The Edge
City Picks Up Tab for Browns Noser When you’re dealing with a $283 million-plus construction project, what’s a loose hundred grand either way? Evidently it’s no small matter to the Browns, who sweet-talked the White administration into absorbing the $110,000 salary of Dave Hamill, the team’s watchdog on the new stadium. Hamill has been at…
Wahoo Chic
The sun was shining, the sky was blue, and the bars around Jacobs Field were packed Monday for the Indians’ home opener. By 10 a.m., the deck at Pete & Dewey’s was standing-room-only. Slackers who had taken the day off basked in the sun, munching Italian sausage sandwiches and downing 16-ounce cans of Miller Lite.…
Take a Letter — Please
The Mandel Jewish Community Center’s decision to put an art exhibit in the atrium of its athletic facility is a risky enough proposition. Most joggers at the conclusion of a workout don’t want to struggle with complicated linguistic concepts; they’d rather just have a cold Snapple. But apart from the question of whether Beyond and…
Letters
Thugs-N-Harmony I just read the article “This Is the Way the Mob Ends” [Scene, April 8] and enjoyed it very much. I lived in New York City most of my life and moved here to Youngstown in 1996. I don’t know which is worse–1,000 mafiosi controlling more than a few things (NYC) or a couple…
Quite the Mischievous Boy
Those who still have nightmares of fussy literature professors drilling the metaphysics of the Melancholy Dane into their Yorick-like skulls can at last discard their defenses and old Cliff’s Notes. At the Brick Alley Theatre is a no-nonsense Hamlet for cerebral but down-to-earth Joes who don’t know their bodkin from a bodice. David Hansen–Cleveland’s champion…
A Spam Souffl
A favorite parlor game at plush gatherings is for old geezers, with brandy snifters in hand, to torture the under-forty guests with reminiscences of theatrical legends they encountered in their theatergoing youth. The youngsters can only hang their heads in shame as they hear tales of faded glory, reaching from the Lunts to Katharine Cornell.…
Home Cooking, Indian-Style
From an alcove just inside Cafe Tandoor’s front door, an image of the elephant-headed god Ganesh keeps watch. Followers of the Hindu religion invoke this joyful deity before any major undertaking, like building a new house or launching a business. First son of Shiva and Parvati, Ganesh dispenses both wisdom and wealth, removes obstacles, and…
Playback
Blur 13 (Virgin) By now Blur has got the Britpop thing down solid. After spending much of the decade constructing clunky and chunky albums detailing such spacious Brit-themes as the Happy Manchester scene and Kinks-style high-class snobbery wars, the art-schooled quartet finally found the key to its Britishness two years ago–in the form of blatant…
Look, Ma, No Hands!
Hamiet Bluiett, baritone saxophone and contra-alto clarinet player for the World Saxophone Quartet, has never been entirely comfortable with tribute albums. They smack of arrested creativity, of retread. If the gruff, outspoken Bluiett’s already heard it, chances are, he doesn’t want to hear somebody else try to do it again, and he’ll tell you that…
Night & Day
Thursday April 15 Writers who cop other people’s work star in the Postmodern Piracy Reading, where regurgitating someone else’s material is high art (similar to a punk band covering “Singing in the Rain”). Borrowing from Shakespeare, medical textbooks, and all points between, tonight’s samplers include language poet Charles Bernstein, from the boring “let’s make a…
The Road to Melville
Techno titan Moby really doesn’t think it’s all that odd that, after creating one of the milestones of the genre, 1995’s Everything Is Wrong, he went and made Animal Rights, a disappointing excursion into punk rock. It was, he says, just a natural exploration and exhibition of his interests. “I’ve been playing music for 25…
Pump Up the Jam
The believers fling themselves on the bare wooden stage like tossed sticks. They giggle and rearrange themselves, then settle on their backs to look up at the “trees”–organ pipes in a dim church. First, a moment of silence. Then the floorboards start to rumble with the third movement of Naji Hakim’s “Homage à Igor Stravinsky.”…
Here, There, and Everywhere
Working with Bob Dylan is nothing new for Al Kooper. In 1965, at age 21, Kooper provided the unforgettable organ part on Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” But when the editors of Encyclopedia Britannica recently asked Kooper to write Dylan’s entry, a part of him felt he had finally merited a gold star. “Of course,…
Fuse Boy
The biblical Tower of Babel was made of stone and mortar, built so a rich man could reach heaven without getting stuck with the grunt work. The Tower of Jim is made of broken clock radios and dented boom boxes, so a dude might blow some fuses, big time. Babel crumbled, a monument to man’s…
Livewire
David Allan Coe Vibrasonics Peabody’s DownUnder April 7 To call the overflow crowd at David Allan Coe’s concert at Peabody’s homogenous would be like saying the NRA members are in agreement about the Second Amendment. Suffice to say the bar didn’t move a lot of Guinness, Samuel Adams, or Corona that evening. It was Budweiser…
Baby Boom
The independent production/distribution company The Shooting Gallery probably got a lot more attention when Monica Lewinsky showed up in Washington wearing a cap with its logo than it is likely to get from the release of this modest, deserving film from writer/director Nancy Savoca. Savoca has made three earlier features–True Love (1989), Dogfight (1991), and…
Soundbites
His pickup truck is waxed, his woofers ready to rumble. Drew Howard has been waiting for warm skies to crawl their way to the North Coast more anxiously than most Clevelanders. When the weather breaks, Howard plans to circle city parks like the ice-cream man. His treats are not popsicles and fudge bars, but the…
Dead Zone
Because it revealed the coke-snorting, ego-fueled corruption of Hollywood in the early 1980s with such acid wit, David Rabe’s play Hurlyburly became a huge audience hit when it burst onto Broadway in 1984. Here was the inside stuff from the Left Coast, gotten up in a frenetic new language combining movie-industry salesmanship, new-age gibberish, and…
Big House, Little Laughs
Imagine, if you will, one of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s classic road movies that never leaves the terminal, and you have pretty much described Life, the strikingly uneventful new comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. It’s their Road to Nowhere. Life, which was directed by Ted Demme from a script by Robert Ramsey…
Redemption of a Rich Kid
It was either God or money. Benjamin Lackey knew eventually there would have to be a showdown between the two. In his mind and in his life, the two converged in a firestorm of biblical proportions. After all, Lackey owes his life–which almost ended sixteen years ago, when a pickup truck backed over his tricycle…
