Going Down Swinging
Overt displays of sexuality make Attorney General John Ashcroft uncomfortable. Look no further than his decision to drape a curtain over the breast-baring Spirit of Justice statue that was a backdrop for his press conferences. So he can’t be happy about being named a defendant in a lawsuit filed by an Ohio-based chain of swingers…
White Riot
MC Paul Barman is an Ivy League Jew, he sounds like one, and he ain’t hiding it. The man is white as Jerry Seinfeld. Defiantly, courageously (foolishly? annoyingly?), he pounces on rap as his creative outlet, and the results are, for better or worse, unlike any other hip-hop album you’ll hear this year. You think…
Lowering the Booms
Chuck Booms, as usual, is putting on a show. He’s got a Michelob in his hand, a smirk on his face. His hands run through his hair; his mouth just runs. The topic: People who flee cops. Booms’s answer: Shoot ’em. “If people do not pull over, the police should be allowed to blast them,”…
Direct to Video
As the temperature drops, the Cleveland concert schedule becomes as limited as Ozzy’s working vocabulary. This is the time of year, then, toA stay home, save money on parking and five-dollar beers — and then blow it all on concert vids to tide you over until the spring thaw. In recent weeks, a bevy of…
Lerner’s Legacy
To hear local media tell it, the whole world grieved when Al Lerner died. “Even the heavens opened up and wept for Al Lerner yesterday,” gushed The Plain Dealer the day after his rainy funeral. A TV reporter opined that, of all the deaths of famous people he’s covered, none seemed so loved as Lerner.…
Rap to the West
Over a beer at Lakewood’s Riverwood Café on a recent Saturday afternoon, Tyler Lombardo utters something we thought we’d never hear a promoter say. “A lot of talk about money . . . gives you bad thoughts; it scrambles your mind,” says the young head of Tydedown Productions, “because if you don’t end up with…
The Terrorist in the Sleigh
CONFIDENTIAL TRANSMISSION FOR YOUR EYES ONLY Mr. Attorney General Ashcroft: I wish to alert you to a terrorist threat, based on an exhaustive investigation by the FBI Counter-Intelligence Task Force, Cleveland Office. Subject is one SANTA CLAUS — alias KRIS KRINGLE, SAINT NICK, THE ROUND GUY. Subject was previously thought to be a serial burglar.…
Möst Impressive
Celebrated Cleveland Orchestra conductor Christoph von Dohnányi cast a shadow the size of the Terminal Tower, but his successor, Franz Welser-Möst, has wasted no time in building a legacy of his own. The orchestra’s new music director was just named Musical America’s 2003 Conductor of the Year at a ceremony held at New York City’s…
(Almost) Everyone’s a Critic
The following letters furnished by the Coalition to Reinstate Keith A. Joseph (Keith A. Joseph, treasurer): I am very sad to hear that Scene’s arts editor has decided to fire Keith A. Joseph as its theater critic. For over 10 years, I have looked forward to Keith’s witty, insightful theater reviews, which so often inspired…
Scar Culture
In terms of ethnic diversity, metal tends to be as homogeneous as it is heavy. But not so with New York City’s Scar Culture. A band with Indian, Russian, and American heritage, Scar Culture brings both breadth and brutality to the fold. Indeed, the group’s sound is just as diverse as its band members’ ancestry.…
Need for Speed
Speedskater Kristin Biondo doesn’t get ready for her next big race by jogging or eating big bowls of pasta. The most important step for the 16-year-old competitor from Broadview Heights is a mental one — being able to picture winning long before she hits the ice. Her visual powers will be put to the test…
The Cigar Store Indians
The dirty southern blues revivalists in the Cigar Store Indians are the hottest thing to roar across Georgia since Sherman lit up the joint. Clearly, a band is working a major groove when popular demand leads to a live album after only two releases — which is exactly how CSI’s latest, Guest List, was stomped…
Orc Chops
Fantasy is at its best when it ennobles our reality, and in this year’s cinema, no fantasy towers above The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The second installment of J.R.R. Tolkien’s dark and delightful yarn is here adapted just as handily as last year’s The Fellowship of the Ring. But in a shift…
Luther Wright & the Wrongs
Canadian bluegrass wranglers Luther Wright & the Wrongs were leading a perfectly normal band existence — first as a side project born from Sarah Harmer’s backing outfit Weeping Tiles, then as a full-fledged entity. A pair of homegrown albums and several successful tours were proof that Wright and his Wrongs were making slow, steady headway.…
Drunk-Punch Love
Nobody asked to see the Canadian Bad Boy’s ass crack, but there’d be plenty more butt-ugliness where that came from. It was still early evening at the fight club in the Flats, and the Sheik was already in trouble. His floppy-breasted opponent had dealt his best blows and was set to move in for the…
David Allan Coe
David Allan Coe has some puckering up to do. “There were 13 kids and a bunch of dogs/A house full of chickens and a yard full of hogs . . . coal burnin’ stove, no natural gas/If that ain’t country, I’ll kiss your ass,” Coe sings on his classic, autobiographical anthem “If That Ain’t Country.”…
Meaner Streets
Martin Scorsese’s latest epic of the streets, Gangs of New York, means to show us how a great metropolis was forged in the mid-19th-century cauldrons of unbridled greed, ethnic violence, and Civil War. It means to give us the city as wild frontier — without the usual cowboy hats. This is a tall order, and…
The Frogs
As alleged “gay supremacists,” who once rattled the cage of underground music with 1989’s cult classic It’s Only Right and Natural, Dennis and Jimmy Flemion have gone beyond telling the world, “We are homos, hear us roar.” Their misguided Racially Yours found them singing about ethnic tension — with one brother in blackface, the other…
Bob Dylan
This series is not as revelatory as the 58 tracks on volumes 1-3, not as revolutionary as the 14 on volume 4, but more rewarding than its predecessors nonetheless — because it marks the spot separating Essential Dylan and Disposable Zimmerman. Before Bobby Z. hooked up with his Rolling Thunder Revue, an all-star and small-star…
One Weak Notice
It had to happen eventually: the adorably scattered Sandra Bullock and the self-deprecatingly charming Hugh Grant, paired in a romantic comedy. As predictable as Miss Congeniality and almost as broad, Two Weeks Notice is an undemanding, by-the-numbers romance that is made bearable only by the presence of its two ingratiating stars. Bullock plays lawyer and…
GZA
Like Nas’s Stillmatic, GZA’s latest release makes titular reference to his breakthrough, 1995’s Liquid Swords, and shows renewed energy and integrity. But while Legend is the best Wu album since Ghostface Killah’s Supreme Clientele, it falls short of being a classic. GZA isn’t the most versatile vocalist; he tends to ride one signature rhythm throughout…
Outsider Art Is In
In 1985, the renowned, self-taught artist Howard Finster created the cover art for the Talking Heads’ album Little Creatures. The Baptist minister painted caricatures of band members in his folksy, childlike style, including one of David Byrne prancing about the countryside in his underwear. A decade later, Congress declared the work of Finster and other…
Kelly Osbourne
It could be worse. Shut Up — the latest product in the Osbourne family’s all-media assault on our ears, eyes, and taste — could be the coming-out party of a future diva. Or a teen dream gone bad. Or even a mess of crashing computers and whispered voices. Instead, Shut Up is a set of…
Hard-On for Hedwig
Male-to-female transsexuals are easily accepted in our culture, as long as they 1) are always identifiable, preferably by their sparkly silver eyeshadow, 2) are truly morose and tormented, and 3) entertain us, at a distance. Girly-boys are still often seen as the ultimate gag (double meaning intended) — monster/minstrels performing in femme-face, to the astonishment…
Ikara Colt
In the years since Johnny Rotten first reared his leering mug, England has been conspicuously slow in spawning successors to its original crop of rock and roll revolutionaries. Rather, recent British movements like “Madchester” and Britpop created a new rock aristocracy preoccupied with little more than its own hedonism, platinum sales, and tabloid celebrity. But…
Lady in Waiting
Mai, despite her regal-sounding name, is a mundane school administrator: one of three Irish sisters who drink whiskey, wear the pantsuits and bandannas that were all the rage in the ’70s, and spout pop philosophies from Cosmopolitan. Yet Mai is unique among the three: She has devoted her soul and identity, tragically, to an absent…
Supersoul
Florida doesn’t have the best rep these days. Musically, it boasts little more than “funky breaks,” a feel-good brand of dance music that goes over great with the candy-ravers, but sends critics scurrying for earplugs. Lately, however, a handful of Miami artists have been breaking into the upper 47, offering a new brand of dark,…
Mexican Standoff
To many Clevelanders, La Voz Hispaña may as well be written in Sanskrit. But when it comes to restaurant menus, most of us here on the North Coast speak Spanish fluently. Whether it’s tostadas or tamales, flautas or fajitas, the vocabulary of Mexican dining has become our common tongue and has made south-of-the-border fare some…
Roberto Ocasio’s Latin Jazz Project
Once again, our small market makes for small ambitions. None of Cleveland’s disparate communities of Latin music lovers are dense enough to float their own boats for long, so longtime resident Roberto Ocasio and his helpmates scrounge up a “tropical jam” that really should be titled Algo Para Todos — Something for Everyone. Devotees of…
Southern Comfort
Trust me, it’s been many a year since anything as plebeian as Twinkies or Oreos have passed these lips. But here’s the thing: Batter-dipped, deep-fried, and given a generous powdered-sugar shower, these bourgeois bad boys are so obscenely delicious, it ought to be a crime. This culinary epiphany came upon me just last week, as…
Various Artists
Hip-hoppers are notorious for dividing into warring factions, but there’s nothing typical about Akron’s rising underground mic wreckers. At a recent blowout CD release party, four of Ohio’s illest — Poets of Another Breed, Honeypot, Phonologic, and Gator — unveiled new discs, all of which are represented on this sampler. Voted Scene’s artist of the…
Grey Skies Turn Blue
Jon Sayre seldom lives up to his nickname. For a guy known as “Freak” to fans and friends, Erase the Grey’s frontman is disarmingly well-mannered. Sitting in his West Side home on a recent Tuesday night, Sayre excuses himself after saying “ass.” He speaks of music with all the wide-eyed wonder of a teen caught…
