Coal Miner’s Son
What’s entertaining about October Sky is the unlikely-but-true spectacle of backwater West Virginia teens teaching themselves rocket science in the Eisenhower ’50s. They progress from a glorified cherry bomb to sophisticated missiles through trial-and-error-and-error. Their inner rocket fuel is the desire to avoid getting stuck in the dying coal industry that supports their hometown. They…
Livewire
Semisonic Remy Zero Odeon February 8 Semisonic appears to know it is a card-carrying member of the one-hit wonder club. Tuesday’s show at the Odeon was the perfect opportunity for the upbeat trio to show off talents larger than “Closing Time,” the 1998 hit that made them wondrous. Unfortunately, they revealed their flaws instead. Swaying…
Candy-Coated Comedies
Plot is a central problem in both Jawbreaker and Office Space, two comedies opening this week: The first has too much, and the second (and far better of the two movies) has too little. Jawbreaker’s 26-year-old writer/director Darren Stein says he wanted to make an homage to the films he watched in his San Fernando…
Soul of the Matter
In the archetypal dead-end town of Lawford, New Hampshire, cold-eyed men looking for trouble prowl the streets in four-by-fours with chrome spotlights and loaded gun racks. The gloomy barrooms are not gathering places so much as solitary confinement cells, and the most popular local sport is macho posturing. In wintry Lawford, the future slides inexorably…
Letters
Lighten Up, Offended Christians I read with great amusement mixed with dismay the letter from Phil Krakowiak of Independence, criticizing the “Jesus of the Week” feature in Scene. This is not the first letter I have seen from some offended religious person. I’d like to offer another viewpoint. First of all, the continued attempt of…
The Straight Dope
I have heard that armadillos carry leprosy. Is this true? How about any other nasty diseases? –Tom Wilkinson, via AOL A query to the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board drew the following response: Q. Why don’t lepers play hockey? A. Too many face-offs. You see why scientific progress is slow. I have, however, established that…
Hookers in Heat
Psst! Wanna feast your eyes on some impressive figures? Check this lineup–24 arrests, an eighteen-month investigation, six search warrants, two escort services, one confiscated Jeep and one former Akron Vice Unit commander. It all adds up to a call-girl sting that ensnared home-based operations in Fairlawn and Berea, both run by female entrepreneurs. They sent…
Saint Diego
V.S. Pritchett, England’s recently deceased dean of letters, once said that the Iberian ego tends to skip the middle ground and go right for the big picture. This, it might be argued, is precisely what Diego Rivera did in his gigantic murals that glorified “The People” and connected contemporary Mexico with its pre-Columbian past. Pritchett…
For the Young at Heart
L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels may lack the sparkling dexterity of Lewis Carroll’s Alice or the fresh whimsy of Barrie’s Peter Pan, yet it is our great American fairy tale, as patriotic as an Uncle Sam piggy bank and as indelible as wheat. Like that noble grain, it has…
Unsinkable Norma Desmond
The stripped-down bus-and-truck tour of Sunset Boulevard, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical rape of Billy Wilder’s sardonic tragedy of a former silent film star’s grand dive into megalomania, takes theatergoers in the neighborhood of a woeful haunted house; the whole experience is permeated with ghostly memories and regrets. The first regret is the ghost of a…
Eating With Your Eyes
Donna Chriszt considers herself, among other things, a visual artist whose medium is food and whose canvas is dinnerware. As owner and chef of Jeso, Chriszt uses her artistic sensibilities to guide diners through sometimes-wonderful adventures in global cuisine. Her palette includes strokes of Asian, Caribbean, and Mediterranean flavors, often skillfully balanced and beautifully presented.…
Makin’ the Scene
Boodah’s Toothbrush singer Jake Simms thought he landed in Mayberry when the band descended on Newton Falls to record at Tune Town studios. “Aliens could have flown out our butts and we would have been less suspicious,” he says. The funk band trades heavily in alien imagery. Simms says he grew up in a house…
Playback
Roky Erickson Never Say Goodbye (Emperor Jones) When Roky Erickson sings, “Don’t drive yourself past living,” he knows something we don’t and urges us to listen. Erickson, with his fragile psyche, damaged by psychedelic drugs while with the legendary mid-’60s acid-rock innovators the 13th Floor Elevators, sings like he’s grappling to manage our world with…
All in the Family
Down-home country music is no stranger to Memphis, Tennessee, but down-home country funky hip-hop does seem a tad anomalous. For the past four years, and four albums, Big Ass Truck has been producing crafty, genre-defying tunes. At times the band makes others sound like stale, unfeeling fish. For a group such as this to be…
Night & Day
Thursday February 18 High-intensity playwright and monologist Eric Bogosian, of Talk Radio and subUrbia renown, returns tonight to his alma mater–Oberlin College (class of ’76), where as a senior, he starred in a student production of Georg Buchner’s play Woyzeck. This time, he passes through town for the midwestern premiere of his one-man show An…
California Dreamin’
Dave Alvin sings about California the way Bruce Springsteen sings about New Jersey. Both men have forged careers singing about the struggles of people with two strikes against them who are still in the batter’s box, swinging for the fence. But while the mention of New Jersey will usually bring a snide remark or a…
Let’s Get Small
“Where’s the line?” wonders Jennifer Gaglione, publicist for The Wizard of Oz. “There was a long line out here–you should have seen it.” Another photo-op flown the coop. But there’s plenty more where that came from, as about two hundred little squirts with numbers on their chests (ages eight to fourteen please, and no taller…
Regatta de Blanc
A biologist might place Cleveland reggae in an ecological niche as narrow and noncompetitive as that of the wolf spider. Not very promising for Akron musician B.E. Mann, who considers his music reggae, while he’s been compared to Boy George. “People in Cleveland would look at First Light [the longtime Northeast Ohio reggae act that…
Coffee and a Byte
In a sleepy little corner of Bedford, a dog the size of a Shetland pony walks his owner. Nearby, in a sunny corner of a coffeeshop, Ray Benne, master of caffeinated ceremonies at Cyber Pete’s Internet Cafe, intently observes the canine vs. human tug-of-war, and wistfully recalls gentler days when the beast was a puppy.…
White Guys Kick Ass
A mop and pail were Kevin “Noodles” Wasserman’s keys to the chamber of secrets. To support himself and his guitar habit while he was in his twenties, Noodles worked as a custodian at the high school he had attended in Orange County, California. The job was like a backstage pass. He had access to all…
