A Mixed-Up Bag
Kim Schoel, co-director of the new Dead Horse Gallery in Lakewood, wants audiences to give contemporary art a chance. “Many people think that art is supposed to be obscure and elitist,” she says. It doesn’t have to be that way, and Mixed Feelings, an ambitious sprawl of a show that includes 115 pieces by 35…
Bitchin’ in the Kitchen
A revival of Look Back in Anger can be much the same melancholy experience as attending the comeback of an aging blond bombshell. One can still see traces of former appeal, but the sag of ensuing years on finite attributes, fresher, younger copies, and changing objects of fascination can render yesterday’s big news as faded…
Star Search 2000
Cleveland may consider itself bigger, wealthier, and more urbane. But bustling little Cincinnati, wedged between the Ohio River and miles of rolling farmland, still has one thing we don’t: Maisonette, a classic French restaurant that is, by some measures, Ohio’s best dining spot. Mike and Nat Comisar’s downtown dining room has been bringing home Mobil…
Sweet Somethings
Parking on Shaker Square may be the pits right now, as redevelopment efforts reach their peak, but at least there is one bright spot. Michael Feigenbaum’s relocated Lucy’s Sweet Surrender bakery and café opened last Wednesday with an expanded menu of casually upscale fare, as well as the fine Hungarian strudels, pastries, and challah breads…
Unplugging the Posies
During a casual open mic night at a Seattle club this past January, former Posies Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow were slated to perform separately on the same bill. But the promoter urged the two to take the stage and play a few acoustic numbers together, and since a Posies live disc (Alive Before the…
Hooked on Psychics
How many times have you answered a ringing telephone, already knowing who was on the other end — without the aid of Caller ID? For reasons you can’t quite describe, the face just came to mind as the phone rang. Have you just had a psychic moment? “Everyone is psychic; everyone has intuition,” claims Karen…
Wyclef Jean
For the Fugees’ Wyclef Jean, life is a carnival — a multicultural, multi-musical extravaganza with dancing, drinking, and an all-around good time. To that effect, The Carnival, Jean’s appropriately titled 1997 solo debut, moved effortlessly from ska to dub to hip-hop to pop to R&B and back again. Wyclef’s second album, The Ecleftic –2 Sides…
Comic Jenius
For stand-up comics like Richard Jeni, winning comedy’s first-place trophy is a relatively long road. There are the spots on The Tonight Show, the Showtime specials, the much-coveted HBO Comedy Hour (Jeni’s take, Platypus Man, won a 1993 Cable ACE award), the TV commercials, and movie appearances. After that, if you’re still standing — and…
Glad to be Gone
Shelby Lynne’s life reads like one of the country songs she grew up on: Her father shot her mother, then turned the gun on himself, leaving teenage Shelby to care for her younger sister. It’s not something she talks about today, but one senses that the demon of this horrendous act is always lurking behind…
Trouble in Mind
Make no mistake: The Cell is, easily, the most unforgettable film of a pedestrian, forgettable summer. You walk out of the theater grateful for the light and the heat; it is, in places, a rather chilling and claustrophobic film. In places, The Cell is also a rather dazzling film: There are things here you haven’t…
Rob Wasserman
In 1983, bassist Rob Wasserman released his debut album Solos and followed it with Duets and Trios. On his fourth release, Wasserman focuses on producing a variety of different rhythms. With a title such as Space Island, you’d expect loads of ambience and New Age musical backdrops. Far removed from that type of self-involvement, Space…
Comedy Central
As any Klump family member can tell you, this has been a hot summer for black comedians. New movies starring Martin Lawrence, the Wayans brothers, and Eddie Murphy have already pulled down more than $300 million at the box office, and by the time Chris Rock’s remake of Heaven Can Wait hits screens in December,…
Graham Coxon
Blur guitarist Graham Coxon’s debut solo release, 1998’s The Sky Is Too High, was the musical equivalent of a collection of journal entries that featured melancholy, off-key guitar work and country crooning. Like The Sky, its follow-up, The Golden D, reveals Coxon’s appreciation for American indie rock. But while Coxon’s first solo effort was lo-fi…
Tears of a Clown
In a perfect world, any documentary about televangelists narrated by RuPaul and a couple of sock puppets would be hailed as the unquestionable conceptual masterpiece of the year. Alas, those stodgy Academy voters just don’t understand cross-dressers, religious broadcasting, or foot-warmers made to look like dogs. And so the best that The Eyes of Tammy…
Nucleon
Like Man . . . Or Astroman, Nucleon has created a myth of interrupted time travel. According to press materials that accompanied its debut, Hyper Emitter, band members were “scraped out of a bong the size of an industrial shop-vac, animated like golems, and given music instruments by an evil, interstellar mad scientist who abandoned…
Reefer Madness
Irish charm and British eccentricity are hot properties to U.S. moviegoers. Witness the phenomenal success here of The Secret of Roan Inish, in which a 10-year-old Irish girl finds her lost brother living among seals off her country’s rugged western coast, or of The Full Monty, wherein working-class Englishmen tackle unemployment through striptease. The year’s…
Korn
Odds are, when Korn lead singer Jonathan Davis takes the CSU Convocation Center stage on Saturday with his California-based band, he’ll be sporting a kilt, and maybe he’ll even play the bagpipes for effect. For Korn, it’s a gesture that’s not made in jest, but is meant as a tribute to Davis’s Scottish ancestry. While…
Feel Sorry For Men
It was just another ordinary day for the vice president of a medium-sized manufacturing company. Meetings, lunch, more meetings, then a short, 15-minute break to entertain wild yet persistent thoughts of leaving it all behind. Hop in the sports car, crank up the tuneage, do 95 on the highway all the way to the Florida…
D’Angelo
Michael D’Angelo Archer is one savvy singer. Not only does Voodoo, his sophomore album, powerfully twine ’70s funk and ’90s hip-hop, it evokes a time when soul music embodied the promise of racial crossover. These days, as the charts alternate thug rap and bimbo pop, that promise — and such sophisticated sexiness — is hard…
No Free Ride
After years of discussion and debate, the Euclid Corridor Transportation Project first entered the realm of fiscal reality for the city on June 19th. On that last day before Cleveland City Council recessed for the summer, Mayor Michael White submitted an emergency ordinance asking the council to release $17 million for the project. Unless council…
Christina Aguilera
In the battle between Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears — and we’re not at all implying that there’s any sort of rift between the two pop princesses — we go for Aguilera, simply because she has a better voice (Britney’s is all studio tricks). “Genie in a Bottle” has a slight edge over “. .…
Misconduct and Intimidation
The case of former probation officer Jeffrey Kellon continues to intrigue. The latest turn came on August 4, when Common Pleas Judge Burt W. Griffin ruled that the Cuyahoga County Prosecutors Office had “engaged in a pattern of misconduct which, intentionally or not, resulted in the intimidation of a defense witness.” The witness in question…
Reynols
On its first tour of the U.S., the Argentine group Reynols comes out of the John Cage-inspired school of composition; everything from silence to random noises can be considered music in the hands of innovative composers. How else to explain the band’s tendency to put on concerts for plants and play music with toothbrushes? Its…
Hot Wheels
I have never read The Odyssey, A Tale of Two Cities, Pride and Prejudice, or, for that matter, the Bible. But I have read, from cover to cover, Occupation: Skateboarder, the just-published autobiography from Tony Hawk. I have never seen most of the films of Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, or Carl-Theodor Dreyer, but I have…
Tattoo Ban Draws Ire
Citizens should have the right to get inked: The law in Cleveland against tattoo shops is, without a doubt, one of the most ridiculous I have ever heard of [“Tattooing the City,” August 3]. It is EIGHTY years old, [and was passed] when there was the Great Flu Epidemic in Cleveland, and everyone was hysterical…
