The Edge
Bay Chief Boosts Sheppard Village People! Among the well-wishers at the Sheppard trial last week was Bay Village Police Chief David Wright. “I wanted to meet Sam and wish him luck on behalf of the Bay Village police,” says Wright, a 20-year veteran of the force. “We certainly hold no animosity toward him. He’s the…
Coinmonster
Coinmonster The Schematic (Bandaloop) A metal band from New Castle, Pennsylvania, Coinmonster might as well be based in Ohio — the trio regularly plays shows in Northeast Ohio and is managed by a firm from Columbus. The band will be celebrating the release of The Schematic, its fifth CD, locally with a show at the…
Letters to the Editor
Honk If You Love Racial Slurs Regarding Mike Tobin’s article “Burn, Baby, Burn” [February 3], I must say this: Honkeys have nothing to bitch about. Honkeys have always run this country from day one. Honkeys always have had the best jobs. Honkeys always have been the majority. Honkeys always had the right to vote, and…
Soundbites
The best Cleveland-based rap act you’ve never heard While acts such as Jahi, Bone Thugs N Harmony, and Thieveland get most of the press around town, Ripsquad (rappers Speed and Furious) might just be the best Cleveland-based rap act you’ve never heard. The group, which is completing a full-length (Illa Godz) slated for release later…
Rubber With Soul
Where was the accident, and how many people died? Tire Sculptures, a new exhibit at the Akron Art Museum, is so full of twisted surfaces that one wonders if there are dead bodies and crushed car parts around the corner. African American sculptor Chakaia Booker knows what to do with scrap, though. By taking discarded…
Son of Burlesque
In the annual Friars’ Roast staged in Hades, the late Bob Fosse undoubtedly still provides the entertainment. His choreography is all suggestive of the cunning serpent, spreading desire under the apple tree in the Garden of Eden (think Joel Grey’s Cabaret emcee flicking a poisonous tongue or Gwen Verdon’s Lola slithering out of her lace…
Blast Resort
Elaine T. Cicora can be reached at elaine.cicora@clevescene.com.
East Meets West
The Greater Cleveland population is composed of people from a wide variety of ethnic origins — Slavs (i.e., Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Bulgarians, and Ukrainians) and non-Slavs (Hungarians, Romanians, and Greeks). Sadly, many people don’t know or care about their own backgrounds, let alone the backgrounds of others, and identify only one form…
Big Beat or Bust
There would be no Fatboy Slim (the guy responsible for crossover hits such as “Rockefeller Skank,” “Praise You,” and “Going Out of My Head”) or, for that matter, any decent dance music today without a chubby man from England named Damian Harris. For it was Harris’s brainchild, the Brighton-based record label Skint, that saw the…
Hair-Raising Metal
What sets Static-X apart from the rapidly proliferating, madding crowd of neo-rap-metallers spawned in the wake of Rage Against the Machine and Korn? What makes the band unique in the music world? Well, actually, absolutely nothing. Singer Wayne Static, he of the finger-in-the-light-socket hair and rubber-banded “beard,” professes and confesses: “Everything has been done already.…
A Novel Scrapbook
If the first novel by Thaddeus Rutkowski — from which he will be reading in Cleveland Heights and Kent this weekend — were made into a movie, it would have to be a slide show. Roughhouse, subtitled A Novel in Snapshots, is a collection of the impressions of a nameless narrator — from his childhood…
Pall in the Family
Like most married couples, Brett and Rennie Sparks spend most of their leisure time together. Unlike most married couples, the Sparkses also spend most of their professional time together, working as a dark folk/country act under the benign appellation the Handsome Family. And when it’s time for an interview, they even answer the phone together.…
Twist-Tie Affair
The Guinness Book of World Records credits 1,036 Colgate University students with playing Twister for three and a half hours on May 5, 1984. Fine, says Yvette Hanzel, campaign associate for the Western Reserve Historical Society, but when The Biggest Twister Party Ever takes place Friday at Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum, expect more than a mangled…
Morrissey
Morrissey Akron Civic Theatre February 14 It was appropriately ironic that, after making a career out of being unlucky in love, Morrissey picked Valentine’s Day to play at the Akron Civic Theatre. If there is a constant theme throughout Morrissey’s career, it’s the honest, often absurd lyrics that he delivers as if he were singing…
The Importance of Being Ernest
“Ernest, are you dead?” “I guess I would be, if I weren’t just that close to being an actual cartoon.” — Ernest Rides Again Cartoons live on forever, but after more than 15 years of falling off ladders, slamming his head into heavy objects, and being repeatedly electrocuted and blown up, Jim Varney, best known…
Herbie Mann and Sona Terra
Herbie Mann and Sona Terra Severance Hall February 20 After spending the bulk of his musical career playing bebop, funk, and Latin jazz, Herbie Mann has turned his attention to the music of his roots (i.e., the folk melodies of Eastern Europe). At least, that was the concept with Sona Terra. In the first of…
Master of the Games
Director John Frankenheimer has been putting bad guys on the street since Luca Brazzi slept with a teddy bear, and he shows no sign of letting up at age 70. In Reindeer Games, a relentless (and relentlessly witty) crime thriller set in the frozen wastes of northern Michigan, a sleazy gunrunner bent on robbing an…
Blue Floyd
Blue Floyd Odeon February 18 Northeast Ohio has always been a sucker for cover bands. Check out the packed house any time the Odeon features cover acts such as Seconds Out (Genesis) or Wish You Were Here (Pink Floyd). While those bands normally play precise versions of the classics, the prospect of seeing something old…
Wonder Bread
.Step right up, youth of the world, and receive the Boomer inoculation that is Wonder Boys, the first feature from director Curtis Hanson since his much-lauded adaptation of James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential. Then marvel at Michael Douglas showing off his wide spectrum of inert doldrums and tedious self-pity. Thrill to the depression and paranoia of…
Oasis
Oasis Standing on the Shoulder of Giants (Epic) “Fuckin’ in the Bushes,” the leadoff track from Oasis’s fourth album, Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, represents the modification the quarrelsome quintet attempted this time around. It’s a sonic collage of found sounds and psychedelic, wah-wah guitar, an instrumental that catapults Oasis from side one of…
Bar Brawl
Mark Naymik can be reached at mark.naymik@clevescene.com.
Rick Rizzo & Tara Key
Rick Rizzo & Tara Key Dark Edson Tiger (Thrill Jockey) Rick Rizzo and Tara Key met some 20 years ago, when both were part of the late-’70s Louisville punk scene; over the years, they’ve abetted each other on their individual projects. Rizzo is best known for his work as frontman of the guitar-heavy Eleventh Dream…
Fat City
Laura Putre can be reached at laura.putre@clevescene.com.
Smashing Pumpkins
Smashing Pumpkins Machina/The Machines of God (Virgin) You can’t blame Smashing Pumpkins leader/dictator Billy Corgan for the band’s 1998 travesty, the electronica experiment Adore. Sure, it was pretentious and obtuse, but at that time everyone was jumping on the electronica bandwagon, including U2. The true measure of the Pumpkins comes with their follow-up, Machina/The Machines…
