Inward Passage
John Pearson’s residency in Japan last year was well-spent. His new sculptures have the characteristics he’s cultivated in his art in the past, particularly the gem-like refinement that evokes Japanese art. But they’re about much more than the land of geishas and Mt. Fuji. Rather, Japan here is the point of departure for an insightful…
Tale of Betrayal
Periodically, this critic has been taken to task for shameless fawning over Dorothy Silver. Judging from the ovation she received for her portrayal of Ruth Steiner in Collected Stories, I am not alone in my admiration for the actress. Her specialties include the ability to light a flame in the most trivial of theatrical kindling.…
Behind the Tandoor
According to an old Indian saying, the grains of properly prepared rice should be like two brothers: close, but not stuck together. It’s a simile that Clay Oven chefs and owners Kesar Singh and Gurcharn Singh have apparently taken to heart, as they turn out platters of firm, nutty long-grained basmati rice that would warm…
Calling All Mountain Men
Look for, the region’s only eatery in an all-log building, to blaze a trail into Chagrin Falls soon. The rustic 250-seat restaurant, with a “family friendly” menu of steaks, chops, ribs, stone-oven-baked pizza, pasta, and rotisserie chicken, is slated to open the first week of April. The recently erected log cabin was built in Montana,…
Hard to Find a Band
Rock and roll is schizophrenic enough without introducing any more possibilities into the mix. Apparently, no one’s ever given that word to Dave Bazan. To date, the membership of his band Pedro the Lion has revolved more than the restaurant in the Space Needle, with Bazan being the only constant. To that end, Bazan has…
B-ing Conrad Brooks
There’s a dubious honor bestowed on Conrad Brooks: He will forever be linked in celluloid history with Edward D. Wood Jr., the man for whom VideoHound’s “Woof!” rating was invented. Of the bad films Brooks did with Wood, the most infamous are Glen or Glenda? (1953), Bride of the Monster (1955), and Plan 9 From…
Like a Rollins Stone
Hardcore icon Henry Rollins has been preaching to the converted for quite some time now. Whether through his work with seminal Los Angeles punks Black Flag, his spoken-word projects, or his own Rollins Band, he has been churning out fast, loud, snotty rock and roll infused with Beat-inspired tales of woe and frustration for almost…
Square Circling
Why do the highbrows with the hip threads have some of the lousiest seats in the theater? Why is the lobby of the State Theatre as long as a football field? And who do those two mugs — the ones peering down from the ceiling of the Allen Theatre’s outer lobby — belong to? Playhouse…
Sounding New Notes
Last year, the Tri-C JazzFest, like many other music festivals around the country, had a natural hook: the centennial of Duke Ellington’s birth. The venerable Cleveland institution did the Duke proud, with numerous concerts dedicated to him and his music. This year, the question was what to do for an encore. Building the 21st annual…
Pump It Up
It’s hard to escape the potent magic of pop music. Some consumers never do, hovering forever in thrall to three-minute sermons of neurotic idiocy blasting from the commercially conjoined pulpits of R&B, rock, and country. In transmutations both alienating and horrifying, advanced pop fans occasionally evolve into stultifying snobs. For instance, back when it seemed…
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
Maybe it was the nearly three-and-a-half-hour length of the concert. Maybe it was the fact that it tried to make up for some serious lost time. Or maybe it was simply that hippie idealism doesn’t translate all that well to the 21st century. Whatever it was, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s exhausting performance at Gund…
Fool’s Gold
From early on, The Road to El Dorado looks and sounds oddly out of time, as though it were removed only yesterday from a time capsule buried in 1972. With its Peter Max visuals and Elton John vocals, it’s a decidedly unhip piece of work — Starlight Express for kids, animated and lit up like…
The Fastbacks
While left off the grunge bandwagon, the seminal punk-pop stylings of the Fastbacks, who formed some 20 years ago, are still going strong. At the half-filled Grog Shop, the Fastbacks showed that the ability to live through musical fads is just one of their many strong points. Appearing without singer-guitarist Lulu Gargiulo, they played as…
Empty Head
Not so long ago, The Skulls would have starred Tom Cruise — but in which role? He could have been either lead; the one he didn’t choose could have landed in the lap of James Spader or Rob Lowe. One can easily imagine Cruise as Luke McNamara, the beefy, rough-and-tumble townie with good intentions who…
Lou Reed
Lou Reed’s latest is one of his more memorable efforts — not for the overlong “Like a Possum,” but for its smaller, more intimate tunes. “Like a Possum,” 18-plus minutes of rant and rave, about aging and sin and the way aging wears sin down, is a great talking point, though, particularly because of the…
Box Set
In the opening scenes of Price of Glory, set in the late ’70s, a young prizefighter named Arturo Ortega (Jimmy Smits) loses a career-making bout. He earns a few grand, but he’s plainly washed up in the ring, and we’re meant to see that it’s his greedy manager’s fault — like Antonio Banderas in the…
DJ Food
If you’ve never heard DJ Food’s music before, never sat back in awe at the mutating roster’s incredible ability for shredding apart old records and reassembling them as the new sound of downtempo DJ music, then put the paper down and go buy Kaleidoscope. Even without a sense of the history that’s behind this DJ…
The Emperor’s Blue Clothes
On a hot day last July, Mayor Michael White called a remarkable press conference. With the command staff of the Cleveland Police Division beside him in their neatly pressed dress blues, the mayor told the world he had credible information that white supremacists were active in the department. At least three of the city’s six…
Dirty Three
The problem with instrumental music is that there’s a tendency to use it as aural wallpaper: a pretty pattern that stays at the edges of a room and knows its place is to beautify without distraction. It can have the opposite impact, as a rump-shaking dance soundtrack filled with beat-laden notes will attest. Australia’s Dirty…
Sallies Forth
Just when everybody decides the call will never come, the call comes. “If it looks good, they’ll probably start running tonight,” imparts the voice on the line, a throaty version of Mister Rogers. It discloses directions to a discreet location, involving daunting inclines and the crumbling treachery of a carriage road. Bring a flashlight and…
Zach
Zach Freidhof performs on March 31 at the Symposium.
Punch Palace
Just outside the Basement, a popular nightclub on Old River Road in the Flats, a uniformed police officer strides by, ordering people onto the sidewalk and out of the way of traffic. They try to obey, but the swelling crowd waiting to get inside keeps knocking them into the street. Pedestrians, just hoping to get…
The Edge
Saint Rudy! Cleveland cops can only gaze wistfully at a mayor like New York’s Rudolph Giuliani, in town Monday night for a fund-raiser at the Ritz-Carlton. Even when New York’s finest are gunning down innocent civilians, the mayor supports them. Giuliani’s Ohio connection is Republican bulldog J. William Petro, who was sworn in with Giuliani…
Letters
What the Doctor OrderedI wish to compliment you on Jacqueline Marino’s article in the March 23 issue concerning the Free Clinic and health care in Cleveland [“Emergency Measures”]. The article was well-researched and clearly written. It accurately reported the evolving role of the Free Clinic and its struggle to provide health care to the medically…
