Hot Pants
Let’s get this out of the way. Bear with us. People: Please, stop talking about Nikka Costa’s pants. You sound ridiculous. We tolerated it at first. Perhaps it deserves mention when a smoldering, 5-foot-1 soul diva with fire-engine-red hair emerges on the scene and coins a brand-new term: “ass cleavage.” Most folks who attempt to…
Updated Ape
How does a modern black man become a disaffected European immigrant from the 1920s? By getting beyond the limitations of skin color. “I hate painting things black and white,” explains Jimmie D. Woody, the African American portraying the misogynistic, misguided Yank in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, opening Wednesday, March 20, in Cleveland Public Theatre’s…
Blowout at the Bomb Shelter
Stepsister bassist Tony Erba has about as much use for subtlety and grace as the beefy wrestlers who have transfixed him on a recent Monday night. “We don’t know dog dick about higher art,” Erba says in the living room of his West Side home, where he and his bandmates are taking in some WWF…
Frankly Phranc
There are probably very few instances in recorded history in which the words “Jewish folksinging lesbian” have been used in connection with “Tupperware lady.” And while we wouldn’t bet a vital organ on it, it’s pretty safe to assume that Lifetime Guarantee: Phranc’s Adventures in Plastic marks the first time since man walked upright that…
Head of the Class
The surly look on the fire marshal’s face said as much about Conya Doss’s rising status as mop-haired soul ingenue as her growing number of spins on powerhouse urban radio stations. It was early last Thursday night, and Club 75 had reached its capacity of 250 people for a showcase performance featuring Doss, Ruff Endz,…
Access of Evil
In the original Resident Evil video game — named Biohazard in its Japanese incarnation — a brash young American infiltrates a large manor house in the country, only to find it inhabited by terrifying, soulless zombies. But since Gosford Park already came out, the makers of the Resident Evil movie had to go with something…
Ryan Adams
Some may blow off the ’70s-style rock on Ryan Adams’s second solo LP, Gold, as derivative of everyone from Gram Parsons to Adams’s biggest fan, Elton John, but you’ve got to give the former Whiskeytown frontman his bonafides as rock’s first and only aw-shucks megalomaniac. Prepare to see both sides of Adams’s persona when he…
Deep Freeze
Ice Age posits a heretofore unfathomable question: Is it possible for computer-generated characters to merely go through the motions? Everything about this endeavor feels pilfered and stitched together. There’s not an original fossil in its entire furry body. Its story, about cuddly and mismatched mammals forced to raise and return a lost human baby to…
Maria Schneider
It could be the coffee. It could be the prospect of a special homecoming. Whatever the case, Maria Schneider sounds giddy about an April visit to her hometown, the tiny Minnesota community of Windom, where this distinctive jazz figure discovered her love of music. “I can’t even wait,” she says by phone from her New…
On With the Show
To say that Showtime is the year’s best glossy studio entertainment film thus far may be the ultimate in faint praise. The first quarter is always pretty bad — following the majors’ traditional end-of-the-year marketing/release orgies — but 2002 has been several degrees worse than usual. From the dual Pearce-ings of The Count of Monte…
Charles Feelgood
In 1990, Charles Feelgood and his business partner Scott Henry started a weekly party in Baltimore called Fever, booking well-known DJs such as Sven Vath and Derrick Carter and steadily building a loyal crowd of about 2,500 ravers and clubbers every Thursday. And even though Henry has gone on to far greater success with Buzz…
Eastern Bloc-Heads
Precious and cloying, Harrison’s Flowers sets out to prove itself a story of hope and human endurance, but swiftly deteriorates into a terribly obvious melodrama and rough-hewn vanity project for lead actress Andie Macdowell. (One can almost hear the echoes of her shouting to her agent: “Hey, Meg Ryan landed a search-and-rescue picture, so where’s…
Mooney Suzuki
“Do they sound like this on purpose?” inquired a friend as Mooney Suzuki’s obsessively vintage ’60s Motor City muscle rock bled through a pair of car speakers. To answer the gentleman’s question, yes. These boys ain’t got a scrap of originality — it’s all MC5/Stooges/whatever swagger updated for the modern too-cool-for-school art crowd. People Get…
Fallen Angel
Wyatt Morrow, a deeply religious man, appeared to finally get his prayers answered. In March of last year, he landed a big promotion at the Cleveland Board of Education. It meant he could stop working nights at his other job at the Cleveland Juvenile Detention Home. It meant an end to 16-hour days. If this…
Alanis Morissette
Alanis Morissette’s jagged little thrill has subsided. It’s been seven years since her debut stormed pop airwaves and she was crowned queen of angst-in-her-pants self-martyrdom. The underperforming Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie somewhat dimmed the burnished jewels of her tiara, but not enough to knock her out of the palace. With Under Rug Swept, she has…
The Most Powerful People in Cleveland Music
Ice-T named an album after it. Iron Maiden was a slave to it. And everybody from Raekwon to Rainbow has written songs about it. Power is what rock and roll is all about. It’s in this spirit that Scene takes a look at the most powerful people in Cleveland music. In an industry as fad-driven…
Lo Fidelity Allstars
At first, it seemed like the Lo Fis never even had a fair chance to make it in the U.S. When your vocalist leaves on the eve of your debut album’s release, and what passes for the big beat community in America thinks you’re a third-gen coattail rider, it’s fair to say the odds are…
The Flats on Trial
A night in the Flats has confined 21-year-old Joseph Kowalski to a useless body. He is blind, can barely speak, and is unable to walk unless braced to contraptions. The tattoo that rings his atrophied upper arm speaks to a youth that ended when a knife pierced his heart five years ago, devastating what could…
Patti Smith
While this is an essential archive of a key figure in modern rock, what you like of it will depend on how open you are to a woman whose best material — the lyrical “Come Back Little Sheba,” the furious “Pissing in a River” — pushes the rock envelope into the literary, occasionally pretentious realm.…
The Long Wait
In a machine shop, the tool and die maker has traditionally been the creator, the one who fashions a three-dimensional world out of nothing but a rough blueprint. Jack Petrusiak was a tool and die maker for 40 years, and his thinking, like his handiwork, is his own. In the 1960s, he saw his entire…
N.E.R.D.
Aside from Timbaland, the Neptunes are the biggest players in the world of hip-hop production. Their crunk digifunk never fails to get heads bopping, no matter who they’re working for. But recording as N.E.R.D (No one Ever Really Dies), they have an opportunity to court their own creative muse, and the result is a rap-rock…
Letters to the Editor
Democrats can make their own decisions: The Cuyahoga County Democratic Party has reached an all-time low since the county commissioner’s race began [“Winner Takes All Brawl,” January 31]. This party lacks leadership. As a black Democrat, I find it disconcerting that Cuyahoga County Democratic Chairman Jimmy Dimora’s concern about diversity comes at a time that…
The Six Parts Seven
Thumbing its nose at the macho, watered-down nature of alt-rock, the Six Parts Seven have taken up the role of brainy rebel rockers. The Kent quintet pens moody, free-form instrumentals that discard conventional structure and verse in pursuit of, well, music. The group excels at crafting brooding harmonies reminiscent of ’70s art rock, but without…
Face Value
The fascinating portraits in the new Cleveland Artists Foundation exhibition, The Many Faces of Cleveland: A Century of Portraiture, unblinkingly return one’s stare. It’s as if they’re issuing a challenge to the viewer: Imagine my life, they seem to say. See me for who I am. And the viewer is compelled to comply. Even long-dead…
Confess, Greg
One day, years ago, Gregory Mcdonald was playing tennis with a man he’d known since they were both 12 years old. It was hot, the middle of summer, and Mcdonald was playing a good game–doing that tricky shit, making with the kind of moves that get under an opponent’s skin and leave a deep blister…
Beware of Bigger Fish
Detroit-based C.A. Muer Corporation, which spawned Charley’s Crab in Beachwood and Big Fish in Westlake, has been swallowed up by Landry’s Restaurants Inc., the nation’s fastest-growing seafood restaurant chain. Landry’s, whose holdings include Landry’s Seafood House, Joe’s Crab Shack, and the Rainforest Café, announced the acquisition on February 19. The purchase netted 16 Charley’s Crab…
Irish Tenor
From the outside, Brendan O’Neill’s looks like every other suburban storefront. Faced in tawny brick and plopped down on the easternmost edge of Westbay Plaza, the restaurant/pub is indistinguishable from the next-door Radio Shack or the nearby phone store. Likely, this dreary outer conformity is a large part of what makes it such a pleasure…
