Barry Bad
On September 10, Barry Sonnenfeld’s Big Trouble, a slight comic caper drenched in the sweltering muck of Miami, was a nagging chore to be tended to by film critics — one more mediocre multimillion-dollar all-star fiasco, in which you can almost hear the filmmakers giggling behind the cameras. On September 11, Big Trouble and reviewing…
Dale Watson
It’s hard to knock Dale Watson’s latest album, Every Song I Write Is for You. The person for whom every song on the record was written is Terri Herbert, Watson’s fiancée, who was killed in a car accident in September 2000. The death devastated the man who gets more credit than anyone for keeping 1950s-style…
Reel Guilty
Joseph Finder’s 1998 novel, High Crimes, reads like a movie and a derivative one at that, borrowing scenes and elements from the likes of Sleeping With the Enemy, Primal Fear, and especially A Few Good Men. It piles on several ludicrous twists all at once for the finale and throws in a few gratuitous Pepsi…
The Crown
There’s a lot of rhetoric surrounding the Crown: how it’s reshaping metal and how its latest album, Crowned in Terror (Metal Blade), is the greatest thing since Slayer’s Reign in Blood — a comparison made explicit in the press release. But this isn’t an accurate comparison — and not only because Reign in Blood is…
Psyched Out
The Cuyahoga County Community Mental Health Board is gripped by crisis today. This is not to be confused with the crisis of a year ago. Or the crises that cropped up in November, December, or at any other point during its tortured 34-year existence. “There are always crises,” says former board trustee Sue Adams. “There…
Cabaret Voltaire
We tend to link musical styles closely with fashion trends. It’s now almost unthinkable that, in the mid-’70s, when hair was feathered, bottoms were belled, and disco and arena rock ruled the airwaves, three gaunt young men were sequestered in an attic in Sheffield, England, grinding out unorthodox sounds with reel-to-reel machines and primitive noisemakers.…
Bench Warmer
The old lady’s trembling hand clutches a cane. As she stands at the podium in Judge Daniel O. Corrigan’s courtroom, the ancient magistrate glares down at her. The woman’s appearance stems from a domestic row turned nasty. Her wheelchair-bound husband was chasing her around their apartment, swinging a cane at her. Cornered, the old lady…
December
The word “trance” has been bandied about carelessly for the last few years, during ambient music’s somewhat surprising rise in popularity. The term, as it’s generally understood, seems to refer to some blissed-out state of navel-gazery, within which only peaceful feelings are experienced and all’s right with the world. Trances, though, come in many different…
D’Andra’s War
In her first three years at Kent State, D’Andra Mull stacked her résumé with the thankless jobs that tend to be the bane and bounty of the young and responsible. President of her sorority. Head of the Black Greek Council. Senator in student government. By last spring, those efforts had paid off. In March, she…
The Lords of Altamont
Their name may reference the Rolling Stones’ most notorious concert, the 1969 disaster that unofficially ended the ’60s, but the Lords of Altamont are not directly descended from the Stones. A more accurate lineage can be traced to the frustrated groups who, back in the late ’60s — when the Stones were bigger than any…
Artless Heathens
That Cleveland sits at the bottom of lists for public funding of the arts is no surprise. It fits with our image as a city where a United Auto Workers jacket is suitable wedding attire. Art, in the Cleveland sense of the word, is best depicted by a quick slant good for seven yards and…
Critikill
Prone to excessive, Halle Berry-style emoting, many dark electronic acts fall prey to a self-absorption that’s inadvertently comedic. Hell, the guy from Black Tape for a Blue Girl actually released a record called There’s a Cat-Shaped Hole in My Heart after his tabby died. To borrow a line from Denis Leary, “Life’s hard, get a…
Tough Break
Being a break-dancer in 21st-century Cleveland is sort of like being a purple zebra at the zoo: People think you’re either really cool or really weird. You’re cool to a coterie of club kids who know that Wu-Tang Clan isn’t a breakfast drink. Everybody else mistakes you for a Michael Jackson groupie who missed the…
Basketball Thugs
When sacred cows take the court: The trouble with CSU basketball is that there’s no accountability for either program’s actions [“Bad Blood and Basketball,” February 28]. Unfortunately, basketball is held up as the sacred cow of CSU athletics, and any action on or off the court is acceptable, even if it’s hazardous to Cleveland State’s…
Opus No. 1
In the same blissful category as first love, first car, and first hot pastrami sandwich is the exuberance elicited by Beck Center’s current production, Saturday Night. Perhaps its greatest bounty is that it reminds audiences that musical theater, when it clicks, can be one of life’s indisputable pleasures. Written by Stephen Sondheim when he was…
Bay Watch
It took nearly a year — from May 3, 2001, until March 12, 2002 — for restaurateur and businesswoman Sin Mun “Jenny” Chan to reopen her Chinese restaurant after a devastating fire. But now, the completely remodeled Sin Mun Bay (3400 St. Clair Avenue, 216-391-4898) has one of the most tasteful interiors in all of…
Keys to Fine Dining
Sometimes I crave nothing more special than a gooey double-cheese pizza and a couple of Coronas, consumed before the TV while I’m lounging in my sweats. Then again, there are days when I practically itch to pin on the rhinestones, pack my wallet with big bills, and bully some unsuspecting fellow into a suit and…
Wet Dreamer
It should come as little surprise that Andrew W.K. loves roller coasters. “You’re from Ohio, are you a big Cedar Point fan?” the Detroit native asks during a recent phone interview, his excitement level rising when talk turns to amusement parks. “I take fun very seriously. There’s no such thing as going too far; there’s…
Reeling in the Years
The show doesn’t have star power, and even some of its key participants aren’t sure what to expect. But “Groovin’ High (and It Don’t Stop),” slotted midway through the Tri-C JazzFest, could be key to the event’s prolonged success — and, its principals hope, a step forward in its musical evolution. If the show works,…
This Is Their Year
This could be the year the Indians go all the way, Clay Benjamin says. Of course, he’s been saying that for each of the past 40 years. The Medina resident is, to say the least, preoccupied with all things Tribe. In 1990, Benjamin won a contest held by WMMS to find Cleveland’s most obsessive baseball…
Metal of Honor
In the liner notes of Shirt’s debut, Anthem of Self-Destruction, the band thanks “whoever came up with the word ‘fuck'” and “the sweet weed that keeps us from killing anyone.” But after recent developments, Shirt might have trouble maintaining its Dick Cheney-like surliness. Last month, the Cleveland-by-way-of-Florida metal band received news that it had won…
Know Your Drum Shows
It involves a bunch of young folks pounding on percussion instruments. It uses unconventional items, such as metal pipes and brake drums, to make music. And it announces itself with a simple, look-at-me title. But Blast! is no mere Stomp rip-off, its originator will tell you. “It’s really a new musical genre,” says James Mason,…
Phantom Planet
Usually, the drummer’s a nuisance — a guileless, toothless oaf confined to the back of the tour bus and the background of band photos. Unlock his cage for shows, keep him from drooling all over himself, and for God’s sake, keep him away from the ladies. Not so with Phantom Planet — without the drummer,…
Lower Education
Hey, dude. How does your taste in college humor run? Feel like seeing a half-dozen smug frat boys devour cream puffs filled with dog semen? How about a field trip to a topless club, where the most luscious stripper in the place evidently had beans for lunch? Wanna see (and hear) what happens when an…
Phillip Lehman and Jeff Silverman
When it comes to antisocial, overly obsessive fans, Trekkers seem to get all the credit. But if there’s one thing that we learned from High Fidelity, it’s that record collectors can be just as bad. Case in point: Phillip Lehman and Jeff Silverman, the heads of New York City’s funk-revivalist Soul Fire Records. These guys…
