Mommy Weirdest
Susan Sarandon is one of the screen’s most gifted actresses, a fiercely intelligent artist who invests her roles with depth, compassion, wit, and humor. She has the ability to elevate even mediocre material, taking a potentially schmaltzy part, as in Stepmom, and making it totally believable. In her best films, Atlantic City, A Dry White…
Playback
Richie Hawtin Decks, EFX & 909 (Novamute) Featuring an astounding 38 tracks, Decks, EFX & 909 showcases Richie Hawtin’s concept of the evolved DJ — the album stands in stark contrast to his previous downtempo, navel-gazing dance abstractions under the moniker Plastikman. Where previous Plastikman albums such as Sheet One, Consumed, and Artifakts (BC) illustrate…
In God He Trusts
“Yesterday I wasn’t even sure God existed,” laments Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), the reluctant yet divinely touched heroine of Kevin Smith’s ambitious new film, Dogma. “Now I’m up to my ass in Christian mythology.” As it turns out, so are we. Strutting to a spiritually snappy groove not observed in mainstream American cinema since Marty Feldman…
Soundbites
The book isn’t quite closed on Pere Ubu. Formed in Cleveland some 25 years ago, the group was never popular enough to garner radio airplay, but has still had (and arguably continues to have) an enormous influence. “Final Solution,” one of the first songs it recorded, prefigured both the punk and Goth movements. Singer David…
Solace in the Back Seat
London-born novelist-screenwriter Hanif Kureishi doesn’t have Margaret Thatcher to kick around anymore, as he did so incisively and effectively in My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, but his concerns have not wandered too far afield. Rather, the hard edges merely have been softened. Universal issues still inspire him, but instead of relentless…
Take the E Train
Tate wants to get rolling. And fast. He sucks on bottled water as he circles the bar at Aqua, the popular nightclub in the Flats. Under the strobe lights of the dance floor, he appears to be moving in giant bursts through the machine-generated haze. One moment he’s at the bar, the next he pops…
Edge
Where’s Westbrook? The deposed council president and mayoral shill isn’t the only luminary missing in action after a particularly brutal week. Among the other bodies littering or conspicuously absent from the battlefield: ·Council Clerk Cecelia Huffman, a Mike White loyalist (and snitch, according to some council members) who was in the mayor’s office shortly after…
Teen Trouble
In so many ways, South High is not Columbine. Its students are 70 percent black and overwhelmingly working class. They hail from neighborhoods a long way from suburbia. A few days before Halloween, they were thrust into the national spotlight, even though there was no shooting rampage in their halls or blood shed in the…
Enjoying the Moment
Seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painters were serious about tulips. And peaches. And lobsters. And cheeses, hams, and herring. That these artists could so precisely capture the textures of such objects is a testament to their observational skills and their way with a brush, but what makes their paintings relevant today is the attitude about life suggested…
A Tale of Two Species
“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” exclaimed this century’s most revered dreamer upon her first full-color experience. The same rush of wonder is awaiting any Cleveland area theatergoer willing to make journeys, to take a powder from black-and-white banalities, and to forgo the calcified turd that usually passes for popular entertainment. The…
Life or Death Situation
After years of precarious flirting with a not-always-too-sharp cutting edge, Cleveland Public Theatre has at last found itself and reached its apotheosis with Der Kaiser von Atlantis, an exotic plant cultivated on the dungheap of the Holocaust. This haunting operatic fairy tale, forged out of blood rather than sugar plums, celebrates death as the benevolent…
Encore
Romeo and Juliet. Beck Center’s production of Shakespeare’s classic appears to have been impaled between Renaissance daintiness and a postmodern Miami free-for-all. In this version, made “accessible and relevant to contemporary audiences,” Juliet and her family are Nubians residing in old Verona, while Romeo and the Montagues seem to have emerged from a Pre-Raphaelite paint-by-numbers…
Great Northern Meal
The big guy at a nearby table couldn’t keep his cell phone quiet. It rang; he answered. He talked for two or three minutes, hung up, and it rang again. Finally, even he had had enough. “Listen,” he said to his insistent caller. “I’m having dinner at some Italian restaurant in the mall. Let me…
Side Dish
Noodle impresario Richard Baribault’s dream of expanding his Tea House Noodles (1900 East Sixth Street) concept to the suburbs is about to come true. Along with partners Dick Korn, Dewey Forward, and Jim Szaller, Baribault plans to open a noodle house and juice bar at Westgate Mall in Fairview Park by the end of the…
The Boss Is Back
“My idea,” said Bruce Springsteen in 1996, responding to a reporter’s query about the songwriter’s intent, “wasn’t to get the next 10 songs and put out an album and get out on the road. I wrote with purpose in mind, so I edited very intensely the music I was writing. So when I felt there…
Purls of Wisdom
Looking at Kaffe Fassett’s artwork could make your granny choke on her tea biscuit. No, he’s not another Mapplethorpe; he’s a knitting, quilting, rug-making, needlepointing, interior-designing maven whose wild colors and patterns break all the old rules of textile art. His sweater designs normally contain at least 30 different shades of yarn, and some have…
Turning the Tables
On his Dust Brothers-produced masterpiece Odelay, Beck Hansen rapped about just needing “two turntables and a microphone” to throw a rocking house party, thus creating a mantra for aspiring DJs and MCs everywhere. Well, Rob Swift can manage just fine without the mic — in fact, he offers a response to Beck with the track…
Muscles and Mirth
He can juggle bowling balls. He can balance plungers on his face. He can walk on stilts. And he can whup the ass of any other clown out there. He’s Buffo, the World’s Strongest Clown, and, with claims that his biceps are bigger than most men’s thighs, he’s not your ordinary funnyman with a big…
Murky Waters
Trying to describe Bardo Pond’s music is a little like explaining what water tastes like to someone who’s never had it. There really isn’t an apt description. Yet the words psychedelic drug band pop up again and again when the Philadelphia quintet’s name surfaces. Is Bardo Pond a psychedelic drug band? “Fuck, I don’t even…
Ruined in Rouen
Luc Besson, director of La Femme Nikita, The Professional, and The Fifth Element, is not the first name that would leap to mind to helm a biopic of Joan of Arc. Sure, he’s French, and sure, most of his films have women/girls as protagonist or savior; but this is a guy who has dealt with…
Livewire
Biohazard H-Blockx Primer 55 Run Devil Run Odeon November 2 Once Biohazard finally started playing after a long wait, the band quickly united the sparse crowd at the Odeon into a veritable sea of pushing and shoving. Surprisingly, only one fight broke out, and the loser was headbutted so hard, he fell to the floor.…
