Another Side of Bacon…
Kevin Bacon is talking about his penis. It’s not his fault — not exactly, anyway. Bacon didn’t bring it up, so to speak. He never does, at least not in public. He’s just trying to promote his latest film, Stir of Echoes. But here he is nonetheless, explaining how it feels to know that the…
Get Me Outta Here
For Morgan J. Freeman (a young writer-director, not the heralded actor), comic timing couldn’t get any worse — or better. That’s because one of the unhappy teenagers in Freeman’s second feature, Desert Blue, is a melancholy girl dressed in moody black who likes to detonate homemade bombs. The Columbine High School massacre and its deadly…
E-Battle
With little fanfare the past few months, Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch Inc., the nation’s largest purveyor of Internet city guides, has been building a new Cleveland on-ramp to the information superhighway. CitySearch’s entry into the Cleveland electronic publishing market puts it head-to-head with The Plain Dealer’s Cleveland Live website, which up to now has dominated online services…
Charmed
The office girls turned out in orange and brown ensembles. Suburbanites donned foam dog bone hats and woofed at each other, and a vendor with bad teeth and a thin goatee sold T-shirts proclaiming “Pittsburgh Still Sucks.” Ironworkers forty feet in the air banged their tools on I-beams in rhythm with the Strongsville High School…
Edge
Who’s in charge here? A sneak preview of the new Browns game program shows owner Al Lerner with a one-page bio, while GM and supposed second banana Carmen Policy gets two full pages. One source close to the team poses the obvious rhetorical question: “Who am I? Am I not the owner?” Meanwhile, the bloated…
Theater Fashion Parade
With Great Lakes Theater Festival and the Cleveland Play House, our two equity theaters, about to start their seasons — and with costumes such a huge part of the theatrical experience — we thought we should give a nod to what the well-dressed audience member ought to be wearing this year. After all, as any…
Riding the Gravy Train
Eddie Sand’s Blueline Café is at its best at breakfast, over sturdy white mugs of steaming coffee, some thick French toast, or a scramble of eggs. That’s when guests at this old-fashioned diner can sink their teeth into freshly baked muffins heavy with juicy blueberries or savor a gooey pecan roll smothered in nuts. Cheerful…
Field of Screams
“Tits, tits, tits!” That’s the chant outside the wrestling ring at a metal radio station-sponsored outdoor music festival in Des Moines, Iowa. The Spooky Clan, Slipknot impersonators, pick women from the audience to “convince Slipknot to take them backstage.” The crowd surrounding the ring is easily the largest all day. Several people, mostly young men…
“Hello, Australia!”
Who are the Pretty Things, and what happened to them? Back in the early to mid-’60s, they were the grittier, alter-ego B-side of the much more successful Rolling Stones. In fact, Pretty Things guitarist Dick Taylor was musically involved with school chums Mick and Keith, but apparently abandoned what proto-band there was because he took…
Head Butts, With Love
The scene is a self-service copy shop on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago, the time is several years ago, and the protagonist is Wesley Willis, beloved local icon. Willis is built like Sasquatch (he’s six feet, four inches tall and weighs more than three hundred pounds), but his spirit is friendly and gentle — which is…
Soundbites
C.D. Truth singer and guitarist Jeff Hardy knows he has a high-pitched voice. Delightfully, it’s not only a high singing voice, but a high speaking voice. Talk to Hardy on the phone, and you nearly want to ask, “So, is your daddy home?” “People say it’s somewhere between Mickey Mouse and [Dead Kennedys vocalist] Jello…
Livewire
Moby Boom Boom Satellites The Odeon September 1 Electronic music has enough faceless anti-superstars; the adoring public can’t adore you when you’re cowering behind a giant synthesizer. A cool breath of fresh air, then, to see Mr. Richard Melville Hall (Mr. Moby to you) saunter onto the Odeon stage with nothing but an acoustic guitar…
A Fan for All Seasons
Though they definitely get genius points for hats shaped like doghouses, Browns fans aren’t famous for their introspection. And that’s by design. Does warm beer on a cold day need explanation? If the sky looks like a “gray flannel blanket,” well, then why is everybody freezing their asses off? Still, writer Scott Huler, a Clevelander…
Vow or Never
Mr. Ephraim Tibbals removed the door between the parlor and the sitting room when he learned that his daughter’s fiancé had returned from the Mexican War and would resume courting her. “As if we couldn’t look after ourselves!” exclaims pink-cheeked Phoebe of dad’s drain on her privacy. But Mr. Tibbals doesn’t have much longer to…
