End should the team get a Major League Soccer franchise has proven hard to kill.

Recently, Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley promised he would introduce ordinances designed to help the team build its facility in the West End, despite controversy around the site and fears from residents about displacement, traffic and other concerns.

A committee from the West End Community Council last week delivered a list of asks that could form a legally binding community benefits agreement with the and FCC that the team had previously team should it come to the neighborhood walked away from.

— though some members of that commitA resolution by the CPS Board of Educatee have big concerns about the process by tion passed earlier this month would allow which that document was drawn up. for a third party, such as the city, to pay And though there’s still no sign of a deal some of the property taxes the district wants between FCC and Cincinnati Public Schools, from the team in exchange for selling land which holds key land the team needs to the district owns currently occupied by Taft build a stadium, the district’s Board of EduHigh School’s Stargel Stadium. cation left the door open just a crack with a “Someone has to speak up for common resolution passed earlier this month. sense,” Cranley said after he announced All of that means it’s possible that the those ordinances were coming during team hasn’t quite moved on to consider its a March 28 city council meeting. Some other possible sites — Newport and Oakley residents at that meeting, there to oppose — despite FCC setting a March 31 deadline the stadium, offered jeers. “Someone has to for its stadium decision. speak up for growth.”

The mayor, at least, would prefer the staCranley’s comments drew pushback from dium be built in the West End. Cranley has some councilmembers, including Tamaya accused those opposing the site of “playing Dennard. The first-term councilmember political games.” called Cranley’s remarks “insensitive.”

FCC General Manager Jeff Berding has “You have to understand things have taken been meeting with the mayor, visiting him place to get us here,” Dennard said, referat City Hall as recently as March 29. Details ring to the West End’s history of disinvestof the mayor’s coming legislation weren’t ment and displacement of black residents. available at press time, but could include “The progress that has taken place in Cincincity help with parts of a deal between CPS nati has been white and affluent.”

Critics say Carney’s estimation is merely guesswork and point out that the bill was introduced without actuarial analysis, a state requirement.

Democrat Attorney General Andy Beshear assured constituents in a video released on his personal platforms that he will take the bill to court if Republican Governor Matt Bevin signs off on it.

All signs point to that court battle happening soon. Bevin ran in 2015 on explicit promises to fix Kentucky’s deep pension trouble.

“Anyone who will receive a retirement check in the years ahead owes a deep debt of gratitude to these 71 men & women who did the right thing,” he tweeted recently, referring to General Assembly members who passed the pension reform bill.

Bevin tried to push pension-centered Senate Bill 1 through earlier this year but the proposed removal of retired teacher’s cost of living adjustments (an increase of 1.5 percent per year) along with the complete abolishment of new teachers pension plans caused enough upheaval in

Frankfort to pump the brakes.

Several state legislators, looking for other options, have argued that legalizing and taxing marijuana and/or casino gambling in the commonwealth would ease the retirement debts, but both measures have been struck down.

Teachers don’t seem to be easing up — perhaps inspired by recent teacher strikes in West Virginia that shuttered schools across the state and eventually won strikers better contracts. Striking is illegal for public employees in Kentucky.

Earlier protests on March 30 closed schools in 20 counties including Campbell, Carroll and Gallatin as teachers called in absent from work.

Stephanie Winkler, current Kentucky Education Association president, called for the April 2 statewide rally in Frankfort.

“If we turn our backs on education, we turn our backs on our futures,” Winkler said March 30. “We are at a crossroads here and if we don’t turn the right way it’ll be to our commonwealth’s detriment.”

City Hall isn’t the only battleground over the still-alive prospect for a West End stadium. A committee of the West End Community Council on March 26 presented what it calls a “framework” for a community benefits agreement with FC Cincinnati should the team opt to build a soccer stadium there. But a couple of those committee members say that framework should not have been drawn up yet or at all.

The introduction to the 13-page CBA starts off by noting the council’s 50-10 general body vote against the stadium and observes that stadiums generally have a large impact on neighborhoods where they are built.

Eighty-four percent of the West End’s roughly 6,000 residents are black, and 50 percent live below the poverty line.

Among the asks presented in the CBA framework are the creation of a West End housing trust that will fund new affordable housing and support existing affordable housing, youth programs, a detailed plan for replacing Stargel Stadium, creation of job opportunities paying at least $15 an hour, vocational training opportunities and support for unions, provision of three storefronts for nascent local businesses at no rent for five years and a number of other items.

The creation of the CBA framework began with a meeting of the ad-hoc committee held earlier in March. That meeting was restricted to neighborhood residents, a CityBeat reporter was told.

At least two members of the 13-member committee protested any CBA presentation to FCC after the council’s general body

voted against the team building a stadium in the West End. In an email to West End Community Council President Keith Blake, the two also opposed presenting the document to FCC before it had gone back before the council’s general body for a vote of approval.

City West resident Earnestine Hill, one of the committee members who wrote the email, says she’s still distrustful after the ad-hoc meeting. Hill and other stadium opponents think that some members of the council are trying to reignite the potential for a stadium in the West End. “I’m not sure who to trust at this point,” she said. “It’s an I-dont-know kind of situation.”

Blake says FCC’s Berding told him to present a proposal and the team would take a look.

Blake, who voted in favor of the stadium, says he’s not sure that the possibility of FCC in the West End is dead yet, but also says he’s not necessarily “hopeful” about it either.

The document the community council committee gave to FCC doesn’t lock the group into anything just yet, and isn’t a bid to woo FCC, Blake says.

“This is exploratory,” he says. “My job is to make sure that, if they build a stadium here, the West End Community Council is at the table. My job isn’t trying to keep a deal going.”

Despite the activity, plenty remains to be puzzled out.

On March 19, an LLC partially controlled by two owners of startup LISNR purchased several key plots of land around 1515 Central Ave. that FCC had identified as part of the site of its stadium.

The LLC says those plots aren’t for FCC, the Cincinnati Business Courier reported.

The group has had an option to buy the land for much of that time. The property’s owners say they’re open to selling the land for FCC’s stadium, however.

Summer’s Best Music at Fraze Pavilion

Alison Krauss

Tony Bennett

Neal McCoy

JUNE 15

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JUNE 24 SOLD OUT!

O.A.R. with Matt Nathanson JULY 24

Jim Gaffigan JULY 27

Southern Uprising JULY 28

Roger Daltrey performs The Who’s ‘Tommy’

Dave Koz & Friends

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Happy Together Tour 2018

Reba AUGUST 4

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Culture Club with Thompson Twins’ Earth, Wind & Fire Tom Bailey AUGUST 23

SEASON SPONSORS: Kettering Health Network, Mid USA Credit Union, Pepsi Beverage Company

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Visit FRAZE.COM for more information

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Buy tickets online at etix.com or by phone 1-800-514-3849

SEPTEMBER 5

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Sit. Savor.

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Bonds Beyond Addiction

BY TIMMY BRODERICK

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Hamilton County court program designed to keep families together. As Shelley and others have found, it’s a hard road — but one that beats the grim alternatives.

On this day in court, part of the process is atonement.

Shelley’s recovery had been off to an auspicious start — her son, Chance, moved back in with her after spending seven months in foster care — but

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helley stands in the courtroom of Magistrate Scheherazade Washington on a recent Tuesday, apologizing.

“I know that once you do plant that seed of doubt, it’s tough to get trust back,” she says.

It has been a trying month for the 50-year-old single mother, whose easy smile gives no clue that she survived a near-fatal overdose of fentanyl last spring.

Since that time, she’s been working to claw her way back from addiction with the help of a special

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As the opioid crisis rages, a look inside one court’s attempts to repair the families left in its wake

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“Back in the day, things quickly soured after her then-boyRich, assaulted her and Chance. To with weed or friend, cope, she started drinking again.

Shelley, who has requested we only use first name, misled the court about her crack, it was an her drinking and whether or not the abusive was still in her life. individual choice. Rich Washington, the presiding judge, is sympathetic to Shelley’s plight, but remains about the rules of the program.

Now, families serious “Drinking and drugging is not an option,” she says. “Period.” are fragmented OTHER VICTIMS to the point of THE OF THE OPIOID CRISIS nonexistence.” Tucked away on the sixth floor of the HamFROM PAGE 13

ilton County Juvenile Court building, Family Treatment Drug Court is a voluntary program designed to help those suffering from drug abuse stabilize themselves and reunite with children who were removed from their care.

The court has been repairing broken families since 2001, when a grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration funded its inception.

Lately, there have been more parents like Shelley who are struggling with addiction and in need of help.

As the opioid crisis escalates, the court’s work is more important than ever. Drug overdoses in Hamilton County rose for the third straight year in 2017, kids have flooded the foster care system and, according to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, more babies are being exposed to opioids in-utero, prompting a higher risk of developmental delays.

Prior to the crisis’ current extremes, Hamilton County Job & Family Services data shows in 2006 there were 1,920 children in the foster care system countywide, a number that grew by only 200 over the next eight years. Then, between 2014 and 2016, that number ballooned to 2,918 children in state custody — a 20-year high.

Since then, nearly 700 more have entered the system.

At a recent conference on childhood trauma, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine confirmed that the number of children entering foster care in Ohio has skyrocketed and that about half of those kids need help “due to abuse and neglect associated with parental drug abuse.”

Some parents don’t make it long enough to seek recovery. Last year, drug overdoses in Hamilton County claimed 529 lives — a big increase from the 403 people who died in 2016. Most of those deaths last year — 373 — were due to opioids.

The crisis’ especially deadly turn of late is one reason an increase in drug users has

not translated to more people in the Family Treatment Drug Court program. “(They) can’t get through the door if they die,” says Magistrate Washington.

But if a parent can survive and get clean, it can make all the difference. According to a study by the Institute for Family Studies, kids who stay with their parents or other family members have better outcomes than those who idle in foster care. Drug court is committed to permanency for the child — the staff works to give parents structure so they can get their kids back and keep them.

“If we can help that parent gain sobriety and stability, addressing their needs, then that’s ultimately going to impact the child and their needs,” says Deanna Nadermann, a specialized coordinator who oversees Juvenile Court dockets like drug court.

Currently, only seven clients are enrolled in Family Treatment Drug Court.

Nobody has graduated since last March and average time in the program — nine months — has shot up thanks to the brutal and protracted nature of opiate abuse withdrawal.

Washington believes neither the court’s size or graduation rate reflect its true impact.

“We are a necessary tool in the arsenal of our community,” she says.

Maintaining sobriety is, of course, a major goal. But drug court also pushes clients to find a community to nurture and support their ongoing recovery; families cannot always bear the added burden of meeting the myriad needs of someone in recovery.

“Back in the day, with weed or crack, it was an individual choice,” Washington says. “Now, families are fragmented to the point of nonexistence.”

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Magistrate Scheherazade Washington has overseen family treatment drug court since its inception in 2002.

PHOTO: TIMMY BRODERICK

The drug court program isn’t easy.

All clients must complete weekly drug screenings and attend 90 Alcohol or Narcotics Anonymous meetings within the first 90 days. Caseworkers from Hamilton County Job & Family Services and lawyers from the public defender’s office help them and their children navigate the deluge of appointments and jump through the requisite legal hoops.

The schedule sounds excessive, but it provides a backbone that clients can use to create a framework for their lives.

Adjusting to the world’s time rather than the drug’s time is difficult. According to social worker Amanda Constantino, it’s really about changing everything in your life. Sobriety is more than the absence of drugs; it also demands a lifestyle populated by people who encourage recovery and a community that welcomes that process.

Maintaining associations with other addicts or dealers is often untenable.

“They have to adapt with not having their best friend (the drug) and having to live life sober and trying to find things to and people to spend time with who are sober,” Constantino says.

Drug court helps clients work toward that goal. It mandates those AA or NA meetings because they are a quick and easy way to find like-minded peers. They also encourage clients to look beyond the recovery groups to different churches or recreational sports leagues — activities that occupy time and encourage interaction with others.

“We try to put enough external success or possibilities in front of them until they can internalize that themselves,” Washington says.

The program has evolved over the years, too. The court’s former policy of no tolerance has shifted as science has shown the promise of medically assisted addiction treatment. While methadone is still forbidden, clients are permitted to enter programs that use opioids like Suboxone and Vivitrol.

Most important of all are the courtroom hearings. Held every Tuesday morning, these sessions hold clients accountable for the grueling, drab work of recovery — going to therapy, getting a job, finding an apartment — necessary to maintain sobriety and regain their kids’ trust.

Hearing one another’s progress fosters a sense of community among the clients, says court coordinator Nadermann. They are invested in and encouraged by each other’s success.

Which is why Shelley apologized to everyone. She had been doing well, staying clean since her overdose last March.

Her son was living with her again. Court officials were optimistic she would graduate soon.

Unfortunately for Shelley, her relationship with Rich went south quickly after her son returned.

WHEN PARTNERS ARE BARRIERS

PHOTO: TIMMY BRODERICK

whole lot of baggage.

“My therapist said until a year after being sober, you should never be in a relationship, you need to get a pet goldfish,” she says with a laugh. “Well, mine turned into a piranha.”

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This relationship is not just harmful to Shelley — Chance suffers, too.

Boone is sympathetic to Shelley’s situation, but her first responsibility is Chance.

“I care about you, but my job and my main priority is the child,” Boone says she has told Shelley. “It’s not my job to protect you against that relationship, but if you won’t keep him out of the house, I can’t guarantee Chance’s safety.”

The 13-year-old already lost his father and another father-figure to opioids, and almost lost his mother. All that pain adds up.

Chance skips school regularly, recently set an abandoned building on fire and has had several stints in juvenile detention — most recently for writing “fuck the police” on a trash can at school.

“It’s like I got this damaged kid back,” Shelley says. “He was already damaged, but he got more appointments than I do and together it’s like holy, good God.” If she wants to regain full custody of Chance, Shelley is going to have to make it work. In April, Juvenile Court will evaluate whether Shelley is fit to be Chance’s guardian. If she fails, she will have another year to tidy up before she permanently loses custody.

Boone says the decision will rely heavily on where Rich is.

“If he is out, that level of trust has been

“I’m already wounded, I’m already damaged goods, so therefore I can only have somebody that’s damaged as well.”

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go hand in hand. Numerous studies show increased risk of physical, sexual or psychological abuse to all parties, but mothers especially. According to one study from the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, opioid-dependent fathers were more likely to be physically, sexually and psychologically aggressive toward the mother of their youngest biological child over the course of the relationship.

Partner abuse crops up often in drug court. Most clients are single mothers, a population subject to higher rates of abuse than other groups. Getting sober and piecing their lives back together is hard enough, but many of these women do so while mired in unhealthy or even dangerous relationships.

Rich has now assaulted Shelley three times in the past six years. One time he even threw her through a glass table. She says she stayed in the relationship because it’s what she felt she deserved.

“I’m already wounded, I’m already damaged goods, so therefore I can only have somebody that’s damaged as well,” she says.

According to social worker Constantino, this sentiment is common among recovering drug addicts.

“They are afraid of leaving and being alone,” she says. “They don’t know that there is help out there.”

Rich also had financial leverage over Shelley.

The gas and electric bill at her apartment was and still is in his name because when she moved out of her old place — the home of the drug dealer who sold her the nearly fatal fentanyl and a place the courts refused to let Chance live — she could not foot the utilities bill.

That’s when Rich, an alcoholic who Shelley thought had cleaned up his act, entered her life with a little bit of money and a

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The day after Shelley’s son Chance moved back in, Rich got drunk.

“He and I had an altercation and he just open-handed me across the seat,” she says.

“That’s when Chance came in, and (Rich) had Chance in a headlock and bit him in the cheek.”

Shelley called the police and filed charges, but they were dropped. Shelley didn’t testify against Rich, she says, because she had to be at work that day.

Eventually, Rich was arrested because his abusive behavior violated his parole.

He will be released in April if the charges are not re-filed.

Shelley has begun that process, but only after Gretchen Boone, her caseworker and Chance’s legal guardian, pushed her to do so. She is determined to keep Rich locked up, even if Shelley — who still texts Rich and talks to him on the phone — is less willing.

“It doesn’t bode well with me that a man bit your child and you do not want to pursue him to the full extent of the law,” the 26-year-old caseworker says about Shelley.

Drug abuse and domestic violence often

Shelley, a recovering drug addict, talks with the magistrate about her housing situation.

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When a client graduates from drug court, they receive this medallion.

PHOTO: TIMMY BRODERICK

“The skill set broken about if she can protect Chance,” says. “If that’s the case, we would have that is required she to ask for an extension for another year.”

Shelley may still talk with her ex-boybut she says she is serious about to be a successful friend, protecting Chance. She is filing a stalkorder against Rich and looking for a drug addict, ing new place so she can escape his financial leverage.

“I don’t want to live the rest of my life if you can transfer having to do this,” she says. “I need to work, I need to find a place, I need to do but I need to fit all these people that to something everything, in my life from (Chance’s) point, from my positive in life, point, therapists, doctors.” you would be A MORE POTENT COURT unstoppable.” ANTI-DRUG Currently, Washington’s drug court is

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going through the process of being officially recognized by the Ohio Supreme Court. Accreditation will allow them to apply for more state and federal grants and in turn add more clients and staff. The process should wrap up within the next year.

Hamilton County specialty court coordinator Nadermann hopes that surplus funds will allow them to expand services and help more people like Shelley. The original Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration grant was large enough to accommodate 15 clients and allow the court to sponsor zoo outings, passes to the YMCA and hold evening sessions. They even brought in a healthcare and exercise specialist.

“We’d all be exercising for 30 minutes in the big ol’ courtroom,” says Washington.

After the money ran out, Hamilton County Juvenile Court stretched the budget to keep the court afloat, but could not cover the costs of the additional services.

However, the absence of these perks over

The matriarchs of family treatment drug court — Magistrate Scheherazade Washington, Deanna Nadermann and custody investigator Megan Taylor.

PHOTO: TIMMY BRODERICK

the past few years has not diminished the court’s impact.

Earlier this year, a former client visited the court with his kids.

“I want you to thank Magistrate Washington,” the visitor told his children, “because she’s the reason you’re here today.”

Shelley feels similarly.

“She really cares about everybody there,” she says. “Her heart is there for us.”

Nadermann says that is by design.

Unlike most courts, the structure of drug court allows the magistrate to actually build relationships with the clients.

“You’ve got to build those relationships,” Nadermann says. “If they trust you, then you can find out what’s going on and you can change behavior.”

Washington is an unabashed optimist, having watched former addicts beat the odds for decades.

“If you can be a successful drug addict,

you can run the world,” she says. “The skill set that is required to be a successful drug addict, if you can transfer that to something positive in life, you would be unstoppable.”

Shelley would settle for some normalcy.

She’s no longer drinking, but the avalanche of responsibilities is hard to bear. All she wants is a stable life with regular responsibilities and people who care about her.

“Does all this crap ever really end?” she muses. “Even after all the legal part of it’s done?”

As the opioid crisis wears on, more and more people like Shelley risk losing their children due to their addictions. In the face of the trauma, however, Washington is optimistic that families can be repaired.

“You never know where the switch is, but we hope we’re planting seeds,” she says of those who come through the program.

“When it takes root, they may come out of the weather.”

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STUFF TO DO WEDNESDAY 04

EVENT: Workout on the Green Warmer days are finally upon us — time to break free of our winter bundles and routines. What better way to start than with community exercise classes outside?

Washington Park is hosting free workout sessions at 6 and 7 p.m. every Tuesday and Wednesday. Tuesdays will start with High Intensity Resistance Training Bootcamp followed by Hip Hop Yoga, both led by The LB Rookwood. Wednesdays are set to make residents sweat with Strength Bootcamp at 6 p.m., with instruction from YMCA trainers, and Turbokick at 7 p.m. with local fitness guru Cindy Thomas. All are welcome to come stretch out, push up and shake it off in the park. 6-8:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Free. Washington Park, 1230 Elm St., Over-theRhine, washingtonpark.org.

— MCKENZIE ESKRIDGE

THURSDAY 05

MUSIC: Thompson Square brings Country Pop to Live! at the Ludlow Garage. See Sound Advice on page 34.

garden?” 6 p.m. Thursday.

Free. Cincinnati Zoo, 3400 Vine St., Avondale, cincinnatizoo.org. — JUDE NOEL EVENT: Appalachian Studies Association Conference For the first time in more than a decade, the annual Appalachian Studies Association Conference will be held outside the region. The move seeks to encompass the evolving face of Appalachia, as generations begin to move to urban centers and other small towns. Despite these geographic changes, the three-day event, “ReStitching the Seams: Appalachia Beyond its Borders,” analyzes shared heritage and experiences despite disparate locations. Hosted by the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition, it will focus on six themes: diversity and inclusion, economic

sustainability, education, environmental sustainability, health and migration. Like a quilt, the region’s people are textured in rich history — the ASAC works like a thread to bring those stitches together into a cohesive understanding, and ultimately empower Appalachian people, near or far. Through Sunday. $135$185. Various locations with a headquarters at the Millennium Hotel, 150 W. Fifth St., Downtown, uacvoice.org/ asa2018. — MACKENZIE MANLEY

FRIDAY 06

LIT: Author Michael Henson appears at The Mercantile Library for the program, “Appalachia: Two New Takes on Fiction.” He’ll be reading from and discussing his latest book, Maggie Boylan.

Read an interview with Henson on page 22.

MUSIC: of Montreal Over the course of its 22-year history, Austin, Ga.’s of Montreal’s music has always reflected the iconic musical influences of mastermind Kevin Barnes, from the Kinks and The Beatles to David Bowie and Prince. But the way Barnes interprets and reinterprets those influences changes with nearly every album, making of Montreal’s discography one of the more fascinating artistic arcs to examine in modern Indie Rock. The band’s earliest work fit into the vintage, guitar-based Indie Pop aesthetic of Elephant 6 (with which the group was loosely associated), but by the mid’00s, Barnes was interjecting Electronic and Dance music sounds into his music. The albums in which those hookladen songs are presented are built around imaginative

concepts and storylines (with Barnes often using things from his personal life as inspiration), another aspect of the band that keeps it constantly evolving.

Barnes’ latest musical art project is White Is Relic/Irrealis Mood, another top-notch entry into the of Montreal canon and also the perfect example of the group’s everchanging creativity. Musically, Barnes was inspired by the 12-inch dance remixes of the ’80s, while his latest personal events (getting over a divorce and falling in love again) informed the lyrics, as did the most recent presidential election cycle, which Barnes says created a paranoia that he soothed by reading books by bigpicture thinkers like Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky and Ta-Nehisi Coates. 9 p.m.

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Cincinnati Zoo and part-time Bluegrass guitarist, joins his passions for wildlife and music at Tunes and Blooms, the zoo’s weekly music series that invites audiences to visit the botanical gardens, reveling in flora and Folk music. Jackson’s quintet, The Dry Ridge Band, will open at the Vine Street Village Stage, followed by a performance from the Comet Bluegrass All-Stars. Local singer-songwriter Randy Amann will play on the Safari Stage. Don’t let the grooves distract you from the surrounding plant life: the start of April means it’s Zoo Blooms season, when more than 100,000 tulips, (not to mention 1 million total plants ranging from hyacinths to daffodils) will be on display.

“Why tip-toe through the tulips,” says the zoo’s website, “when you can rock the

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MUSIC: Tunes and Blooms Cecil Jackson, a veteran elephant manager at the

PHOTO: JASON BECHTEL

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EVENT: Drink and Draw: Boozy Botany The Contemporary Arts Center is in the spring spirit with this latest Drink and Draw class, featuring a pop-up shop with goods and plants from local Paper + Petal. This is not an instructional art program but supplies and inspiration will be provided. You just need to bring yourself, your desire to draw some pretty plants and a wallet to buy some discounted drinks. 6-8 p.m.

Thursday. Free. Contemporary Arts Center, 44 E. Sixth St., Downtown, contemporaryartscenter.org. — MAIJA ZUMMO

Cincinnati Rollergirls Superhero Night

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HOMECOMING MUSICNOW

IN ASSOCIATION WITH

APRIL 28-29, 2018 xx CINCINNATI, OH xx SMALE PARK

FROM PAGE 19

Friday. $17; $20 day of show.

Woodward Theater, 1404 Main St., Over-the-Rhine, woodwardtheater.com.

— MIKE BREEN

SATURDAY 07

FRIDAY 4/27 MUSICNOW OPENING NIGHT CELEBRATION AT THE CINCINNATI MASONIC CENTER FEATURING:

MOUSE ON MARS—RED BIRD HOLLOW (BRYCE

& AARON DESSNER)—SAM AMIDON—LISA HANNIGAN SPANK ROCK—KRISTÍN ANNA VALTÝSDÓTTIR PLUS SPECIAL GUESTS (SEPARATELY TICKETED)

SATURDAY 4/28 HOMECOMING AT SMALE PARK:

THE NATIONAL FATHER JOHN MISTY

THE BREEDERS—LORD HURON—JULIEN BAKER MOUSE ON MARS—SAM AMIDON SPANK ROCK—LANZ PROJECTS ELECTRIC COUNTERPOINT & GARCIA COUNTERPOINT PERFORMED BY BRYCE DESSNER MUSICNOW PRESENTS AT FREEDOM CENTER: (OPEN TO HOMECOMING PASSHOLDERS)

CRASH ENSEMBLE PERFORMS HANS ABRAHAMSEN’S SCHNEE TYSHAWN SOREY TRIO—AND MORE

SUNDAY 4/29 HOMECOMING AT SMALE PARK:

THE NATIONAL

MUSIC: Chicago duo HIDE brings caustic Industrial sounds to the Northside Yacht Club. See Sound Advice on page 34.

EVENT: Northside Record Fair “This ain’t no Beatles and Elvis fair,” proclaims the Northside Record Fair’s Facebook page. Though there will undoubtedly be some early Rock LPs shuffled into the mix of music on sale, the event features an eclectic and all-encompassing selection of turntable material from Industrial Noise to Prog Rock, sure to please anyone who loves the musty smell of aged record sleeves. Local collectors like Torn Light Records and Trash Flow Radio’s Ken Katkin will be on site to trade and sell their vinyl, but keep an eye out for vendors who have made a road trip to the fair: Dayton’s Omega Records and Pittsburgh’s Mind Cure Records are often sources of hidden

PERFORM BOXER

gems. If you’re on the lookout for that rare demo tape or limited color pressing, now’s your chance to snag it.

11 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday. $5; $10 early bird with 10 a.m. entry. North Church, 4222 Hamilton Ave., Northside, northsiderecordfair.com.

— JUDE NOEL EVENT: Victory of Light Expo Open your third eye to the psychic world with this annual body-mind-spirit event. In a weekend packed with information, there will be workshops, readers, holistic healers, artists, live music and more to help you harness the power of your spirit through parapsychology, psychic development, intuitive healing, energy work and more. Workshops and presentations explore everything from medical intuition and the divine feminine to animal reincarnation, Tibetan singing bowls and the metaphysical power of trees. Special guest and clairvoyant Lisa Williams will be giving a ticketed live mediumship demonstration on Saturday (with audience reads), followed by a workshop on how to communicate with departed loved ones in spirit. In addition to seminars, vendors

will be on hand for some holistic and artistic shopping all weekend. 10 a.m.-7 p.m.

Saturday and Sunday. $15 single day; $25 weekend.

Sharonville Convention Center, 11355 Chester Road, Sharonville, victoryoflight. com. — MAIJA ZUMMO SPORTS: FC Cincinnati Home Opener Though the future of the franchise may be obscured by local politics and uncertainty, Cincinnati’s cult futbol fanbase can take solace in another season at Nippert Stadium, where the club has racked up an impressive 28-16-18 record in just 2 years of existence, notching an average of 21,199 attendees per game in regular season play in 2017. Following contests against Charleston Battery and Indy Eleven, FCC will break in their home turf against Louisville FC. This game also kicks off the season-long rivalry between the two clubs, known as the River Cities Cup: FCC has taken the title each year that the trophy’s been offered, but Louisville’s momentum (coming off of a 2017 championship run) may prove difficult to stop. Come cheer on your local club to make sure FCC has homefield advantage on its side.

PHOTO: KELLI BRAMBLE

FEIST—FUTURE ISLANDS MOSES SUMNEY—ALVVAYS—BIG THIEF

KAITLYN AURELIA SMITH—LISA HANNIGAN BEN SLOAN ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE (FEATURING A DELICATE MOTOR & BRYAN DEVENDORF)

HAVEN COUNTERPOINT PERFORMED BY BRYCE & AARON DESSNER MUSICNOW PRESENTS AT FREEDOM CENTER:

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EIGHTH BLACKBIRD WITH BONNIE ‘PRINCE’ BILLY & BRYCE DESSNER—CRASH ENSEMBLE AND MORE PLUS EXHIBITIONS AND PERFORMANCES AT THE CINCINNATI ART MUSEUM, CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTER, THE CINCINNATI BALLET, AND MORE

DAILY TICKETS & WEEKEND PASSES ON SALE NOW AT NTLHOMECOMING.COM & MUSICNOWFESTIVAL.ORG

FRIDAY 06

ONSTAGE: Beauty & the Beast Be Cincinnati Ballet’s guest to a tale as old as time. Enough with the references? It’s Beauty & the Beast, people. Experience the family-friendly ballet featuring students of the Otto M. Budig Academy. Soak in the vibrancy of the costumes, set, dance and narrative that mark this production as a classic. Watch as the rose petals drop to a storyline infused with nostalgia-soaked imagery of unlikely love and quirky people-turned-household-items backdropped by a regal mansion shrouded in mystery. Through Sunday. $20-$36. Aronoff Center, Procter & Gamble Hall, 650 Walnut St., Downtown, cballet.org. — MACKENZIE MANLEY

PHOTO: FIELD MEDIA

SATURDAY 07

EVENT: Monster Jam Triple Threat If your idea of an evening well spent involves massive trucks with names like Grave Digger and Alien Invasion popping wheelies and crushing much smaller trucks, Monster Jam is the answer to your prayers for vehicular carnage. This weekend, Monster Jam will bring its oversized competition to U.S. Bank Arena, featuring a sizeable list of events from a series of races to a freestyle stunt contest. There’s even a challenge to see which driver can do the most donuts in as little time. Because this is a “Triple Threat” event, you’ll also get the chance to see some smaller vehicles like ATVs and Speedsters join in the Jam. Arrive early for the pre-show Pit Party and get your chance to meet the folks behind the wheels of your favorite trucks. 1 and 7 p.m. Saturday; 1 p.m. Sunday. $16.50-$71.50. U.S. Bank Arena, 100 Broadway St., Downtown, usbankarena.com. — JUDE NOEL

7 p.m. Saturday. $10-$35.

Nippert Stadium, University of Cincinnati, 2700 Bearcat Way, Clifton, fccincinnati. com. — JUDE NOEL

SUNDAY 08

TUESDAY 10

MUSIC: JD McPherson brings Garage Rock crunch and soulful shake and shimmy to the 20th Century Theater. See Sound Advice on page 35.

YOUR WEEKEND TO DO LIST: LOCAL.CITYBEAT.COM

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

CLASSICAL: concert:nova presents Your Brain on Music, an evening that displays MRI images of the musicians’ brain activity while playing or listening to music, in combination with musical performances. Read more on page 25.

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EVENT: Art & Poetry at Findlay Market Some of Cincinnati’s most talented artists will unleash their words and crafts this Sunday at Findlay Market’s annual Art & Poetry event.

The afternoon features a poetry slam competition from noon to 3 p.m. along with work from local fiber artists, potters, painters and jewelry makers set up across the outdoor stands from 10 a.m-4 p.m. The cash-prize poetry competition serves as a celebration of National Poetry Month, a medium that legendary writer, activist and

human being Audre Lorde describes as “not a luxury” but “a vital necessity of our existence” (agreed Aude!

Agreed). Best to start resting your snapping fingers now. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sunday.

Free. Findlay Market, 1801 Race St., Over-the-Rhine, findlaymarket.org.

— MCKENZIE ESKRIDGE

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SPORTS: Cincinnati Rollergirls Superhero Night Cincinnati Rollergirls Superhero Night is back for the second year at Schmidt Memorial Fieldhouse as the CRG’s Black Sheep take on the West Virginia Roller Derby All-Stars at 6 p.m., and CRG’s Violet Lambs battle the Chicago Outfit Roller Derby shortly after. The busy night will feature two costume contests (one for kids, one for adults) during the first match’s half-time, a performance from Dance Flash Fusion at intermission and costumed superhero characters wandering around the arena. While we can’t deny the fun of dusting off our Wonder Woman crowns and squeezing into bright tights, our real heroes rock roller skates and elbow pads. 6-9 p.m. $12 advance, $15 at

door; $5 advance, $7 at door for ages 7-12; free 6 and under. Schmidt Memorial Fieldhouse, Xavier University, 3900 Winding Way, Evanston, cincinnatirollergirls.com.

— MCKENZIE ESKRIDGE

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ARTS & CULTURE Examining Lives Caught in an Appalachian Crisis Michael Henson’s new collection of stories, Maggie Boylan, examines the opioid scourge from a grass roots perspective

BY B R I A N B A K ER

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ince the 1980s, Michael Henson has counseled addicts and alcoholics for various local organizations, including the Talbert House. In retirement he has become a full-time writer and part-time musician, but he remains vitally connected to the issues that framed his long counseling career. For Henson, the transition to writing was natural.

“I got paid to have people tell me stories,” he says, during an interview at the Coffee Exchange of Pleasant Ridge. “A lot of what happens in the healing process is telling and hearing stories. My academic training was in literature, and a lot of what you do there is learn to interpret stories.”

Henson’s counseling and life experiences have long been grist for his writing mill; early works like Ransack and Tommy Perdue were centered around addiction.

His new book, Maggie Boylan (Ohio University Press), is a story collection where the connective tissue is the title character, a strong-willed, conniving Oxycontin addict in rural Appalachian Ohio. Henson notes that Maggie Boylan is a composite, based on the totality of his professional and personal observations.

Henson will debut his new book Friday at the Mercantile Library, sharing a program called “Appalachia: Two New Takes on Fiction” with Kentucky author Robert Gipe, whose Weedeater: An Illustrated Novel (also Ohio University Press) is the follow-up to Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel.

“It wasn’t just what I saw or heard as a counselor, it was also friends and reading the newspaper and hearing the news,” Henson says of the inspiration for Maggie Boylan. “The book is dedicated to the son of a friend who died of an overdose. Yes, it’s (from) the counseling, but it’s also just living in this world and knowing people in the city and the country who are dealing with these issues.”

Henson’s writing is impacted by his outreach work within the Appalachian community. He was a founding member of the Urban Appalachian Council in 1974 and worked for the group off and on for 13 of its 28 years. The council closed briefly

but was revived as the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition, which is the host sponsor for the Appalachian Studies Association Conference occurring here Thursday through Sunday and based at the Millennium Hotel.

The theme of the conference is “Restitching the Seams: Appalachia Beyond its Borders.” Activities include local tours, a film festival, and panels on a variety of topics including community health and Appalachian music. Some events are open to the public, such as a Saturday night showcase of musical and literary talent at Aronoff Center for the Arts’ Jarson-Kaplan Theater.

For more info, visit appalachianstudies.org.

“My band, Carter Bridge, will be playing on Thursday night at Herzog Studio, showcasing local Bluegrass talent,” Henson says. “And during the conference, I’ll be doing a panel on writing about the opiate crisis, reading from my work for another panel and coordinating a table for the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative so we can get our work out and let people know what we’re doing.”

The conference has a broad agenda and sets some historic precedents; it’s the first time that a community group and not a university has hosted it. “That’s significant,” Henson notes. “It’ll be a busy time.”

Maggie Boylan raises questions about law enforcement’s role in the opioid crisis.

Shady officers and corrupt officials crop up in the book’s storylines. While Henson believes certain aspects of the legal system are culpable, he’s quick to give credit where it’s due.

“I didn’t want to paint a totally negative picture, because there are heroic efforts happening by law enforcement,” he says. “I work with a community group called Mt. Washington Cares! and law enforcement is part of our effort. We have an officer who’s been a part of the countywide effort, and he started out with a lock-them-up attitude.

He’s come around to say that we can’t arrest our way out of this problem. He’s been a major part of the effort to get needle exchange programs, quick response teams and other more holistic responses to the drug problem.”

Henson will be at this week’s Appalachian Studies Association Conference.

PHOTO: ELISSA POGUE

Henson wanted to address the responsibility of pharmaceutical companies in fueling the opioid epidemic in Maggie Boylan, but the narrative just didn’t steer that way.

“I had hoped to expose the nefariousness of the corporate structures that brought this crisis to us, but the story wouldn’t allow for that,” he says. “The characters just wanted to tell their stories; they didn’t want to deal with all that political stuff.

“I do writing about that in other ways, though,” he continues. “I’ve got a book of essays on poverty and addiction that I’m trying to sell called Hammered, and I blog for an online magazine called The Fix about addiction and recovery. I’ve written essays where I’d like you to support needle exchange or expansion of treatment, and I think it’s crazy that we’re cutting Medicaid when we’ve had a 25 percent increase in overdose deaths in this county in the last year.

“Telling stories, writing stories, is kind of archaic. If I was trying to be effective, I’d be doing a podcast or creating a game you play with your thumbs.”

There’s no resolution in Maggie Boylan.

Like the opioid crisis, an end has not presented itself. Henson will continue to document the fictional lives and real-life struggles of people whose existence is plagued by addiction, and he’s begun a book that could feature one of his heroic cops from Maggie Boylan as its lead character.

Henson retired with the intent of never counseling again but rather addressing addiction from a global perspective through his writing. He hopes Maggie Boylan hits its mark in a variety of ways.

“In counseling, it’s a one-on-one thing and you’re patching people up all the time,” he says. “I got tired of patching people up and I wanted to see a social response. It’s my hope that people see Maggie Boylan as a work of art. When I sit down to do these stories or poems, I try to think as an artist, and an artist doesn’t come up with solutions, an artist comes up with questions.”

Michael Henson will appear at The Mercantile Library (414 Walnut St., Downtown) at 5 p.m. Friday. It’s free and open to all. To attend, email reservations@ mercantilelibrary.com.

BIG PICTURE

UC’s ‘Bloody’ 1968 Spring Arts Festival

BY S T E V EN R O S EN

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This is the 50th anniversary of the most Record wrote a front-page story describing eventful year of the 1960s, itself a decade Nitsch’s appearance. of change and upheaval, and it will see all According to that story, he brought manner of media remembrances before a gutted 200-pound carcass of a pig to 2019 arrives. It was an excitingly creative the hall and, while volunteers played on yet dangerous time — blood was spilled in band instruments, encouraged the nearthe streets here and overseas in America’s capacity crowd to become involved as he awful, losing war in Vietnam. became stained with a bright red liquid Blood was spilled at University of that appeared to be blood. (He told CityCincinnati, too, 50 years ago this week. Or Beat he preferred to use blood whenever so it appeared to anyone who attended possible in his actions and believes he the “action” performed on April 4, 1968 used it in Cincinnati.) by the extraordinarily controversial, “In the final stages of the performance, confrontational Austrian performance artist Hermann Nitsch. He was at the school’s 1968 Spring Arts Festival, which has been called by historian/ blogger Greg Hand “the most avant-garde week in Cincinnati history.”

“It was a great success,” says Nitsch, during a Skype phone interview from his Austrian offices.

(His assistant helped him reply to questions.)

The festival featured a who’s who of Contemporary anti-establishment, avant-garde artists — radiHermann Nitsch in a photo supplied by his foundation cal counterculture band The Fugs, performance/ PHOTO: GEORG SOULEK media artist Nam June Paik with the now-legendary topless cellist Charlotte Moorman, Nitsch became extremely involved with experimental filmmakers Jonas Mekas, his art and after tossing a few entrails at Peter Kubelka and Jud Yalkut, and more. the audience it brought back participation But even among them, Nitsch was from the crowd in what could be likened special. Now 78, he has developed an interto a pie-throwing fight,” the News Record national reputation as a forceful painter. reported.

But in the late 1950s and through the 1960s, The film presents not quite so blithe a the European performances of his Orgien picture. At times, it seems to be chroniMysterien Theatre caused him to be jailed cling some kind of cult sacrifice — Nitsch, for public indecency. Ritualistic in nature, in a white shirt and dark pants, sticks his especially in their use of animal carcasses, hands inside the open belly of the hanging his work struggled to find a cathartic, pig; a barefoot student lies on the floor as audience-participatory way to show the Nitsch pours the liquid redness from a vial human need for emotional and physical onto him; students mill about the “bloody” release. He also, maybe, was commenting floor. on our propensity for violence. He held It’s impossible to watch now and not actions that called on his audiences to, in think of American violence. Perhaps most the words of his Nitsch Foundation’s webremarkable is that Nitsch’s action occurred site, “pour and slop fluids” like wine, hot after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assaswater, Chasselas (a wine grape), lukewarm sinated earlier in the evening in Memphis. water, urine, hot blood serum, alcohol, Some in attendance may not have even blood, greasy wash water, paint and “etc.” known yet.

But he had never come to the United “Before I started to perform, Jonas States before arriving in 1968 for two Mekas told me about Martin Luther King actions in New York City and one in Cinand asked if I wanted to say that this is cinnati. It’s been hard to find people who dedicated for (him),” Nitsch says. “For me, remember attending his April 4 perforthe death of Martin Luther King was so sad. mance in the Great Hall of UC’s Tangeman (But) for me, it would be bad to connect University Center. But the late Cincinnati this sad incident with my work. But I knew filmmaker Steve Gebhardt, with partner about the death, and in my heart it was Bill Fries, made a 9-minute film of the there. That action in Cincinnati was not event, which can be rented from The a normal action. It was a really intensive Film-Makers’ Cooperative. And UC’s News action.”

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CLASSICAL MUSIC

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This Is Your Brain on Music

BY A N N E A R EN S T EI N

In 2007, Daniel Levitin published This is deals with in milliseconds. And if you’re Your Brain on Music, a groundbreaking reading music, it’s even more complex.” study of how — as the title suggests — the Some of the brain imagery to be shown human brain creates and responds to belongs to Ted Nelson, concert:nova music. It prompted scientists and musico-artistic director and a cellist. “As I was cians to engage in collaborative research going through the MRI, I listened to Bach’s and performances. first cello suite. Then One example they asked me to play occurred here in the air cello. Appar2009, when the ently, different parts innovative chamber of my brain lit up,” he music ensemble says, grinning. concert:nova Soprano Kemper performed in darkFlorin (Todd Florin’s ness, followed by a wife) was able to sing discussion with a as she went through neurologist. the MRI, so audiNow, concert:nova ences will view what is back for more, preis called a “cinematic senting a Your Brain MRI,” one that the on Music program doctors will attempt Tuesday at the Woodto sync with her voice ward Theater and as she sings works by Ixi Chen, concert:nova artistic director April 11 at Cincinnati Schubert and Luciano Children’s Hospital Berio during the PHOTO: PROVIDED Medical Center. This program. time, audiences will The program does see MRI images of the players’ brains not include complete performance pieces, during the program and hear University so that musicians and audiences can focus of Cincinnati neuro-radiologist Lily Wang on specific responses to briefer musical interpret what she sees. The MRIs were selections. Chen cites the fifth movement of done in advance of the program, while Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14, Opus 131 the individual concert:nova musicians as an example of how the program will work. listened to or made music.

“There are all these weird, incomplete There will also be additional comphrases,” she says. “We may play one mentary from Todd Florin, a professor of phrase, stop, ask the audience what they emergency medicine at University of Cinhear, and then replay it all the way through, cinnati, Children’s Hospital physician and so it becomes an engaging, immersive concert:nova board member. “This will be musical experience.” more an experience than a performance,” A movement from Mozart’s Clarinet he says.

Quintet will focus on the Mozart effect, The idea came about after Florin, who popularized by a French researcher who also conducts a summer music festival in claimed that listening to Mozart helped Cape Cod, read about and shared program boost intelligence. The theory spawned information with Ixi Chen, concert:nova’s a line of CDs and was taken to heart by a managing artistic director and clarinetgeneration of expectant mothers. ist, about a two-day workshop on music Although it wasn’t possible to include and wellness last year in Washington, D.C. live EEGs (electroencephalograms) for Chen then talked to retired UC neurosurthis performance, Chen doesn’t rule geon John Tew about a Music and Medithat out as a future possibility. She wants cine program.

Music and Medicine to be a regular part of “I knew about this workshop, so when concert:nova’s schedule.

Ixi told me she wanted to demonstrate Florin agrees this program scratches the how a brain responds to music, it was surface — there is so much more to learn a wonderful opportunity to bring this concerning the brain on music. information to a wider public,” Tew says.

“We want to explore how music affects “Music’s power to heal goes back to mental illness and vice versa,” he says. ancient times,” he adds, referring to the “Why can some people work with music Orpheus legend and the biblical stories playing and others can’t? When it comes of David. “And I’ve seen what a powerful to the intersection of music and biology, impact it had on my own patients.” there’s a real smorgasbord.”

He introduced Chen to Wang, who concert:nova presents Your Brain on is also a violinist. Everyone then began Music 8 p.m. Tuesday at The Woodward collaborating on this program. Their Theater (1404 Main St. in Over-the-Rhine) task was daunting. For Florin, confrontand 7:30 p.m. April 11 at Sabin Auditorium, ing the brain’s capacity — especially for Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Cenmusic — is awe-inspiring. ter (3333 Burnet Ave., Avondale). Tickets/ “The complexity is staggering,” he says. more info: concertnova.com.

“It’s a complicated set of loops the brain

LIT

New Book Shows the Unknown Tony Pérez

BY JAS O N G A R G A N O

Author John Erardi PHOTO: GINA ERARDI

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

John Erardi will discuss Tony Pérez: From Cuba To Cooperstown at 7 p.m. April 11 at Joseph-Beth Booksellers (2692 Madison Road, Norwood). More info: josephbeth. com.

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had never heard of Pérez.

“It’s almost incomprehensible to me that somebody could know about the Big Red Machine, know about Pete Rose and Johnny Bench, and not know about Tony Pérez,” Erardi says of the cab driver. “To somehow grow up in Cuba as a big baseball fan and not know Tony Pérez? That explains the difference between a free society and a Communist one — they just don’t let the news through.”

Erardi was also determined to relay the impact Pérez’s wife, Pituka, had on his life and career as a Cuban in America who initially spoke little English and was exiled from his homeland.

It’s not a stretch to say that The Big Red Machine remains Cincinnati’s best-known export, a collection of diverse, uniquely talented men who transcended sports. It’s also not a surprise that many Reds fans claim Pérez as their favorite player.

“I still hear it from people to this day — that Tony was their favorite Red,” Erardi says. “I kind of wrote the book not just for people that were of that era but also for those that came along after, those who didn’t know who he was and wanted to know why he exceeded his statistics.”

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How can it be that Tony Pérez, the glue that held the immortal Big Red Machine together, has never had a book written about him? Pérez — who played for the Cincinnati Reds from 1964 to 1976 and from 1984 until his retirement in 1986 — is also the only player from the baseball-mad country of Cuba enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Yet multiple generations of Cubans have never even heard of the guy known in these parts as “The Big Dog.” John Erardi’s incisive and impressively researched new book, Tony Pérez: From Cuba To Cooperstown (Orange Frazer Press), aims to right this wrong and shed light on a player known as much for his qualities as a person as for his skills as a baseball player.

“Tony is so modest and humble,” Erardi says in a recent phone interview. “What made him a great teammate is also what made him a reluctant book subject: He just doesn’t have an ego, doesn’t want to beat his chest. He feels like he’s better off operating underneath the radar, which is why (Reds Manager) Sparky Anderson always felt he could go to Tony to get control of the clubhouse, because Tony could move among all the factions. Whether it be the Latinos, the Caucasians or the AfricanAmericans, Tony had the mutual respect of everybody because of that lack of ego, lack of an agenda. I think that’s largely why there is no biography of him until now — he didn’t want one.”

Erardi, who covered Pérez for more than three decades as a staff writer at The Cincinnati Enquirer Enquirer, wasn’t surprised when his invitation to collaborate with him on a biography was turned down.

Erardi’s first order of business was to visit Pérez’s native Cuba. He was determined to uncover how Pérez’s roots influenced who he became as a member of the Cincinnati Reds, and that meant researching a topic his subject has rarely addressed publicly — the political situation in Cuba under Fidel Castro during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

At age 17 in 1960, Pérez reported to the Reds’ rookie league franchise in Geneva, N.Y., where he was joined by another future Hall of Famer, Pete Rose. Pérez would return to his family in Cuba during off-seasons, but that would change following the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 — he barely made it back to the U.S. for the 1963 season, after which his father told him to stay in America until things calmed down.

It would be 10 years before Pérez returned to Cuba, where his exploits as an All Star with the Reds were barely known due to Castro’s restriction on all things American, especially “defectors” like Pérez.

Erardi opens the book with a telling anecdote about his trip to Cuba in 2015 and an encounter he had with a cab driver who, despite being a massive baseball fan,

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27 Years of Live Stand-Up Comedy in Cincinnati!

TV

One ‘Wild Wild’ Docuseries

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

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April 5 - 8

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Just 15 minutes from downtown in Mongtomery!

3 Pool Tables • Large Patio

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If “Rajneeshpuram” doesn’t ring a bell, literal blink-and-you-miss-it clues and revyou’re not alone. The self-made commuelations as this unusual story unfolds. Even nity that seemingly popped up overnight still, there are many questions left unanon a Central Oregon ranch in 1981 and swered. Some facets are left unexplored, as the controversies that surrounded it have it would be impossible to cover every angle been largely forgotten by those not directly in six hour-long installments. affected. In this time of documentaries Forget all the click-baity reviews duband dramas rehashing highly publicized bing Wild Wild Country a “sex cult doc” true crimes, Wild Wild Country (Netflix) — the truth is far more complicated and hits a sweet spot by exploring an unbelievfascinating than a group of horny hippies able real-life American saga that is still living on a commune. And to compare it to news to many viewers. other cult-demystifying fare would miss While I believe it’s best to enter this the point, because it’s a much larger story docuseries as blindly as possible (as I did), involving American freedoms, laws, capiWild Wild Country follows a tiny Oregon talism, working the system and fighting it. town, the Rajneesh movement inspired by an Indian guru and the explosive results when the two intersect.

When members of the so-called cult buy a 64,000-acre property in Wasco County and quickly transform it into a self-suf self-sufficient bustling city called Rajneeshpuram, residents in surrounding areas — mostly older, conservative retirees — quickly grow concerned. What unfurls is a chain reaction based White robe-wearing Bhagwan surrounded by his cult’s followers in fear: fear by locals of this strange group all clad PHOTO: COURTESY NETFLIX in red, orange and purple infiltrating their sleepy farming town; fear by the sannyasins, as When you think of “fringe groups” and the members were called, that the town who might join them (because, let’s be would try to kick them out of what’s legally honest, who willingly joins a “cult”?), you theirs. All the while, these fears further might think of people in desperate posiescalate to catastrophic levels. tions with nowhere else to turn. That might At the risk of comparing very different be true of some sannyasins, but many beasts, this miniseries gives Making a of them were very successful, educated, Murderer a run for its money in terms of intelligent and often wealthy people lookbinge-ability, crazy twists and unforgeting for that esoteric “something more.” At table characters. Wild Wild Country offers Rajneeshpuram, people from all over the a far more unbiased view that explores world and all walks of life could put their voices and faults on both sides. Footskills to work and actually build a commuage comes mostly from a treasure trove nity. But what went on behind the scenes of archived video and news clips, with was conversely less than idealistic — to say contemporary interviews from former the least. members and Oregonians. These people Enigmatic leader Bhagwan isn’t even the are all biased — it would be difficult to find most interesting character at play. In fact, a first-person account that wasn’t tainted, little time is devoted to him in comparison because everyone involved was very much to his secretary-turned-spokespersonon one side or the other. turned-de-facto-leader Ma Anand Sheela, By presenting these differing views side the series’ true star. It is Sheela who uses by side to create an even playing field, it her experience in and knowledge of the actually gives more of a fair view than, say, U.S. to transform the group from a small Making a Murderer Murderer. Those filmmakers gathering of internationals in an Indian wanted the audience to walk away rooting slum to an incorporated American city for Steven Avery. Here, directors Chapman with a population of 7,000, complete with and Maclain Way put the ball in your court. its own banking system and law enforceGood luck taking sides. ment. The lengths she is willing to go to From the very beginning, each episode protect Rajneeshpuram — or advance throws you into the thick of the action, herself and her own power, you decide — is leaving you (or at least me) yelling, “What?!” nothing short of remarkable. at the screen throughout the series. With Contact Jac Kern: @jackern the pacing of a runaway train, there are

FILM

Wes Anderson’s Canine Kinship

BY T T S T ER N - EN ZI

Boss is one of the exiles on Isle of Dogs.

PHOTO: FOX SE ARCHLIGHT PICTURES

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Boss (Bill Murray) and Duke (Jeff Goldblum), who all have pleasant memories of human companionship — the voice work of these actors seems to lovingly mimic the rhyme and rhythms of their characters’ former masters. So when Atari (Koyu Rankin) steals a plane and crash-lands on the isle in search of his own exiled dog, it comes as no surprise that Rex is able to convince the others to help the young boy. Even Chief supports the pack, but he always starts off pulling as the others push forward.

In Anderson’s live-action features, his actors usually have to invest their characters with their own personal charisma and warmth, as Anderson seems to resist doing that for them in his screenplays and removed directing style. Bill Murray, for instance, seems to perpetually be playing “Bill Murray” in Anderson projects; we enjoy him for being himself, but we know he’s never going to cut loose and give us even more of his prismatic charm, because that would unsettle the ironically detached Anderson vibe.

But here, I found a real sense of kinship among the dogs, and the magic of Isle of Dogs is in full bloom in their interactions.

We see their unity of purpose, but also understand that it is not always cohesive from the onset. Chief chafes under the quickly proclaimed leadership of Rex. It would be easy to see the pack as a collection of alpha dogs — that is how Chief envisions them — but they aren’t. The interplay between Chief and Rex never results in the antagonistic conflict we might assume.

Anderson shows us how each of these willful characters bends without breaking.

And in doing so, Anderson loosens up, too. Isle of Dogs is earthy and elemental in its depiction of human qualities, and it’s a blueprint that hopefully the writer-director will learn to apply to his future live-action films. A film is more than just the carefully appointed details of its frames. (Now playing) (PG-13) Grade: B+

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For most of his career, I have had a begrudging respect for the fastidious aesthetic of Wes Anderson. There is an undeniable craft on display in every single frame that he composes, one that is meticulous and filled with obvious wit.

His films live and breathe in the minute, with carefully orchestrated details of the somewhat hermetically sealed worlds of his characters.

From 1996’s Bottle Rocket to 2014’s Grand Budapest Hotel, the characters in his live-action films are archly sketched types, too smart by a noticeable degree and too easily bothered by the mundane world around them. It almost always feels like they exert a force of will or personality to alter their realities. That was the effect of Wes-world. That sense came, first and foremost, from the writer-director, as if the characters were merely a collection of variations of his own persona, and it was Anderson sharing his dreamscape with us.

So where does that leave his two stopmotion animation works — 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and now Isle of Dogs? I would argue that these films, which put the artifice at the forefront, offer a truer expression of the human element because we know and recognize that these characters are stand-ins. They aren’t simply human markers or placeholders (better yet, not avatars).

We understand that the animals represent ideals and principles that his humans fail to achieve, but the animals still have faults, failings and primal urges utterly familiar to us. They are not abstractions, as I sometimes feel Anderson allows his live-action human characters to become.

In Isle of Dogs, which is set in Japan, the canines have been exiled to a trash heap of an island after a severe case of dog flu overtakes their population and threatens the routine stability of human life. There we meet the characters. Chief (voiced by Bryan Cranston) is a rascally stray perpetually on the verge of a sharp biting attack because he is wounded and unfamiliar with human contact. He might want to be Man’s Best Friend, but life hasn’t given him a reason to trust a man enough to be loyal.

His cohorts on the island are Rex (Edward Norton), King (Bob Balaban),

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Craft Taco Destinations

FOOD & DRINK

Find inventive fillings and a culinary approach to Mexican street food at these six taco stops

BY PA M A M I TC H E L L

T

acos exemplify the best of street food — in this case, Mexican street food. Some of the most popular food trucks in America dish out savory, spicy combos of meats and veggies on fresh corn tortillas. And taquerias — brick-and-mortar versions of those food trucks — have been reliable places for inexpensive, delicious meals for decades. Add margaritas and other cocktails and expand the range of fillings for the tortillas and you’ve got a slightly upscale version of the street staple.

Over the past few years, the “craft taco” eatery has become quite the thing in our town and a recent addition cropped up early this year in Covington. Its location, at the corner of Madison Avenue and Seventh Street, couldn’t be better for this kind of casual food. Agave & Rye faces both Hotel Covington and The Madison Event Center and is just around the corner from the Braxton Brewing Company. With its full bar and kitchen open until 2 a.m. seven nights a week, this glossy taqueria has been an instant hit for patrons of those neighboring establishments and pulls in families and young couples earlier in the evening as well.

Interestingly, though, owner Yavonne Sarber said she doesn’t consider Agave & Rye to be a Mexican restaurant. “The taco is a vessel for our food,” she said, and the food — taco fillings — ranges across many cuisine influences.

Mexican or not, except for a few small

side dishes and a couple of desserts, the menu consists entirely of tacos ($3-$5).

They’re organized as “Graze” for meatbased fillings, “Swim” for fish-filled tortillas and “Grow” for veggie versions.

Graze is the largest category, with eight different options that include a taco based on kangaroo meat — we didn’t try that one — as well as chicken, pork, beef and duck confit. Altogether we selected from 15 taco options, including a monthly feature with “cheese-filled mini beef meatballs, mac and cheese, white cheddar and vodka sauce.”

We skipped that one, too.

One unusual feature of the menu is that each taco comes in a crispy corn shell and a soft flour tortilla. The filling goes Agave & Rye inside the crispy taco and 633 Madison Ave., the flour tortilla surrounds Covington, the whole shebang. Sarber 859-360-1060, told me later that because agaveandrye.com. they intended to serve Hours: 11 a.m.-2 a.m. hefty portions of the food tortilla but they’re pretty daily. inside the tacos, they went impossible to eat as a taco with this double wrapping. unless there’s almost no Since I’ve always filling. With Agave & Rye thought the gold standard tacos, you get that yummy of good tacos should be corn crunch with every a soft corn shell — sometimes two, if the bite while the firmer flour tortilla holds it fillings are heavy — I couldn’t see how this all together. was going to work. Strangely enough, my For our meal, the three of us selected friends and I all gave this innovation a six tacos, two sides and a cocktail each. thumbs-up. I’ve always liked a crispy corn The restaurant was almost full and the bar

More Tacos to Try

BY PA M A M I TC H E L L

More recently, two relatively upscale taquerias opened on opposite sides of the Ohio River. At Casa Figueroa, owner Heather Byer renovated and beautifully decorated a Pleasant Ridge building, then developed a tacos-heavy menu starring a “Cochinita” taco with barbecue pork, salsa verde

and orange-cured onions, and the “Barbacoa” with roast beef, pico de gallo and cotija cheese. Across the river, Frida 602 — named after and whimsically decorated to honor the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo — has high demand for both its Brussels sprouts taco with smoked peanut salsa, and one called “Gobernador” with shrimp, bacon and shaved lettuce. Casa Figueroa, 6112 Montgomery Road, Pleasant Ridge, casafig.com. Frida 602, 602 Main St., Covington, fridaonmain.com.

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

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

A couple of years ago, the talented Josh Campbell — formerly chef at Mayberry downtown — became chef/ owner at Django in Northside and started making tacos and other Mexican-style foods.

Among his tacos, patrons love the fried chicken with

pimento cheese and honey, and the veggie with butternut squash, spicy broccoli, mushrooms and quinoa. Django Western Taco, 4172 Hamilton Ave., Northside, djangonorthside.com.

service a little slow, although the manager apologized repeatedly for the delay in serving our drinks: a house cocktail based on tequila and St-Germain, a tall coffee drink on ice with mezcal and the house margarita.

The food came out much faster. A taco called The Bee’s Knees would have been better if the chicken in it hadn’t been too dry, but we all loved The Alderman — ancho grilled steak with Mexican street corn salad and a good salsa. The Swanky One came in a fried wonton shell — the only non-tortilla wrapped taco — with a filling of ahi tuna poke, serrano aioli and guacamole. It tasted good, but the shell fell apart when you picked it up. One of the veggie tacos, The Bang Bang, hit the right notes with crispy cauliflower, spicy carrots and a creamy cheese sauce.

We enjoyed the food and drinks, but what I liked best was the décor and vibe of the place. Sarber and her husband, Wade, the chef, gutted the diner that had previously been in this location and selected a color scheme played out in murals, paintings, chandeliers and other light fixtures and a custom bar. The music on the sound system was upbeat, familiar and not too loud, and the space between various types of tables made for a cozy but not crowded feel.

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Cincinnati gained another excellent place to try Mexican street food when Mazunte set up shop in Madisonville

late in 2013. Although it has a menu that goes beyond tacos, they make some dandy ones.

Among their most popular are the fish tacos, beer battered or grilled with Mexican slaw and avocado salsa. Mazunte, 5207 Madison Road, Madisonville, mazuntetacos.com.

PHOTO: HAILEY BOLLINGER

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Bakersfield set the standard for taco deliciousness here when it opened its casual, ultra-hip spot on Vine Street in Over-the-Rhine at the beginning of 2012. Among their standout tacos are the vegetarian huitlacoche with corn truffles, roasted poblano and cotija cheese, and the meaty short rib with queso fresco and crema. Bakersfield, 1213 Vine St., OTR, bakersfieldtacos.com.

Agave & Rye uses taco shells as a vessel for unique fillings.

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C I T Y B E AT. C O M

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THE DISH

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Finally: A Healthy Donut?

BY L AU R EN M O R E T TO

The owner of Charnee’s Mindful Donuts is making the world a tastier place with whimsically decorated, relatively guilt-free donuts.

Cortney Carnes, a resident of Bellevue, honed her baking skills while working at Happy Belly, a healthy-food-focused café in Over-the-Rhine.

There, owner Abby Reck Reckman urged her to explore her passion for sweets by experimenting with differCharnee’s wellness-focused sweets are dairy, gluten and grain free. ent donut recipes. Though the establishment closed PHOTO: HAILEY BOLLINGER in May 2016, Carnes’ love for the pastry extended beyond her time there, as did her fanbase. date, but flavors change seasonally.

That same year, she was approached The most captivating part of Charnees’ by the team at Off the Vine Juice Bar, who Mindful Donuts are the designs. Each invited her to hold a pop-up shop at their golf-ball sized mini is covered with a layer store. Today, you can find her products of glaze and unique toppings like chunks there, as well as at The City Flea, Little Flour of dark chocolate or shredded coconut. The Baked Goods and DCCH Farmers Market. orange turmeric is especially eye-catching Along with classic and mini donuts, she with its sulfur-yellow glaze and bullseyealso takes specialty cake orders. shaped drizzle of chocolate.

Carnes’ mindful approach to baking is Emphasizing nutrition in her donuts is something you can both taste and feel in a move that stems from Carnes’ love for her donuts — they are light and energizing health and wellness, which she formed (and not in the usual sugar-rush way). after years spent in a tumultuous relationAs a one-woman team operating out of a ship with food. commercial kitchen in Northern Kentucky, “When I was a young female in high baking these small-batch treats is an school, trying to fit in and feel beautiful involved process. First, Carnes prepares and all of those things, (I was) trying to and spices the flour — usually either figure out the right diet in order to sustain almond or coconut. The next day, she works this image. And honestly, I always ended with the wet ingredients and commences up feeling like crap when I would restrict the baking process. The donuts are then myself or when I would indulge in sugar,” placed in a freezer and taken out the folshe says. “I was trying to get away from lowing day for glazing. The glazes are made sugar and processed foods and just things with raw cashew, coconut oil, maple, honey, my body couldn’t use for good.” egg or fruit.

This mindset led her to pursue a more The finished product is a gluten-, dairysubstantial diet that she carried with her and grain-free delicacy that makes satisfyinto adulthood. ing your sweet tooth accessible to those But food would become more to her than with assorted food allergies and enjoyable a way to gain sustenance. When stressed or to the general population as well. The dense anxious, she would pick a recipe to make desserts are moist, and the glaze seems to and add personal touches, mixing flavors carry most of the sweetness, making them or swapping ingredients for healthier ones. a well-rounded treat.

Then, she would take the final product and Carnes is committed to incorporating give it away to coworkers. organic and local ingredients whenever “They didn’t seem to mind and loving othpossible; she even sources herbs like basil ers by making them treats was the beginand thyme from her mother’s garden — ning to my healing process,” she says.

Gone to Pot, a backyard nursery in Fort In the future, Carnes is interested in Mitchell — and utilizes local farmers starting a joint venture with her mother or markets for other ingredients, like the fresh going mobile with a business on wheels. beets used in her chocolate donut recipe.

But for now, she’s concentrating on putting For the adventurous foodie, Carnes’ out beautiful, tasty creations for loyal cusorange turmeric donut boasts vibrant tomers to savor. flavors. There’s the slight bitterness from “For those that can’t eat wheat or simply the turmeric and a hint of sweetness from (do) not want to consume a lot of sugar, I the glaze that complement each other in want them to feel good about this one decian unexpected way. The peanut butter sion in their day,” she says. beet donut is one of her most flavorful Find Charnee’s Mindful Donuts at faceand approachable. Other options include book.com/charneesmindfuldonuts. samoa cookie, super matcha and tahini

CLASSES & EVENTS WEDNESAY 04

Cinnamon Rolls Workshop — A hands-on class where you’ll learn to make ooey, gooey fresh-from-the-oven cinnamon rolls. The instructor will also demonstrate how to make Cincy favorite, schnecken, a variation on a cinnamon bun. 6-9 p.m. $75. Tablespoon Cooking Co., Findlay Kitchen, 1719 Elm St., Over-the-Rhine, tablespooncookingco.com/ classes.

Washington Platform Oyster Festival — The 32nd-annual Oyster Festival features more than 40 bivalves so suck, shuck and eat raw. There are freshshucked oysters on the half shell, firecracker oysters, oysters giovanese and oyster roulette — a fun game where one of the oysters on your plate is loaded with Dave’s Insanity Hot Sauce.

Through May 12. Prices vary.

Washington Platform, 1000 Elm St., Downtown, washingtonplatform.com.

THURSDAY 05

A Steakhouse Dinner at Home — In this hands-on class, students will learn how to make an arugula salad with pears and walnuts, grilled filet mignon with lemon-butter crabmeat, three cheese baked penne, prosciutto-wrapped asparagus and apple dumplings with cinnamon sauce. 6-8:30 p.m. $75. The Cooking School at Jungle Jim’s, 5440 Dixie Highway, Fairfield, junglejims.com.

Ladies Night Out at Vinoklet — Head to the winery for an evening of “fine wine and fine food.” Dinner includes six wine tastings, a half-bottle of wine and bites.

7 p.m. $49.95. Vinoklet Winery, 11069 Colerain Ave., Colerain, vinokletwines.com.

SATURDAY 07

Be Our Guest Tea Parties at the Contemporary Arts Center — Before the ballet’s performances of Beauty & The Beast, head to the CAC for a tea featuring a performance from either the Cincinnati Boychoir, the Cincinnati Balia!, Flying Cloud Academy of Vintage Dance or the Natyahasta School of Dance. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Free.

The Contemporary Arts Center, 44 E. Sixth St., Downtown, guide.artswave.org.

Brew House 29th-Annual Chili Cookoff — All you need to do to enter the Brew House Chili Cookoff is bring a crockpot full of chili to the restaurant before 2 p.m. The general winner takes home a $200 prize; the vegetarian winner takes home $100. The judges will accept creative bribes, which will count to your overall score. 2 p.m. entry; 3 p.m. tasting. Free. Brew House, 1047 E. McMillan St., Walnut Hills, facebook.com/ brewhousecincinnati.

Lebanon Chocolate Walk — The second-annual Chocolate Walk in downtown

MONDAY 09

Darkness Brewing and Elusive Cow Beer Dinner — The Elusive Cow chef and owner Jim Fisher will serve four original recipes made with neighboring Darkness Brewing beer. The four courses will also be paired with four pours of Darkness brews. Darkness founders Eric and Ron will be on hand to talk beer, while Jim talks food. 7 p.m. $25. Elusive Cow, 519 Fairfield Ave., Bellevue, Ky., brownpapertick brownpapertickets.com/event/3353978.

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Baseball, Burgers and Beer — Chef Dana Adkins leads this class on crafting creative burger and side pairings. The menu includes a barbecue beef burger with buttermilk onion straws, New American potato salad with aged cheddar and bacon and double Belgian donuts. 6:30-9 p.m. $55. Cooks’Wares, 11344 Montgomery Road, Harper’s Point, cookswaresonline. com.

TUESDAY 10

Steakhouse Favorites — Learn how to prepare the perfect steak with the correct temperature and glistening sear. Class includes instructions on how to make classic sides, as well as wine and beer. 6-9 p.m. $75. Tablespoon Cooking Co., Findlay Kitchen, 1719 Elm St., Over-the-Rhine, tablespooncookingco.com/ classes.

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

Ballet + Brunch — Close out the Cincinnati Ballet’s season with dance and a meal at the Radisson Hotel in Covington. 11 a.m.-1 p.m.

Free with pre-registration.

Radisson Hotel, 668 W. Fifth St., Downtown, cballet.org.

Lebanon stops at 20 different shops and eateries around the historic main street. Each destination includes a high-quality treat, and the evening ends with a wine and beer reception with live music, a chocolate fountain, cash bar and more.

6-10 p.m. $25. Lebanon Conference and Banquet Center, 121 S. Broadway St., Lebanon, eventbrite. com/e/chocolate-walk-tick com/e/chocolate-walk-tickets-44034579613.

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FRIDAY 06

Afternoon Tea at the Taft — Visit the Taft Museum of Art for a unique afternoon tea experience. There

will be a viewing of Louis Comfort Tiffany: Treasures from the Driehaus Collection, followed by an assortment of sweets, homemade scones, savory bites and hand-sculpted chocolates. 2 p.m. and 2:30 p.m.; 2 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. Monday. $40 members; $60 non-members; $20 child members; $25 child non-members. Taft Museum of Art, 316 Pike St., Downtown, taftmuseum.org.

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Date Night: Killer Fried Chicken + Champagne — During this dinner-for-two class, learn hands-on how to make a full fried chicken dinner from scratch and pair it with a series of champagnes. 6-9 p.m. $150 for two. Tablespoon Cooking Co., Findlay Kitchen, 1719 Elm St., Over-the-Rhine, tablespooncookingco.com/ classes.

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

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MUSIC The Musical Omnivore Ahead of its October premiere, Rufus Wainwright workshops his latest opera in Cincinnati

Rufus Wainwright P H O T O : M AT T H E W W E L C H

BY A N N E A R EN S T EI N

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

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t’s no surprise that the morning after Rufus Wainwright gave a one-man show at the Taft Theatre, he was workshopping his new opera Hadrian, the latest project undertaken by Opera Fusion: New Works, a collaboration between the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music’s opera department and Cincinnati Opera.

“Fluid” may be a trite adjective but it defines Wainwright’s two-decade career.

The astoundingly prolific songwriter/performer handles Pop, Cabaret, the American Songbook, Art Song and opera with an assurance grounded in his profound love for music.

In between rehearsals and phone meetings, Wainwright made time for an interview. Relaxed and sporting a full beard, dappled with white, the 44-year-old was eager to talk about Hadrian, toggling between tours and working on new material and the next opera project. His confidence never came off as arrogance, and a mischievous joy ran through the conversation, frequently punctuated by laughter.

Though he broke through as a popular music artist, Classical music and operatic influences are everywhere in Wainwright’s work. “Opera was a secret weapon I could use for Pop,” he told the audience following a public performance of excerpts from Hadrian on March 21.

For opera lovers, it’s more of a cult secret.

Those looking for opera’s traces in his music can start with the series of doomed operatic heroines in “Damned Ladies” and the lines lifted from Verdi’s Macbeth in “Barcelona,” both songs from Wainwright’s 1998 eponymous debut album.

Composing opera and bringing it to the stage were natural progressions for Wainwright, who fell in love with opera — “grand opera,” he emphasizes — when he was a teenager. He cites as inspiration the massive works of Wagner, Strauss and Verdi and notable performers with a passion and keen understanding of the immense challenges in bringing a new work to life.

“I really respect the artistry and dedication of these performers, especially anyone who can hit those high notes,” he says with a laugh, but quickly turns serious.

“They’re dedicating their whole being to

this process. That’s necessary in the world of opera and I’m very appreciative. There’s much more a sense of community — and fear — that I find thrilling. It doesn’t exist in the Pop world at all.”

What does exist in the Pop world, Wainwright says, is a sense of humor. “(Opera) is soooo serious, so correct and so formal that it can be stifling. But having said that,” he laughs, “I like both worlds.”

His first opera, Prima Donna, offered a character straight out of an opera fanatic’s fever dream: an aging operatic soprano attempting a comeback. Wainwright co-authored the French libretto with Bernadette Colomine.

“I’m proud of that piece in terms of its purity,” he says. “I wanted the public to get the message immediately, so I kept it simple.”

Wainwright included the soprano’s final aria, “Les feux d’artifice t’appellent,” on his 2010 release, All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu. The vocal line and rippling piano accompaniment are indeed simple but gorgeously expressive. It’s perfect for a recital hall or a cabaret.

Prima Donna’s 2009 premiere in Manchester, England drew mixed reviews, but virtually all agreed that Wainwright should give it another try. He was way ahead of the critics, already thinking about his next opera even as he was rehearsing Prima Donna.

“Once you accomplish this great feat, you can’t sit around on your laurels,” he says. “And the higher the stakes, the more important it is not to dwell on that.”

The Canadian Opera Company commissioned Hadrian in 2013, but Wainwright had already been at work on the tragic story of the Roman emperor and his lover Antinous. The opera is a response to Wainwright’s life and activism as a gay man and a story that he hopes will resonate with the LGBTQ community, who are among opera’s most devoted followers.

Creating a gay love story “as grand and dramatic as a heterosexual one” was the priority of Wainwright and his librettist, Canadian playwright and director Daniel MacIvor. Wainwright admits that ceding control of the words was difficult, but with a much more complex story, he acknowledged the need for a more experienced

theatrical writer.

“After we met, Daniel immediately started giving me words that I liked. Once material appears and makes sense, you follow that thread. Our relationship was very… dramatic. We argued a lot,” he says, diplomatically adding, “He learned a lot. I learned a lot.”

Personal issues confronted Wainwright while composing Hadrian and completing other projects, including the death of his mother, singer/songwriter Kate McGarrigle, in early 2010.

“When I was writing Prima Donna, my mother was around,” he says. “She was my greatest fan and took as much joy as I did in the process, and I could enjoy it all through her eyes because it was as much an accomplishment for her as it was for me.”

Besides continued work on stagings of Prima Donna (in 2015, he headed up a revival in Athens, Greece that included new video installations), he says his 2012 solo album, Out of the Game, on which he collaborated with a host of Indie Rock musicians, was also part of the healing process. Wainwright has released four recordings since Prima Donna’s premiere, including a double-album recording of the

opera in 2015 released on venerable Classical label Deutsche Grammophon.

Despite opera’s big productions values, it’s not a lucrative career for a composer, so Wainwright maintains a relentless international touring schedule through July, presumably carving out time in late summer and early fall to attend rehearsals leading up to the October premiere of Hadrian at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto.

“In order to do this opera, I have to work much more. I can’t have any down time,” he says without a trace of regret. He adds that his appearances lead many of his Pop fans to the opera house. “I came to opera out of love for the form, and a lot of people followed to see Prima Donna who’d never been to an opera before.”

Wainwright tosses aside criticism over a “Pop artist” adding opera to his palette by persuasively offering some of his more intangible credentials.

“I actually do love opera — probably more than most other composers who write them — and I know about the history of the form,” he says. “In terms of an ambassador, they couldn’t do better than me, so… you gotta work with that.”

SPILL IT

Locals Celebrate “The Hag”

BY M I K E B R EEN

Merle Haggard PHOTO: MYRIAM SANTOS

Overcast Fest Debuts This Summer

“Recent studies” are quick and easy click bait popular with a lot of online media. They’re often used to connect random items to health concerns (like “fidget spinners cause sleep apnea!”) and are given “legitimacy” by being connected to a college or doctor.

But closer inspection often reveals questionable scientific methods or motives. One such recent study found that experiencing live music improves mental well-being twice as much as yoga or dog-walking, and can add up to nine years to your life. Though conducted by an “expert in behavioral science,” the study was commissioned by the U.K.’s O2, which is described as “the world’s most popular music and entertainment venue.” How lucky for them that the study didn’t find that live music causes impotence!

Jesse’s Twirl Personally attacking teenagers for getting involved in activism after their friends were killed in a mass school shooting isn’t a wise business decision (ask Laura Ingraham). Perhaps that’s why Eagles of Death Metal frontman Jesse Hughes had a change of heart after posting a vitriolic tirade calling the kids behind the pro-gun-control March for Our Lives movement “disgusting vile abusers of the dead.” The singer offered a weird, Jedi-mind-trick apology a few days later, saying, “I did not mean to do what it seems like it was I was doing” and calling the students’ actions a “beautiful thing.”

JBM PROMOTIONS presents 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

jd mcpherSon April 10th @ 8pm Southgate houSe revival 111 E. 6th St. • Newport, KY 41071

david bromberg quintet April 11th @ 8pm

Sierra hull April 21st @ 8pm

big Sandy & hiS fly-rite boyS May 16th @ 8pm

MeMorial hall

1225 Elm St. • Cincinnati, OH 45202

iriS dement with Sam baker May 4th @ 8pm

www.jbmpromotions.com • facebook.com/jbmpromotions

Aiming for Controversy Killer Mike of the Hip Hop duo Run the Jewels also raised some eyebrows when an interview about his pro-gun stance with NRATV was released just as the March for Our Lives was starting. The rapper’s main argument for gun rights is different than Hughes’ and the NRA’s — he believes African-Americans should have the right to own guns for protection, including against things like police brutality — and he also responded more eloquently to the ensuing controversy. Mike quickly apologized for the timing, saying, “I’m sorry adults chose to do this,” referring to NRATV’s video release and those on all sides who used his interview as “a lightning rod.”

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

Contact Mike Breen: mbreen@citybeat.com.

Concert Corporation says: ‘Concerts Healthy!’

|

Beginning in the mid-’90s, Cincinnati’s Scribble Jam grew to become a marquee event for indie and underground Hip Hop lovers. And not just among local fans — the fest attained iconic status within underground Hip Hop circles far and wide, attracting massive crowds every year with its blend of established and up-andcoming performers, as well as its various “battles” and other features.

Scribble Jam ended a decade ago, but the spirit of the event lives on in the justannounced Overcast Hip-Hop Fest, which runs Aug. 31-Sept. 1 at Northside brewery/venue Urban Artifact and features a dynamic array of artists who represent the music’s progressive and sometimes experimental side.

One of the top-of-the-poster Overcast performers is Cincinnati Hip Hop legend Mr. Dibbs, who formed the DJ crew 1200 Hobos in the early ’90s and went on to work with artists like Atmosphere and El-P. Dibbs was also a co-founder of Scribble Jam. While there are several out-of-town acts, the inaugural Overcast lineup is heavy on local artists, including Raised X Wolves, Trademark Aaron, Sons of Silverton, Eugenius, Audley, Audley K. Savage, Watusi Tribe, Devin Burgess, Evolve and Triiibe (the group formerly known as Blvck Seeds).

Overcast was created by Cincinnatibased Grasshopper Juice Records, which was co-founded by musician Nick Mitchell, aka Hip Hop producer/DJ Juan Cosby Cosby, and is also the force behind the AYE Music & Art Festival. Juan Cosby will perform at Overcast with his various projects, including Counterfeit Money Machine and his collaboration with the duo WeirDose.

Overcast will also have a rap battle and open-mic cypher.

For the latest Overcast updates (including ticket info), visit overcastfest.com.

BY M I K E B R EE N

A P R I L 4 – 1 0 , 2 0 18

Last year, local musician Joe Macheret, fiddle player in popular Folk band The Tillers and leader of his own Country Blues group, Joe’s Truck Stop, organized Hagfest, a tribute to legendary Country music singer/ songwriter/guitarist/fiddler Merle Haggard, who’d died the previous year.

The influence “The Hag” had on Country music can’t be overstated (Bob Dylan once said Haggard was “even too big for Mount Rushmore”). An innovator of the “Bakersfield Sound” and an associate of the initial Outlaw Country scene of the ’70s, Haggard’s music was often a response to the sterile Pop Country sound coming out of Nashville. Besides Dylan, his music also inspired titans of music like Gram Parsons, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Grateful Dead (to name a few), and his influence can still be widely heard in the music of today, from Country superstars to a number of AltCountry and Americana acts.

Featuring local and out-of-town performers, the inaugural Hagfest was held on April 6 last year, which is both Haggard’s birthday and the date he passed away.

Hagfest is back this Friday, returning to the Southgate House Revival (111 E. Sixth St., Newport, southgatehouse.com) and featuring more than a dozen Country and Americana acts. Showtime is 6 p.m. Tickets are $15 in advance or $20 at the door.

Though many versions of songs from Haggard’s catalog will certainly be played, Hagfest isn’t like most tribute shows. Instead of a show made up entirely of cover versions, the performers are invited to pay their respects to Haggard however they want. Macheret posted on Facebook that, along with Haggard’s music, Hagfest also “(pays) tribute to those who came before and paved a way for newer artists to find their own route, write their own songs and keep getting better at picking their guitars.”

Local artists performing at Hagfest include Joe’s Truck Stop, Comet Bluegrass All-Stars, Harold Kennedy and the

Honky Tonk 3, Arlo McKinley and the Lonesome Sound, Billie Gant, Magnolia Mountain, Warrick & Lowell, Maria Carrelli and Casey Campbell. Hagfest will also feature Texas guitar hero Bill Kirchen, the inventor of “Dieselbilly” (what he calls his mix of Honky Tonk, Rockabilly and other rootsy styles).

Like last year, some of the proceeds from the second annual Hagfest will go to the Appalachian Prison Book Project, which gives free books to incarcerated people in West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and Maryland.

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C I T Y B E AT. C O M

|

A P R I L 4 – 1 0 , 2 0 18

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

34

Thompson Square PHOTO: KRISTIN COFER

Thompson Square Thursday • Live! at the Ludlow Garage Thompson Square is back. Several years ago, you couldn’t get through an awards show without watching Shawna and Keifer Thompson pick up trophies or flirt their way through a performance of their biggest single, “Are You Gonna Kiss Me or Not.” After parting ways with their longtime label, Stoney Creek Records, the duo took time off to focus on family, but last week the pair’s hiatus officially ended.

After teasing new music for quite some time, Thompson Square finally announced their new record, Masterpiece. The record doesn’t officially release until June 1, but five songs are already available for fans to pore over. Given their substantial break from the business and that this record was done independently, it’s a smart move. The five tracks are a great way get the word out and rustle up interest from people who might have forgotten about them.

Not that the couple has made it easy for Country music fans to forget them. Aside from the omnipresence of “Are You Gonna Kiss Me or Not” on Country radio, Thompson Square are also avid social media users. In recent months, they took to Facebook Live nearly every week to host “Wino Wednesday.”

During the broadcast they HIDE answer questions and play through some songs. The PHOTO: GARRET T

couple also posts snippets of their family and tour life on their Instagram account, making their lives an open book for all who are interested.

Not only is Thompson Square back, but they’re coming in hot. Of the songs currently available, a couple already seem to have the potential to surpass their previous hits’ successes. The title track, for instance, beautifully illustrates the importance of their break, spinning the idea that the duo’s “masterpiece” is their family. The tone is reminiscent of Dan + Shay’s “From the Ground Up,” but Thompson Square manages to put its own spin on it.

“A Love Like This,” though, is the standout of the new tracks. It follows a relationship from budding romance to a sweet new baby — something the couple knows plenty about, given their recently expanded family. If this is what they sound like without a record label to guide them, going independent might have just been the best move for Thompson Square. (Deirdre Kaye)

HIDE with S.N.A.F.U., FAITHXTRACTOR, Asphyxiate, Casteless and Hostik Saturday • Northside Yacht Club

HIDE, the Chicago-based Industrial duo consisting of vocalist Heather Gabel and instrumentalist Seth Sher, is a caustic reminder of exactly what their genre used to stand for. Since HIDE’s inception in 2014, the pair have been producing tracks that reach out and choke the listener with overwhelming bass, unnerving samples and rhythms pulled from the darkest of mindsets. Over it all, Gabel’s pained vocals roar above the din in a drone that’s both mesmerizing and unsettling. Now, with their first full-length, Castration Anxiety, released on March Anxiety 23, HIDE is hitting the road to remind music fans of just what the Industrial genre is missing.

In many ways, oldschool Industrial was an uncomfortable genre.

The songs screeched and clanked with tilted, non-traditional sounds jammed together in a way that scared as often MERCHANT

859.431.2201

as it intrigued. But as the genre grew, the music began to soften. Elements of other electronics-based music seeped in and dulled the blade a bit. Whether or not these changes are seen as good or bad depends on the listener, but this fact is also what gives HIDE much of its abrasive impact. By erring on the side of the genre’s forefathers, HIDE’s music gets the blood flowing and the body moving, as the brain questions exactly how good of an idea that may be.

This artful unease carries over to HIDE’s live performance. Visually stark but undeniably enthralling, the duo has mixed lighting and Gabel’s siren-like fusion of sexuality and danger to capture the audience’s eye and keep it until the last beat drops. Sher’s carefully constructed layers of sound, pulsing and undulating beneath a wave of bass slams, are synced with strobe flickers, which makes it feel as if snapshots are being taken of Gabel and Sher trapped in time and then released as the inevitable next cascade of flashes locks them into another movement of cathartic explosion.

It is HIDE’s adherence to the pillars of Industrial that makes them so riveting.

Their music draws in and pushes away and their live show is built just the same.

It’s not beautiful music, nor should it be.

HIDE’s musical output shines bright light on the dark places of humanity and dares you to look away. (Nick Grever)

JD McPherson with Jake La Botz Tuesday • 20th Century Theater

1404 main st (513) 345-7981

TICKETS AVAILABLE AT THE SOUTHGATE HOUSE LOUNGE OR TICKETFLY.COM 4/4 - April Artist in residence: tchris comer trio w/ dAn berger: sAx

JD McPherson PHOTO: JOSHUA BL ACK WILKINS

returned to Nashville and recorded the new songs at RCA Studio B, where many classic Country sessions (often produced

by Chet Atkins) have taken place through the decades. He’s quoted in press materials saying that Undivided Heart & Soul “was difficult to make, difficult to write, difficult to record.” One of those studio difficulties was that McPherson and Co. had to move their equipment in and out and record only at night, due to the daily tours given of the historic studio. But those troubles are not reflected in the finished mix; it’s an exhilarating blend of feisty arrangements and greasy Rock & Roll power.

Featuring co-writes with musician Parker Millsap, Butch Walker and Aaron Lee Tasjan, Undivided Heart & Soul feels like much less of a vintage throwback than McPherson’s previous albums. “Crying’s Just a Thing You Do” jitter-steps in with wild flanges of guitar and a cheeky chorus that summons you to the dance floor and will stick in your head long after you hear it. Showing his range, McPherson evokes early ’60s R&B within the slow, sultry scorch of “Hunting for Sugar.”

From opener “Desperate Love,” a brooding stomper that sets the tone for much of what follows, to magnetic single “Lucky Penny,” an infectious, stuttering, Black Keys-style Blues bender that features Jimmy Sutton’s burbling upright bass and JD’s aggressive guitar, every song on Undivided Heart & Soul is a gold nugget.

(Gregory Gaston)

4/8 - jim lAuderdAle

ThE mounTaIn goaTs DEaD rIDEr

4/10 - the slAckers, newport secret six, queen city silver st stArs; AngelA perley & the howlin’ moons

4/13

Trauma IllInoIs

4/11 - dAvid bromberg quintet, chicAgo f rmer; dAve hAuse, roger hArvey; April fA Artist in res: chris comer trio w/ umclink

4/18

buy tickets at motr or woodwardtheater.com

W W W . S O U TH G A TE H O U S E.COM

Live Music

1345 main st motrpub.com

no cover

Wednesday 4/4

EP rElEasE show DuranD JonEs & ThE InDIcaTIons ErnIE Johnson from DETroIT Ern

wed 4

mothers, soften

thu 5

darlene, static falls

Todd Hepburn & Friends 8-11

Fri 6

siren suit, killii killii, breaking glass

Friday 4/6

s at 7

the claudettes (album release)

sun 8

faith healer ellise barbara

Jess Lamb & The Factory 8-11

Thursday 4/5

The Phil DeGreg Trio 8-12

w/ mike michels

Medicine Show – June 22, Riverbend

G-Eazy – Aug. 18, Riverbend

Jess Lamb & The Factory 8-12

mon 9

twisted pine

Salt N Pepa/Biz Markie/ Young MC/All 4 One – July 14, U.S. Bank Arena

Descendents – Aug. 24, Bogart’s

cocktaiLs

NEEDTOBREATHE – Sept. 4, PNC Pavilion

Wed. - Fri. open @ 5pm | Sat. open @ 6pm

tue 10

motr mouth: stand-up comedy writer’s night w/ lucas

Walk the Moon – July 28, Great American Ball Park

firepLaces

125 West Fourth st. | CinCinnati, ohio 45202

www.BromwellsHarthLounge.com

free live music open for lunch

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

Willie Nelson/Sturgill Simpson/The Head and the Heart/Old Crow

4/12

4/7 - vernon mcintyre’s AppA pp lAchiAn ppA grAss; squAre dAnce!; grAyson jenkins, joe’s truck stop, eric bolAnder, mAriA cArrelli; ford theAtre reunion

|

Lucinda Williams/Dwight Yoakam/Steve Earle – June 20, PNC Pavilion

of monTrEal, mEga bog

4/6 - hAgfest 2018; punk rock night: the enstrAngers, dissonAnce And dissent, new third worlds

saTurday 4/7 Future Sounds

4/6

4/5 - jAson eAdy; Andrew hibbArd, Andrew Adkins, deAd mAn string bAnd

A P R I L 4 – 1 0 , 2 0 18

With last year’s release of Undivided Heart & Soul, Oklahoma’s JD McPherson swaggered into new sonic turf smeared with Garage Rock crunch, bad-ass grooves and soulful shake and shimmy. It’s ironic that it took a recent move to Nashville from his native state to leave behind some of the retro-Rockabilly of his first two records in favor of a harder rocking sound.

When starting work on the album, McPherson found himself stymied with his latest batch of songs, until his friend Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age invited him to his California studio to reinvent the material. With his modern, metallic edge, Homme’s musical influence might seem an odd fit with McPherson’s rootsier music, but something clicked and inspiration blossomed. McPherson

111 E 6th St Newport, KY 41071

35

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 04 BLIND LEMON - Sara Hutchinson. 7:30 p.m.

Acoustic. Free.

H

LATITUDES - Ricky Nye and Bekah Williams. 6 p.m.

Jazz/Blues. Free.

BROMWELL’S HÄRTH LOUNGE - Jess Lamb & The Factory. 8 p.m. Soul/ Pop/Industrial. Free.

H

CINCINNATI PUBLIC LIBRARY, MAIN BRANCH - “Pop Goes the Library” with Kyle Hackett. 7 p.m. Acoustic/Alt/Pop/Rock. Free.

KNOTTY PINE - Dallas Moore. 10 p.m. Country.

Free.

THE MAD FROG - Slaughter To Prevail. 6 p.m. Deathcore/ Death Metal. $20.

H

MADISON LIVE - SunSquabi with Exmag. 8 p.m. Electronic Hydro Funk. $12, $15 day of show.

MANSION HILL TAVERN Losing Lucky. 8 p.m. Roots.

Free.

H

MOTR PUB - Mothers with Soften. 9 p.m.

Indie Rock. Free.

SOUTHGATE HOUSE REVIVAL (LOUNGE) - Chris Comer Trio with Dan Barger.

8 p.m. Jazz. Free.

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

Big Band Jazz. $10.

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A P R I L 4 – 1 0 , 2 0 18

THURSDAY 05

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

THE HAMILTON - Will Pope.

7 p.m. Guitar. Free.

BOGART’S - Dashboard Confessional with Beach Slang. 6:30 p.m. $34.

CAFFÈ VIVACE - Lou Lausche and Wayne Yeager.

7 p.m. Jazz

36

Combo. 8 p.m. Latin Jazz. $5.

LIVE! AT THE LUDLOW GARAGE - Thompson Square with Noah Smith. 8 p.m. Country.

Cover.

MADISON LIVE - The Steel Woods with Branden Martin.

8 p.m. Southern Rock. $15, $20 day of show.

H

MOTR PUB - Darlene with Static Falls. 10 p.m.

Indie Rock. Free.

NORTHSIDE YACHT CLUB - Howardian, Scott Yoder, Eugenius and John Hays. 9 p.m. Psych/Rock/ Experimental/Various.

SCHWARTZ’S POINT - On A Limb featuring Jackson Shurlds. 8:30 p.m. Jazz.

Cover.

SOUTHGATE HOUSE REVIVAL (LOUNGE) Andrew Hibbard, Andrew Adkins and Dead Man String Band. 9:30 p.m. Americana/ Various. Free.

H

SOUTHGATE HOUSE REVIVAL (REVIVAL ROOM) - Jason Eady. 8 p.m.

Country. $10.

H

URBAN ARTIFACT Bumpin’ Uglies with Rockstead and Joey Harkum Band. 9 p.m. Ska/Punk/Reggae. $8, $12 day of show.

FRIDAY 06

ARNOLD’S BAR AND GRILL - Dottie Warner with Phil DeGreg. 7:30 p.m. Jazz.

Free.

H

BLIND LEMON - Mark Macomber. 7:30 p.m. Acoustic. Free.

BLIND LEMON - Warren Ulgh (9 p.m.); Ed Oxley (6 p.m.). 6 p.m. Various. Free.

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

Free.

BROMWELL’S HÄRTH LOUNGE - The Phil DeGreg Trio. 8 p.m. Jazz. Free.

CAFFÈ VIVACE - Jim Connerley Trio. 7 p.m. Jazz.

COLONEL POMPS TAVERN - Shiny and the Spoon.

7 p.m. Folk/Pop. THE GREENWICH - Mambo

ARNOLD’S BAR AND GRILL - Buffalo Wabs and the Price Hill Hustle. 9 p.m. Americana. Free.

Various.

Cover.

THE COMET - Beyond The Borders. 10 p.m. Rave Punk.

Free.

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

Free.

FIBONACCI BREWING COMPANY - Vernon McIntyre’s Appalachian Grass. 7 p.m. Bluegrass.

Free.

SOUTHGATE HOUSE REVIVAL (REVIVAL ROOM) - Punk Rock Night Cincinnati with The Enstrangers, Dissonance and Dissent and New Third Worlds. 9 p.m. Punk Rock. $5.

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/Soul/Pop/Dance. $5.

JEFF RUBY’S STEAKHOUSE - Grace Lincoln Band. 8 p.m. Soul/R&B. Free.

JIM AND JACK’S ON THE RIVER - Danny Frazier. 9 p.m. Country. Free.

KNOTTY PINE - Wayward Son. 10 p.m. Rock. Cover.

LAWRENCEBURG EVENT CENTER - Easton Corbin. 8 p.m. Country. $25-$45.

MADISON LIVE - Hyryder.

9 p.m. Grateful Dead tribute. $12.

MANSION HILL TAVERN - Mistermann & the Mojo Band. 9 p.m. Blues. Cover.

MOTR PUB - Siren Suit with Killii Killii and Breaking Glass. 10 p.m. Indie Rock.

Free.

H

NORTHSIDE TAVERN Dark Harbor, Darkroom Ignite and American Summer. 10 p.m. Indie/Rock/ Various. Free.

H

OCTAVE - Blockhead with Funk You, Eugenius, CJ the Cynic, AP and Haskell x WILLIS. 9 p.m. Hip Hop. $10, $12 day of show.

RADISSON CINCINNATI RIVERFRONT - Basic Truth.

8 p.m. Funk/R&B/Soul. Free (in the Fifth Lounge).

H

SOUTHGATE HOUSE REVIVAL (SANCTUARY) - Hagfest 2018 with Bill Kirchen, Justin Wells, The Comet Bluegrass All-Stars, Arlo Mckinley, Billie Gant, Harold Kennedy and The Honky Tonk 3, Joe’s Truck Stop, Maria Carelli, Magnolia Mountain, Warrick and Lowell, John Clay and Luke Bell. 6 p.m. Country/Americana/Various. $15, $20 day of show.

THOMPSON HOUSE Acoustic Showcase with Scott Luck, John Baxter, Jeffery Cleveland, Jacob Vincent, Brian Aleslagle and Bookends. 5 p.m. Acoustic. $10.

URBAN ARTIFACT - Verment, Dead Medusa, Well of Night, Fenrir and Carrion Vael. 8 p.m. Metal. $5.

WASHINGTON PLATFORM SALOON & RESTAURANT - Dave McDonnell Quartet. 9 p.m. Jazz. $10 (food/drink minimum).

H

WOODWARD THEATER - of Montreal with Mega Bog. 9 p.m. Indie/ Rock/Pop/Dance/Various. $17, $20 day of show.

SATURDAY 07

ARNOLD’S BAR AND GRILL - Cincinnati Dancing Pigs. 9 p.m. Jug band/Americana. Free.

BLIND LEMON - G. Burton (9 p.m.); Michael Babbitt (6 p.m.). 6 p.m. Various. Free.

CAFFÈ VIVACE - Faux Frenchmen Trio. 8 p.m. Jazz.

THE REDMOOR - Sound Body Jazz Orchestra. 7:30 p.m. Jazz. Cover.

BLUE NOTE HARRISON - Jose Madrigal. 8 p.m. Santana tribute. $15.

COLLEGE HILL COFFEE CO. - Ricky Nye. 7:30 p.m.

Blues/Boogie Woogie. Free.

RICK’S TAVERN - Turned Up Band. 11 p.m. Dance/ Pop/Various. $5.

COLONEL POMPS TAVERN - Gary Devoto. 7 p.m.

SCHWARTZ’S POINT Emily Jordan. 9 p.m. Jazz.

BOGART’S - Supertzar: A Tribute To Black Sabbath with Vinny Appice. 8 p.m.

Sabbath tribute. $12.

BROMWELL’S HÄRTH

LOUNGE - Jess Lamb & The Factory. 8 p.m. Soul/ Pop/Industrial. Free.

CAFFÈ VIVACE - Mike Wade Quartet. 8 p.m. Jazz.

COLLEGE HILL COFFEE CO. - Betsy Lippitt. 7:30 p.m.

Various. Free.

THE COMET - Harlot and Me or the Moon. 10 p.m.

Folk/Americana. Free.

THE GREENWICH - Kelly Richey. 8 p.m. Blues/Rock. $10.

THE HAMILTON - Judy Tsai.

8 p.m. Jazz. Free.

JAG’S STEAK AND SEAFOOD - Brass Tracks. 9 p.m.

Rock/R&B/Funk/Soul/Various. $5.

KNOTTY PINE - DV8. 10 p.m. Rock. Cover.

LAWRENCEBURG EVENT CENTER - Brian McKnight.

8 p.m. R&B. $20-$130.

L’BURG DRINKS & MORE - Trailer Park Floosies. 9:30 p.m. Dance/Pop/Rock/Hip Hop/Country/Various. Free.

LIVE! AT THE LUDLOW GARAGE - Karla Bonoff.

8 p.m. Singer/Songwriter. $25-$30.

MACADU’S - Ambush. 9 p.m. Rock. Free.

MANSION HILL TAVERN Johnny Fink & the Intrusion.

9 p.m. Blues. Cover.

H

MOTR PUB - The Claudettes. 10 p.m. Blues/ Soul/Roots/Various. Free.

NORTHSIDE TAVERN - Sexy Time Live Band Karaoke. 8 p.m. Various. Free.

OCTAVE - Terrapin Moon. 9 p.m. Grateful Dead tribute.

RICK’S TAVERN - Black Bone Cat with Mojo Rising.

10 p.m. Rock. $5.

SCHWARTZ’S POINT - Ron Enyard with Rob Allgeyer & Dan Drees. 9 p.m. Jazz.

Cover.

SOUTHGATE HOUSE REVIVAL (LOUNGE) - Vernon McIntyre’s Appalachian Grass. 8 p.m. Bluegrass.

Free.

SOUTHGATE HOUSE REVIVAL (REVIVAL

ROOM) - Grayson Jenkins, Joe’s Truck Stop, Eric Bolander and Maria Carrelli. 9 p.m.

Country/Americana. $8.

H

URBAN ARTIFACT Oids, Wolfmen and Future Renaissance. 9 p.m.

Alt/Rock/Pop/Various. Free.

WASHINGTON PLATFORM SALOON & RESTAURANT - Ron Jones Quartet.

9 p.m. Jazz. $10 (food/drink minimum).

SUNDAY 08

BLUE NOTE HARRISON Adelitas Way with Sons Of Texas, Stone Broken, Taking Dawn and more. 6 p.m.

Rock. $15, $18 day of show.

MOTR PUB - Faith Healer with Ellise Barbara. 8 p.m.

Indie Rock. Free.

H H

OTR LIVE - Wyclef Jean. 8 p.m. Hip Hop/ Various. $35-$75.

SOUTHGATE HOUSE REVIVAL (REVIVAL ROOM) - Jim Lauderdale. 7 p.m. Americana. $25.

MONDAY 09.

MANSION HILL TAVERN - Acoustic Jam with John Redell and Friends. 8 p.m.

Acoustic. Free.

MOTR PUB - Twisted Pine.

9 p.m. Rock/Pop. Free.

NORTHSIDE TAVERN Northside Jazz Ensemble.

10 p.m. Jazz. Free.

TUESDAY 10

H

20TH CENTURY THEATER - JD McPherson with Jake La Botz. 8 p.m.

Rock & Roll. $20, $25 day of show.

BLIND LEMON - Nick Tuttle.

8:30 p.m. Acoustic. Free.

CHRIST CHURCH CATHEDRAL - The Marmalade Brigade. 12:10 p.m. Roots/Jazz/ Americana/Various. Free.

SOUTHGATE HOUSE REVIVAL (LOUNGE) Angela Perley & The Howlin’ Moons. 9:30 p.m. Rock.

Free.

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SOUTHGATE HOUSE REVIVAL (SANCTUARY) - The Slackers with The Newport Secret Six. 8 p.m. Ska. $13.

YOU HAVE SPOKEN and we

THANK YOU!

CityBeat’s 2018 Best of Cincinnati Awards #1 Neighborhood Pizza Joint (West Side)

#2 Restaurant to Take the Kids

#1 Neighborhood Restaurant (Northern Kentucky)

#1 Neighborhood Pizza Joint (East Side)

#2 Neighborhood Pizza Joint (Northern Kentucky)

#4 Overall Restaurant in Cincinnati

VISIT THESE NEIGHBORHOOD LOCATIONS OAKLEY SQUARE | HARPER’S POINT | CLIFTON | KENWOOD | WEST CHESTER

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

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HARRISON GREENE | ANDERSON | NEWPORT ON THE LEVEE | Crestview Hills

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#1 Salads

#1 Neighborhood Pizza Joint (Central)

#1 Overall Pizza (Chain)

37

PUZZLE

Popinjays

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

Across

1. Oil collector’s degs.

5. Go “bibbity de dop de doodly do dee�

15. Vehicle with a medallion 16. Glass piece?

21.. Climatology studying sites

20. Help out

25. Big name in crunk

19. Sired, old-style

24. One in a diaper

17. Bad vibe from a women’s clothing store?

23. “What ___ doing?�

9. Door holders 14. It’s all around you

27.. Bright as the night sky 30.. Failed Trump Atlantic City casino, casually 32.. “Rogue One� vil villain ___ Krennic 33. Second stage 35. Boxer’s foot

31. “Just. Stop.�

33. Knitter’s stitch

47. BYU Museum of Paleontology city 48. Cast list entries 51. Genesis brother 52. City near San Francisco

37.. Google Play download

3. In need of water

36. Che buddy

53. City near Ventura

38. Dig (into)

54. Somewhat open

40. Vote for

55. Josh Radnor/ Rosie Perez TV show

45. Sweltering 46. Latest OS version 48. Eye parts 49.. ‘80s video game “One on One: ___ vs.

Larry Bird�

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30.. The things right in front of me

46. Milk provider

34.. Zero figure?: Abbr.

44. Thread leader

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DOWN

1. ___ California peninsula

an Egyptian radio station?

2.. Japan’s highest peak

42. Miami Marlins CEO Derek

C I T Y B E AT. C O M

65. Hankook product

36. Powers up

39. International Workers’ Day

38

64. Have legs

4. Reds pitcher Romano 5. Visit 6. Procter & Gamble soap 7. Lutz alternative 8.. Oldest daughter on “Bob’s Burgers�

10. Knuckle-dragger 11.. Really huge star of the Texans?

12. Stomach settler, briefly

53. Crew mover

13. Bedsheet material

58.. Muslim pilgrim on an Indonesian island?

60. Avoid 61. Rapier-like weapon 62. Easter dye brand 63. Some apples

42. Jacob’s son 43. The Loop trains 45. ___ Union

57. Words about an ancient hero 59. Right on the money

9. Place for a hard hat

50. Russian ballerina Galina 56.. Places to get a belt

41. Ultrasound images

18. Pick up 22. Make holy 24. “Come at me, ___�

26. Deadlift muscle, for short 27. Soak (up) 28. Vehicle in a pit 29. Tune played on

L AST WEEK’S ANSWERS:

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CLASSIFIEDS LEGAL NOTICES Notice is hereby given that Extra Space Storage will sell at public auction, to satisfy the lien of the owner, personal property described below belonging to those individuals listed below at location indicated: 525 W 35th St Covington, KY 41015 (859) 2611165 on April 17, 2018 on or after 12:00 pm.

Bennie Doggett, Unit 3405, Personal Items; Daniel York, Unit 2317, Household Goods; Alesha Logan, Unit 4133, Household Goods; Tim McIntosh, Unit 2217, Household Goods; Jason Cain, Unit 5115, Household Goods; Angela Thompson, Unit 3307, Household Goods; Zach Troxell, Unit 3501, Household Goods; Martin Kraus, Unit 2408, Household Goods; Dravin Adams, Unit 4118, Miscellaneous Items; Jason Harden, Unit 4126, Construction materials; Shawn Wright, Unit 2323, Household Goods Purchases must be made with cash only and paid at the above referenced facility in order to complete the transaction.

Extra Space Storage may refuse any bid and may rescind any purchase up until the winning bidder takes possession of the personal property.

Notice is hereby given that Extra Space Storage will sell at public auction, to satisfy the lien of the owner, personal property described below belonging to those individuals listed below at location indicated: 2526 Ritchie Avenue, KY 41017 (859) 206-3078 on April 17th, 2018 on or after 9:30 am. Rosalie Dallary unit #203, household items; Maria Louis unit #142, household items Purchases must be made with cash only and paid at the above referenced facility in order to complete the transaction.

Extra Space Storage may refuse any bid and may rescind any purchase up until the winning bidder takes possession of the personal property.

Notice is hereby given that Extra Space Storage will sell at public auction at the storage facility listed below, to satisfy the lien of the owner, personal property described below belonging to those individuals listed below at location indicated: 5970 Centennial Circle, Florence, KY 41042, (859) 408-5219, April 17th, 2018 on or after 10:30 am Gary Minor, 552, Household items, furniture; Kathleen Wilson, 522, Household items; William Turner, 817, 1 bedroom house 3 dressers, side tables,

Notice is hereby given that Extra Space Storage will sell at public auction at the storage facility listed below, to satisfy the lien of the owner, personal property described below belonging to those individuals listed below at location indicated: 2900 Crescent Springs Rd, Erlanger, KY 41018 on Tuesday, April 17th at 11:00 AM Erick Carter, Unit 256, Household goods/furniture; Sonja Russell, Unit 349, Couch, misc. furniture.

Purchases must be made with cash only and paid at the above referenced facility in order to complete the transaction. Extra Space Storage may refuse any bid and may rescind any purchase up until the winning bidder takes possession of the personal property.

Notice is hereby given that Extra Space Storage will sell at public auction at the storage facility listed below, to satisfy the lien of the owner, personal

property described below belonging to those individuals listed below at location indicated: Extra Space Storage, 8080 Steilen Dr. Florence, KY 41042 on April 17, 2018 at or after 10 am.

Trista Kinman, 1014, Household; Julie Hancock, 1010, furniture; Teirra Lake, 1712, Beds, dressers, table, couch, recliner; Joan Bryson, 220, Household furniture and boxes; Jennifer Louden, 1004, Household Goods; Gordana Juhic, 826, Household Goods; Hailey Miller, 1016, Household Goods.

Purchases must be made with cash only and paid at the above referenced facility in order to complete the transaction.

Extra Space Storage may refuse any bid and may rescind any purchase up until the winning bidder takes possession of the personal property.

Notice is hereby given that Extra Space Storage will sell at public auction, to satisfy the lien of the owner, personal property described below belonging to those individuals listed below at location indicated: 7 Sperti Dr Ste 200, Edgewood, KY 41017 (859) 795-2771 on April 17, 2018 on or after 11:45 am. Jeremy Riddle, Unit 1101, 2 bedroom apartments, tools, washer, dryers, tv’s;

Shannon Gross, Unit 1203, Household furniture, boxes; Crystal Norris, Unit 1100, misc household items. Purchases must be made with cash only and paid at the above referenced facility in order to complete the transaction.

Extra Space Storage may refuse any bid and may rescind any purchase up until the winning bidder takes possession of the personal property.

HELP WANTED Personal Assistant/ Caregiver For active person who just needs help. 3-4 Days per week, 3-4 hours per day. Must Drive and pass a background check. Contact Kim @ 513-310-9312.

Sunrock Farm is hiring part-time tour guides and camp counselors. Must have

All adult line ads must contain the exact phrase “Body Rubs” and/or “Adult Entertainment.” Illegal services may not be offered in any ad. CityBeat does not accept, condone or promote advertisements for illegal activity.

Every ad purchase includes ONE phone number or e-mail address listing. Additional phone numbers & e-mail addresses can be printed for $10 each.

Ad copy & payment must be received by FRIDAY AT NOON. for the Wednesday issue.

All ads must be PREPAID with a VALID credit card or in cash/ money order. If a credit card is declined for any reason, the ad will be pulled from the paper and online.

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A P R I L 4 – 1 0 , 2 0 18

Read us on your phone instead of talking to your friends at brunch.

dining table and boxes of misc household Purchases must be made with cash only and paid at the above referenced facility in order to complete the transaction.

Extra Space Storage may refuse any bid and may rescind any purchase up until the winning bidder takes possession of the personal property.

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C I T Y B E AT. C O M

the all-new

39

DELIVERY CONTRACTORS NEEDED

CityBeat needs contractors to deliver CityBeat every Wednesday between 9am and 3pm.

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

NIGHT GARDEN RECORDING STUDIO

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 plug-ins 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.

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513.651.9666

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A P R I L 4 – 1 0 , 2 0 18

FEATURING THE BEST CLASSIC, CONTEMPORARY, INDEPENDENT AND FOREIGN FILMS

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