Last Call Cleveland: Songs of Denigration and Mirth
If the above video – or this one – makes you laugh, then you might want to clear your Friday night, when Last Call Cleveland will perform these and other ridiculous songs at Lakewood’s Winchester Tavern, 12112 Madison Avenue. Band leader Mike Polk says the set list is, sadly, “mostly songs that denigrate women. Which…
Cav’s Loss: It’s All Regina Brett’s Fault
The stakes were the highest they’ve ever been for LeBron James last week. After carrying the Cavs to their first ever NBA Finals, the pressure was on to do the impossible again: taking down the almighty San Antonio Spurs. Add to that the birth of his son Bryce on the morning of game four, and…
Mr. Nice Guy: A Travis Haffner Spotting
LeBron may be King, but another Cleveland athlete gets our vote for Best Sport: Indians’ slugger, Travis Hafner. We spied the strapping 30-year-old in the company of a Pretty Blond and her little dog last Saturday, strolling through Rocky River’s lakefront park, just moments after sunset. As they approached the small playground, the buzz began.…
An Indian’s View of the Gay Pride Fest
The organizers behind Cleveland’s 19th annual gay-pride fest are giving themselves a collective high-five for counting a record 7,500 homos at the Cruising for Pride on Saturday afternoon. But don’t expect Sanjaya Patel and his bride to send home postcards about it to their native India. Earlier in the day, the Patels were spending the…
This Just In: Concert Announcements
This week, 39 new shows. Spicy blues from C.J. Chenier. INXS return with some new guy on vocals. Seminal pop-punk from the reunited Smoking Popes. Summertime soul from Macy Gray. Metal, Vegas-style, from Avenger of Blood. Totally killer metal from Pig Destroyer. And the return of Donny Osmond…
The PD: Your Source for Remedial Exercise Tips
Mondays tend to be scary for The Plain Dealer, the day newspapers struggle most to sell ads. So editors have countered by putting out slim editions filled with lots of light “news on the go” and state-the-obvious infographics. What they’re trying to say is, “Hey, we know you’re just too busy to read a real…
The TV Ratings Weren’t the Cavs’ Fault. They Were the NBA’s.
With the NBA finals wrapped up, most of Cleveland is moving on to the Tribe. Not so with some sports writers. They’re left to analyze the series and the state of the NBA in general. If you hadn’t heard, the series between the Spurs and Cavs had the worst television ratings in decades. Despite the…
Hating Eva Longoria
After the Cavs’ painful loss to the Spurs last week, many Clevelanders will never be able to watch Desperate Housewives again. Not after being subjected, night after night, to the actress Eva Longoria (Gabrielle on the show) clapping her perfect hands and beaming her perfect smile for the TV cameras in support of her fiancé,…
Free Music Monday: The Black Keys
It bears repeating: Akron’s Black Keys really are that good. After being tapped to open for Radiohead, everyone’s favorite Akron duo are currently touring with Dinosaur Jr. and the Walkmen. The Keys and the Walkmen play the Agora Monday, June 25. Tickets are sold out. And if you can’t score any, get some Keys free…
Mikey G’s Entertainment Picks of the Week
This week’s top arts and entertainment picks around town, from the guy who’s paid to pick them: Monday: Just a couple of years ago, Cliks frontman Lucas Silveira answered to his birth name of Lillia. These days, the transgendered leader of Toronto’s alt-rock combo doesn’t even bother to hide his sexuality … or his rage…
Senses Fail
Coming out of the ever-fertile emo-screamo scene, New Jersey’s Senses Fail has served up murderous fantasies, lethal desperation, suicidal despair, and buckets of self-loathing since 2002. Consider this line from the title track to 2006’s Still Searching: “I stare at accidents in a sick attempt to feel at all.” Hell, Morrissey has got nuthin’ on…
Unbunch Panties, Please
Eli Roth is obviously a poseur, but on the evidence of Hostel: Part II, he’s also kind of a pussy. Anyone can string a naked woman up by the ankles and slit her throat, and while I admit it takes a little extra something to position a Eurotrash villainess beneath her flayed torso, then gawk…
Family Fun
It’s just after five on a weekday. The Sluggers & Putters Family Fun Center in Canal Fulton, just outside of Akron, is nearly empty. The batting cages are quiet; the driving range is deserted. I’m meeting Patrick Sweany for mini grand-prix racing. A blues guitarist from Massillon, Sweany has known the road intimately for more…
Hungary Heart
Cleveland’s Hungarian American community celebrates József Domján’s 100th anniversary in Domján: Master of the Color Woodcut, now on view at the Hungarian Heritage Museum. The 100-piece exhibit showcases prints the artist designed after he fled his native Hungary for New York City in the late 1950s. The display consists of works that were first intricately…
Peanut Butter Wolf
For two decades, DJ Peanut Butter Wolf has been the Pied Piper of the hip-hop underground, bridging schools both old and new, as well as establishing Stones Throw Records, the scene’s most formidable label. In the process, PBW (aka Chris Manak) has helped launch the careers of such indie titans as Madlib, J Dilla, and…
Walk On By
What kind of man would abandon his child? That is a question that haunts many sons and daughters who have been left behind when an irresponsible semen-squirter decides to hit the bricks after a squalling baby shows up. But before you answer the above query with the obvious reply — an asshole — it seems…
Now That’s Music
“We’re not the kind of place that has Bud and Miller,” says John Bomba, co-owner of Now That’s Class. On the Cleveland-Lakewood border, the new club is the kind of place that has microbrews and a jukebox loaded up with Iron Maiden, Blue Cheer, Pentagram, the Cro-Mags, Hank Williams, Bob Marley, and Gary Numan. And…
When Nature Calls
Cain Park opens its gallery season tonight with Take a Bite Out of Art, an exhibit featuring work by local artists Lee Heinen and Adele Marihatt. Heinen says her landscape paintings could never compete with the real thing, so she ditches imitation and uses Mother Nature as a launching point to her own interpretation of…
Absenstar
Chicago’s AbsentStar is working on its major-label debut with Dan Wilson, the Semisonic singer and Dixie Chicks collaborator. And until it’s available, the band is working its way around the Midwest, introducing crowds to its aggressive, melodic rock. Band members claim Radiohead and Muse as influences, but their music is more radio-ready than their idols’…
Capsule reviews of current area theater presentations.
Frozen — In Frozen, now playing at the Beck Center, playwright Bryony Lavery uses triangulation — a process used to fix a location using three discrete reference points — to pin down the essential nature of evil. By looking at a pedophile serial killer from three perspectives, the play attempts to plumb the horrifying depths…
Mouthus
Mouthus often sounds like a lot of things: tribal-industrial, U.S. Maple, white noise, Jandek, minimal techno, even various folk forms from Asia. Thurston Moore, whose Ecstatic Peace imprint released the band’s Loam LP in 2005, has described the pulsating squall produced by axeman Brian Sullivan and drummer Nate Nelson as “a brain-gouged cross of Manowar…
Work-Free Comedy
Stand-up comedian Todd McCune says he used to overthink his act. No more. “I tried to force myself to write,” he says. “But it got weird — like I was trying too hard. Comics are [supposed to be] natural smartasses.” So he started looking around for inspiration. And suddenly, everything became joke material – like…
Fairmont
Fairmont features two ex-members of Eyeball Records’ Pencey Prep, the band that Frank Iero fronted before he joined My Chemical Romance. But there will be no makeup or operatic emoting on this night of rock and roll. “Basically, we’ll melt your face off with our mesmerizing set of indie-rock bliss,” says singer-guitarist Neil Sabatino. “We…
Capsule reviews of current area art exhibitions.
NEW Exhibit: Cleveland — Don’t say art never did anything for you. Visit this neighborly little show at Wooltex, and you’ll gain new respect for the power of a painting. The small exhibit includes 10 local artists, some of whom you may be familiar with. But that’s only half of it. The rest of the…
Forever in Terror
In the ’80s, Metal Blade Records helped usher in the golden age of thrash. Its roster now includes Six Feet Under, the Black Dahlia Murder, and a new addition: Forever in Terror, five high school kids from Streetsboro, who look like they haven’t cut their hair since watching Blue’s Clues. “When I first heard the…
Air Time
Stand-up comedian Robert Hawkins has a bit in his act about the Blue Angels, the military’s daredevil jet team. He says they should be fired — because “they don’t do anything, expect set off car alarms. I don’t know how they’re supposed to scare anybody. Run for your life, before they do a loop-the-loop!” Then…
New Wave Rave
Before the Cure developed the most agonizingly dull live show in the history of rock and roll, the big-haired Brits had a lively catalog of material that was flat-out ecstatic. So California-based tribute band the Cured takes special pains to emphasize that it’s a tribute to 1980s Cure. While they go as late as the…
Beat the Crowd
Glastonbury (THINKFilm) Only a Julien Temple concert doc would get the R rating — for nudity (male, mostly, and not terribly flattering at that), drug use (weed, mostly — yawn), language, and sexual content. Also dig the overwrought BBC narration, in which Glastonbury is described as a former refuge for “saints, mystics, and holy men,”…
The Raccoon County Music Festival 2007
Out in the wilds of central Geauga County, a rare breed of music maker crawls out of the dark every summer to play bygone American tunes. “People rarely get to see the real thing,” says director Pete McDonald of the annual Raccoon County Music Festival. “These musicians are experts in their genres: Cajun, old-time, bluegrass,…
Hear Them Roar
New York’s As Tall as Lions aim for Coldplay-style majestic rock with the moody set-pieces on their self-titled second album. Singer Daniel Nigro certainly has his part down, swooping in with lyrical deftness that crests in a grand falsetto. It’s as if Chris Martin himself blessed the songs from above. The rest of the band…
KRS-One and Marley Marl
With stunning production from old rival Marley Marl, KRS-One delivers a sharp retort to Nas’ recent proclamation that Hip Hop Is Dead — but not without kicking some dirt on gangsta culture. The highlights on this 12-track disc are many, including “Nothing New,” in which the Teacher delivers his indictment via a Rasta dancehall chorus;…
Car Lust
I was driving home from work the other day when it occurred to me that, despite being college-educated and reasonably intelligent, I have no idea how my car works. I know the gas goes in, because I do that part. But after that it gets fuzzy. When the mechanic’s telling me what’s wrong with the…
Stephen Stills
For most of us who didn’t grow up in the early ’70s, Neil Young is the only redeeming member of the supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Of course, David Crosby used to be cool back in the ’60s, when he was a Byrd. And the same goes for Stephen “Buffalo Springfield” Stills — and,…
Power Rangers
Back in the day, the Powerhouse was energy headquarters to downtown’s streetcar system. For the past four years, the pub located inside the century-old building has been churning out a different kind of resource: Men of Steel. Every Saturday night, the male-dancer revue shimmies and shakes for ladies celebrating bachelorette parties, birthdays, and divorces. “Girls…
Battles
It seems unthinkable that an avant-jazz/noise-rock band, one that includes former members of Helmet and Don Caballero, could summon such well-anchored melodies and coherent polyrhythms from a sea of cables, laptops, and pedals. Although this kind of bionic rock has been done before, it has never sounded so approachable yet undiluted, which is probably the…
Here are the week’s best releases from the pop-culture universe:
DVD — The Best of Chappelle’s Show Uncensored: This single-disc compilation of the greatest bits from the decade’s funniest program includes a few new Charlie Murphy stories, as bait for folks who already own the three season sets. The sketches you know (“A Night With Wayne Brady,” “Racial Draft”) are worth watching again. And the…
Barenaked Ladies
To pop fans in 2007, keeping up with the Barenaked Ladies is as embarrassing as monitoring Corky and the Juice Pigs tour posters on eBay. While some do fancy the Canadians’ improvised raps and witty stage banter, most of us in the States consider the Ladies a novelty import that died long ago (sometime in…
Traviata’s Travail
Kelly Clarkson’s recent battle with her record company, which refuses to release her new album till she makes some changes to it, is nothing new. Artists have fought cash-dispensing execs and fickle audiences for centuries. Way back in 1853, Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata baffled opera fans, who stayed far away from the theater after its…
Moby Grape
Of all the bands to call the Bay Area home in the ’60s — including the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver — Moby Grape was the most underrated. But with the gift of hindsight, the Grape just might have been the best. As this career-spanning collection verifies, the band doesn’t sound dated at all, which…
Our top DVD picks for the week of June 12:
Blood & Chocolate (Sony) Breach (Universal) The Cecil B. DeMille Classics Collection (Passport) Deadwood: The Complete Third Season (HBO) 52 Pick-Up (MGM) Ghost Rider (Sony) The Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries: Season Two (Universal) Hellboy: Blood & Iron (Anchor Bay) James Stewart: Screen Legend Collection (Universal) Jesse Stone: Night Passage and Death in Paradise (Sony)…
Wasted Away
Grand River Cellars’ Winey Margarita bash turns the tiny town of Madison into a tropical paradise tonight. It’s the first event in a summer-long series of booze-centered programs. Tonight’s al fresco outing serves up plenty of the venue’s signature margarita, which eschews the usual tequila in favor of vino. “It’s all about fun and creativity,”…
Zodiacs
Zodiacs blow away just about every stoner-rock outfit out there. So if you crave brutal acid rock melted with malevolent wah-wah, banshee reverb, and spine-piercing feedback, pick up Gone. This lo-fi muck will absolutely bugger you, especially the 10-minute closer, “Road Star Blues.” But wait — on second thought, fuck that. I expect more from…
The Perfect Scam
Juanita Myrick got her first job with county human services as a records clerk and quickly devoted herself to the patron saint of government: paperwork. Over the next 17 years, she became the mistress of meticulous documentation — of clients, welfare checks, case evaluations. No detail was too mundane to escape her. The model bureaucrat…
From Dusk Till Dawn
Jazz singer Kurt Elling’s latest CD, Nightmoves, features a set of songs all about a moon-kissed lifestyle. But ever since his daughter was born a year and a half ago, the seven-time Grammy nominee sees nighttime from a whole new perspective. “I used to be a night person,” he laughs. “I’m a different kind of…
Ozzy Osbourne
What is Ozzy now, 100 or something? You’d think the old coot would call it a career, rather than further tarnish his legacy. But as with most icons past their prime, he just doesn’t know when to say when. He’s clearly saddled by idiots; why else would he choose to whore himself out on MTV?…
So Awesome, It Hurts
An old man has his shirt off in a crowded bar. His chest looks more like an old woman’s, droopy and sad, but his face is that of a young boy. He’s holding up a new T-shirt. He looks giddy. So do the cluster of young men circling him, especially the guy taking the old…
Love Her in Black
During the past two decades, Doro Pesch invented the metal tango, proclaimed “I Rule the Ruins,” and crowned herself the Metal Queen. The German singer just released 20 Years: A Warrior Soul, a DVD featuring live performances and backstage footage. The 43-year-old Doro fronted Warlock when she was barely out of her teens. Solo, she’s…
Soulless
Soulless’ Forever Defiant sets a new Cleveland standard for kicking ass from the get-go. Six seconds in, Chris Dora has already squeezed in two hyperspeed drum rolls that leave you feeling as if Parma heshers stuffed you into a steel drum and rolled it down a 66-story set of spiral stairs leading straight to Hades.…
The Crackdown
They hung on the corners wearing the compulsory junior-badass uniform — long white T’s with jeans barely hanging from narrow hips. But if their look was unimaginative, their sales system wasn’t. Everyone knew their roles. One guy hustled customers. One took the money. Another supplied the product. If the cops showed up, it was a…
Movin’ on Up
The Irregulars comedy group takes its act to a classier joint tonight. On the third Tuesday of each month, the 11-man troupe ditches open-mic nights at neighborhood shot-and-beer spots in favor of stand-up showcases at the Improv. “Not to sound haughty, but open-mic nights have a stigma of being a bunch of doctors who you…
Last Stone Cast
Witness the next phase of the ongoing ’80s revival: the return of hair rock. Last Stone Cast is a new power trio anchored by bassist Jon Epstein. Formerly of retro-rockers Fast Chester, Epstein finally has the chance to show what he sounds like when he’s not smothered in four pounds of guitar-Gouda. If you’ve ever…
Citizen Blackwell
For those worried that Ken Blackwell has been living in a cardboard box since losing his gubernatorial bid, fear not. Ohio’s former secretary of state and psycho-in-chief has found more suitable employ. Blackwell is now waging war against sin as a senior fellow for the Family Research Council in D.C. It’s a Christian lobbying group…
The Running of the Dads
People can score a last-minute Father’s Day gift at today’s DadsDay Run. Everyone who crosses the finish line at the fifth-annual outing gets a tie. “We put them around their necks, like medals,” says director Peter Nagusky. The day features three races: a 5K opening race, a 1K run, and a 100-meter Kidsprint. The kickoff…
Global Table
Ever wonder what kind of restaurant you could launch if money was no object? Look no further than Table 45, veteran chef Zack Bruell’s new sexpot of a salon inside the InterContinental Hotel on the Cleveland Clinic campus. Better yet, pull up a chair — one of those plump Corbusier models, done up in chocolate-brown…
Cleveland, Incorporated
Gangsta corporations mug black citizens: Bob Gross has every right to express his outrage [Letters, May 30] over Michelle Hamilton’s letter [May 16] that condemned whites for persecuting and exploiting blacks. But Gross was absolutely wrong to blame blacks for all of the corruption in Cleveland and its schools. Cleveland is run by the white…
Three Cheers for the Queers!
L.A.-based comedian Jason Stuart skewers ex-boyfriends, pop culture, and politicos at today’s Cruising With Pride bash, the city’s 19th-annual homo fest. The gay comic will specifically aim jabs at the Bush administration and its inability to capture Osama bin Laden. “He’s six-foot-three, attached to a dialysis machine, and nobody can find him,” he says. “Unbelievable!…
Penne Saved
After 22 years of trying to convince Clevelanders that the Baricelli Inn isn’t Italian, chef-owner Paul Minnillo has decided to give it a rest: As of last month, he has put an Italian spin on the restaurant’s New American menu and added a handful of imaginative pasta dishes, priced at $25 or less. “This is…
National’s Anthems
No one knew quite how to react when Matt Berninger, frontman for the National, started hopping around on one foot and screaming to the ceiling, “My mind is not right! My mind is not right! My mind is not right!” This is unsettling behavior for an opening act. The sold-out crowd, gathered here at New…
Sticky Situation
This weekend’s annual Avon Heritage Duct Tape Festival shows off the colorful adhesive in many ways Dad never dreamed of. Games, life-size sculptures, and the always-popular fashion show — all using duct tape — throw the spotlight on Avon’s no. 1 export. And ever since HGTV and Montel Williams aired segments about the fest, it’s…
Busker Love
Once, written and directed by John Carney, is a deceptively simple movie — a narrative strung together by pop songs, but without the sheen (or arrogance) of most cinematic musicals. By day, a Dublin busker (Glen Hansard) sings Van Morrison on a street corner for spare change, which, on occasion, is swiped by old friends…
Crawdaddy! Rock
Current readers of Pitchfork take the hyperbole that accompanies positive reviews with a pound of salt. But rock criticism has always harbored such fervor. Take this example: “There’s a group you have to hear. They’re called the Doors, and they’re the best new band I’ve heard this year.” That proclamation ran in the seventh issue…
At Your Services
Porthouse Theatre launches its new season tonight with Pump Boys and Dinettes, the story of six high-stepping, string-strumming kids and a roadside diner that doubles as a gas station. “It’s more of a concert than a play,” says director Eric van Baars. The 25-year-old show, billed as a country and blues musical revue, is short…
Panthers
Punk rock is passé for Panthers. The Brooklyn quartet swung that style of chin music on their first full-length, 2002’s Are You Down??, which was a crooked set of hardcore and post-punk. It was a brainy sound with roots in Orchid, the group that three-fourths of Panthers used to be in. But old-timers know that…
The Mystery of the Tween Demo
So lame it’s . . . cool? Nancy Drew, writer-director Andrew Fleming’s attempt to jump-start a new Warner Bros. franchise, is a movie flaunting a most obvious demographic strategy — a teen flick with a sensibility, or at least sense of humor, that’s most definitely parental. Invented in 1930 by the same Stratemeyer syndicate that…
A Congo Square Revival
“One hundred and fifty years ago in old New Orleans, there was a public square called Congo Square. It was a dusty old place where on Sundays, when they did not have to work, the African slaves came with their drums to sing and dance what they called the bamboula,” wrote Langston Hughes in his…
Tastes of India
Herbert Ascherman Jr. and Unni Krishnan Pulikkal, the two photographers featured in Interesting Faces, Colorful Wings, have one thing in common: Kerala. Clevelander Ascherman visited the Indian city that’s the focus of the new exhibit (which opens at the Museum of Natural History today) twice over the past two years; Pulikkal was born there and…
