From the Editor

Letter from the Editor

Jay Stowe — Thu, 02 May 2013 11:00:00 GMT

I am proud to say that on more than one occasion in my career as a journalist I have sent a pickle through interoffice mail. Why? My God, isn’t it obvious? When you work in an office with fewer than 100 people, it’s absurd to drop something in a manila envelope and have it take up to two days to get there when you can walk over and hand it to somebody in 30 seconds. That said, you can’t just walk up and hand a person a pickle. It requires too much explanation. Much better to use the interoffice mail system. It amplifies the comic—not to mention cosmic—impact immeasurably. The pickle I sent to a colleague as a joke was passed along to most of the rest of the editing staff before someone finally asked, “Who keeps sending this pickle?” I confessed—and never heard the end of it. Friends of mine still bring it up.

I am a big fan of pickles. I love their snap, their crunch, their briny tang. I also love that the pickle qua pickle is inherently funny. I’m not sure why; it may have to do with the word itself, which is pretty malleable. You can get caught in a pickle, be put in a pickle, declare something a pickle, become pickled, and of course eat one.

In this issue we celebrate the sandwich in all its forms and variations. It’s a mouthwatering package, full of heroic photographs of double-deckers, dagwoods, and banh mis. But buried in the mix is a short but wonderful essay by Kevin “Doc” Wolfe, our Fine Diving columnist, in which he considers the pickle. Seriously. Haven’t you ever wondered why every time you order a sandwich a pickle comes with it? Kevin has. And he’s done a little snooping. Turns out the pickle played an oddly important role in the discovery of America, and much later, a less odd but still important role in the shaping of the American mind. Well, that’s a bit of a stretch. But no less than Amerigo Vespucci, the man our country is named after, swore by them. And 500 years later, the pickle is as common and subtly patriotic as Mom and apple pie. If there is one thing you take away from “Stacked,” our effusive rundown of some of the tastiest damn sandwiches being engineered in Cincinnati (not to mention excellent chips, sides, onion rings, and breads), it should be this: Every pickle you eat makes America a better place.

Originally published in the May 2013 issue.
Photograph by Ryan Kurtz

Letter from the Editor

Jay Stowe — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 04:00:00 GMT

There is a light that never goes out. It is small, and you can only see it at a distance, hovering over a long straightaway on a country road outside of Oxford. It’s not always there—you can’t see it in the daytime. But if you drive out after dark, preferably around midnight, turn your car so that it’s pointed back down that straightaway, switch off the engine, and flash the headlights three times…you will see the light.

Cue the eerie monster mash music if you like, but I speak from experience. Twenty-plus years ago, when I was still in college, I made the trek up to Oxford on spring break to visit some friends. Somebody brought up the legend of the Oxford Ghost Light and suggested we head out of town to see if we could conjure it out of the cold night air. Before I saw it, I was more than a little skeptical. But after we flashed our headlights, the small, singular quavering beam appeared. It looked like the headlamp of a motorcycle, or a car with one light out, moving toward us. Except there was no engine noise. There was no sound at all. Just this white circle, rising and falling over the dips in the road—once, twice, maybe three times, before sinking into the last dip and disappearing.

Weird, huh? I couldn’t explain it then or now, but I know what I saw and it was strange and fascinating. A few months back we got talking about some of the still-unanswered questions and unclassifiable phenomena floating around Cincinnati and it dawned on us that there might be a larger story (or two…or three) to tell. Once we started digging, we realized there was an entire package we could put together on the subject. And so: You hold in your hands our first-ever Unsolved Mysteries issue. Every story in the feature well touches on a case, an event, a crime, a curiosity, or some other marvel that defies easy explanation. Some are fabulous (Bigfoot!), some are intriguing (George Remus’s buried treasure), and some are merely bewildering (an outbreak of UFO sightings in 1973). Julie Irwin Zimmerman takes us inside the overcrowded hallways, offices, and store rooms of the Hamilton County crime lab, a wonderful piece of reporting that lays out in depressing detail how far the televised ideal of CSI is from reality. And Jeff Wilson actually solves the mystery behind the creation of one of the most hallowed James Brown recordings of all time, The Grodeck Whipperjenny. But other mysteries are plainly grim, particularly those revealed in Ryan Kurtz’s stark photographs of pieces of evidence—some related to brutal unsolved crimes—that remain on the shelves of the Cincinnati Police Department’s property room, inanimate objects providing mute testimony to the vagary of justice.

Some things, it seems, can never be explained.

Originally published in the April 2013 issue.
Photograph by Ryan Kurtz

Letter from the Editor

Jay Stowe — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 12:00:00 GMT

My favorite anecdote in Craig Fehrman’s piece about Aroldis Chapman is the plane story. Here’s Aroldis, a young Cuban émigré just called up to the big leagues, boarding the team plane for possibly the first time, being told that as a wacky bit of rookie initiation he’s supposed to dress in drag and serve drinks to his teammates. And he refuses, flat out. His teammates' response? “Guys got kind of upset about that,” says one player.

Maybe it didn’t occur to them that the new $30 million left-handed phenom was so overwhelmed by everything happening to him and around him that he instinctively went dark whenever things got too weird. And continues to. That’s what attracted Fehrman to Chapman to begin with. On the field Chapman has been both electric and confounding, throwing 100-mile-per-hour pitches and fanning opposing players one day, collapsing the next. Off the field his life has been...complicated. Sure, he drives a Lamborghini and lives in a mansion in Miami, but then there are the speeding tickets, the incident with the stripper in the Pittsburgh hotel room, and the lawsuits. At numerous points over the last three seasons, players and fans alike have been left scratching their heads and wondering: Who is this guy? Chapman stopped talking to the press about his personal life a while ago (and neither he nor the Reds would speak to us for this story), but of course that only serves to increase people’s curiosity. In the age of Twitter and Honey Boo Boo, the notion that a well-known sports figure might try to live his extraordinary life in a cone of silence is an anomaly. But as Fehrman makes clear in “The Enigma of Mr. 105,” Chapman’s got his reasons.

As I read through the rest of this issue, that word—extraordinary—popped up in a few other places. I know, it’s absurd to link the exploits of a fireballing major league pitcher to those of the kitchen magicians populating our local restaurants, but for the purposes of this column I ask you to suspend disbelief. Because it’s true! The amount of creativity and prowess on display is remarkable. I don’t know how or why Cincinnati’s dining scene continues to fly under the national radar but let’s enjoy the open secret for as long as we can. From high priests like Todd Kelly and Jean-Robert de Cavel to new alchemists like Owen Maass and Dan Wright, the city is in the midst of a glorious foodie renaissance. (And if you want to see some culinary poetry in motion, go to our website and check out the video interview with Jimmy Gibson, as he takes us behind the scenes at JimmyG’s.)

So, to recap, this issue is: Extraordinary. Confounding. Electric. Enigmatic. And I’ll add mouth-watering. Except for Bob Woodiwiss’s rat story. It’s...well, you gotta read it. Hopefully it doesn’t make you upset.

Originally published in the March 2013 issue.
Glasses photograph by Ryan Kurtz

Letter from the Editor

Jay Stowe — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 14:58:00 GMT

We’re constantly being told that, as a country, we don’t make anything anymore. All you hear is that Brazil is going bananas, India is growing by leaps and bounds, and the Chinese are eating our lunch (which we also didn’t make). With globalization, the U.S. economy has been forced to make room on the capitalist stage for new players. And that can be disruptive. But if you zoom in and take a closer look, especially in Cincinnati, you might be surprised to discover how much cool stuff—everything from new gadgetry to useful staples like shoes and chairs and tables—is still made here. And not just made but crafted.

A few years ago, my wife and I were on the hunt for something to contain my slowly metastasizing record collection. We cruised showrooms from Home Depot to Ikea trying to find something (a space-age shelving device, a series of compartments, a large vibrating egg…) hefty enough to contain the groaning weight of all that vinyl yet pleasing enough not to be banished to the garage. One day we were at the Contemporary Arts Center, just sitting around looking at the art, when I had a eureka moment: The wooden box I was slouching on (five sides of sleek birch plywood with the sixth side open for storage) was exactly what we needed. Strong and solid, with clean lines, it was the perfect union of utility and subtle sophistication. We contacted the CAC and found out it had been made in-house by a local artist named Chris Vorhees. Chris, it turned out, loved working with wood and was totally willing to modulate his design and build us a long, low, boxy wood shelf (on wheels!). Weeks later, when he pulled up with the shelf in the bed of his pickup, I had two reactions: Hosannah! I’ve found my holy grail! And: Holy crap! There is no way we will ever get that leviathan upstairs. (A few months later, it took five guys from a moving company to hoist it—ingeniously—up to the third floor, where it resides today. Every night at bedtime, I pray that it doesn’t fall through the ceiling and crush me.)

OK, so we’re not talking about building electric cars (for that you’ve got to go to Amp Electric Vehicles in Loveland, which we featured in November 2012). But what we are talking about in our “Made in Cincinnati” package (page 50) is the growing brain trust of artisans, craftsman, jewelers, cobblers, woodworkers, printers, industrial designers and more who are creating a rich and inventive new eco- (as in economic) system all over town.

Stay crafty, Cincinnati.

Letter from the Editor

Jay Stowe — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 12:00:00 GMT

It’s not every day you stumble on something amazing growing in your backyard. That is one theme that will run through Tomatoes, the new comic narrative by Carol Tyler that begins on our back page this month. It also describes the talent perennially sprouting in these hills.

Carol is a prime example. In 1997 she closed her eyes, stuck her finger on a map of the U.S., and landed on Cincinnati. “That’s where I’m gonna move,” she told her parents. With her 12-year-old daughter in tow, she made the leap from the West Coast to the middle of everything. What prompted the move? Suffice to say, an intense period of personal upheaval. Or as she notes in her first installment on page 224, “It was...starting-over time.”

Things worked out better than she may have expected. Over the last 16 years she has, by her own account, achieved a lot: “Paddled her way” into a job as education director for Tall Stacks; worked as a substitute teacher in Cincinnati Public Schools; become a popular adjunct professor at UC’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning; and raised her daughter. She’s also plowed much of her life into her work, including her 2005 comics collection Late Bloomer and her critically acclaimed trilogy You’ll Never Know, an illustrated memoir of her father’s experiences in World War II and the lingering effects that had on her family and their relationship. (Both books are published by Fantagraphics Books.) She’s been an Eisner Award nominee many times over, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and has won an individual excellence award from the Ohio Arts Council. All that and she’s successfully maintained a healthy crop of tomatoes over many seasons in the garden outside her Avondale home (which she compares to “living in an Edward Hopper painting”). In truth, the tomatoes have sometimes been a struggle. But that’s what her monthly serial will be about: the challenges of living in Cincinnati, stitched together with epiphanous moments of inspiration, frustration, perspiration, and elation.

So, you may be wondering, what happened to Bob Woodiwiss? After five years, Bob had pretty much stuck his finger in the highly charged light socket of traditions, sentiments, and cultural foibles held dear by proud citizens as many times as a guy can. (We have the letters to prove it.) But as we wave goodbye to The Last Detail, we say hello to his new column—The Observer. Every other month, Bob will take the mundane stuff in life and show us what we have missed, for good or ill, for lack of engagement or lack of neurosis.

You’d be hard-pressed to find two more thoughtful yet distinct voices growing in such close proximity. Must be something in this fertile bottomland.

Originally published in the January 2013 issue.
Photograph by Ryan Kurtz

Letter from the Editor

Jay Stowe — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 12:00:00 GMT

One year ends and another year begins—fiscal cliff or no fiscal cliff. To go on you have to have optimism. You’ve got to have a raison d’être, right? Stuff that makes life worth living! (Work with me here, people.) Well, I’m feeling positive. And in the spirit of our Best of the City issue I’ve put together a list of personal bests—things that get me out of bed in the morning and keep my eyes on the prize. Here goes:

Mantras. Technically I’m 45, but psychologically I hit my seventies about 20 years ago. Which explains why I mutter a lot and punctuate my muttering with lofty, exasperated pronouncements. I return to the same themes often enough to think of them as mantras. My current favorite go-to is “Nothing works anymore.” Closely followed by “All the wrong people are dying.” Psychologically I may actually be in my eighties. But these mantra things, they work.

My wife. Who puts up with most of my muttering.

Scotch. See above. Also see the scotch selection at the Party Source, overseen by the estimable Jay Erisman.

Findlay Market. The tub butter at Gibb’s. The fresh pasta at Bouchard’s. The cherry-lamb sausages and pepper bacon at Kroeger & Sons. The lachsschinken at Krause’s. The Dutch chocolate gelato at Dojo. I could go on. Instead I’ll just keep going back—until my cardiologist says I can’t.

The way my daughter laughs at old I Love Lucy shows. Especially the episode where Ricky thinks he’s going bald.

The burgers at Terry’s Turf Club.

Washington Park. Perhaps the most wonderful thing to happen to Over-the-Rhine since Music Hall was built. Plus: Synchronized water jets!

The 11th hole at Shawnee Lookout. And any round of golf I get to play with my 83-year-old father, who still knows how to lock it, cock it, and sock it.

Sifting through the used record bins at Everybody’s Records and Shake It.

Fries Café. A pint, a game of pool, and “Cowgirl in the Sand” on the jukebox.

English muffins from Blue Oven Bakery. The. Best. Ever.

Withnail and I. One of the greatest films of all time. Along with The Third Man, Manhattan, Dr. Strangelove, The Big Lebowski, The In-Laws.... Which reminds me, why don’t we have a repertory cinema in this town?

The view from... The right field seats at GABP. The balcony in Music Hall. The top of Carew Tower. The Celestial Bar at midnight.

Fool Moon Rides. With Captain Phil Roberto on the Loveland Bike Trail.

I admit it’s an incomplete list. But that’s what the next 45 years are for.

Letter from the Editor

Jay Stowe — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 11:00:00 GMT

There is a brief scene early on in John Updike’s novel Rabbit, Run, where the main character, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, hurtles through the night in his car with the radio on. It’s meant to communicate the loneliness of this very American long distance runner, always fleeing something, driven by a constantly looping inner mix tape of existential anxieties and desires. Updike lists the songs and commercials beaming into Rabbit’s car—a rootless man riding the wave of his own destiny, all set to the dulcet tones of “The Stroll” and “Sorry (I Ran All the Way Home).” I always found this scene weirdly comforting, rather than a downer. It rang a bell. As a kid, I used to love to switch the radio on at night and listen to WEBN, thinking that I was getting away with something while my parents were out of earshot. Of course they rarely were, and I usually got told to “turn the darn radio off and go to sleep!” It’s a memory I cherish: me, alone in the dark, listening in on what seemed like another world. As Jack Heffron makes clear in his piece on the current state of things at WEBN (“Ribbit, Ribbit,” page 70), that really was another world, a time when rock and roll was king and an upstart radio station that reveled in its merry prankster status ruled the local airwaves.

If you tune in to WEBN these days, well, things have changed. It’s still alive, still trying to fly its freak flag as the home of the “Lunatic Fringe.” Except that it’s hard to do that in an era when disc jockeys beam their songs to listeners nationally through the digital magic of voice tracking, and on certain days, the studio sits practically dormant. Me, I like to know that the person whose voice is coming over the air is physically there while I’m listening in. Whether it’s Marty Brennaman at a Reds game or Katie Laur and her sidekick Wayne, yacking and laughing in-between songs, it’s the human touch that makes all the difference.

All 36 of the innovations and brilliant new concepts in our “Big Ideas” package (page 56) this month have at their heart the human need to connect with others, to solve problems, to overcome hurdles, to improve lives. Some are doing it with electric car engines. Some by trying to end slavery in Haiti. Some by creating a new bike path to connect more than 100,000 people from Norwood to Mariemont. Some through a new app or the simple act of designing an easier-to-use Metro map. I’d argue that, back in the day, spinning psychedelic rock records and voicing satirical commercials from a little blue house on Considine Avenue in Price Hill was also a big, innovative concept—one driven by the now quaint-seeming but actually pretty powerful idea that if you arm a DJ with two turntables and a microphone, and then step back, their iconoclastic voice will bring the listeners in. But I don’t have to argue that, really. It’s part of this city’s DNA.

Originally published in the November 2012 issue.
Glasses photograph by Ryan Kurtz

Letter from the Editor

Jay Stowe — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 11:00:00 GMT

A magazine is a huffing, puffing beast of a thing. It takes a lot of time and effort on the part of a small crew of editors, writers, designers, and photographers to assemble it each month and every issue has its own particular challenges. Here’s a small sample of the hurdles we ran into as we put this one together: A source disappeared in the middle of the fact-checking process; one writer filed his feature two days before the entire magazine had to ship; one editor announced he was leaving to take a job in St. Louis (he will be missed); William Smith, one of the main subjects in our story on the Second District congressional race, was only available to speak or be photographed on Saturdays, requiring a good deal of logistical jujitsu on our end. At this very moment, as I write these words, our server is giving us fits, freezing up every 10 minutes, causing a massive slowdown as we try to push the last few proofs through the editing process and send them off to the printer. There’s a chance I may not even be able to fini—bwooorrrrrrrrrr...OK, I’m back. That was the sound of my brain shutting down, not the server. It’s still running.

So: not an easy month. Still, I’m feeling pretty bullish about this issue. It is chock-full of great stuff. It starts with “Forks in the Road,” which takes you by the hand and leads you to some of the tastiest destinations within a day’s drive of Cincinnati. The Middle Eastern bakeries and cafés of Dearborn, Michigan. The “smokehouse trail” of southwestern Kentucky. The cocktail laboratories and hot dog emporiums of Chicago. (It makes me hungry just to type that. I desperately want an Old Fashioned, a platter of Newsom ham, and a slice of baklava right now.) From there we move on to William Powell’s report on the curious candidacies of Brad Wenstrup and William “Butch” Smith, a piece that proves the maxim “All politics is loco.” And to Jason Cohen’s essay on why the reunion of the Afghan Whigs, one of the best bands to ever come from Cincinnati, presents a conundrum for aging rock fans. And finally to Amy Brownlee’s painstakingly reported story on a macabre murder in Covington, a hard journey into one young woman’s heart of darkness.

Of course there’s more. Katie Laur sings the praises of home-cooked holiday meals. Donna Covrett experiences tandoori bliss at Mantra on the Hill. Dr. Know reveals the truth about Tiny Town. Holly Coletta creates an actual chart out of pie (with a little help from the art department). And Bob Woodiwiss introduces the John-O’-Lantern, a “decorative ceramic pumpkin ‘carved’ with the super-spooky image of House Speaker John Boehner.”

Like I said, a huffing, puffing beast of a thing. Just in time for Halloween.

Originally published in the October 2012 issue
Photograph by Ryan Kurtz

Letter from the Editor

Jay Stowe — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 11:00:00 GMT

When did bacon become the coin of the realm in culinary circles? I’m sure someone out there, some blogger or Wikipedia editor, could put their finger on the precise moment this beloved but maligned smoked pork product went from simple morning meat to the most common ingredient known to man... which can also kill you if you eat too much of it. (Sad but true, according to a recent study in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Though, subconsciously, it’s not exactly news since pretty much any rational person who’s ever eaten bacon probably suspected this. Nothing that tastes that good could conceivably be good for you in the long run.) For me, a few crispy strips alongside a pair of over-easy eggs, some hash browns, and a cup of coffee is still the best way to enjoy bacon. I’m speaking of breakfast, of course, and since I’m speaking of it, I’ll add that it’s also the best way to enjoy pancakes, corn cakes, waffles, croissants, scrambled eggs, French toast, omelettes, doughnuts, butter, salt, syrup, sugar, coffee, tea, crepes, burritos, dim sum, huevos rancheros, coffee cake, sausage, ham, and goetta. All of which will also kill you if eat enough, especially in great galloping American-sized mouthfuls, the way us Americans do. I guess what I’m saying is, we’re all going to die, so we might as well enjoy our breakfasts before we do.

Still, what is the deal with bacon? I suspect its popularity lies in the fact that it may be the most ingenious taste delivery system ever invented. Of the five known tastes that our brain and buds register—salty, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami—bacon can, in its most lovingly cured forms, hit at least three out of five. Especially umami. On the Umami Scale™ (which picks up on savory sensations, and which I just invented), bacon is off the charts. Also, it has an amazingly pliant texture, simultaneously crisp, crunchy, and floppy, that few other foods can match. And then there’s the fat content. Any food that can literally melt in your mouth is golden as far as I’m concerned.

Which is why I would also make the case for goetta. Over the years we’ve published thousands of words extolling the virtues of our homegrown sausage. We adore the stuff—an inspired mixture of beef, pork, pinhead oats, spices, fat, and salt. It has a flavor profile that is remarkably similar to bacon with a texture that, once fried, is unlike almost any other death-meat: crunchy on the outside, creamy on the inside. I love bacon, but if I have to choose a breakfast treat that will ultimately hasten my demise, I’m gonna go with goetta every time.

So turn to page 70, immerse yourself in our in-depth investigation of breakfast in Cincinnati, and start your own personal countdown: 5...4...3...2...1...Serenity Now!

Originally published in the September 2012 issue.
Glasses photograph by Ryan Kurtz

Letter from the Editor

Jay Stowe — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 11:00:00 GMT

This magazine serves many purposes—one of which is to be a surrogate home for Big Ideas. Writers and editors often approach the birth of an idea with palpable trepidation. As a general rule, you want to appear smart in print. But as a general rule, not all Big Ideas are, upon first inspection, smart. So a certain amount of manhandling goes into the birthing process: Writer pitches Big Idea, editor chews over Big Idea and spits it back at writer, who chews it over some more then spits it back at the editor. Rinse. Repeat. Eventually, if the Big Idea has an extra-hard core that resists all that editorial mastication, a nugget survives and moves to the next stage: actual creation—the painstaking work of reporting, writing, editing, and designing the thing on the page. Yep, it’s a crazy process. What’s even nuttier is that we willingly put ourselves through it every month.

Now, want to hear something really crazy? When Polk Laffoon IV brought us his Big Idea nearly two years ago it came fully formed. It wasn’t just that Polk had a known track record for producing clear, substantive, well-wrought pieces in our pages (though that helped). Or that he’d thought long and hard about it (though that helped, too). It was that, in addition to perspective and gravitas, he was passionate about it. This Big Idea had gripped him and, by God, he thought that it would grip the readers, too. It also helped that the idea was deceivingly simple: Over the course of three separate essays centered on the river, the hills, and the architecture of Cincinnati, Polk would explore how these features not only define who we are—as a city and as citizens—but show us where we’ve been, where we’re going, and what challenges lie ahead.

With this issue we publish the third and final installment, which focuses on the architectural riches in our midst and kicks off with Polk’s piece “Make No Small Plans.” Polk has rambled far and wide for all of his essays. He hiked the secret valleys of LaBoiteaux Woods and quizzed the city’s geotechnical engineer about the state of our slopes, dove in (literally) to the Great Ohio River Swim, paddled his canoe in Paddlefest, and tapped the brains of the folks at ORSANCO to limn the state of the river. This month he gives us a first-rate education in the significance of the buildings that surround and, yes, define us. To complete the package, we put together a list of the “10 Buildings That Changed the City” and tapped a few more big brains (Aaron Betsky at CAM, Walter Langsam and Michael McInturf at UC, and Cincinnati Form Follows Function cofounder Susan Rissover). At the heart of Polk’s essay is a deep concern, which he boils down in one sentence: “Do we have enough resources—and the civic will—to hold on to what we’ve built?” It’s a Big Idea, one that I’ll let you chew over on your own, but I think we all know what the answer should be.

Originally published in the August 2012 issue.
Glasses photograph by Ryan Kurtz