Noel Cassidy Update
Noel Cassidy was in good spirits when he walked into a courtroom packed with thirty supporters last Thursday. But his optimism was given a serious reality check moments later, when Immigration Judge Elizabeth Hacker denied his petition for adjustment of residency status, dealing a serious blow to his bid to remain in the United States.…
The Edge
Workers of the World, Call Your Office With political repression all the rage in Eastern Europe, local despots are naturally anxious to join in. So when a flyer announcing a protest against the bombing in Yugoslavia was circulated two weeks ago, City Hall went right to work. Andrew Cox, an apparatchik from Imperial Mayor Mike…
Operation Top Secret
Three years ago, Cleveland Mayor Michael White issued a warning to restaurants and groceries who dared sell spoiled food in the city of Cleveland. His inspectors would find them, drag them to court, fine them, and shut them down. Dirty restaurants, he vowed, were dead meat. “If you really want to get somebody’s attention, put…
Letters
No Justice, No Peace in N. Ireland Thanks for Mike Tobin’s story about Noel Cassidy’s deportation case [“The Revolutionary Next Door,” April 22]. It offered a real sense of the hardship nationalists suffer in British-occupied Ireland and here in the United States. It’s clear that Noel was arrested, imprisoned, and forced to fight a long…
Crazy From the Heat
The photographs by Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, highlight the problem confronting all urban outsiders who attempt to capture the ethos of a rural community. In this instance, the question is whether Iturbide can chronicle indigenous Zapotec and Seri life with a simplicity consistent with the speech patterns…
Theater Americana
With high schools going ballistic and bombs dropping out of the sky, it’s a comfort to attest that community theater is alive and well and living in Brecksville. Everyone, for the good of his or her spiritual well-being, needs to patronize one of these havens of Americana at least once a year. They offer the…
A Potpourri of Playlets
All the well-meaning social workers and chiropodists who descend Dobama’s formica staircase in their imported sandals and Apache jewelry have a ringside seat to the damned. So far this season they’ve been put through incest in the deep South; Scott Plate’s naked, redheaded AIDS weltschmerz; the exhausting rigors of slavery; and the wails of a…
A Fistful of Diamonds
A reputation can be tough to live up to. Just ask any gunfighter: Soon as folks start calling you the fastest draw in town, they’ll expect you to prove it every time you step outside. Sans Souci, one of Cleveland’s better dining spots, could be in an analogous situation. The French restaurant with a Mediterranean…
Playback
Ben Folds Five The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner (550 Music) Hey, Ben Folds! You’ve just scored a sizable radio hit in “Brick,” a song about a gloomy holiday abortion. What are you gonna do now? Judging from his trio’s third album, The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, it certainly isn’t a trip to the…
Cement Mixers
They don’t wear thong bikinis, but butterflies are sun worshippers. “Often you’ll see them basking on rocks in the morning, just to get their body temperature up,” says Laura Cyrocki, urban butterfly watcher and instructor at the Cleveland Botanical Garden. But if the rocks are all taken, they’ll settle for a sunny slab of concrete,…
Livewire
Big Wreck Fireside Poets Sara Star Peabody’s DownUnder April 19 There are plenty of reasons why a live performance by grunge-sounding Big Wreck should not be inspiring. Pilfering the Seattle sound–power chords, brooding bass lines, howling vocals–this quartet appears to be no better than the formulaic Bush or Collective Soul. Yet the Boston band ripped…
No Aesthetic Required
Thomas Edison may have invented the lightbulb, but black-light posters, blue-light specials, and ladies’ nights were left to other masterminds. “Can I buy you ladies a drink?” shouts the gentleman with the freshly mowed buzz cut, leaning in so his appeal might register above the throbbing strains of “No Diggity.” He smiles broadly, revealing a…
1999 Scene Music Awards
The Rust Belt Never Sleeps Cleveland is the rock-and-roll capital of the free world, but for the area’s working musicians, I.M. Pei’s shimmering pyramid may as well be nestled against a stream in Montana. In recent years bands of all stripes have struggled mightily to break out of Northeast Ohio. For all its proud music…
Night & Day
Thursday April 29 Scottish jazz saxophonist Tommy Smith recorded his first album while still in high school, but his chops weren’t squandered on reckless youth. The straight-ahead player, composer, and arranger, well-versed in the acoustic jazz tradition, went on to play with vibist Gary Burton’s group for a few years and to record with guitarist…
Guts Spilling Out
Here is a fellow who has his hands full, literally and figuratively. “Yeah, I have time to talk,” says Austin-based singer/songwriter Alejandro Escovedo. “I’m holding a baby right now, but I can talk while I’m holding her.” The baby is Juanita, Escovedo’s five-month-old daughter. She’s another of the many new things in Escovedo’s life at…
The Great Caper Collapse
Sean Connery has always been a terse, minimalist actor, spitting out his lines in tight bursts of Scottish brogue. But in Entrapment, the kingly Scot goes beyond minimalism to the point where he’s practically doing semaphore with his eyebrows. As the legendary art thief Robert MacDougal, Connery isn’t just reserved, he’s comatose. The picture opens…
The Oblivion Express
Whoever said that the classics never go out of fashion probably wasn’t referring to popular music. In a field where styles date faster than President Clinton on a weekend fund-raiser, it’s hardly startling that, for most artists, fame is as fleeting as the glow of a nearly spent spliff. What is surprising, though, is the…
I Was a Headless, Pot-Smoking Teenage Zombie
The most surprising thing about the new teensploitation horror film Idle Hands is the lack of masturbation jokes. It is a movie about a seventeen-year-old boy who loses control of his right hand to an evil demon, yet there’s only one such obvious crack. As the gloriously lazy hero Anton (Devon Sawa) prepares to slice…
Soundbites
Last week WZJM-FM/92.3 listeners were told they live in the greatest city in America. Too bad the DJ was talking about New York City and not Cleveland. WZJM dropped its Top 40 format like a bubblegum wrapper on the pavement Monday, April 19, in favor of what’s known in radio as “jammin’ oldies.” WZJM found…
Force Feeding
There is a moment in Star Wars, the 1977 film about a bored teenager who left home to save the galaxy, where a tiny black spaceship gets blasted in the wing and spins off into space. It is not destroyed, and neither is its inhabitant, Darth Vader–the bad guy. This happens late in the movie,…
May the Force Be Withheld
Rising anticipation of The Phantom Menace, nurtured by sixteen Star Wars-free years, has been quelled by a system of Lucasfilm security measures designed to protect everything from the film’s plot to promotions; if Beanie Bobas are in the works, you won’t know it till they hit the shelves. But the corporate code of silence has…
