The Mild Bunch
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” Kris Kristofferson sings in his most beguiling song, “Me and Bobby McGee.” Stephen Frears’s The Hi-Lo Country tries in vain to be just as lyrical about love and liberty. In this twentieth-century western, a cattle rancher named Pete (Billy Crudup) narrates the short, unhappy life of…
Forever Young
So I mentioned to a friend the other day that I was going to interview the Violent Femmes. Her lip curled up like distressed elastic on a pair of jockey shorts. “They remind me of high school,” she said, and then she proceeded to tell me all about a friend she had at the time:…
Virtual Content and Its Discontents
Just as David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) came off as an organic reaction to a terrible new wasting disease, his new movie crystalizes the confusions of an epoch that can’t decide whether it’s the Entertainment Era, the Information Age, or the Digital Millennium. Named for a fictional “game system” also called eXistenZ, eXistenZ takes place…
Guy Gets Girl,Unfortunately
Comedian David Spade’s chosen shtick–every line a zinger, every crack calculated to draw blood–works well in the short bursts characteristic of stand-up, sketches, and TV sitcom. But the man can wear you out over the course of a two-hour movie. Like the too clever motormouth at a cocktail party, he doesn’t seem to know when…
The Revolutionary Next Door
The bar in the basement of the East Side Irish American Club in Euclid has all the trappings of a good Irish pub–it’s small and cozy, with dim lighting and a boisterous crowd. It’s as much a community gathering place as it is a watering hole, a mix of cultural and social expression. The pub…
Monumental Makeover
The five-acre south lawn of the Cleveland Museum of Art, with its flowering trees and shrubs, shimmering lagoon, and flowing terraces, immediately grabs the attention of passersby. It’s a good thing too, because the dozen or so statues that dot the grounds look like hell. Take, for instance, Fidardo Landi’s “Mermaids”–a marble sculpture anchored on…
The Edge
The Best Story You’ll Never Read If there’s anyone in town who can make things happen with a single phone call, it’s political godfather Sam Miller. But apparently Miller didn’t need to kill a Cleveland Magazine story on the Medical Mutual fiasco. Publisher Lute Harmon seems to have fumbled it nicely on his own. Miller’s…
Letters
Too Smart to Be That Stupid Being part of Jacqueline Marino’s story about Ben Lackey [“God and Man in Medina,” April 15], I couldn’t help but remain amazed at how absurd and malicious the article turned out to be. I was amazed at the misrepresentation of the reporting. First, the comments about the “totalitarian island,”…
End Games
To allow cockroaches to crawl over your naked body, you either must have no gag reflex at all or you must be a performance artist. Miya Masaoka is a performance artist. Fittingly, her Ritual–With Giant Hissing Madagascar Cockroaches was the opening act in the twelfth and final Cleveland Performance Art Festival, which started April 16…
Gone With the Girdle
For those who collect archaic terms, an “old settler” is a woman nearing forty, rushing headlong into spinsterhood. For those who collect archaic plays, The Old Settler is a play where, for the first time since the hula hoop was declared passe, an enraged virtuous woman tells a painted, man-stealing trollop to “get your hussy…
Haunted Hearts
To see a production as finely etched as Neil Thackaberry’s rendering of Arthur Miller’s The Price, one must make sacrifices. Astute theater lovers must, like missionaries, seek out a mysterious land to satiate their passion. Thackaberry, the Brigham Young of Northeast Ohio theater, has loaded his wagon train with the area’s most stalwart thespians. With…
Motor City Medium
The irony of it all is that Derrick May, one of techno’s pioneers, is a black American who set out, in the early/mid-1980s, to make music for his people. It was essentially electro-funk then, an extension of the robotic R&B of George Clinton (via Kraftwerk), a plugged-in eulogy for disco’s demise. But May couldn’t get…
Miracle on Madison
It could be argued that no cuisine has suffered more in its translation to the American table than China’s. Those ubiquitous plastic bowls filled with greasy fried noodles . . . the bland melanges of unidentifiable meats and vegetables in thick, starchy sauces . . . the huge portions of salt-and fat-laden foods in wire-handled…
Soundbites
The name is synonymous with low-budget cheese, but Tommy Wiggins didn’t mind. K-Tel Records said it was serious about starting a frontline jazz label, Nouveau, when it signed him. “They have the rap of the Veg-o-Matic and car crash videos,” Wiggins today laughs. As someone who’s worked in the business for more years than he…
Night & Day
Thursday April 22 Writer Jesse Lee Kercheval grew up near Cape Kennedy, Florida, in the early ’60s, during the height of the space program, in a suburban neighborhood more barren than the surface of the moon. But just as the moon–that blue dot on the television screen–was made magical by Neil Armstrong’s silver suit, so…
Playback
Penelope Houston Tongue (Reprise) Penelope Houston has such good intentions that it’s difficult to fault her for the overall blandness that surrounds her second major-label outing, Tongue. As leader of San Francisco’s the Avengers, a punk band that explored the sound when the music and hardcore scene really mattered, Houston flipped the culture’s predominantly male…
Touched by an Angley
Typically, executing a wild right-handed ear yank followed by a lightning-fast head slap on somebody would land you a nice little felony assault charge. Fortunately, the faithful at televangelist Reverend Ernest Angley’s Miracle Services in Cuyahoga Falls are eager recipients of his 1-2 combinations. It’s “freedom night” at the Grace Cathedral, and Angley is busy…
Livewire
Brownie Mary Jason Falkner Grog Shop April 15 Playing the Grog Shop is sort of like taking the SAT: You’re going somewhere all right; it’s just a matter of where. Thursday night, Jason Falkner’s rising star intersected with the once full-of-promise Brownie Mary. Falkner, who has gained critical praise and a small following from his…
Wry on Rye
A break in the workday–time to relax, grab some coffee, maybe create a literary masterpiece. Frank O’Hara, American poet, hunted and pecked poems on store display typewriters during his lunch breaks as curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. A New Yorker to the core, he wrote about skyscrapers, Ginger Rogers, and dogs wearing…
Newfolkland
Preparing for an interview with Great Big Sea can bring back a lot of memories of grade school. Not fond recollections, mind you, but ones of doing those reports on a faraway place about which you care little and whose name you can’t even spell. “I’m so glad to hear you have a map in…
