Smooth Waters Ahead
We promise not to make any more lame jokes about restaurateur Sako Satka’s peculiar choice of business names. Sure, he christened his upscale dining room Titanic, after one of history’s greatest maritime disasters. But it’s more illuminating to think of the moniker as part of the restaurant’s quirky charm — of which it has plenty…
No Ugly Duckling
Kevin McKenzie couldn’t stand it anymore. The longer he’d been the artistic director of the American Ballet Theater, the more weary he grew of the company’s adaptation of Swan Lake. It was stale, tired, and boring as an episode of According to Jim. “By the time I became director in 1992, it was as old…
Al Green
Al Green cleared his throat with I Can’t Stop, his smooth, formulaic return to secular form in 2003. With Everything’s OK, the Memphis minister is in full voice: His second disc with longtime producer Willie Mitchell finds the two at the top of their game. Largely written by Green, Everything’s OK is a full-bodied, swank…
Punks in Winter
Paul E. Tsongas Arena is located in the heart of Lowell, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb once known for its prolific textile mills and miles of winding canals. It’s home to Lowell High School, whose entire student body seemed to congregate at the cavernous arena during a recent weeknight stop of the Taste of Chaos Tour,…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, March 10 The Mid-American Conference Men’s Basketball Tournament looks to be even tighter than in years past. Akron, Kent State, Ohio U, and Miami are among the seven or eight teams that have posted strong seasons, which should make for three days of fierce action at Gund Arena (100 Gateway Plaza). Tip-offs are at…
Daft Punk
On its third studio album, Daft Punk lays on the irony as thickly as the distortion. Ditching the glittery nouveau-disco textures of 2001’s Discovery, the French duo renovates the gnarly crusts of tweaked noise that animated the best cuts on its debut disc, Homework. They loop absurdly rudimentary synth riffs and rhythms with an obsessive-compulsiveness…
A Taste of Taste of Chaos
Band: My Chemical Romance HQ: Newark, New Jersey The Lowdown: Like fellow mascara-mad punks AFI, My Chemical Romance is a band of artsy outsiders suddenly thrust into the mainstream spotlight. Signed to the Thursday-affiliated label Eyeball after just three live shows in 2002, the quintet grew out of its Damned-aping phase by last year’s major-label…
What’s Up? Docs
Following in the recent footsteps of such high-profile movie fests as Sundance and Cannes, the 29th Cleveland International Film Festival (which runs Thursday through March 20) features a slate packed with documentaries. They include films about a guerrilla artist, a sex-change operation, and Iranians looking for love. One of the best is Boxers and Ballerinas,…
Busdriver
Busdriver belongs to the rapid-firing, overcaffeinated slam-poet school of MCing. While such diarrheic verbalizing can be numbing, the L.A. artist’s verses prove consistently fascinating, mainly because they’re witty and well detailed, with a cockeyed surrealism. Much of Fear of a Black Tangent concerns the ridiculousness of the hip-hop milieu — not a new topic by…
Bloody Shame
Everyone has known for some time that 50 Cent is a brilliant self-promoter, an up-from-nothing gangsta icon with coattails longer than the stretch limos that now carry him about. And of course, even your grandma can recite the number of times he was shot (nine). What hasn’t been clear up to this point is whether…
In the Zone
3/11-3/12 What do you get when you throw together Tattoo from Fantasy Island, Warhol cohort Susan Tyrrell, actors in blackface, and Danny Elfman’s first stab at movie music? A fucked-up piece of cult moviemaking called Forbidden Zone. “I never saw the world larger than my own fishbowl,” laughs director Richard Elfman (Danny’s brother) about the…
Solas
On Waiting for an Echo, Solas once again extends an olive branch to the fans it lost when the quintet stopped recording albums that were almost wholly Celtic jigs, reels, and airs, and started getting into jazz-pop fusion covers of singer-songwriter material. But rather than return to the stuff it was doing on its first…
Cope With This
Unlike blues, jazz, R&B, and soul, hip-hop has proved a stubbornly tough genre to incorporate into other song forms. Though the movement has been more or less in the mainstream for more than 25 years now, and a whole generation of musicians spanning every point of the racial spectrum has grown up immersed in it…
Biker Chicks
WED 3/16 Before Neil Kaufman ever thought of organizing For Women Only: Bicycle Survival & Maintenance 101, he’d heard his female customers tell the same story over and over again: They’re on long-haul bike rides, their tires blow out, and they don’t know how to fix them. “Many don’t even know how to take their…
Saj Supreme
Saj Supreme is Cleveland hip-hop’s leering id, a sex- and violence-obsessed MC whose latest is a cross between Grand Theft Auto and Cinemax After Dark. “I smoke when I wanna smoke/ Drink when I wanna drink/Fuck who I wanna fuck/Stick who I wanted stuck,” Saj (pronounced “Sage”) boasts in a pinprick of a voice that…
…And Justice for All
For Ozzy Osbourne, getting sued is as much an everyday event as looking befuddled and struggling to operate Velcro. But recently, Ozzy was hit with some fairly unprecedented legal action — even for a guy known for urinating in public and biting the heads off stuff. Last month, an Illinois man filed a class-action suit…
Generation Excess
THU 3/10 Suze Orman has written six books about the financial traps folks often fall into. Yet “there’s an entire demographic that’s being passed by,” she says. So she put together The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous & Broke, a guide for people in their twenties and thirties. “What this generation needs to do…
Rikets
On Rikets’ “Hollywood,” singer Scott Rose sounds like Pantera’s Phil Anselmo growling over an aggro-electro track left over from a Gravity Kills song. Then comes a soaring, suddenly melodic chorus borrowed from a Victory Records band. But where most modern rockers are mesmerized by their own vulnerability, Rose is sick of tender feelings altogether. Take…
Tequila!
“When I design bars, I think of a song,” says Terry Barbu, the founder of Liquid Living, the management group that owns Tramp/Funky Buddha and 10 other clubs from the Warehouse District to Atlanta. “For Tramp, I was thinking of Kid Rock’s ‘Cowboy.’ For this, I was thinking of ‘Rawhide.'” Set to open Friday, March…
Bless His Pointy Little Ears
3/11-3/20 Of all the shows Steve Arnold has previewed for the Players Guild this season, Bat Boy: The Musical is by far the most kitschy. The script is based on a 1992 series of reports in Weekly World News about a “human bat” found in a cave in the Virginia mountains. “He’s become a pop…
Turbo ACs
This New York City trio has been out schlepping the gear, getting the $50 from the bartender, sleeping on a stranger’s floor, and doing it all over again the next 50 nights for close to 10 years now. It’s paid off a little better for them in Europe, where their slicked-back pompadours, black leather jackets,…
St. Patrick’s Day Listings
Get your Irish up! Following is a list of Irish-themed events and St. Patrick’s Day happenings. Call venues for more information. Ace’s Bar and Grille: 6600 Biddulph Rd., 216-741-4911. Ace’s opens for food and drinks at 6 a.m., and we won’t stop until we close. Drink specials run all day, and our menu features corned…
Amorphis
These Finns have been slowly, incrementally softening over time, like a melting glacier. At the dawn of the 1990s, they started out as a fairly blasting black metal outfit, though they always hinted at a proggy, semi-commercial side. And sure enough, each of their five Relapse albums turned out to be a little softer, a…
Without Sin
If you’re looking for an escapist shoot-’em-up action adventure, and figure a Bruce Willis flick is a reliable option, think twice. Hostage certainly delivers violence and heroics, but not in a way everyone will enjoy. Children and dogs die brutally, and the villains are so thoroughly hateful that even the staunchest liberal will be rooting…
Same Old Song and Dance
Bride & Prejudice is the third major film released stateside in the past few years to fuse the epic romantic musical stylings of Indian “Bollywood” movies with more Westernized, “Hollywood” elements. It’s also the most successful of them, but when the only significant competition has been The Guru and Bollywood/Hollywood, that isn’t saying a whole…
Norma Jean
Like its legion of predecessors in the metal/hardcore ranks, Norma Jean combines ominous imagery with an unholy racket. Both frontman Cory Brandan’s vocal style and the band’s Bless the Martyr and Kiss the Child cover model resemble Linda Blair at her most demon-possessed. Norma Jean loves the Lord, however, and unlike many of its haloed…
Talkin’ ‘Bot Love
“From the creators of Ice Age,” boasts the poster for Robots, which is no ringing endorsement. That 2002 animated feature, a sort of Three Mammals and a Baby in a prehistoric setting, looked and felt every bit as frigid as its snowbound scenery; it was impossible to warm to a movie that played like Pixar…
Deep Impact
A cynic might describe movies as the most depraved and fantastic system of exploitation ever devised. After all, they trade on the greed and hubris of the financiers, the beauty and allure of the stars, and the trust (or, if you prefer, gullibility) of the audience. No one involved in the process is immune. If…
Rhonda Vincent
If Alison Krauss jumped off a cliff, would Rhonda Vincent do it too? It seems so, when one observes how bluegrass mandolin queen Vincent morphed from prim hausfrau to flesh-baring femme fatale on the heels of Krauss’ graduation from run-of-the-mill cutie to cleavage-flashing glamour doll. No sooner did Krauss slip into a clingy, low-cut, long…
Wishbone Ash
Back in the prehistoric ’70s, “jam band” was not yet an operative term. Outfits loosely grouped as “progressive” featured extended instrumentals, expanded melodies, and highly orchestrated arrangements. Most bands of this persuasion were fronted by multiple keyboards — as well as guitar. Formed in 1969, Brit quartet Wishbone Ash managed much of the same acrobatics…
Pop Out
It’s odd that a sport with a pace as leisurely as baseball’s would generate such passion and controversy. After all, a baseball game offers a few seconds of intermittent action separated by long stretches of jockstrap adjustment, rosin-bag fiddling, and batting-glove restrapping. It’s one of the few sports where the conclusion isn’t determined by a…
Waking Up Bingo
Ken Hayes, the old basketball coach at the University of Tulsa, taught hundreds of players over his 42 years. “Who was the best you ever coached?” people in Oklahoma often ask. There’s a story Hayes likes to tell. “They were having a track meet at the University of Tulsa one afternoon,” he starts in, his…
Marc Broussard
At first glance, it’s tempting to lump Marc Broussard in with folks like Gavin DeGraw — all those good-looking white boys signed in the wake of Dave Matthews’ success. There’s quite a bit more to Broussard, though. His latest record, Carencro, may be too slick, but his voice is immediately striking — deeper and more…
4 Scores
If you’ve ever known anyone grappling with the overwhelming effects of clinical depression, you soon learn not to say, “Hey, droopypuss, let’s turn that frown upside down!” Vapidly upbeat drivel may work for someone experiencing a fleeting malaise, but real depression exerts a gravitational pull on the psyche as powerful — and often as deadly…
The Matrix
The letter from Texas got straight to the point. The state “will no longer participate in the Matrix project,” wrote Marshall Caskey, chief of the Texas Department of Public Safety. The news must have been a blow to Hank Asher. His company, Seisint, had been peddling its Matrix computer database to police agencies across the…
Chips Moman
Chips Moman got his rock and roll baptism early, playing guitar for obscure Sun Records artist Warren Smith in the late ’50s — that’s probably him driving Smith’s “Ubangi Stomp,” one of the less politically correct Sun singles. The Georgia native’s star rose quickly: Moman’s first notable production work was for Carla Thomas after her…
On Stage
The Exonerated — Outside the friendly confines of Texas, some Death Row inmates are actually freed when unmatched DNA or belated confessions from real perps pop open the jail doors. This concert-style production, assembled from interviews with formerly doomed inmates by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, interweaves the stories of six people who spent from…
Shark Etiquette
It’s bad form to blame a crooked salesman: “Shark Tales” [February 16] is a very sad tale. Not sad because of the stories you chose to tell, but that you chose to tell them. I work for a bank and spent three years in the auto collections department. Before that, I worked as a service…
Zoo Station
Get a jump on St. Patrick’s Day with Zoo Station. Cleveland’s own tribute to U2 nails mellow favorites like “One” and “With or Without You” — but the boys from Dublin haven’t rocked it out like this since before that Fly dude started filling in for Bono.
On View
NEW Urban Passages — Tucked into the second floor of the Tri-C West library, Urban Passages features two artists making intelligent visual points and counterpoints. William Chill offers views of factories and other urban landscapes that declaim Cleveland’s waning status as an industrial city. He demonstrates great variety within his theme: The show opens with…
Educating Larry
You’re expecting not to like state Senator Larry Mumper. His press clippings precede him. The Plain Dealer called his latest bill “un-American.” Other papers invoked Joe McCarthy, Joseph Stalin, and Chairman Mao. They used words like “inanity,” “zealots,” and lots of “chilling effects” — the last of which is stiff-collared journalistspeak for “Holy Christ, this…
Taya Parker
(In David Lee Roth-style tone of deep ballyhoo): “Miss Nude USA 2004 finalist Taya Parker — live in front of your naked, steaming eyeballs.” ‘Nuff said.
Johnny on the Spot
“Every time I eat, my mouth sings,” croons Johnny Mango, that fictional bon vivant, gourmet, and, since 1996, namesake for one of the region’s sassiest casual eateries. Now, make that two sassy eateries. Since November, our man Mango has been splitting time between his original Ohio City digs and a new, conceptually identical Johnny Mango…
Hostage Crisis
Don’t let Grandma go car shopping at Ganley East. She may never come home again. When 65-year-old Gloria Morman’s 1988 BMW finally died, she called a salesman at the Wickliffe dealer. “He seemed like a very nice young man,” says the retired librarian. Two weeks later, her phone rang. It was the Ganley salesman. He…
The Mars Volta
If Frances the Mute was a horror movie (and with all its ominous imagery, that’s not much of a stretch), it would thrive on gotcha! moments — those sudden shocks that make viewers spill their sodas or otherwise soil their seats. Acoustic strums set a mellow mood until intrusive riffs crash into the composition, like…
