Fox in the Jailhouse?
Curtis Patrick is no stranger to the bitter dispute between union and management at Northeast Pre-Release Center, the women’s prison on East 30th Street. As prison investigator, part of Patrick’s job is to gather evidence when guards are accused of having sex with inmates. And that has been happening a lot. In the past five…
Straight Downhill
Many of us grew up with diva dreams, picturing ourselves alone onstage in the spotlight, surrounded by adoring folk. Then Mom came in, wiped the lipstick off our mouths, and told us to get ready for dinner. As we grew, we figured out that, if we really wanted to live that fabulous fantasy of stardom,…
Various Artists
More frightening than watching a couple of horror has-beens duke it out is suffering through a B-side from the sucky South African group Seether on the Freddy Vs. Jason soundtrack. A moldering hit from Powerman 5000 also makes the flesh crawl; fortunately, a pair of Cleveland’s finest — metalists Mushroomhead and Chimaira — help buoy…
Letters to the Editor
Leave Rent-to-Owns Alone They’re the best bet after Best Buy: I am responding to “Bounty Hunter” [July 9], on rent-to-owns. As a consumer, I feel that your article is based on half-truths and has a very one-sided opinion. It is unfair and ridiculous to accuse rent-to-own businesses of harassment. When customers enter into an agreement…
Old Friends
Like most serious dining devotees, we can’t wait to discover the hippest new restaurant or check out the hottest new chef. But sometimes — especially when summer’s pace starts to slow and we have time to catch our breath — it’s fun to reconnect with old friends: some of the tried-and-true restaurants that form the…
Dandy Warhols
With their boho-Stones swagger, psychedelic drone, and tongue-in-cheek lyrics — not to mention the sexiest cover ever made of AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells” — the Dandy Warhols struck ironic musical poses before irony became hipster camouflage. Remember that, when you listen to the electronica-fried Welcome To The Monkey House, co-produced by vocalist Courtney Taylor-Taylor and Duran…
Celluloid Zeroes
The five film freaks at the center of Cinemania are compulsive. They take in dozens of movies each week. They alter their diets to accommodate their no-time-for-bathrooms lifestyle. Without a doubt, they would be among the audience members watching the 2002 documentary about New York City movie fans (which plays Saturday as part of the…
Hit the Trail
Don’t let those bulging calf muscles fool you: For most of our hiking and biking buds, a workout on the Towpath Trail is as much an excuse to toss back a few cold ones and load up on carbs as it is about fitness. Until recently, though, the choice of accessible and appropriate eateries for…
Chingy
Chingy’s debut album rides into record stores on the strength of “Right Thurr,” an insanely catchy single full of chest-swelling keyboard melodies. It sounds like the inside of a strip club, spewing out snare effects and lewd drum patterns (inspired by the Neptunes) that twirl and clap like dancers spinning on a pole. Mostly produced…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, August 7 Alt-rock is alive and well in a pair of young bands from California. Trapt and Smile Empty Soul, on their eponymous debut albums, churn out ultra-heavy guitar riffs, while their easily irritated singers pile on enough dark and brooding imagery to populate a Wes Craven flick. Sure, these guys need to soak…
Building a Mystery
Gene Simmons never talked about his favorite breakfast cereal. Robert Plant never explained how he squeezed himself into blue jeans so tight that his bulge became Led Zeppelin’s unofficial fifth member. Three decades ago, rock and roll’s prime movers all pointedly cultivated an air of mystery about themselves, which made their bands seem larger than…
King Britt
Remember those old “Are You Bourgie?” posters found at college campuses back in the ’80s? “Bourgie,” which was shorthand for bourgeois — referring to those who straddle the top end of the blue-collar social scale and the lower end of E. Franklin Frazier’s proper Negro caste — was used as a low-level dis back then.…
Meet the Beatle
Lawrence Gilmour accidentally left his towel in Paul McCartney’s dressing room four years ago. Good move. When he politely told an assistant he wanted to retrieve it, “A voice from the back shouted, ‘Is that Lawrence? Tell him just to come right in,'” recalls the Scotland-born Gilmour. He had been chosen to play McCartney’s doppelgänger…
Room at the Top
As is true with many of the new breed of male singer-songwriters occupying the same cultural blip, there’s plenty to dislike about Atlanta-based musician John Mayer: his goody-goody sincerity, his polished presentation, his loosely handsome good looks. Like his labelmate Pete Yorn, he reminds you of one of those guys in high school that the…
Mint
It’s pretty telling that Mint dots the “i” in its name with a little heart, on the cover of its eponymous debut. With handclaps, talk of rainbows, and song titles such as “I Still Think the World of You,” Mint’s winsome pop is radiant enough to deepen tans a shade or two. “All I want…
No Future
SAT 8/9 The Pink Holes last played together three years ago. The veteran local punk quartet hasn’t picked up an instrument or even discussed potential gigs since the turn of the century. Yet they’re one of the three bands taking part in Ohio’s Punk Past, a concert at the Rock Hall paying tribute to the…
Oh, the Humanity
Artists whose reputations precede them usually fall into one of three categories: legends, problem kids, and the overhyped. Aimee Mann can’t be forced into any of those pigeonholes. She might one day be considered a legend; to many songwriters, she already is. A fighter for artists’ rights and rebel against major-label hegemony, she exudes a…
Dead by July
Dead by July starts off helter-skelter, and the band burns countless calories staying out of kilter. Hopped up on booze and smokes, the Cleveland quartet play punk based on the Detroit model: hard, fast, no-frills garage rock. Four/four-crash-fill-repeat drumming pounds away behind dragster riffing that comes out of analog amps so loud, you can feel…
Sandy Dunkin’
SUN 8/10 You don’t have to sport a SoCal tan and physique to play at Mitchell’s Tavern, but it wouldn’t hurt to tune up your skills for the Sand Volleyball Tournament taking place on Sunday. Six-player teams (at least two must be women) will play three regulation games; the four teams with the best records…
Dying for D.I.Y.
Before it was silenced on New Year’s Eve 2002, Cleveland’s Speak in Tongues had become one of the most renowned D.I.Y. clubs in the country. Located for eight years at 4311 Lorain Avenue, S.I.T. was up there with such prominent arts/music collectives as New York City’s ABC No Rio and Oakland’s Gilman St. Over 1,600…
Bugs for Breakfast
FRI 8/8 The brown bats that call the South Chagrin Shelterhouse home are so small, they can crawl through a hole the size of a dime. But they’re a big part of the park’s Bat Gala Friday. The action starts at dusk, when the bat colony takes flight. “It’s ‘good morning’ for the bats,” explains…
Burning Sensation
“This was one of the weirdest things we’ve ever done,” Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne announced during his band’s headlining set at the Scene Music Awards last Thursday. For a band whose albums are populated by priest-driven ambulances and pink robots — and which took to the stage backed by dancing owls and a shimmying…
No Place Like Foam
SAT 8/9 Chris-Anthony Gonzalez has been making dance floors frothy since the mid-’90s. Now the godfather of foam is bringing his 2,500-square-foot “vertical bedroom” to Akron for the Big Fag Party at the gay club Interbelt. At a recent event in Detroit, dancers were stripping to their birthday suits, Gonzalez says. “They went crazy. They…
Midwest Reggae Fest
Over the past 11 years, the Midwest Reggae Fest has blossomed into the most successful annual reggae festival between California and N.Y.C. And with good reason: Who doesn’t enjoy packing the cooler (and the collie pipe) and basking in the sun-soaked smoky vibes, while the best of Jamaica and Northeast Ohio’s reggae talent pumps through…
Artful Dodging
MON 8/11 In the six years that Steve Hackett played guitar with Genesis, the band grew from a cult favorite to an international music machine. Which was exactly when he bailed. “If I don’t love it, I don’t do it,” says Hackett, who left the band in 1977 because of its growing reliance on “songwriting…
3 Doors Down
Mississippi’s 3 Doors Down makes top-notch second-rank rock: “Kryptonite,” the big one from their 2000 debut The Better Life, married cleanly corrosive guitars, efficient rock-dude vocals, a Nickelback chorus that actually swung, and a snare-drum riff that made it easy to pick out on the radio. Away From the Sun, the band’s latest, is less…
Officers Down Pat
Not to worry. Whenever summer machismo levels threaten to fall below mad-dog range, Hollywood invariably steps in to restore the status quo. Witness S.W.A.T. , a thoroughly unremarkable police-action movie, starring the magnetic Samuel L. Jackson as L.A.P.D. Sergeant Dan “Hondo” Harrelson — known affectionately to his men as “the gold standard of ass-kickin”” –…
The Human League
Now that electroclash and DJ song-melding have made New Wave a popular era from which to pillage ideas, Human League, the synthpop innovator from Sheffield, England, is enjoying a boost in credibility. Earlier this year, noted mash-up maestro Richard X took the digital dirge of their 1978 debut single, “Being Boiled” –dating from when the…
Stupor Freak
The hormone-crazed teens who jam into the multiplexes this week to watch Freaky Friday are unlikely to have any idea that this domestic fantasy about a 15-year-old girl who switches bodies with her mother for a day is the remake of a movie Disney released 25 years ago. They won’t know — or care –…
Adrian Legg
You can’t listen to Adrian Legg for long without being exposed to a lot of different music. Eclecticism appears to be a natural state for the critically acclaimed London-born guitarist. Shifting gears from delicate classical phrasing to country-blues romp, from simple folk melody to ear-opening jazz harmony, is just business as usual for Legg, who…
London Underground
It’s a great pleasure to behold a chunk of art that’s both dank and fresh at the same time, and this appraisal perfectly fits the superb Dirty Pretty Things. The latest from veteran director Stephen Frears (Gumshoe, Prick Up Your Ears, High Fidelity) immediately transports the viewer to a subjective inner landscape, shaped by dub-funk,…
Steely Dan
It’s weird, and more than a bit ironic, to see Walter Becker and Donald Fagan on tour as Steely Dan in the 21st century. Becker and Fagan quit touring at the height of Steely Dan’s popularity (“Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” their first Top 5 hit), signaling the breakup of a band that might never…
The Crime of Father McBride
It had been a hell of a day. Douglas Burkhart had spent the afternoon visiting a friend who was dying of colon cancer at University Hospitals. What Burkhart really needed was a beer. He stepped into Rockies, a popular gay bar on a rundown section of Detroit Avenue. Burkhart was gay, but he was also…
Dutch Master Manipulator
Aernout Mik’s video installation at the Cleveland Museum of Art isn’t a crowd-pleaser — at least not one recent afternoon. Initially lured by the show’s big screens and luscious colors, youngsters fled within seconds, complaining of nausea and dizziness. Parents quickly followed, griping that the art wasn’t art. Few stuck around for more than 30…
Soilent Green
Soilent Green is one of the weirdest bands to come out of the murky Southern noise-core scene. They share Eyehategod’s affection for feedback and filth, but rather than heading down a blind alley of doom-riffage, Soilent songs continually mutate as they go along, rarely ending on the same riff with which they began. This makes…
Whacking Weinbaum
Batya Weinbaum was an eccentric, noisy, untidy presence on the 18th floor of Cleveland State University’s Rhodes Tower. She liked to argue politics. She liked to carry on about feelings. And she had a seemingly insatiable appetite for confrontation. English department faculty must have known what they were getting when they brought her aboard in…
No Borders Here
Chiwetel Ejiofor is phoning in from Montreal. Sounds like a Tom Waits lyric, but it’s true: The fresh, gifted actor with the tricky handle is too busy at present (just finished doing The Canterbury Tales for BBC-TV, currently working on the feature Slow Burn, with LL Cool-J and Jolene Blalock) to wing around promoting his…
Suzanne Vega
Suzanne Vega’s voice is a glass of ice water in your sunburned hand. Yet its insistent cool can be a problem. No matter how precise her diction is or how refined her tone, many listeners hear her newer records as more of the same. Unless they see Vega perform. It would make sense if Vega…
Love Is All Around
The Cleveland Museum of Art is internationally heralded for its diverse collections and great depth of Asian, pre-Columbian, and medieval works. Now the museum’s chief executive is rolling in the accolades as well. Katharine Lee Reid, who most recently nurtured goodwill in the form of widespread layoffs and pay cuts, has been named Asshole of…
Bat’s Where It’s At
The page-one news these days is pretty shocking. “CROP CIRCLES APPEARING ON PEOPLE’S HEADS!” “SECRET VIDEOTAPE SHOWS LIONS EATING CHRISTIANS IN IRAQ!” Blissfully unfettered by the niggling requirements of truth, the supermarket tabloid Weekly World News also has been running a long-standing series on the adventures of one Bat Boy, a half-human/half-bat supposedly found in…
Neil Young
Some of Neil Young’s best records are bound by a unifying theme — Tonight’s the Night, Rust Never Sleeps, Sleeps With Angels. But he’s never made a concept album as linear, narrative, and ambitious as Greendale, a song cycle about a fictional California town and one of its families, which captures three generations dealing with…
