Road Warriors
One doesn’t watch Amores Perros (Love’s a Bitch) so much as absorb — like a body blow. “I wanted to make a movie that smelled of filth,” Alejandro González Inárritu has said about his feature directorial debut. He has succeeded beyond perhaps even his wildest dreams. One of this year’s Academy Award nominees for Best…
Joe Lovano Nonet
After six nominations, tenor saxman Joe Lovano finally won a Grammy this year for his Blue Note album 52nd Street Themes. A Cleveland native, Lovano enrolled at Berklee College of Music in 1971, and there he made some contacts with musicians who have remained in his life to this day. In 1976, he moved to…
Wizards of Oz
Somewhere, in deepest New South Wales, Australia, there exists a humble sheep paddock. (In this particular case, the paddock is nearly devoid of sheep — barring the odd sound effect — but never mind that.) The setting is rural, it’s pastoral, it’s quaint as all heck — and it also happens to be hallowed ground…
Jerry Cantrell
Does anyone know what Alice in Chains has been up to lately? Does anyone care? After releasing its self-titled opus in 1995, the grungiest of Seattle’s sludgy rock bands has been M.I.A. There were a couple attempts at documenting the band via a greatest hits package and an ill-advised boxed set in the late ’90s,…
Once More, With Feeling
In the white-bread world of musical theater, there are very few roles for one-eyed black women who talk with a lisp and can’t sing a note. But Stephanie Taylor-Ayers, a one-eyed black woman, doesn’t care. She’s performed in many a wholesome play, even though she “hates white love stories, hates romantic stuff, and hates wholesomeness.”…
Soulstice
The San Francisco underground electronic act Soulstice brings together the soul-saturated house production talents of Andy Caldwell and Gabe Rene (the two have been scoring some big dance-floor hits on their own lately — Caldwell, with his work for Om and Rene, for Naked Recordings, under the alias Aquanote) and adds vocalist Gina Rene and…
Where the Levy Breaks
Inside Walton Elementary School on Cleveland’s near West Side, kids of all races scurry out of class, backpacks on shoulders. Outside, parents pull up in cars and minivans, some with Puerto Rican flags hanging from their rearview mirrors. On May 8, when Clevelanders vote on whether to raise their property taxes to repair the city’s…
John Cale
By the release of Vintage Violence in 1970, John Cale had been deeply involved in the creation of albums that shook the world to its very core (as a performer on the first two Velvet Underground albums, as producer/multi-instrumentalist on Nico’s Marble Index, and as producer of the Stooges’ first album) and that continue to…
Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em
In the 1930s, when Frank Stern began smoking, he paid a dime a pack. He burned Old Golds, then Chesterfields, then Raleighs. Around 1987, 55 years after he began smoking, he quit. The Mayfield man says he hasn’t lit up since. Now 88, Stern is a robust, still-restless senior with an 88-year-old girlfriend and bowling…
Stevie Nicks
Here she goes again, seeing crystal visions. On her first album in seven years, Trouble in Shangri-La, witchy woman Stevie Nicks is up to her old magic tricks. A quick glance over song titles — “Candlebright,” “Sorcerer,” “Planets of the Universe,” and “Bombay Sapphires” — reveals that not much has changed since 1994’s Street Angel.…
Rose’s Thorns
It was a beautiful scene. The requisite spectrum of media dorks was stuffed inside a Justice Center conference room the size of an ice-fishing hut: TV guys with bulletproof hair, old-timers who had seen it all, newspaper geeks whose self-importance was large enough to eclipse the sun. For eight months — since the day Joel…
The Marbles
It seems as if this bunch once called itself Manda & the Marbles, and for what it’s worth, it should stick with that name. Lead singer Manda Marble possesses a solid, brassy rock and roll bellow, and she is clearly the focal point of this bubblegum punk trio. Eye candy becomes ear candy on Seduction,…
Shearer Delight
There is no good place to begin with Harry Shearer, because he doesn’t sit still long enough to allow one the chance to focus. He is a blur, forever in motion–on his way to the radio station, on his way from the movie studio, on his way to the publisher’s office, on his way from…
Three Big Hits
April 5, our dream issue: Your recent article titled “Law Schooled” [April 5] is excellent. As a teacher in an inclusion setting, and one who has experienced all sides of these issues, I found your article balanced and complete. Thank you! The struggle continues here in the classroom to always remember the child, and when…
Sob Sisters and the Old Maid
In the great Funny Girl tradition, we have two explorations of dames who just can’t hold their men. Side Show at the Cleveland Play House is a lachrymose musical that creeped out Broadway audiences in its short run. Remotely based on a true story of conjoined twins, it follows the exploits of the Hilton sisters…
Meet Me at the Metro
The southwest corner of West Sixth and St. Clair is once again abuzz with the well-heeled trendinistas who have given Warehouse District dining its undeniable panache. Remodeled, redecorated, and renamed by owners Joe Saccone, Richard Hauck, and Alton F. Doody Jr. (head honchos of the ever-expanding Hyde Park Restaurant Systems Inc.), the former Piccolo Mondo…
Dinner and a Showing
Members of the Ohio City Near West Development Corporation are once again gearing up to present an Evening in Ohio City, the popular annual event that combines great food and drink with the chance to peek inside some of the neighborhood’s most interesting houses. This year’s movable feast will begin at 6 p.m. on Saturday,…
Loud Speaker
When hip-hop emerged in the ’80s, the MC stood at center stage, while the producer took to the sidelines. But as sample-based music morphed into house, drum ‘n’ bass, downtempo, electronica, and ambient, the producer carved out his own domain in the underground DJ movement. And while instrumentals and sampled vocals allowed producers to define…
Christian Soldiers
James Lewis has spent the better part of the morning trying to drain the swamp on his small ranch in Nova, a town some 50 miles south of Cleveland. Between working as a physical therapist assistant and rehabilitation consultant, and keeping up the ranch where he and his wife raise American Saddlebred horses, Lewis barely…
Sexy and Seventeen
The form of Japanese haiku is simple and immutable: three lines and 17 syllables, written along a nature theme. But when the poet happens to be an adolescent attending an all-boys Catholic high school in Cleveland, lured into a region-wide haiku contest with the promise of extra credit, restrictive form is one thing; subject matter…
Babushka Beat
Three and a half years ago, local accordion and clarinet player Walt Mahovlich played a show in a loft space next to Spaces, an art gallery near the West Bank of the Flats. There, he befriended Thomas Stanchak, an art student with an interest in Eastern European music. Mahovlich took Stanchak with his group, Harmonia,…
Big Dish in a Small Pond
Mentioning the Australian role in the 1969 Apollo 11 mission — the first to put a man on the moon — sounds like the start of a bad joke. Even Australian director Rob Sitch, whose film The Dish is based on the Aussies’ participation in the historic event, first thought of it that way. But…
Lars Frederiksen & the Bastards
You can only really make out one word on the brief, bombastic intro to Lars Frederiksen’s self-titled solo CD, and that word is “motherfuckers.” It’s a fitting opening salvo from the mohawked Rancid guitarist, one of the most visible and respected figures of just-above-ground punk, who is famous for veering between profanity and incoherence. With…
Termagant of Endearment
Visualize a pretty young woman and a handsome young man, heading for the bedroom. She has just suggested that she wants to show him what she really wants, so naturally, he begins unzipping his trousers en route to the bed. Oblivious to his loud boxers, she sits and begins swooning over her motley scrapbook of…
John Tejada
John Tejada’s mother and father — a renowned opera singer and a classical concert pianist and conductor, respectively — probably had few doubts that their son would spend his life making music. But when they set him in front of a piano at the ripe age of four, it’s doubtful that either knew he would…
