Tag Archives: Cincinnati Ohio

Burning Man at CAM

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I have never been to Burning Man but I’ve a son who has. I texted him while attending the recently opened “No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man” at the Cincinnati Art Museum. “Those things aren’t supposed to make it off the playa”, he said. “Burn it. It’s in the frickin’ name.” Those aren’t angry words. They’re amused words. In context, he seemed to be chuckling at the idea of people trying to understand the annual gathering by looking at some things that had once been there. I’d already picked up some sense of how silly this was from the exhibition’s title. “No Spectators” comes from Burning Man’s “radically participatory ethic”. “Participation” is one of the community’s ten principles. No one attends the actual event as a spectator. The joke (possibly even intentional) is that, regardless of the name, the majority of people viewing the objets d’art at the museum are 100% spectators. Silly or not, I spectated profusely.

As is apparent from the first photo, the Burning Man pieces are not shuttered off in an isolated gallery but share space with the museum’s permanent displays. The Truth is Beauty standing at the top of the main staircase is a third the size of the original 55-foot tall sculpture that appeared at Burning an in 2013. A description is here; Another view here.

Although several examples of the art of Burning Man are unavoidably encountered on the way, there is a gallery devoted to Burning Man history which is a good place to visit before actively seeking out the rest. Burning Man of today bears little resemblance to the original 1986 event. Today it is well organized and scheduled far in advance. The “city” that is created annually in the Nevada desert now has a population near 70,000. Given the name Black Rock City, a Department of Public Works exists to operate the city and a group called the Black Rock Rangers patrols it. A large part of the Ranger’s success is credited to the fact that they are not outsiders but participant volunteers helping keep other participants safe and enjoying themselves. There is a brief description of the DPW and BRR here. The jacket belongs to DPW founder Will Roger Peterson.

The history display includes some actual artifacts from past events. Starting in 1998, Crimson Rose, one of the organizers, has collected remnants of the Man on the morning after the burning. The keys were found on the playa by organizers Michael and Dusty Mikel between 2005 and 2012.

The guy on the right of the first picture is Thorax, Ambassador of the Insects. The mutant vehicle in the center picture is from 2008. It is named Tin Pan Dragon. I liked it so much that I grabbed a full side view and a shot of the video playing nearby. The big screen visible beyond the dragon show a loop of various Burning Man scenes with seating for a small audience.

The capacity of this theater is much higher with three rows of four seats each. Although No Spectators officially opened on April 26, several items, including this self-propelled theater were in place when I visited another exhibit just about a month ago. On that occasion, I took this picture of the screen with my phone. This time I took no screenshots but did sit through the entire presentation of silent shorts.

While some of the Burning Man pieces appear a little bit awkward in makeshift settings, this piece and this circular room seem made for each other. Gamelatron Bidadari is comprised of 32 bronze gongs played by computer-controlled mallets. There’s a better explanation here.  The few minutes I spent in this room were the most pleasant of my entire day.

Photos of Shrumen Lumen appear in promotional materials for this exhibit including the program cover. It is one of the few items that require a little participation and at least slightly supports the “no spectators” idea. As explained here, each ‘shroom is activated by stepping on a pad at its base. In the third picture, a non-spectator steps on a pad then steps back and back again to watch the show.

Phase 1 of “No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man” opened on April 26. Phase 2 additions will be made on June 7 and everything will remain through September 2. I’ll be back for Phase 2 and to listen to those gongs some more.

ADDENDUM 4-Aug-2019: As promised, I returned to the museum for Phase 2 and reported on the visit here.

Wonderful Day, Pitiful Timing

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I’m embarrassed, angry, and disappointed. I missed the 2019 Findlay Market Opening Day Parade. I was close but no cigar. More accurately, no parking place. I left home slightly before 10:00. Traffic was a little heavy on the expressway but not really an issue. I was where I wanted to be around 10:30. It’s a spot a few blocks from the parade start point where I intended to grab a breakfast sandwich before walking to and strolling around the parade staging area.

In prior years, I’ve found street parking within a couple of blocks at this time of day. Not this year. I started checking parking lots and struck out there, too. The few that weren’t completely packed had “Monthly Only” or “Permit Only” signs with guards posted. I slowly expanded my search range with no luck. A big reason for expanding my range so slowly was that congestion was really starting to be felt. Those filled lots were bordered by rapidly filling streets. I eventually headed to an area east of downtown where I’d managed to snag a spot in years gone by. It is far enough from the city center that spaces were once plentiful and cheap. I only recently learned that this area has a name. I’ve heard that name, Pendleton, quite a bit recently because it has become home to several restaurants and a brewery. Apparently, other employers have moved in too, because even lots signed by the restaurants for evening use are monthly or permit only until 4:00. Congestion was now severe. Downtown Cincinnati was about one Honda away from gridlock. I finally accepted that there would be no parade for me and escaped at the earliest opportunity which wasn’t very early at all.

Escaping from downtown Cincinnati, when you are nowhere near a bridge or expressway ramp, means north toward the Clifton neighborhood. Happily free of bumper-to-bumper traffic, I headed to a bar I once frequented. The small parking lot was completely empty. I walked to the door but the empty lot and somewhat dark interior convinced me it was closed. A sign on the door said, “Open at 1:00”. I turned back toward my car and checked the time on the way. 1:03. I’d been in my car for three hours!

I returned to the pub door, actually tried it, and became the day’s first customer. I’d found my parade-watching spot, and I’d soon learn something very cool. There were numerous reasons for the extra large crowd downtown. It’s the 150th anniversary of professional baseball which began with the Cincinnati Red Stockings in 1869. That fact has been talked up around here along with the fact that today’s was the 100th Findlay Market Parade. Those don’t line up as nicely as it might initially seem, but that’s OK. The first parade was in 1920. This is the 100th parade. The 100th anniversary of that first parade will be celebrated next year and maybe I’ll get to see it.

Now for that cool thing I learned. Back when I expected to actually see the parade and anticipated it being the complete focus of this post, I tried to come up with something that started in Cincinnati in 1969. I figured I’d throw in some line about 50, 100, and 150. I almost immediately hit on the Ludlow Garage and went no further. Ludlow Garage was the concert venue operated by Jim Tarbell that hosted national acts like Santana and the Allman Brothers. As I sat at the bar, I saw a shirt advertising the fact that the recent Saint Patrick’s Day was Murphy’s 50th. Murphy’s Pub also opened in 1969 and I have a lot more memories of Murphy’s than the Garage.

Doug Bailey, who changed a neighborhood bar named Mahoney’s into Murphy’s, was a very close friend of John Nawrocki, a very close friend of mine. I became pretty good friends with Doug and even met Noel Murphy a few times. I remember when the bar first opened and some of the changes since then. Although my visits have hardly been frequent in recent years, they do continue.

I wasn’t Murphy’s only customer for long. Among the later arrivals was a group of three guys whose reason for being there was nearly the same as mine. They were in town for the 4:10 game, and thought they might as well take in the parade, too. They too escaped the near gridlock to recover at the first bar they came to. They left their car in the lot and took an Uber to the game.

I really am happy about the massive turnout for the parade. Sorry I missed it but that was my own fault. I can deal.  

More Museum Returns

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I’m sure there was at least one occasion when Ooola pulled Alley Oop into a major cave cleaning project. Among all the other repairs and additions, something very much like that must have occurred with the popular cave attraction at the Cincinnati Museum Center. The artificial limestone cave has been touched up and cleaned while retaining the appropriate level of dim damp caveiness.

I remember when the Natural History Museum moved to Union Terminal from Gilbert Avenue and the cave went missing for a while. My memory may be in error, there is no doubt that it’s foggy, but my recollection is that the cave was different after the move. Bigger, perhaps. Improved, maybe. I believe that the cave I saw Friday was pretty much the same cave I saw before the 2016 closing. The subtle wear and tear of twenty-five years of traffic have been dealt with but the pools, stalagmites, and narrow passages visitors have become familiar with over the years are all right there. They are simply a little cleaner and fresher.

In addition to the reopened cave, Friday’s members only “preview” saw the return of Cincinnati in Motion, another museum favorite. This 1/64 scale model of the Queen City presents different sections in different decades from the 1900s to the 1940s. Both of the first two pictures contain the Roebling Bridge and those who look close enough might see street cars entering the Dixie Terminal Building after crossing the bridge. There’s a closer look here.

Friday’s event was just the latest in a series of reveals following the Museum Center’s two year long renovation. It has been and will continue to be a mix of old and new starting with November’s “grand reopening” which included a brand new Dinosaur Hall and the refurbished Public Landing. I’ve no doubt that more new exhibits await and the list of previously displayed items yet to be unpacked is a mile long. Unwrapping this present is going to take a while and it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Cincinnati in Motion once again welcomes visitors to the history museum but there’s not yet a lot beyond it. There is a possibly temporary display of Cincinnati related vehicles called Engines of Growth with a literal bright spot in this 1951 Crosley Super Sport. As noted on a nearby plaque, the car was a gift from Michael C. Warmbier in memory of his grandson Otto Frederick Warmbeir. Otto Warmbeir was the college student who died in 2017 shortly after being released from a North Korean prison. It’s a very nice car and a very sad story. The phrase “in memory of his grandson” is heartbreaking in any context. 

I came. I saw. I’m sorry.

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Saturday’s weather was quite nice. Temperature in the mid-40s. Dry. Lots of sun. It was a great day for a parade so I went to one. Back in 2013 when the anti-LGBTQ slant of Cincinnati’s Saint Patrick’s Day Parade first surfaced, I noted that, “I hadn’t been paying attention.” I can honestly make the same claim this year, but I cannot claim the same ignorance I possessed six years ago. The post where I spoke about not paying attention is here. I returned the next year although I paid a lot more attention to events leading up to the parade. I think I hoped that 2013 was an anomaly but by the day of the parade I knew it wasn’t. I wrote a fairly normal post about the actual parade, but it had become apparent that the parade’s organizers, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, had views different than me and a lot of other people. My 2014 post is here.

I hadn’t forgotten my 2013 and 2014 thoughts, but I did kind of push them aside. The Saint Patrick’s Day Parade used to be one of my favorite Cincinnati events. I attended Saturday’s parade with a certain amount of curiosity but I also had some hope of just enjoying things like I used to. There was plenty of the familiar like pipe and drum groups and people being silly. I did not see any of the protests I saw five and six years ago. They may have been some — I did not go to the parade’s start point and there was a lot of the route I did not see — but I didn’t see any.

There were also plenty of differences. A shifting of the route had been a topic of discussion in 2013. It is now even farther from the city center and closer to the river on Mehring Way and Freedom Way. Some of the other changes can be measured. In 2013 and 2014 at least fifteen Irish built DeLoreans had participated. This year there were four. Multiple groups of Shriners in miniature cars have appeared in past parades. Each group might have ten or so cars of the same type such as Model Ts, Mustangs, or racers. This year there was only one group with just a few of each type and a total of ten or or so. Maybe that’s just normal attrition or maybe car owners are staying away on principle. I have no way of knowing.

I could not put numbers on other changes and can’t even say with certainty that they were real. I had a sense of fewer commercial entries and more informal groupings. There were quite a few families like the Donnellons and the Flynns. I think that their number was increased but I can’t be certain. Even if it’s true, I can’t say whether it comes from a desire to promote families and family values or a desire to maintain the size of the parade. It remains a respectably sized event with a length of about an hour. Maybe I’ll check on it again in five or six years. Maybe not. Articles like this make me sorry I was there this year.

My after parade activities included catching a little of the entertainment on Fountain Square, briefly watching a street juggler, and downing my annual Guinness at Arnold’s. As you can see, the parade day crowd at Arnold’s has not diminished even the slightest.

I also visited a place where the crowd has temporarily, I believe, diminished. Following Terry Carter’s, retirement amid some unpleasant publicity, Terry’s Turf Club has become The Turf Club and has been stripped of almost all of the neon signs that covered the building and the lawn beside it. When Terry sold his previous business, the very appropriately named Neons, all of its electric trim went with him and it became Neons Unplugged. It’s tempting to think of this place as Turf Club Unplugged, but that would be quite wrong. Including all those outdoor signs would have made the purchase financially impractical for new owners Tom and Marc Kunkemoeller, but that’s pretty much where the changes end. Inside all of the eye catching decor remains along with the menu and most of the staff. I was torn between a ‘burger or the ham sandwich I’ve come to love on my first post-Terry visit, but ultimately decided to test what they’re best known for. The Kunkemoellers know what they’re doing and retaining staff was crucial. The neon will be missed; The quality’s still there.

Horns Aplenty

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The 27th Bockfest parade has come and gone. There’s still plenty of festival left, but the Friday night promenade is the highlight for me. Precipitation of just about any kind will keep me away but this year was dry and the mid-40s temperature was downright balmy compared to some years. I drove, parked, and walked to the parade start point at Arnold’s Bar and Grill to meet a friend who works just a couple blocks away and can stroll over in a few minutes.

There was no shortage of folks in full-body Bockfest garb, but there seemed to be quite a few with nothing Bockish except fake (I assume) horns. It was only while editing pictures for this post that I noticed Clyde, the friend I’d just connected with, peering from behind the horned hat.

Clyde had stepped into the street to talk with some members of FC Cincinnati support group Die Innenstadt. He had marched with the club in last year’s parade and was seen in a story WCPO recently broadcast to promote this year’s event. When he spotted WCPO’s Evan Millward, Clyde approached the newsman and the two talked about the broadcast. For some reason, Evan was carrying Mayor Cranley’s Bockfest proclamation which I took advantage of by snagging a photo.

I was really just joking about the balmy temperatures but it appears that kegs, whether being carried on your bare shoulder or concealing your bathtub’s propulsion mechanism, will keep you warm.

Like Arnold’s self propelled bathtub, these three are long time parade regulars. By the time this is published, 2018 Sausage Queen Luis Balladares will have been replaced by a new queen selected on Saturday. Both the Sausage Queen and Beard Baron competitions are gender neutral. No one ever seems to follow the Whip Lady too closely but the same cannot be said of the Trojan Goat.

Some people may wonder why the Kentucky Chapter of the Association for Gravestone Studies has a parade unit and why they are participating in an Ohio parade promoting beer. But those are the same sort of people who question the presence of dinosaurs or a Krampuslauf group. Bockfest does not need those people.

I missed getting a picture of Aaron Sharp when he first passed in the parade vanguard. I’m glad he circled back. Aaron was one of the key individuals at the sorely missed WNKU radio station where good music could always be found. He is now part owner of Lucius Q where good BBQ and beer can always be found and often good music, too. I’ve never sorted out what his official role is with Bockfest but he’s been doing it a long time and I know he is really good at it — whatever it is.

Although they’ve been around since 2016, this is the first time I’ve seen Dance Flash Fusion and realized it. They have been in at least one previous Bockfest parade so I must have seen them but either they’ve improved considerably or I wasn’t paying attention. I was impressed. Die Innenstadt is the FC Cincinnati support group that Clyde belongs to. I’m pretty sure they set off one of their colored smoke bombs somewhere near MOTR on Main Street, but, even though I was moving with the parade at that point, I was way too far behind to hear or see it. Stuff like that does linger, however, and I put other senses to use as I passed through the area.

Here’s the group with the large goat head featured at the start of this article but I don’t know who it is. The base of the float is covered with album cover reproduction but I saw no identifying markings. They were preceded by a truck with banners reading “Crocodile Bock” and “Crocked on Bock” and this musical duo. I’ve no idea whether or not they’re connected. The Red Hot Dancing Queens have been favorites of mine ever since I first saw them in 2015 not long after they had formed. I think the RHDQ have a slight edge on DFF but it’s really exciting to have two dance troops having so much fun and so much talent.

Not long after the RHDQ passed by, I headed north with the parade. The sun was setting faster than I was traveling which contributed to none of the pictures I took along the way amounting to much. These three were taken at the last turn to the parade’s conclusion at the Moerlein Malt House. With little light, I notice even fewer details through the camera viewfinder than I do in the light. I failed to see a rather major feature of the “Bock on with Your Bock Out” float. It’s pretty obvious but even easier to see here. The name I used comes from the shirts being worn though I’ve no idea whether there is any connection with the beer by that name from a Chattanooga brewery. The Rabbit Hash General Store float is always near the end of the Bockfest parade and I have several pictures of it at this corner. There was a large gap in front of the entry in the last picture and, if it hadn’t been for people staring down the parade route, I’d have assumed the parade was over. A large plastic tarp was carried by a van with walkers holding up the edges and fog filling the space under it. The combination made for extra slow travel and thus the gap.

I walked on down to the crowded Bockfest Hall where bands were playing and bocks were flowing. I had one from the Alexandria brewery then, after meeting up with an out of town friend, another from Hudepohl. I’d had a single Moerlein Emancipator back at the parade staging area. Apparently my current Bockfest beer quota is three. 

Time of Pharaohs

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The renovated Cincinnati Museum Center takes another step at getting back in the swing of things by hosting the U.S. debut of Egypt: The Time of Pharaohs. The exhibit is new but the objects in it are anything but. Some of the 350+ artifacts on display are more than 4,500 years old. 4,500 years isn’t old like a colonial- era cabin, or a New Mexico pueblo, or even a European castle. No, we’re talking old like a pyramid, which is, of course, where some of these items come from.

I was there Friday evening for a members-only event. It was a well-attended members-only event. Part of me was really happy to see that lots of people support the museum with their memberships, and that same part was really happy to see that lots of those members also support special, extra-cost exhibits such as this one. Another part of me kind of wished all those people would just get out of my way.

I was smiling when I wrote that last sentence. Timed entries kept the exhibit from being overrun but attendees were not being hustled through it. The crowd simply meant I had to occasionally wait a bit to read a placard or study an artifact up close. It also meant that most photos I took had one to twenty people in them, but just about every one of those people was seriously curious, and that’s a very good thing.

Based mostly on Hollywood movies, my idea of Egypt includes a lot of gigantic stone things like the Sphinx and those pyramids. But, almost immediately, I found a wooden jackal, a bronze cat, and a clay cup. A sign next to the cup dates it to the 1st half of the 3rd millennium BCE. The 2nd half of the 3rd millennium BCE started 4519 years ago. By comparison, the cat is almost modern. It’s from the 3rd century BCE. The jackal is from around 1000 BCE.

These bronze statues are just a few inches tall and quite detailed. That’s Amun-Ra on the left and Isis on the right with a sun disk on her head and Horus on her lap. I didn’t catch a date for the Amun-Ra statue. The Isis statue is from the 6th to 3rd centuries BCE.

My Cecil B. DeMille-based ideas weren’t entirely wrong; The Egyptians did do a fair amount of stone carving. The first stele features the crocodile god Sobek. It was carved sometime between roughly 1290 and 1190 BCE during the 19th Dynasty. I screwed up and got no information on the second stele. The third picture shows a plaster cast of a carved wall of the Temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak. The plaster cast is 135 years old. Like the first pictured stele, the wall was carved during the 19th Dynasty. The casting is a solid grey. The colors are from a projector that cycles on and off to show the wall as it was originally. A replica of a 13th-century BCE chariot stands in front of the wall.

Of course, you can’t have an Egyptian exhibit without a sphinx and some mummies. This limestone sphinx is a baby, just a couple of feet long. It’s from the 3rd to 1st centuries BCE. The coffin is from the 14th or 15th centuries BCE. It’s a mix of wood and plaster with gold trim. The mummified cat comes from the same time period as the sphinx.

There is actually plenty of modern technology mixed in with the multi-millennium-old artifacts. An audio guide is available that provides commentary keyed to specific displays. There are several interactive exhibits that help explain timelines, hieroglyphics, and more. The final display is pretty high-tech. High-resolution CT scans have recorded the details of every layer of a mummy from about 750 BCE. Holography is used to project a rotating 3-dimensional image inside a clear pyramid. The image cycles through the layers as it rotates. It’s a time warp that even Doc Brown might appreciate.

Egypt: Time of the Pharaohs is at the Cincinnati Museum Center through August 18.

The Holocaust and Humanity Center is Open

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The Cincinnati Holocaust and Humanity Center reopened in its new location last Sunday on the 74th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I had seen the space it moved into on a “hardhat tour” during the Cincinnati Museum Center’s members’ preview in November. At the time, I noted my failure to visit the center in its current location, despite it being on my list and relatively near my home. I once again resolved to get there “before they start carrying stuff out” but I failed. I tried after about a week had passed, but it was already too late. The move had already begun and the operation at Rockwern Academy in Kenwood had already closed.

I would not get inside the Center today, either, but it wasn’t because I was too late. I arrived about half an hour before the 1:00 opening ceremony, when the space around chairs provided for holocaust survivors and family members was wide open. I could have staked out a spot right next to them but didn’t. By the time the procession of survivors and descendants began, my best view was via the giant screens at either side of the stage. The processional was quite moving, not only for those participating or watching familiar faces enter the rotunda, but for folks like me who recognized no one. Some in the procession may have been experiencing memories of when they first saw Union Terminal. This was where many people escaping Europe or recently freed from Nazi concentration camps arrived in the 1940s to begin a new life in Cincinnati. The last picture shows the center’s Executive Director, Sarah Weiss, cutting the ceremonial ribbon along with Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley and Nancy and David Wolf, for whom the center is named.

Entry to the Holocaust and Humanity Center was free on Sunday via time stamped tickets. I doubt that people were actually being forced out of the center after fifteen minutes, which was the interval on the tickets, but it was pretty obvious that this was not the day for a leisurely stroll through the exhibits. I thought it absolutely wonderful that the opening had attracted so many people, but quickly decided to take advantage of one of the perks of being retired and come back sometime during the week.

Incidentally, the HHC opening wasn’t the only thing bringing people to the museum center on Sunday. The picture at right, taken long before the crowd appeared for the opening ceremony, shows a line of people stretched across the front of the rotunda waiting to get museum and movie tickets. There probably wasn’t a lot of overlap with the HHC crowd; Most of the groups in line included young children. I noted in my post about the theater reopening that families with school-age children were flocking to the renovated Union Terminal during the holiday break, and it looks like that flocking continues on weekends. I bet it’s the dinosaurs.

I made it back on Tuesday. Entry to the Holocaust and Heritage Center is not included in Cincinnati Museum Center membership, but tickets are sold through the CMC kiosk in the rotunda and there is a discount for CMC members. These sculptures were at the front of the rotunda and usually surrounded by people on Sunday. At present, they are near the stairs leading down to the HHC. The HHC is right next to where the Cincinnati History Library and Archives were and will be. The library closed in 2016 along with the CMC and has not yet reopened.

We were given a peek at a small portion of this mural on that November “hardhat tour”, and I had been looking forward to seeing the whole thing. It didn’t disappoint. The 63-foot mural covers more than one wall of the center’s lobby area. I had some time to look it over as I waited to enter the “Winds of Change” theater that separates the lobby from the museum galleries, but know I have some more looking to do. I believe all of the mural’s twenty-six scenes come from stories that are told, at least partially, inside the museum. Inside the theater, holocaust survivors now living in Cincinnati tell pieces of their stories in a video. The local connection appears throughout the museum in the display of artifacts and quotations from local survivors.

The first gallery beyond the “Winds of Change” theater begins with the story of the rise of Nazism. It’s a story of relatively small steps that go from Jews being valued members of their communities to their extermination being seen as a solution to something. The HHC utilizes two types of interactive exhibits. One uses touch screens to allow selection from a small set of recorded first-person accounts related to the display they are part of. The second uses sliding panels operated by push-buttons. This not only provides more surface area for images and text but also involves visitors ever so slightly. At first, I thought this was a little hokey, but I quickly became a fan. If you don’t press the button, you will miss out on something, and when you do press it, you’re kind of committed to studying what is revealed. 

In addition to the big mural, I believe that every description of the center I have seen mentions the bullet picture and the train window. The bullet picture is an image, reproduced with empty shell casings, of Jews being gunned down in a burial pit they had been forced to dig themselves. The train window is simply a window in the museum wall that opens onto the active tracks behind the building. Only a tiny bit of passenger traffic trickles through Union Terminal but freight traffic passing through the yard is quite significant. Visualizing human beings stuffed into box cars isn’t difficult.

The aftermath of the holocaust is also examined. I was on the leading edge of the Baby Boomer generation. The war was over and the death camps liberated before I was born. Some of the war crimes trials occurred in my lifetime, but I certainly don’t remember them. However, I do remember seeing the movie Judgment at Nuremberg in a theater during its first run and same-day TV coverage of the Eichmann trial. This was in 1961, when the events they dealt with were less than twenty years in the past. The holocaust was just outside of my own memory, but was quite fresh in the memories of the adults in my world.

The “Points of Light” theater marks the end of the Holocaust Gallery and the beginning of the Humanity Gallery. From here on out, the exhibits deal more with today’s world. People called “upstanders” are identified, and their stories of resisting hate or doing something else to improve their part of the world are told. The last picture is of the “Make Your Mark Wall”. Visitors can leave their thoughts and impressions via the touch screens and add their selfie to the wall if desired. On the day I was there, a portion of one of the large screens was blacked out, but I’m guessing that was just from someone leaving their coffee in front of a projector or something similar.

The Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanities Center is an impressive and welcome addition to the Cincinnati Museum Center. I entered the “Winds of Change” theater by myself, but took my time going through the galleries, and found myself in the presence of several other visitors by the time I exited the museum. Even so, I know I need to go back. It is really impossible not to see similarities between the increasing hatred seen in some corners today and some of the events described in the center. The centers’ creators were certainly aware of these similarities, and I don’t doubt helped make them more apparent here and there. That sure doesn’t seem like a bad thing to me.

Signs and Suds

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The American Sign Museum almost always has something on the schedule that interests me but there have been way too many scheduling conflicts of late. Not so on Thursday and the Signs & Suds event with Rhinegeist Brewery. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect but I like Rhinegeist and love the sign museum so I signed on just as soon as I realized I could make it.

I used the event at the museum as an excuse to have dinner at the nearby Camp Washington Chili. Traffic was nowhere near as bad as I feared so I got to the chili parlor, enjoyed my 4-way with absolutely no time pressure, and arrived at the museum just after the doors opened at 6:00. The event was scheduled to start at 6:30 so I had plenty of time to look through the gift shop, chat with a few of the other attendees, and speculate what might be inside those growlers and crowlers. I also spent some time contemplating the growlers themselves. The tight sealing insulated containers certainly bear little resemblance to the glass jugs my buddies and I would lug back from the neighborhood bar filled with 3.2 beer back in the day.

The beer tasting would take place during a fairly normal guided tour of the museum conducted by Kevin Wallace. No one will ever match museum founder Tod Swormstedt as a tour guide, although Kevin is getting pretty close. I failed to get a head count, but an after the fact guess is around 40 attendees. Before getting rolling on the tour, Kevin asked how many were in the museum for the first time. It seemed to me that about 3/4 of the hands went up. Maybe I should have expected that but I didn’t; Neither did Kevin.

Of course, this was not an entirely normal tour. Its other guide was TJ DiNino from Rhinegeist, who poured and described four different beers throughout the tour. The beers were Amelia Belgium, Existential Apple, Odd Job, and BA Big Willie. TJ spoke about the ingredients, process, and taste of each in an easily understood layman’s language although he was perfectly capable of speaking in more esoteric terms when called for.  

The event’s description included the phrase “will pair iconic American Sign Museum signs with rare Rhinegeist beers”. As someone who has toured the museum multiple times, I admit to sometimes wandering off and not always paying close attention to what was being said. I did not hear all of the pairings but I did hear “Since we’re drinking a California style IPA, here’s a sign from California.” Good enough for me. 

Max is Back

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I saw a movie on Thursday. I suppose I could have made this a movie review but I was really more interested in the theater than the movie. Besides, if I used this as a review to be posted on Wednesday, I’d have to resort to some canned article for the regular weekly post.

Thursday was the first day the newly renovated Robert D. Lindner Family OMNIMAX® Theater at the Cincinnati Museum Center was open to the public. It was partly luck that put me in the theater for the first showing of Volcanoes: The Fires of Creation and more luck that put me in one of my favorite seats near the projector. The seat was part of the renovation. It was new, a little wider than what it replaced, and quite comfortable. I took no pictures inside the theater. Some can be found online in professional reports. The picture that opens this article is the only one I took of any part of the theater. It’s a room that patrons pass entering and exiting. In the old days, huge rolls of 70 millimeter film laid on tables here to feed the big projector directly overhead. Nowadays the movie is digital and probably stored on something roughly the size of a grain of rice.

Not being certain that I would be in town for the opening, I’d made no plans and was surprised to see that loads of tickets remained for all showings. That produced a deep lack of urgency and I was equally surprised when I approached the museum and found a long line of cars working its way into the parking lots. I later learned from a staff member that it had been like this at the recently reopened Museum Center ever since schools closed down for the holidays. “And the rain helps”, she added.

I instantly realized that I should have committed to a specific time and bought my ticket online but, although the theater doors were opened well before I reached them, I was safely in my seat before the action began. As I entered, it was announced that the showing was sold out but there were still many empty seats when the lights went down. The wider seats have reduced capacity from 245 to 227 but I’m guessing that won’t often be an issue.

With the lights still up, differences in the screen were obvious. The old screen was more porous and the speakers behind it could be seen when nothing was being projected on it; A little staring revealed the seams where panels overlapped. The new screen is a little whiter and less porous; There is no overlapping of panels. Some darkish lines, which I believe are bits of the backing frame, can be detected if you look hard enough. There are still speakers behind the giant screen but now they can only be heard and not seen. They say that the new sound system sounds better and I believe them. It certainly sounds wonderful but so did the old one and a side-by-side comparison just isn’t possible.

The action on the screen starts, as it has since the theater’s beginning, with the attention gripping light tunnel. There are improvements but they are subtle and they remain subtle into the feature. The images seems crisper and a little brighter. The slightly fuzzy focus and warping that sometimes crept into the edges is virtually gone. I’m guessing that some of that is due to the theater, and some is due to the camera and recording technology. The movie begins with an animation of Earth’s collision with the planet Theia some 4.5 billion years ago. The images are sharp and crisp. They seem just as sharp and crisp when the scene changes to humans backed by a lake of lava. Although I know that the second scene came through a camera’s lens, that knowledge doesn’t prevent part of me musing about whether the lake is real or a man-made special effect. No doubt, the conditioning that comes from seeing action movies with similar scenes produced by CGI is partly to blame but it’s also a testament to just how good the “real” scene looks.

Most of the improvements are a matter of perception. One is an indisputable fact. The floaters are gone. No matter how hard theater operators tried, it was impossible to keep those over-sized rolls of film entirely dust free. Specks of dust would occasionally appear on the screen like floaters in your eye; Not with digital.

Using Volcanoes to reopen the theater was a good choice. According to the movie’s website this is the tenth theater to show it. A fair amount of science is mixed in with the dramatic visuals. Those visuals include lava lakes, billowing plumes of smoke and ash, startling eruptions, scenic landscapes, and even some animals such as elephants and giraffes on the plains of Africa. There is considerable footage of the recent lava flows in Hawaii. I found the shots of eruptions particularly impressive. Incredible power is very much in evidence here. Dark spots in the smoke and flame can appear to be floating upward like scraps of burning paper at a camp fire, but when they stop their climb and plummet downward it quickly becomes apparent that they are massive boulders tossed into the air by the volcano’s explosive force. Sometimes the recording equipment is close enough capture the thud of their landing.

A schedule for future movies at CMC has not yet been worked out. In fact, I found no information on when Volcanoes’ run here will end. Plans exist for the return of the popular Weekend Classic series In January. That will most likely start with a digital version of National Park Adventure which was the last movie to play here in the old analog days. My review includes a shot of the room at the top of this article when it was filled with gear and those big rolls of film.

Relocated Cincy

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Attending the Cincinnati Museum Center preview last week reminded me that I’d sort of lost track of the murals that once hung in the terminal’s passenger concourse. When the concourse was demolished back in the 1970s, they were moved to the Cincinnati Airport in northern Kentucky. They once again became homeless when the airport terminal they were installed in came up for demolition. A new home was found on the west side of the Duke Energy Convention Center and they took up residence there about a month ago. You can read about the re-dedication ceremony here. Those panels above the murals form the city’s name tag. Anyone visiting or even passing through Cincinnati at night may have seen the name spelled out in lights. I apologize for this crappy picture being the only one that I own but I know there are some good ones out there on the web.

The nine 20 feet square murals are in a climate controlled space behind tinted glass. That’s good for the murals which deserve all the protection they can get, but not so good for taking photographs. That bit of glare is a just minor inconvenience, however, and I’m certainly not complaining. I’m really quite happy to see the murals both protected and accessible. Passersby can now study these nine images of Cincinnati history with out so much as a train or plane ticket.

And here’s a bit of relocated Cincinnati history I’ve been remiss in checking out. I saw sketches of this installation while Cincinnati Gardens, the letters’ original home, was still standing. I mentioned the plan when I wrote about the Gardens in this post. Then I read about it being completed here. I can’t say why it took me nearly three months to get to see it but sometimes that happens. Cool and clever.