A Jungle Out There
Standing in the muggy confines of the Grog Shop, Dave Hill looks like he should be sweating. Although it’s only 30 degrees outside, it feels just short of tropical inside the club, and Hill is wearing a shaggy fur coat that must be uncomfortable. The jacket, along with Hill’s long, scraggly hair, radiates a glamorous…
Seeing Red
NASA Glenn power systems engineer Geoffrey Landis has visited Mars, at least through his work on the Mars Pathfinder mission, which put a remote-controlled robot on the planet’s surface. But to fully explore the landscape, he has to rely on the same thing as everyone else: imagination. The difference is, Landis, also an award-winning author,…
Richie Rich
Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora can rattle off statistics relating to the band quicker than a geeky sports nut can tell you how many innings Roger Clemens has pitched this year. Talk to the guy (who’s married to Heather Locklear, by the way) long enough, and you learn the band played 42 countries when it…
Fresh Fruit
Merrill Nisker led a pretty normal life as a youth. Obsessed with preppy clothes and blow-dried hair, she readily admits to being a “JAP” (Jewish American Princess) whose taste in music was typical for a teenager of the ’80s — she liked the Ramones, the Who, and the Pretenders. But somewhere along the way, the…
Security Guarded
“I’ve been trying to call you for 10 minutes, but I guess I was dialing wrong,” explains Polly Jean Harvey. “As soon as I had someone dial it for me, I had no problem at all. I forget what order buttons go in. Sorry about that.” Perhaps the fact that Harvey has done so few…
Like-Minded
The somber figure of Ingmar Bergman no longer looms over the film world like a guilty conscience, but the great Swedish director has spawned enough artistic descendants to keep us supplied with thorny philosophical and ethical questions for decades to come. Faithless, the second film that actress Liv Ullmann has directed from a Bergman script,…
U2
Now that the hype, the glowing reviews, the magazine covers, the Grammys, and the inevitably nervous kickoff to the inevitably nervous world tour are behind U2, we can admit in earnest that All That You Can’t Leave Behind, the band’s big-deal new record, is boring as hell. It essentially provides 11 uninspired pop tunes with…
Troubles With Harry
Just when we culturally deprived, mystery-starved Americans were convinced that that most delicious of movie genres, the French thriller, was dead and buried, a literate and exciting new filmmaker named Dominik Moll has emerged to revive it — and set our nerves exquisitely on edge. It’s a minor miracle that With a Friend Like Harry…
The BellRays
How the BellRays managed to come together and survive in Los Angeles is a mystery. Sounding like an amalgam of two of the greatest things to come out of Detroit — balls-out garage punk and heartfelt soul — you’d swear they were from some Midwestern industrial wasteland, not slick-as-plastic, ultra-image-conscious L.A. Ten years, two albums,…
Dead Again
At first glance, 1999’s The Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser as a lantern-jawed Indiana Jones-in-waiting who faced off against an undead Telly Savalas look-alike, played like knowing spoof, a lighthearted if half-assed remake of the 1932 film starring Boris Karloff. At first listen, it was one big joke, a horror-movie parody masquerading as special-effects extravaganza –…
The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Taking your band’s name from a Marlon Brando flick is a debatably hip move. But taking your sound from the dark shadows of Love and Rockets and peppering it all up with nods to a host of glam/goth despots, ranging from Marc Bolan to the Jesus and Mary Chain, is a far more capital idea…
Casualty of the State
One Sunday afternoon in July, a 13-year-old inmate at the Riverview Juvenile Correctional Facility ran cussing and screaming into the rest room, where she hurled snacks and fruit juice against the wall and refused to come out. For 30 minutes, corrections workers tried to calm her down. Rainey Watkins yelled and swore at them. Then…
Disturbed
Young fans of the WWF are unlikely to be aware of big-time wrestling’s small-time beginnings in the Georgia sticks, where nameless Nature Boys took on scurrilous Masked Marvels without the help of either T&A sideshows or pay-per-view production values. Likewise, fans of Disturbed — the new metal quartet famous for a reworking of the “Stone…
Newsflash: Crime Is Down!
Bill Patmon was perplexed. The city council’s Public Safety Committee was meeting to discuss jails, yet the councilman couldn’t get a straight answer to what, it seemed, was a fairly simple question: Why are facilities so overcrowded? For years, Cleveland has been touting statistics showing crime dropping like a stone. Just a few months before…
David Byrne
David Byrne has been a smarmy academic know-it-all on record for almost 25 years. He’s also been oblique, ambiguous, and often difficult to decode. So it’s hard to tell how seriously we should take his latest album, a relatively earnest effort that sort of wraps up a little of every music style he has ever…
Family Ties
“They call this the Danny Greene Building.” Lyndhurst police Sergeant Rick Porrello has just pulled into the parking lot of Beachwood’s Brainard Place to provide a play-by-play of the last moments of Danny Greene’s life. As he leans back and tells the story of the legendary car bombing, the ticktock, ticktock of his Oldsmobile’s turn…
Bardo Pond
Since its 1995 release Bufo Alvarius, the Philly band Bardo Pond has consistently produced albums of beautifully layered, dreamy stoner rock that have gained it many dedicated fans, but never quite pushed it to the forefront of the indie scene. When the group signed to Matador in 1996, many thought it would be its time…
New Meth
Our snooty cousins on the coasts often mock the Heartland for its inability to pounce on the latest trend. We were still paying a buck for coffee when we could have been paying six. We first thought angst was a new breed of cattle. And when FUBU arrived, we confused it for heightened interest in…
Various Artists
The artists involved in the making of both Clicks & Cuts 1 and 2 seem convinced that these collections are not just entries into some new subgenre of dance music. Instead, they insist that this experimental electronic music, in which most of the minimalist tracks feature clicking noises and glitch-like rhythms, is actually a movement.…
Shoot Straight
Last thing first. At this very moment, Chris Carter sits behind his desk in the Ten Thirteen Production offices, on the 20th Century Fox lot in Studio City, California, finishing the final X-Files episode of this season. The show’s creator has just one scene left to write–the very last–and that is how he will spend…
S.O.S.C.
After three tracks and nearly three minutes of what amounts to little more than “intro” material, the Lorain-based rap quintet S.O.S.C. finally delivers its opening song. But first, we have to sit through a commercial (cut one is actually called that) and several skits before “Livin’ for Today” shows up — not the best way…
Special Defects
Special-needs children suffer in our schools: While reading your article “Law Schooled” [April 5], I got the impression that you were trying to be evenhanded in discussing the issue of parents suing their school districts to receive services for their children with special needs. Unfortunately, many of the special education cases you used made me…
Art With an Edge
A substantial slice of local art history is on view in the Cleveland Artists Foundation’s Harmonic Forms on the Edge: Geometric Abstraction in Cleveland exhibit at Beck Center. This is a historical overview of work that was created mostly during the 1960s and ’70s, a period that saw a revision of what was previously known…
A Closer Look
Anyone who has progressed beyond adolescent comic-book fantasies couldn’t help being engrossed by Dobama’s production of Closer. Patrick Marber’s 1997 gilt-edged comedy/drama is the fiercest illumination of human foibles since Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women. Audience members at Dobama’s opening night were spotted hyperventilating, fanning themselves in an appreciative frenzy with their programs. They even…
Mega Meals at Meeker’s
Johnson & Wales-trained chef Brendan Meeker is clearly having fun on this crisp Saturday evening, posing for pictures beside a rotund (but still smaller-than-life-sized) carving of himself on the sidewalk in front of his Akron restaurant. The jokes and laughter gradually give way to handshakes and goodbyes, and Meeker’s admiring guests pile into a white…
Class Distinction
Cleveland-area foodies have a rare chance to get cooking with award-winning chef and Food Network regular Michael Symon during his upcoming appearance at Cuyahoga Community College on May 15. Symon, chef-owner of Tremont’s trendy Lola (900 Literary Road, 216-771-5652), will pair up with culinary instructor Zona Spray to offer a three-hour demonstration class that is…
