Ryan’s Hope
Remember that silly little-girl version of Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, snuffling “I’m difficult!” through a charming tantrum? Well, make it a point to greet Ryan’s new incarnation in the psychosexual thriller In the Cut. Post-Crystal, post-Hanks, and even post-husband Dennis Quaid (toward whom this performance almost plays like revenge), she’s an actress…
John B
John B has traveled the electronic landscape with some of the genre’s top stars: He laid down a track on Grooverider’s now-legendary album Prototype Years and showed his salsa side on DJ SS’s acclaimed Countries LP. John found his greatest success with his hardcore-influenced track “Up All Night,” which appeared on Goldie’s Metalheadz label. The…
The Verdict Is In
One relishes her reputation as a black-robed Terminator. Another comes off as a camera-loving blowhard. A third is the judicial equivalent of the Homecoming Queen. We wanted the inside dirt on Cuyahoga County’s Court of Common Pleas judges, so we went to the people who deal with them every day: lawyers. We mailed questionnaires to…
Give Thanks
Pieces of April, made by playwright-turned-novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-director Peter Hedges, could be confused for a compendium reel of someone’s home movies. Shot on digital video using existing light, it looks like something assembled by a film student for a final project and lost soon after, left behind for a stranger to find and watch and decipher. It…
Nobody
Contrary to his nom de musique, Nobody (Los Angeles producer Elvin Estela) is far from a nonentity; his two extraordinary albums have thrust him into a rarefied niche within hip-hop’s dichotomous universe (have the underground and mainstream ever seemed farther apart?). Within this stratified context, no other hip-hop artist is so in tune with his…
Professor Eden Speaks
Originality is not among David Eden’s blessings. The Free Times’ editor has a habit of taking cheap shots at people in power, often bestowing a bad nickname in the process — like a discount Chris Berman. County Prosecutor Bill Mason? He’s the “Parma political hack.” Mayor Campbell is “Queen Jane.” Eden’s distaste for Alex Machaskee…
Grin and Bear It
Perhaps feeling the need to atone for his portrayal of a rabidly carnivorous military man in Buffalo Soldiers, PETA spokesman Joaquin Phoenix can now be experienced onscreen in Brother Bear as an animated Inuit hunter transformed into a bear, who comes to the realization that hunting animals makes them sad. The setting is prehistoric Alaska,…
The Constantines
Try to hear this unlikely musical encounter in your head: Shane MacGowan, possessed by the ghost of Joe Strummer and 20 pints of Guinness, staggers into his rehearsal space, only it’s not the Pogues staring at his disheveled ass — it’s Ian MacKaye and the rest of Fugazi. Instead of stumbling out to find the…
Booty Queens
The words on the Best Hotel’s marquee, “Black Tail HERE TONIGHT,” should be stopping traffic. But at 8 p.m., the older woman at the ticket table is drowsing over a paperback Grisham. The 100-plus seats in the ballroom are empty. A few young men mark time on cell phones in the lobby, leering salaciously at…
Our Town
It’s always been a curiosity that Cleveland, a city with a history of so many Byzantine civic convulsions (virtual bankruptcy, the Kucinich years) and such milestone events as the election of the nation’s first African-American big-city mayor, has not been the subject of more journalistic and artistic activity. Indeed, why The Plain Dealer doesn’t have…
Ween
During its longest period between albums, Ween has taken one hit after another: Touring drummer Claude Coleman survived a near-fatal car accident; the band got more attention for a commissioned-but-never-aired Pizza Hut jingle called “Where’d the Cheese Go?” than for releasing any of its backlogged collectibles; and the group split from Elektra. Amputation has never…
Bound & Gagged
The e-mail was like most letters that come from attorneys — wordy, officious, subtly threatening in that dainty lawyer sort of way. Ohio State Bar Association President Keith Ashmus was sending his membership a warning: Respond to this survey, and someone may come after you. Ashmus had discovered that Kevin Hoffman, Scene writer and merry…
Pious Hilarity
With all the vein-popping arguments about whether a southern judge should plop a two-ton boulder bearing the inscription of the Ten Commandments at his courthouse and whether kids should dutifully recite “One nation under God” in their morning pledge of allegiance, it’s good to remember that religion and hypocrisy often are inextricably entwined. Can anyone…
Dead Prez
Love or loathe the politics of the radical fringe, it’s hard to deny the left’s musical potency. Gang of Four, Public Enemy, Rage Against the Machine — you never had to work out their multiple contradictions to appreciate the most important byproduct of their fury. Florida’s Dead Prez doesn’t bring quite the noise of these…
Wal-Mart’s All Heart
Wal-Mart’s All Heart Time to call the ACLU: Regarding “Nigger Dave,” [October 15]: Thank you for giving me another reason not to shop at Wal-Mart –not that I needed one. At Weather Chemical Corp., where I work, these people would have been fired by their crew supervisors. Heads would be rolling fast. How about it,…
Flipped Out
Maybe you love it, maybe you hate it, but few diners are neutral on the notion of sitting around the hibachi table at a Japanese steakhouse. Those who scorn this exercise in communal dining and entertainment complain that it’s akin to a forced encounter-group session. Plus, they sigh, just how many times can one feign…
Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man
British chanteuse Beth Gibbons once provided the emotional anchor for Portishead’s haunting trip-hop. Ditching turntable scratches, swooping theremin, and programmed beats for decidedly organic accompaniment, Gibbons and collaborator “Rustin Man” (a.k.a. Paul Webb, bassist for defunct new-wavers-turned-experimentalists Talk Talk) mix jazz, folk, and R&B influences on Out of Season while still leaning toward the torch…
The King James Bible
LeBron James plays in his first pro basketball game this week, but already there are multiple books about him. The latest, LeBron James: The Rise of a Star, purports to be the most comprehensive and accurate of them — mainly because its author, David Lee Morgan Jr., has had access to the roundballer, his family,…
Shell Game
The savvy staffers at Sans Souci, one of downtown’s most enduringly popular Mediterranean dining rooms, have long known that weathering hard times means cooking up incentives to draw diners through the door. So several times each year, chef du cuisine Ben Fambrough and his staff come up with special culinary creations to do just that.…
Joe Ely
By any objective standard, Joe Ely’s latest album is a solid, intelligent piece of work, brimming with Texas wisdom and guilt-free twang. “Fightin’ for My Life” sports striking couplets such as “I used to read the Bible and Paradise Lost/Now it looks like everybody’s been gettin’ double-crossed,” and Ely sings them with the steely authenticity…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, October 30 The Cleveland Play House’s Next Stage Festival of New Plays is back up and running for a full month again, after being cut in half last year. The program — a celebration of playwrights as much as plays — is designed to gauge audience reaction to new works, which are read onstage…
Numbers Game
At a little before midnight outside the Parma Exchange, the line starts at the door, snakes around a few right-angle turns, then stretches down the next block. The crowd began gathering outside the record store four hours earlier, awaiting an appearance by Mushroomhead, the modern-metal octet celebrating the release of its first album for a…
Killing Joke
Every few years, Killing Joke emerges to remind rock young’uns that what they consider revolutionary is as reactionary as a Barbra Streisand album. The uncompromising Killing Joke features the original lineup of vocalist Jaz Coleman, bassist Youth, and guitarist Geordie, as well as later-period bassist Paul Raven and Foo Fightin’ Dave Grohl on drums. Killing…
Twisting Fate
On his 2001 album The Houston Kid, Rodney Crowell reminisced about a half-century of life as a child, a musician, and a father. It was a personal look back for Crowell, whose new album, Fate’s Right Hand, looks within. “The next one’s gonna be looking around,” he jokes. Fate’s Right Hand explores the emotional attachment…
Rapt Too Tight
Mattie Safer, bassist for the Rapture, isn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. He’s glad that people like his band. The photo shoots, the magazine profiles, the panegyrics extolling the Rapture’s music as an ass-shaking hybrid of techno, funk, punk, and garage rock — it’s all gratifying, really. And it’s great that…
Kid Koala
Montreal-based Kid Koala is a world-class DJ, a member of the jazz-jam-fusion band Bullfrog, and the author of a darkly cryptic graphic novel, Nufonia Must Fall, a story of the illicit love between a woman and a robot that includes a downtempo soundtrack for piano and turntables. Some of My Best Friends Are DJs continues…
Getup and Ghosts
FRI 10/31 Halloween’s a real drag for Tom Joseph. At Friday’s Helloween costume contest at the gay club Grid/Orbit, he’ll compete as Sister Discipline, a tough-talking, chain-smoking nun. “Handcuffs hang from my belt, for those students who get out of hand,” Joseph says, “because I’m not messin’ around.” He’s not kidding. Strutting in five-inch pumps,…
No Thanks for the Memories
Sometimes, the version of history that never happened is as interesting as the one that did. No Thanks!, the new four-CD punk-rock retrospective from Rhino, was originally called the wide-open-to-interpretation Ever Get the Feeling You’ve Been Cheated? Was it a reference to the fact that the almighty Sex Pistols, whose frontman spat those words at…
Mary Martin
Recent times have been good for jazzy women, and Mary Martin’s new album is among the region’s best. A staple of the North Coast scene in the late ’70s, the talented singer-guitarist has also kicked around Chicago and D.C. This ear-grabbing work might very well take her elsewhere. On the self-produced Myths and Antidotes, Martin…
Lita Floored
MON 11/3 Lita wants to dismiss all the gossip about her future with WWE Raw. “It was never a matter of if I would return,” she says. “It was a matter of when.” It didn’t seem that way in April 2002, when a stunt man on the set of Dark Angel accidentally dropped the 28-year-old…
Misery’s Lost Company
There’s a scene in Wes Anderson’s off-center family portrait, The Royal Tenenbaums, in which shell-shocked former tennis star Richie Tenenbaum (played by Luke Wilson) attempts suicide to an Elliott Smith tune. As Smith’s spare, stinging “Needle in the Hay” plays in the background, Richie slices at his Brillo beard, his hair, and then his wrists.…
Gerald Levert
Gerald Levert’s breathy R&B is the sound of overworked bedsprings and clothes hitting the floor. On the Cleveland crooner’s seventh LP, the oversexed soul has become a lot like lovemaking itself: For all the repetition, it never really gets old. Stroke of Genius fits comfortably into Levert’s come-hither canon, throbbing as it does with understated…
Howl Prowl
SAT 11/1 Every November, Summit County Metro Parks naturalist Pat Rydquist leads tours into the woods to hear the coyotes that live in nearby hollowed-out logs. Armed with an audiocassette of howls, she’ll try to coax the animals into responding at Saturday’s Coyote Calling. “We want to be inconspicuous,” she says. “Their senses are so…
Erase the Band
After a brief major-label roll in the hay, local hard rockers Erase the Grey have announced their breakup. “I started this band with the hopes of writing great music, getting signed, and getting out there to see the world,” frontman Jon Sayre said, in a posting on the band’s website. “We accomplished a great deal…
Fun With Needles
10/31-11/1 David Vidra is the ringmaster of Induction, a 40-member circus of pleasure and pain that’s hosting a Kinky Halloween this weekend at Metropolis. On Friday, the group performs its Salem Witch Trial Suspension Exhibition — a mock 17th-century court hearing, complete with convicted witches fastened to hooks and hoisted 15 feet into the air…
Magic Slim & The Teardrops
The road from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago has been traversed by many blues artists. Since after World War II, movers and shakers such as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf brought the down-home sound north, electrified it, and gave it a new home in many a Windy City bar. The remaining artists who can boast…
South Survivors
WED 11/5 The Drive-By Truckers are making a nice career out of overcoming the impossible. In 2001, they released Southern Rock Opera, a two-disc concept album that linked redneck rockers Lynyrd Skynyrd, Dixie-baiting Canadian Neil Young, and onetime Alabama governor (and full-time racist) George Wallace. And it didn’t suck. On their new album, Decoration Day,…
Decoded Feedback
When done right, industrial rock can be a strange, disparate combination of forces. It can simultaneously repulse listeners with harsh blasts of anti-music and still keep them drawn by its primal rhythms. It’s that combination that brought acts such as Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly to prominence within the black-clad community and is also…
The Big Bug Be Back
Some movies approach perfection. Alien: The Director’s Cut basically enhances a 99.9% perfect movie from 1979 with some digital polishing, small additions (including the revelatory “nest” scene), and minor nips and tucks. If, for some weird reason, you haven’t seen this brilliant creature-feature, boycott the typically tell-all new trailer and go see it now. It…
King Diamond
Is it possible to hate the Darkness with every fiber of one’s being and still dig King Diamond? Sure it is. All falsettos are not created equal, and the King’s proto-black-metal, lawsuit-inspiring face paint (not to mention his fantastic cross-of-bones mic stand) make him a metal god, no question about it. He’s got a new…
Love and Death
Sometimes something so wonderful appears on the big screen that I want to leap up like a shameless nonprofessional and hug it. Such is the case early on in Sylvia, a superb drama based on the brief life of writer Sylvia Plath. While boating in Cambridge, England, with her beau, Edward “Ted” Hughes (Daniel Craig),…
Atmosphere
The proliferation of talented underground collectives can be overwhelming, even for the hip-hop cognoscenti, who devote their time to manning the radar stations. In the last few years, a staggering number of artists have dropped albums with depth, texture, and clarity that mainstream acts couldn’t begin to match. And while the progenitors of the movement…
