Danger Management
With city government exclusively populated by kinder, gentler Democrats, one might presume they’d create a kinder, gentler workplace. But try telling that to the 100-odd clerks who process speeding tickets, DUIs, and misdemeanor assaults. Data entry isn’t what you’d call dangerous work. Yet Municipal Clerk of Courts Earle B. Turner has seen fit to install…
Riverchance
“Hot Food . . . Cool View,” is the motto at LeFever’s, a handsome Cuyahoga Falls restaurant perched on the banks of its namesake river in central Summit County; and owner Robert LeFever has got that at least 50 percent correct. The view of the rugged river as it rushes over one of the smaller…
Danger Mouse & Jemini
When DJ Danger Mouse and Brooklyn MC Jemini released Ghetto Pop Life in October 2003, only those in the know really caught on. But once Danger Mouse dropped The Grey Album — a remix of Jay-Z’s The Black Album using sounds and samples from the Beatles’ White Album — his name raced through the industry.…
Class Dismissed
Class Dismissed Time to drop the F-bomb: Just wanted to make a few general comments about your article “The Fifteenth Minute” [June 2], written about Fredo LaPonza. First of all, was it really necessary to use the F-bomb? That made the article seem trashy right from the get-go. Second, was it also necessary to describe…
Speedy Greek
Add Greek to the mix of international flavors now available at the Rockside Corners shopping center (6901 Rockside Road, Independence), with the recent arrival of Fournos Café. The attractive space at the west end of the plaza joins Chipotle Mexican Grill, Aladdin’s, the Winking Lizard, and several other casual eateries in an area that has…
Patterson Hood
Yes, Virginia, there were Drive-By Truckers albums before a bandwagon of critics hailed the Alabama natives’ Southern Rock Opera and Decoration Day as the rebirth of the Confederate Guitar Army. The Truckers have, in fact, been around for eons, and the first officially released solo record by frontman Patterson Hood harks back to those less…
No One-Shtick Pony
Klezmer is traditional Jewish folk music performed at weddings and festivals. It’s played on clarinets, trumpets, saxes, banjos, and violins. And Bert Stratton, leader of the Cleveland-based klezmer group Yiddishe Cup, swears that it translates well to contemporary audiences. “It’s come back in the last 20 years,” he claims. “It’s had a renaissance. “I’ve done…
Feels Like Old Times
Michael Anthony used to drink Jack Daniel’s straight from the bottle. The fleshy Van Halen bassist, whose body once looked as if it were held together by Bisquick and bourbon, would gulp the stuff down right onstage, draining liter bottles of Tennessee’s finest, to no end but his own. The guy was the life of…
Armand Van Helden
In the mid- to late ’90s, Armand Van Helden was the name in American progressive trance and house, penning hits like “U Don’t Know Me” and “Witch Doktor” while remixing tracks by everyone from Puff Daddy to the Rolling Stones. His two post-millennial LPs met with tepid critical press and little dance-floor furor, making Van…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, July 1 The Cleveland Orchestra kicks off the extra-long Fourth of July weekend with a Star-Spangled Spectacular Concert and Festival, its 15th annual free downtown shindig. Blossom Festival director Jahja Ling leads the orchestra through a patriotic program that includes “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “America the Beautiful,” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” (Other summertime…
Holy Smoke
Because he got high — and because his smash song about it helped his 2001 major-label debut go platinum — Afroman’s record label expected a few more bong-friendly hits the second time around. But the ribald rapper showed up with plans for a double album praising Christ instead of cannabis, and Universal lost its faith.…
2.2 Kid Life
2.2 Kid Life’s Villains gets the blood flowing like a lungful of carbon monoxide. Essentially a one-man show by Cleveland’s Frank Longano, Kid Life debuted in 2001 with The Escape Artist. The three people that stayed awake through that disc raved about Longano’s use of samples, strings, and looped beats. His sophomore disc is more…
Lady Is a Champ
At 5-foot-1 and 100 pounds, Danica Patrick looks more like the perky high-school cheerleader she used to be than the tenacious race-car driver she is now. Bring up open-wheel racing, and she can talk about fuel injection, twin-cam engines, and five-speed transmissions like a seasoned auto mechanic. And her handshake is as solid as her…
Kiss, Me
It’s not easy being a Kiss fan — even a reformed one. I haven’t been able to stomach the self-proclaimed “hottest band in the world” for years. I still cringe every time it hawks another overpriced trinket or embarks on its annual farewell tour. It’s almost too tough to bear. You see, Kiss was my…
Abdullah
Abdullah’s bloodless doom was once so measured and numbing, you could practically feel your heart slowing when the band played, as if you were listening to them in a meat locker. But on its latest demo, Abdullah downshifts again with pulse-quickening death rock that further excavates its punk roots. Last time out, Abdullah beat the…
Tiger’s Goods
SAT 7/3 Ever since Jon Everett trumpeted that Tiger Tyson was coming to his Jungle Party, his phone has rung off the wall. “It’s just amazing the number of calls we’re getting,” says Everett, the interim director of the gay-minority advocate BlackOut Unlimited. Tyson is touted as the most prolific “Blatino” porn actor in the…
Reelin’ in the Beers
Jesse McCoy bellies up to the bar at the Warren Tavern and eyes the contents of its beer coolers suspiciously, like a steelworker who’s just been served quiche. Once a homely neighborhood hang, the Warren has gone upscale. Its wobbly tables have been replaced with plush padded booths and floral arrangements. Its menu now boasts…
Renaissance Glare
SAT 7/3 As “queen” of the Kingdom of Pentwyvern, Shana McCoy knows that her subjects are primed to kill her. On the first Saturday and third Sunday of every month, McCoy and her husband dress up in medieval garb for an afternoon of fantasy battles in “Pentwyvern” (geek-speak for “Five Dragons”). Armed with foam-padded shields…
Local Bands Get Warped
The Vans Warped Tour will visit the Tower City Amphitheater Friday July 23, bringing more than 40 national touring punk bands and featuring four Cleveland groups. Delay, HowAboutNo, Johnny Psycho, and the Radikills will play the Ernie Ball stage, which presents local bands at every stop on the tour. “We want our stage to be…
Puppet Masters
SAT 7/3 As the education assistant at Oberlin College’s Allen Memorial Art Museum, Loren Fawcett took a crash course on everything Ramayana — the ancient Hindu epic that teenagers in her Puppet Summer program will reenact on Saturday. The kids spent the past two weeks constructing two- and three-foot-tall Javanese shadow puppets out of durable…
Reel Big Fish
Reel Big Fish is one of the SoCal ska-punk horde, the most famous of whom were bands such as No Doubt and Sublime. When these bands first came out, a lot of folks called them the Ska Revival. All of those people were wrong. The Specials and Madness were ska revival; the Skatalites were ska.…
Tennessee’s Pride
7/1-7/17 John Woodson, director of Porthouse Theatre’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire, doesn’t see the point in messing with a classic. Besides, how would some of Tennessee Williams’s 1940s-specific conditions and conventions — like morally fragile characters and sexy jazz music — adapt to modern times? “It’s sort of a historical piece,” he says.…
Nick Curran & the Nightlifes
There was a time when jump, blues, R&B, swing, and rock and roll were more the same than they were different. As some styles were fading in popularity and others just emerging, the lines that defined each from the other were not always so sharply drawn. It’s from this delightful mishmash that Nick Curran concocts…
Run, Don’t Crawl
All you need to know about Spider-Man 2 is revealed in the opening credits, in which comic-book artist Alex Ross recaps the 2002 original in lovingly, lavishly painted panels. Spidey and Mary Jane Watson are again entangled in that now-iconic upside-down kiss; nutty Norman Osborn, out of Green Goblin garb, gnashes his teeth; a dumbstruck…
Floorian
When Bomp Records head honcho Greg Shaw talks, people listen. The man who discovered and put out the first records by the likes of the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Warlocks, as well as releasing the first American record by Spacemen 3, has just signed Floorian to his roster, so don’t be surprised if you…
Soul Doubt
America’s Heart & Soul, the debut feature from commercial director Louis Schwartzberg, is being depicted in some quarters as the antidote to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, mostly because it’s a documentary about the U.S.A. being released around the same time. For more simplistic minds that equate anti-Bush sentiment with hatred of America, this analogy may…
Edwin McCain
Because bland people who wear bland clothes and have bland conversations at bland dinner parties in bland houses with bland landscape prints on the wall need more bland background music to play once the Train CD ends, South Carolina’s Edwin McCain puts out a bland new album every two years or so. Really, though, what…
Robbin’ Hood
Nineteenth-century Irish-Australian folk hero Ned Kelly may be little known in America, but in his own country he is a legend, a cross between Bonnie and Clyde and Robin Hood. Born outside Melbourne to poor Irish Catholic immigrants, he was branded an outlaw by the Protestant English establishment that controlled the new colony as firmly…
Wayne “The Train” Hancock
Wayne “The Train” Hancock isn’t one of those alt-country stars to whom roots-music fans turn for the red-blooded emotion so many tin-eared grouches insist is missing from Nashville-produced radio fodder. On A-Town Blues, Hancock’s most recent studio album, Hancock sings, “I’m sorry, darlin’, that I hurt you so/I don’t wanna hear you cry, so I’ll…
Talk Dirty to Me
While busily pursuing our daily routines, we also simultaneously try to act out personal, fictional scripts, balancing who we are with who we would like to be. (“I’m not really a bookkeeper; down deep, I’m actually a rock star.”) No wonder we have a hard time crawling out of bed in the morning. This layered…
Icarus Line
Icarus Line songs are like the louts you’d least like to share a cramped restroom with. They’re loud, sloppy, and willing to take you out in order to hightail it back to the bar to try more pickup lines. Not coolly detached or political like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, the Icarus Line could still tour…
The Lemons Pledge
The basketball court at Beachwood High School is so spit-shine clean, it practically glows. Middle-aged men in knee braces and goggles run up and down the floor, their sneakers as white as their skin. When Rodney Lemons shows up with his long mesh shorts, cuffed black T-shirt, and flashy earring, asking for half the court,…
Listerine, Please
Before a director even thinks of doing a new version of Grease, the Broadway (and then Hollywood) musical tribute to 1950s’ high school wet dreams, he’d better make sure he revels in that time period. The show is a love letter to the hoods, dorks, and grinds who made secondary education during the Eisenhower years…
Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers
A Halloween joy ride through the rockabilly side of town, Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers conjure a backwoods boogie that recalls Southern Culture on the Skids and the Cramps, but with a hip-loose, wild-eyed, blues-inflected fervor that’s all their own. The fun starts with lead singer J.D. Wilkes, whose spectacular mouth-harp theatrics and horror-movie vocals key…
The Old Man and the Dirt
What many people don’t know about Danny Dean is that he can switch from being the most sparkly-eyed, flirtatiously friendly man around to one tough sonofabitch in just under a second. His fans — and he has a lot of them — know him as the last gentleman dirt-track racer, the man in the pits…
On Stage
The American Revolution — Playwright Kirk Wood Bromley has crafted a look back at our country’s first war that fairly bursts with inventiveness, comic wordplay, and Shakespearean riffs; his edgy wit tumbles over itself without ever getting in its own way. It all begins and ends with George Washington, who is considered a bit of…
Goodie Mob
After helping create the genre-busting southern hip-hop that fellow Georgian pioneers OutKast would ride to superstardom, Goodie Mob’s third album, 1999’s World Party, sounded like a discouraging dead end. The content-free rhymes were poorly received and led to the departure of the Mob’s most formidable weapon, the crooning, keening rapper-singer Cee-Lo. The title of the…
The Men of Wal-Mart
From the day she set foot in Wal-Mart, Kathleen Schmeida wanted to be a store manager, professing her goal to anyone who would listen. Such ambition would seem a precious thing. If you’ve ever needed help at Wal-Mart, you know that finding someone with enough brain activity to qualify as a living human is an…
On View
Capturing Cleveland: Pages from a City Sketchbook — The 200-plus works in various media by 21 Cleveland Institute of Art students all portray Cleveland scenery. Although their subjects are easily recognizable, providing opportunities to reminisce, most of the works are mere surface studies, lacking tangible mood and depth. Among the exceptions are Sarah Laing’s digital…
Neurosis
Neurosis has spent the past few years playing down its metal roots. The Bay Area throb ‘n’ crunch maestros peaked artistically with 1996’s epic Through Silver in Blood. Their combination of Laibach-like tribal percussion and Sabbath-worthy guitar was overwhelming but still inviting. Times of Grace, three years later, bore the thumbprint of indie-rock kingmaker Steve…
