Jacques Brel Is Dead and Buried in Tahiti
Twenty-five years ago, downtown Cleveland was an arid desert populated by homeless vagabonds and a few hearty suburbanites in polyester leisure suits, who cruised the orange shag carpet at the Elegant Hog and discoed to the latest Village People record at the Rusty Scupper. Across the street stood four closed, neglected once-elegant movie palaces, waiting…
Big Things in Little Italy
Take a walk along the narrow brick streets of Little Italy on a Saturday night, and you won’t get far before being captivated by the aromas of garlic, olive oil, and freshly baked bread. This is, after all, a neighborhood where you can’t swing a pizza box without hitting an Italian restaurant. As you would…
Soundbites
All that’s missing are Kevin Bacon and John Lithgow. A Footloose-esque drama is playing out in Streetsboro, since theatrical metal band Mushroomhead was booked to headline an April 24 show at the high school to benefit WSTB/88.9-FM, the school’s student radio station. Last Friday afternoon, about a hundred Streetsboro High School students protested the cancellation…
Paul’s Not Dead
Paul Westerberg has a dream date for New Year’s Day, 2000. Would it be John Coltrane, the jazz giant whose music he often passes the day with? Bob Dylan, fellow Minnesotan and chronicler of personal hells and bleary-eyed heavens? Mick Jagger, whose band Westerberg’s Replacements were once compared to without irony or hyperbole? No. It’s…
Folk Terrorists Find Peace
It’s darn near impossible to keep it real as a hardcore indie band when the national media are knocking down your door. Sebadoh learned that lesson three years ago, when Lou Barlow’s single “Natural One” blew up on commercial alternative radio. It was the day before the band went into the studio to cut its…
Yo Quiero Thump Thump
Two starred-and-striped flags hang on the walls at Belinda’s Nightclub. One has fifty stars for fifty states. The other has one star: for Puerto Rico. It’s Saturday night, and colored light twinkles on the ashtrays on red-vinyl-covered tables, bounces off a mirrored ball, and oozes across the flags. The music overflows with machismo. It’s all…
Keeping the Faith
The Tri-C JazzFest’s tribute may be the biggest, most thorough, and most innovative Duke Ellington celebration in the country. In this centennial anniversary of Ellington’s birth, Cleveland already has seen some real departures from the obvious tribute fodder–most notably the performance of A Drum Is a Woman and My People, two Ellington pieces seldom heard…
Dead Letter Office
The drugs, the gritty blues-mama voice, the turbulent personality that filled concert halls–everybody knows that Janis Joplin. But that’s not all there is to the ’60s icon. At least according to Janis’s sister, Laura. In 1992, Laura Joplin published Love, Janis, an even-handed biography of her sister that skips over the inflated pathos as the…
Livewire
Jazz Explosion: Will Downing Gerald Albright Vesta Phil Perry State Theatre February 28 While jazz may not have been on anyone’s mind–least of all the musicians–sex certainly was. Just about all the lyrics all night had to do with love or gettin’ busy or something in between. And the music, often nothing more than syrupy…
Night & Day
Thursday March 4 Take a walk on the webbed side with the annual salamander migration, a nocturnal affair in which thousands of the foot-long critters slither along the quarter-mile route from their burrows to vernal ponds, where they flirt by rubbing their chins against each other. “It’s not quite a parade,” says National Park Ranger…
Playback
Wilco Summer Teeth (Reprise) It became impossible to not refer to Wilco’s second record, Being There, as “sprawling.” Quilting together rock, pop, and country, the ambitious double album didn’t get bogged down by the lachrymose posture and faux Merle Haggardisms that defined so many other alt-country records. Singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy kicked any doubts he was…
Chance of a Lifetime
In the three decades that director Ken Loach has been a steadfast champion of the British working class, his films have lost none of their sting. Whether examining a brutal Belfast police incident in Hidden Agenda (1990) or the plight of an unemployed man struggling to buy his daughter a first-communion dress in Raining Stones…
Dangerous Intentions
For Cruel Intentions, his directorial debut, writer Roger Kumble has come up with the clever idea of updating Choderlos de Laclos’s durable eighteenth-century novel Dangerous Liaisons. With its focus on totally amoral protagonists who use sex as a tool to manipulate innocents, often just for the hell of it, the book caused a scandal when…
Man at the Top
Jimmy Cagney brought the same electric physicality to gangsters that he did to song-and-dance men. He gave a bright-eyed mug like his character in Public Enemy extraordinary powers of attraction and repulsion. In The General, Brendan Gleeson enacts a real-life criminal chieftain–Dublin’s notorious Martin Cahill–with a belly-hanging-out buffoonery that is just as magnetic as Cagney’s…
The Straight Dope
At a recent evening of “girl talk” with some of my friends, the subject of makeup tips came up. One of the women said her mother swore by Preparation H to reduce the dreaded under-the-eye puffiness we all get sometimes. We all laughed, but afterward I wondered, Does it really work? What’s in it that…
Letters
Leave Your Libido at the Door Liz Phair put on a great set as opener for Alanis Morissette. Even if the teenyboppers in the audience there to see the more mainstream, popular, benign (and hence more boring) Morissette didn’t appreciate the set, I did. I have admired her and her music for a long time.…
Sale of the Century
Calling all sheep! Not you, astute comrades. But surely you know a few non compos mentis types you can alert. Mayor Mike White has 84,000 bricks for sale. And he’s ready to sell ’em at a hundred bucks a shot. Nope, they ain’t gold bricks. These are paving bricks to place around Cleveland Browns Stadium.…
Look! Up on the Wall!
Superheroes perform feats of dexterity and strength with such apparent ease that their exploits are sometimes more than a mite boring. Superman always seems to appear just in time to catch the robber with the loot; Michael Jordan missed the occasional jump shot–but rarely in crunch time. By contrast, Gilligan, a modern superhero in everything…
Where the River Runs Wild
Keith Josef Adkins is the melodic moniker of a newly unearthed Cleveland Public Theatre playwright. As his On the Hills of Black America demonstrates, if combustible talent, originality, and a facility for coining new language count as currency, Adkins should be able to bankroll a small country. Emblazoned with CPT founder James Levin’s magnetism, this…
