Hoop Jumping
The boxes of new Nikes take up half a city block, their sunlit swooshes shimmering like a school of bluefish. Sometime before dawn, a couple of hucksters decided to turn the weed-cracked parking lot on East 105th Street into Ed and Joe’s Fly-by-Night Shoe Warehouse. It’s a spectacle that doesn’t please Sabra Pierce Scott, councilwoman…
Beth Orton
It’s the voice that gets you — like your pillow after a long day, or the coolness of water under a hot sun. Fragile, supple, human, heavenly: the voice of Beth Orton. Daybreaker, Orton’s third album, is as rich with gorgeous songs as Trailer Park and Central Reservation before it, but, as with those albums,…
Sexual Demon for Hire
SM, turn-ons include strip joints, freaks: I’m responding to the June 26 letter titled “To Hell With the Christians” [in response to “Attack of the Puritans,” May 29]. I agree: Christianity does not have the fucking right to tell me not to go to gentlemen’s clubs. Christians hate individuality if it does not strengthen their…
Orbital
The premise of the Back to Mine series of dance mix albums is truly innovative. Under the direction of the country’s premier DJ organization, DMC USA, Back to Mine gives featured electronic artists the chance to collect the records — whatever they might be — that they would play for their friends after a night…
Extreme Rockin’
What’s an extreme-sports competition without extreme music? All five days of the Gravity Games will be accompanied by an appropriately hard-hitting lineup of rockers and rappers. Following is a rundown of who’ll be rocking Voinovich Park: Thursday, 6:30 p.m. — Default. They’re from Canada, they’re friends with Nickelback, and their debut album, The Fallout, is…
Big Moe
Black male vocalists tend to break down into two camps nowadays. There are the sweet, almost-too-precious crooners, such as Musiq and Maxwell. Then there are the funky-butt stylings of such folks as Cee-Lo and his Dungeon Family compadres. Houston’s Big Moe, who waxes playalistic on his latest, Purple World, leans toward the latter category. Emphasis…
Wheels in the Sky
Trevor Vines isn’t big on sitting still. When he’s not catapulting his body and bike over 90-foot jumps, as he will this week in the Gravity Games’ freestyle motocross competition, he’s traveling the country in search of the next ramp. If it’s not off to a contest, it’s to showcase his aerial skills at a…
Various Artists
When bebop hit the scene, critics and other un-hepcats maligned the movement as inarticulate noise with little artistic merit. So it’s only fitting that another clan of outsiders, dance-music DJs, should reinterpret the now-classic sounds of Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, and Shirley Horne. Whether it’s Joe Claussell laying a deep and funky bassline for Simone…
Signs of Faith
This time around, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan puts the surprise at the beginning of his film, and it’s a subtle, shimmering clue — one easily missed and, frankly, one that might not even be there at all. Such are the temptations offered by the maker of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable: Even if it isn’t…
Collapse
The Achilles’ heel of much hardcore-based music is that its acts have the tendency to put hyperbole above headbanging. This threatens to be the case with Collapse, a promising young trio whose bio states that “Collapse hates American pride and wishes the economy would fall under the weight of its own fraudulent capitalist business practices.”…
Sunny Delight
It’s daunting to hear that John Sayles’s Sunshine State is almost two and a half hours long and mostly consists of calm conversations. But don’t be deterred, or you’ll miss out on a study of character, class, and changing times that puts Robert Altman’s stodgy Gosford Park to shame. In a small beachfront town in…
Happy Ending
As George Clooney says in Ocean’s Eleven, do the math: four Canon XL1 digital cameras, one dual 800 MHz Power Mac G4, a copy of editing software Final Cut Pro 3, 18 shooting days, a two-million-buck budget, one Oscar-winning director, and nine high-profile actors (among them Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, David Duchovny, Catherine Keener, and…
Art for the Masses
Most artists hate the idea of cookie-cutter production. The opposite of creative, aesthetic individualism, it reminds them too much of working in a factory. In his 1936 film Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin railed against the standardization of the age by showing the poetic Little Tramp getting swallowed up and spat out by industrialism. For Chaplin,…
Hot Spot
Just when diners were fretting that Cleveland’s restaurant renaissance was running out of steam, along came Fahrenheit, a charming little bistro in Tremont, with outstanding food, engaging atmosphere, and enthusiastic service. For this, we must thank chef-owner Rocco Whalen. At a mere 25, Whalen displays a balance and sophistication in his cooking that some chefs…
Wake and Bake
There are 26 bands, 114 dudes, and one woman performing at this year’s Ozzfest, the annual headbanger bacchanalia, whose queasy mix of Coors and Coppertone often feels like one prolonged Maalox moment. Amid all the tanning lotion and testosterone, Otep is the lone woman. “It’s like being a diaper attached to the very active ass…
Jersey Devils
Just west of Manhattan, across the Hudson River, lies the burg of Jersey City, the second most populous township in New Jersey. It’s a city littered with a history of corruption and mob influence, thanks to its Depression-era mayor, “Boss” Frank Hague, an FDR crony, and his successor, John V. Kenny, an organized-crime puppet eventually…
The Wizard of Vincent, Ohio
About the only time Jim Gustafson stops smiling is when he gets his hair caught in his pants. Otherwise, life is good for the self-professed “wizard of psych.” His records regularly fetch $600 a pop, folks have been known to drive upwards of five hours just to get his autograph, and in the stoner-friendly psych-rock…
I-tal
For those too young to remember, reggae music used to be huge in Cleveland. Throughout the late ’70s and ’80s, many clubs were booking reggae as many as five nights a week. Local sensations like I-tal would play the old Peabody’s. The long line out the door signaled that the venue was packed to capacity.…
The Outlaw State
Ohio law enforcement is turning a blind eye to criminal activity statewide — that’s the conclusion of a recent investigation by Scene. Our exhaustive half-hour probe uncovered evidence that authorities are systematically ignoring a vast range of state statutes. More disturbing still, when confronted with their negligence, police agencies across Northeast Ohio seemed brazenly unconcerned…
Duke Robillard
If the kitchen-sink approach to blues is your kind of music, Duke Robillard is definitely your guy. Robillard is one of the genre’s foremost proponents of the “more is more” philosophy when it comes to making records. Horns? Works for Duke. Saxophone and other winds? Put ’em in there. Heavy organ lines? No problem. Robillard’s…
Calling All Queers
At a superficial glance, Richard Florida’s theories ring of mushy academia. The Carnegie-Mellon professor speaks of diversity and inclusiveness and the “demographic changes in our society.” It’s stuff usually heard from sensitivity trainers, who your boss hires once a year to bestow enlightenment on the cubicle farm. And sensitivity trainers, as we all know, should…
Love, featuring Arthur Lee
Legendary psychedelic soulman Arthur Lee will front the latest version of Love when he plays the Beachland Ballroom August 4. What he will play is a mystery, though pressure will be on for a nostalgic show. Released from prison in December after serving six years of an eight-year sentence, Lee is one of the longest…
Tour of Duty
One morning in April, two professional athletes were hitting golf balls at a West Side driving range. One was Cavaliers center Zydrunas Ilgauskas, who made $11.2 million last season. The other was Chris Wollmann, a pro golfer whose winnings this year would send a librarian on strike. “Damn, look at his clubs,” Wollmann says, as…
Curl Up and Die
Unfortunately, We’re Not Robots, the new full-length from Sin City’s favorite metal trio Curl Up and Die, would instantly convince just about any listener that these instrumentally inclined ogres were nothing more than desert-baked Hessians. Mike Minnick’s unintelligible vocals and the group’s distorted guitars and drums hark back to grindcore’s glory days. But the blend…
