Time to Punt
Somewhere under the glossy imbecility of Varsity Blues lurks an idea that could make a great American movie: a coming-of-age story in a setting where no one else has come of age, a place where the hero must find his way to maturity without a mentor. The setting, in this case, is the small town…
Playback
Ani DiFranco Up Up Up Up Up Up (Righteous Babe) There’s good reason why the Anthology of American Folk Music is such a treasured piece of work. The individual voices in this splendid box don’t matter as much as the songs they’re singing. In the big picture, “Stackalee” the song means more than Frank Hutchison…
The Waiting Was the Hardest Part
Writer-director Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, the filmmaker’s adaptation of James Jones’s 1962 bestseller about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal, arrives in theaters with an almost unbearable weight of expectation. After graduating in the first class at the American Film Institute’s Advanced Film Studies program and working briefly as a screenwriter, Malick…
Wild About Harry
As the film world’s foremost peddler of nostalgia-driven baby-boomer romanticism, Nora Ephron is acutely aware of the crucial role that music plays in selling her three-hanky tales. The soundtrack to her 1993 megahit Sleepless In Seattle not only enhanced that film’s sentimental mood, it sold more than 2 million copies and ultimately bolstered the movie’s…
The Akron Wonder
Jerome Childers is sitting in the living room of the house he’s lived in his entire life. Encyclopedias and his mother’s paperback romance novels line the bookshelves; the mantle is crammed with bowling trophies. “Your video’s on,” calls a voice from the next room. Jerome smiles. “My video’s on,” he says. He lets out an…
A Twinkie in the Eye
Not many musicians quote Shakespeare, as Bellacore’s vocalist/guitarist Zach Stein does in “Sooner or Later.” The song begins with “O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright/It seems she hang now upon the cheek of night” from Romeo and Juliet. The next line, however, keeps the song from taking itself too seriously: “But I…
The Straight Dope
I’ve always wondered about stories of Western women being kidnapped and sold to sheikhs in the Middle East, a practice that supposedly ended sometime in the last century. It stretches credulity to believe that a young woman from, say, England or France could be snatched off a boat or a train, brought to the Gulf…
Back to Nature
Hey, do we need any more concrete reefs in Lake Erie? By spring we’ll have an extra 50,000 tons of concrete chunks, once the Richfield Coliseum is finally demolished. Since the Coliseum is the last privately financed pro sports facility this area may ever see, we’ve gotta hide all traces of its existence. Yep, we…
To Hell With “Public Opinion”
When some Canton churches threw their considerable collective weight behind the referendum that eventually sunk the city’s ill-conceived bid to become the first off-track betting site in the state last year, a curious objection to their efforts was raised by the local Libertarian Party chairman. “Churches are very limited in how active they’re supposed to…
Letters
Director Gracefully Declines Keefer First of all, I want to thank Keith Joseph for his support and kind words on our work at Cleveland Public Theatre this season. I think things are going quite well here, and I appreciate his taking notice. The mention of so many of our artists makes us proud. However, I…
Greco-Roman Wrestling
Mimmo Jodice’s photographs of Mediterranean ruins, artifacts, and archaeological sites, now on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, would never pass muster in Fodor’s. The typical tourist shot whispers in your ear: “Look how nice these things are–wouldn’t you like to be here?” Jodice’s photographs, by comparison, almost seem to declaim, “Even if you…
New Plays Hatched at CPT
As the Romans bequeathed us plumbing, the Chinese endowed us with fireworks, and Twentieth Century Fox gave us Shirley Temple, so Cleveland Public Theatre continues to offer the city’s most esoteric yearly theatrical grab bag. Their New Plays Festival is entering its seventeenth year and is specifically designed for theatergoers who have a gambler’s spirit,…
Attracting the Beautiful People
It’s a snowy Thursday night at Johnny’s Downtown, and members of Cleveland’s upper crust huddle in the marble foyer, awaiting their table. While reservations are spaced a leisurely two hours apart, our weary host explained that guests often linger in what may be the city’s most opulent dining room. Sometimes, he confided, diners have to…
Livewire
Billy Branch Savannah Bar & Grille January 10 Some thirty years ago, the late Junior Wells told a California teenage harmonica player named Billy Branch that the youngster just didn’t have what it takes. Well, he found it. Branch, who moved to Chicago in 1969 to attend college and be near his heroes Wells, James…
Squeaky Wheel Gets the Greasin’
As the main singer and songwriter of the successful Canadian punk/folk band Lowest of the Low, Ron Hawkins felt restricted by the dynamics of a normal band. Rather than confront the inspiration-constricting chains, he looked the other way until he no longer could. “I started writing into a bit of a dead end. You get…
Day Jobbers
It’s not often that a regional band’s long-term goals do not include playing music for a living, but the Influence has come to terms with the idea. Hell, I could make a New Year’s resolution out of that. Finally, no letting myself down. “We don’t want to do this full-time, where you have deadlines and…
Making a Splat
Shiny new developers won’t come knocking on the metal door of the crumbling warehouse on West 63rd Street near Stock Avenue, unless they’re looking for a good place to dump a dead body. The former Swift Premium slaughterhouse, which hasn’t seen a side of bacon since the 1960s, has all the ambience of a Third…
Makin’ the Scene
Before his regular Wednesday show at Fat Fish Blue, Robert Lockwood Jr. sat at the bar and received congratulations on his Grammy nomination for Best Blues Record. “I got a Grammy comin’,” he told one well-wisher. “All the judges say I’m going to win.” What made I Got to Find Me a Woman more Grammy-worthy…
Night & Day
Thursday January 14 He (finally) traded in his manual typewriter for one of those newfangled computers, but you can still hear the rattle of the old Smith-Corona in the work of Plain Dealer columnist Dick Feagler. Though most folks under forty consider him a throwback (who, under the pretense of “common sense,” belittles women, minorities,…
The Cup Is Half Full
Number One Cup’s Seth Cohen has plenty to be grateful for this new year. Last September, the singer/guitarist/keyboardist was splayed out in the middle of an ice rink in Danbury, Connecticut, wondering if he would ever perform–or for that matter, walk–again. “Frankly, I’m lucky to be alive,” he says. “I was playing hockey with my…
Rookies and Rogues
Who was “The Tattooed Man”? Or, for that matter, “The Lady of the Lake”? The colorfully nicknamed cadavers were victims of Cleveland’s notorious serial murderer of the 1930s, whom the newspapers called “The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.” The elusive killer skillfully dismembered his prey, then dumped their remains in Kingsbury Run, a barren ravine…
Brooklyn Dodgers
The city that brought us Lou Reed and the Ramones is the heart of a new scene: back-to-roots ska, if you believe The New York Times. The ska revival is being played for all it’s worth on every alternative station throughout the country, but unconventional wisdom says that the only real thing is in Manhattan.…
