Life Swapping
Although its themes are about as revelatory as those of the average Cathy comic strip, there’s something irrefutably charming about Philippa “Pip” Karmel’s debut feature, Me Myself I. The editor of Academy darling Shine has scripted a laundry list of woman’s woes, added a subtle Twilight Zone twist, and turned Rachel Griffiths loose to frolic…
Al Green
Born in 1946 in Dansby, a sharecropper community near Forrest City, Arkansas, in the Mississippi Delta, Al Green grew up both there and in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he began singing gospel with his brothers and touring the gospel circuit in the Midwest and Southwest through the ’60s. In 1969, at a gig in Midland,…
Mutha’s Day
The title of the 1971 Gordon Parks detective movie Shaft worked as a double entendre — when it presented Richard Roundtree’s “black private dick” John Shaft as a superstud, at whom women of every race threw themselves, it wasn’t hard to believe. The joke changes when the name is given to Samuel L. Jackson, with…
Royal Trux
Most famous for reportedly blowing an advance from its record label to buy drugs and then having the gall to ask for more money, Royal Trux — now clean and sober — has kept the Pussy Galore aesthetic alive even more than other Galore offshoots, such as the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Boss Hog.…
Crash of the Titan
It’s the year 3028, and man . . . is an endangered species! (Haven’t we heard that somewhere before, like last month?) But this time around, the threat is a little more intimidating than those effeminate, Xenu-worshiping Conehead psychologists in platform boots. The villains in Fox’s new animated spectacular Titan A.E. are the Drej (pronounced…
Jimmie Dale Gilmore
Braver Newer World, Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s 1996 follow-up to his Grammy-nominated 1993 masterpiece Spinning ‘Round the Sun, was a disaster. Gilmore’s idea of taking a disparate collection of songs other people wrote and making an album out of them fell flatter than your mom’s first attempt at a soufflé. So why did he chart the…
Slippery Slope
Sixty-year-old public housing resident Clara Bell is tired of hearing about the promises, the plans, and especially the consultant-created studies to redevelop her Cleveland home — the Riverview Towers on West 25th Street. So, when the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA) and a design consultant organized a meeting last week to solicit input from Riverview…
Sinead O’Connor
Odd as it may seem, coming from a woman who once ripped up a photo of the Pope on national television, Sinead O’Connor’s declaration of faith, “Everything in this world would be OK/If people just believed in God enough to pray,” on “The Lamb’s Book of Life,” a hymnal track from her first album in…
Team Chlorine
Wearing velvet underwater puts the dry world in perspective. Famine, nuclear holocaust — pshaw! Worries are few, but primal: Will you sink from your own absorbency? Are you gonna get a wedgie? “Wedgies are a big problem,” confides Martha Montgomery, a lifter on a formation that looks like a flower. “And sequins — they really…
NOFX
Anyone familiar with NOFX’s snarling, melodic punk, delivered four chords at a time and backed by that ubiquitous, absurdly fast double kick drum that’s been used on every Lookout! album since 1985, knows what to expect from the group. The new NOFX record is so brazen in its marriage of smirking, wise-ass intellect and sophomoric…
Edge
A scrap between Councilman Joe Jones and Black Trades Council leader George Edwards will continue in civil court, says Edwards, who claims Jones viciously decked him last month. Edwards had confronted Jones about the lack of minority participation on construction projects in his ward when Jones allegedly “sucker-punched me in the jaw.” Jones has denied…
Alvin Youngblood Hart & Sue Foley
Alvin Youngblood Hart and Sue Foley — two of the better young blues artists — explore the idea of traveling on their new discs and come up with some new ways of making the traditional blues theme resonate. When Hart, a dreadlocked guitar virtuoso, released the acoustic Big Mama’s Door in 1996, he was hailed…
Dealer’s Choice
It had the makings of a public relations disaster, and Wal-Mart executives back in quaint Bentonville, Arkansas, knew it. In early June of last year, a white supervisor at the company’s Cleveland Heights store accused 23 black employees of stealing money. For hours, the workers were locked inside the store while managers rifled through their…
Frank Camp
Like Tony Lang, with whom he played in the Simpletons, singer-guitarist Frank Camp put a great deal of thought and care into recording his solo debut. For Ignoring the Obvious, Camp went to three different studios — Neon Cactus in Akron, Old Hickory in Nashville, and his own Campland Studios in Cleveland — and recruited…
Revenge of The Fanboy
There exists deep within any man who once read comic books and collected them–protected them, actually, with plastic sleeves and cardboard backs and boxes that fought off the yellowing of time–the mythical being known as The Fanboy. A long time ago, The Fanboy pored over every issue of World’s Finest and Brave and the Bold,…
Spare Change 00
This summer, Spare Change 00 will be touring in support of its first CD with national distribution (. . . At First Sight, out on Grilled Cheese/Cargo Records, the label famous for introducing Blink 182), but the Canton trio already has accumulated the kind of war stories that it takes most bands a lifetime to…
Letters to the Editor
The Devil in Mike White Gifted reader V.M.D. of North Royalton offers this rendering in response to “A Question of Style,” in the June 1 issue of Scene: Plenty Mayoral Ass-Kissing LeftEric Brewer’s “white-man-keep-black-man-down” analogies in reference to why Mike White is still mayor [Letters, June 8] are not only ignorant, but they’re racist and…
Much Pain, No Gain
Fitness buffs take their workouts seriously. One realizes just how seriously during those late-night infomercials on the tube. There’s Tai-Bo, for those who want to put a dash of the martial arts into their exercise regimen. The Bo-Flex machine, for those who dislike bulky gym equipment, and the Total Fitness Gym, for fans of Christie…
Moor Is Less
In 1934 Cole Porter penned his vision of Armageddon, when he had Ethel Merman’s nightclub evangelist Reno Sweeney belt out, “The world has gone mad today, and good’s bad today, and black’s white today — anything goes!” While watching Karamu’s insidious attack on Shakespeare’s Othello, these lyrics ring in our skull as a prophecy. In…
Grooving on the Grovewood
The Grovewood Tavern and Wine Bar’s transformation from a down-at-the-heels neighborhood watering hole to a modest yet sophisticated dining spot has been slow but steady over the past year. Sure, the decor is still apt to remind you of your high-school buddy’s basement apartment, with its secondhand furniture, chipboard walls, and mismatched lighting fixtures. A…
Whatever Will Be, Willoughby
The three-block stretch through picturesque downtown Willoughby is already something of a Restaurant Row, with culinary alternatives that run the gamut from old-time burgers-and-booze joints to upscale coffee houses, an Italian fine-dining spot, and one of the area’s most popular microbreweries. Now, Awakenings (4140 Erie Street, 440-269-8174), a pleasant little juice bar/veggie palace/bookstore, is adding…
Idle Time
Eric Idle is worried — about Cleveland, no less. Idle, one-sixth of the legendary British comedy brain trust that spawned the BBC’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus, is concerned that, based on advance ticket numbers, there could be a near-empty house in Cleveland when his Python revue visits the Palace Theatre on Sunday. “Are they notoriously…
The Neighborhood Guy
One of the greatest and most innovative improvising musicians of the last century, 73-year-old Joe Maneri, isn’t well-known, but he’s finally beginning to get the props that should have been his in the ’50s. It would have been a tragedy if he had fallen through the cracks, because Maneri anticipated the currently avant-garde genre blending…
Horse Sense
It didn’t matter that Monty Roberts had been talking, not whipping, horses into the saddle for 40 years — when Queen Elizabeth II asked him to do it for her, the author of The Man Who Listens to Horses and creator of the Join-Up training system got nervous. “I was pretty sure it wasn’t going…
Motorhead
Twenty-five years have passed since Motorhead formed in London, but it still comes as a shock that frontman Lemmy Kilmister was once a member of Hawkwind. Turning his back on the space rock world, he formed Motorhead with a group of dirty-jeans-and-leather-wearing miscreants whose music was as inviting as a soccer thug who finds out…
Disney Lightens Up
Sixty years after Walt Disney’s original plans to expand on the original Fantasia, Disney has finally gotten around to making new musical segments for a reprise of the film’s classical-music-cum-animation concept. Fantasia/2000 has seven new sequences, with that old favorite, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” thrown in for old times’ sake. Disney originally released Fantasia/2000 in the…
Scratching With Itch
The first thing you hear when Decoder (Darren Beale) picks up the phone in the Bristol, England studio where he’s recording is a woman singing at the top of her lungs. A producer and DJ, Beale is obviously in the middle of a recording session, and given the fact that Beale records for a number…
