Ink Strain
Many things improve with age: wine, cheese, a man’s ability to snooze with the television at full volume. Some things do not. Take the now well-chronicled feud between Mayor White’s office and The Plain Dealer. If onlookers thought White’s decision against seeking a fourth term in office would settle things down, they were mistaken. The…
Various Artists
Most of our local college radio stations make it their duty to support local bands. One of the most dedicated to this cause is John Carroll University’s WJCU 88.7-FM. With 4,292 Seconds Thru Cleveland — A WJCU Compilation, the second compilation of local acts the station’s DJs have assembled (the first was last year’s 3,128…
Back to School
Judd Apatow tries not to think of what became of Sam and Lindsay Weir, Neal Schweiber, Bill Haverchuck, Daniel Desario, Nick Andopolis and the other freaks and geeks Apatow knew back at McKinley High School. Those kids were his family, the children born when Apatow and writer Paul Feig created a beloved television show, about…
Broke From the Broker Fee
A lesson in subprime lending: I can relate to the article “Bank of Jim Crow” by Sarah Fenske [August 16]. The lease for my beauty salon (established for 19 years) was not renewed, and I needed a loan for a building. I had a 30 percent down payment for the building, had paid off loans…
Scared Straight
With Party, theater’s equivalent of a Big Mac, San Diego-based Elephant Productions has converted Cleveland Public Theatre into the closest thing to a male burlesque house. Along the same lines of Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding, it appropriates a cherished ritual. But where the fun of Tony n’ Tina is being a guest at an absurd…
Hollow Promises
Fine-dining spots like Sans Souci, at the downtown Renaissance Cleveland Hotel, don’t just spring up overnight. Foresight, skill, time, and exceptional devotion are required to make such places happen. So we certainly didn’t expect to find La Petite Sans Souci in Painesville, at the newly renovated Renaissance Quail Hollow Resort. But was it too much…
Erie Similarities
Diners always hold their breath when a chef jumps ship from their favorite restaurant: Will the menu change? Will quality suffer? But the transition at Erie Bleu (4204 Detroit Avenue; 216-651-2538) — from Warren Dolata to Bo Mueller — is shaping up to be a smooth one. Mueller, a graduate of the Pennsylvania Culinary Institute…
St. Joan
Trying to summarize Joan Jett’s contributions to rock and roll, former Rolling Stone editor and renowned rock writer Dave Marsh probably came as close to a suitable distillation as anyone. “Joan Jett is the female Chuck Berry,” he wrote with admirable concision. While that is hardly the definitive assessment of Jett’s place in rock and…
Okay to Be Weird
Denise Sullivan opens Rip It Up! Rock & Roll Rulebreakers with a simple anecdote. When she received her first record player at age six, she took a copy of the Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow into her bedroom and “closed the door for the next 12 years.” “I only ever remember being interested in music that…
Buffett Backers
Cheryl works for the City of Canton Water Department. She doesn’t drink regularly or see many rock shows. But when Jimmy Buffett comes to town, she turns into a Parrothead, one of Buffett’s crazed fans. Twirling and singing, she’s enjoying his August 27 Blossom show with some 17,000 other Parrotheads. She doesn’t even mind when…
Spell Bound
Before the advent of powered flight, most forms of air transportation involved the magic of flying carpets or broomsticks. But if it seems that all the dazzle has gone out of aviation, now that the sound barrier has been broken, don’t fret. The divide between the mystical and mundane is being filled this weekend at…
Plea for Peace Tour
So what separates a mainstream punk/ hardcore/metal band from an indie punk/ hardcore/metal band? Hype, mostly. Tonight’s three main attractions are lauded as alternatives to the alternative, and a few of ’em may actually deserve the attention. Hot Water Music is a foolproof “post-hardcore” Florida outfit with a seven-year track record of noisy and honest-to-God…
Summer Scamps
Shaker Heights native David Wain stopped attending summer camp in Maine in 1986, after ascending to the rank of junior counselor, because he “didn’t want to go to the next level and actually have to work all day.” The irony is that for Wet Hot American Summer, based on his childhood experiences at camp, he…
The Minders
The Minders may not have a revolutionary, original sound, but their melodic hooks and instrumentation elicit unavoidable comparisons to acts such as XTC, Big Star, the Beatles, and the Move (Roy Wood’s pre-ELO band). Based in Portland, Oregon, the Minders — former Englishman Martyn Leaper and his wife Rebecca Cole — are part of the…
Gimme Swelter
Finally, here’s this season’s candidate for worst movie ever made, a distinction cherished (and frequently awarded) by the bellicose lummoxes of this trade. Be warned: Those hoping for a return to the salad days of Meatballs should commence singing “Are You Ready for the Bummer?” right about now. Even playing its own stupid little game,…
Godsmack
You’ve got to hand it to Godsmack singer Sully Erna. In a nu-metal universe, where tattoos rule and toughness is measured by one’s ability to say “fuck” as many times per sentence as humanly possible, Erna is a bona fide, card-carrying, devil-fearing Wiccan. Like Ozzy before him, he not only talks the talk, he walks…
Shakespeare in Suburbia
What is it that people get out of Shakespeare’s plays? That’s a relevant question, given the number of updates and reimaginings of his work that show up on an almost weekly basis, not to mention the faithful restagings. Is it the stories? The flowery dialogue? The author’s ability to capture a time and place that…
Sun Ra Arkestra
Its leader died eight years ago, but the Sun Ra Arkestra carries on, with its strange combination of big-band swing, groove-heavy blues, and extraterrestrial aspiration. Herman Blount, the keyboardist and arranger whose Sun Ra moniker became synonymous with jazz adventurousness and utopianism, made a passel of records on various obscure labels for a good 40…
Don’t Mess With Sherrod
Before the 1974 election, Sherrod Brown met with Vern Riffe, the then-powerful state representative from southern Ohio. With his spray of curly brown hair, Brown looked like something out of a Bobby Kennedy handbook for young idealists. He was 21 years old, a Yale senior, and Mansfield’s Democratic candidate for the Ohio House. Riffe, in…
Bjork
The clicks and hums that make up the aural landscape of Vespertine, Bjork’s first studio release in four years, embrace the digital medium in much the same way that Radiohead’s pair of albums, Kid A and Amnesiac, did. And like Radiohead’s static-charged, non-linear compositions, Vespertine is preoccupied with the sound of music, not its emotional…
Something in the Air
A team of engineers left their Houston offices three years ago with a blank check and a yearning for the perfect hole. They appraised 6,000 of them coast-to-coast, but none was as impeccable as the one they found in Norton, Ohio. The town, about 35 miles south of Cleveland, has a 540-acre cavern nearly a…
Butthole Surfers
The virulence of the Butthole Surfers really started in 1987, with the release of Locust Abortion Technician and the band’s subsequent tour. As magnificently shocking as the album was, nothing could match the sight of Gibby Haynes’s enormous frame hulking around the stage as he growled into his mic, occasionally setting fire to King Coffey’s…
Cut, Curl, Column
The Mike Roykos and Herb Caens of the world were brash, big-city columnists whose white-hot words burned through the page. Soot filled their lungs and tar mingled with their blood. But they were pretty useless with a hair dryer and a set of hot rollers. Which is too bad, because beauticians get all the good…
Joy Division
Ian Curtis’s quasi-romantic legacy — he hanged himself the night before his band, Joy Division, was to come to the States for a tour — has, rightly or wrongly, inspired lots of kids to start bands, write death-obsessed poems, and reconsider their lives. His haunting monotone, plus the band’s numbed minor-chord backing, was post-punk before…
