This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, November 20 The third-annual Lord of the Rings Marathon starts tonight with a lecture that asks, “The Lord of the Rings on the Screen: Does It Work?” Seeing that the first two films grossed more than $650 million, we’re gonna say yes. (The final part of the trilogy, The Return of the King, hits…
The Real Shock Rock
Daniel Partner plays old-school American dance music, and he’s exceedingly particular about how authentically he presents it. Before we proceed, cast out of your mind the vision of a DJ spinning classic Detroit techno records circa 1982 and fussing over the vintage of his Adidas tracksuit. Partner, who grew up in San Francisco but now…
The Queen of Clubs
Charissa Saverio has led a charmed life. As a kid, she romped in the palatial digs of the luxury hotels her stepfather managed in Asia, Europe, and Africa. By her early teens, her family had settled in England, where she practiced piano and tended to the horses. Then Saverio had an epiphany: While watching a…
Boss of the Flats
For years, WMMS DJ Kid Leo kicked off the weekend every Friday by playing Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” Now, workingman’s rock will continue all night. Every Friday from December 26 through the end of February, the Powerhouse Pub (2000 Sycamore Street; 216-861-4982) will become Cleveland’s Bruce Springsteen Headquarters, playing music from Springsteen and related…
Fat-Free Comedy
THU 11/20 The Crown Royal Comedy Soul Festival hits town Thursday, “and it’s zero percent fat,” says headliner Earthquake (pictured). “I’m going to be talking about people not taking responsibility for their decisions — like Roy, who was messing with them damn tigers. If you walk out of church and a tiger grabs your ass,…
The Easy Star All-Stars
A thin line exists between a gimmick and a good thing. When rumors started circulating in reggae circles that some New York boys were assembling tracks for a song-by-song reggae tribute to Pink Floyd’s classic album Dark Side of the Moon, many bloodshot eyes were rolling. Dub Side of the Moon, however, forced cynics to…
Sunday Services
SUN 11/23 Mickey Koral won’t forget last year’s Browns Versus Steelers Party. Browns fans without tickets to the home game squeezed into his tiny Sportsman Restaurant — only to watch Pittsburgh squeeze out a 23-20 nailbiter. “It was a packed crowd, rowdy,” Koral says. “Fans have a thing against Pittsburgh.” To comfort them, Koral served…
Brian Jonestown Massacre
Like the colorful, tie-dyed musical miasma of ’60s rock from which it draws inspiration, the Brian Jonestown Massacre employs a dynamic palette of shifting shapes and textures in illustrating its opulent soundscapes. While singer-guitarist Anton Newcombe and company paid early and frequent homage to this era, the Massacre’s sound has expanded greatly since its genesis.…
Camelot in the Flats
11/22-11/23 There are no round tables or Holy Grails in this Camelot. But magic and sorcery abound in the kids’ play Ultimus Veneficus. Translated as “Last of the Sorcerers,” it’s a modern-day Arthurian tale about a boy named Timothy. When his grandmother catches him fighting with his snotty older brother, she breaks them up and…
Vendetta Red
Punk rock’s about as tough as a riled-up kitten these days. Maybe that’s why all the new bands that have sprung from the backwash of Blink-182 and Good Charlotte are being pegged as “mall punk.” Hipsters and punk purists, especially, despise the stuff. Zach Davidson of the Seattle quintet Vendetta Red, however, doesn’t want to…
Glory Haze
THU 11/20 Bob Dyer admits it was kinda tough gathering positive material for the “glorious” part of his book, Cleveland Sports Legends: The 20 Most Glorious and Gut-Wrenching Moments of All Time. After all, Cleveland sports history is built on crushing and embarrassing incidents, from Red Right 88 to Beer Night at the old stadium.…
Cradle of Filth/Type O Negative
A few short years ago, Cradle of Filth was utter crap. There’s not much in music worse than a bunch of campy Brits trying to mingle Goth, fetish fashion, and black metal — and failing on all counts. But the band’s 2003 opus, Damnation and a Day, is a masterpiece, easily one of the best…
AIDS for Laughs
11/20-12/14 In gay New York, sex isn’t something you swear off for the rest of your life. But don’t tell that to wannabe actor Jeffrey. The title character in Paul Rudnick’s comedy (onstage at the Beck Center) makes that bold decision in the early ’90s, when AIDS became known as more than just a gay…
Paul Oakenfold
The term “superstar DJ” has become just as clichéd an oxymoron as “sports entertainment.” Instead of waiting for such electronic-music barometers as Urb magazine or Gilles Peterson to anoint whichever spinsters can be considered upper-echelon talent, many of them take it upon themselves to create their own immortal, self-important personae. Just as many dance fans…
Living Dead Girl
It took them four years, but finally Dark Castle — Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver’s horror division, which puts out a movie a year around Halloween — have made something that’s genuinely scary. It may be no coincidence that this time around, Silver has scored a higher profile cast than usual and a better-known director…
Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks
Before bands such as Asleep at the Wheel were rebirthing western swing and the Manhattan Transfer brought sophisticated jazz harmonies to ears raised on rock, guitarist/singer/songwriter Dan Hicks was blending these elements and others with a big dose of idiosyncrasy. The result was the Hot Licks, one of the most original groups pop has ever…
Kitty Litter
If you’re hankering for a movie about an awkward yet lovable “outsider” type, who wanders into a pastel mock-up of Middle America and cajoles the straights to get saucy, you’re in luck. It’s called Edward Scissorhands, and it’s been available on video for years. Renting it will absolve you of having to endure Dr. Seuss’…
Tracy + the Plastics
“Electroclash” is almost as dirty a label as “emo” these days. A reference to any pretentious art-school grad with a drum machine, neon ’80s wardrobe, and a synthesizer, the movement earned heavy press hype, which in turn created a lingering backlash. Nevertheless, calling one-woman show Tracy + the Plastics just another lame electroclash buzz band…
The View From the Inside
Lawyer William Hamann Jr. pleaded guilty in 1991 to stealing more than $2 million from estates and trusts that he oversaw. He spent more than a decade in prison, but was recently paroled. Scene asked him to describe the changes he saw at Marion Correctional Institution during his two stays there. I had two tours…
Muck, Raked
In the annals of fraud and fakery, a discredited ex-magazine reporter named Stephen Glass will likely wind up a mere footnote. The people who forge Van Goghs and the con artists who bilk naive grandmothers out of their life savings (not to mention certain fast-dancing corporate executives) deserve even more richly the loathing that’s heaped…
John Lee Hooker
It’s fitting that John Lee Hooker’s final release finds him takin’ care of business. The blues legend, who essentially invented the boogie sound as most modern listeners understand it, was still weaving his smoldering spell before he passed away two years ago. His daughter Zakiya put some final, mostly successful production touches on these sessions,…
Steal This Song
Hollywood always loves a good murder story, and Michael Weiss made the perfect villain. In 1978, the Chicago businessman opened one of the country’s first video retail stores. Soon after, lackluster sales led Weiss to a new strategy that would revolutionize his business: Instead of selling copies of M.A.S.H. for $90 a pop, he began…
Word Jumble
There had to be a moment in prehistory when the first caveman uttered the first audible grunt, startling himself as well as everyone within earshot. And no doubt another humanoid standing nearby immediately thought, “I wonder what he meant by that?” The sounds that emanate from our pie holes — be they crude or complex,…
G-Unit
Bloodied repeatedly at the hands of 50 Cent, Ja Rule should find some small redemption in his rival’s latest project. After all, wasn’t it 50 who called Ja a pop-loving wanksta? Who claimed Ja would “do anything to sell a record”? Who continues the assault on the debut from his group G-Unit, right down to…
Captive Audience
On August 12, the Marion Correctional Institution played host to a most unlikely revival. The Promise Keepers, the international men’s Christian ministry, put on a four-hour service for about 1,000 men — more than half the prison’s population. Joe White, a former Texas A&M assistant football coach, offered a talk tailor-made for his audience. “The…
Happily Blue
For years, when residents of Hudson, Twinsburg, Macedonia, or the other southern suburbs wanted a dining experience to brag about, they had to head into Cleveland. (Hey, we love the Inn at Turner’s Mill, but just how often can you eat there?) But finally, the scene is heating up. We heard about Downtown 140, executive…
Triumph the Insult Comic Dog
Almost everyone knows someone like Triumph — no, not a canine puppet chomping on a cigar and leering like a lecherous Bela Karolyi — but a friend with a sense of humor so perverted and dirty that it boomerangs from offensive back to hysterical from one moment to the next. Such is the premise of…
The Cain Mutiny
Mayor Madeline Cain is a martyr. Just ask her. Only a few weeks ago, she was captain of a prosperous suburb. Lakewood’s tax receipts had grown faster than inflation for two decades. Home values rose 62 percent between 1990 and 2000. And when the county reassessed property values, Lakewood’s were jacked by 14.5 percent –…
Happy Campers
The backwoodsman lifted a gnarled finger to his lips. His long gray hair lay limp against the collar of his buffalo-plaid shirt (L. L. Bean, I think; possibly, Ralph Lauren), but his old eyes danced in the light of the fire. “Shhh,” he whispered. “Do you hear it? That’s the song of a loon.” Oh,…
Sheryl Crow
Sheryl Crow left Las Vegas, but have the ’90s given us a better recidivist than she? The singer’s new, surprisingly great greatest hits package is a virtual treatise on shining up shit — on turning the shallow and tawdry and questionably legal into little three-minute packets of abandon we’d pump our quarters into till they’re…
Badly Drawn Brat
British singer-songwriter Damon Gough — a.k.a. Badly Drawn Boy — is known for his graceful guitar-playing and sensitive lyrics about love and longing. But the stocking-capped little troll is also gunning to become the Axl Rose of folkpop. “He writes songs for Hugh Grant movies,” says Heather Milum, who attended Gough’s November 11 show at…
Hard Day’s Fight
For the past decade, Rancid’s bare-knuckle punk has been synonymous with broken bones, not broken hearts. But all that changed earlier this year, when Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong weathered a high-profile divorce. His wife, Distillers singer Brody Dalle, left him and promptly engaged in a very public fling with Queens of the Stone Age singer…
The Flaming Lips
There’s something about the Flaming Lips that helps you understand the origins of Christianity. Seriously. Though they may have a deliriously opaque sound and a hankering for morally serious lyrics about robots and vegetables, they’ve attracted devotees far outside the realm of people who walk around knowing who played bass for Moby Grape. Take an…
Closed Door Policy
Closed Door Policy Musta hit him where he lives: I was appalled to learn that Neil Thackaberry, artistic director of the Actors Summit Theater, has barred your theater critic, Christine Howey, from reviewing productions at his family theater [First Punch, October 29]. I have read Ms. Howey’s reviews, and while she is not the second…
Hourglass
The Bronx is hundreds of miles away from Little Louie Vega’s vantage point on the patio behind Miami Beach’s Panna Café, where he sits and enjoys a cup of coffee late one morning. He’s here under some duress: In three hours, he has to rejoin his wife, the beautiful Cape Verdean vocalist Anané, to pack…
Norse Law
Seldom do Lynyrd Skynyrd and Vanilla Ice get props in the liner notes to the same album. Rarer still is the pair of dudes that spit rhymes in guttural death-metal growls while sporting plastic Viking headdresses. Norse Law’s first national release sets precedents in both departments. Blending rapid-fire Euro-metal fretwork with strained grunts, Sweet Home…
Dear Big Shot
Don Novello is determined to keep people in power grounded. As Lazlo Toth, Novello — the Lorain native who played Father Guido Sarducci on Saturday Night Live — writes letters of advice to corporate bigwigs, government officials, and world leaders. His findings? “Everyone is lying,” he says. “The police chief in San Francisco lied on…
Out With the Nü
It had all the makings of Rock Star II, sans the codpiece. Three weeks ago, Switched frontman Ben Schigel was asked to join the platinum metal band Drowning Pool, replacing the replacement for former frontman Dave Williams, who died in the summer of 2002 from a heart attack suffered on the Ozzfest tour. Schigel had…
Various Artists
An A-list of Cleveland punkers donated songs to Ain’t It Fun, a compilation every bit as solid as last year’s low-dough ClePunk.comp. And, being free, this collection is the better bargain. How do they do it? There’s nothing to give away except the music: The compilation exists only in cyberspace (at www.cleveland-aintitfun.com), where audiophiles from…
