White Tiger Unleashed
Professor Donald Schulz doesn’t look like a guy with sinister plans. He strokes his white goatee as he thinks. Round, wire-rimmed spectacles speak to the fact that he reads for a living — to which the shelves, spilling over with political science books, also attest. His desk floats in a universe of paper — an…
The Lure of Patio Dining
To the list of our favorite alfresco dining locations — which includes the secluded courtyard at Gamekeeper’s Tavern (Chagrin Falls), the intimate garden at Baricelli Inn (Little Italy), and the urbane sidewalk caf´ at Mise (on Clifton Boulevard) — we have added the scrumptious patio at Willoughby’s Lure Bistro. From its Caribbean-blue indoor-outdoor carpeting to…
Political Stomping Grounds
Joe Santiago lives in a century-old house on West 14th Street in Tremont, a block away from I-71. The 34-year-old retirement home worker and ex-Navy cook has ambitions: He wants to be a Cleveland city councilman. And he’s not going to let one little city block stand in his way. Santiago likes his representative on…
Tables Turned
For every DJ who makes a living flying from city to city to play late-night dance clubs, there must be five who never make it past practicing in their bedrooms. In fact, it can take some DJs 10 years to build a solid career. But 25-year-old San Francisco-by-way-of-Belfast resident Laura Totten, who spins drum ‘n’…
Wasted at the Wal-Mart
Today’s youth is the future of this country, and let’s just hope that future doesn’t come from North Olmsted. That’s the word from Wal-Mart near Great Northern Mall, which is experiencing a rash of thefts of — get this — Dramamine. The motion sickness drug is an antihistamine, which means that, when crushed and snorted,…
Role Model in the Making
Relaxing in her spacious two-story home on a wooded lot in Medina, Debrae looks like a pop diva. She’s wearing a sleeveless zebra-patterned top, cut low enough to reveal a tad of cleavage, and hip-hugging black pants that are just tight enough to show off her curvaceous figure. The local country singer has more than…
Meals on Turtles
We waited all through Sally and Oprah. When lunch finally arrived, we were well into Montel. Perhaps the Meals on Wheels driver had confused my friend Jane with someone in the Alaskan time zone. It being after 5 p.m., Jane, a retired seamstress who doesn’t take things lying down unless she’s pinning them to a…
Critikill Acclaim
Dressed in a sharp suit, his cropped hair dyed a bluish purple, Craig Pearsall mugs for the camera, rocking back and forth as he plays bass. His band Critikill is taping its first video (it’s for Road Runner Rocks, a website and cable-access program that’s taped at the Time Warner Cable office in Akron), and…
In Cold Blood
There are not many stories left buried in James Ellroy’s past. In 1996, at the age of 48, he penned his memoirs, in which he paired his life story with that of his dead mother, Jean Ellroy, a nurse found strangled and beaten in the bushes of suburban Los Angeles in 1958, when her son…
Cappadonna
Of all the Wu-Tangers who’ve released solo albums, Cappadonna is the least assuming of the bunch (he was also the last to join the 10-member group, by the way). And by least assuming, we mean he’s the Clansman most likely to be forgotten among the records of Raekwon and Ghostface Killah and the continuing criminal…
The Case for Kucinich
Dennis is a steelworker’s friend: There were serious factual inaccuracies in a letter to the editor, “Bill and Dennis Killed LTV” [April 26]. The writer is dead wrong about Congressman Kucinich’s record on steel. Kucinich was the first member of Congress to challenge the Clinton Administration on the Asian financial crisis’s effects on the steel…
Dick Dale
Mondo surf guitarist Dick Dale is to guitar aficionados what Mike Ditka was to the Superfans on the Saturday Night Live sketch. He’s quite simply a formidable six-string force of nature. After a move from East to West Coast with his parents in the early ’50s, the teenage Dale, a former drummer and fledgling guitarist…
Lose Your Blues at Chicago
London, 1594. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy is proclaimed by The London Picayune as “theatrical ambrosia fit for the gods,” while Richard III is berated as the equivalent of “horse dung by an upstart crow.” Inevitably, Father Time proves to be the true theatrical sage. Skip forward a few hundred theatrical seasons to Broadway, 1975.…
Twine
Having a member of your group move to another state tends to slow down musical activity, if not stop it cold — especially if you’re a duo. But for the electronic/experimental pair in Twine, it seems to have had the opposite effect. Since 1997, Greg Malcolm and Chad Mossholder, originally based out of Kent, have…
Grin and Beer It
If the parks and sidewalks of Rocky River seem suspiciously barren on Saturday nights, you don’t have to look far to figure out why. Just take a peek inside the reservation-free Rocky River Brewing Company. It wasn’t even 8 on a recent overcast Saturday, and already the vivacious crowd was four and five deep at…
Grant Hart
Hüsker Dü may have been the most important indie rock band of the early ’80s. Stapling together messes of noise from punk, hardcore thrash, and heady pop, as well as a touch of introspective acoustic strumming, the band refined the possibilities of discordant art. In retrospect, it only seemed inevitable that the band was a…
R.E.M.
R.E.M. has finally hit the wall. The wall that never seemed even to be in view — at least since the group signed with Warner Bros. more than 13 years ago. In that time, R.E.M. has consistently rewritten itself, always keeping one step ahead of expectations. The big-league jump/stumble Green was followed by the shiny…
Burning Airlines
J. Robbins suffers from the common ailment of having cast too long a shadow too early in his career. With stints in both Government Issue and Jawbox on his musical résumé, Robbins has often been in the position of having to defend his current activities against his past glories. That was certainly the case three…
Joe Henry
Joe Henry is a slippery singer with a penchant for noir. He crafts refined, heart-tugging songs of love, ambivalence, and regret, and sounds like the love child of Tom Petty and Edith Piaf. On Scar, Henry sings both ruefully and stylishly over jewel-like arrangements in tunes that are both memorable and disquieting: “Mean Flower” etches…
Guinness on Raft
To earn a place in the Guinness Book of World Records, one used to have to be obscenely fat or really tall or grow unnaturally long nails. But as the book moved away from the freak-show element, more innocuous records crept in, like that of the World’s Largest Free-Floating Raft of Canoes and Kayaks. And…
Brian Henke
A former rock guitarist who now plays unplugged, Brian Henke performs some 300 dates a year, spreading the folk gospel to regional coffeehouses and participating in national competitions (he recently won a regional contest sponsored by Guitar magazine and will be competing in the finals on May 20 in Boston). Henke spends his spare time…
A Show of Hands
“Dude, this is like tap dancing,” Sam Phillips says. “This is like spoons, like handbone. This is the blues, man; it goes way back. I’m not the only one that can do this.” Phillips isn’t just talking with his hands; he’s talking about his hands, which, when he waggles them correctly in the air, produce…
Angel of the Mourning
Chances are, you don’t know a whole lot about Angel Eyes, other than that it’s the brand-new Jennifer Lopez movie. Maybe you also know that it co-stars Jim Caviezel (periodically known as James; he doesn’t seem to have fully decided yet). It’s been described in some articles as a supernatural romance, and Caviezel himself has…
Northern Exposure
There’s a majesty to Michael Winterbottom’s new film — a majesty and a terrible, icy chill. There’s also a fair bit of invention, as the director of the wrenching Jude — based on Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure — has shifted the locus of that author’s fierce, beloved English West Country to the much fiercer…
Under Ogre
Kids might well be amused by the frenetic pacing of Shrek, the latest computer-animated film from DreamWorks, which moves so quickly it’s nearly a blur, though they need not get the jokes to enjoy frolicking in the muck (and the maggots) with a green, snaggletoothed ogre who wants only to be a knight and get…
Petty Woman
Presently sitting in a very peaceful meditational facility. First time here. The location (which shall remain unnamed, so as to maintain nondenominational vibe) was selected specifically for the loving creation of this review, as it provides an almost perfect contrast to The Center of the World, the new motion picture from acclaimed director Wayne Wang…
