Welcome to the Jungle (Lounge)
It’s easy to see why most local club owners would be skeptical about the merits of hosting an all-jungle night on a weekly basis. Once described as “dance music that you can’t dance to,” jungle isn’t as accessible as other forms of club music. As evidence, the atmosphere at Spy, the Warehouse District club where…
Pipe Dreamers
Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church has seen better days. It began losing members after the construction of I-71, which butchered many of Cleveland’s downtown neighborhoods. An early 1960s peak of 1,500 parishioners dwindled to just 120 in the ’70s and is now back up to a robust 200. But back in 1956, the church’s growing congregation…
Giving His Saul
Jack Rugan doesn’t look much like a rock star. He’s wearing brown loafers, a crisp pair of blue jeans, and a spotless blue sweatshirt. And his house, nestled in the MacIntosh Farms planned community in Broadview Heights, is a suburban palace, complete with a spacious yard where his two dogs can run wild and a…
Mammoth Undertaker
Dr. Larry Agenbroad, a professor at Northern Arizona University who accompanied French explorer Bernard Buigues to Siberia to excavate an intact 23,000-year-old woolly mammoth, describes the experience as “kind of like being the first man on Mars.” For the last 26 years, Agenbroad — who will speak on the Siberian expedition (as seen on the…
Erykah Badu
Erykah Badu’s magical voice alternates between tentative and self-assured. On her gorgeous 1997 debut, Baduizm, she delicately stepped over R&B’s past, present, and future with a confidence that her mentors would applaud. She channeled Billie Holiday through a scratchy hip-hop groove, and she peered through the looking glass to ’70s funky soul with knowledge of…
Lump of Coal
The man who made Problem Child, Beverly Hills Ninja, and Brain Donors — movies that are to humor what Robert Downey Jr. is to clean living — has, perhaps all too explicably, become Hollywood’s most coveted and celebrated comedic director. “From the director of Big Daddy” — so blares the trailer for Saving Silverman, touting…
Bob James
One of an increasingly rare breed, pianist/ arranger/producer Bob James has worked extensively in the smooth jazz vein and loves easy, catchy melodies. Not unlike David Sanborn or Grover Washington Jr., he knows his music and certainly holds his own in more mainstream jazz settings. And thanks to James’s catchy mega-hit, “Angela (the Theme from…
Hannibal Minus One
Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, with a screenplay by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian, is being released exactly 10 years after Silence of the Lambs, the film that established Hannibal Lecter as an iconic villain in our culture, right up there with Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, Friday the 13th’s Jason, and Halloween’s Michael Myers, though…
Thin Lizzy
The Doors put out two albums after Jim Morrison died. Big Brother and the Holding Company continued recording without a female singer after Janis Joplin left. The Grateful Dead knew they could roll on without Pigpen or Brent Mydland, but never without Jerry Garcia. So why are these second-rate musicians touring as Thin Lizzy? Isn’t…
To Be Gay, Gifted, and Imprisoned
That anyone should consider making a film of Reinaldo Arenas’s memoir Before Night Falls is curious. That the person to do it should be painter-turned-film director Julian Schnabel is truly unusual. And that the results should be as good as they are is most remarkable of all. But it would appear that the supernova of…
The Queers
For nearly 20 years, the Queers — guitarist Joe Queer and a rotating band of punk iconoclasts that now includes Dave on bass and Lurch Nobody on drums — have been the lone punk voice emanating from the Portsmouth, New Hampshire wilderness. From the band’s first EPs on Doheney Records in the early ’80s (“Love…
Welcome to East Cleveland
Michele Ragland was five years old in 1966 when her family moved to East Cleveland. She’d run around her neighborhood playing hide-and-seek, feeling completely safe amid the well-kept homes owned by stable families, both white and black. “It was wonderful then,” she says. Now, Ragland and her husband are raising their sons just a few…
Rod Stewart
It’s sad when your voice is so expressive and you have so little to say. On Human, his first record for Atlantic Records, Rod Stewart runs through a collection of lackluster tunes, spanning the nonsensical namecheck “Charlie Parker Loves Me,” the Journey-esque first single “I Can’t Deny It,” a clutch of cool soul tracks, and…
Plate Expectations
There are diehard Ohio State football fans who go to every game. Then there is Shad Phipps, who goes to every game wearing a BUKIFN license plate around his neck. The plate has proved somewhat of an albatross for the OSU senior. Police tend to hassle him for turning state property into game-day regalia. Little…
Stephen Malkmus
The end was fitting for a band as fucked-up as Pavement. No announcement. No prolonged weeping. No four-hour farewell concert. Just fractured tales of the band’s imminent demise and half-assed denials from the relevant players. When word of the breakup was official, it was tentatively squeezed out, like a fart in church, months after the…
When Old Punks Dry Out
Mike Salinger’s drinking got old about the same time the idea of “nude people crucifying themselves as live theater” got old. Which is to say, the recovering performance artist mellowed with his medium. Sometimes, he still might hit life over the head with a sledgehammer, but at least he’s not getting hammered anymore. The director…
The Gentle Waves
On Swansong for You, Isobel Campbell drops the pseudo-Christian folk harmonies of her main musical outlet, Belle & Sebastian, to tackle that nasty four-letter word — love. But don’t think she’s abandoned twee-pop altogether; her second album under the Gentle Waves moniker is as tumultuous as a tempest, and the somber transcendental melodies that made…
Jacks Jilted
It’s late December, and Hank Kassigkeit is still king. He trolls the halls of Gund Arena, stopping to talk to a beefy couple in his-and-hers Lumberjacks jerseys. Theirs is a conversation of laughs and familiarity. To these fans, the Lumberjacks owner is not some distant man of means secluded away in a luxury box. He…
Maëry Lanahan
Originally from Dayton, singer-songwriter Maëry Lanahan moved to Columbus three years ago and took her fledgling label, Not My Fault Records, with her. She released her six-song debut, The First One, on Not My Fault four years ago and has issued the follow-up, Lessen, on it as well. As you can tell by the way…
Back to the Future
When the lights finally came up in the Washington, D.C., movie theater, Leonard Nimoy sat still, silent, and a bit shaken. He could scarcely believe what he had seen–and what he had not seen. The movie was beautiful, but beneath the surface sheen, there was no heart, no soul. It had been hard enough for…
A Painful Lesson
Drug sentencing issue hits home: I would like to congratulate David Martin on a well-written piece — painful, but well-written [“The Average Inmate,” December 14]. I have always believed that the drug sentencing laws were unbalanced, but never did I imagine the issue hitting so close to home as it did for our family. My…
Something for Everyone?
Visiting Mr. Green, a first play by failed screenplay writer Jeff Baron, is beginning to hold the country’s community theaters hostage. It’s small and cheap to produce, and it gives audiences what they want: a far-from-intellectual evening. The equivalent of a McDonald’s Happy Meal, it offers a satisfying junk-food rush. Just as those who crave…
Simply Sergio’s
University Circle was hopping — in a dignified manner, of course — on a recent Saturday night, with a Cleveland Orchestra concert scheduled for Severance Hall and an evening affair taking place at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cars streamed into nearby parking lots. Sidewalks overflowed. And, in a remodeled carriage house just off East…
Eugene’s Turns Blue
Eugene’s Restaurant (28260 Miles Road, Solon; 440-349-1480) will soon become the Sapphire Grille and Sushi Bar. GM Dennis Em says his family will maintain ownership of the space, but they’ll be bringing in new management, new kitchen staff, and a new chef, with an eye toward becoming a more upscale, contemporary dining room. The restaurant…
Puppet Master
In Curt Kirkwood’s mind, it was an easy decision. The Meat Puppets’ singer-guitarist could have kept plugging away with the Royal Neanderthal Orchestra, the band he formed while the Pups were officially put on hold in 1996 after he moved to Austin, Texas, and left behind the other two founding members (bassist Cris Kirkwood and…
