14th Annual Midwest Reggae Fest
Packy Malley’s Annual Midwest Reggae Fest is now in its 14th year, and seasoned fest-goers already know the deal — anything homemade, home-brewed, or homegrown is positively welcome. For the uninitiated, however, here are a few guidelines. One: Bring a comfortable blanket to sit on, and jam your cooler with plenty of ice-cold brew for…
Pour It On
At the Roundhouse in Put-in-Bay, Teri Winchester is like a dorm mother to the college coeds she hires as bartenders for the summer. She’ll bake for them, give them extra shifts, and listen to their woeful tales of broken romance. So it’s only fitting that, for the last 20 years, Winchester has marked the end…
A Boost for the Boys
When the United States finally entered combat during World War II, there was an accompanying activity called the “war effort.” Ordinary citizens and celebrities alike made sacrifices at home, turning in scrap rubber and metal and planting gardens to supplement food rationing, as well as donating their time at “canteens,” dances and entertainment events designed…
50 Cent
Righteous naysayers are on target when they complain about 50’s sub-par rhymes and conventional thug persona — not to mention his embrace of gangsta rap’s casual brutalization of “niggas and bitches.” But as fans and foes know, this former gangbanger has a history of taking direct hits and coming back stronger than ever. The mistake…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, August 11 Cleveland Heights’ Party in the Heights summer series peaks with tonight’s Coventry Street Fair, a family-friendly gathering of jugglers, clowns, face painters, magicians, balloon sculptors, and artists. Food and drink vendors will set up shop on the sidewalks, alongside outdoor displays from many of the area’s clothing, book, and tchotchke stores. There’s…
On Stage
Aïda — Back in 1998, the folks at Disney Theatrical Productions thought it would be dandy to update Giuseppe Verdi’s tale of doomed love and handed it off to rocker Elton John and his librettist, Tim Rice, to conjure their pop-music magic. The result is a bubblegum version that shares little more than three vowels…
Can’t Stop the Beat
The new new wave breaks every Sunday at the B-Side Liquor Lounge. Can’t Stop the Beat is one of the busiest nights at the chic underground (literally) hang. DJs Rudeiecorexxx and F-Gunn spin indie dance rock, electroclash, Britpop, new wave, nü wave, and anything else that’ll make you move it, including but not limited to…
The Dirty Truth
The Aristocrats’ premise — more than 100 comedians deliver their own versions of the same dirty joke — doesn’t sound like much to hang a movie on. But the joke — not a terribly funny one — serves not only as a secret handshake among stand-ups, but also as a jazzy riff, a comic story…
On View
NEW Learning to Crawl — Before you can crawl, you need balance. It’s clear from this show that Matt Sesow and Dana Ellyn Kaufman, Washington, D.C.-based artists in a self-proclaimed experimental phase, will soon be standing upright. But their work also is polarized, either obvious or confusing. Many of their acrylic and oil paintings here…
Cool Cleveland’s ‘Til It Hurts Party
The Cool Cleveland e-bulletin goes out to those in the city concerned about being socially involved — in both the municipal and mingling sense of the term. And when Cool Cleveland throws a party, well, it’s pretty cool. This week, four DJs from Grand Poo-bas Record Shoppe will provide the soundtrack for ‘Til It Hurts,…
Ship Shape
SAT 8/13 It’s a rare day when the Lake Guardian is given the day off from its round-the-clock job ferrying scientists to their watery workstations on Lake Erie. But twice a year, the 180-foot research vessel sails to lakeshore festivals. On Saturday, it stops at the Burning River Fest. Along with food, bands, and lectures…
D-Lightful
As in most any business, savvy restaurateurs must constantly reinvent themselves to meet the needs of their clientele. It’s a chore that can be a little like trying to cross the Cuyahoga on a guitar string. Give customers filet mignon when they want burgers, and you’ve blown it. Give them down-home when they want upscale,…
Nevermore
Although it’s not technically a rock opera, Nevermore’s This Godless Endeavor appropriates the dramatic elements of that form, especially the expository lyrics. Almost every verse includes breathless first-person narration. Occasionally overwrought language (“Your face is painted on my soul”) doesn’t obscure the solid plotlines here, the best of which pits an android against the mentally…
See Dick Too
8/12-8/14 Mary Jane Chichester is convinced she made the right move three years ago to let men compete in the 10K race and volleyball parts of Run, Jane, Run. She projects that one out of three runners and volleyball players in the contest is male. The golf tournament, however, remains man-free. “Last year, we had…
That Lady From That Place
It’s been 30 years since Isabella Basile first fell for University Circle’s energy and charm, and decided to open a bistro there. Not that she knew anything about the biz; she was simply smitten by the bustling vibe and vintage architecture. But apparently the dining gods had her number: Soon after her epiphany, a pair…
The Waco Brothers
Since avant-leftist Jon Langford had already been toiling for some 15 years with England’s seminal punk-to-country collective the Mekons when he resettled in Chicago and formed the Waco Brothers, the sextet at first seemed like a momentary indulgence in the twangy roots rock that the Mekons had moved beyond. But this seventh album celebrates the…
Back to Bataan
FRI 8/12 The Great Raid director John Dahl didn’t want to make a typical World War II movie. “I wanted to make something as historically accurate as possible,” he says. “[Other films] have action-movie sensibilities brought to World War II. That wasn’t [the veterans’] reality. It wasn’t a lot of fun.” The film (which opens…
Born Identity
Heard the one about the rapper who lost his pants, but kept his head? The episode took place in April ’04 at House of Blues in Los Angeles. It was the second-to-last night of a 27-city “Quannum World” tour, marking the first time since the founding of the artist-owned label that almost its entire roster…
Schoolyard Heroes
Take three dudes, barely out of high school, who play spazzy, jagged post-hardcore. Give them a baby-faced female vocalist who combines the sugary pertness of Gwen Stefani with the shrieking of Kathleen Hanna, and you’ve got a recipe for punk-rock glory, right? Well, Fantastic Wounds is no world-beating triumph, but it’s certainly energizing — and…
Slam Dance
WED 8/17 Behind the decks, D/DJ thumbs through a catalog of 17,000 songs burned onto hundreds of CDs. As one cut ends, he slowly turns up the volume on the next . . . and hopes he won’t hear a “slam,” when two songs with different beats play back-to-back. “It’s horrible when you have to…
Different Strokes for All Folks
John Rich of Big & Rich — the funniest and funkiest new rebels in country music — likes to tell a story about his preacher dad and Mötley Crüe, a group that embodies rebellious fun (if not exactly funk) for a whole generation of heartland Americans. About four years ago, when Rich was struggling to…
From Autumn to Ashes
Since its last disc, 2003’s The Fiction We Live, From Autumn to Ashes has lost two-fifths of its lineup. And appropriately, half of the new Abandon Your Friends measures up to the band’s first two albums. Live cracked the 150,000 mark for emo clubhouse Vagrant, even though the band sounded like the East Coast brother…
Working Blue. And Brown.
Pity the daily newspaper critic who must review The Aristocrats without using such phrases as “a longshoreman’s arm up a little girl’s ass,” “then my wife goes down on my son while the dog’s licking his balls,” “my grandmother’s covered in my come,” and “is it shit before piss, or sucking before fucking?” Yet sentences…
A Likely Story
“Police arrest Village People’s original policeman in Daly City” Not only did you read that right, but it’s completely true. As reported by the Associated Press, “Victor Edward Willis, the original policeman in the 1970s music group the Village People, was arrested by real police who allegedly found a gun and drugs in the former…
My Dad Is Dead
My Dad Is Dead main man Mark Edwards is as idiosyncratic a character as Cleveland rock has produced. His nasal moan, post-punk guitar sounds, mechanical rhythms, and worrisome lyrics are instantly recognizable. But since his brief stint as the darling of critics around the time of his 1989 double-LP masterwork, The Taller You Are, the…
Deuce Is Wild
The Aristocrats may be the foulest-mouthed movie of the summer, but Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo is the foulest in deed, actually depicting some of the nigh-unspeakable acts that are merely hypothetically talked about in the former film. It’s been a while since we’ve seen a big-time gross-out comedy, and European Gigolo definitely merits its R…
A Kut Above
Kut Nyce’s latest mixtape begins with a common complaint: “I don’t know if I just got a bum copy, but it definitely shouldn’t sound like this,” an irritated caller gripes on the chopped and screwed DJ’s voicemail. “Every song is all in slow motion. I mean, tell me it ain’t all supposed to be slow…
Chimaira
“Can’t sleep with this frustration,” Chimaira frontman Mark Hunter growls midway through his band’s fourth LP, sounding like he hasn’t had a good night’s rest in about two years. And in a way he hasn’t. After touring for nearly 20 months straight after the release of 2003’s The Impossibility of Reason and becoming national headliners,…
Funky Bunch
The old John Wayne-Dean Martin hayburner The Sons of Katie Elder wasn’t a very good movie the first time around — Dino and a cowboy hat go together about as well as Sinatra and bib overalls — and John Singleton’s jokey, urbanized rehash isn’t likely to snow the Oscar voters either. Set in Detroit in…
Then There Were Four
One of the city’s more productive hip-hop partnerships, between Cleveland rap collective 12 Monkeys and Buffalo’s Deep Thinka Records, has disintegrated, but a new label is emerging from the dust. Following a split with Deep Thinka, Monkey clique members Rime Royal and Edotkom have formed their own record label, I.V. League Entertainment. “Things that were…
Infinite Number of Sounds
Featuring former Racermason drummer Ron Tucker and spoken-word artist J. Scott Franklin, Infinite Number of Sounds is a perennial nominee for Best Alternative/Electronic act at Scene’s Cleveland Music Awards. And for a largely instrumental group with an experimental bent, the group rocks hard and never strays too far from a hook. Behind their wall of…
Swamp Thing
The Skeleton Key ranks high on the list of 2005’s funniest films, bested only by the first two-thirds of The Wedding Crashers, all of The Aristocrats, and that part in Stealth where the airplane starts sassing Josh Lucas. Doubtful that was the intention of director Iain Softley (K-PAX, an inexplicably well-regarded hack) and twist-obsessed writer…
Thor
The role of gimmickry in great rock and roll can’t be underestimated. Whether they’re letting the drummer sing or dressing all nine band members in boiler suits and hideous masks, the best bands know you gotta give the people something to look at while they’re listening. Thor understands this. The guy’s a former competitive bodybuilder,…
Sweet Spot
The two smallest boys on the field are standing near the dugout, the sun heavy on their backs. The taller boy is telling the smaller one about the sweet spot of a baseball bat. He’s explaining that if you hit the ball just like so, the ball will go hard and far, and good things…
Quest as Test
The contentedly independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has brought his restless energy to a series of surreal road movies that move along nicely on the strength of rare characters, quirky humor, and a willing embrace of chance adventure. These quest stories for hipsters have transported Jarmusch’s fiercely loyal audience from New York to Cleveland (Stranger Than…
Destiny’s Child
When vocalist Kelly Rowland let it slip recently that Destiny’s Child’s present tour would be the group’s last, it was the farewell some observers had been expecting since they first heard the R&B trio. Formed in Houston when its members were just nine years old, the act that became Destiny’s Child took off after Mathew…
Grimm Fairy Tale
As she slouches on the patio of her Kent apartment, Shenna Grimm pulls long drags from Kool after Kool. Her eyelids sag over her glassy, green gaze. She trips over her words from a speech impediment that acts like a permanent tongue depressor. “It’s like a nightmare I can’t wake up from,” she says. The…
Unknown Soldiers
“The most daring rescue mission of our time is a story that has never been told,” boasts the poster for The Great Raid. The credits of the film, however, reveal that it’s based on not one, but two books about the 6th Ranger Battalion, which ventured 30 miles into enemy territory to free more than…
Solomon Burke
Solomon Burke is sure to rock the house at Cain Park when he rolls into town for his first Cleveland-area concert since winter 2002. Packing tunes from Make Do With What You Got, the album he released in March on Shout!, Burke guarantees a powerful presence, infused by his inspired gospel approach. At 65, Burke…
A Lesson in Scamming
A former TIPS staffer escapes: I am a former teacher at TIPS, and I am so glad that you wrote the article [“Dream Killer,” July 27]! Like most teachers there, I was afraid of getting involved because it could mean losing my job. Fortunately, I signed a contract yesterday at a new school and don’t…
DJ Language
Rare groove can be a hard genre to pin down. The label tends to get slapped onto just about any DJ who plays soul, funk, and jazz tracks from the ’60s or ’70s, though there are plenty of DJs in the genre who incorporate fresh tunes into the mix. To complicate things even more, many…
Being Played
In June, Council President Frank Jackson invited the leading mayoral candidates to a photo-op, where they would profess their support for the $46 million school levy. Somehow, the sight of these distinguished leaders, united as one, was supposed to convince America’s poorest city to dig the last coins from its purse. Delusion would play the…
The Greencards/Kasey Chambers
First came the “newgrass” revival. Then Alison Krauss. Later, Nickel Creek showed up. Now, the Greencards are traveling the path blazed by the aforementioned acts and others that have given bluegrass a few original twists, keeping the music fresh and helping bury the yee-haw stereotype. What sets this Austin-based trio apart is that none of…
Good Old Boys
In 1987, admissions officer Ronald Oleksiak founded John Carroll’s first office of minority affairs. During his tenure, minority enrollment increased, Oleksiak received stellar job reviews, and he was even named vice president of the Association of Jesuit Colleges & Universities Conference of Multicultural Affairs — though the title was much too long to fit on…
