Swimming With Sewage
Beyond the stands of trees in Euclid’s Sims Park, stairs lead down to one of the stretches of sand where Clevelanders soak up summer. A few moms and their kids cavort in the water, unaware that they’re at one of the dirtiest beaches on Lake Erie. Under a pier at the end of the beach,…
Jim Lauderdale
Lately, it seems that any discussion of country music must necessarily concern itself with image, marketing, unit sales, and playlist rotation, while ignoring the two most important aspects: the country part and the music part. Nashville has become so preoccupied with its enormous pop success that it seems to have forgotten its position as fertile…
It Happens
Matt Stone has little time to talk. It’s Tuesday, July 17, 1 p.m. in Los Angeles, yet Stone and Trey Parker have yet to finish a television show that will debut some 30 hours from now–an episode of South Park titled “Terrance and Garfunkel,” in which the farting, fighting Canadian twosome Terrance and Phillip break…
The Button
The weird world of Paul Ryan, Sam Harmon, and Jay Kennedy has always been buoyantly confined to the midnight-hour chaos of their Sunday night radio show on WRUW-FM/91.1 called Press the Button. The program is a wild sound collage of sketches, skits, and shtick culled from everyday occurrences and noises strung together in an entertaining…
Guys, Stay Out of This
Abortion is a women’s issue: So here we are again, listening to a man rambling on about what a woman should do with her body. This letter is in response to Louis Pumphrey’s letter in the July 5 issue [“Hippocratic Oafs”]. Pumphrey says that, even though 250 women will die each year, no one will…
Intimate Images
A few years ago, literary critic Phyllis Rose wrote a book called Parallel Lives, in which she dissected five (mostly unhappy) marriages between writers during the Victorian era. Rose started from the premise that every marriage is actually composed of two marriages — the man’s and the woman’s — with each half of the pair…
Unseemly Queen
Greg Cesear, artistic director of Cesear’s Forum, may not be the noblest Roman of them all, but he certainly lays claim to being our most quixotic theatrical entrepreneur. In the tradition of the lost boys of Neverland, he labors underground. One flight beneath the restored theatrical splendors of Playhouse Square, he has set up operation…
Fun on a Bun
Heavy foods and highfalutin settings can seem a bad fit with the carefree days of summer, times when winding country roads and dusty antiques emporiums beckon us from all directions. Perhaps you, too, find yourself feeling that this is the season for casual pit stops on the road to other adventures, rather than for serious…
Grab the Handel’s
The sweet folks at Canfield-based Handel’s Homemade Ice Cream & Yogurt are rightfully puffed up over their inclusion in a recent Chocolatier magazine article on outstanding ice creams. The family-owned company’s Chocolate Pecan Ice Cream — “a must-have for serious ice cream aficionados, who will covet the rich chocolate flavor and creamy satin texture” –…
Devil’s Advocate
Marilyn Manson was leaving Las Vegas. But before stepping onto his tour bus, he took a stroll through a casino, decked out in black leather pants, a black military hat, and silver motorcycle cop glasses. “You know what? It was strange, because it wasn’t exactly a disguise,” Manson says via phone. “I don’t think people…
Who’s Watching Now?
If it’s not one intrusion, it’s another: Cameras follow you in the drugstore and peruse you at the ATM. Strangers eavesdrop on your cell-phone conversations; your boss monitors your e-mail. Your activities, however mundane, are recorded and stored away for some unspecified future use. Then there are the voyeurs who use hidden cameras to peer…
Fall Sports
Patrons of the Cleveland Sport Parachuting Center pay for an experience that engenders both extreme physical tension and emotional elation. But stepping out of the cozy confines of an aircraft and plummeting at 125 mph to the countryside 14,000 feet below, before opening a chute for a four-minute glide back to earth, is bound to…
Screaming for Chicken Wings
“How’s Cleveland? I’m missing it,” says singer Tim “Ripper” Owens. On tour in “I’m not even for sure what part of Germany,” Owens has the kind of story that gives hope to aspiring musicians playing in faceless heavy metal bands everywhere. After all, if Owens, an Akron native who has fronted Judas Priest for the…
Sticking His Necks Out
Right about the same time Jimmy Page unveiled his double-necked guitar for live performances of “Stairway to Heaven,” Junior Brown was on the road as a session player for various country bands. Twenty years later, Page’s twain-shafted instrument had become an overused symbol of rock and roll excess, and Brown created the “guit-steel,” country’s version…
Hessfest 2
Last year’s Hessfest, a six-band bill assembled by Cleveland artist Derek Hess to celebrate the launch of his website, shouldn’t have taken anyone by surprise. After all, Hess was partly responsible for putting the Euclid Tavern on the hard rock/alternative map, with the hundreds of shows that he booked there for the first five years…
Ape Escape
There are scenes in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes redo that are so hysterical, they drown out minutes’ worth of dialogue that follow, which is hardly a knock. Indeed, the film is often so comical, so ridiculous in that self-aware, wink-wink sort of way, it plays like a parody of the 1968 original, written…
Rod Stewart
It’s easy to understand why Rod Stewart doesn’t spend much energy on the languid songs that make up his latest album, Human. It’s a pallid, uninspired, adult-oriented affair of the heart dripping with sentimental affection. Attempts at injecting Human with some relevancy (like a duet with Macy Gray and a track written and produced by…
The Way They Were
The Road Home is the 10th feature from Zhang Yimou, still the mainland Chinese director best known to international audiences. His latest film has a number of things going for it: It represents a synthesis of Zhang’s two contrary stylistic tendencies; it also centers on the debut performance of Zhang Ziyi, who subsequently went on…
Reel Big Fish
No of-the-moment mid-’90s ska-punk outfit suffered more guilt than Reel Big Fish at cashing in on the of-the-moment mid-’90s ska-punk craze. Case in point: “Sell Out,” the hit single that made these boys. With it, Reel Big Fish hung its “workin’ for the man” shtick on song lyrics, interview sound bites, and T-shirts. It was…
Gangster Crap
When last we spotted indie icons Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau onscreen together, they were knocking back fruit-flavored martinis and chasing L.A. skirt in the inventive Gen-X hit Swingers. The goofy charm of that phenomenon now gives way, sad to report, to a labored fringes-of-the-mob comedy called Made, in which the friends play guys five…
Jimmy Eat World
The Arizona quartet Jimmy Eat World is so unassuming that its ordinariness is its main virtue. It plays riff-heavy alt-rock that isn’t quite cutting-edge, but not quite stuck in 1995 either. And on Bleed American, its fourth and best album, it weaves in and out of the pop-rock landscape traversed by similar-minded bands since the…
Beam Me Out
Twenty years ago, Mahoning County Sheriff Jim Traficant made Willie Oliver’s South Side neighborhood look like a scene from Walking Tall. Oliver nervously watched as armed deputies surrounded a ramshackle drug house on Willis Street and Traficant marched up to the front door. It was a risky move. Deputies would later discover a small arsenal…
Lyle Lovett
Lyle Lovett may be one of the most misunderstood artists in the history of music. After graduating from Texas A&M with degrees in German and journalism (he also studied in Rothenburg, Germany), his musical career began in Mr. Gatti’s, a pizza shop near school. A four-song demo tape led him to singing backup on Nanci…
Curb The Dogs!
Art’s Cart isn’t just a hot dog cart. It’s a gourmet hot dog cart, serving 10 kinds of dogs. Proprietor Art Fried claims he’s huge in Kent, where he serves the bar crowd till 3:30 a.m. He also caters everything from parties in Bedford Heights to horse shows in Moreland Hills. But he just can’t…
Zeni Geva
Coming out of the Japanese noise scene of the mid-’80s, Zeni Geva set itself apart from the pack with its dark, heavy riffs and off-kilter time signatures. As its status as an epic Japanese power trio grew, it gained the attention of Shellac’s Steve Albini (Bush, Nirvana, Page & Plant), who would go on to…
