Bob’s Mob
The scene: At an abandoned warehouse outside Columbus, notorious mob boss Roberto “No-Chin” Taft has summoned his top henchmen to a secret meeting. The Taft Organized Crime Family has been linked to a scheme to defraud the state of $12 million in rare coins. G-Men are swarming Columbus. The family’s very survival is at stake.…
On View
NEW Michaël Borremans: Hallucination and Reality — The world envisioned by this young Belgian artist is not an appealing place, despite his skill in portraying it. In this large exhibition, Borremans outlines, in the most delicate hand, a dark, mechanistic, submissive society in which man and nature are traded and altered like commodities. His pencil…
Shook Up in Shaker
Shook Up in Shaker Drunks send Whitey back to ‘burbs: I am shocked and disappointed to see such an ungenerous and limited social perspective published [First Punch, May 25]. According to his letter, “Whitey from Macedonia” took his family to Shaker Square to see a movie and decided to stay for dinner. He complains that…
Pleasure Cruise
The dining room of Lakewood’s Titanic Ristorante shimmered like a Tiffany showcase that Saturday evening, as the sun’s final honeyed rays poured through the brocade-draped windows, bounced off the marble floors, ricocheted between scores of colored-glass prisms dangling from the chandeliers, and finally dispersed across imported Italian tabletops the size of twin beds, adorned with…
Jolly Rancher
Blake Shelton isn’t quite sure why he’s so happy these days. It could have something to do with his marriage of a year and a half. Or with the fact that he not only beat the sophomore slump with his third album, Blake Shelton’s Barn & Grill; he also scored a third No. 1 country…
Pride of Ohio
Why come to Cleveland, only to watch a bunch of bands from New Jersey and Seattle? And really, don’t the Pixies have enough props already? Make the most of your gonzo midwest weekend, and sample some of Ohio’s finest at the all-day Festival Village stages on the Flats West Bank. Band: The Dreadful Yawns Hometown:…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, June 9 In her latest thriller, Devil’s Corner, Lisa Scottoline moves outside of the law firm that’s been the setting of most of her bestsellers. This time, the protagonist is a feisty assistant U.S. attorney, hell-bent on bringing down the drug gangs that have taken over the Philly neighborhood in which she grew up.…
Rock Around the Clock
As Heartless Bastards, Fags, and Lab Rats prepare to invade Cleveland for the three-day CMJ/Rock Hall Music Fest, the city is girding for one of the biggest events of its kind ever to take place here. With more than a hundred bands performing at every major club in town, the fest spans everything from bossa…
Game On
SUN 6/12 When Matt Zeto of Dallas isn’t pocketing $80,000 a year on the professional video-game circuit, he’s taking on wannabe pros on the nationwide Game Riot tour. The traveling arcade of 70 gaming stations — including Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Star Wars: Republic Commando — stops in Cleveland this weekend. And the 22-year-old…
Cleveland Challenge II
Scientific studies have shown that reading this column saps one’s intelligence, like eating paint chips with Larry the Cable Guy. So once a year, we take it upon ourselves to sharpen minds, rather than dull them. This brings us to the second installment of our annual Cleveland music trivia extravaganza. For public-health purposes, we insist…
Big Hair
Cleveland native Mark O’Donnell jokes that he would have “slept with anyone” to write the script to the musical version of John Waters’ Hairspray. He didn’t have to; his prayers were answered when a New York theater critic recommended him to Broadway producer Margo Lion. “Talk about who you know,” chuckles O’Donnell (pictured, inset). “I…
Dark Side of the Pavilion
It was the biggest concert ever, and now it’s happening again. In June 1977, Pink Floyd drew more than 83,000 fans to Municipal Stadium, setting a world attendance record for a one-act show at the time. On Saturday, July 16, Cleveland-based Floyd-tribute act Wish You Were Here will reenact that concert at Scene Pavilion, complete…
Boat People
6/10-6/12 To open the North Coast Harbor Boating, Fishing & Seafood Fest on Friday morning, Captain Bob Marthai of Chicago will pit his Windy II against the schooner Roseway in a mock “tall-ship invasion.” “We’ll invade, raid, and pillage,” jokes Marthai, a Cleveland native who sails the 150-foot barquentine to teach maritime history at festivals…
The Clarks
Clarks bassist Greg Joseph describes the band as “American guitar rock,” which means timeless songs about pining for the girl, getting the girl, dumping the girl, getting over the girl, and finding a new girl who can appreciate a tender acoustic ditty like “Penny on the Floor” — even if it’s about her unworthy predecessor.…
Saucy Ladies
WED 6/15 There’s a very good reason why the competitive BBQ circuit is a man’s world. “Those guys have these big rigs and are working 12 hours,” explains Karen Adler, co-author of The BBQ Queens’ Big Book of Barbecue. “It’s a business and livelihood to them. I don’t know of any women who are [professional]…
Grand Buffet
Grand Buffet will spend the latter part of the summer in Europe, supporting indie-hop icon Sage Francis. But for now, it’s pushing Five Years of Fireworks, a new DVD-CD recap of the story so far. Full of ’80s-style keyboard tracks and weaponized beats, the dynamic rap duo is the Eastern seaboard’s sole purveyor of Benjamin…
Night of the Hunters
WED 6/15 It’s not that the Headhunters aren’t grateful to Herbie Hancock, the jazz great who recruited them as his backing band 32 years ago. “But Herbie kinda kept a lid on things,” says drummer Mike Clark. “We’re much more adventurous now. Herbie kept things in line. He used to tell us, ‘Don’t take it…
White Stripes
The White Stripes’ fifth album is a collision between traditionalism and forward progress. On one hand, tunes like “I’m Lonely (But I Ain’t That Lonely Yet)” and the square-dance-worthy “Little Ghost” proudly display the blue-collar grit the duo perfected on four previous albums — discs soaked in Nashville heartache and vintage Victrola blues. Increasingly, however,…
Problems at Home
The consequences of marital discord in Mr. & Mrs. Smith go way beyond sleeping on the couch or maintaining an icy silence at the breakfast table. Thanks to a cartoonish premise by British screenwriter Simon Kinberg — and the dictates of the summer-movie marketplace — the battling Smiths of the title go at each other…
Maximo Park
For those who’ve longed for the poetic license of Morrissey crammed into the keyboard-tinted riffs of the Cars, leave it to the limeys to satisfy the demand. Maximo Park has already received panting advance praise, and A Certain Trigger actually bears out much of that premature adulation. “Apply Some Pressure” will doubtless pack every venue…
Dream Child
Robert Rodriguez just keeps cranking ’em out. This hasn’t always been a good thing — Spy Kids 2 and 3 felt rushed in a way that the first one didn’t, and Once Upon a Time in Mexico looked cheap compared to its cinematic predecessor, Desperado. But the more Rodriguez keeps at it, the better handle…
Kelly Osbourne
Even with heavy-metal genes, electronically enhanced vocals, and a fashion-punk backing band, Kelly Osbourne couldn’t rock. Her debut disc, Shut Up, filled with powerless ballads and mild outbursts, stocks more bargain bins than Tony Martin-era Black Sabbath. Like Pink, another artist who turned in a stylistically unflattering inaugural release, Osbourne asked songwriter Linda Perry to…
Quelle Horreur!
About a year ago, buzz started building among horror fans about a French slasher movie titled Haute Tension, about two girls who go to a country house and get terrorized by a maniac in workman’s coveralls. It had been well received in Europe, and horror geeks with websites here occasionally managed to procure an import…
Various Artists
Unless you unceasingly don sunglasses, jeans, and a black leather jacket, and have ditched your surname in favor of “Wolf,” chances are you aren’t a fanatic of Japanese garage-punk trio Guitar Wolf. Obsessives insist on owning all eight of the band’s high-octane, bash-‘n’-scream recordings; for everyone else, one of them — any one of them,…
All the Right Moves
Ten is a magical age, when kids are old enough to make articulate statements about their experience and young enough to express their feelings without shame. In a couple of years, excitement will go the way of the bag lunch and become uncool, and acceptable poses will shrink to a few — boredom, anger, bravado.…
Backyard Babies
If rock critics ran the world, the Backyard Babies would be headlining stadiums instead of sweating it out in closet-sized rock dives. But none of the three albums the Swedish band’s released since 1997 has managed to awaken slumbering U.S. rock fans. See how influential the press is? Liquor & Poker is attempting to rectify…
The Bucks Stopped There
It was nearing the end of January, and as the winter days multiplied, so too did Sheila Foster’s dread. Electricity and phone bills were mounting, and Christmas charges had come due. Every winter for the past two years, the unemployed single mother from Cleveland Heights had received an extra child-support check that helped her scrape…
Beached Whale
An enthusiastic cast can save a musical of questionable quality, as can a few good singing voices or some inventive staging gimmicks. This is obviously what director Scott Spence had in mind when he decided to mount Moby Dick! The Musical at Beck Center. So his young cast emotes like crazy, the singers turn in…
AAI
After years of thuggin’, blingin’, and getting crunky with it, it’s time for hip-hop to get back to the basics, and AAI lead the charge with Rap Album. Coming straight outta Brook Park, Matt and Jeremy Knize address important topics that have been sadly neglected in recent rap — like their nuts. Distasteful as some…
Crushing the Competition
It was a University Heights tradition: Every year on John Carroll’s graduation day, neighborhood kids set up lemonade stands around the school for visiting parents. Obviously, this was bad. It had to be stopped. This year, Pat Rhoa’s sons, ages 9 and 11, were engaged in junior commerce when they were approached by John Carroll’s…
Fun With Dysfunction
Dysfunctional families have been the animating force behind theater forever, dating back to the time a caveman first lost patience with his father’s idiotic obsession for collecting mastodon tusks. But when young contemporary playwrights venture into the Land of Weird Relatives, they usually load on the stereotypes — Dominating Depressive Dad, Haranguing Harpy Mom –…
Colin John Band
Don’t let the title fool you: The first national release from this well-traveled blues rocker is no laid-back affair. Fronted by the guitar tandem of Colin John and guest Michael Hill, this CD delivers a drivin’, rock-solid set capable of shaking things up on any bandstand. It should cause some to rethink their notions of…
Suicide Bridge
So many bodies have fallen from the sky into Juliet Shreve’s neighborhood that she can’t remember specifics. They blend together into one limp, anonymous figure. “They never came one after another,” she says. “They’d always catch you by surprise.” She must sift through her memory before one sticks out. It was June 27, 1990. Her…
On Stage
A Chorus Line — This elegant metaphor for the human journey takes place in a stark theatrical version of a Skinner box — an empty black space with mirrors on the back wall, where rewards and punishments are doled out by the frequently disembodied voice of the choreographer. He’s the reigning deity in this claustrophobic…
