Tool Time
This weekend’s Home Improvement Show features enough tips, tools, and products to keep even the most hardcore DIY renovator busy. Also on board: HGTV’s reDesign host Kenneth Brown, another in a growing list of tool-belted celebs. Jan. 26-27, 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Sat., Jan. 28, 10 a.m.-10 p.m.; Sun., Jan. 29, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
A Tomb With a View
The trouble with being a pharaoh in ancient Egypt was that it was impossible to forget the untimely end of your predecessor. Just ask the dude who succeeded King Tut. George Kollias, the drummer for Nile, finds himself in a similar spot, yet he has willingly assumed death metal’s most dangerous throne. Pete Hammoura, Nile’s…
The Hellacopters
On Rock & Roll Is Dead, Sweden’s favorite sons-of-bitches come flying out the gate with “Before the Fall,” a swell Chuck Berry-cum-MC5 ditty that harks back to the Hellacopters’ nitro-burning early daze. But the album quickly settles back into the arena pop of the last two CDs. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. “Everything’s on…
Roasted Romance
If brevity is the soul of wit, the title of the musical revue I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change has to be recognized as one of the most succinct summations of interpersonal relationships ever. Indeed, that sentence is so flawless in both structure and meaning that any show that trails along in its wake…
Join the Party
Bernardo Bertolucci is no stranger to controversy. The acclaimed Italian director helmed both Last Tango in Paris (in which Marlon Brando got naked and busy for two hours) and The Dreamers, his latest movie, about an incestuous brother and sister. Bertolucci’s also quite familiar with epic filmmaking. The Conformist, his 1970 breakthrough, marks the first…
And You Thought They Sucked
Arthur is a free New York music rag that’s become something of a bible for the hipster avant-garde. Besides running a monthly column devoted to “the latest emanations from the deep underground,” written by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and rock crit Byron Coley, Arthur highlights the obscure and the peculiar, such as the treasures of…
Cat Power
Cat Power is the greatest femme misérable in hipster rock. While other sad-slacker singers have waxed and waned — changing course, as Beth Orton did, or dropping from sight like Shannon Wright — Cat Power’s moon has risen with each new release. Yet despite the blunt boast of its title, The Greatest turns out to…
Capsule reviews of current area theater presentations.
Dark Room — The conventional image we have of playwrights and poets is of lonely souls slaving away in a poorly lit basement. Well, you’ve got the location and the illumination right, but everything else about the Dark Room project is much cheerier. Sponsored by the Cleveland Theater Collective, it’s a once-a-month workshop/cabaret for writers…
Tiptoe Through the Tulips
We’re eagerly anticipating the return of GroundWorks Dancetheater to the Cleveland Botanical Garden this weekend. There’s something about all that fancy footwork amid the foliage that just seems so appropriate. We especially dig the dance troupe’s contemporary moves in a setting that’s literally sprouting with life. Sure beats those musty performance halls any day. Jan.…
Tickle Me Emo
Really. Stop using Mad Libs for band names. Call your band Taking Back Sunday, and you sound like a bunch of whiners. Lord knows, it’s rough owning a PlayStation 2 when all your dudes have Xbox 360s, but really, nobody cares about how deprived you are. Here’s another helpful hint: As far as rock bands…
Tha Alkaholiks
In a genre where topical disses and tapping the producer of the moment are often confused with artistic growth, you have to give Tha Liks points for consistency. On what they’re claiming is their final album, Cali’s infamous hip-hop drunks are staggering out the same way they stumbled in a dozen-odd years ago: The beats…
Capsule reviews of current area art exhibitions.
NEW All Digital — Still lobbying for separation of art and computers? This exhibit will counter your most defiant belief in the primacy of traditional media. Just try to experience John Simon’s work without wonder, let alone brush past it quickly. His “Endless Victory” has all the color of a Mondrian painting, though it consists…
A Maze-ing Grace
At today’s Exploring the Labyrinth program at Lakewood Public Library, folks have the opportunity to make like lab mice. But there’ll be no cheese waiting for those who manage to find their way out of the portable maze. There will be a reward, however. “It helps center [people] in the noisy, busy, and stressful world…
Money Where Your Mouth Is
Band: Calo (myspace.com/calo; www.calomusic.com) Hometown: Cleveland Sounds like: “Hardcore combined with the attitude of old punk rock. Funk and techno vibes can be felt underneath in the rhythm. The melodic hooks are delivered in more of a jazz structure.” Fun fact: “Mike, the bass player, and Dave, the drummer, are brothers who share the name…
Tortoise & Bonnie Prince Billy
Over four years in the making, The Brave and the Bold arose out of Overcoat Records boss Howard Greynolds’ desire to get a copy of Will Oldham (aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy) doing Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road.” Greynolds recommended Tortoise for Oldham’s backing band, and things went so well that the project turned into a covers…
Now Dirtier Than Ever
The Aristocrats (Lions Gate) The single joke around which Paul Provenza’s documentary revolves has a standard beginning and ending, like pieces of bread that make a sandwich stuffed with excrement, incest, and whatever other foulness the teller can come up with. Provenza and Penn Jillette recorded more than 100 comedians riffing on this joke; the…
Shouldn’t That Be Stubs and Suds?
Joseph Manuel Alvelo, the general manager of gay bar Krave, feels sorry for cash-strapped college students. That’s why he offers drink specials to folks who pay the $3 parking fee during the bar’s weekly college-ID night, Studs & Suds. “If people bring in their parking stubs, we’ll give them a free well drink or domestic…
Sound Advice
Since the ’80s, Tony Erba has played in bands that include LEK, Face Value, Stepsister, Upstab, and now Nine Shocks Terror and Amps II Eleven, which Scene readers voted 2005’s rock band of the year. What have you been listening to lately? Karma to Burn, Almost Heathen. Red Sparowes, At the Soundless Dawn. Annihilation Time,…
Jenny Lewis With the Watson Twins
The late Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes once challenged her TLC bandmates to issue simultaneous solo records, predicting hers would be the biggest hit. While that project was cut short by her death, the gantlet was picked up by Rilo Kiley singer-songwriters Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennett, who share a January 24 release date. Score this…
Exit the Matrix
Pop-culture pundits generally fall into two camps: those who think entertainment encourages a nation of knuckle-draggers, and those who say it’s actually making us smarter. In the case of Atari’s The Matrix: Path of Neo, both sides have a point. Like the movie trilogy that inspired it, Path of Neo is both innovative and trite,…
American Express
You won’t hear Constantine Maroulis talking trash about American Idol. One of two long-haired rockers who made it to last season’s finals (he was the one who didn’t win), Maroulis realizes that without Idol, his 2006 wouldn’t be shaping up quite as fab. On tap: a solo album, a starring role in a sitcom based…
Last Word
“I’ll miss it. I’ve seen a lot of great shows there over the years, and it was always a great place to see a show, with great sound. Hopefully, someone will reopen the room and keep it going.” — Matt W., Lakewood “I think the last show I saw at the Odeon was Rammstein in…
Matthew Shipp
Pianist Matthew Shipp is among the new breed of jazz musicians who find inspiration outside the genre. He’s recorded with indie-rock darlings Yo La Tengo and U.K. drum & bass experimentalists Spring Heel Jack. While his 2005 opus Harmony and Abyss (Thirsty Ear) was a dazzling, disquieting synthesis of free-jazz improvisation and claustrophobically dense, ethereal…
Our top DVD picks for the week of January 24.
Address Unknown (Tartan) Anyone Can Dance: Nightclub Freestyle (Delta) National Lampoon’s Barely Legal (MGM) Dallas: The Complete Fourth Season (Warner Bros.) Educating Rita (Sony) Flightplan (Touchstone) The Fog (2005) (Sony) God Save the Queen: A Punk Rock Anthology (Music Video Dist.) Hooked (Eclectic) Ludacris: Southern Smoke (Music Video Dist.) My Big Fat Independent Movie (Anchor…
Hot Tots
Jeff Allison thought his weekend junket to New York in November would take his mind off the day-to-day grind at his club, the Garage. But his imagination started to work overtime after a trip to the movies to see Napoleon Dynamite, followed by a late night at a Brooklyn bar that dished out free French…
Mother Approved
As much as we like the moniker of Brooklyn’s Say Hi to Your Mom, we like its music even more. The group, a solo project for singer-songwriter Eric Elbogen, usually turns into a quartet onstage. All the better to reach the heights found on its third CD, Ferocious Mopes, which is filled with semi-complex indie…
Charity’s Closet
Now looking good is officially a form of public service. Bring your stylish clothes to Charity’s Closet, where you can trade nice threads with like-minded ladies and friendly fashionistas in a fun and social atmosphere. And better still, proceeds benefit the Red Cross and victims of Hurricane Katrina. Complimentary Ketel One cocktails, martinis, and appetizers…
Kill the Fall
In Ray Terry’s world, every day is The Corpse Bride. Except that, for the frontman of Kill the Fall, it’s not cast with dancing puppets. It’s full of disfigured undead lovers clawing their way back to the world of the living, where the weather isn’t so great. (In fact, it looks a lot like Cleveland.)…
The week’s best releases from the pop-culture universe.
CD — The Cellar Door Sessions: This exhaustive, six-disc set chronicles Miles Davis’ four-night stand at a Washington, D.C. club in 1970. Edited sections were excerpted on the genre-busting Live-Evil album, but this is the first time most of the material has been released. Things really get cooking on the last two discs, when guitarist…
Dust Devils
There’s a familiar crunch and wave of noise on Sevendust’s fourth album, Next. It’s the same rolling thunder of sound that’s accompanied the band since its 1997 debut. New guitarist Sonny Mayo (who used to play with funky metalheads Snot) doesn’t mess with the group’s hard-rock values — he just slips right into them. While…
Kenneth Thomas
Detroit DJ Kenneth Thomas once opened a show for superstar Paul Oakenfold, and Oakenfold liked him so much that he brought Thomas into his circle of jet-setting superstar dance-music machers. But before he globe-hopped, Thomas played Cleveland whenever he could, and he’s always glad to return. This week, he’ll headline Euronight, one of Cleveland’s biggest…
Eric Wilson
Many an up-and-coming artist has used his debut to show everything he can do. It’s tempting — all the more so when the artist is also a producer with tracks he can shop around the hip-hop universe. Cleveland’s Eric Wilson, head of his own Scratchpaper Productions, certainly makes an asset of his versatility on The…
Hog Heaven
More than a dozen manufacturers unveil new bikes, gear, and accessories at today’s Motorcycle Show, but it’s the loads of special events that’ll have us doing wheelies all the way to the I-X Center. In addition to all the old and new bikes on display, there’s a stunt show in which riders perform synchronized tricks…
The Hot Club of San Francisco
Most jazz historians and fans maintain the first truly European jazz musician was guitarist Django Reinhardt. While jazz spread across the Continent early in the 20th century, most players took after American models like Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines. Reinhardt was the first to bring his own ethnic identity to jazz. His elegant but hard-swinging…
Indian Winter
Somewhere, the surf is up, the sky is blue, and bronzed dudes and dudettes flex their pecs beneath the vigilant gaze of Old Man Sol, on a beach of soft, white sand. Somewhere . . . but not in Cleveland. No, here on the North Coast, we expect to be up to our armpits in…
Porn to Rock
At five foot six and just shy of 200 pounds, Ron Jeremy was “happily surprised” last year when Adult Video News named him the top porn star of all time. Performing in more than 1,700 XXX-rated movies and having sex with approximately 4,000 women made him more than qualified. Having a nearly 10-inch unit didn’t…
Pardon Our Dust
When a fabulous new construction project is christened, the fabulous people pull out all the stops. So it went that October morning at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Just past the barricades that hem the grounds like a prison yard, beside the calm of Wade Lagoon, they gathered to celebrate the museum’s expansion. The mayor…
Whole Wheat Bread
To visit Whole Wheat Bread’s MySpace page, which pairs a profile photo of three unsmiling black men with streaming strains of fast melodic punk, is to suspect an elaborate hoax. Not because black dudes can’t play punk — Bad Brains obliterated that silly stereotype two decades ago — but because it’s just the sort of…
Urban Makeovers
There’s nothing quite like the hands-on involvement of an ardent owner to help a business reach its potential. So we can’t wait to see what develops at two of our favorite underachievers — Le Oui Oui Café (1881 Fulton Road, Ohio City) and Artefino (1900 Superior Avenue, in the Tower Press Building) — now that…
Lush Life
Rambler 454 drummer Jason Linder swears the story behind the title of its new EP, Gabe, is true. The local alt-country trio named the five-track CD in tribute to a longtime pal and fan who’s been busted for three DUIs over the past year. Remarkably, he beat the charges each time. “He has this unique…
The Blue Curtain Of Silence
The sudden turn caught their attention. It looked like the Pontiac Grand Prix was trying to avoid police. Officer Scott Clayton ran the plates. Bingo: The car was wanted. Clayton radioed for backup. The Pontiac turned down West 85th. The path was blocked by Car No. 113 — Officers Matthew Baeppler and Robert Taylor. This…
Holmes Brothers
You don’t have to hail from Shanghai to dig egg rolls, and you sure don’t need Mexican roots to pine for an ice-cold Corona. So it goes for a great gospel sound. It may have been some time since you last caught a Sunday sermon, but that won’t stop the Holmes Brothers from stirring your…
Rocky Waters
No one has ever mistaken Rocky Balboa for an officer and a gentleman, but that’s just about what we get in the numbingly predictable and none-too-stirring Annapolis, an underdog-makes-good boxing movie stuffed inside what amounts to a U.S. Navy recruiting pitch, with a dash of Good Will Hunting tossed in to complete the formula. It’s…
Trapped in the Closet
Chelsea Delray’s found a curious sideline to supplement her income as a full-time drag queen. Twice a year, for $1,000 a scene, the former Miss Gay Michigan sheds her glittery gowns to star in transsexual porn as Jane Bond. “Men find trannies attractive, because they’re a stepping stone into the gay world,” claims the 35-year-old…
Strings Attached
When Robert Robinson wanted to buy a car for his daughter Danielle, he took her to Ganley Pontiac Honda in North Olmsted. They looked over a few models and took a test drive. Then they settled on a new silver Civic. Robinson, a retired LTV electrician from Brook Park, had bought a few cars in…
BR549
For BR549, this a modest coda to a delirious decade of wishful thinking. When they first burst out of Nashville with their Arista debut, these five retro country boys landed on the cover of every publication from rockabilly fanzines to the Sunday Times, and they packed midsized clubs with roots-minded urban sophisticates and adventurous old…
Heavenly Hag
There is evidently no limit to the sacrifices actors will make for their art. If you thought beautiful Charlize Theron went the distance by transforming herself into a bloated, scowling murderess for Monster, just wait till you and the kids get a load of Emma Thompson in the darkly amusing fantasy Nanny McPhee. Sporting a…
Happy Camper
BC Camplight is one of those one-man bands that disguises itself as a full-time group. Still, 25-year-old Brian Christinzio manages to build a wall of sound on his debut album, Hide, Run Away. Layering playful synth notes, pop harmonies, and sing-along choruses, Christinzio is also the sort of guy who can write a song called…
The Babes of Bob
Leave it to a woman to get her panties in a ruffle over something as silly as diversity. State Senator Teresa Fedor (D-The Kitchen) is fuming over Governor Taft’s recent appointment of eight men — and not a single babe — to a special study council on Medicaid. Just because more than half of Ohio’s…
Low
Even the best bands — and Low is one of the most engrossing of the past decade — indulge in the occasional harebrained scheme. The Minnesota trio’s new EP, Tonight the Monkeys Die, farms out “Monkey,” from last year’s uncharacteristically accessible The Great Destroyer, for remix by five artists, including indie celebs Stephin Merritt and…
Valley of the Dolls
The big news about Bubble, the new film by director Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich, Traffic), is the way it’s being released. Rather than opening first in theaters, then later on DVD and cable, Soderbergh and his producers have decided to do it all at once. Or so they thought. Turns out that retailers don’t restock…
Girl Power
Local photographer Michelle Murphy traipsed through the remnants of natural disasters for her contribution to Flux: Feminine Identity, a woman-centered exhibit on display at the Fine Arts Association. One pic even shows the shutterbug standing among fallen trees, with a saw in her hand. (It’s a joke.) The show also features work by printmakers Pamela…
Border Porn
Must’ve been a slow day on the bridge: While I was trying to cross into Canada at the Peace Bridge border station, the Canadian Gestapo flagged me for not having a certain required paper among the job-related documents I had brought with me. A border Nazi asked me to follow him to a little room…
David Allan Coe
David Allan Coe is one of the last pioneers of outlaw country-western music, and he has the scars to prove it. Traveling the country for decades, Coe has built a reputation as one of the most respectable touring acts of the genre. A native of Akron, Coe knows hard times — he served multiple sentences…
Tarnished Ivory
With the release of The White Countess, the much-honored Merchant Ivory canon is complete. The Bombay-born producer Ismail Merchant died in May 2005 at age 68, and whatever direction his longtime collaborator and life-companion, director James Ivory, now chooses, the working partnership that gave us a dozen elegantly furnished period pieces over a quarter-century is…
My Best Friend, the Microwave
In his stage debut, New American Appliances writer and star Eric Alleman chats with his fridge, spars with his typewriter, and maintains relatively healthy relationships with the rest of the machines around him. Yet he can’t connect with human beings on even the most basic level. “I feel a very tight connection to a lot…
Sunset in the Warehouse District
A new jazz lounge in Cleveland’s Warehouse District offers an alternative to the steady stream of live music and thumping dance tracks at the other downtown clubs. Sunset Lounge (1382 West Ninth Street) is the fourth upscale spot from the owners of downtown restaurants Mallorca and Brasa Grill, and Pepper Pike’s Marbella. “People ask me…
Sonata Arctica
It’s a never-ending source of frustration to some folks that Mannheim Steamroller makes cheeseball holiday music and not the crushing Teutonic metal its name suggests. It should swap with Sonata Arctica, which sounds like an orchestral Yule-log soundtrack but is actually a metal group, albeit one with extended keyboard solos and all the other hallmarks…
Smiles to Go
We popcorn-chomping hitchhikers never know who will pick us up on the road. In Flirting With Disaster, it was a neurotic Manhattan adoptee on a nationwide search for his biological parents. The desert-parched heroines of Thelma & Louise brought us along as they raised hell en route to their doom. In Sideways, we toured Napa…
Parody on Display
As the “curator” of The Colored Museum, Karamu House director Caroline Jackson-Smith is well aware that George Wolfe’s controversial play puts black history under a satirical microscope. It’s made up of 11 vignettes, or exhibits, that poke fun at African Americans. “The Last Mama on the Couch Play” spoofs historically black theatrical productions, like A…
Live to Tell
The following two events are connected: Now, right now, Madonna has a single on the pop charts — “Hung Up” — a quite danceable throwback to her ’80s heyday. And, in 2000, after notable lack of success as stone-faced global moralists and the humbling horrors of “Lemon” and “Discotheque,” U2 enjoyed a late-career swoon with…
The Toasters
Modern ska’s greatest asset is a sense of its own mortality and an insistence that death hasn’t come for it just yet. Supporters are energized by a refusal to surrender to fashion and the pride of knowing they rescued ska from post-third-wave oblivion. The Toasters, one of the States’ finest ska bands, also exemplify the…
Passionate Misses
If it weren’t for the pesky detail of having to die first, most of us would love to have the power of ghosts, able to float through walls and disregard the barriers between illusion and reality. Of course, upon closer observation, we are all possessed of this ability, since we deftly mix large dollops of…
Two for the Road, Eh?
Aleksandar Antonijevic is one busy guy onstage. The principal dancer with the National Ballet of Canada takes lead roles in a pair of works — The Firebird and The Four Seasons — being performed this weekend. And the 36-year-old hoofer still manages to dance circles around troupe members half his age. “I do need to…
