CityBeat | Jan. 7, 2015

CINCINNATI’S NEWS AND ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY • JANUARY 07 - 13, 2015 • FREE

Nearly 500,000 fewer Americans passed the GED in 2014 after a major overhaul to the test. Why? And who’s left behind?

BY DANIEL MCGRAW • PAGE 11

3/10/15 • Gaelic Storm

On Sale nOw! • TafTTheaTre.Org

VOL. 21 ISSUE 09 VOI C ES 05 LETTERS 04

NEWS 08 C OVER S TO R Y 11 S TUF F TO D O 16 ONGOING SHOWS 17

AR T S & CULT U RE 18 TV AND FILM 22

EAT S 25 EATS EVENTS AND CLASSES 27

MU S I C 29 SOUND ADVICE 32

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811 Race Street • Fifth Floor • Cincinnati, OH 45202 Phone: 513.665.4700 • Fax: 513.665.4368 EDITOR Danny Cross MUSIC EDITOR Mike Breen SENIOR EDITOR/Eats Editor Maija Zummo ARTS & CULTURE EDITOR Jacqueline Kern STAFF WRITER Nick Swartsell COPY EDITOR/WEB EDITOR Samantha Gellin CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Rick Pender, Theater; Steven Rosen, Art, tt stern-enzi, Film CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Reyan Ali, Anne Arenstein, Casey Arnold, Brian Baker, Keith Bowers, Stephen Carter-Novotni, Chris Charlson, Brian Cross, Hayley Day, Jane Durrell, Kristen Franke, Jason Gargano, Larry Gross, Ben L. Kaufman, Deirdre Kaye, John J. Kelly, Harper Lee, James McNair, Candace Miller-Janidlo, Anne Mitchell, Tamera Lenz Muente, Julie Mullins, Sean Peters, Rodger Pille, Garin Pirnia, Selena Reder, Ilene Ross, Holly Rouse, Kathy Schwartz, Maria Seda-Reeder, Leyla Shokoohe, Bill Sloat, Brenna Smith, tt stern-enzi, Michael Taylor, Isaac Thorn, Kathy Valin, Kathy Y. Wilson, P.F. Wilson EDITORIAL INTERN John Hamilton CREATIVE DIRECTOR Rebecca Sylvester PHOTOGRAPHER and DESIGNER Jesse Fox CARTOONIST Tom Tomorrow CROSSWORD PUZZLE Brendan Emmett Quigley PHOTOGRAPHY INTERN Amanda Flanagan SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER Tony Frank SALES ACCOUNT MANAGERS Annette Frac, Jake Lee, Dan Radank, Neil White HACKER TRACKER Kane Kitchen Office Administrator Brandi Ballou EVENT DIRECTOR Kenneth Wright Events Social media Assistant Brynn Kinard Marketing & Events Team Savannah Burke, Bernadette DiStasi, Eric Fuentes, Kaitlyn Gottdiner, Chanell Karr, Kyle Kivett, Lauren Meisner, Andrew Moorhead, Sharayah Phipps, Ashley Sparling, Ben Wittkugel CIRCULATION MANAGER Steve Ferguson DISTRIBUTION TEAM Tom Sand, Jack McCarthy, Bill Hartmann, Gary Skitt PUBLISHER Dan Bockrath SouthComm Chief Executive Officer Chris Ferrell Chief Financial Officer Patrick Min Chief Marketing Officer Susan Torregrossa Chief Technology Officer Matt Locke Chief Operating Officer / Group Publisher Eric Norwood Director of Digital Sales & Marketing David Walker Controller Todd Patton Creative Director Heather Pierce Director of Content / Online Development Patrick Rains

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VOICES your voice LETTERS bother us email Myrtle’s Hopes to Serve the Neighborhood letters@citybeat.com

Dear Ms. Wilson: I am one of the managers at Myrtle’s and I find your article (“There Went the Neighborhood,” issue of Dec. 31) very disturbing on many levels. The man who you quoted at the end of article was actually Citybeat.com banned from our establishment that night for his outburst. Secondly, most nights our crowd dies down early, around midnight and we ourselves facebook facebook.com/Cincinnat- (bartenders and managers) are leaving and locking up the bar by 2:30 at the latest, so I’m sorry if someone has been keeping you up at 3 a.m., but I iCitybeat can assure you it is not our patrons, possibly your neighbors (the neighbortwitter hood as you said is becoming more diverse). We have had an amazing four weeks in the neighborhood and we have found that most of our clientele is @CityBeatCincy @CityBeat_News not coming up from Over-the-Rhine or Hyde Park or anywhere else in the @CityBeatMusic city. Most of our patrons live within walking distance of the Punch House and are excited to have something close to their homes to practice responvoicemail sible drinking. I’m sorry you had a bad experience and I will be sending (513) 665-4700 you this post privately with my personal contact information so you can contact me about any noise problems or any other situation of your consnail mail cern. I hope we can keep the charm of the neighborhood while providing a 811 Race St, Fifth Floor, new experience for its residents. Whether they have been in Walnut Hills a Cincinnati Ohio 45202 year or their whole life, we want to be a place the whole neighborhood can enjoy. Cheers. online comment

— Jacob Trevino, AGM Myrtle’s Punch House

Myrtle’s Music Is Really Good, Actually

I book the music for Myrtle’s. Ironically enough, every act who has played our lower level has won or been nominated for a Cincinnati Entertainment Award from CityBeat. We’re happy to be bringing acoustic, alloriginal music to the neighborhood, employing musicians and entertaining bar patrons. The complete list of the bands who have played so far is: the Hiders, the Young Heirlooms, Jeremy Pinnell, the Burning Caravan, Ryan Malott (500 MTM), Dan Mecher (Turnbull ACs), Mark Utley (Magnolia Mountain), members of the Comet Bluegrass All-Stars, Buffalo Wabs and the Price Hill Hustle, and Jess Lamb (a contestant on American Idol and Cincinnati native). I don’t think (and I believe the CityBeat music writers would agree) that any of these acts are “bad” or “annoying” and I encourage everyone to come check out the bar’s lower level (called the Rathskeller) on weekend nights.

— Stuart MacKenzie, comment posted at citybeat.com in response to “There Went the Neighborhood,” issue of Dec. 31

The Reality of Gentrification

This is a great piece — it really lays bare the opposing forces in gentrifying neighborhoods of Cincinnati: black livelihood vs. white entertainment.

The self-centeredness of the white affluent class isn’t surprising, but what is surprising is their ability to obscure their newfound thirst for urban novelty in the rhetoric of “progress” and “revitalization.”

— EconocideOTR, comment posted at citybeat.com in response to (“There Went the Neighborhood,” issue of Dec. 31

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cincinnati vs . the world

VO I CE S w or st week ever !

BY I SA AC T H O RN

Can You Believe What Duke Did to the “Cincinnati” Sign?

America thrives so much on controversy and flooding comment sections of online articles with statements so stupid that your first instinct is to check the poster’s profile to make sure you don’t have any friends that are friends with them.

Recently we’ve seen events and tragedies both nationwide and here on the home front that have offered ample opportunities for people to let loose and show the rest of the Internet world just how bigoted and/or stupid they are. We here at WWE! noticed that the “Cincinnati” sign adjacent to the convention center was lit up in rainbow colors and wondered if it had anything to do with showing support for Leelah Alcorn and if local jabronis were going to get all indignant and ugly about it. It turns out the color shift of the sign was just a New Year’s celebration so now we’ll move on to other depressing and unsettling societal issues that we seek to dilute with humor.

Studies Show Kids Must be Indoctrinated Early on to How Grisly and Unpleasant Life Is

heroin is so high that individuals who know they’ll be sentenced to jail have been known to swallow balloons so they have plenty to use and sell once they fish it out of the toilet. Jail workers, lawyers and visitors will face added scrutiny while on site as well. Although the big sweep this week only netted two small bags of marijuana, it probably gives law enforcement officials the reassurance that even though they can’t keep drugs out of jails, let alone off the streets, there is nothing to be gained from admitting that rethinking our nation’s strategy or acknowledging the futility of the War on Drugs might be prudent.

Before Twitter and the like, kids used to just throw Thirst Busters into open convertibles and set trashcans on fire spontaneously without seeking the encouragement and approval of others first. Now it’s all about the retweets, it seems. During the Pittsburgh Steelers’ loss to the Baltimore Ravens on Jan. 3, a young fan in attendance who inexplicably had battery life left on his phone in the fourth quarter tweeted out that he would hop the wall and scamper onto the playing surface of Heinz Field if his Detroit is a city renowned declaration of intent for spawning draft-dodgearned more than 400 ing, all-around douche retweets. Predictably, nozzle Ted Nugent, so it’s he quickly received Apolitical hard to imagine someway more than 400 one usurping him as retweets. Also predictthe biggest loudmouth ably, people tagged #Steelers in it and stadium associated with it. However, like salmon skinning security was quickly made wise to the plan. They themselves to pieces to get upstream, humans identified the perpetrator, who was kind enough always find a way. Kid Rock’s recent editorial for to tweet out a selfie giving away his seat location, London’s The Guardian makes it clear that over and ejected him from the stadium. NFL security the long haul he could supplant The Motor City hopes that this indiscretion serves as a valuable Madman as the most relevant Detroiter who got lesson to the fan and other likeminded individurich because people like shitty music and started als who may seek to disrupt playoff football, thinking that the public valued his opinion. In which is important. In the end, the game finished addition to saying he doesn’t use “FaceTweet” without incident, and neither the fan, the Steelon the Internet but does like porn, Kid Rock also ers nor the Bengals rushed on the field during opened up about guns being cool, noting that their Wild Card Weekend losses. he’s “always buying more guns. I have everything from a Civil War cannon to an MP5 machine gun and old police guns. If someone invades your house, yeah, you can shoot them. I don’t think crazy people should have guns.” The American public eagerly awaits Kid Rock’s next nose-inthe-air op-ed now that he’s ultra-rich, civilized The world is full of illegal drugs and people who and no longer performing sophisticated sonnets will do damn near anything to procure them. featuring Joe C rapping about such important A recent heroin overdose (the second fatal contemporary issues as being “three foot nine one) in the Hamilton County Justice Center has with a 10 foot dick.” prompted the sheriff’s office to try harder to stop inmates and staffers from bringing drugs and CONTACT ISAAC THORN: letters@citybeat.com other contraband into the facility. Sherriff Jim Neil organized an hour-long sweep using several K-9 drug dogs the morning of Jan. 5. The demand for

I Was Boahhhhn Freee ♪♫

Hamilton County Shifts Anti-Drug Efforts to Inside the Justice Center

ARTS BLOG: Stage Door Weekend Theater Preview

Pop culture news and Internet findings in

I Just Can’t Get Enough

NEWS BLOG: Morning News & Stuff

Eight Cincinnati neighborhoods, including Evanston, Walnut Hills and West Price Hill, will get special consideration to receive city funds to boost housing development as part of a new program, The Cincinnati Enquirer reported. The CoreFore program ensures money is available to developers to “create exceptional homeownership and rental projects,” city officials said. Cincinnati +1 Florida’s ban on same-sex marriages expired at midnight on Jan. 6, according to the AP. A federal judge lifted a stay on her July ruling that Florida’s same-sex marriage ban is discriminatory.

Florida is the 36th state where gay marriage is now legal statewide.

World +2 Carmike Cinemas, a Georgiabased movie theater operator, has plans to open a nine-screen dine-in movie theater complete with a liquor license in Anderson Township, the Cincinnati Business Courier reported. The township has been working to open a theater on Beechmont Avenue for nearly 10 years. The theater will occupy a former Kmart store in the Anderson Towne Center. Cincinnati +1 THIS WEEK Cincinnati: 2 World: 4 YEAR TO DATE Cincinnati: 2 World: 4

— SAMANTHA GELLIN

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The crisp sound of a rifle shot rings out. Bambi’s mom is dead as fuck. Ol’ Yeller gets a touch of the rabies and earns a hot one right behind the ear. Scar shows Mufasa who’s the boss when things get real in The Lion King. For many years fairy tales and movies have included blood-splattering violence to prep kids for the beauty of the world that awaits them when they grow up. These days people are more connected to keyboards than their fellow flawed humans and there’s a study to back up the notion that parental or fluffy dog death is portrayed five times as often in children’s animated films than in dramatic films for adults, according to the official-sounding British Medical Journal. (It’s probably not true and will be refuted by a competing study with a different motive and agenda in a few weeks, but we’ll report on it anyway.) It’s too early to tell if parents should be concerned about their kids seeing a bunch of morbid stuff at an early age or if scientists will determine that this is better than what happens when they grow older and see the same tired ass movies about Transformers and Star Wars over and over as Hollywood continues to mask the fact that they’ve come up with very few good ideas in the past 20 years.

Steelers Fan Solicits Retweets, Promises to Take the Field during Team’s Loss to the Ravens

A record 104 women will serve in the 114th Congress, which convened for the first time on Jan. 6, the AP reported. A total of 96 racial minorities will serve the Congress as well, and for the first time African-American members of both genders will represent both parties. World +2

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Joshua Alcorn was born a boy but reportedly felt “like a girl trapped in a boy’s body” since he was 4 years old. And so far, there’s been little besides judgment and speculation about this teenager who stepped in front of a semi-tractor trailer on I-71 in the early morning of Dec. 28 to end a short life of depression, repression and unspeakable suffering.

But Joshua Alcorn is doing a lot of speaking from the grave, and whatever we choose to hear and to take away from his emotionally manipulative posts will be based on our own experiences wading through sexual identities.

Hopefully, we can embrace the notions of cognitive dissonance, of holding within us two emotionally yet diametrically opposed viewpoints but with each being right and true.

Joshua, who wanted to be called Leelah, wanted to live fully as a transgender person; his parents — devout Christians — hadn’t given their consent for their son to have any gender reassignment surgeries, and the teen was, therefore, relegated to dressing as the girl he imagined he’d be once he was transformed.

Joshua’s internal gender identity was female.

But he never lived through to be fully one way or the other. He killed himself lingering somewhere in the hyphen between male-to-female transwoman. To be clear, the unspoken rule of engagement with this delicate subject matter is to assign pronouns to people according to whom they identified themselves as — to call them what they call themselves. However, I am calling Joshua by his birth name with masculine pronouns out of respect for his parents who knew him better than any onlookers but who couldn’t reconcile their son’s shifting sexual identity, perhaps out of fear, ignorance, religious zeal or because of the cloistered judgments leveled by residents in a small northern Cincinnati burb.

Whatever their reasons for rejecting their son’s desires to be female and despite that Joshua posted they’d sent him to exclusively Christian counselors whom he felt judged him harshly without helping him toward self-acceptance, we bystanders cannot and should not forget that parents of children who grow up to be transgender people are figuring out this morass of sexuality just like their children.

They should be allowed some room to be as shocked, frightened, horrified, confused and ultimately as liberated as their children.

Further, unless these parents are spawns of Satan, they’re not wishing suicide as a solution on their children.

In my sanctified imagination, no parent left to plan their child’s funeral has ever invested time, love, attention, doctors’ visits, music lessons, rain-drenched soccer games and the anxiety of first-time driving lessons into a child they assume will kill themselves before they’re old enough to legally drink.

Healthy parents don’t bring their newborn

“

Belief systems are in play not to oppress and judge but to be challenged and reshaped.

I believe Carla Alcorn when she says her family loved Joshua. Maybe they didn’t love him in ways that expressed to him he could be free to choose and construct his own identity, but I believe they loved him the best they knew how at the time.

Here’s what’s hardest to say and think about all of this: If Joshua had the will, the solace, the refuge, the strength to just live another day, he would have been one day closer to being legally free to leave his parents’ home and to journey out into the world and find a community that would have accepted him as Leelah and one that could also have helped him toward all the emotional, psychological and medical procedures necessary to transform himself fully into the woman he wanted to be so desperately.

But suicide is a narcissistic, string-pulling bitch of a mistress and Joshua is getting all the attention, all the martyrdom in death he couldn’t get in life. And in doing so, he’s cast his family as a tribe of unforgiving and close-minded Jesus freaks.

Meanwhile, the true message of a young and potentially beautiful life cut short is a mere side note to what’s becoming a sexual identity sideshow.

Will tolerance of disparate sexual identities be taught now in Joshua’s high school? Will other parents of questioning and transgender children come together in support of the Alcorns? Will the Alcorns’ church pastor deliver the loving and tactful message of acceptance this community needs to hear at this moment or will it be one rife with the confusing passages of Leviticus? Will Joshua’s siblings get all their questions answered or will their brother’s name be a shameful whisper?

This endless list of questions is one hell of a way to begin a new year for this family, but maybe they can find solace in the unwavering truth that Joshua’s road to his true self wasn’t paved with nearly enough time.

And that time was the gift only Joshua could’ve given to Leelah.

How can we expect confused and frightened people to ever relax their religion, their outward acceptance, if we do not practice the same in return?”

home with that violent, tragic end in mind.

Still, the blaming and co-opting has begun.

It’s never widely or publicly spoken, but queer activists can be some of the most intolerant, vitriolic and judgmental people around.

If the rest of us aren’t politicizing our identities boldly or vehemently enough, then the Queer Mafia will find us, shame us and brow beat us or, in this case, our bereaved loved ones all in the name of “shedding light” on a dark cause or to “bring light” to heretofore sexually squeamish subject matter.

So to all the Queer soldiers who are bullying the Alcorns online and telling them in this time of public speculation and all-out banner waving how they should have loved their son unconditionally, to you I say pipe down so this family can hear themselves grieve.

I will add this: Practice some of this liveand-let-live sensitivity you talk so much about in all your public rallies. How can we expect confused and frightened people to ever relax their religion, their outward acceptance, if we do not practice the same in return?

CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: letters@citybeat.com

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n ews Fa m i l y M a t t e rs

PHOTO: jesse fox

Attendees mourned Leelah Alcorn at a Jan. 3 vigil at Kings Mills High School.

The search for acceptance is high-stakes for transgender youth

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By N i ck Swa r t s el l

Visit citybeat.com for daily news and political coverage.

E

mmanuel Gray was a 19-year-old student at the University of Cincinnati when he came out as transgender six years ago, first to his peers and trusted mentors at school, then to his parents. Gray, who grew up in Clifton, always felt a bit unsettled as the girl his parents named Emma.

“I didn’t know there was such thing as transgender,” Gray says of his younger years. “I just knew how I felt. Ever since I was little, I was always trying to reconcile. Once I knew I was allowed to be myself, it was one of the most liberating feelings. I was on a high for about a week after that.”

Gray says it was support from a network of people that made coming out an occasion in which joy trumped fear.

“I was afraid of a lot of things at that point, but I also had a lot of people around me who were accepting,” he says. “It wasn’t like coming out in high school, which probably would have been extremely harsh.”

That network — family, friends, advocacy organizations, social workers — can make all the difference for transgender people.

According to a 2011 study called the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, more than 40 percent of transgender people in America attempt suicide at some point in their lives. A more recent study by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention found that the percentage spikes into the 60s for those without the support of family or peers.

And dangers lurk beyond the deep emotional distress caused by lack of acceptance. In Ohio, at least four transgender people were murdered in 2014, each more than likely due to their gender identity. Among them was Tiffany Edwards, a 28-year-old transgender woman who was shot to death in Walnut Hills last June and left in the middle of the street. Her family believes her murder was a hate crime. Another transgender woman, Kendall Hampton, was shot to death in the same neighborhood in August 2012. Transgender advocacy groups also say that shooting was related to Hampton’s gender identity.

For some, help and acceptance doesn’t come soon enough. But awareness around issues facing those in the transgender community is building.

The Dec. 28 suicide of Leelah Alcorn, a 17-year-old transgender woman from Kings Mills, made national news last week after her suicide note was found on Tumblr and shared across social media. More than 300 people gathered to remember Alcorn Jan. 3 at a vigil at Kings High School, holding candles and glowsticks against a cold, dreary rain. The crowd included advocacy groups, activists, students and the families of transgender youth.

Zay Crawford, a 12-year-old transgender girl, was one of the attendees at the rally. With her were her mother and father, Chasilee and Jason Crawford.

“We are a family,” Chasilee told the crowd. “And we love our Zay for who she is and what she is.

And we would not change that, ever.”

Organizers said the rally was meant to show the kind of support and love for trans people

Alcorn said she had trouble finding in life.

“I feel like a girl trapped in a boy’s body, and I’ve felt that way ever since I was 4,” Alcorn’s suicide note said. The note recounts Alcorn’s struggle to find acceptance and help. Her parents tried faith-based counseling and so-called “conversion therapy,” but that did little to ease her confusion and feelings of isolation, her note says. Alcorn hoped to begin transitioning physically (usually achieved through hormone treatments or surgery) at age 16, but fell into a deeper depression when her parents would not grant her permission to do so.

“We don’t support that, religiously,” Alcorn’s mother told CNN in an emotional phone interview Dec. 31. In the interview, she refers to Leelah as Joshua, her given name, and uses masculine pronouns, both of which caused subsequent controversy. “But we told him that we loved him unconditionally. We loved him no matter what. I loved my son. People need to know that I loved him. He was a good kid, a good boy.”

Seventeen-year-old Abby Jones met Alcorn at Kings Island, where they both worked drawing caricatures. After a couple months working together, Alcorn felt close enough to Jones to share her secret. She also talked about her trouble at home, Jones says.

“I feel like they could have definitely supported her more, even if they didn’t agree with it religiously, and making her feel the way she did.”

Experts say the search for acceptance can be high-stakes for transgender youth.

“The biggest predictor of depression, anxiety, distress, suicide, is rejection for these kids,” says Sarah Painer, a social worker with Children’s Hospital who works with transgender youth and their families. “When you’re not supported and you’re not accepted for who you are, there are increased rates of depression, anxiety, homelessness, suicide, substance abuse. All the risk factors go up, up, up. The reality is, a lot of the kids that come to us at the clinic come to us from the psych units because they’re so depressed.”

Some of those outcomes, like addiction and homelessness, can drive transgender youth into very hard circumstances. Over the summer, CityBeat spoke with Shane (who asked we not use her real name), a homeless transgender woman, for an article on sex work.

Shane was estranged from her family and engaging in sex work to survive.

“She’s been pushed out for so long,” Lighthouse Youth Services Program Director John Keuffer said of Shane, whom he met while doing outreach for the nonprofit. “At some point, you end up just looking for a family and love, and the love you find is kind of a sick love.”

There are a number of support groups offering help for transgender youth and their families, including The Heartland Trans Wellness Group, a statewide advocacy organization based in Cincinnati, and the Gay Lesbian

PHOTO: jesse fox

About 300 people turned out for a vigil for Leelah Alcorn Jan. 3.

Straight Education Network, or GLSEN, which provides support for members of the LGBT community. Children’s Hospital also offers counseling and medical advice for transgender youth looking to transition.

“Most of the kids who come to us have a level of support from their parents, even if it’s not full acceptance, because they’re bringing them to us,” Painer says. “Kids like Leelah, we don’t know about. We didn’t know her. We don’t have an opportunity to work with them.

If the families come in, we’ll meet them where they are.”

Even with support, societal attitudes and a steep learning curve can make coming out

a long road for transgender people and their families.

“When I was younger I tried to come out in different ways, even though I didn’t have the vocabulary for it,” Gray says, noting that it took a long time to come to terms with his identity.

“When I was rejected, it was hard. I’ve been there – when I was 13 I planned my suicide.”

Parents face a rocky, often confusing path as well.

“It was a journey, not having the language and the social support,” says Susan Gray, Emmanuel’s mother. “I thought I had three sons and a daughter, but I actually have four sons.

I’ve learned so much.” ©

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Nearly 500,000 fewer Americans passed the GED in 2014 after a major overhaul to the test. Why? And who’s left behind?

BY DANIEL MCGRAW

S

I have to be patient. I’m not going to give up.”

Ohur isn’t the only one struggling with the changes to the state’s diploma equivalency exam. Tutors say the old test, which had been around since 2002, usually required about six months of studying — three to six hours a week — for a person of average intelligence to have a chance of passing. But the test changes — which implemented the controversial Common Core standards and required the exam be taken online instead of on paper — have made passing the GED test more difficult than anyone can remember.

The numbers are shocking: In the United States, according to the GED Testing Service, 401,388 people earned a GED in 2012 and about 540,000 in 2013. As of mid-December, only about 55,000 had passed nationally in 2014. That is a 90-percent drop off from the previous year.

And there are serious repercussions. As national economic policy is emphasizing more adult education programs, and most jobs (even Walmart shelf stockers) require a high school

diploma, the new GED test has pretty much moved the goal posts way back. And that includes the incarcerated, where so many prison re-entry education programs include getting the high school drop-out population to pass the GED test.

••• Has the GED test always been hard? Some would say so.

Especially if you are 20 years or more removed from high school and haven’t thought of quadratic equations or Thomas Jefferson’s verbiage since then. But for those trying to take the GED test today, passage of the high school equivalency is probably less likely than at any other point in the 70-year history of the test.

The changes were made to bring the test up to date, in some people’s eyes. That meant adapting the test to reflect the new Common Core standards being taught in most high schools across the country, doing it online only and not on paper, and requiring more essays. The results have been dramatic:

j a n u a r y 0 7 - 1 3 , 2 0 1 5 | 11

y Ohur pores over an article with a tutor at the Eastside Adult Education Center on Riverside Drive. Before going to work at the Hyatt downtown Monday through Thursday, he shows up here to work on English and other subjects he must master to pass Ohio’s General Educational Development (GED) test. It’s a challenge, especially after recent changes to the test and the way it is administered.

Ohur would like to get a diploma so he can get a better job at Hyatt — a supervisor’s role, maybe, instead of his current job helping set up for conventions at the hotel. He would also eventually like to go to college so he can get back into pharmacy work, which he did in his native Sudan before coming Cincinnati as a refugee in 2004. Ohur knew very little English when he came to the United States.

“It’s really hard,” Ohur says. “I took the test last year. I’ve taken it two or three times. I passed two subjects, but was waiting to finish the other three. Now they’ve changed it and I have to start from the beginning and take them on the computer. But

PHOTO: nick swartsell

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Sy Ohur (right) studies with a tutor at the Eastside Adult Education Center in the East End. In 2014, about 350,000 fewer people will earn a GED nationally than in 2012, and close to 500,000 fewer than 2013. The GED accounts for 12 percent of all the high school diplomas awarded each year. In Ohio, 16,092 passed the test in 2012, and 19,976 did so in 2013, but only 1,458 had passed as of mid-December.

Data from the Ohio Department of Education shows that in Hamilton County, only 233 of the 747 people who took the GED in 2014 passed, or just 31 percent. In 2013, 1,538 of the county’s 2,388 test takers passed — 64 percent.

Other states have similar rates. The drop off in Texas was about 86 percent; Florida, about 77 percent; Michigan, about 88 percent.

About 2,100 prisoners in the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections earned a GED in both 2012 and 2013. Only 97 have earned the GED in 2014.

Project Learn, a program contracted to tutor inmates in the Cuyahoga County Jail, saw a total of 80 inmates pass the GED test in the past three years, but only one county jail inmate had passed as of mid-December.

The problems are myriad. Many think this test is too hard, too focused on algebra and essays, too much analysis of history instead of knowing historical facts. But the main issue is: Who is the GED test for and what should it measure? Should it be geared toward determining if someone has the skills to make it in college, or the skills necessary to be employed and to move up to a better job? The GED has always struggled with servicing both groups, but right now most GED test teachers feel the test

has moved too far into measuring college preparedness.

“Raising the standards was an important thing to do, but without adequate teacher training and a significant investment in current technology, it left adult and correctional education students even further behind in educational achievement,” says Stephen J. Steurer, executive director of the Correctional Education Association, the largest prison educational organization in the country. “It is a national tragedy that will continue to have repercussions for years.”

••• When it was announced a few years ago that the test would change on Jan. 1, 2014, academic and educational consultants overseeing the new version predicted a slight downturn in passage rates and overall test takers. The reasoning: So many people would try to pass the test in 2013 because any sections they had previously passed wouldn’t carry over once the new test began in 2014. This is why the number of people who passed the GED was slightly higher in 2013 than in 2012.

But those who have taught the test for a long time say the new test is so radically different that the dip in passage rate will not be a short blip as students and tutors adjust to the new test.

“We are freezing out a large portion of those who would have had a good chance of passing before, and we are doing that because there is a shift in what the test is measuring,” says Robert Bivins, program director of Education at Work at Project Learn in Cleveland.

Local tutors agree.

Adele Craft, executive director of the Eastside Adult Education Center, says higher educational standards are good. But she says the test is much more difficult and assumes contextual knowledge students may not have.

“It is harder just because it’s asking for different things now,” Craft says. “They used to have you read a paragraph and answer the questions, and the answers were in the questions. Now they’re asking you to read something and you have to know a lot in the background. They’re doing more things like interpreting fiction, which you never had to do before. Some of these people don’t have that background.”

But there is another reason for the small number of people passing the GED test in 2014: Hardly anyone is taking it this year.

And that has as much to do with how the test is administered as the content. The previous test was administered with pen and paper, but this version can only be taken on a computer. And here’s the kicker: More than half the people in the U.S. who do not have a high school diploma do not have a laptop or desktop computer at home. The same number, not surprisingly, have no Internet access either.

“Almost everyone taking the GED is living in poverty,” Craft says. “That’s why they’re here, a lot of times. They don’t have computers. They have no access.”

Those making less than $25,000 clock in at similar rates regardless of their educational background. So many of those who need a GED most — those without a high school diploma

and with a poverty-rate income — do not have a computer or Internet access, which puts them far, far behind from the very start for two reasons: It’s hard to build keyboard and mouse skills for a timed test without practice, and GED Testing Service (the company that administers the test) makes it maddeningly hard even to print sample questions to study at home.

To get sample tests, students must have access to the Internet to take them, pay $6 for each sample test section with a credit card (if their tutoring program won’t buy it for them, and most don’t), and have an active email account. All of that makes having a computer and Internet access paramount to passage.

“We are just finding that students without a computer or credit cards are not able to keep up as well, and in studying for a test like this, it is easy to find reasons to quit,” says Bivins of Project Learn in Cleveland. “The way this test has been set up has put barriers in front of people, when we should be doing a test where keeping the goals in front of them is what they see instead of more reasons to quit.

While a certain lack of access makes studying for the GED harder, the content itself makes it even more difficult.

And that raises the question that has dogged the GED test since its inception after World War II: Is the primary purpose of the test to measure a student’s college preparedness? Or is it a measure of a dropout’s willingness to achieve a goal that makes them more attractive to employers?

In other words, is the GED designed to measure whether a student can handle Jane Austen novels and polynomial equations, or whether that person has the wherewithal to stock shelves at Walmart or hang drywall? The current test suggests it is the former that seems to be more important. And while the old test seemed to have some “just showing up” success rate measurement attached, which in some eyes was a practical way to administer the GED, the new one seems to have none of that.

To put it another way, we all would agree that high school students need to know more before entering college and that sound math and language skills are part of that. But are we going to ace out a whole group of people from getting a GED because some college administrators don’t think their incoming students know enough algebra?

“What I’ve noticed more than anything is that the participation rates are shockingly low this year over previous years, so the word has gotten out that it is extremely hard,” says Stan Jones, president of Complete College America, a nonprofit based in Indianapolis that works with states to get more of the poor and disadvantaged into college.

“The way I see it, they have effectively gutted the GED program by these changes they have made,” Jones says. “Adult students who have been out of high school for a while aren’t passing this test. There needs to be a viable option for older adults to get into college and move up in the job market, and the changes made this year have greatly diminished the GED as a pathway to get to that goal.”

•••

“Raising the standards was an important thing to do, but without adequate teacher training and a significant investment in current technology, it left adult and correctional education students even further behind.”

Stephen J. Steurer, executive director of the Correctional Education Association

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The GED test sprang out of World War II. In 1942, when Congress lowered the draft age from 21 to 18, it meant some high school students were put into military service. When the war was over, and the G.I. Bill was passed to pay for veterans’ college education, there was a need to figure out what to do with the soldiers whose high school education was interrupted by the war. They knew they couldn’t send 21-year-olds who had landed on the beaches at Iwo Jima back to high school to finish up.

So a test was devised, but not one that just measured academic skill sets. It was designed in more practical ways, testing for those non-cognitive or common sense life skills veterans had learned during the war. So it was a mixed bag when it began, attempting to balance and give credit for the knowledge obtained by the test taker outside of school in the real world.

Over time, the GED grew substantially with help from college administrators. It was seen as a second-chance diploma (a Good Enough Diploma, as many joked), and, over time, all 50

states accepted the GED test. It grew particularly quickly in the 1960s when President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty” used GED certification as a way to promote more high school graduates among students who may have had to quit high school and go to work due to poverty issues.

The test has changed four times since its inception, the last in 2002. Each time the changes were made to keep up with changes in education. Sometimes the changes meant more math, sometimes more essay writing, mainly because college educators wanted some assurances that their GED students would have the necessary skills to handle the rigors of the postsecondary world. And over the years, the GED was overseen by the American Council on Education (ACE), which represents college presidents and administrators.

As part of the changes this time around, the test was developed and overseen by a joint venture between the nonprofit ACE and the for-profit testing company Pearson VUE through a company called GED Testing Service.

The joint venture was very late in getting teaching materials to programs for student preparation, with many centers not receiving them until November 2013, just two months before the new test took effect.

Though some states have voucher grants of $40 for first-time takers (Ohio participates in this), most test takers will pay $120 for the new test, up from $40 previously. A small sample test is offered online for free, but to get a larger sample of questions (about half the size of the actual test, containing four sections), prospective testers pony up $6 per section. So in theory, it could cost a student $168 to take two sample tests and the actual test one time.

Some places, like the Eastside Adult Education Center, have found workarounds for the fees. People don’t have to pay to come to the center, which runs on grants and fundraising. They also have a scholarship fund to pay all or part of the $40 test fee.

Director Craft says the previous lower fee was often hard for the center’s students to come up with, let alone the higher fee instituted last year.

“I called the state and had a fit because they moved it from $40 to $120,” Craft says. “We couldn’t get the $40 from them, how are going to get $120?”

Craft says after a number of other people complained as well, an agreement was reached. If you come through a center like Eastside and test at an 11th or 12th grade level, the state will waive the $80 fee increase.

“We tell our students right away you don’t have to pay that,” Craft says. But she adds that most people who want to take the GED don’t know about that deal and are likely to simply sign up for the test without going through an adult education center.

The higher costs and online-only service represent the need to offer better and quicker responses to how the student has done on the test, according to C.T. Turner, GED Testing Service spokesman. “We heard from testers that there wasn’t a flexibility under the old system that would let the test takers know with certainty what progress they were making,” he says.

“This system of doing it online lets them know instantly what they got right and what they missed and what they need to do to improve.”

As far as getting rid of the pen-and-paper approach, Turner says the decision “was made to make sure those passing the test had the computer skills which reflected college and career readiness.” But when asked why the test seemed to not be testing technology knowledge, but use of a keyboard and mouse, which may be far less used with the advancement of touch screen technology and voice activation, Turners says, “We are measuring what a student who graduates from high school now has to be proficient in, and knowing how to use a computer is part of that.”

And that is a big part of the controversy over this test. In the past, the GED had not been strictly a measure of what a high school grad’s cognitive skill set was from that time period, but leaned a bit toward crediting the older test taker’s life experi-

“Most of my tutors can’t pass it without studying. And they’re college graduates.”

Adele Craft, executive director of the Eastside Adult Education Center ence. But those defending the changes said over and over that to make the GED easier than what the high school student needed to know to graduate would be “unfair” to those high school students, along with causing undue remedial classes if the GED passers wanted to go to college.

Administrators argue you can’t just give a GED to a person who shows up to classes for a number of months and then can sign their name in crayon.

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••• The Common Core standards are the driving force behind the new GED test’s content changes and are somewhat difficult to explain. For years, many college educators thought that high schools were not preparing their graduates well enough for college curricula, and there was a movement to rectify that. In the end, basically, rote learning was replaced by analysis, placing a greater importance on why facts were relevant and how they could be used, not what they were.

They first began getting traction in the mid-1990s among university presidents who thought their freshman students were ill prepared. By the late 2000s, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates started championing educational changes through his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Some 44 states eventually adopted the standards, though a dozen or so are now rethinking their educational policies, sometimes by way of reflection on how the state has performed, sometimes by way of conservative backlash at what the fringes claim as lefty conspiratorial endeavors into schools.

Along the way, the thought process went like this: If the country were to change what students were expected to know upon graduation from high school, then the test that allowed dropouts to graduate must also reflect those changes. The problem in that assessment: Only 40 percent of those who passed the GED went on to any higher educational pursuits, and, of those, only a small fraction (single-digit percentages according to most studies) attended college for more than a year. The vast majority of those taking the GED were doing so for employment opportunities.

Measuring job-ready skills was an afterthought in the Common Core standards from the beginning. “The workplace” aspect of the standards is only mentioned at the end of the executive summary in a cursory manner in an essay called “The American Diploma Project,” one of the early Common Core studies published in 2004: “States have developed high school assessments without much regard for what colleges need, and colleges use admissions and placement exams that are disconnected from the curriculum students study in high school. The result is too many tests and a mixed set of messages to students, parents and teachers about which ones matter most. States must streamline their assessment systems so that high school graduation and col-

lege admissions and placement decisions are based on student achievement of college and workplace readiness content.”

A heavily shared Facebook post earlier this year from a frustrated parent illustrated the controversy over the new standards.

The father published a picture of a homework assignment for his fifth-grader: Subtract 316 from 427. Instead of stacking the two numbers on top of each other and subtracting vertically to reach 111, the assignment wanted the elementary school student to use a linear approach, where the student would get the answer by subtracting 100 from 427 three times, then 10 once, then one six times.

The father wrote to the teacher that, as a frustrated parent and electrical engineer, he couldn’t get the right answer using the Common Core approach. “In the real world, simplification is valued over complication,” he added.

GED tutors and teachers echo his sentiment — that the new standards overcomplicate the test. The math portion, for example, used to include fairly straightforward questions without dipping into wordy presentations and ventured little beyond basic algebra. The new test emphasizes more algebra and geometry, as well as polynomials, graphing and quadratic equations. A question from a sample test illustrates the verbose nature of the problems: Cilia are very thin, hair-like projections from cells. They are 2.0 x 10-4. What is the maximum number of cilia that would fit side by side — without overlapping — across a microscope slide that is 25 millimeters wide? a. 8.0 x 10-6 b. 1.25 x 10-3 c. 8.0 x 102 d. 1.25 x 105 “The old test was about 25 percent algebra,” says Dan McLaughlin, the program director at Seeds of Literacy. “The new test is about 55 percent algebra, and there is very little basic math on it. Even our tutors have had a hard time with some parts of the math test.”

Local tutors echo that sentiment.

“Most of my tutors can’t pass it without studying,” Craft says.

“And they’re college graduates.”

The science section pushes students further, too. One sample question asks the test taker to interpret, via an equation, whether energy is stored, created or produced when glucose, water, oxygen and carbon dioxide are combined. The old test, McLaughlin says, required the students to know some of the elements on the periodic table, but did not have them analyze how the element reacted with each other.

And in the writing portion of the test, the previous test asked for one personal essay, the topic of which might be: “Who is someone you think is successful and why?” The purpose of the essay was to see if the respondent knew how to put nouns and verbs and prepositions together in proper order. In other words, it tried to determine if could you understand what they were saying, but it didn’t really care about the content.

But the new test flips that around. There are now two essays, and they are graded not on grammar but on reasoning. For example, one of the sample questions in the language portion of the test asks the tester to read two essays on daylight saving time — one in favor, one against — and then write an essay about which one is better and why. Another example is writing an essay about the importance of the concept of “sustainability” within the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Another asks a test taker whether a school’s decision to expel a student refusing to salute the flag or saying the Pledge of Allegiance is covered by freedom of religion or freedom of speech, and how Thomas Jefferson’s writing fits into the question at hand. The essay will be judged, in part, on “your own knowledge of the enduring issue and the circumstances surrounding the case to support your analysis.”

And again, grading is focused on analysis and interpretation rather than sentence structure, and the GED website says a passing essay might exhibit “draft writing.”

“We do not hold test-takers to a standard of very formal conventions at all,” it says. “Rather, we understand that they have minimal time for proofreading and we can accept diction that is significantly more casual than, for example, what might be required on a resume cover letter. The language requirements are not as high as ‘Edited American English.’ ” So the test measures knowledge of how many tiny cell hairs can fit on a slide, the energy production of an equation, Thomas Jefferson’s analysis of a West Virginia court case and interpretation of the concept of environmental sustainability. All in four test sections that have to be completed in about seven hours. On a computer. By people who may have limited computer skills.

And no spell check.

••• John Eric Humphries, a Ph.D. candidate in education at the University of Chicago and co-author of The Myth of Achievement Tests (University of Chicago Press, 2014) says the key warning sign is not how few are passing, but how few are taking the new test. “The most shocking thing is that people taking it has plummeted,” he says. “And we have to find out the reason for that. Is it the computer skills needed, the cost, or the content, or a combination?”

Humphries thinks the problem is not so much the Common Core standards used for the questions, “because this is a fair test of what graduates of high school should know, and if that is how we determine math or English or computer skills, the GED should be a reflection of that. Over time the GED instructors and the students will catch up with that.”

“But the real problem is that we use the same assessment for a job parking cars as we do for getting into college with the current GED,” Humphries says. “Those are completely different tasks and different questions we should be using. But we use the same test for both.”

There has been movement through the years to create different tests to measure different abilities, and the notion of a GED for college admissions and GED for work qualifications has been bandied about. Ten states have either opted out of the Pearson test and offer one of two competing tests, or offer all three. Ohio may move to another test, according to Gary Cates, senior vice chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents, which administers the test in Ohio, because of the huge drop off in people passing the test this year.

“The numbers are not good, and we recognized going in we would have some issues,” Cates says. “The test is harder because it was designed for the Common Core standards, but we also recognize that the GED is important for people to keep or get a job. We will keep all the options we have open.”

And a part of the assessment is the cost. The U.S. Department of Education spends about $564 million a year on Adult Basic and Literacy Education (ABLE) programs. Ohio gets about $15 million of that federal money, and adds about $7 million in state funding to the adult education programs. Ohio does not keep track of how much of the $22 million is spent specifically on GED teaching programs, but it does make one wonder about how the public investment is being served by fewer GEDs being earned because of the changes.

If the state is spending $22 million on adult education programs and 20,000 Ohioans get a GED, that might be a good investment. But spending $22 million and getting 2,000 GEDs might not be.

In addition, studies have shown that prison recidivism rates decrease by about 30 percent if the incarcerated take educational programs while locked up. And for every dollar spent on education, the savings is $4 to $5 in future costs because they stay out more.

“We have seen that doing education programs for those in prison is a good investment, but if they aren’t seeing a reasonable payoff to their efforts, there is a real danger that they aren’t going to perhaps buy into other changes they need to make,” says Dr. Lois Davis, senior researcher at research organization

RAND Corp., who has studied education programs in prisons.

“If the state of Ohio goes from more than 2,000 prisoners getting a GED each year down to a few hundred, there are just going to be many problems that the state has to deal with,” Davis says. “The numbers are shocking; I am surprised the prison officials aren’t sounding the alarms more on what is happening here.”

The problems for Bivins from Project Learn are that we are pushing a group out of the equation that doesn’t need any more shoving out. “We are telling people they need to have a GED to get a job and they can only apply online with a computer,” he says. “But then those same people are frozen out of the process because they don’t have a computer in the first place. Then we tell them they need to know more algebra to pass the GED test so they do better in college when they have no intention of going to college.

“The people who needed to pass this test had to work hard before to do it, but now we’ve made it much harder and there is no good reason for that. We tell people in jail they need to get a GED while they are in there, but then we set it up so they can’t accomplish what we told them they need to do,” he says.

“Think of the message that sends. How do you think you would approach things when you get out? You can’t set people up for failure, but we are freezing a large portion of people out of the process right now.” * A version of this story originally appeared in Cleveland Scene. CityBeat staff writer Nick Swartsell contributed reporting to this version. ** The 2014 GED statistics are based upon information from the state agencies that oversee the testing, and is the testing data for the year up to late October and early November 2014, depending on the agency.

Stan Jones, president of nonprofit Complete College America

j a n u a r y 0 7 - 1 3 , 2 0 1 5 | 15

“There needs to be a viable option for older adults to get into college and move up in the job market, and the changes made this year have greatly diminished the GED as a pathway to get to that goal.”

PHOTOs from left: carol rosegg; press here publicity

Cinderella

Talib Kweli

c it y b e at sta ff p i ck s WEDNESDAY 07

16 | j a n u a r y 0 7 - 1 3 , 2 0 1 5

ONSTAGE: CINDERELLA Rodgers and Hammerstein created a musical about Cinderella for TV in 1957, watched by an audience of 107 million. It finally made its Broadway debut in 2013, with a contemporary story using their songs. In Douglas Carter Beane’s new script, the bedraggled chambermaid is Ella — taunted as “Cinderella” by her nasty stepsisters because she’s always dirty from cleaning the fireplace — and her story has had some political intrigue injected, making the heroine a bit of a social reformer. It earned nine Tony Award nominations, including one for gorgeous costumes, which you can see at the Aronoff during its twoweek run. Through Jan. 18. $49-$101. Aronoff Center, 650 Walnut St., Downtown, 513-6212718, cincinnati.broadway.com. — RICK PENDER ATTRACTIONS: MARTHA: A STORY OF EXTINCTION Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, effectively rendering the species extinct. After her death, she was stuffed and put on display at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. until 1999 — and she’s back there now until September for the exhibit Once There Were Billions. Despite the lack of her physical presence, the Cincinnati Museum Center’s exhibit, Martha: A Story of Extinction, shows how hunting and habitat destruction affect animals today and how some are being brought back from the brink. Through March 1. All museum pass: $18 adults; $17 seniors; $13 children.

1301 Western Ave., Queensgate, cincymuseum. org. — MAIJA ZUMMO

THURSDAY 08

MUSIC: Skronky Psychedelic Blues band BEHOLD THE BRAVE plays MOTR Pub with Pluto Revolts. See Sound Advice on page 32.

MUSIC: Nashville trio SOUND & SHAPE craft a sonic presence that bristles with Indie Rock verve. See Sound Advice on page 32.

MUSIC: TALIB KWELI In October, acclaimed rapper Talib Kweli was in the Queen City for a reunion show with Reflection Eternal, his duo project with renowned Cincinnatibased DJ/producer/artist Hi-Tek. This week, Kweli returns to the area to perform as a DJ. For Kweli’s visit to The Drinkery, the rapper/DJ will be joined by Brazilian-born/Florida-based MC NIKO IS, who is the latest artist signed to Kweli’s label Javotti Media (which released Kweli’s latest album, Gravitas). Rounding out Thursday’s bill are local Hip Hop/Funk/Soul artist Aida Chakra, excellent Cincy MC Santino Corleon and Chicago’s K’Valentine. 9 p.m. Thursday. $15; $20 at the door. The Drinkery, 1150 Main St., Over-theRhine, drinkeryotr.com. — MIKE BREEN COMEDY: GEOFF TATE Comedian Geoff Tate is adept at telling hilarious personal stories from his life, as well as making sharp observations about the seemingly mundane. “I think commercials are making fun of us,” he tells an audience. “They treat us like we’re dumb. All Coors Light tells you in their commercial is that their beer is cold. That’s it. That’s the commercial. Get Coors Light; we’ll tell you if it’s cold. Our hands don’t work anymore.” Tate, a Cincinnati native, now lives in Los Angeles. He also

hosts a podcast called Afternoon, Everybody! during which he talks about the sitcom Cheers with his friends. Showtimes Thursday-Sunday. $8-$14. Go Bananas, 8410 Market Place Lane, Montgomery, gobananascomedy.com. — P.F. WILSON DANCE: SWAN LAKE: A WAKING DREAM Theatrical dance group InBocca Performance — with actors ranging in age from 8 to adult — presents a wild reinterpretation of Tchaikovsky’s fairy tale ballet Swan Lake at the Southgate House Revival. It features actor-created choreography, text and movement sequences that examine loneliness, the fear of being forgotten and the joy of discovery through the tale of Odette, a princess turned into a swan by an evil sorceress.

7 p.m. Thursday- Sunday. $12. Southgate House Revival, 111 E. Sixth St., Newport, Ky., southgatehouse.com. — MAIJA ZUMMO

FRIDAY 09

MUSIC: Hip Hop artist Gerald Earl Gillum — under the moniker G-EAZY — plays Bogart’s.

See Sound Advice on page 33.

DANCE: MAMLUFT&CO. DANCE IN CONCERT is a mixed repertory show at the Aronoff. See feature on page 20.

MUSIC: Award-winning fiddlers Rachel Baiman and Christian Sedelmyer are 10 STRING SYMPHONY. See Sound Advice on page 33.

ONSTAGE: WEST SIDE STORY opens at The Carnegie. See more upcoming shows in Curtain Call on page 19.

EVENT: SYRIAN SHRINE CIRCUS The 94th annual Syrian Shrine Circus comes to the Bank of Kentucky Center. The Shriners’ three-ring circus features death-defying aerial acts, clowns and animal attractions like tigers and elephants. Along with gorging themselves on cotton candy and laughing at various clown gags, kids will have a chance to interact with and pet the animals — not the tigers, but yes to the elephants, donkeys and camels. 7:30 p.m.

Friday; 1 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday; 1 p.m. Sunday. $10-$30; $5 parking. 500 Louie B. Nunn Drive, Highland Heights, Ky., bankofkentuckycenter. com. — MAIJA ZUMMO MUSIC: LOUIS CONDUCTS BEETHOVEN 2 Conductor Louis Langrée leads the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in “Louis Conducts Beethoven 2,” with guest pianist JeanEfflam Bavouzet. The performance includes Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2, preceded by a reading of Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament from a member of the Ensemble Theatre. The testament is a letter from Beethoven to his brothers despairing over his impending deafness. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. $12-$105. Music Hall, 1241 Elm St., Over-the-Rhine, cincinnatisymphony.org. — MAIJA ZUMMO EVENT: CAVALCADE OF CUSTOMS The Duke Energy Convention Center hosts the Cavalcade of Customs, with tons of custom cars, hot rods, trucks and motorcycles, plus the cars of The Fast and the Furious, a live-demo chop shop, a Miss Cavalcade pin-up challenge and more. You can also catch celebrities like WWE’s

PHOTOs clockwise from top left: michael weber; provided; provided; provided; Shiftone Photography

Behavior Caused by Joy

Martha: A Story of Extinction

Cin City Reptile Show AMSOIL Arenacross

Big Show, Richard Rawlings from Gas Monkey Garage, Laura Marano from Disney’s Austin & Ally and NASCAR analyst/Top Gear’s Rutledge Wood, among others ... including SpongeBob SquarePants. 3-10 p.m. Friday; 10 a.m.-10 p.m.

Saturday; 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday. $16; $6 kids ages 6-12. 525 Elm St., Downtown, koiautoparts. com/cavalcade. — JOHN HAMILTON ART: BEHAVIOR CAUSED BY JOY: MICHAEL WEBER AT THUNDER-SKY, INC. Thunder-Sky’s artist-in-residence, Contemporary Arts Center gallery attendant and early member of Visionaries + Voices Michael Weber will have his first stateside one-man exhibit of brightly colored abstract paintings in the aptly named Behavior Caused by Joy. The work Weber is exhibiting has been inspired mostly by his recent trip to Japan, wherein he had his first international solo exhibit at SoHo Art Gallery in Osaka. The visible influence of Weber’s visits to Japanese shrines and gardens should also be readily seen.

Opening reception 6-9 p.m. Friday. On view through Feb. 13. Free. Thunder-Sky, Inc., 4573 Hamilton Ave., Northside, raymondthundersky. org. — MARIA SEDA-REEDER

EVENT: TAP ROOM TROLLEY In advance of February’s Cincinnati Beer Week, the Tap Room Trolley takes happy imbibers to six different Cincinnati breweries. The guided bus tour lasts approximately seven hours with three different routes — A, B or C — to take you to different alcoholic parts of town. All busses leave from the Moerlein Lager House, then route A travels to Old Firehouse Brewery in Williamsburg, Mt. Car-

ART: BRICKS, BARREL VAULTS & BEER: THE ARCHITECTURAL LEGACY OF CINCINNATI BREWERIES This favorite exhibit of Cincinnati’s 19th-century brewing industry returns to the Betts House. It features photos, charts and narratives of the tunnels, breweries, buildings and people of our beer past. Bricks, Barrel Vaults, & Beer also highlights the social and cultural influences like immigration that made Cincinnati a brewery destination.

Curators historian Mike Morgan and executive director of the Over-the-Rhine Beer Brewery District Steve Hampton will be at the opening to discuss the history of Cincinnati breweries and the developments for the new Brewery Heritage Trail in OTR. Brewer David Parks will also be on hand to discuss home brewing techniques. Opening reception: 2-5 p.m. Saturday. On view through May 7. Free. The Betts House, 416 Clark St., West End, thebettshouse.org. — MAIJA ZUMMO SPORTS: AMSOIL ARENACROSS U.S. Bank Arena hosts AMSOIL Arenacross Saturday — an enclosed, dirt-track off-road motorcycle

race filled with jumps, turns and other obstacles.

Watch as a whole slew of amateur supercross racers stop in our fair city in the hopes of earning their license — and pro status — for the Monster Energy Supercross championship. In addition to watching a group of motocross racers reach ludicrous speeds around the arena, you’ll also get a chance to meet five-time Monster Energy Supercross winner Ricky Carmichael. 7 p.m.

Saturday. $10-$40. 100 Broadway, Downtown, usbankarena.com. — JOHN HAMILTON

SUNDAY 11

EVENT: CIN CITY REPTILE SHOW This reptile show is for everyone from collectors (of reptiles) to people who enjoy freaking themselves out by looking at snakes. Thousands of exotic reptiles, amphibians, supplies, feeders and inverts will be for sale and display from responsible vendors at the monthly Cin City Reptile Show. And, for those afraid of said reptiles, all animals will be securely contained. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sunday. $5. 74 Donald Drive, Fairfield, cincityreptileshow.com. — MAIJA ZUMMO

TUESDAY 13

LITERARY: AMBER HUNT & DAVID BATCHER As we await the possibility that it could be another Bush-Clinton matchup for the presidency in 2016, it’s a good time to think about that most storied of political dynasties: the Kennedys.

Amber Hunt and David Batcher’s new book, The Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America’s Most Public Family, specifically looks at the women who married into the famously tight “Camelot” clan — from the iconic Ethel and

Jackie to the lesser-known Joan and Vicki. Hunt and Batcher discuss The Kennedy Wives at Joseph-Beth Booksellers. 7 p.m. Tuesday. Free.

2692 Madison Road, Norwood, josephbeth.com.

— JASON GARGANO

WEDNESDAY 14

LITERARY: WALNUT STREET POETRY SOCIETY KICKOFF EVENT The Walnut Street Poetry Society kicks off its 2015 season at the Mercantile Library with readings from moderator, poet and Xavier University English Professor Dr. Norman Finkelstein and writer/educator Kathy Y. Wilson — you may know her from CityBeat? Throughout the year the society will focus on African-American poetry. Meetings/readings take place at noon the second Wednesday of the month. Noon Wednesday. Free and open to the public; reservations requested.

Mercantile Library, 11th Floor Reading Room, 414 Walnut St., Downtown, mercantilelibrary. com. — MAIJA ZUMMO

ONSTAGE Tenderly: The Rosemary Clooney Musical Playhouse in the Park, Mount Adams (through Jan. 11)

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SATURDAY 10

mel, 50 West, Bad Tom and Blank Slate; B goes to Cellar Dweller, MadTree, Listermann/Triple Digit and Rhinegeist; and C goes to Tap & Screw, Rivertown, Rock Bottom, Ei8ht Ball and to the Moerlein Tap Room in OTR. Tickets include transportation and a swag bag, but not the beer itself.

Tour A departs at 11 a.m. Saturday and Sunday; tour B leaves at noon Saturday and Sunday; tour C leaves at 1 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. $30.

Moerlein Lager House, 115 Joe Nuxhall Way, The Banks, Downtown, cincinnatibeerweek.com.

— MAIJA ZUMMO

Amber Hunt

a r t s & c u ltu r e M A K I N G WAV E S

PHOTO: jesse fox

Skip and Cal Cullen pose with artwork from the upcoming show Most Likely To Succeed, opening Feb. 6.

Camp Washington’s multipurpose gallery space Wave Pool boosts Cincinnati’s contemporary art community

BY G ARI N P I R NI A

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For more information on WAVE POOL (2940 Colerain Ave., Camp Washington), visit wavepoolgallery.org.

Visit citybeat.com for complete calendar, dining, music & film listings.

S

an Francisco used to be a destination for aspiring artists until the high cost of living started driving creatives away. In its wake, suddenly Cincinnati’s affordability and desire for artists have pegged us as a potential new art frontier.

Artists Calcagno “Cal” and Geoffrey “Skip” Cullen had both gotten their M.F.A.s from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning by 2008 — she grew up in upstate New York; he’s from here — and shortly thereafter got married and moved to San Francisco. Besides creating their own art, the couple has years of experience in arts education and teaching: Cal worked as an education associate at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and currently teaches part time at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and Skip taught at the Art Institute of California-Sunnyvale. But after five-and-a-half years on the West Coast, they decided it was time to head back to Cincinnati and take a gamble on opening their first gallery, Wave Pool.

“The reason we moved out to San Francisco in the first place is because everything supposedly happens on the coast,” Cal says. “So moving back we were like, ‘We want to bring the energy of the coast to the Midwest,’ and so Wave Pool is kind of like the Midwest version of a beach.”

In October the couple and their infant daughter moved, found an old firehouse in Camp Washington and transformed it into a gallery, a book nook that sells artist-published books, an artist-inresidency space and a woodshop, making it a multipurpose center to involve the community.

“We’re placing our bets on Camp Washington,” Cal says about why they chose the up-and-coming neighborhood, which is close to the Brighton arts district.

“Brighton’s gone through these periods of galleries shooting up and then shooting down and it’d be nice to have some sort of permanence,” Skip says. “We’re close enough to Brighton and Northside and other areas, and we thought, ‘We like Camp Washington.’ ” Cincinnati’s art scene cannot compete with San Francisco’s saturation, but the benefit Cincinnati does have over the West Coast is available spaces and lower costs.

“They’re [San Francisco] losing artists left and right because no one can afford to live there anymore,” Cal says. “When we first moved there, they still had kind of a bohemian scene and now so many of our friends are being forced out of the city. It’s just depressing.”

And there’s so much opportunity here, Cal adds. “There’s hope for Cincinnati to become a spot because of the resources and architecture,” she says.

One opportunity Wave Pool offers is their ongoing artist-in-residency program. Artists must apply for the program and, if selected, they get to work and live in Wave Pool for about a month.

“Most people think of an artist-in-residency as a place where an artist can go and focus on their work and nothing else, and in this residency, yes, in some parts it’s that but in other ways it’s a lot about community,” Cal says. The Cullens expect the artists to produce socially engaged works sur-

rounding Cincinnati-centric topics.

Cal’s work also focuses on socially engaged art. “[Socially engaged art] is art that really engages with people in the community and tries to make connections between people and develop a community — that’s really what I’m interested in,” she says.

In 2011 she self-published a thick book entitled New York City Letters, where she typewrote 500 letters and sent them to random people in NYC in hopes of receiving responses.

She says out of every 50 letters, she received maybe a couple of responses in return.

In December, Wave Pool hosted a one-night photography pop-up show, Tri-X-Noise, from Punk band photographer Bill Daniel. The minimalist show gave gallery-goers a sneak peek of the type of art Wave Pool will exhibit when their first official show, Most Likely To Succeed, a group exhibit featuring works of art from Kristin Farr, Chase Melendez and Christine Wong Yap, opens Feb. 6.

“We don’t want this to become just another museum on a hill where people aren’t interacting with the art,” Cal says. “We want people to feel the push-pull with contemporary artists and be able to interact with them directly. I think our goal is for this space to be a community hub, for this place to be a space for artists to come and see really great work, to engage with contemporary artists both locally and nationally, for it to be a place where people feel really welcome and feel like they can come and express themselves.”

Even though for the past few years they’ve been absent from Cincinnati’s art scene, Cal feels good about the city and thinks it’s becoming more DIY, while Skip thinks the scene is growing at a slow and steady rate.

“It’s getting better,” he says. “It takes time.”

In order for Wave Pool to swim, they’re a project under fiscal sponsorship from Fractured Atlas, an organization that gives money to the arts. “We get to use their nonprofit status to fundraise for grants. We accept donations so we’re basically working as a nonprofit without having to go through all of the paperwork of the 501(c)(3) business,” Cal says. “They’re definitely helping us in a lot of ways, but eventually we may need to become our own 501(c)(3).”

Through Wave Pool, Skip and Cal both think they can concurrently assist artists and educate the masses about contemporary art.

“I get this question all the time: ‘What kind of work do you make?’ ” Cal says. “It gets more and more complex, and the more and more complex it gets the more people are like, ‘I don’t understand it so I’m not interested.’ To make a space to show that work and to have it be really accessible, to present it in a way where people find it fun and engaging, is kind of what we want to do so that we can grow a bigger audience for contemporary art in Cincinnati.” ©

a&c curtain call A Theater for You? BY r i ck p ender

Did you resolve to see more theater in 2015?

If so, where to start? If you don’t know a lot about specific plays, consider the audiences that local theater companies serve. If you match up, then pick a show in the next few months and check out a performance.

The Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park serves a broad range of audiences. On its mainstage, the Marx, it presents shows that resonate with a lot of people, such as Ring of Fire: The Music of Johnny Cash (opens Jan. 17), featuring an actor who played the iconic country singer on Broadway. On its smaller Shelterhouse stage, the Playhouse tends to be more adventurous, aiming at somewhat more serious theatergoers: Chapatti (opening Feb. 7) is about two seniors in Ireland who bond over a shared affection for animals.

Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati calls itself “your premiere theatre” because it stages brand new plays with lesser-known titles, often recently staged in New York City. ETC offers the opportunity to see them locally staged for the first time. Coming soon: The Other Place (opening Jan. 27), a nominee for several Broadway awards in 2013. It’s the story of a brilliant scientist who hopes to reconnect with her estranged daughter, but her quest might be shaped by an inherited brain tumor.

Of course Cincinnati Shakespeare Company presents works by the Bard, including The Taming of the Shrew (opening April 3). But it stages other classic stories that appeal to lovers of literature. Samuel Beckett’s absurdist classic Waiting for Godot (opening Jan. 16) kicks off the year with “a vaudeville of cosmic proportions” that grapples with the mysteries of the universe.

In February they’ll stage an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel Little Women.

On Cincinnati’s West Side, the Covedale Center for the Performing Arts most often presents familiar, crowd-pleasing plays and musicals. That’s certainly the case with Greater Tuna (opening Jan. 22), a comedy with two actors playing an array of quirky characters from Texas’ “third smallest town.” A little later, you’ll find The Marvelous Wonderettes (opening March 12), a comedy with Pop tunes from the early 1960s.

Like the Covedale, The Carnegie in Covington, Ky., generally produces familiar, audience-tested plays and musicals. The New Year predictably offers a “lightly-staged” musical, with an onstage orchestra, minimal scenery and costumes,

“

big voices and dancing. The latter is a sure thing when West Side Story (opening Jan. 9) is presented.

If you know of Cincinnati’s annual Fringe Festival, you might have a sense of what Know Theatre presents — quirky, contemporary plays with low-budget but high-intensity performances.

Up next on Know’s Over-the-Rhine stage is a one-woman adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (opening Jan. 23), the story of society forcing women to become vessels for population growth.

You can find local “storefront theater” — adventurous works in tiny spaces — on Ludlow Avenue, just east of the Esquire movie theater. Clifton Players and Untethered Theatre share a space that was once a downstairs coffee shop. That’s where Untethered will stage Cincinnati’s first production of the sprawling 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner, August: Osage County (opening Feb. 19). It should be fascinating to see this drama about a dysfunctional family played in an intimate space seating 50.

Don’t overlook colleges and universities. They lack specific niches since they strive to give students varied performance experience, but you’ll often find smart productions featuring students who aspire to professional careers, usually presented in excellent facilities. (Pay attention to dates — these shows typically have short runs.)

At the University of Cincinnati’s CollegeConservatory of Music you can see musical theater at the highest level; Many CCM grads head straight off to Broadway. The high-flying Peter Pan (opening March 5) takes off next. But don’t overlook equally high quality work by CCM Drama, presenting Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles (opening Feb. 12), the first time a play by this major playwright has been staged locally. CCM Drama gets creative with its annual Transmigration Festival (opening March 11), featuring works created and staged by students.

Northern Kentucky University takes its own shot at creativity with its biannual Y.E.S. Festival in April, offering three world premieres of plays by established playwrights who compete for the honor. NKU’s does a fine job with ambitious musical theater productions, too: Les Misérables is up next (opening Feb. 19).

Take your pick. But definitely go see some theater in 2015!

If you don’t know a lot about specific plays, consider the audiences that local theater companies serve.”

j a n u a r y 0 7 - 1 3 , 2 0 1 5 | 19

CONTACT rick pender: rpender@citybeat.com

NT BRANDING

a&c onstage MamLuft&Co. Dance Brings Mixed Repertory to Aronoff

BY KATHY VAL IN

A vodka tasting event

IZONTAL LOGO OPTION

Friday February 13th

5:30-8:30PM Commandery Asylum 6th Floor of the Cincinnatian Masonic Center 317 East 5th Street Cincinnati Ohio

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Food provided by: Tickets on Sale Now at Citybeat.com Stag $25 / Ball & Chain $45 / Threesome $60

A portion of the proceeds will go to support:

“We use a lot of improvisation in our Coming off a successful fall touring season creation, a lay person might think our moves with performances in Chicago and Roanoke, aren’t choreographed,” she continues. “We are Va., the eight modern dancers of MamLuft&Co. in the middle. We love the technique of contact Dance take the Aronoff stage this weekend for improvisation. We love gravity. We are original, the company’s first mixed repertory concert. visceral, physical. We want to be organic, On the bill are short-form adaptations of strong, agile. We are imaginative full-length there to say something favorites from the last — to create a world.” three seasons.

She acknowledges Subject matter the formative effect of ranges from a “danceconsidering audience for-camera” film created reaction during a work’s in five different sites and creation. Though she’s the concept of getting always believed in art lost in order to be found for art’s sake, she’s also a to an expression of practical director who is love and loss between willing to bend to make characters (inspired by a her work comprehenCincinnati Art Museum sible. exhibit of Expressionist “Since it became one prints from World War I) of our goals to enlist and the power struggle community support, between two rising leadwe needed to have the ers after an apocalyptic community able to make event. sense of our work,” she It’s a milestone event, PHOTO: jeannE mam-luft says. “When modern for sure. Director and MamLuft&Co.’s Maps dance began so many choreographer Jeanne years ago, in the ’20s and Mam-Luft is a multi’30s, it began as a revoludisciplinarian whose tion against the very classicist ideas of ballet. talents spill beyond boundaries — she’s also a The idea of being modernist was a pulling designer, photographer and letterpress printer away from, a paring down, of being more for who “dabbles” in lighting, video and sound. the people — more egalitarian but at the same In 2007 she brought her focus to Cincinnati, time being more austere. And, modern dance with the idea of creating a sustainable modern makers tended to pull away from narrative dance company, one that would support because they felt that dance could speak for modern dance artists on more than a projectitself and that movement could be beautiful in by-project basis while bringing modern dance its own right.” to the community. Today the company has When Mam-Luft realized that some of her become known for its intrepid technique and own company’s early dances were so abstract thoughtful choreography in works both accesthat they weren’t always making sense to audisible in their parallels to real life scenarios yet ences, she started to have an interest in “story.” challenging in their abstract nature. There’s a “It’s not like ballet, however,” she’s quick special nod to today’s visual culture. to point out. “And we don’t use mime. We When I talked with her in late December, move our bodies; we choreograph what we Mam-Luft was excited about the upcoming are feeling. We do try not to situate ourselves repertory evening. “It’s a different kind of year in stories known to a few elite, such as Giselle. for us,” she says. “Our format in the past has How many people outside of ballet really know been on creating original evening-length works. that story?”

We’ve put out a new work every year, what we “We think that seeing us is an adventure to call a main stage event at the Aronoff’s Jarsonour audiences,” she continues. “They come to Kaplan Theater.” see what our characters are experiencing in Typically each year MamLuft&Co. has also real time. Hopefully we are pulling them into collaborated with another arts organization in our world. There’s a lot to watch. I like to hope another original work. The company has also people will see very big things, and very small done many outreach activities and smaller things, the range of how a dancer can be very performances. Mam-Luft believes that this technical but very human at the same time. weekend’s program of four works from the Our mission has become to bring more modern past three seasons will illuminate the comdance to more people.” pany’s unique style.

“I didn’t realize it for a long time and tried MAMLUFT&CO. DANCE IN CONCERT AT THE ARONOFF takes place Friday and to compare it to more well-known choreograSaturday. Tickets and more information: mamluftcodance.org. phers. But we haven’t met other groups that look like us,” Mam-Luft says.

a&c all lit up R EVI EWS BY J OHN J . K EL LY

Kathleen Flinn Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good (Viking)

Phil Klay Redeployment (The Penguin Press)

Every New Year offers the opportunity to look forward to the future, reflect on the past and consider those who have enriched our lives. And that’s exactly what Michigan native and best-selling author Kathleen Flinn does so well in this engaging memoir of food, love and what she calls her “unremarkable and utterly fascinating” Midwest family. The Flinn clan’s journey spans three generations, beginning with the Great Depression. It’s a delectable feast of stories that entertain and inspire.

This is Flinn’s third book on cooking and food and it’s a perfect mix of family adventures, morality tales and the recipes that accompany them. She writes lovingly about her Grandma Inez, Grandpa Charles, parents and siblings, all noble altruists who, despite tribulations, practiced and taught generosity in spirit and deed. From her father’s daring decision to join his pizza-making brother in California to tales of deer hunting, fishing and raising chickens, Flinn’s memoir will warm your heart.

Each new family challenge is sprinkled with enriching life lessons about “sunshine work” — simple acts of kindness toward others.

This endearing memoir is a tribute to an inspiring family whose great strength has been resourcefulness with food and affection, never wasting a morsel of either. Flinn describes with humor and humility how her family survived tough times and celebrated solidarity with a bold spirit of adventure.

She succeeds in serving up a satisfying feast that is one part a selfdiscovery of her own love for cooking, one part a passionate plea for kindness at a time when the world is starving for love.

Grade: A+

2710 Erie Ave Hyde Park · 513-321-4721 www.tellersofhydepark.com

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Phil Klay’s extraordinary short story collection Redeployment, winner of 2014’s National Book Award for fiction, chronicles America’s ill conceived, futile and costly Iraqi occupation. But on a deeper existential level, these stories address good versus evil, human suffering, mercy and, ultimately, the existence of grace. Based on his experiences as a U.S. Marine in Iraq, Klay brings home the visceral essence of war: the smell, the taste, the crazy confusion of battle, the constant fear of dying for nothing. These sensations seep out of the pages and get under your skin. Yet, despite the darkness and conflict, Klay somehow miraculously infuses his war stories with little rays of light and hope.

Klay’s brilliance as a storyteller is his gift for creating characters and situations that are authentic but never clichéd. A grunt forced to shoot stray dogs that are eating corpses left in the streets returns home to find his beloved dog dying. Proud Marines argue for hours over who killed the most Iraqis. U.S. soldiers watch helplessly as an Iraqi child plants IEDs in the roads they travel daily. Madness on parade.

Written with the pinpoint precision of a sniper and the heartfelt eloquence of a poet, Redeployment does what all ageless war stories do: It puts you on the battlefield, asks you to make daily life or death decisions, and sends you home to reconcile what you chose to become. Angel or devil. You decide.

With this stunning debut, Klay takes his place beside some of the great writers of human conflict — Crane, Owen, Conrad, Hemingway, Herr, O’Brien — all of whom have bravely and unflinchingly conveyed the terrible conflicts and absolute horror of war.

Grade: A+

a&c film IN THEATERS

The Future Is Now: A Sneak Peek at the Year

BY TT S TE R N -E N ZI

Send reStaurant tipS, newS and preSS releaSeS to

The Champagne of Beers

INHERENT VICE — Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson reteams with Joaquin Phoenix (The Master) for this adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel, set in 1970, about a hapless Los Angeles detective named Larry “Doc” Sportello (Phoenix).

Doc starts off investigating the disappearance of a former girlfriend, but (thanks to his drug-addled state) winds up spiraling further down a rabbit hole with no end.

Anderson, harkening back to the epic casts of past efforts like Magnolia and Boogie Nights, stockpiles talent here — Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Eric Roberts, Maya Rudolph, Michael Kenneth Williams and Martin Short — like it’s going out of style. (Opens Friday) – tt stern-enzi (R) Not screened in time for review SELMA — Director Ava DuVernay (Middle of Nowhere) and newbie screenwriter Paul Webb wisely choose a key and pivotal moment in the Civil Rights struggle — the epic march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965 — to serve as the focal point in their exploration of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. So often biopics aim too broadly to tell the whole story of a life when, it appears, it is the individual moments that truly define who we are. Expect to hear much about DuVernay, Webb and stars David Oyelowo (as King), Tom Wilkinson (as President Lyndon B. Johnson), Tim Roth (as George Wallace) and Carmen Ejogo (as Coretta Scott King) throughout this awards season as the film’s life takes shape. (Opens wide Friday) — tts (PG-13) Not screened in time for review

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TAKEN 3 — It all comes down to this supposedly final installment in the Taken series, with Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) taking on the challenge of clearing his name, when a mysterious figure from his past attempts to frame him for the murder of his ex-wife (Famke Janssen).

When franchise creator Luc Besson first introduced audiences to Mills, there was a method to his action-happy madness, using hectic-editing and CSI-styled graphics to re-create crime and punishment through this character, but now it feels like what life there was has been taken from the premise, reducing it to yet another routine thriller. (Opens wide Friday) — tts (PG-13) Not screened in time for review

and Malick’s far-too-interior fever dream To As a critic or cultural commentator, you the Wonder), even when such efforts, while are required to turn the page, flip the switch, frustrating, prove to be more inspired and or do whatever you have to do as quickly (and riskier bets than the working hacks could ever as smoothly) as possible when it comes to imagine in a thousand years with all the riches year end/new year coverage. There’s precious of the world at their disposal. little time to waste waxing nostalgic about From a regional perthe recent cinematic past spective, I would be remiss because the future doesn’t to not include Carol from even bother knocking on Todd Haynes and Miles the door; it’s got a key and Ahead from Don Cheadle, has already made itself at since both films were shot home. in the area. Miles Ahead At least that’s how it has no release date, so feels this year. Last week I maybe including it in a list shared pleasant memofor 2015 smacks a bit of ries about the cinematic wishful thinking, but I’m moments that helped to willing to dream on. I’m define 2014 for me, and also keeping an eye on now I find myself someMidnight Special from how already surrounded Jeff Nichols, who is not by question marks. What exactly a local guy, but I films will dominate the reserve a special place in box office this year? How my critical heart for him will I be able to replicate PHOTO: wikipedia after Take Shelter. He’s the festival/online-streamLeonardo DiCaprio stars in The Revenant. got a key-for-life to the ing schedule I established state of Ohio as far as I’m last year in order to concerned. guarantee that I will be in Yet what I’m truly jazzed about when it position to offer authoritative opinions about comes to film is not strictly limited to film in the film landscape? And what, pray tell, will the going-out-to-the-movie-theater sense I once the film landscape even look like in this new was so religiously devoted to. I’m awaiting shared universe of screens where big and small word on the Netflix release of the Marvel series have merged into a flat medium view?

Daredevil (with Jessica Jones to follow later I start off simply, seeking to answer this on in 2015). Last year, Marvel Studios anquestion: What am I looking forward to in nounced their ambitious plan for two to three 2015? That should be easy enough. I refeature films a year, a dedication to network searched and banged out a list of names of television with Agents of Shield (and Agent films and directors I suspect will give shape to Carter, which debuts this week during Shield’s the wide field of vision that will be this interestwinter hiatus), and an emerging rollout of four ing year. (This list is in no particular order.) character-based serials on Netflix (Daredevil, The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu) A.K.A. Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Silence (Martin Scorsese) Fist) that would culminate in a team-up miniDemolition (Jean-Marc Vallée) series (The Defenders).

Life (Anton Corbijn) In terms of the big picture, Marvel wants to Sea of Trees (Gus Van Sant) establish a shared universe with the potential Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick) to have characters and/or plotlines flow across Joy (David O. Russell) the three viewing formats, and why not? This Triple Nine (John Hillcoat) makes perfect sense for a comic book comPartially based on recent track records pany with such a diverse collection of inter(Iñárritu, Vallée), career expectations (Scorsrelated characters and narratives that extend ese and, intriguingly, Russell) and in the case of from the outer limits of the galaxy to the urban Corbijn and Hillcoat, a sensibility of curiosity dangers of Hell’s Kitchen. With such scale and and creativity that inspires me to think and scope, it makes sense to exploit that resource. dream about what film (even genre-based stoAnd the real winners, I would like to berytelling) could be in the right hands, this list lieve, are not Marvel Entertainment or the Walt lays a solid and hopeful foundation. Even the Disney Company (which owns Marvel), but wildcards’ names — Van Sant and Malick — audiences. We get access to stories, a seemwhisper promises like Drugstore Cowboy, My ingly never-ending fountain of stories that will Own Private Idaho, Gerry and Last Days, and entertain and challenge a new generation of Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line viewers and creators. and The Tree of Life, respectively. It would be Welcome, 2015. Make yourself at home. churlish to focus on their misfires (Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho CONTACT TT STERN-ENZI: letters@citybeat.com

ONE LANDMARK THEATRE THREE ARTISTIC EVENTS TOO MANY TO COUNT LIBATIONS & LITE BITES

a&c television Not Those Kinds of ‘Girls’ by j ac k er n

With Lena Dunham’s omnipresence in the media between the build-up for and release of her book Not That Kind of Girl and her controversial Tweet/hair color/relationship du jour, it’s easy to forget we’re due for a new season of Girls (Season Premiere, 9 p.m. Sunday, HBO). But Hannah and friends are back for another round of comical misadventures.

One major change in this fourth season is the setting — while Jessa, Marnie, Shoshanna and the dudes are still living the dream in New York, Hannah is doing her thing at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Expect to see Hannah and Adam navigate a long-distance Girls relationship; Marnie and Desi work on their music and maybe more; Shosh graduate (and we get to meet her parents, played by Ana Gasteyer and Anthony Edwards); and Jessa try to stay sober.

Guest stars are always a highlight each season; this time around, look out for Gillian Jacobs, Marc Maron, Zachary Quinto, Maude Apatow and Spike Jonze.

WEDNESDAY JAN. 7

THURSDAY JAN. 8

Portlandia (Season Premiere, 10 p.m., IFC) – Season Five kicks off with a look back at how

Signature Series

SUNDAY JAN. 11

The 72nd Annual Golden Globe Awards (8 p.m., NBC) – The girls are back! No, not PHOTO: HBO Hannah and friends; I’m talking about Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. The pair hosts the Globes for the third consecutive year, celebrating the year’s best movies and TV the only way they know how — hilariously.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine (8:30 p.m., Fox) – Jake’s borrowed quite a bit of cash from the other detectives and crew over the years, so they decide the time has come for him to repay. Elsewhere, Holt and Santiago reopen the Brooklyn Broiler case.

Shameless (Season Premiere, 9 p.m., Showtime) – Season Five: The Gallaghers get gentrified!

Togetherness (Series Premiere, 9:30 p.m., HBO) – A married couple tries to reignite the spark that parenthood and life’s stresses have quelled as they invite a struggling actor friend and an impulsive, fun sibling to move in. Mark Duplass (The League, The Mindy Project), Melanie Lynskey, Amanda Peet and Steve Zissis star in this new relationship comedy from Mark and Jay Duplass.

My Husband’s Not Gay (Premiere, 10 p.m., TLC) – OK?!

TUESDAY JAN. 13

Parks & Recreation (Season Premiere, 8 p.m., NBC) – This seventh and final season offers a glimpse into the future of Pawnee (it’s 2017).

Each week brings two episodes to catch up with Knope and Company. But some things never change: Tammy is back, and she’s weaving her Black Widow web around a new victim — Councilman Jamm.

Kroll Show (Season Premiere, 10:30 p.m., Comedy Central) – Bobby Bottleservice and the other “Gigolo House” contestants play H.O.R.S.E. to determine who goes home; On “Wheels Ontario,” Mikey gets addicted to pills.

CONTACT jac kern: jkern@citybeat.com or @jackern

JAN UA RY

30

BLUES & BREWS

TICKETS $47 (all inclusive) 6:30 Reception and Enjoyment of Cincy’s Best Brews 8:00 Performance by The Ori Naftaly Band Evening highlights:

Don’t let the winter blues get you down. Join us on January 30th for a “Blues & Brews” celebration with The Ori Naftaly Band whose rapid rise to the top of the blues charts has won them a spot as a semi-�inalist in the 2013 International Blues Competition. Let this powerhouse of electric feel and funk rhythm enliven your winter blues and rede�ine your de�inition of this American tradition. Relax before the show as you enjoy the best brews made in Cincinnati, along with the famous Eli’s Barbeque.

join us!

E T IX

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j a n u a r y 0 7 - 1 3 , 2 0 1 5 | 23

American Idol (Season Premiere, 8 p.m., Fox) – Harry Connick Jr., Keith Urban and Jennifer Lopez return to the judges’ panel to find the country’s next major musician. Keep an eye out for talented local Jess Lamb, who auditions in this week’s premiere episodes (8 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday). Spoiler Alert: The judges love her, and so will you.

Modern Family (9 p.m., ABC) – After facing a near-death experience, Manny and the Dunphys all decide to make drastic life changes, which include avoiding all automobiles and getting (another) llama.

Blackish (9:30 p.m., ABC) – When Dre turns to his father to help him seem more masculine to Bow, Pops actually ends up attracting a woman himself — his ex-wife Ruby. Elsewhere, a school play gets awkward when Junior and Zoey are cast as Romeo and Juliet.

American Horror Story: Freak Show (10 p.m., FX) – Neil Patrick Harris, AHS fan and freelance magician, guest-stars as the new show boss, ready to take over Elsa’s role as she prepares to leave for Hollywood. The traveling salesman/ illusionist has an eye for the twins … and a creepy doll fetish. AHS alumna Jamie Brewer also makes a return this week.

Toni met Candace. Before the duo was hawking vagina pillows at Portland’s finest feminist bookstore, they were battling it out on the dance floor. Basically, Toni and Candace were Romy and Michele in power suits.

Parenthood (10 p.m., NBC) – The season picks back up with Zeek’s health scare. As the family anxiously waits for news, Joel continues to prove he’s the best (Julia, take him back) and the women plan a baby shower for Amber. It’s the 100th episode of the series; celebrate by shedding 100 tears.

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5440 Dixie Highway, Fairfield, Ohio 45014

The Weekly Juicery’s rainbow assortment of cold-pressed juices

FEATURING: PHOTO: jesse fox

E AT S f r es h Res o lutio n s The Weekly Juicery shines for juicing fans and skeptics alike

D

R E V I E W BY K RI S T E N F R A N K E

pineapple, almond butter and cayenne pepper (among other ingredients) is lacking in depth and sweetness and not necessarily worth a second try, though I swear I’m smarter after drinking it.

By far, the juicery’s best contribution to my palate is the Fire Island smoothie. I’ve visited the Weekly Juicery three times since it opened, and each time I have heard someone order it eagerly. The combination of pineapple, banana, coconut milk, goji berry, cinnamon and cayenne pepper tastes like a tropical vacation with a sexy travel mate. Everything about this smoothie is divine, and I find myself thinking about it on even the coldest, why-would-I-drink-something-with-ice-in-it winter days.

The shop’s second best contribution to humanity is the Mason Jar Salad. Not only is the concept adorable but it is also actually quite brilliant.

Bright, fresh, colorful salad ingredients are layered carefully on top of a bed of homemade dressing in a large mason jar. I tried the roasted corn salad with cashew dressing and about fell over in delight. The dressingon-the-bottom idea keeps the greens from getting soggy and also allows the eater to choose the amount of nom-licious dressing they want to add.

Most salads ring up under $10, and they tend to run out quickly — they’re pre-packed and stored in a grab-and-go fridge with the juice.

Other snack options include items like the Thai Shebang, a tiny container of carrot and zucchini “noodles” paired with peanut sauce.

They also carry raw veggie wraps and creative options like sweet potato hummus and carrot cupcakes. These snack items at The Weekly Juicery are small and slightly overpriced, but extra fresh. I ordered the carrot “cupcakes” ($7.50), an uncooked mixture of carrots and dates with a mysterious “cream cheese” icing. The cakes were gooey, tasty and extremely filling. The bellyache I had after eating them is only a testament to the fact that my body is not used to eating so many veggies at once.

The Weekly Juicery’s Hyde Park location still has a few kinks to work out — updated takeaway menus, price tags on their to-go items — but the fresh produce that regularly comes through its doors makes the whole New Year’s resolution/healthy eating thing a little easier.

The Weekly Juicery

Go: 2727 Erie Ave., Hyde Park; Call: 513-321-0680; Internet: theweeklyjuicery.com; Hours: 7:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. daily

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j a n u a r y 0 7 - 1 3 , 2 0 1 5 | 25

isclaimer: I am not fully on board with the juicing trend.

Perhaps it’s because I enjoy eating too much, or perhaps it’s because when someone calls a liquid combination of romaine lettuce, lemon juice and cucumber “delicious,” I just can’t relate. The Weekly Juicery, however, while enthusiastically committed to the juicing concept, is about much more than juice.

The Kentucky-based company just opened its first Cincinnati location in December, strategically placing the cozy, colorful shop in the very center of Hyde Park Square. With successful juiceries in Louisville and Lexington, their well-established concept places The Weekly Juicery a few steps ahead of its OTR counterpart, Off the Vine.

The juicery boasts an almost entirely gluten-free and vegan menu, and the staff is sensitive to just about every allergy imaginable. Their weekly juicing programs offer three, four and five-day juicing regimens in the $27 to $54 price range.

My first visit occurred shortly after they opened and I was eagerly offered a juice tasting. I sampled options from their cold-pressed line as well as their beet juices, carrot juices and blends (ranging from $8.75 to $9.50 and served in reusable glass bottles). Most of the cold-pressed juices are greens-heavy and many of them feature fresh ginger. Did I feel great after drinking them? Sure. But the combination of burning ginger and bitter greens on the back of my throat was hardly enjoyable. The beet-based juices tasted just like they sound, and the carrot ones are not for everyone. For juicing cynics like me, I recommend the “blends” list; their Pineapple Passion is popular and on the sweeter side.

Where The Weekly Juicery really excels is in their other options.

Their smoothies are eons away from what you’d find at the mall — in a really, really good way. That said: If you’re used to a shovel-full of turbinado in your beverage, then you might not like it here. The smoothiemakers at this juicery lean on the natural sugars in fruit to sweeten their drinks, only occasionally adding honey. But the use of ingredients like almond and coconut milk, cinnamon, cayenne pepper and chocolate plant protein really add something to the generous amounts of fruit packed into each $7.50 serving. The result is well worth the steep price tag.

The smoothie menu is always subject to change, but a few stand out. The Blue Suede Shoes has what appears to be an entire carton of blueberries in it, combined with healthy additions like almond butter and flaxseed. It is smooth, only the slightest bit sweet and very almond butter-forward. The Green Gracious, a kale-based smoothie with banana,

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435 Elm Street, | Cincinnati, OH 45202 (513) 621-8555| www.jimmy-gs.com

eat s drink Collective Espresso Expands to Northside

BY SEAN M. PETE R S

Collective Espresso now offers two of the city’s finest coffee shops found off the beaten path.

Owned and operated by Dave Hart and Dustin Miller, Collective Espresso’s original alleyway location off Main Street in Over-theRhine quickly established itself as a worthwhile destination for caffeine-cionados. They’ve branched out with a second location between Happy Chicks Bakery and Fabricate on Hamilton Avenue in Northside. And their new spot has inevitably found itself on a similar easy-tomiss-but-hard-toforget alleyway — enter through the swinging wroughtiron gate in front of Cluxton Alley, home to Cluxton Alley Roasters, which is renting them the space.

The imposed sense of secrecy only adds to Collective Espresso’s allure. Staff and owners, who are usually steaming milk or doing pour-overs alongside each other, are extremely inviting, talented and knowledgeable in all things espresso. And though the new location boasts a fully functional coffee roaster (owned

by Cluxton Alley Roasters), it’s not in the duo’s business trajectory to roast and sell their own coffee beans yet.

The shop has already enjoyed a soft opening and is currently open the same hours as the OTR location (7 a.m.-2 p.m. Monday; 7 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Friday; 8 a.m.-4 p.m. SaturdaySunday). The Northside shop also serves Collective’s same critically acclaimed coffee drinks, which recently received accolades from Food Network star Alton Brown, who grabbed a “spot-on” cortado when he was in town for his show at the Aronoff.

Before construction on Collective Espresso Northside was finished, CityBeat shared a cup of java with the brewed-bean bosses and shot the coffee-scented breeze about what’s in store for new locale.

CityBeat: Why a second location?

Dave Hart: Our shops are small and I don’t think we would want to expand the space down in OTR. Northside feels like a really good neighborhood right now and there’s a lot of momentum over here. There’s a lot of good stuff happening. We’d said offhandedly if this spot ever became available we’d want to do something in Northside.

CB: What is the occupancy limit?

Dustin Miller: About 14. Dave and I really like small spaces. People experience our coffee shops differently than going to other places because you’re kind of forced to be in close proximity with people.

DH: People go to coffee shops to connect with people, but then you go to big coffee shops, use your laptop and you don’t connect. [Collective Espresso] is like a forced connection.

CB: How do you grow Collective Espresso while staying true to your original vision?

DM: We want to be pushed and we want to be on the edge. We’re experimenting with different brew methods. Sure, we know PHOTO: jesse fox how to use Hario and Chemex, but what else is there? What else can we get good at?

CB: Does your business have the potential to expand outside of Ohio?

DH: It’s weird because that’s the way this kind of coffee shop is going right now. When this specialty coffee industry came up it was always based on little one-off shops. If you go to Chicago you can go to Intelligentsia, if you go to Portland you can have Stumptown; you’re seeing a bunch of cash flow going into these types of businesses. Now Intelligentsia is not only in Chicago, but Los Angeles and San Francisco. You’re seeing these people expand.

They’re getting a lot of cash dumped into their businesses from investors. There’s definitely room in the market for shops like this to move out from one’s city, but I don’t know if we’re close to that yet.

DM: I wouldn’t say it’s our passion to try to do that. Part of the fun for us is going to other cities and seeing all these good shops being run just a little differently. I like the differences.

There’s room for growth in Cincinnati.

Cincinnati’s going to continue to take off, and when that happens that means a lot more neighborhoods will need things like [Collective Espresso]. There’s something about these hidden spaces that seems to fit our brand. It’s not something we set out to do. The entrance sequence off of Hamilton is amazing. It feels like you’re doing something wrong.

COLLECTIVE ESPRESSO’s newest spot is located at 4037 Hamilton Ave., Northside. The original location is at 207 Woodward St., Over-the-Rhine.

More info: facebook.com/collectiveespressootr.

eat s classes & events Most classes and events require registration; classes frequently sell out.

WEDNESDAY JAN. 7

Taste of the World Food Tour — Take a guided foodie tour of Ohio’s oldest public market, Findlay Market. Includes stops and tastings at six merchants. 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Wednesdays; 3-4:30 p.m. Saturdays. $20. Meets at Daisy Mae’s Market at Findlay Market, 1801 Race St., Over-the-Rhine, cincinnatifoodtours.com.

Entrée Worthy Salads — Learn to make three delicious salads, incorporating different flavors and textures. 6-8 p.m. $70. The Learning Kitchen, 7659 Cox Lane, West Chester, thelearningkitchen.com.

Hands-On: Grilling with Ellen, a Steakhouse Dinner — Learn step-by-step how to cook a juicy and tender fillet. Sides included. 6-8:30 p.m.

Wednesday and Thursday. $65. Jungle Jim’s, 5440 Dixie Highway, Fairfield, junglejims.com.

THURSDAY JAN. 8

Lunch and Learn: Sumptuous Soups — Learn to make three soups: a stew, a chili and gumbo. 11 a.m.-1 p.m. $45. Cooks’Wares, 11344 Montgomery Road, Harper’s Point, cookswaresonline.com.

FRIDAY JAN. 9

Homemade Pasta Workshop — Learn how to make fresh pasta at home. 6-8 p.m. $75. The Learning Kitchen, 7659 Cox Lane, West Chester, thelearningkitchen.com.

SATURDAY JAN. 10

Hands-On: Sushi Basics — Calvin Tam leads you through the fundamentals of sushi making. Noon-2 p.m. $65. Jungle Jim’s, 5440 Dixie Highway, Fairfield, junglejims.com.

Healthy Cooking Classes — Peachy Seiden discusses nutrition and health while preparing two dishes. 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. $30. Peachy’s Health Smart, 7400 Montgomery Road, Silverton, peachyshealthsmart.com Sushi Rolling and Dining — Includes training and three rolls. BYOB. 7 p.m. $25. Sushi Cincinnati, 130 W. Pike St., Covington, Ky., 513-335-0297, sushicinti.com.

Date Night: India at Home — Learn to make Indian for two at home. 5-7 p.m. $160. The Learning Kitchen, 7659 Cox Lane, West Chester, thelearningkitchen.com.

Modern Shepherd’s Pie — Modernize this classic dish and add a wedge salad. 6-8 p.m. $70. The Learning Kitchen, 7659 Cox Lane, West Chester, thelearningkitchen.com.

Superfoods from Nectar — Nectar chef Julie Francis leads this class. 6:30-9 p.m. $55.

Cooks’Wares, 11344 Montgomery Road,

Healthy Living with SkinnyMom — Health and fitness expert Brook Griffin leads this class on skinny classics, with Weight Watchers points included. 6-8:30 p.m. $50. Jungle Jim’s, 5440 Dixie Highway, Fairfield, junglejims.com.

WEDNESDAY JAN. 14

Wildflower Café & Coffee House — Chef Todd Hudson discusses his restaurant and local food at the Fitton Center for Creative Arts, with a lunch buffet and music by Treva Boardman. 11:30 a.m. $15 members; $20 non-members. 101 S. Monument Ave., Hamilton, fittoncenter.org.

DeRay Davis

Barbershop, Semi-Pro, Life as We Know It

NEXT WEEK: 1/16 - 1/18 Dave Coulier

Full House, America’s Funniest People, The Surreal Life

Newport On The Levee UPCOMING SHOWS: 1/22 - 1/25 Guy Torry

1/28 - 1/31 Greg Morton 2/5 - 2/7

Brad Williams

Reservations a must! Call 859.957.2000 or visit www.funnyboneonthelevee.com

Meatless Everyone Will Love — Spend one day a week cooking a vegetarian dish, and learn to explore new foods and cook with in-season veggies. This class will teach you some black bean and pasta recipes. 6-8 p.m. $70. The Learning Kitchen, 7659 Cox Lane, West Chester, thelearningkitchen.com.

Taste of the World Food Tour — Take a guided foodie tour of Ohio’s oldest public market, Findlay Market. Includes stops and tastings at six merchants. 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Wednesdays; 3-4:30 p.m. Saturdays. $20. Meets at Daisy Mae’s Market at Findlay Market, 1801 Race St., Over-the-Rhine, cincinnatifoodtours.com.

THURSDAY JAN. 15

Fall in Love with Soup — Learn the art of soup making while you prepare a roasted butternut squash soup and a crispy chicken, potato and leek soup. 6-8 p.m. $70. The Learning Kitchen, 7659 Cox Lane, West Chester, thelearningkitchen.com.

Winter Comfort Soups — Learn to make hearty comfort soups. 6-8:30 p.m. $50. Jungle Jim’s, 5440 Dixie Highway, Fairfield, junglejims.com.

Lunch and Learn: All About Potatoes — CityBeat food writer Ilene Ross leads this class on taters.

11 a.m.-1 p.m. $40. Cooks’Wares, 11344 Montgomery Road, Harper’s Point, cookswaresonline. com.

SATURDAY JAN. 17

Super Bowl Sunday — Learn to make a fan favorite spread of apps, like Dorito-dusted popcorn, spicy pork stew, grilled homemade bratwurst and more. 11 a.m.-1:30 p.m. $50. Jungle Jim’s, 5440 Dixie Highway, Fairfield, junglejims.com.

Made in Cincinnati at Woodstone Creek — The distillery opens for wine, mead and craft spirit tastings. 1-6 p.m. $3-$35. Woodstone Creek Winery & Distillery, 4712 Vine St., Saint Bernard, 513-569-0300.

j a n u a r y 0 7 - 1 3 , 2 0 1 5 | 27

TUESDAY JAN. 13

Harper’s Point, cookswaresonline.com.

THIS WEEK: 1/9 - 1/11

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m u s i c R e a d y t o H appe n After two solid EPs, Cincinnati’s Let It Happen is prepared to take the next step with Cause + Effect IN TE RV IE W BY BR IAN BAKE R

For more on LET IT HAPPEN, visit letithappenband.com.

Visit citybeat.com for complete calendar, dining, music & film listings.

PHOTO: provided

A

Cincinnati Alt Rock foursome Let It Happen looks for wider success with its debut full-length, Cause + Effect.

Although the quartet — Highley, guitarist/lead vocalist Drew Brown, guitarist Michael Vogel and bassist Nathan Joiner — had been pleased with the results of their initial EPs, they sensed that Cause + Effect was a next-level release.

“I felt like it was a big step from the last things we’d done and I was really happy with it,” says Vogel, who is also Highley’s cousin. “Any time you release something you’ve spent a lot of time and effort on, you think it’s great. You’ve got to kind of see where it goes. We didn’t know what to expect.”

“You get so close to your own product, you’re like that mom who’s like, ‘My daughter’s got a lovely singing voice!’ ” Highley says. “It’s important to step back from your own stuff.”

One of the big shifts for Let It Happen in the making of Cause + Effect was in the album’s pre-production phase. On the EPs, the band was relentless in working and reworking the songs to get them ready for the studio, but the members’ preparation for the album material was considerably less structured before bringing it to producer Nick Ingram.

“The pre-production for this album was a lot more lax,” Highley says. “We’d been used to working with a producer who’s like, ‘Your songs are finished, let’s record.’ This experience was nothing like that. We worked with someone who cared about our record a lot, so we came in and it was like, ‘This track has written guitars and drums for it, let’s build.’ That was creative.”

Perhaps most importantly, the band’s songwriting regimen was considerably different from its previous releases. Where the EPs had been fully composed prior to entering the studio, the songs for Cause + Effect still had some cooking time left in them.

“I had essentially no lyrics or vocals until we went into the studio,” Brown says. “Which was a blessing in disguise. I was going nuts and stressing out, but it was that last minute pressure that pushed us. And there was no opportunity to ever overthink anything.”

The band also allowed a greater gestation time for Cause + Effect to evolve and find its identity.

“We worked on ‘The Lonely One’ for several months,” Joiner says. “We knocked every other song on the rest of the album out in the exact amount of time it took to write that one song.”

“Different people worked on bits of each song,” Vogel says. “I think that’s kind of why it sounds a bit different than our EPs.” The band also used a lot of different groups and albums as reference points for the new material, citing Paramore, Third Eye Blind, The 1975 and Young the Giant as being crucial in that regard. Rather than identifying them as influences, the quartet sees the bands they listened to prior to Cause + Effect as inspirations to realize the sounds and outcome the members’ envisioned.

“It made it way more personal,” Brown says. “There was no time to think about anything, so it was ‘What’s going on right here, right now in my life and how do I feel about it and how do I get it into a song?’ So it did become very personal and I think that’s what made it a good record.”

Everything on Cause + Effect evokes deep feelings, given the honest and raw emotion that Brown invested in the lyrics. One of the album’s best is the quietly powerful “Astray,” a departure from its high-octane surroundings.

“I felt like we were missing that emotional, sad song,” Brown says. “I went home after recording, I was drained, I didn’t give a fuck about anything at the timeand I just wanted to be done.”

Even as Let It Happen was consciously attempting to push themselves in new directions, they were also very aware of the fan base that had brought the band to its current status on the verge of a potential national breakout.

“We didn’t want to make that 90 degree turn, we wanted to make that swerve,” Highley says. “We didn’t want to abandon the ship that’s been carrying [us]. We love our fans, but we’re growing and our fans are growing with us and we didn’t want to stray too far from that.”

“That’s where Sean’s taskmaster role came in,” Brown says.

“At points, the three of us were like, ‘Fuck it, let’s just go crazy!’

And he’d be like, ‘That’s good stuff, but not too far.’ ” ©

j a n u a r y 0 7 - 1 3 , 2 0 1 5 | 29

t the five-year mark, a band can begin to wonder if they’re making an impact, and perhaps even consider a musical (or even a career) course correction.

You won’t find any such speculation within the ranks of Let It Happen. The Cincinnati quartet may have taken five years to release their first full-length, last year’s bracing and infectious Cause + Effect, but the members seem as energetic and eager to move to the next phase as they must have been when they first coalesced as a band half a decade ago.

With the blazing Alternative Pop of Cause + Effect, Let It Happen is poised to become the next local band to raise their profile to a national level.

The band’s touring activities of late have been intermittent but productive, and the notices for Cause + Effect, released in September by Findlay, Ohio, label InVogue, have been almost universally positive.

“It’s been critically received really well, but we haven’t been able to do a ton of touring on it,” drummer Sean Highley says in the living room of his Walnut Hills apartment. “I think it’s a thing where it’s our first release, it takes a little while to gel.”

Although Cause + Effect is Let It Happen’s first full length, it’s the band’s third studio foray. The group self-released its debut EP, 2011’s It Hurts, But It’s Worth It, and then sent the recording of its sophomore EP, 2013’s Unravel, to InVogue, who signed them and then re-released the EP to a wider audience.

“A mutual friend knew the guy who owned the label, so there was a little ‘in’ there,” Highley says with a laugh, “I guess it was the music that did it. I hope.”

It was the music all right. From the start, Let It Happen has served up adrenalized Pop/Punk with the satellite-bouncing energy of Jimmy Eat World and fun., taking care to balance its smartass effervescence with a seriousness of intent. By avoiding either extreme, Let It Happen has earned a reputation as a band that can be thoughtful and introspective as well as explosive and smirkingly charming. That’s an impressive tightrope to navigate.

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music spill it Chris Arduser Delivers Again with ‘Flibbertigibbet’ by mike br e e n

1/7 1/8 1/9 1/10 1/11 1/12 1/13 1/14

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Music starts @ 9:00pm

friday, January 9th

papa loves mambo saturday, January 10th

trumpeter gary winters friday–saturday January 16th–17th Guitar Great

Dan Faehlae “The Wes Montgomery Tribute” returns for two nights

30 | j a n u a r y 0 7 - 1 3 , 2 0 1 5

Friday, January 23rd

Vocalist Ann Chamberlin

Saturday, January 24th

To Be Arranged

1000 Elm Street | Cincinnati OH, 45202

513-421-0110

www.washingtonplatform.com

He’s Never Heard of You, Either During a fan Q&A last month, Paul McCartney was asked if he ever imagined he would one day be in history books. McCartney said when he actually found out he was in one of his kid’s history books, he said, “What?!

Unbelievable, man!” It seems as if a few kids skipped that page because after Kanye West released a single with McCartney called “Only One,” several social media users wondered who this McCartney kid was and predicted big things for the unknown now that he had Kanye’s seal of approval.

At least that’s how it appeared — scrolling through the steady stream of “Who’s Paul McCartney?” tweets, it’s clear that many of the “confused” people were just joking. That didn’t stop practically every news outlet on the planet from running a story about how we as a society are doomed because a few people might not know who The Beatles are.

Dial-A-Song 2.0 They Might Be Giants first came to the public’s attention in the ’80s with a concept called “Dial-A-Song,” whereby anyone could call a certain phone number and hear a new TMBG song on an answering machine. Though the twosome disconnected the number in 2006, Rolling Stone reports that TMBG is bringing DialA-Song back with a modern twist. There is still a number to call to hear the new tracks (844-387-6962), but the band is also using technology to distribute the new tunes. The Dial-A-Songs will also be accessible through dialasong.com, email, YouTube and about 100 radio stations worldwide. Yes, there are still at least 100 non-corporate radio stations on the planet willing to do something like this! The stations — which will air short segments with each song weekly — include college and underground channels.

Car Wars It seems fair that if a recording of an artist’s music is played in public, that artist should be compensated.

But a Swedish organization that collects money for writers and publishers wants to stretch the definition of “public.”

The company, STIM, says that car rental company Fleetmanager should have to pay licensing fees because the rental cars have stereos and renters do not own the cars and are therefore members of the public, in a public place. So, STIM argues, Fleetmanager should be required to purchase public performance licenses. The collection agency notes that other Swedish rental car companies have complied, as have several hotel chains. Note to those visiting Sweden soon — be careful what you whistle when walking down the street. Unless you have the proper license, of course.

Late last year, veteran multi-instrumentalist/ singer/songwriter Chris Arduser released the latest addition to his stellar discography, a new solo album titled Flibbertigibbet (yes, it’s a real word, meaning “a flighty or excessively talkative person”). Arduser is known for his work as the drummer/singer/songwriter in psychodots and The Bears, as well as being the frontman for his own Roots Pop outfit The Graveblankets. Flibbertigibbet is his fourth solo effort.

Arduser is one of the city’s best drummers, a great vocalist and remarkably talented on mandolin, guitar and several other instruments (he plays a little of everything on the new album, but is also joined by guests like his Graveblankets mate George Cunningham and his fellow psychodots Rob Fetters and Bob Nyswonger, among others). But Arduser’s songwriting skills may be the sharpest tools in his ample toolbox, showcasing a fantastic sense of melody and some phenomenal lyrics.

Flibbertigibbet is an impressively dynamic Pop Rock album full of depth, soul and instantly unforgettable melodies. The album kicks off with the sparkling “Stalling,” a mid-life crisis-like tale about a person who’s stuck in life and “can’t move forward, can’t move back.” Arduser is known for trademark darkness in his lyrics, but “Stalling” shows glimmers of hope, a trend that pops up throughout the album. “Wake Up Screaming” is the album’s highlight, a gloriously arranged slab of Power Pop, shifting from an engagingly herkyjerky verse to a dreamy, ethereal chorus and sounding like a lost Elvis Costello track. Other album highlights include the propulsive “One Girl Show,” which rumbles like The Who; the gorgeous, airy “Dark Dream”; the rootsy “Stayed Too Long”; and the gentle, melancholic “Sharyn,” in which the narrator fondly remembers a teenage paramour who loses her life to a drunk driver.

Flibbertigibbet is available through most major online music retailers, as well as local-music friendly Cincinnati record shops, like Shake It Records and Everybody’s Records.

Catch Hot New Local Artists Next Weekend

Mark your calendars for Saturday, Jan. 17, as CityBeat presents the 2015 edition of our “Best New Bands” showcase at Bogart’s (2621 Vine St., Corryville, bogarts.com). Showtime is 7:30 p.m. and admission is just $5. The show is open to music fans 18 and up.

The showcase will feature the Cincinnati Entertainment Awards nominees in the “New Artist of the Year” category — Noah Smith, Leggy, Elk Creek, PRIM, Honeyspiders and Dream Tiger.

The bill will be rounded out with other great new local acts JetLab, Harbour, Near Earth Objects and Kate Wakefield.

Grab a copy of CityBeat next week for our Best New Bands issue, featuring profiles of all of the New Artist of the Year nominees and more.

The Cincinnati Entertainment Awards ceremony, featuring performances by nominees Young Heirlooms, Injecting Strangers, Buggs tha Rocka, The Cliftones, Electric Citizen and more, is Jan. 25 at the Madison Theater (730 Madison Ave., Covington, Ky., madisontheateronline.com).

Tickets for the 18th annual event are available through cincyticket.com for $20.

There is still time to vote for your favorite CEA nominees; visit citybeat.com for a link to the ballot.

Support Music Education

This Sunday marks a great chance to catch the next generation of local musicians as Mason’s School of Rock presents a benefit concert to support the Rock School Scholarship Fund, which helps provide music education to young people who would otherwise not have access due to costs. The site rockschoolfund.org has details on the scholarship programs; money raised at Sunday’s benefit will be focused on helping Greater Cincinnati kids specifically. (The site includes a donation page if you are unable to make the show; be sure to mention School of Rock Mason with your donation.) Mason’s School of Rock provides lessons, workshops, live performance opportunities and more for students ages 7 to 18 and is part of a chain of more than 140 Schools of Rock located all over the world.

Sunday’s all-ages benefit takes place at The Woodward Theater (1404 Main St., Over-theRhine, woodwardtheater.com). Admission is $7 in advance through cincyticket.com or $10 at the door.

The show begins at 4 p.m. and will feature nearly half of the school’s 150 students throughout the event. The concert will consist of the best material from the School of Rock’s three most recent public performances — tributes to Blondie and The Police, The Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and KISS. The show will also include appearances by participants in the school’s adult and beginners programs, as well as the school’s House Band, which contains some of the school’s best players and has been featured at the MidPoint Music Festival and Milwaukee’s huge Summerfest.

For more on the benefit and the school itself, visit mason.schoolofrock.com.

CONTACT mike breen: mbreen@citybeat.com or @CityBeatMusic

MUS IC L IST IN G S

MadisonTheaTer

CityBeat’s music listings are free. Send info to MIKE BREEN via email at mbreen@citybeat.com. is CityBeat staff’s stamp of approval.

Listings are subject to change. See citybeat.com for full music listings and all club locations.

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Wednesday 07

Anderson Pub And Grill— Open Mic Night hosted by Jody Stapleton. Various. Free.

Arnold’s Bar and Grill— Todd Hepburn. Piano. Free.

The Drinkery— Kaitlyn Peace and Dr. Hue. Pop/ Rock.

The Greenwich— Apollo @ The Greenwich. R&B/Hip Hop/Adult Contemporary/Spoken Word/Various. $5.

HD Beans and Brews Café— Open Jam with Nick Geise and Friends. Various. Free.

Knotty Pine— Dallas Moore. Country. Free.

MOTR Pub— Analog Bandits with Expeditions. Indie Rock. Free.

Mac’s Pizza Landen— Bob Cushing. Acoustic. Free.

Mansion Hill Tavern— Jeff Thomas & Angie Holt.

Roots. Free.

Maudie’s— No Gimmicks featuring DJ Amir Gamble.

DJ/Dance.

Northside Tavern— Sexy Time Live Band Karaoke.

Various. Free.

Friday 09

20th Century Theatre— Norwood Promise Benefit Concert featuring The Dallas Moore Band. Country. $15-$20.

Arnold’s Bar and Grill— The Tadcasters.

Americana. Free.

H Tequileria— Talib Kweli (DJ set). Hip Hop/DJ. $10.

HBarrio G-Eazy with Jay Ant. Hip Hop. $25.

HBogart’s— Dee Felice Café— The Sleepcat Band. Jazz.

Free.

The Drinkery— David Bowie Birthday Party with DJs Brian & Gerald and The Spiders. Rock/DJ.

Maudie’s— Urban Brew with Solid Color Fields.

Rock.

HD Beans and Brews Café— Byrdman’s Blues Band. Blues/Various. Free.

MOTR Pub— Behold The Brave with Pluto Revolts. Indie Rock. Free.

H

The Mad Frog— Reggae Thursdays. Reggae. Cover.

Plain Folk Cafe— Open mic with Tony Hall. Various.

Free.

Southgate House Revival (Revival Room)— Sound & Shape with Day Camp, Sweet Ray H Laurel. AltRock. $6.

Tin Roof Cincinnati— Core. Rock. Free.

Walt’s Hitching Post — Bob Cushing. Acoustic. Free.

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Fill Inn— Sonny Moorman Group.

Blues/Rock.

HMiller’s Pirates Den (Western Hills)— Pandora Effect. Rock.

Folk Cafe— My Brother’s Keeper. Bluegrass/Roots. Free.

HPlain The Redmoor — Young Jazz Messengers. Jazz. $10.

Rick’s Tavern— Gee Your Band Smells Terrific. Pop/ Rock/Dance. $5.

Southgate House Revival (Lounge)— Adam Klein.

Folk/Americana. Free.

House Revival (Revival Room)— 10 String Symphony. Indie/Folk/Progressive. $10.

HSouthgate Tin Roof Cincinnati— DJ Diamond. Dance/DJ. $5.

Tyme Out— Bob Cushing. Acoustic. Free.

Washington Platform Saloon & Restaurant— Papa Loves Mambo. Latin Jazz. $10 (food/ H drink minimum).

Woodward Theater— Leggy with Babe Rage, Curtsey and Honey Wild. Rock/Punk/Pop/ H Various. $5.

Saturday 10

Arnold’s Bar and Grill— Lagniappe. Cajun. Free.

CONTINUES ON PAGE 34

j a n u a r y 0 7 - 1 3 , 2 0 1 5 | 31

Southgate House Revival (Lounge)— Straw Boss with Jason & the Punknecks. Roots/Country/Honky Tonk/Rock/Various. Free.

23

dAvid AllAn Coe

Brothers and Noah C. Rock/Jam/Various. Cover.

Thursday 08

The Drinkery— Talib Kweli (DJ Set) with NIKO IS, K’Valentine, Aida Chakra and Santino H Corleon. Hip Hop/Funk/R&B. $15, $20 day of show.

January

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Bar & Grille— Tana Matz. Country/Pop. HMVP The Mad Frog— Rubix Wheel with The Marsh

Mansion Hill Tavern— The Juice. Blues/R&B. $4.

Dilly Deli Cafe Wines & Gourmet— Steve Barone.

Classical/Jazz guitar. Free.

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Automaton, Ford Theatre Reunion, Lords of the Trident, Stagecoach Inferno, Deadiron, Scarangella

MOTR Pub— The Almighty Get Down. Funk/Rock.

Free.

Tin Roof Cincinnati— Donnie Bray. Acoustic. Free.

Dee Felice Café— Lee Stolar Trio. Jazz. Free.

17

Knotty Pine— Prizoner. Rock. Cover.

Madison Theater— Madison Theater Band Challenge. Various. $10.

Comet— The Valenteens with Bummers Eve and Sleeves. Punk. Free.

HThe

January

Jim and Jack’s on the River— Stagger Lee. Country/ Rock. Cover.

Southgate House Revival (Lounge)— Daniel Van Vechten. Acoustic. Free.

Arnold’s Bar and Grill— Dottie Warner and Ricky Nye. Jazz/Blues. Free.

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MUSIC SOUND ADVICE Behold the Brave with Pluto Revolts Thursday • MOTR Pub It’s not the least bit surprising that Chattanooga, Tenn.’s Behold the Brave left its mark on the assembled multitude that gathered to witness its blazing MidPoint Music Festival set in Cincinnati at Mr. Pitiful’s last year. The Behold the Brave band’s skronky Psychedelic Blues with a side of Soul and a sprinkle of Pop melodicism was an easy sell to local fans of the Buffalo Killers’ loping Psych Pop thunder and the Heartless Bastards’ quirky Indie Blues mutations (lead vocalist/guitarist Clayton Davis often hits a register that suggests Erika Wennerstrom’s vein-popping howl), but comparisons Sound & Shape to the shivering intensity of Alabama Shakes and the swaggering bravado of Jack White offshoots like The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather are equally appropriate.

So far, Behold the Brave’s recorded output is relatively sparse. Davis, guitarist Zack Randolph, bassist Joel Parks and drummer Jeremiah Thompson have released 2010’s Lost in the Woods and 2012’s The Great American Challenge (featuring the scorching and infectious “Rocky Mountain Strawberry”), potent but all-too-brief EPs that were expanded to full-lengths. That’s not a huge catalog for a band that’s been together nearly seven years — dating back to 2008 when Davis, Thompson and Randolph started the band as students at Lee University in southeastern Tennessee — but the intervening years have seen Behold the Brave build a solid reputation as an incendiary live presence and their commitment to the road has superseded their need to sequester themselves in the studio.

If you didn’t catch Behold the Brave at MidPoint, you weren’t alone. The group drew the short time-slot straw and played against the Joseph Arthur/Wussy/Afghan Whigs bill at Washington Park. So now’s your chance to spend a little face-melting time with one of Tennessee’s most powerful young exports … and if you ask real nice, they might even haul out their amazing cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Cecilia.” (Brian Baker)

Sound & Shape with Day Camp and Sweet Ray Laurel Thursday • Southgate House Revival Either there’s an evolution/revolution going on down in the hills of Tennessee or someone has spiked the water supply with a chemical blend of adrenaline and amphetamine, because the Riff Rock sounds emanating from the state these days could strip the bark off a redwood tree at 50 paces.

The latest case in point is Nashville, Tenn., trio Sound & Shape, whose releases to date (2006’s Where Machines End Their Lives, 2009’s The Love Electric, 2011’s Now Comes the Mystery and PHOTO: tr agency 2012’s Hourglass) have been prime examples of a heartland perspective on Led Zeppelin and Mars Volta. Those recording efforts were mere tune-ups for the main event: Bad Actors, the band’s recently released and fully realized sophomore full-length album.

With Bad Actors, Sound & Shape crafts a sonic presence that bristles with PHOTO: provided Indie Rock verve while flexing Prog Rock muscles and coloring the proceedings with hints of sugary Pop melodics. From the hypercaffeinated Foo Fighters pace of opening track “The Laughing Lovers” to the Dream Theater-flecked bombast of “Heavy is the Head” to the Jimmy Eats World jangle Rock of “Hemingway on Broken Hearts,” Sound & Shape taps into a veritable who’s who of influences to create their familiar but unique identity.

Guitarist/vocalist Ryan Caudle peels off Classic Rock/Metal riffs that resonate with Pop atmospherics and channel some of the most powerful six-string inspirations in the history of electric music, while Sound & Shape’s relatively new rhythm section, bassist/vocalist Gaines Cooper and drummer Grant Bramlett, build a sturdy yet adaptable foundation for any framework that Caudle provides.

If local references are required before you can make up your mind, Sound & Shape opened for the Buffalo Killers when they played Nashville’s Stone Fox back in November; there’s your Good Rockkeeping Seal of Approval. (BB)

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j a n u a r y 0 7 - 1 3 , 2 0 1 5 | 33

the most successful Hip Hop artists/producers 10 String Symphony to emerge from the Oakland, Calif., scene in the Friday • Southgate House Revival past decade.

In April, I found myself at North Carolina’s G-Eazy’s earliest notice came through the Bay MerleFest watching the “Hillside Album Hour,” Boyz, a Hip Hop collective he assembled out of an annual mid-festival event where Classic Rock Berkeley High School that band The Waybacks recregained wide exposure ate a classic album with an 10 String Symphony through MySpace postall-star group of artists. At ings. From there, G-Eazy the most recent MerleFest, transitioned into his solo/ Crosby, Stills, Nash & mixtape persona, starting Young’s great Déjà Vu reout in wildly tinted skinny cord was brought to life by jeans, a dookie strand as the host band plus special thick as a logging chain guests Jim Lauderdale, and lensless glasses, a Celia Woodsmith, Ben Mornerd/jerk aesthetic that rison and an impressive garnered him fans and fiddler named Christian attention.

Sedelmyer.

During his time at New Sedelmyer is an Orleans’ Loyola Univeradmired talent who has sity, where he majored in worked with a large array PHOTO: provided Music Industry Studies, of great artists, including G-Eazy released a string Jerry Douglas, Vince Gill, G-Eazy of mixes that successively Emmylou Harris and many heightened his profile others. A couple of years (particularly 2008’s The ago, Sedelmyer made a Tipping Point and 2011’s musical connection with The Endless Summer, the award-winning fiddler which featured his Rachel Baiman. With both updated sample spin on artists choosing the fiveDion and the Belmonts’ string fiddle as their axe of “Runaround Sue” and choice, the duo began to notched more than 4 record and tour under the million YouTube views). appropriate moniker 10 While a senior at Loyola, String Symphony. Baiman G-Eazy was tapped to is a former Illinois State PHOTO: the chamber group open for Drake; since Fiddle Champion who has then, he’s warmed up crowds for Snoop Dogg studied under acclaimed fiddler Matt Combs and Lil Wayne. at Vanderbilt University, where she graduated With his freshly minted 2011 diploma in hand, magna cum laude.

G-Eazy shifted to a slicker, more sophisticated What is awesome and innovative about 10 neo-Rat Pack presentation and began work on String Symphony is that while both Sedelmyer his debut solo album, 2012’s self-released Must and Baiman are profuse in the Bluegrass, Be Nice, which cracked Billboard’s R&B/Hip Old-Time and Celtic styles, they possess an openHop Top 40 and earned him a slot on the 2012 minded bent for blatantly Progressive music as Warped Tour. That album’s success led to an well. Their concert at Southgate will be about RCA contract and his breakthrough major label seeing two masters at work, having fun and sophomore album, the patently amazing These pushing the envelope. (Derek Halsey) Things Happen (featuring his chill hook-up ode, “Tumblr Girls”), which topped both the R&B/Hip G-Eazy Hop and Rap charts and hit No. 3 on Billboard’s Friday • Bogart’s Hot 200 albums this year. On “Almost Famous,” If Gerald Earl Gillum was an actor, he could from Must Be Nice, G-Eazy posed this astute probably score a role playing little brother to question: “And while I made a splash/Rappers Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal or Edward Norcame and passed/But still I ask myself/How long ton, since there’s a little bit of all of those guys does famous last?” Given his killer flow and imfloating around in his intense visage. But Gillum’s peccable flair, G-Eazy’s famous could last as long gig isn’t in front of the camera, it’s behind the mic as any of Hip Hop’s current practitioners. (BB) and, as Young Gerald or G-Eazy, he’s been one of

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FROM PAGE 31

Knotty Pine— Randy Peak. Acoustic. Free.

The Comet— “Basement Reggae Night”. Reggae/ DJ. Free.

Legends Nightclub— Lee’s Junction Big Band. Big Band/Jazz. $10.

Dee Felice Café— The Sleepcat Band. Jazz. Free.

Pub— House of Whales. Alternative Hip Hop. Free.

HMOTR

The Drinkery— Magnolia Sons. R&B/Soul/Rock.

Froggy’s— Pandora Effect. Rock.

The Greenwich— Randy Villars Quartet. Jazz. $10.

Jim and Jack’s on the River— Heather Roush & Cason Coburn. Country. Cover.

Knotty Pine— Prizoner. Rock. Cover.

MOTR Pub— Lemon Sky with Bummers. Rock. Free.

The Mad Frog— CinciFrost3 featuring DJ Masha, Mama Lingo, DJ Bloodbath, Crazy H Caroline, Jah Killin, DJ Junkie and more. Dance/DJ/ EDM. Cover.

Madison Theater— Madison Theater Band Challenge. Various. $10.

Mansion Hill Tavern— Prestige Grease. Blues. $3.

Maudie’s— Go Go Buffalo with Animal Circles and Abertooth Lincoln. Rock.

H

Miller’s Fill Inn— Doc Savage. Classic Rock.

Northside Tavern— Old City, Prim, Uman, Links. Indie/Rock/Electronic/Various. Free.

H

O’Neal’s Tavern— Marsha Brady. Pop/Rock. Cover.

Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen— LoHeat (6 p.m.).

Blues/Rock/Country. Free.

Northside Tavern— “Classical Revolution”. Classical/Chamber/Various. Free.

Om Eco Café— Live Jazz Brunch (11 a.m.). Jazz.

Free.

Slammer’s Lounge— LoHeat Sunday Jam. Blues/ Rock/Country/Various. Free.

Sonny’s All Blues Lounge— Sonny’s All Blues Band featuring Lonnie Bennett. Blues. Free.

Woodward Theater— School of Rock Mason benefit the Rock School Scholarship Fund (4 H p.m.). Classic Rock/Various. $7, $10 day of show.

Monday 12

Greenwich— Cincinnati Contemporary Jazz Orchestra. Big Band Jazz. Cover.

HThe Knotty Pine— Open mic with Paul Denuzzio. Various.

Free.

MOTR Pub— Ppeell with Go Go Buffalo. Rock. Free.

Mansion Hill Tavern— Acoustic Jam with John Redell & Friends. Acoustic/Blues/Various. Free.

Maudie’s— Cryptodira with Wings Denied. Metal.

Plain Folk Cafe— Ronnie Vaughn & Co. Various.

Free.

McCauly’s Pub— Open jam with Sonny Moorman.

Blues. Free.

Rick’s Tavern— Black Bone Cat. Rock. $5.

Northside Tavern— The Qtet. Fusion/Jazz. Free.

Silverton Cafe— The Groove. Dance/Various. Free.

Om Eco Café— Ron Enyard Jazz Quartet. Jazz. Free.

Southgate House Revival (Lounge)— Lovecrush88 with Chakras and Wilder. Rock. Free.

Tuesday 13

Southgate House Revival (Revival Room)— Ratboys, Bent Denim, Moonbeau, Carriers. Indie/Various. $5.

Talon Tavern— Sonny Moorman Group. Blues.

Thompson House— POPE, Bad Remedy, Starlit Skies, Finished Falling, Jordan Taylour and Rumoured. Rock/Metal. $10.

Tin Roof Cincinnati— Flip Cup All-Stars. Rock/Pop/ Dance/Country/Various. Free.

Washington Platform Saloon & Restaurant— Gary Winters. Jazz. $10 (food/drink minimum).

Sunday 11 34 | j a n u a r y 0 7 - 1 3 , 2 0 1 5

Mansion Hill Tavern— Open Blues Jam with The Ben Duke Band. Blues. Free.

The Comet— Comet Bluegrass All-Stars. Bluegrass.

Free.

Dee Felice Café— “Sunday Jazz in the Afternoon” (4:30 p.m.). Jazz. Free.

Arnold’s Bar and Grill— Noah Wotherspoon. Blues.

Free.

Comet— Young Heirlooms. Folk/Pop. Free.

HThe MOTR Pub— Writer’s Night. Various. Free.

Maudie’s— Zeno Su with The Invisible Strings. Indie/ Pop/Rock.

Northside Tavern— Northside Square Dance. Country/Dance. Free.

Sloppy Joe’s Bar and Grille— Bob Cushing. Acoustic. Free.

Southgate House Revival (Lounge)— Musicians Showcase with Hayden Kaye and Mae Klingler.

Singer/Songwriter. Free.

Stanley’s Pub— Rumpke Mt. Boys. Bluegrass. Cover.

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15. Kim Deal was one, once 16. Kinda risky 17. Put away everything from the lunch box 18. “You ___ kidding!”

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20. Start of some advice for some circusgoers 23. Give to the church 24. Chewed out but good 27. Eyelid problem 28. Classic rock selection 32. “___ world ...” (clichéd movie trailer line) 33. Worn at the edges 35. Halloween loot 37. Middle of some advice 40. Eric B.’s partner in rhyme 41. Post the URL again 42. Feminist hero/ computer programmer Lovelace 43. Curving shot in billiards 44. Touch, e.g.

48. Psychedelic buttons 51. Video game blogger Sarkeesian 52. End of the advice 57. TV actress Dushku 59. Wipe clean 60. Helsinki deer 61. Role words 62. Freshen (up)

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For Lease CityBeat Iso “housemate” at 811 race st January 5, 2015 1. Decemberists

Upper FLoor, hIgh CeILIngs, 2,000 sq. Ft.

What A Terrible World

2. New Basement Tapes Lost On The River

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All Hearings and Appeals • Disability Awards Occupational Disease • Wage Loss Benefits Amputation Injuries • Death Claims Asbestos & Mold Claims • Safety Violations

8. Lucinda Williams

Eugene J. Stagnaro, Jr.

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Blake Bartley 513-675-6351

www.wnku.org

blake@urbanfastforward.com

621-8755 808 Main St. Downtown • eugene1@fuse.net “Leaders are like Eagles, they don’t flock, you find them one at a time.” © E. Stagnaro Jr., Copyright 5.23.05