No Place Like Home
Our esteemed suburb is being thrust into the national spotlight with The Battle of Shaker Heights, a script written by Los Angeles native Erica Beeney that was tapped by HBO’s Project Greenlight contest. Greenlight documents the making of an independent movie — from script selection to production to its theatrical run. Its first season chronicled…
True Believer
Cody Chesnutt couldn’t be more sincere. It’s a typically hot July night in Hollywood, and he’s onstage at the Knitting Factory, halfway through “Up in the Treehouse,” a honey-sweet love song from his massive double-album debut, The Headphone Masterpiece. “Dream dream, that’s all I dooo,” goes the lyric. “Dream dream about me and yooou .…
Letters to the Editor
Where politics is all wet: Cuyahoga Falls won the 2002 Art Modell Award for City of the Year [December 25] for the shamelessness and depravity of its racial politics. Yee-haw! Pete Kotz has moved to the head of the class, hilariously shining the spotlight on this racist burg (“a little slice of Mississippi right here…
Bringing Up Baby
There was a time when a major record label run by a man with no previous experience in the music business would have seemed ludicrous. But with the chairman of Sony Music, Tommy Mottola, resigning a few weeks back to be replaced by Andrew Lack, the former head of NBC, those days have faded like…
First-Class Male
When a guy can make his living exploiting the ignorance of men, you know he’s got the world figured out. Robert Dubac, the man behind The Male Intellect: An Oxymoron?, has seen his one-man show’s popularity soar in its first four years, inspiring him to take the next big step: franchising. The actor-playwright has groomed…
The Reputation
Sarge didn’t have a radio single, a groundbreaking style, or a fashion-forward way of appropriating an established sound. It was a female-fronted trio, but singer and guitarist Elizabeth Elmore and bassist Rachel Switzky weren’t riot girlies, Lilith fare, or scantily clad pop princesses, which would seem to exclude them from coverage in the mainstream media.…
Pro Bono
With the February 9 opening of In the Name of Love: Two Decades of U2 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, the Irish quartet is finally getting a corner to claim as its very own within the coveted corridors. Not that Bono and the boys really need the Rock Hall –…
Charlie Haden/ Gonzalo Rubalcaba
At a time when contemporary music often chooses brashness and attention-getting hijinks as a means of self-expression, the meditative calm that Charlie Haden has dabbled in over the past few years seems as different from modern trends as it is from the bassist’s own early years, when he ran with the jazz avant-garde. Now, instead…
Anarchy in the U.K.
If nothing else –there’s nothing else to this movie — Shanghai Knights allows Jackie Chan, he of halting dialogue and poetic movement, to pay direct homage to his idols. He hangs from the arms of Big Ben, dangling off the stories-tall clock like Harold Lloyd in 1923’s Safety First; he tangles with a little tramp,…
The Pretenders
Even at their most accessible, the Pretenders have never been easy. Akron native Chrissie Hynde’s lyrics can be cutting, even bitchy, and the range of styles the band has sampled in its 25-year career can be diffuse. There’s been pop, hard rock, reggae, even techno — a versatility that doesn’t always add up to cohesiveness.…
Hudson Hawked
Astaire and Rogers. Hepburn and Tracy. Heck, Ball and Arnaz, Houston and Washington, or Vardalos and Corbett. Over the decades, Hollywood has proved that its romantic comedies needn’t suck. But alas, they often do — as is the case with How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Clearly, bigwig co-producers Robert Evans (the remake…
Stacie Collins
We refuse. We won’t fall into the trap into which so many other local journalists happily leap by referring to Stacie Collins as “Cleveland’s own” — even if she does have a better claim on the prefix than Trent Reznor or that Middle East hostage fellow Terry Anderson, who moved from Lorain as an infant.…
Quiet Strength
While virtually no one in this country foresaw the American disaster in Vietnam, the late British writer Graham Greene glimpsed it with astonishing clarity, a decade before the first U.S. “advisor” set foot on Vietnamese soil. Now Greene’s 1955 novel has been made into a disturbing and provocative film, The Quiet American, by Australian director…
Dead Prez
Like Henry David Thoreau with two turntables and a microphone, Dead Prez preaches civil disobedience over beats that resonate like a shotgun blast. “Who shot Biggie Smalls?/If we don’t get them they gonna get us all/I’m down for running up on them crackers in they city hall,” MC Sticman barks on “Hip-Hop,” a cut as…
See No Eva
Director Gary Hardwick’s first film, The Brothers, was a refreshing take on the single-black-man romantic comedy, offering a surprisingly mature perspective full of depth and well-rounded characters, without resorting to the time-honored stereotypes of black man as player and black woman as ball-busting bitch. Hardwick wrote the script himself, and it rang so true that…
Metal Mix-up
Looks like Akron’s Tim “Ripper” Owens may not be out of Judas Priest just yet. After Priest drummer Scott Travis recently told a writer from Brave Words and Bloody Knuckles magazine that Owens’s tenure in the band was all but over, Judas Priest’s management has scrambled to refute Travis’s statements. Says management coordinator Jayne Andrews…
Sorrow’s Child
Being of the minority who did not worship Schindler’s List (vital message, tedious movie), it’s easy to feel skeptical of the preachy delivery of Ararat, which concerns not the Jewish holocaust but the Armenian one, its genocidal forebear of 1915-1918. Armenian-Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan has — like Spielberg with Schindler — crafted an important and…
Massive Attack
100th Window is only Massive Attack’s fourth album in 12 years, but each one has maintained a level of quality control that this group’s contemporaries would do well to emulate. Though classified as pioneers of Bristol, England’s trip-hop movement, Massive Attack progressed way beyond such narrow strictures on 1998’s dark, electronic-rock masterpiece Mezzanine. On the…
A Fine Farce
The Actors’ Summit shares its digs in tony downtown Hudson with an antiques gallery, a shrine to old-time charm crammed with floral-print postcards and milk-glass candy dishes. Currently on view in the theater across the hall is an antique every bit as quaint, yet somehow still fresh: Charley’s Aunt. Relying on the timeless comic device…
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Around, oh, the 11th or 12th repetition of the bludgeoning chorus “Babe I’m on fire” on the track of the same name, it hits you: Nick Cave has jumped the shark. For a Cave devotee, this is a sorry and painful thing to report, but true nevertheless. Oh, Nocturama has its moments, mostly brought about…
Racial Divides
In a city as neatly and profoundly segregated as Cleveland, where African American families residing in western suburbs must often deal with hostility (unless the man’s name is emblazoned on the jersey of a local pro team), there is a need to continually probe the dynamics of race relations. Two short plays in production through…
Zwan
Billy Corgan sounds like he’s having fun again. On Mary Star of the Sea, the debut album from Corgan’s new band Zwan, the former Smashing Pumpkins frontman pushes aside all the baggage that made the last couple of Pumpkins albums so miserable and proceeds without an agenda. And it’s a significant move: Sans a gloomy…
The Pain Train
Rawson Thurber has been so busy the past few days that by the time he finally returns a reporter’s phone call, he does so at 1:30 in the morning–and he doesn’t even realize the late, or early, hour till he hears the groggy croak on the other end. He’s sorry as hell–“Aw, dude, you were…
Matthew Shipp
One of Matthew Shipp’s more accessible albums, Equilibrium is the first of three recordings this New York pianist plans to release this year. The man is inherently collaborative; this disc features his interplay with longtime associates William Parker on bass, Gerald Cleaver on drums, and Chris Flam on synths and programs. The new element is…
Grape Expectorations
Drivers might be skittering across Northeast Ohio’s icy roads these days, but serious wine lovers are making a beeline to Lockkeepers (8001 Rockside Road, Valley View; 216-524-9404) to take part in the region’s only wine school. While the ambitious new program of classes, seminars, and tutored tastings was jolted just after New Year’s by the…
Rainer Maria
Too much has been written about Rainer Maria’s “articulate” rock by critics who are too easily impressed with the band’s vocabulary. If it’s vocabulary that strikes us and not the music, then maybe both sides — the media and Rainer Maria — need to reevaluate the game. Maria’s latest, Long Drawn Knives, is plenty verbose,…
The Case for Debauchery
Before the lawsuits and the drownings, before the police raids and the bad press, there were street festivals and concerts. There were traffic jams and boat races. There were piano bars and dance joints, dive bars and music clubs. There were seven million visitors a year, soaked in booze, crowned with big hair, loaded with…
Acquiring a Taste
“Like eating custard in a sewer,” is how one wise-guy connoisseur describes the sensation of tucking into a durian. But whirled in a blender with a little condensed milk and sugar, poured into a tall glass, and crowned with whipped cream and a cherry, this exotic Southeast-Asian fruit looks as guileless as a milk shake.…
Blak Stallion / Mr. Who?
“These are the kind of tales told at midnight,” goes the intro to The Hoe Tales, a collection of rhymes as filthy as Redman’s apartment. With enough heavy breathing and hot talk to rival the entire Vivid Video catalog, this disc packs the raunch of a Porky’s marathon. Smoother than the Smut Peddlers, rawer than…
The Unknown Soldier
Subtlety doesn’t work at the Medina Gun Show. So Mickey Downie mounted an M-60 machine gun high above his booth, knowing that it could be seen from anywhere on the floor, beckoning gun lovers the way a church steeple summons the God-fearing of a small town. If that wasn’t incentive enough, he hired two beauties…
Hollowed Ground
It’s been a little more than five months since the shit hit the fan, and as far as Steve Earle is concerned, the initial outcry over the rabble-rousing country singer-songwriter’s most recent release, Jerusalem, hasn’t had much lasting effect. “Most of the press on this record has been really good,” Earle notes, slightly bemused. “The…
Fatherly Advice for LeBron
Dear LeBron: I know what it’s like to grow up without a father. Okay, not literally, but I watch a lot of Lifetime movies. And it’s come to my attention that you’re currently without a father figure, seeing as how the last one is enjoying the hospitality of the Ohio Department of Corrections. Which is…
Terminal Velocity
At first it was a low rumble from the underground, news from the front line that an era had ended. And then, once it was official — once the statements were there in black and white, acknowledging the dissolution of the Elephant 6 collective — the indie-rock world responded loudly and with one voice: Huh?…
