The Church in the Lurch
Misguided leadership is to blame The Catholic Church should have a priority on vocations over anything else: bold and dynamic leadership from the bishop, major funding for the vocation office, and a team of men with the fire and drive to treat this “crisis” as a problem to be solved [“A Few Good Men,” May…
Antifreeze Frame
It’s fitting that Don Harvey co-founded and edited an arts magazine called Dialogue. The photo-based sculpture in Don Harvey: Invented Landscapes — A Ten-Year Survey, a retrospective now on view at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, demonstrates his ability to examine many sides of an issue. He creates disciplined visual images that express volatile…
And Then There Were Nuns
Most people associate The Sound of Music with Julie Andrews, but if it weren’t for Mary Martin, the show wouldn’t exist at all. Martin was the Broadway legend who created the singing Peter Pan and was renowned for washing that man right out of her hair in the original South Pacific. Back in the late…
The Veal Deal
John and Stephanie Sutter’s homey little Geauga County restaurant is set back mere feet from the road and dwells in the shadows of a tire store and an excavating contractor’s facility. Here, the farmland is giving way to scarcely regulated industrial sprawl, and 18-wheelers roar by at semisonic speeds. In a word, it seems an…
Sunny Bono
The owners of Northfield Center’s new upscale Italian dining room, La Tavola Bono (32 West Aurora Road), deserve credit for trying to bring a taste of Little Italy to the land of pepperoni pizza-to-go. Frank and Elizabeth Porcelli (cousins of the owners of Porcelli’s on Mayfield Road) and Lisa Giganti hope to woo the locals…
The Money Pits
There’s a morbid side to auto racing fans that longs for a little Hollywood action — a spectacular wreck, or at least a spinout — to spice up the laps. But for every driver at the 20th Marconi Grand Prix of Cleveland on Sunday, there are crew members who can’t help biting their nails with…
Road Testing
Evolution is unpredictable when it comes to music. Melbourne, Australia’s the Living End is a case in point. The band was formed in the early ’90s when guitarist Chris Cheney and bassist Scott Owen met in high school and bonded through their mutual love of rockabilly. Drummer Travis Dempsey solidified the lineup, and the band,…
Peter Principles
Peter Pan is a classic of the silent-film era, but don’t call it a timeless classic — at least not in front of pianist Philip Carli. To him, no film is timeless, and therefore a composer’s score must match the film’s own era. And there’s no place for blistering guitar solos or kooky Wurlitzer organs…
Syncing Ship?
When the lights dimmed at Cleveland Browns Stadium on June 22 for the second of two ‘N Sync concerts, the giant TV monitors with Verizon Wireless logos were the first things to flicker to life. The mock instructional video that played was intended to not only excite the already giddy audience, but also reinforce the…
Space Oddity
For almost two decades, Stanley Kubrick wanted to make a film based on Brian Aldiss’s 1969 short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” about a robot child named David who wants only to be “real” so Mummy and Daddy will love him. The late director of 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange envisioned…
Dido
Dido’s latest single, “Here With Me,” is the bomb — but you’ve gotta have a soft spot for English lasses who write dopey pop songs and coat ’em in dub atmospherics and keyboard-generated symphonies. It’s worth debating how famous Dido would actually be, had Mr. Eminem not co-opted her pretty lame “Thank You” (a lovey-dovey…
Father Hood
Like countless European American filmmakers before him, African American filmmaker John Singleton tends to operate under the faulty logic that vengeance equals heroism. Anyone who doubts this assertion is welcome to compare his grooveless, mean-spirited remake of Shaft to the deceptively simple and human original. This isn’t to say that he’s not an important filmmaker…
Billy Idol
The clenched fist. The snarl. The blond hair stood on end with toothpaste. The tattered clothes of the Reagan era’s promised apocalypse. Singer Billy Idol may be better remembered for these things than for the records he’s made, and it’s too bad. Idol’s work, particularly on mid-’80s album tracks such as “All Summer Single” and…
Psyches Gone Wild
Sexy Beast, the debut feature from British director Jonathan Glazer, is a riveting, scary, and often funny foray into a traditional American genre: the gangster film. Like the western, the gangster film has always been predominantly American turf, but — unlike the western — every decade or so, the Brits come up with an entry…
The Extreme Steel Tour
With bands with names like Slayer, Pantera, Static-X, Skrape, and Morbid Angel on the bill, you expect the Extreme Steel Tour to be a kick-ass affair. And chances are, it will be a kick-ass affair. Who really cares if none of these bands actually makes music that can be called contemporary by today’s metal standards?…
Nurses Wanted
It’s Monday morning, and the nurses at the Cleveland Clinic’s Medical Intensive Care Unit are still talking about Karen Van Kerkhove’s dismal week, when she lost three patients in as many days. That’s unusual, even for the drama-packed ICU. Combat nurses may not lose three patients in three days. The Clinic’s ICU is a war…
Kevin Cunningham
Although Kevin Cunningham, who goes by DJ K.C., has lived in Chicago for the past three years, he got his start here in the mid-’90s, regularly spinning drum ‘n’ bass and house at local raves. In 1996, he linked up with Cleveland’s Tik Tak to found the Baseheads crew, and the two frequently played side-by-side…
Her One Mistake
James Middleton slid up to the bar at the 3030 Club next to Lorna Sheats and Karen Spencer, a glass of cognac dangling from his fingers. He introduced himself as “Curtis,” his middle name. That’s what friends and family called him. He stood 6-foot-2 and weighed 210 pounds, with wide shoulders, a lean, muscular body,…
Various Artists
Rhino, a label that caters to collectors no matter how obsessive, has outdone itself with this sequel to Nuggets, the four-CD anthology of American garage rock it released three years ago. The latest installment in what Rhino executives suggest is an ongoing franchise stresses British rock, but also includes flower-powered, fuzz-toned proto-punk (and much else)…
Waking the Elephant
Richard Hackerd is walking Cleveland’s Brooklyn Avenue, looking for votes. A man sitting on a porch eyes him warily. Though Hackerd is dressed casually, the gleaming gold nametag pinned to his tan jacket flags him as a salesman. But Hackerd is selling only himself. He strides up the porch steps, offers a flier, and says…
Stone Temple Pilots
Some bands just aren’t cool. Period. And no band has tried and failed so spectacularly as Stone Temple Pilots, the grunge-era workhorse that has inexplicably survived long enough to unleash a fifth album, Shangri-La-Dee-Da. Brief recap: Four studs rip off Pearl Jam (not cool) for a pair of critically denounced, publicly adored records. The third…
Lush Life
Pat Hanych looks like a neighbor lady who’d call the cops on a really loud punk band. Her soft, blond hair frames pointy glasses, and her blouse is sprinkled with a pattern of small blue flowers. Add a fresh coat of pink lipstick, and she’s ready for an afternoon outing at Parmatown Mall. But Hanych,…
Basement Jaxx
Of its contemporaries — the Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk, and the Propellerheads — Basement Jaxx is the most disco-oriented of the bunch. The London duo of Felix Buston and Simon Ratcliffe fueled its dynamic 1999 debut, Remedy, with a combination of pre-’90s house, ’70s-era funk, and post-millennium techno. Its new album ups everything learned since…
The History Business
In the movies, whenever Angelina Jolie drinks a bit too visibly from a can of Pepsi or a FedEx truck lingers in the background, it’s because those companies paid to have their names seen. Call it “product placement,” which stems from the Iroquois phrase “We bought our way into the damn movie.” But museums would…
The Six Parts Seven
An instrumental act from the Kent area, the Six Parts Seven formed in 1995 when guitarist Allen Karpinski and his brother, drummer Jay Karpinski, both formerly of the Old Hearts Club, decided to give the post-rock thing a try. The band, which also includes bassist Jay Visker, guitarist Tim Gerak, and viola player Heather Wiker,…
Chin Up
By his own definition, Bruce Campbell is a “midgrade, kind of hammy actor”–a B-movie star, in other words, a man whose career unfolds, like a Swedish porn loop, on Cinemax in the wee small hours of the morning. When I mentioned to a handful of people I was writing about Bruce Campbell this week, they…
