Y2K? Why Not?
I’ll admit it, I don’t know the first thing about computers. Well, actually, I do know the first thing (or maybe it’s the second, after turning the power on): I can set the damn date, OK? Which is saying a lot, since I still haven’t figured out how to do that with the VCR that…
The Straight Dope
Frankincense and myrrh are readily available at health food stores for $20 a pound–high for meat, but average for herbs. Their only obvious use is for skin care (they work). My question is, why were they considered such a valuable gift by the Magi? Did the ancient Palestinians have such bad skin? Can you smoke…
Beggars Banquet
Set the table, comrades. No need for silverware. Keep the good china locked up. Hell, we don’t even need paper plates. We’re dining with politicos who gorge themselves like pigs at the public trough. Our main dish? Char-broiled Wallet of Taxpayer. So who drew up this invitation list? The Plain Feeler’s Brent Larkin, with his…
Letters
Back up the Smut Truck Once again David “I never voted in an election and am proud of it” Sowd displays his ignorance on current events. His “See No Evil” column [December 17] about pornography on the Internet makes one thing perfectly clear: He doesn’t have kids and he never should. His equating today’s perverted…
Missing the Big Picture
In “Homage to Nature,” a work from her latest series, “Doubleword,” conceptual artist Sarah Charlesworth has staged and photographed a death. Not of a person but of a miniature evergreen tree, which, with its root structure still intact, has been placed in one of those bulbous glass display containers that restaurants use to preserve cheese.…
Massimo Da MilanoMisses the Mark
Here’s the good news: Massimo Da Milano dishes up plenty of food at reasonable prices. The bad news? Not all of that food is so good. The restaurant, situated since 1989 in a beautifully restored, 95-year-old bank building on the edge of Ohio City, has a large menu of enticing-sounding pasta, veal, steak, chicken, and…
Black Sheets of Rage
As Robert Penn Warren wrote, “Poetry exercises a diagnostic and a therapeutic function.” Though he may not have imagined it, the same can be said about heavy metal, at least when it comes to Akron-based Spawn. The word rage appears in several of the songs on the band’s second release, aptly titled Round 2. Where…
Re-Kronikled
“I’m fucking sick of the whole thing. I’m sick up to here with it,” announced the Kinks’ Ray Davies from a London stage in 1973. Davies had recently attempted to take his own life once again by downing a bottle of uppers, and as the story goes, later that evening he checked himself into a…
Playback
DJ Quik Rhythm-al-ism (Profile) Back in the day (well, five years ago), rap was all about having the biggest gun, the biggest dick, and the biggest bank account. While the latter two priorities haven’t changed all that much, the guns (and the gangsta rap that spawned them) have slowly gone the way of grunge. There…
Night & Day
Thursday January 7 Classical composer Alfred Schnittke, who died last year, was like the guy in the back of the classroom who cackles to himself: obtuse, scary, and hard to forget. His Not a Midsummer Night’s Dream features a solo for the twelfth second violin player, and a double negative: The work has no direct…
Livewire
FreeBass Son of One Peabody’s DownUnder December 31 As if to let 1998 shrivel up and die alone, FreeBass waited until midnight to begin his New Year’s Eve show. Good move. A year when Lucianne Goldberg became a household name is not one that will be remembered for its funky flavor. Armed with a bass…
Put Some Clothes On
When champion ice skater Michelle Kwan announced that she was going to dance to music from The Little Mermaid for a television special, her costume designer, Scott Lane, nearly busted a gill. Now he had to design Kwan her own fish costume–after having just spent nine months in an underwater Nerf land, fashioning scores of…
Makin’ the Scene
Jericho Turnpike singer Jim Morrison looked around a vacant Peabody’s DownUnder and let out a grim chuckle. The band’s opening gig for Rosavelt would be an intimate set as Saturday’s snow and ice storm kept all but the hardiest music fans at home with their cable providers. “Another natural disaster,” Morrison said. “Thunderstorms, hurricanes …”…
Close Quarters
Driving home, a young man notices a figure huddled in a phone booth near the Laundromat. As he draws closer, he recognizes his father, who refuses to emerge, despite his family’s importuning. Asked why he’s in the booth, the old man replies, reasonably, “Everybody’s gotta be somewhere.” A comically existential father-son dialogue is the centerpiece…
King for a Day
To work with Elvis is to become, in small measure, Elvis. In the mid-’80s Steve Binder was directing a canned segment for the Emmy Awards show on the set of Taxi. During the shoot, he was accosted by a noted Elvis enthusiast–Andy Kaufman. Binder, Kaufman learned, directed what has come to be known as The…
Objection Overruled
The great attorneys of our time–Tom Cruise, Susan Sarandon, Tom Hanks–must now make room in the firm for a new partner. John Travolta, who in past lives has been a disco king, a hip hit man, and a deep-fried presidential candidate, reinvents himself in A Civil Action as a greedy personal-injury lawyer named Jan Schlichtmann,…
Wag the Dogma
Denmark was the first Scandinavian country to have a film industry, but–with the exception of the revered Carl Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Ordet), whose career lasted from the middle silent era through the Sixties–the nation’s filmmakers until recently functioned in the shadow of Swedish directors such as Mauritz Stiller, Ingmar Bergman, and…
Never Mind the Troubles
The relentless charm of Kirk Jones’s Waking Ned Devine lies in its embrace of two lovable Irish geezers who manage to work beautiful mischief on the world, in the raw beauty of their sun-splashed coastal village, and in the general notion that Ireland is the land of poetic conversations, enduring friendships, and perfect pints of…
From Chinatown to Niketown
In 1974 Robert Towne was seething about the lot of his script for Chinatown, now considered his most famous work. Released that same year, the screenplay won an Oscar for Towne. When I interviewed him at the time, he was appalled at director Roman Polanski’s heavy hand, particularly his insistence that Evelyn Mulwray, Faye Dunaway’s…
