Power Points
In an early scene in Instinct, a new film released by Touchstone, a division of Disney’s Buena Vista Films, we’re told that a brilliant primatologist named Ethan Powell (played by Anthony Hopkins) is being brought back to the United States from Rwanda, where for several years he has been engaged in a close study of…
Letters
Taking a Stand for Stan Regarding Mike Tobin’s piece on Mayor Stan Trupo [“Big Bucks in Berea,” May 27] (full disclosure: Trupo is a friend of mine): Trupo may be too honest and have too much class to be a 1990s politician. He is misguided enough to believe that his priority should be serving the…
Up Close and a Little Personal
The peerless Ethiopian distance runner Haile Gebrselassie is a tiny man–five-foot-three and barely 115 pounds–but in his native country, his heroism looms large. Since 1994 he has set fifteen world records at five different distances, and at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, he outdueled a trio of favored Kenyans to win the gold…
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
Conceptual art can be a real snore; one need only think of Ohio native Jenny Holzer, who coins one-liners like “Expiring for Love is beautiful but stupid,” puts them on posters and billboards, and then places them in public spaces where they can stimulate weary pedestrians into thinking about something other than yesterday’s ball game.…
Drinking with the Pros
Real Drinks How to order as if you know what you’re doing. Dewar’s on the rocks Boilermaker (shot and beer) Manhattan Bombay/Beefeater Gin Martini Rolling Rock Cuervo Loser Drinks Save these for the wedding reception. Alabama Slammer Purple Hooter Sex on the Beach (and any other sexually themed drink) Long Island Iced Tea Cocaine Lady…
Pub Fare With Flair
Outside, the sun was shining bright. But inside the windowless Linden Tavern, it might as well have been midnight. What little illumination there was came from a string of Christmas lights, a few brass wall fixtures, and the television set hanging over a corner of the bar. And even that faint light was filtered through…
The Origin of Drunks
It’s been more than 150 years since Charles Darwin sailed the globe to study how the world’s creatures evolved since crawling out of the primordial soup. Some of his most compelling studies occurred on isolated islands, not unlike the Bass Island chain a hundred miles west of Cleveland. Too bad Darwin never got to Put-in-Bay…
Soundbites
Yeah, Rolling Stone sucks anymore. The covers are a pedophile’s delight. The formerly reliable film critic Peter Travers sometimes reads like one of those hacks who wants to see his blurbs used in promotional advertising. Someone, apparently, is returning Dr. Thompson’s phone calls. Rolling Stone isn’t all crap. William Greider continues to write thoughtful essays…
Busted!
You don’t feel drunk. A little buzzed, maybe, but certainly not over the legal limit to drive. Suddenly there’s a copper in your rear-view mirror with his lights flashing, and the person he’s pulling over is you. What now? Since you were stupid enough to drink and drive, you probably deserve whatever happens next. But…
Playback
Snoop Dogg No Limit Top Dogg (No Limit) On his fourth album, No Limit Top Dogg, Snoop Dogg finally gets back (at least temporarily) to the g-funk that shaped his career at the top of the decade. Now that he’s one of Master P’s soldiers, though, Snoop must play in P’s army, which means an…
Drinking with Droogs
Russia may be a political and financial disaster, but when it comes to drinking, Americans have a lot to learn from their booze-swilling brethren. The first lesson: the art of drinking vodka. Vodka drinking should not be undertaken by the faint of heart, nor by anyone with a low alcohol tolerance. It is meant to…
Livewire
Goo Goo Dolls Fastball Splender Tops Great American Rib Cook-Off May 28 When it shares the bill with food and drink, musical entertainment is often a dicey thing at best. All the scarfing and slugging can make a concert seem more like a frat party: long lines for everything and beach balls, plenty of bouncing…
Blame it all on Michael Flatley
He’s the too-pretty guy who shaves his chest and wears those headbands that John Travolta wore pre-Vincent Vega. The “Lord of the Dance”–whom my Irish buddies Sully, Corcoran, McKibben, Sully, Sully, and Neary desperately want to beat to a bloody pulp. Sure, some of the blame can be spread around to guys like Frank McCourt,…
“That’s Just the Way Everything Is”
With a slit-eyed stare, his brows hanging low, like a snowdrift slumped over a gutter, he took in the crowd. Richard Buckner looked mean. A barking, dirty, don’t-cross-the-road-or-you’ll-regret-it mean. But for a show in a noisy bar down in the Flats, everyone was too preoccupied or drunk to care. The laughing, the shouting, and the…
A Smart Person’s Guide to Drinking
Forget rib burns, parades, fireworks, and all the other PR claptrap. The No. 1 summer recreational activity in this city is drinking. Two-fisted, bang ’em back, balls-to-the-wall-style drinking, befitting a hardcore industrial town. Let others offer excuses, apologies, MADD mothers wagging their fingers. We love drinking! We celebrate it in all its forms, from that…
Untinted Glass
The rock star/journalist relationship has encountered some definite turbulence of late. Don’t believe it? Check out the new Radiohead documentary, Meeting People Is Easy, now out on video. Meeting People reveals a band weary of awards and accolades and energy-draining sold-out performances and, yes, endless streams of stupid questions from endless streams of stupid journalists.…
Microbrew Mayhem
Anybody can open up a microbrewery these days, and the beer tastes like it. Pour a cute-named pint of murky dishwater out of a tap, and every yup in town is ready to plop a fiver on the bar, their taste buds parched by too many Lites. Still, let’s agree on this: Virtually any microbrew…
His Aim Is True
Canadian musicians tend to remain remarkably Canadian. There are a few exceptions. Neil Young is at ease in the lumberman’s flannel of the Pacific Northwest. Bryan Adams wishes he were the son of a New Jersey mechanic. Who knows what the hell Loverboy was thinking. But artists like Joni Mitchell, Rush, the Tragically Hip, and…
Twin Killing in Lakewood
* Tarrymore Inn, 13356 Madison Avenue. Thrill to the emotive strains of Journey and belly up to the meticulously shabby bar, where our inquiry as to what’s on tap yielded an inviting “nothing you’d want.” Ice-cold draft means Genesee, and the “Please!!!!! do not touch the television” notice guarding the 15-inch console means YOU. “Fresh…
How to Get a Bartender’s Attention
When you’ve poured drinks for a living like I have–for vacationers in Hilton Head, for yuppies and aspiring yuppies in D.C., for frat boys in Athens, Ohio, and for blue-collar plumbers and firefighters in Cleveland–you never forget that perfect bar patron. To paraphrase Bogie: We’ll always have Hilton Head. That’s where I was slinging cocktails…
Why They Secretly Despise You
When I tell people I tend bar, the typical response is, “Oh, that must be fun!” It ain’t. Sure, there have been moments, like the time an attractive drunk woman followed me into the walk-in cooler. (I sat her on a cold keg of Killian’s Irish Red while I searched for somebody to take her…
Take Back the Bar: A Girl’s Guide to Social Drinking
It’s a cutdown as old as the Y-chromosome: You (insert verb) like a girl. In sports, business, or any other bastion of maleness, it’s widely believed that one must act male in order to be respected. In no place is this more true than the bar. Most women have a lower tolerance for alcohol than…
Night & Day
Thursday June 3 They’re trying really hard . . . they’re the Hairy Apes, a band from Austin, Texas, that’s striving for a rainbow swirl of rap, reggae, and psychedelia–but amounting to brown mush. Maybe if they stuck to one genre, they’d shine. They’ll perform at 10 p.m. with the Crackhouse Jazz Quartet at the…
The Grown-Up Drink
Bitter and cold, like life itself, the martini has been separating the grown-ups from the kiddies for almost a century now. In its purest, most venomous form, the martini is nothing more than two or three ounces of gin, stirred with one or two drops of vermouth, and ice. Strain the drink into an elegant,…
More Than Jake
Most bars and restaurants that have sprung up around Jacobs Field share dubious similarities–an entree named after one of the hometown heroes (the “Travis fish-Fryman”?), bass-thumping jock jams, and beer prices better suited to a millionaire right fielder. But off the beaten basepaths, some locales still sport pre-Jake beer rates or offer food that doesn’t…
Noisy Neighbors
It’s just past 2 a.m. on a Sunday, and the sidewalk along a strip of trendy nightclubs is filled with revelers in no hurry to go home. Two guys lean against a brick wall, sipping beer from plastic cups and eyeing a cluster of passing females. A man trailing not far behind kicks a green…
Cookie’s Misfortune
Set smack in the middle of a Brooklyn, New York, ghetto, the giant pink fiberglass clam was a real crowd-pleaser. Swarms of boys climbed it in the middle of the night, holding open its mechanized mouth with a metal bar, trying to steal the real pearl inside. Now that’s a successful sculpture, thought artist and…
The Edge
Prez Descendant Told to Take a Hike Walk softly when you visit Lawnfield, the home of President James A. Garfield in Mentor, and for God’s sake don’t ask what became of that garrulous old groundskeeper. The man in question is Jim Garfield, the 79-year-old great-grandson of the President, who was born and raised on the…
