El Gallito
When Cleveland City Councilman Nelson Cintron Jr. arrives for a recent breakfast meeting at Michael’s Family Restaurant, a small eatery on Clark Avenue near West 25th Street, he’s accompanied by eight-year-old Lyonette and six-year-old Lisanette, two of his four children. On this Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Cintron shares babysitting duties with his ex-wife, Nayra Perez, with…
Side Dish
Wine Tasting 101 Ready to wean yourself away from the white zinfandels and step into the world of grown-up wine? Shopkeeper and enologist Brian Wright is eager to help. Wright, manager of Wine Crafting (25200 Miles Road, Bedford Heights), is leading a series of educational but oh-so-friendly Wednesday wine tastings at his store, aimed at…
Revival of the Fittest
Some of the audience at the splendid pre-Broadway revival of Finian’s Rainbow at the Palace seemed a bit disoriented, as if they had just encountered fresh churned butter after a lifetime of scooping oleo out of a plastic container. Those weaned on decades of anemic stage versions of movies (Saturday Night Fever) and empty spectacles…
Redemption Gone
When the Wu-Tang Clan released its first single, 1993’s “Protect Ya Neck,” hardcore rap was associated almost exclusively with the West Coast. Dre, Snoop, and Cube were hip-hop’s most notorious rappers, and Death Row Records head honcho Suge Knight (currently serving time) was still at large, overseeing the whole g-funk operation as if he were…
Fishing Lines
The food’s not bad. The decor is clever, casual, and lighthearted. And the prices are reasonable. But does any of this justify the huge crowds angling for tables at Westlake’s Big Fish on Friday and Saturday nights? Not from this side of the shrimp fork, it doesn’t. The seafood restaurant — the 21st dining spot…
Lightening the Load
Jim Putnam is having one of those days. The Radar Bros. frontman recently threw out his back during a “grueling tour in Europe.” Making matters worse, the Los Angeles-based trio are scheduled to begin a two-week tour of the States in a few hours, and Putnam isn’t quite sure his body is up to it.…
Christoph Babbles On
“My life is a bit chaotic,” DJ Christoph de Babalon explains via phone from his home in Berlin. “I was just moving from Hamburg to Berlin, so everything is in boxes.” Chaos is virtually a way of life for de Babalon, who’s in the midst of preparing to embark on his first U.S. tour (he…
Livewire
Mark Murphy Nighttown December 2 Considering that be-bop singer Mark Murphy has the status of an elder statesman of jazz, the single twinkling earring he sported seemed oddly out of place. The stab at youthful fashion might have been better left at home. His singing, however, was another matter entirely. No throaty vestige of lost…
Playback
Tom Jones Reload (Gut/V2 import) Ignore Tom Jones’s “What’s New Pussycat?” past; the guy is modern and still a great performer. The title of Reload, a hit in England but currently not scheduled for domestic release in the U.S., may not play well in these post-Columbine times, but it’s on par with his latest work,…
Soundbites
Rapper Luther “Luke” Campbell visited the Rock Hall last week to check out the hip-hop exhibit and answer a few questions during a short press conference. Campbell, the founder of Miami’s 2 Live Crew, a group whose ribald song “Me So Horny” set off a whirlwind of controversy when it was released in 1989, rolled…
Instant Karma
Have you ever endured a relationship in which your partner beat you up mercilessly, just so he or she could “heal” you and play the redeemer later on? Granted, that’s a weird question and perhaps one better explored via Akbar and Jeff in Matt Groening’s Life in Hell strip, but it directly relates to the…
Holiday Gaiety
The North Coast Men’s Chorus holiday concerts are a prelude to a bigger, more celebratory festival next July in San Jose. It’s there that more than 120 choruses — 5,000 members from the Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses — will participate in the quadrennial, noncompetitive event. Neil Giewont, one of the founders of the…
Black and White and Red All Over
Already tired of those evergreen Christmas tales of toy soldiers and sugarplum fairies? Don’t despair — there’s plenty of blood to splatter your halls red this holiday season in John Stark Bellamy II’s new book, The Corpse in the Cellar, a collection of 25 true gut-wrenching tales of Cleveland’s crime-ridden past. Relive the “Gothic doom”…
Party at Ground Zero
Millennial hysteria takes many forms. Some people fall prey to a travel agent and book a cruise to the Aegean, bent on passing New Century’s Eve with Aristotle’s ghost and a nice plate of moussaka. Others, of appropriate age and inclination, vow to get drunk and copulate at the stroke of midnight, thereby conceiving a…
The Frankenstein Factor
The reporter from Toronto wants to know about the two-headed dog. Actually, there was no two-headed dog, explains Robert J. White, distinguished brain surgeon, papal consultant, and head transplanter. There was a dog with two brains. In the 1960s, White and his surgical team attached an isolated brain to the blood vessels on a dog’s…
Make Justice, Not Money
Sticking it to The Man in Seattle last week, thousands of chanting, sign-carrying, entrance-blocking, fist-raising, banner-blowing, arrest-provoking college students embraced hell-raising in all its many forms. They and their ilk put the city in a state of emergency trying to relay to World Trade Organization delegates — through clouds of tear gas — a simple…
Edge
Another Browns pasting? Who cares! The hot betting action in town these days is on the high school gridiron, with the tournament victories of St. Ignatius and Walsh Jesuit closing out the most lucrative year yet for local bookies. Spurred by the Internet and overheated “Friday Night Fever” television coverage, wagering on scholastic studs now…
Excessive to a Fault
The new exhibit at Spaces is like the guy in the old Federal Express commercial who rattled off a half-hour speech in 30 seconds. Accumulations includes the work of six artists who compress large quantities of toy guns, balloons, colorful soft-drink cups, and much else into concentrated areas, and it’s quite a sight all right.…
