Queen for a Night
A few hours before curtain time, Paco Martinez lounges in a bubble bath, a disposable razor and a can of shaving cream in his hands. With the precision of a neighborhood barber, he shears off every hair south of his forehead. Out of the tub and at his dressing table, the 34-year-old Lorain native meticulously…
Happy Trails
Americana mainstays the Cowslingers are riding off into the sunset, capping 15 years together with a farewell show March 13 at the Grog Shop. “Bobby [Latina], our guitar player, didn’t want to tour anymore,” explains frontman Greg Miller. And touring was a big part of what the Cleveland band did. Its mix of rockabilly, garage…
Last Picture Icon
SUN 3/14 Tough job, working as psychiatrist to the psychiatrist of a mob boss. But somebody’s got to do it. And Peter Bogdanovich is just that somebody. In addition to playing a shrink’s shrink on The Sopranos, the director and film historian has just penned Who the Hell’s in It, which will be released in…
The Fever
Being a band from Brooklyn is getting a little dicey. The flood of “cool” acts and their big-city-centered hype has grown tiresome. And thanks to the internet, the time it now takes for hep-culture schlubs here in Ohia to ingest and poop out the next big thing has been bumped up from two years to…
Parts and Labor
SAT 3/13 Chuck Harris calls himself an incurable “bicyclist recyclist.” He can turn a discarded beer can into a rearview mirror. Give him a plastic bottle, and he’ll make a helmet out of it. He’ll show you how at Saturday’s Better Biking With Stuff You Thought About Throwing Out. Harris, an ex-electrical engineer, stumbled onto…
Vienna Teng
The tragedy of American Idol’s karaoke sweepstakes is amplified in the person of Vienna Teng, whose talents include not only a warm, smoky voice, but piano, songwriting, and composing chops that beg for the attention squandered on Kelly Clarkson and Clay Aiken. A Stanford grad and onetime software engineer with Cisco Systems, Teng quit her…
And the Chicken Goes To . . .
3/13-5/29 Clarence VanDuzer never imagined that the rubber chicken he received in the late 1960s would become such a prestigious award. The painter and sculptor made a mold of the bird’s head, poured in five pounds of metal, mounted it, and presented it at a colleague’s retirement party in 1970. The trophy soon became an…
Bitch and Animal
Ani DiFranco once metaphorically said that she has both spots and stripes. Righteous Babe Records’ Bitch and Animal really have both: Bitch sometimes has a row of dots over her right eye; Animal has been known to sport a bright-red mohawk. They sound like a pro-wrestling tag team, but they’re more likely to tag-team your…
It Coulda Been Ringo
3/11-3/14 According to Kevin McKenzie, artistic director of American Ballet Theatre, the company’s Within You Without You: A Tribute to George Harrison was conceived the day the Beatle died in 2001. “We were lamenting his passing and feeling a little old,” he explains. “And someone asked, ‘Has anyone ever done a ballet to the Beatles?’…
The End
One can’t say for sure whether Montreal’s the End went into the recording of its latest, Within Dividia, intending to make a sort of metalcore answer to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, but that’s pretty much what it turns out to be, impressively enough. Don’t get too excited: People who loved Neutral Milk Hotel’s…
Dammit, Mamet!
The problem with Spartan isn’t so much that it’s mediocre, but that it could be a whole lot better. Unlike writer-director David Mamet’s last movie, Heist, a film with such a generic plot and predictable Gene Hackman performance that it never had a chance, Spartan has a reasonably compelling story that makes the viewer at…
Julian Marley
We know what you’re thinking. Another Marley? Truth be told, reggae legend Bob Marley had a lot of children, many of whom have chosen to follow in their father’s footsteps. Julian was born in London in 1975 and moved down to Jamaica at 18. There he linked up with half-brothers Ziggy and Stephen Marley, both…
London Falling
Which is cooler: the snazzy cars, high-tech gadgets, hot babes, and kick-ass fighting, or knowing that you are saving your country and maybe even the world from the clutches of assorted power-hungry and sinister bad guys? Sixteen-year-old Cody Banks gets to enjoy it all in his second cinematic outing as a junior James Bond. The…
Rephlex Records USA 2004
Are you ready to Braindance? England’s Rephlex Records coined this snarky term to encompass its baffling array of left-field techno, drill & bass, dancehall, jungle, ironic rave, and other lunatic-fringe species of electronic music. For this rare U.S. visit by the Rephlex crew, Polish rhythm-vandal Bogdan Raczynski is likely to unleash the spasmodic yet playfully…
From Bad to Worse
If you were expecting the first film to emerge from Afghanistan since the defeat of the Taliban to be even remotely celebratory, you’ll have to adjust your expectations. Radically. In Osama, filmed in 2002 and 2003 in a “suburb” of Kabul, writer-director Siddiq Barmak is not interested in showing us images of liberation or reconstruction.…
Eric Johnson
There were fits and starts at first, but time caught up with guitar wizard Eric Johnson in a big way. Slowed early on by a bad management deal, Johnson ultimately experienced a rapid rise to fame in the form of Grammys, gold records, critical love, and fan adulation. A pyrotechnician on par with his prime…
Panty Raid
As we dress ourselves in today’s modern clothes, it’s sometimes difficult to remember how the world was . . . before spandex, before rayon, before, say, elastic. Ever since some lab geek invented that dandy rubberized fabric, our knickers have been kept snugly and modestly in place. But around the turn of the last century,…
Mates of State
San Francisco’s Mates of State are schooled in the Dressy Bessy college of cuddlecore. Helmed by the married couple of Kori Gardner (formerly a teacher) and Jason Hammel (once a cancer researcher), the duo blends cutesy male-female vocal harmonies, burbling organ, and simple beats to create sugary blasts of vintage barrette rock. The pair started…
Kill the Principal?
When you’re a rural rapper, street cred is hard to come by. But Kevin Beebe might want to find a different way to promote himself. On February 27, Beebe put copies of his unnamed CD on the windshield of cars at Jefferson High School, which was clever enough. Unfortunately, some of the lyrics suggested killing…
Punk Funk
Rock-and-roll music was a monstrously renegade force back in the 1950s, driving parents of teenagers to their martini shakers and ministers to their pulpits to proclaim the end of morality and civilization. Ever since then, young people, righteously pissed off at the conventions and hypocrisy of society, have been trying to re-create that rage through…
Godsmack/The Tallywood Strings
Faced with the choice between making lackluster original music and emulating a master band, Godsmack chose to play Alice in Chains cover songs. Studying Alice’s moves, it grew into the one band from the hard-rock class of 1997 that may survive well into the next epoch. The Grammy winners are showing all the signs: supporting…
Under the Big Top
It’s 4:30 in the afternoon, and fat lines ring Gund Arena. Thousands of people have arrived 2 1/2 hours early to see the home team, which is 12 games under .500, play some guys who might finish a respectable third in the Bedford CYO league. Yet the draw is not the game. The Cavaliers have…
Pub-lic Inquiry
They say there are more than 11,000 pubs in Ireland — some, as grand as castles, are filled with stained glass, fanciful ironwork, and mahogany; others, like humble country cottages, have low ceilings, dark corners, and a smoky fire on the hearth. But regardless of the physical surroundings, their patrons can be sure of one…
The Black Heart Procession + Solbakken
With a simple but generous premise — Dutch indie music distro Konkurrent gives bands two days in the studio to record absolutely anything they want — the ongoing “Fishtank” musical project represents indie rock’s unconstrained collaborative spirit. Its excellent 11th installment benefits from this cooperation: The sweeping gothic statements by San Diego’s Black Heart Procession…
Hype Dream
On the day Ohio picks its favorite Democratic presidential candidate, the news seems obvious. Or at least it does to three Cleveland TV stations. But there are four screens in the office of WEWS General Manager Ric Harris. “Look!” he says, jumping from his chair to point one by one to the monitors showing WKYC,…
Pub Crawl
On a scale of shamrocks, Five Shamrocks means excellent, Four Shamrocks good, Three Shamrocks fair, Two Shamrocks poor, and One Shamrock a bleedin’ mess. The Harp 4408 Detroit Avenue; 216-939-0200 Hours; 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday. Bar stays…
Zero 7
England’s Zero 7 was praised/damned as Air Lite upon the release of its 2001 debut, Simple Things. The album served as a blissful post-clubbing ice pack, and tracks from it graced countless chill-out comps. Zero 7’s follow-up, When It Falls, finds the downtempo dons descending into invertebrate, “vanilla soul” songsmithery. You can imagine hearing this…
Blood Sport
Most people have no reason to notice Vega Avenue. The one-way street swoops into a highway entrance ramp, and drivers barely glimpse the huge, decaying homes before merging into 75-mile-an-hour traffic. Vampires prefer it that way. On the lawn of a home at Vega and West 25th, Peter Wells holds forth on the undead. He…
Givin’ ‘Em Hell
Doug McKean never drank in high school. This fact does not bode well for a young man attempting to approximate the boozy bray of Shane MacGowan, the irascible former Pogues singer whose liver required its own tour bus. But as the frontman for the Pogues cover band the Boys From County Hell, McKean is expected…
El-P with the Blue Series Continuum
With the latest in the Blue Series Continuum — a conceptual pairing of non-jazz artists with famed New York pianist Matthew Shipp and his talented cohorts — El-P has whipped up another stimulating recording. This time, though, the intellectual rapper/producer belies the mic-throttling to focus on the potential beauty culled from the marriage of instrumentation…
Mel’s Movie
Mel’s Movie He took the call: In regard to Robert Wilonsky’s “Suffer Unto Mel” [February 25], I was born Roman Catholic. I read this article with grief and disgust. I read Scene every single week. We at the Justice Center greatly appreciate and admire your newspaper more than the notorious Plain Dealer. Because I and…
Soul Survivor
“I’d love to play a bad guy,” muses Darlene Love as she watches an A&E Biography on Kevin Bacon. A singing legend and well-traveled actress, Love is relaxing in her hotel room during a recent tour stop of the long-running Broadway musical comedy Nunsense, in which she stars. “You can dig into that something that…
Nightbreed
The death-punk rat pack Allergic to Whores was as averse to harmony as it was to hussies. But in Nightbreed, the new trio led by former ATW frontman Ray Terry, the heart-pounding pace has been abandoned for harmony and hopelessness. The transition is akin to Glenn Danzig’s leap from the Misfits to Samhain. On Nightbreed’s…
Out of Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa is home to nearly three dozen cultures, each with its own language, habitats, and customs. Senenkunya: Many Voices, One Family, which opens Saturday at the Museum of Natural History, takes on the arduous task of documenting each of those different tribes. Featuring more than 100 artifacts placed within re-created village settings, the exhibit…
Ya Down Wit’ FCC?
There’s been a lot of hollering about radio-and-concert giant Clear Channel in recent years, gripes over monopolistic practices and homogenized airwaves. But indie MC Sage Francis took on the company loudest and clearest in January, when he announced the title of his latest trek: the Fuck Clear Channel Tour. “Clear Channel and Ticketmaster both like…
Robert Lockwood Jr.
There’s no finer way to experience Robert Lockwood than in an intimate setting such as this. The mix from the stage is just right, the crowd is casual but attentive, and the man is in top-notch form; The Legend Live is a resounding success. Of the handful of blues artists whose careers have stretched six-plus…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, March 11 One difference between Disney’s take on Little Red Riding Hood and Poland’s cartoon version is that Uncle Walt’s hirsute villain didn’t accost the heroine while sporting a boner. Other distinctions spotted in the Cleveland Cinematheque’s A Short History of Polish Animation include death, despair, loneliness, and isolation at every turn. This ain’t…
Like a Hurricane
He’s been to Hollywood. He’s been to Redwood. To Ohio, too. And now Neil Young is sitting on a puffy sofa in his manager’s office, toughing out a cold and chatting enthusiastically about, among other things, his exciting new multimedia project, Greendale. At first, with his low, cordial voice purely antithetical to his familiar croon,…
