Held Hostage
Day One: It was just part of the job, just another movie on another afternoon. This one promised to be no more special than any other, save for the casting of Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe. Proof of Life was the movie during which they fell in love, or whatever it is they call adultery…
The Dictators
When the Dictators released their now critically hailed debut Go Girl Crazy! in 1975, rock and roll seemed ripe for a serious kick in the ass. The New York Dolls’ dim star had just faded, and the seminal New York punk movement was yet to be born. So Andy Shernoff, Ross Funichello, Scott Kempner, Stu…
American Limbo
When the student protesters started their hunger strike and raised their tents at the square in front of the Lenin statue in Kiev, Konstantin Daviskiba felt compelled to be there. He was 32, and he’d been rebelling against the Soviet Union’s Communist government since he was the students’ age. It was 1990, a year after…
Cypress Hill
After nearly a decade of packing the bowls and taking hits from the bong, Cypress Hill deserves a live album. That doesn’t make the new Live at the Fillmore anything more than a quick cash-in or the performances on it anything but cheap re-creations of songs done much better in the studio. Still, it seems…
Wanted: Students
Notre Dame College of Ohio President Anne L. Deming read the surveys, but all she needed to do was talk to the moms on campus. A number of administrators had daughters with near-perfect SAT scores — and none of their girls would consider attending an all-women’s college. “If those young women won’t, when they have…
John Cale
John Cale is an enigmatic, dour Welshman with a quirky sense of humor, exquisitely refined aesthetic sense, and a checkered, fascinating rock-and-roll résumé. Cale, who turns 60 this month, is a founding member of the Velvet Underground, but because he refused to play second fiddle to the preening, autocratic Lou Reed, was dismissed in late…
A Ripped Safety Net
As October waned, Angela Jones worried. An eviction notice menaced her from its ripped-open envelope. She was sliding into homelessness — her daughter and three grandchildren in tow. The ground started giving way in July, when Jones, a high-school secretary, replied to an innocuous classified ad. The ad featured a house Jones thought her daughter,…
Roger Waters
While he was no Syd Barrett, singer-bassist Roger Waters made a better frontman for Pink Floyd than singer-guitarist David Gilmour, who took control of the band after Waters left in 1983. On his subsequent solo records, Waters explored the same heavy-handed themes of abandonment, paranoia, and disillusion that ran through Pink Floyd’s albums, while Gilmour…
The People’s Patrol
When you’re Joe Crimefighter, you gotta keep your temper in check. Kids might mock you or throw Rally’s bags at your car, but you can’t get mad and yell at them. Even if you really, really want to. “We try not to provoke people. Which for me is pretty hard,” says Keith Lane, commander of…
Various Artists
Tupac Shakur wasn’t easy to classify. The late rapper was a walking contradiction, a study in dichotomy so fierce that even his friends and family never could get a firm grasp on the guy. His poetry, thoughtful and elegant, spoke of life as a black man at the end of the 20th century; he was…
The Edge
The mayor-council catfight rose to new levels last month when Hizzoner’s Office released a report — large enough to be used as a weapon in a bar fight — refuting a Plain Dealer story in which council members accused Big Mike of holding up civic projects for political purposes. The report doesn’t exonerate the mayor,…
Pepe Deluxe
In an earlier life, DJ Slow, Ja-Jazz, and DJ James Spectrum produced a few swank slow jams for a phone sex company overseas. Experience pays. The 13 tracks collected on the Finnish turntable trio’s debut warm up with soft-core porn grooves, then swell into the kind of catchy big-beat hooks that were missing on Fatboy…
Bless the Blockhead
Christmastime is here, but for the first time, Charlie Brown’s father will not be around to watch his depressed, round-headed child celebrate the holiday. He will not be in front of the television next week to watch his little boy seek psychiatric help from a nickel-grubbing girl who diagnoses her patient with pantophobia, “the fear…
American Rockstar
You’ve gotta wonder about a group that calls itself American Rockstar, an act of self-aggrandizement that’s the equivalent of calling your first novel Bestseller. In keeping with its lofty self-image, the group sees itself as the panacea for a stagnant local scene, calling its album a “real in-your-face rock and roll album with a real…
The Hunt Continues
Lying doesn’t make you a Nazi: Your article [“The Hunt for Dailide,” November 16] is one of the best that I have read on the operations of the Office of Special Investigations. I knew only one of the accused, and I am totally convinced that the OSI impoverished and hounded to death an innocent man.…
Women’s Work
Since 1991, the Florence O’Donnell Wasmer Gallery on the campus of Ursuline College has been host to the yearly Women’s Invitational, an exhibit of work by female artists from the Greater Cleveland area. This year’s installment showcases Sheryl Hoffman’s witty neo-Dadaist sculpture, Phyllis Seltzer’s accomplished paintings and prints of Cleveland, and Joan Damankos’s provocative installations…
Weia to Go
Just when you think the Cleveland-area dining scene is getting too full of itself, along comes a place like Weia Teia, a funky little restaurant inside Great Northern Mall whose motto could well be “We have fun with food.” This is owner Jia Wei’s second “multicultural” restaurant, the first being the identically named Weia Teia…
That Darn Wabbit!
The Cleveland Play House is hedging its bets for the holidays. Its marble halls are crammed with corporately sponsored Christmas trees. In the lobby, burning brightly with the glow of diversity, is a life-sized menorah. On the Bolton stage is the Play House’s fourth production of Harvey, one of the most foolproof charmers of the…
Chef Shift
We were all geared up to take a second look at Napa Valley Grille (26300 Cedar Road), the happy alternative to food-court eats in tony Beachwood Place, when we got the bad news: Executive Chef Robin Wilkins — hired in September to head up this outpost of the California-based chain — is already history. It’s…
Darker Days
Known best for having produced the bright-eyed folk-pop songstress Jewel and those bratty punks Blink-182, San Diego generally isn’t regarded as a hotbed of brooding indie rock. Playing somber music that sounds like Neil Young experiencing a nervous breakdown, the Black Heart Procession is perhaps the least likely act to be associated with a sunny…
Inn Distinct
Against all evidence, Robin Yates believed in Prospect Avenue. This was the ’70s, when “Cleveland was the murder capital of the world” and he could look down his street and see hookers standing nude in their windows. “Prospect was the worst,” he says now, in the refined elegance of his parlor. “There were 500 prostitutes…
Beatle Bum
During the five-year period he spent in seclusion at his home in New York’s Dakota Building, John Lennon periodically issued dispatches to the outside world confirming that he was content to be a devoted bread-baking husband who never left the house. The reality, as author Robert Rosen tells it in the consistently engrossing Nowhere Man,…
Bar Chords
Whether you’re a seasoned veteran of musical theater or someone who only belts out “Oklahoma” in the shower, you have something in common with Bob Navis, the artistic director at Ohio City’s Near West Theatre. Four years ago, Navis walked into the Harmony Bar and Grille and noticed a piano tucked away in the corner.…
Soundbites
Oblivious to the deafening “ICP” chants echoing through the Agora, Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, the two rappers who make up the Insane Clown Posse, are relaxing in their backstage dressing room. They’ve been at the venue all week, rehearsing for a 10-city December tour. The November 28 date here was added at the…
Pushing the Limit
About halfway through the megabudget mountain-climbing adventure Vertical Limit, even the most rugged, thrill-hungry disaster movie fans may find themselves going numb. Not from the howling weather on the icy faces of K2, in the Himalayas, where the action supposedly takes place. Not from oxygen deprivation. Not even from stretches of dialogue so crudely written…
Marilyn Manson
Original shock-rocker Alice Cooper now brags about his golf game and lords over his own budding theme restaurant enterprise — so much for feeding his Frankenstein. It remains unlikely that Marilyn Manson, Cooper’s incendiary modern equivalent, will suffer the same middle-of-the-road fate. Still, it’s a surprise that Manson has survived for this long in any…
