Preschool Police
Three years ago, Sherry Beavers watched her two daughters play from the window of her apartment in St. Myers Terrace, a low-income housing project that locals call “the Moon” because of its distance — literally and figuratively — from main street Martins Ferry, a river town this side of Wheeling. Three-year-old Janice, the younger of…
Artful Dodger
Britain’s latest DJ dance obsession has sent its first heralds. Pete Devereux and Mark Hill, better known as Artful Dodger, have become the overnight poster boys for the U.K.’s newest sample-based mongrel — two-step, a.k.a. U.K. garage. Like R&B on speed, two-step takes the signature two-bar beats of Britain’s half-breed drum ‘n’ bass and gives…
Crash Course in Chillin’
In a sleepy little prestigious college town, two great minds are hard at work. “I’m making my lunch!” hollers Neil Chamberlain, thwacking on the bongos. Alex Malmude, his lab partner, plants her crimson running shoes on the chewing-gum-colored carpeting and artfully rhymes “thang” with “Corey Haim.” It’s exam week at Exco, Oberlin College’s student-run experimental…
Weezer
They have crossed oceans of time to find you. Back when they wrote songs about unraveling sweaters and lampooned Happy Days, you loved ’em; when they subsequently wrote songs called “Tired of Sex” and lampooned themselves, you hated ’em. Then they disappeared –reportedly broke up and went crazy — and you loved ’em again, inexplicably.…
Money Where the Mouth Is
When we last left James Martin (“The Cop vs. the Pot Smoker,” February 15), he had just collected a $459,000 jury award for getting his ass kicked in an Old Brooklyn bar. The Cliffs Notes version: Martin claimed he was minding his own business when off-duty Cleveland PD officer Patrick Brown dragged him outside and…
Drumplay
As good as this live album is, the overall effect is hard to discern, because its duration is too long and its motives are too unclear. A lengthy recording that stands in the shadow of Coltrane, Santana, and the Beat poets, this showcase for Drumplay percussionists James Onysko, Warren Levert, Joe Tomino, and guests (saxman-about-town…
Look Ahead
The publicist asks if I’d like to speak to D.A. Pennebaker to commemorate the 60th birthday of Bob Dylan, which falls on May 24. She asks this because, during the spring of 1965, Pennebaker made a documentary about Dylan’s tour of England, Dont Look Back, which captured a drained, cagey Dylan as he transitioned, uncomfortably,…
Harvilla, Call Your Mother
Then get in here and explain this Hammer business I have to question your criteria for hiring music writers. It seems that you have one too many young punks whose heads are still stuck in the Seattle grunge phase and who apparently know squat about good rock music. As a longtime U2 fan, I have…
High Art
At Corky and Lenny’s, Cleveland’s kosher haven for theater buffs, devotees of matzo balls and cheesecake gather to sniff out the most viable entertainment prospects. The buzz emanating over the hot pastrami these days centers around the Cleveland Play House’s riveting season closer, Art, by Yasmina Reza, a French actress who also happens to be…
Trial by Fire
In the end, it all boils down to salt and pepper. “Seasonings, seasonings, seasonings!” chants judge Michelle Gaw. “The lack of seasoning is my pet peeve.” Gaw, executive chef at the Watermark restaurant in the Flats, looks over the plates that she and colleague Helen Merkle have just finished picking apart in Bistro 87, the…
In for a Dry Spell
The tandoor at Parma’s popular Clay Oven (5747 Chevrolet Boulevard) may soon grow cold, unless the restaurant’s owner, Kesar Singh, figures a way out of his present dilemma. Seems the dal house lost its liquor license earlier this month, due to an apparent snafu on the part of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. According…
Blood on the Racks
When Bob Dylan played at Public Hall three years ago in support of his last studio album, 1997’s Time Out of Mind, he performed with an agility that belied his age. Dylan duckwalked his way through “Silvio” as if he were a young Chuck Berry and slung his guitar fervently while playing “Highway 61.” He…
No Bones About It
As the frenetic frontman of the pioneering ska band Fishbone, Angelo Moore was often seen climbing atop speakers and stage-diving, all in the name of celebrating a “party at ground zero,” as he put it. But as Dr. Madd Vibe, a spoken-word alter ego Moore adopted six years ago, he doesn’t need no stinkin’ horns…
Merle’s Makeover
On the road, country singer Merle Haggard’s a living legend, but at home on his 185-acre ranch near Redding, California, he’s simply a family man. “I feel what I do is a privilege,” he says. “But it comes with a lot of baggage. You have to give up a lot of time at home. But…
Conventional Wisdom
Melissa Barth and her daughter Emily sit in their suburban Medina home, watching the latest fan-produced Star Trek video dropped off by the mail carrier. A collage made up of the female crew members of Star Trek Voyager flickers across the screen, as Aretha Franklin and Annie Lennox belt out “Sisters Are Doin’ It for…
That’s a Rap
David Velo Stewart’s modest Shaker Heights apartment is the quintessential bachelor pad. A few African masks hang on the walls in no particular order, and the only furniture consists of a sofa and a dining room table. On top of the table — which is so cluttered, there’s no space for placemats or candles –…
Bora! Bora! Bora!
Pearl Harbor isn’t really a movie at all, but a highlight reel prepared for a Jerry Bruckheimer career retrospective. The film is as impressive and as empty as any the producer has ever made — most of which seem to have been cut and pasted into it. There’s Top Gun: Two hotshot pilots, Rafe McCawley…
Andy Smith
DJ Andy Smith (of Portishead fame) has a style that’s a far cry from the melancholy trip-hop he creates when performing with a band. A Bristol beathound since his teens, Smith met up with Portishead co-founder Geoff Barrow while spinning hip-hop tracks at a local club, and it wasn’t long before the two were scrambling…
Dang Those Nuances
Like nearly all Merchant-Ivory productions, The Golden Bowl, their latest book-to-film adaptation, is a feast for the eyes, with choice real estate, exquisite interior design, and dazzling costumes all bathed in a golden light that not only enriches the colors, but also helps to give the settings a sense of depth that belies the two-dimensional…
The Tour of Brotherly Love
Someone call the Kinks! The Tour of Brotherly Love, featuring the Black Crowes and Oasis, is a rock and roll caravan designed around one of popular music’s longstanding traditions: feuding brothers. And these two groups — both of which came to prominence by playing recycled riffs, taking plenty of drugs, and brandishing attitude to spare…
Hit and Miss
In screenwriting classes — in fact, in almost any kind of writing classes — they hit you with the old saw regarding writing what you know about. This leads inevitably to that hoariest, most worn-out genre: stories about writers trying to write stories. Worse yet is when the characters succeed only after realizing that they…
Kitty Gordon
When Mark Addison lived in Cleveland in the late ’70s and early ’80s, he played with a new-wave/bar band called the Generators that could regularly pack the Euclid Tavern and similar venues in town. After that, he played in a band called Nation of One and a host of other local acts, but he soon…
Mayhem All the Way
Time and Tide — the latest action picture from producer/director Tsui Hark, one of the world’s great entertainers — is a compendium of many of the best (and a few of the worst) traits of Hong Kong action cinema. It’s relentlessly visceral, making you feel as if you’ve been shot out of a cannon; on…
Punk-O-Rama
Some folks visualize the pop/punk divide as a meaningless boundary, an arbitrarily drawn line in the sand. Really, it’s more of a towering, ominous cliff stretching out over the end of the world: Load up on too much TRL-ready, kiddie-baiting pop gloss, and you fall right off, plummeting helplessly until you land in a steaming…
A Few Good Men
Father Bob Stec wakes up at six, ready to tackle God’s will. It’ll keep him up past midnight. He’ll motor throughout the eight counties that make up the Diocese of Cleveland, a cell phone strapped to his side and a question burned into his mind: Where can I find new priests? As the vocation director…
Tool
Something happened to Tool in the five years since its last album: The Los Angeles quartet became relevant, important, and even crucial to the rock and roll landscape. Lateralus, its fourth album, is immersed in the same prog-metal juices of its past work, but while previous albums seemed self-serious, slight, and pretentious at turns, Lateralus…
