One of the best things about getting off work is being able to sit down and relax over a cold beer with your buds. Unfortunately, as we get older and busier that happens less and less frequently. People have to work, spend time with their families or hang out in their mom’s basement playing video games (don't judge me, man!). So we get stuck in a bad country song, drinking alone with our sad hound dog by our side. Well, beer manufacturers have heard our silent sobbing and stepped up to assuage our sorrows. Over the last few months, the Internet has been lighting up about new craft brews l...
Cereal Banter’s “Lights Lights Lights” is one of those albums that are hard to pigeonhole into any genre. It has been described as avant-garde, neo-psychedelic and noise-jazz. The truth is that the dynamic duo of Molly McKay and Joseph Rafidi has created something unique. Songs that begin almost ethereally quickly take surprising turns – sometimes soothing, sometimes jarring but always apparently purposeful. Drums and keyboard are the heart and soul of the music. Rafidi’s drums are furious and unpredictable, and the minimalistic sounds around them allow them to take up room on eac...
Yesterday we told you about the Avengers Super Bowl Ad and how awesome it looked. Today we're going to give you an extended look at the extended trailer for the upcoming John Carter. This movie has been a long-time coming. John Carter is the main character in the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel "The Princess of Mars," and has since been serialized, appeared in a story with Tarzan (another Burroughs creation) and adapted into a movie costarring Tracy Lords. The current adaptation has had its own series of problems. Robert Rodriguez was originally set to direct the film, but when he dropped...
Marvel Comic's upcoming movie, The Avengers, is the definition of spectacle movie. If everything goes as planned, it will be to superhero movies as Titanic was to romantic comedies. We unveiled a two minute trailer back in October that showed a little bit of the group dynamics we can look forward to from the leading man (and woman - in the unfortunate singular) explosion fest that will be The Avengers. Tony Stark's (Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr.) retort to Captain America (Chris Evans) is genuinely funny, and something that could only spring out of a comic book world. Since that clip, the ...
Mr. 101 is a hip-hop fusion outfit out of Canton. Normally, appending the word fusion to the end of anything is a red flag for me - jazz fusion is usually bad jazz, Japanese-Mexican fusion is a dinner engagement I'm waiting to miss and hip-hop/rock fusion usually ends up being a rock band with a vocalist finally ready to admit they can't sing. Not everything ends up embodying the stereotype, however, and "Brain the Cerebral Balance" is much more the exception than the rule. From the drum crash that introduces the first track, "Introducing 101," to the subdued rock guitar that closes the set...
Vegetarians are taking over the world. In the last ten years vegetarianism has doubled in size, more often in younger generations. The growth is part of a trend that ties health and environmental concerns together, and includes buzzwords like “organic,” “green” and pretty much anything prefixed with “eco-.” But the fact is more vegetarians are starting to eat meat. Don’t get your Big Mac-hating panties in a bunch just yet. Let me explain. In a society in the midst of what has been called an “obesity epidemic,” it seems like a smart move for people to eat healthier. That mu...
Calendar girls. The phrase bring to mind pictures of scantily clad women draped over cars, tacked to the wall above a toolbox. For decades, businesses have been pairing models with products in a blatant attempt to sell you their product with the thinly veiled excuse of “giving you something nice to look at.” Enter the 2012 Ohio Tattooed Girls Calendar by local photographer Summer Lin. The Ohio Tattooed Girls Calendar is different. “I wanted it to be about the girls,” Lin said during our interview. Flipping through the pages makes that even more obvious. The calendar has taken Lin...
Christmas movies and it's only December 14? What the hell! The hell is that Christmas movies are a big deal. There's a ton of them, and they include significant films like Home Alone, Elf, It's A Wonderful Life and Charlie Brown's Christmas. Holiday movies rake in cash and profoundly effect our most important years. The reason we're getting to them early: next week's list is going to be devoted to the big man himself, and the actors that took the challenge of bringing him to life. For now, enjoy 6 Christmas Movies you should go watch this week to get ready for the big day. A Christmas...
The Black List is Franklin Leonard's (Overbrook Entertainment) list of the "most-liked" unproduced screenplays floating around Hollywood. Although there's nothing official about the list, it is a highly-respected unofficial litmus stick of what the near future will hold. Previous years have seen films like Juno, The Social Network and Fuckbuddies make the list. This year's list is covered completely by Deadline Hollywood, and it is fairly long. Here's a few of the highlights, including the top vote-getters. The The Imitation Game by Graham Moore This biopic of WWII cryptographer Alan Tu...
A little over twenty years ago, a slumbering Mouse House took a tragic mermaid story written by a Danish author, retrofitted it with a happy ending and a Broadway soundtrack and released it to the public as a potential last huzzah from a failing animation department. The result was the Disney Renaissance that was the 1990s, bringing us “Alladin,” “Beauty and the Beast” and a host of others. While boys were running around acting like Rambo and Luke Skywalker, girls were dreaming of growing up to be Ariel or Belle or Jasmine. Sari Kauppinen was one of those girls. Although Sari has...
NOTE: Stark County HIV Testing Locations are listed at the bottom of this article. The history of HIV reads something like a conspiracy thriller, complete with a “patient zero” and rampant theories of government involvement. Although the virus has probably been carried by humans for nearly a hundred years, the first real reporting of it was only in 1981. Misinformation was everywhere surrounding the spread and effect of the virus, and the truth was hard to find. Even now, with AIDS awareness programs and information technology at an all-time high, there are a lot of misconceptions an...
Discordia is one of those acts that you only ever hear about, that you don’t understand until you see it happen. Composed of four attractive females with a fire fetish, Discordia’s act is a mixture of fire-breathing and eating, grind sets and cabaret. The group was put together by Rae Gentry and Cheryl Bergenstein as a way to show off their talents while bringing something unique to the table. As they developed their act, they brought in Chelsea Mueller and Jessica Stitchedupdoll (at least, that’s how she’s listed on Facebook) to round out the group. The girls all have artistic b...
Location, location, location. Where a movie takes place is often as important as the characters, to the point that it can become a character in its own right. New York has been a character in any number of films (New York, I Love You, Sidewalks of New York), as has Paris, Beijing and most other major cities. Ohio, being one of the most densely populated states in the country, has its fair share of spotlight moments. Individual areas (Cleveland, Xenia) have been highlighted, fictional places have been created and generalizations have been made. There are a huge number of flicks set in our gr...
Video games are becoming increasingly costly to produce. New games are developed like movies, with script writers, voice actors, special effects gurus, directors and producers all working on multimillion dollar projects. Release dates mirror opening weekends – success hinges on the sales volume of that week, and whole companies can fold thanks to a single bad day. Then you have the independent arm of the business. The 100,000 Euro price tag of Angry Birds would barely purchase a single Modern Warfare map, but that didn’t prevent it from selling over 12 million copies through Apple produ...
The words “pledge drive” conjure images of Jerry Lewis standing in front of a bank of phones, some manned by individuals you’ll give your money to if only for the chance to talk for a few seconds. This isn’t exactly polished quality programming, and that’s exactly why a ripple of confusion swept through the media community when WQED in Pittsburgh announced on September 22 that they would be broadcasting a 24-hour pledge drive channel, called WQED Showcase (13.4). WQED is a station with a storied history that includes a pile of Emmy Awards and an Academy Award, three other cable st...
Winter in Ohio is cold, wet and often miserable. This is unfortunate for the theater community, since theaters tend to be large, open buildings that require a small fortune to keep warm and patrons often prefer to huddle in their homes in front of space heaters instead of braving the weather to see a show. As such, many theaters close down in the winter months because heating the building costs much more than the small amount of revenue the trickle of an audience provides. Since many theaters operate on a shoestring budget, this downtime can be dangerous. That’s why The Oakland Center for...
How an area is perceived is based on a number of things, like food and weather. Or gun laws. Or how people from the area are portrayed through the creation of fictional characters. I’m going to talk about the third one. I’m avoiding shows set in Ohio, like WKRP and “3rd Rock From The Sun.” Same with movies like “A Christmas Story” and “Heathers.” I’ll get to those someday. Instead, I’m going to take a look at the people that left Ohio to show the world how we do it. Ted Mosby – “How I Met Your Mother” I’m going to start with the most obvious. “How I Met Y...
Game of Thrones fans: we're all chomping at the bit for the second season of the Emmy nominated (congratulations, Peter Dinklage!) fantasy series, but fortunately for us HBO was nice enough to release a promo for the filming of the second season. From the looks of it, things are only going to get more dramatic. The show has been called "The Sopranos of magic," and similar things, since Sean Bean lost his head, but that isn't stopping us from enjoying the hell out of it. Also, in the trailer below you'll notice D.B. Weiss wearing a stick-figure shirt. That's from the FREE online game King...
Pixar Releases "Brave" Trailer Ever since Cars 2 hit the theaters, everyone has been anticipating Pixar's next film with baited breath. Pixar has been crazy successful with every film they produce, but the auto sequel seemed to create a chink in their armor. Well, wait no longer, because the animators have stepped up their game. The new flick, Brave, will follow a young girl on her quest to save her kingdom after a folly of youth sets off problems only she can deal with. This stretch into traditional fantasy is completely new for Pixar, but what we're seeing looks worthy of anticipation. T...
Put the needle on the record is a collection of vinyl cover art from the 1980’s, compiled from Matthew Chojnacki’s personal collection. Although each photo is accompanied by a blurb about the album (or the art), the book is as much a visual representation of the art and music scene during America’s glammiest decade. Album covers are arranged in pairs with a common theme associating them. Both albums may have a similar color scheme, a particular pose or, in the case of “The Neverending Story” by Limahl and “Young Turks” by Rod Stewart, have skinny cheeked, frosted tipped pretty...
