LeBron Inc.
Last summer, LeBron James played basketball with Michael Jordan, a man whose prime LeBron is too young to remember. Jordan was coming out of retirement, and the scrimmages he convened at a Chicago gym were his way of measuring his skills — at age 38 — against the best players on earth. LeBron — at…
Joey Ramone
This final send-off ain’t the half-realized piece o’ pap it could’ve been. In fact, it’s the album that Joey Ramone was destined to make, even if he hadn’t succumbed to cancer: a perfectly agreeable disc of bubblegum punk, not all that different from the last Donnas record or previous Ramones opuses like Brain Drain. Which…
Fun With Safety
Being a hotshot Hollywood director has its plusses, none of which include the satisfaction of knowing you’ve made the world a safer place for tractors. This is small consolation for Sheldon Gleisser, the visionary responsible for the gripping agricultural drama Sharing the Road With Farm Vehicles, the impossibly sexy Handling Hazardous Mail, and the spellbinding…
Alan Jackson
If you’ve had difficulty summing up your reaction to September 11, listen closely to Alan Jackson’s 28th No. 1 hit, “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning).” His reflective, self-penned tune is enough to capture the emotions of most any listener. In less than 24 hours following the song’s debut on national television, alanjackson.com…
Wolstein’s Boring Side
Job development, tax revenue, blah blah blah: It amazes me that David Martin chose to author a story that was so one-sided and out of touch with reality [“Menace II Suburbia,” December 6]. Of course, the other side of the story doesn’t achieve the tabloid-type headlines that your paper pursues. When I look at Bart…
DJ Tranzparent
Simultaneously breaking rules and barriers, Cleveland-area turntablist DJ Tranzparent has earned a reputation for taking his listeners on journeys through progressive house sounds that go far beyond traditional 1-2 beats. In his second compilation, Clearly House Vol. 2, Tranzparent blends classic house beats with killer transitional drum ‘n’ bass riffs that do more than just…
Shouts and Murmurs
If Jane Hammond and Eve Thomson weren’t exhibiting works in the same place, it’s unlikely anyone would associate one with the other. Hammond’s bold pieces are freewheeling extroverts, filled with vibrant color and taking up sizable chunks of wall space. Thomson’s canvases come across more like introverts; models of controlled expression, they quietly wait to…
Magnetic Madam
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is a strange, one-of-a-kind musical, as raucous as vintage Li’l Abner, yet invariably winding up as melancholy about the human condition as anything in the Chekhov canon. Its co-writer, Larry L. King, describes in his book The Whorehouse Papers how it came about. He was commissioned to write an…
Devil’s Advocate
It should be so easy to hate this man sitting on a couch in a high-priced hotel suite, this man sharing his bottle of Evian. He is, after all, a demon dressed head to toe (or tail?) in slate gray, the Satan of Cinema. Attacking him has long been regular bloodsport among journalists to whom…
Sheik’s Choice
Oh sure, Cleveland has a number of chefs whose skills have been put to a royal test. Michael Symon, for example, has fired up the Lola grill for top-rated chef Thomas Keller, of Napa Valley’s French Laundry. Marlin Kaplan, from One Walnut, just got back from creating a Wine Lover’s Christmas for discriminating palates at…
Check (List), Please
Good service can rescue a bad meal, industry insiders will tell you, but nothing makes up for bad service. That’s why the bulk of restaurant complaints boil down to poor treatment at the hands of thoughtless staff. Clevelanders, of course, aren’t the only people who struggle with indifferent, rude, or downright hostile waiters and waitresses.…
‘Bone Voyage
Norwood Fisher has all the symptoms of a man who is delighted to be alive. The bassist and founding member of the L.A. ska/funk/soul/punk collective Fishbone is audibly weary as the band continues its full-bore, coast-to-coast tour, but there is an underlying joy in his voice that can’t be denied. “It’s a rockin’-ass show,” Fisher…
The Sci-Five
Since only the most caffeine-riddled sci-fi geek will make it through all 30-plus hours of the Case Western Reserve University Film Society’s 27th Science Fiction Marathon, we offer, as support to those of you who require body-functioning things like sleep, a list of the Top 5 must-see movies on this year’s schedule. The marathon, full…
Hopping-Up the Hip-Hop
“High is high, low is low/Everybody wants to get to heaven/But nobody wants to die/ Nobody wants to die/Nobody wants to do the don’ts/Don’t the dids/Color outside the lines/Nobody wants to try.” Ignore the probability that the above paean to transcendence was written under the influence of amphetamines, hallucinogens, or some combination thereof. That’s (arguably)…
Rare Medium
Alan Bean wants to be known as an artist who once walked on the moon, not as an astronaut who knows how to paint. Since retiring from the NASA space program in 1981, he’s been on a “self-assigned mission” to create as many as six paintings a year, most of which depict scenes from his…
Important Imports
Fernanda Cunha shudders every time the door opens at Sergio’s, an upscale Brazilian restaurant in University Circle. As she sits with microphone in hand, tucked into a corner near the establishment’s entrance on a recent Monday night, it’s obvious she has little appreciation for the January cold that invades her space every time a patron…
Hell and Back
Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, based on reporter Mark Bowden’s factual account of a 1993 U.S. Army operation gone dreadfully awry in Somalia, doesn’t just kick your ass. It pummels your entire body; it leaves you trembling. Once the premise and setting are established, this brutal combat adventure doesn’t catch its breath until about an…
The Suicide Machines
Detroit’s Suicide Machines are hyper-aware of the toxic punk heritage that seeps like a plutonium leak from the Motor City’s storied musical archives. Since the early days of Iggy Pop and Fred “Sonic” Smith terrorizing the city’s streets and stages, few bands have had the chops, the volume, or the attitude to maintain the legacy…
Bad Dogs
In 1994, author Gary Paulsen published the book Winterdance, a gripping account of his participation in the Iditarod, a grueling 1,180-mile dogsled race across Alaska. It’s a compulsive page-turner filled with literal cliff-hangers, hallucinations, brutality, and an ending as tragic as it is triumphant. Thus, it ultimately caught the attention of Hollywood. Winterdance is very…
Easy Action
When Easy Action smears hate and bourbon all over Roxy Music’s “If There Is Something” on its snaggletoothed self-titled debut, it’s akin to the painting of a mustached Mona Lisa: a complete debasing of something that was once beautiful. Kind of like Fabolous and the Cure, Easy Action belies its name, as there’s nothing simple…
A Matter of Principal
There was no criminal pattern, no discernible trail of corruption that led to Assistant Principal Jeff Silversteen. His weekdays were spent with the unruliest teens in Eastlake North High School, to whom he preached discipline, obedience, and honesty. Nights meant volunteering to operate the clock at basketball and football games. Weekends were reserved for the…
Baaba Maal
Just before his cell phone cuts out, Baaba Maal says he’ll bring a five-piece band to perform here January 18. Then the connection to Senegal, where Maal is a superstar, dies. So tantalizing. So frustrating; somewhat like Missing You, Maal’s latest album. The language gap makes the CD hard to understand, but its passion is…
Dog Day Afternoons
From eToys to Enron, American industry has seen better days. The economy was plenty spooked before terrorist-commanded planes and anthrax-spiked envelopes scared the collective bejesus out of a nation. But one local enterprise showed a can-do spirit. In 2001, 106 Cuyahoga County banks were robbed, up from 88 the year before. Explaining the upsurge is…
Big Chief Bo Dollis & the Wild Magnolias
Few sights at New Orleans’s Mardi Gras celebration catch the attention better than the Mardi Gras Indians — black men decked out in elaborately beaded robes and feathered headdresses, dancing through the streets to the beat of Afro-Caribbean rhythms. Oddly, their outfits — on which they spend thousands of dollars and work for weeks preparing…
The Fix Ain’t In
Every 10 years, the Ohio Legislature gets to redraw congressional boundaries. It’s essentially a legal way to fix elections: Slice up the power bases of your enemies, concentrate your own, and — bingo! — you’ve got a rigged path to reelection. Bonus round: Since Ohio will lose a congressional seat this year, the Republican majority…
Richard Pryor
The funny thing about Richard Pryor was that he wasn’t that funny a lot of the time. Pryor could make folks laugh as surely as his Super Nigger character could outrace a bowl of chitlins, but his vulgar wit was really just a dash of sugar to make his medicine more palatable. Sure, it may…
