Date with Disaster
The air is oppressively humid and the sun still shining brightly at 6:30 p.m., but the bars on Court Street in Athens, Ohio, are already mobbed with students celebrating the upcoming summer break. About sixty of them have streamed into the Pub, one of a dozen popular watering holes that line this red brick street,…
In the Clear
Juno the Transparent Woman doesn’t let life’s little melodramas–like having 75 lightbulbs implanted in her shoulder blades–get to her. Her fifty-year-old pickup lines are unfailingly fresh: “The next generation begins in my ovaries,” she enthuses. And she always invites everybody to look at her pancreas. Yes, she’s a freak. But she’s our freak. Tall, statuesque,…
The Edge
White Deal Blindsides Oglebay Nuke the Huletts! Or at least the increasingly convoluted plans to save the historic iron-ore unloaders. At last week’s contentious Landmarks Commission meeting, the White Administration finally jumped into the fray, hoping to quiet pesky preservationists by sweetening the Port Authority’s offer to disassemble and store a single Hulett–for the modest…
Desperately Seeking Subjects
Lucky, the guy behind the window at a local gay bathhouse, looks surprised and slightly unnerved. “I’m from the AIDS Clinical Trials Unit,” says Ron Johnson, the registered nurse standing in the lobby. Undeterred by Lucky’s cheerless reception, Johnson goes on to ask if he can drop off some posters, bar cards, and condoms advertising…
Letters
Scene: Your Source for Utter Filth I just wanted to let you know how disappointed I was to see such a trashy article in Scene [“Full Swing,” June 10]. I can’t believe this article appeared in a publication that is available to the public. Your paper is usually a source of entertainment information for the…
True Grit
Raymond Chandler, the creator of all those detective novels that unapologetically inhaled the dank odor of Depression-era corruption in Southern California, was once asked for a pithy description of his fictional world. Responded Chandler, “It’s not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain artists with tough minds and…
Out of the Pens of Babes
If the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade evokes the quaint heart of the Big Apple, Dobama’s Marilyn Bianchi Kids’ Playwriting Festival does ditto duty for Cleveland. Last week’s 21st annual showcase of area youths’ literary fruit is evidence that the event has remained delightfully naive and wide-eyed, thanks to reams of Elmer’s glue and crepe paper,…
Royal Broil
Life is full of pipe dreams waiting to burst. How can any red-blooded Anglophile resist the manly notion of experiencing Shakespeare’s boys-at-war epic Henry V in the great outdoors, as the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival offers it? In the regal courtyard behind Mather Mansion on the Case Western Reserve campus, there are noble turrets with more…
Seven Slick Courses
A trip to the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area usually means Lycra shorts and bike helmets, or skis and snowboards. But on one Friday evening each month, May through November, it’s Fancy Duds Night in the valley, as Brandywine Catering hosts an extravagant Winemaker Dinner at the Brandywine Ski Resort. Owners Dick and Erleen Ludwig…
Soundbites
Last Wednesday, a video crew was filming outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “Who are you with?” I asked. “MTV,” one of the cameramen said. Funny, but none of their gear bore the famous MTV logo. “Really?” I asked. He shook his head in the affirmative. The crew wasn’t from MTV. They were…
No Smoke, but Still Fire
You’ve seen those billboards around town–the ones with the gloomy teenagers holding cigarettes and standing in front of the road sign welcoming visitors to Loserville, the town where everyone huffs (Jesse Helms, Mayor). The population of Loserville recently dropped by one. Stanley Dural Jr., better known as Buckwheat, hasn’t lit up in months. Buckwheat, an…
The Mellowing of Mr. C
When Elvis Costello was approached by fans during the mid-’80s, he would squelch their questions with a two-word conversation stopper: “I’m retired.” He used this reply, he says, “because it was just easier than trying to explain what I was actually doing.” Chuckling, he adds, “What a bastard I was.” Note Costello’s use of the…
Maximum Bob
Max Bangwell is complaining about the weather. He doesn’t do that, usually, because weather is what made the leader of his eponymous blues band relocate from Cleveland to Los Angeles. “It’s cool and hazy out here, too,” Bangwell says. “We’re supposed to be like this all summer. Something about La Nina is going to keep…
Livewire
Steam Donkeys Blind Pig June 10 Watching a good-timing honky-tonk band play to an empty house is as sad as a cowgirl with a cold sore. Unfortunately, that was the scene from the Made in America series at the Blind Pig, where the Steam Donkeys undoubtedly encountered fewer people than they had at the Big…
Vine Art
Disney departed from its usual practice of basing its big animated features on classic literature or myth when it made what has proved to be one of the studio’s most popular films ever, The Lion King. Yet just barely beneath its surface, that film had a streak of xenophobia carried almost to the point of…
Playback
Orbital The Middle of Nowhere (ffrr/London) The Chemical Brothers Surrender (Freestyle Dust/Astralwerks) Electronica, no matter how it’s been sliced and diced over the years–from techno to rave to ambient to jungle–remains constant in at least one factor: the ability of the music to appeal to ever-changing moods. It can be brainy one minute, a house…
Irish Stew
It has not been lost on the Quinn brothers–actor Aidan, cinematographer Declan, and writer/director Paul–that in old Gaelic culture the tribal bard, or storyteller, was held in the highest esteem. The Quinns want to be Irish storytellers, too, and to that end they have loaded up This Is My Father, their first movie collaboration, with…
Night & Day
Thursday June 17 Find that nineteenth-century Empire chair, or maybe grandpa’s long-lost glass eyeball, at the Cleveland Play House’s annual Treasure Sale, which starts tonight with a benefit preview party. Check out lots of crystal, an eighteenth-century dropleaf table, and a U.S. Post Office cubbyhole that once belonged to Wicked Witch of the West Margaret…
15 Minutes With Fame
This is the first thing you notice about John Travolta as he stands before you, extending his hand in welcome: He does not look at all like a movie star. At 45, he seems a bit soft in the flesh, a tad shorter than he did even on television, where the small screen never could…
Drummer’s Delight
Chaos with a downbeat shakes the souls of the faithful in a tiny white church in tidy white Hudson. Several dozen celebrants pound a multicultural melange of drums–djembes, dumbeks, bongos, congas, and ashikos. They’re loud enough to wake the dead–at least until 11 p.m., when the city’s noise ordinance kicks in. Each solstice and equinox…
