Kiss
Like a good orgasm, Kiss’s worth isn’t measured by any sort of critical evaluation, but by how loud it makes you scream. And the 80-million-plus devotees of Kiss’s umpteen records must have raw vocal cords indeed. Granted, most of the criticism leveled at Kiss’s pleasure-for-pleasure’s-sake rock and roll has been apt. Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley,…
Hunger Strike
“Mr. Human Rights,” they once called him, and though his was never the most famous name on the bill–that was Bono or Bruce Springsteen, Sting or Peter Gabriel–as the organizer of the Conspiracy of Hope concerts in 1986 and the Human Rights Now! world tour two years later, Jack Healey was very much the public…
Zero 7
Simple Things arrives in the States seven months after its initial release in Britain, where it seems to have challenged afternoon tea as the universally loved facet of English life. It’s almost platinum already, with the notoriously exuberant U.K. music press predicting its place on album-of-the-year lists for years to come; yet it remains to…
In Fine Spirits
Grandpa and his “beer and a bump” buddies would probably tumble right off their barstools if they could see what Clevelanders are drinking nowadays. According to bartenders at some area dining rooms, regional imbibers have gone gaga over Cosmopolitans, those fruity, easy-sipping cocktails of vodka, triple sec, lime juice, and cranberry juice. “Maybe it’s from…
DJ Colette
Like that opening crackle of the needle connecting with vinyl, a rhythmic backdrop of rainfall and thunder cues the onset of Colette Marino’s latest full-length house collection. But before the metrical thump of bass begins to swell, DJ Colette takes an opportunity to display her operatic chops with a potent a cappella rendition of the…
Busting Chops
Say, who’s that skinny fellow standing at the end of the bar? The guy with the tipped fedora, the loosened tie, and the jacket slung over one shoulder with a certain suave panache. Could it possibly be . . .? No, it couldn’t . . . and yet, if the Chairman of the Board were…
The Pink Holes
In the liner notes of this reissue of the Pink Holes’ second record, Holes guitarist Kurt Turd confesses that, when the band would get together, sometimes he’d be laughing too hard to play his instrument. This becomes wholly evident upon listening to Breakfast With the Pink Holes, an album that puts punch lines far above…
Joyful Vibe
Langston Hughes really isn’t known for his sense of joyous abandon. In fact, the celebrated writer could be preachy, moralistic, and heavy-handed at times. Which makes the presence of Black Nativity in his repertoire both surprising and exhilarating. The two-act play tells the tale of Christ through song, dance, and spirited storytelling, each spiced with…
Rockette-ing to Stardom
For four years, Toni Krakora was a dancer in a flashy Las Vegas casino. Night after night, she performed alongside Madonna and Michael Jackson impersonators. It wasn’t a bad gig, but not exactly Krakora’s dream job. For years, the Mayfield Heights native had aspired to dance with the legendary Radio City Rockettes. She even auditioned…
Ocean’s Eleven, give or take
The lights go down, and the puzzlement begins. Ensemble cast of superstars? Check. Loose remake of amusing curiosity? Check. Built-in, prefab sense of cool? Check. A little something for wistful fans of Dino and Sammy? Check. So . . . wait a minute. Is this The Cannonball Run Redux? With his ambitious but unnecessary remake…
The Ice Men Cometh
In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton led an expedition designed to reach the South Pole. But the winter was unprecedentedly harsh, and his ship, The Endurance, was trapped for eight months before being destroyed by the ice. The result was a two-year ordeal of almost unbelievably bad luck, offset only by equally unbelievable determination and strength…
A Glitch in Time
The beautiful little conceit at the heart of Brad Anderson’s Happy Accidents is that audiences will sit still once more for the crackpot notion of time travel — and in a movie that’s not science fiction. To his credit, Anderson pulls off the trick. All but the coldest hearts in the house will likely become…
Lion Hearted
Having grown up in New Orleans, center of the jazz universe, Nicholas Payton can’t even remember his first Mardi Gras, his first visit to Preservation Hall, his first jazz concert. It’s not his fault, though: The 28-year-old trumpeter attended each event before his first birthday. “I was doing that kind of stuff since I was…
Our House
Together is the second feature from Swedish director Lukas Moodysson, whose 1998 Fucking Amal was shown in America two years ago under the title Show Me Love, renamed for obvious reasons. Together is an ensemble piece — a sharp, perceptive look at a Swedish commune in a suburb of Stockholm, circa 1975. That Moodysson himself…
Thinking Out of the Box
Seated in quiet obstinacy, an audience of perturbed post-rock enthusiasts lined the floor of the Beachland Ballroom on a chilly Sunday evening in September. Already disgruntled over having to wait more than 40 minutes to get in the door, ticketholders were in no mood for anything but the act they came to hear: instrumental experimentalists…
Life After LTV
So this is what exile from corporate America looks like: an office with the charm of a credit bureau. No secretary, no desk the size of the U.S.S. Enterprise, no view of the city skyline. Just a single window offering a peek at a courtyard in Berea. No, this is not the office Peter Kelly…
The Natives Are Restless
Scott Jacobs has a big head. Literally. As MC Chief Body of the injun-obsessed Cleveland rap group Strik9ine, Jacobs is known to sport a woolly mammoth of a headdress that looks as if it’s left some unfortunate, sheared baboon shivering in its birthday suit. But while Jacobs may have trouble getting his dome through doorways,…
Menace II Suburbia
The hearing in Geauga County Court is late to start, and Bart Wolstein is fidgety. He leaves his chair to stand in the doorway, arms folded. At six-foot-three, Wolstein cuts an elegant figure. His white hair, coal-colored eyes, and bone-deep tan suggest Ricardo Montalban. In contrast to the restless Wolstein, John McGill sits straight and…
DJ Krush
With a record and a mixer, Japan’s DJ Krush has sought to evolve the turntable from a simple device that re-creates sound to one that generates and unites new forms of it. Splitting from Japanese hip-hop outfit Krush Posse in the early ’90s, Krush soon dropped his first solo experiment, Strictly Turntablized, a steamy brew…
No Witnesses
One day in 1998, four Jehovah’s Witnesses pulled up to a stop sign in the village of Stratton. A man came up to their car and started shouting. “He said they were not allowed to be in the town, that people moved to Stratton with the understanding they would not be bothered by Jehovah’s Witnesses,…
Weezer
The average Slayer fan could kill every single person at a Weezer show with his bare hands. But if nerds in grandpa sweaters rule the world, Weezer teaches it to sing. What began as slacker irony (sweater songs, Happy Days spoofs) soon morphed into painful introspection (Weezer’s underrated 1996 album Pinkerton). But seeing as how…
Main Dish: Poverty
Case Western Reserve’s literature includes liberal deployment of words like “community,” “leadership,” “partnership,” and the ever-popular “commitment to excellence.” It’s the kind of sloganeering used by most universities, which fancy themselves as beacons of enlightenment on par with the College of Cardinals — only without the funny hats. But in the world of advanced scholarship,…
Soilent Green
Black metal, just like soccer, is a recreational activity in which Americans routinely have their asses handed to them by the Euros. With all the inevitability of the Netherlands national team delivering a smackdown to Team U.S.A. in the quest for the World Cup, American black-metal wannabes pale in comparison to their church-burning counterparts in…
Licensure Nightmares
Ohio’s education equation doesn’t add up: I read with interest your piece “Teaching Teachers” [November 8]. This is an angle of Ohio’s education equation that has been largely overlooked by the media. Because I am a tenured teacher with 22 years of experience in Ohio, I have a unique view of education, and I must…
Nickel Creek
Perhaps only The New York Times could have written this headline: “Bluegrass That Can Twang and Be Cool Too.” Excuse me? Somebody inform the gray lady that all bluegrass is cool. Nickel Creek, the subject of the above header, is just different. The twang’s there, but forget everything you think of when you hear the…
Marching on Berlin
There are two toe-tapping reasons to seek out the Cleveland Play House’s Christmas offering of The Tin Pan Alley Rag. Besides its blissful lack of most things mistletoe, it contains a generous sampling of crisply rendered songs by two of the last century’s central popular music innovators, Irving Berlin and Scott Joplin. These songs are…
