photos credit: Ken Alan
The Further Files…
Rhine & Dine: From a vibrant downtown district to its hip and happening Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, Cincinnati’s star is on the rise
Ken Alan The American Sign Museum
Picture a fairly nondescript storefront, just a local video store with a sign out front - Video Archive - and there’s nothing incongruent about that except, maybe, the twin, slim jackrabbit heads stenciled on the front windows appearing a bit - how to say it - foreboding?
Inside, there are a few shelves lining the small, brightly lit room, their rows bearing B-grade videotape boxes, many with kitschy horror titles or gritty grindhouse cinema classics. Stepping across the black-and-white checkerboard floor (like the one I’m suddenly recalling from a certain pulpy-fictional movie from 1994), I am met by the clerk; a bearded fellow who first asks for my ID and then proceeds to recommend one particular movie that’s situated on the middle shelf, “A fun remake starring Jessica Biel. I think you’ll really like it.”
Our entourage thumbs through the selections. “Aha!” one of us exclaims, while pulling out the 2003 remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Suddenly, the middle shelf slides open exposing a hidden den with lots of pink neon and flickering movie images along a brick wall within.
No, Video Archive is not just any mere retail store - it’s a speakeasy, one with a succinct and fervent dedication toward motion picture director Quentin Tarantino.
Seated along the bar, I scan a menu reading like a who’s who from the director’s greatest hits. Should I order a cocktail called Hanzo Steel (a Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2 reference), a Five Dollar Milkshake (Pulp Fiction), or Mr. Pink Lives (Reservoir Dogs)? No, instead I request a Jackie Brown. The bourbon-infused drink is like the titular char- acter herself - strong, honeyed and salty - all at once.
If you were to gaze around the nearby landscape with me at the series of graduating, low-rise skyscrapers - some architected in the Deco-style of the 1930s, others crafted in stoic, post-WWII cement- like utilitarian design, and still a few others embellished with latter- day, modernistic touches - and then look sharply at the nearby neighborhood scenes, teeming with beer bars, cocktail-culture clubs, a plethora of creative restaurants, and the requisite amount of tatted, backward cap-wearing hipsters intermingling with smartly dressed white collar office workers who, in turn, are consort with blue collared union guys sharing civic space with people of pretty much every nationality, orientation and persuasion - you’d probably think this melting pot of a city could easily be Portland, OR, Seattle, WA, or Greenwich Village in New York City.
Surprise! This is Cincinnati, OH. Mid-Atlantic EVENTS Magazine 91
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