Dawn of the Dead
This was to be a column extolling the daring and inventiveness of a very groovy Sci Fi Network television show called good vs. evil, in which two dead men, a fro-sporting, cool-spouting brutha and his pale-faced partner, try to save the souls of those who have made Faustian deals with the devil’s minions, among them…
Tangled Up In Blue
It was late afternoon before anyone thought something might be terribly wrong with Cleveland Police Sgt. Gerald Goode. An unwavering creature of habit, Goode always retrieved his newspaper by 11 a.m. On that ill-fated afternoon last October, however, Goode’s neighbor, Nancy Rozell, saw the bundle still lying at the edge of the driveway at 4.…
Edge
29ed! That’s lawyer talk for the knockout ruling by Common Pleas Judge Eileen Gallagher last week, dismissing the “honor killing” case against Musa Saleh. Prosecutor Carmen Marino was said to be “distraught” after fumbling what police and prosecutors thought was a solid case. It didn’t look that way to defense attorney Jerome Emoff. “There literally…
Letters to the Editor
font size=+1> Reflections on a Troubled TimeYou will probably get tons of response on the Kent State story [“Bloody Monday,” May 4], but here is what I can say: I was 10 years old, and I remember when this happened. May 4, 1970, was the day of the end of innocence in American culture. The…
Western Accent
Throughout the centuries, the Japanese have been masters at assimilating different cultures without losing their own. A compelling new exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art, called East Meets West: Tradition and Innovation in Modern Japanese Prints, demonstrates how this process has played itself out with respect to Western influences. Modern Japanese printmaking has achieved…
Angst in the Catacombs
As we embark on the new century, one truth holds: Everyone still wants to see Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera. A pair of tickets is a talisman, guaranteeing its owner a choice of A-list dates. Even after more than a dozen years, the show still casts its spell on Phantom veterans and…
Side Dish
As any serious gourmand knows, our culinary choices are influenced by trends every bit as insidious as those that buffet the fashion industry. Today, for example, Northeast Ohioans are still tucking into “upscale comfort food”: old-fashioned favorites like pot roast and macaroni and cheese, usually treated to a contemporary tweaking that Saint Fanny Farmer never…
Just Desserts
One heady autumn evening some years back, I found myself in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with neither dinner plans nor a companion. Rather than bemoaning my aloneness, I used that rare unstructured moment to ask my True Self what, exactly, she had a taste for. Her uncompromising answer hardly took me by surprise: “Hot fudge sundae,”…
Hog Heaven
Coupling the sexier-than-thou attitude of singer Cristina Martinez with the brand of distorted, fire-eating rock and roll that has made her husband, singer-guitarist Jon Spencer (of the infamous Blues Explosion), the toughest kid on the rock and roll block, Boss Hog’s story is built on two of rock’s oldest ingredients: sex and rock and roll,…
Fruits of Duress
Anxious spectators at Barnum’s Kaleidoscape watch in awe as sharpshooter Guy Tell fires a series of crossbows, the arrows simultaneously ripping through a row of white balloons. As the last arrow is about to launch, Tell dashes in front of the bull’s-eye and balances a shiny red apple atop his head. In a heartbeat, the…
Bad to the Bone
A decade ago, just about anything by the stringently feminist indie rock group Bikini Kill was probably sufficient to scare the piss out of a young Fred Durst many times over. The oft-quoted, oft-misunderstood riot grrrl movement tended to frighten people in the early ’90s, spraying mainstream culture with furious punk and unrelenting feminist politics.…
War Is Swell
When the power goes out for any length of time, most people can’t even locate candles, let alone drum up entertainment. The TV is silent, the cineplex dark, the stereo useless. It’s much like the world of the 19th century, and people are forced to tell stories. The American Magic Lantern Theater, which will perform…
The Reel Thing
Traditional Irish folk music has been combined with plenty of different musical styles, so you’d think mixing it with punk and hardcore would be some kind of joke, right? Wrong. The Dropkick Murphys, Boston’s premier Irish punk working-class band, use bagpipes, grinding guitars, and bone-shaking rhythms. Three-chord punk rhythms surround Celtic jigs and reels, and…
Green Light
Given that most film studios have multimillion-dollar marketing budgets with which to target 18- to 25-year-olds, it’s astonishing how little they seem to know about the everyday life of those they’re supposed to be studying. Drew Barrymore has never been kissed? Please. Rachel Leigh Cook undatable until Freddie Prinze Jr. fixes her up? In which…
Pearl Jam
After defining grunge rock nearly a decade ago with the seething anger and potent social commentary of Ten and its equally powerful follow-up Vs., Pearl Jam has spent the past six years and three studio albums distancing itself from its anthemic rock roots. Early fans have since jumped ship for more accessible, less cerebral bands…
Misery Loves Company
It’s hard to imagine a more relentlessly lugubrious basis for a movie than Jane Hamilton’s 1994 novel A Map of the World. The story is about Alice Goodwin, a school nurse in a small town, whose neighbor’s two-year-old daughter accidentally drowns in the back pond. Alice blames herself and masochistically punishes herself with guilt. Since…
Phish
Broad commercial success has managed to elude Phish’s official releases throughout its 17-year career. Although it has issued 12 albums, including a live six-disc boxed set, Phish has sold a total of only 4.5 million albums, and only 1995’s double disc, A Live One, has gone platinum. The band’s latest, Farmhouse, is probably not destined…
Red Shoes 2000
When asked to name the most erotic sequence they have ever seen in a film, people tend to pick moments like the love scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now or that indelible image of Kathleen Turner in Body Heat, standing just inside her house, silently daring poor, dumb William Hurt…
Jeff Buckley
Those who knew Jeff Buckley insist he did not commit suicide, and that his drowning death in 1997 was purely accidental. What made his death a little harder to believe was the irrefutable darkness of his lyrics and allusions to ending it all. We’ll never know if Buckley intentionally followed his singer-songwriter father, Tim, to…
Church and Fate
The command center is a modest affair: a desk, books, a computer, boxes of files, a poster of Malcolm X, lots of Bibles and crosses. It’s here, in the second-floor office of his Mentor home, that James Watkins charts the triumphs and pitfalls of his fight against conservative Christian America. With the click of a…
Mialso
A quintet out of Akron, Mialso, which consists of singer Matt Savering, bassist Nate Steckel, guitarist John Siladie, DJ John Wade, and drummer Ryan Kelly, calls the music on its debut EP “hop-rock.” Part of the same scene that includes acts such as Poets of Another Breed and Cyde, at whose Grooveyard Studios the band…
Rhapsody in Blow
The life of a harmonica star can be a grueling one, fraught with cheap motels and cold pork ‘n’ beans. But at least Al and Judy Smith have each other. When they met 20 years ago at a harmonica convention, it was love at first slide. “I got lucky,” says Al, husband half of the…
Soundbites
It was only a coincidence that Kiss, on a farewell tour that’s 20 years overdue, happened to be in town for two shows at Gund Arena a mere week before the opening of Rock Style, a new exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum that focuses on fashion and rock and…
