Cloak and Dagger
It’s your classic twisted tale, beginning quietly when a few power brokers can’t get what they want. Then comes the clandestine plotting. The backroom lobbying and political head-counting. The eavesdropping moles and stealthy intelligence gathering. A trail of intrigue, a hint of payoff, and of course, the lawyers. It always ends with an army of…
To Park, or Not to Park
So the other night I’m out riding around with my buddy Bob, and I ask him to swing by this local music store so I can pick up my weekly copy of Scene. We discover, much to our dismay, that all the parking places are taken, save for the single “Handicapped Only” spot directly in…
The Straight Dope
The hepatitis C virus (HCV) has become the new, ugly epidemic in this country, but it’s not showing up in the headlines. What’s up with that? There are 3.5 million Americans chronically infected with HCV. At least 80 percent of the cases are blood-borne. The experts seem uncertain about the origin of the other 20…
Letters
No More Pinko Commie Look This morning I stopped at my local coffeehouse to pick up the Free Times. It wasn’t in yet, so I grabbed Scene–something I haven’t done in a long time, because it used to look like such the kind of paper that could only be read if it were free, sort…
Prattle of the Sexes
Relationship gurus like John Gray (of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus fame) and Deepak Chopra (is anybody anxiously awaiting the hip-hop musical he’s preparing based on his tips and incantations?) would feel right at home with some of the art on display at Cleveland’s SPACES Gallery. This Side Up, an exhibit featuring…
Nothing But the Truth
Since it has become a form of cultural suicide to frown upon any work that paints the horrors of slavery, charts the triumph of the human spirit, or depicts the transformation of a member of an oppressed minority group (especially a woman) into a glowing icon, be grateful that the hard-driven qualities of Eric Coble’s…
They Hate Men
Repertory theaters like the Cleveland Play House make their reputations by unearthing important new plays. If the theater gods are smiling, these works ascend to Mount Olympus, which in this country and century means New York, all leading to a regional Tony. Throwing its hat in the ring, the Play House has chosen from its…
A Cozy Escape From Winter
Open the doors to the Inn at Turner’s Mill, and you’re likely to think you’ve stepped into an early American tavern. On any winter evening, the much-renovated 1852 mill is aglow with candlelight. In the “library,” diners pull their black Windsor chairs up to tables draped with paisley-and-white linen before a crackling fire. Dried-flower festoons…
Playback
Leo Gandelman Brazilian Soul (Verve Forecast) Saxophonist/composer Leo “From Rio” Gandelman has created a strange studio artifact with his latest album, Brazilian Soul. Without a doubt, the album’s attempt to update an Ipanema Brazilian sound with the accoutrements of streetwise, modern pop has resulted in fancy elevator music. But it’s hardly reducible to just that.…
Splice of Life
The phone call catches Ira Glass by surprise. He was waiting for a producer to answer his query: “When can you say ‘pussy’ on public radio? Like, if you have someone saying, ‘Come and get it, pussies,’ is that all right?” Glass’s guileless musings are familiar to fans of This American Life, the public-radio anthology…
A Moon in Full
Mention the name Keith Moon, and images of ruinous excess come just as readily to mind as do the man’s achievements as the unbridled drummer of the Who. In a new biography, author Tony Fletcher credits Moon for revolutionizing “the concept of the drummer in rock and roll and pop music by rejecting the previously…
Yawn With the Wind
Let’s get this straight: Herbert Stein is not one of those Winnebago-driving, baggy-shorts-wearing tourists with a video camera grafted to his eyeball. Sure, he pilots a big van weighed down with equipment and snack foods . . . and OK, he does tend to steer with one hand and videotape with the other . .…
My Little Pony
For the members of the hard-rocking band Tesla, the late ’80s and early ’90s were a dream. The critical success of its debut disc Mechanical Resonance was followed by the commercial success of The Great Radio Controversy and the cover of “Signs” from the unplugged Five Man Acoustical Jam. The band was headlining arenas, selling…
Night & Day
Thursday January 21 The last two times they peeled into Cleveland, ska rockers/Yankees fans Spring Heeled Jack turfed the lawn with rallying cries of “The Indians suck!” But the members of the New York-based septet–who previously opened for Reel Big Fish and Cherry Poppin’ Daddies here–are still alive, and tonight, they’ll be singing songs about…
Livewire
A Drum Is a Woman My People Severance Hall January 17 For an early concert in this year’s “Everything Ellington” celebration, producer John K. Richmond unearthed a pair of Ellington works that had been dormant for quite some time: A Drum Is a Woman, Duke’s oratorio on the roots of jazz, and My People, a…
She Ain’t Heavy, She’s My Sister
Genius can be a terrible, destructive gift. Jacqueline du Pre, the brilliant British cellist who enraptured audiences in the ’60s and ’70s with her musical passion and intensity, lived a life of great renown and acclamation, but also one of harrowing loneliness and emotional turmoil. Her story is movingly told in Hilary and Jackie, a…
Makin’ the Scene
Mike Martini was fooling around with a guitar effects pedal when he found the mutation that sparked his experimental rock project Nine Ninety Eight. Properly tweaked, the pedal emitted a seemingly random flash of sound. Martini, a 29-year-old art school dropout who lives in Chardon, then had the idea to play a compact disc through…
Love for Sale
Elevate The Jerry Springer Show a notch or two–in other words, dispense with the one-legged serial killers who are having sex with their blind mothers, and other such nonsense–and you’ve got Willard Carroll’s Playing by Heart. Too harsh a judgment, some will say. After all, this well-meaning, relentlessly sincere ensemble drama shoots for no less…
Animal Instincts
Ask people about Eric Burdon, and if they have any idea who he is–this is a guy who has no trouble admitting that the best-selling T-shirt of his career bore the inscription “Fuck Me. I thought he was dead”–and they will drop names like the Animals and War, songs like “House of the Rising Sun”…
Money ChangesEverything
Ultratough guy Jesse “The Body” Ventura says he means business as the new governor of Minnesota. But for now the nasty crime wave in that state continues unchecked–in the movies anyway. Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, a psychological thriller that shows us how dangerous life can get after three ordinary men from a remote Minnesota…
Slouching Tall
In 1970, Randy Newman wrote a song for Frank Sinatra called “Lonely at the Top,” and it went like this: “Listen all you fools out there/Go on and love me–I don’t care/Oh, it’s lonely at the top.” Newman, then a 27-year-old singer-songwriter with two albums of his own out on Sinatra’s Reprise label, meant it…
