Kid Gloves
The students were restless. For four years, Ben Ezinga, Josh Rosen, and Naomi Sabel had listened as their professors droned on about economic “theories” and sociological “hypotheticals.” Why, they wondered, was everyone always studying change, but not enacting it? No city ever got built by reading. The three friends vowed to be different. After graduation,…
Private Dicks
As a screenwriter, Shane Black has built a reputation on action movies featuring mismatched partners. Crazy Mel Gibson and aging Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon; sassy Samuel L. Jackson and amnesiac hit-woman/housewife Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight; burnout detective Bruce Willis and football player Damon Wayans in The Last Boy Scout; and larger-than-life…
Kottonmouth Kings
With the exception of straight-edge groups, who make a cottage industry of abstinence, one could argue that all bands should openly embrace marijuana — regardless of whether they actually inhale. Put this in your pipe and smoke it: Just get some paraphernalia props and ask “Do you like to get high?” a dozen times per…
Hail to the Chef
It’s six hours till Parker’s American Bistro opens for dinner, but the menu hasn’t been set, the tables remain undressed, and the curtains are drawn. To enter now feels improper, like a groom glimpsing his bride just before the wedding. In the kitchen, Parker Bosley — wearing a long white apron tied loosely at the…
Bum Rap
About halfway through Get Rich or Die Tryin’, the new movie starring rapper 50 Cent (aka Curtis Jackson) and loosely based on his life, 50’s character, Marcus, is in prison, being visited by his girlfriend, Charlene (Joy Bryant). Surprised by his inability to communicate with her, she asks the gangsta rapper, “You always have so…
Cage
Even against the pathology-ridden backgrounds of his fellow hip-hop artists, Cage’s upbringing still retains some shock value. The son of a soldier addicted to heroin, Cage (Chris Palko) followed in his father’s troubled footsteps; he was eventually sentenced to a psychiatric hospital, where he became a guinea pig for the drug Prozac. He survived several…
The Eight-Year War
John Eldridge should be lighting a Cohiba over the mounds of legal documents he will soon be able to forget. In September, the former video technician finally won his suit against Summit County, which he accused of wrongly firing him in 1997. An appellate court told the county to cough up eight years’ worth of…
Capsule reviews of current area theater presentations.
Dark Room — The conventional image we have of playwrights and poets is of lonely souls slaving away in a poorly lit basement. Well, you’ve got the location and the illumination right, but everything else about the Dark Room project is much cheerier. Sponsored by the Cleveland Theater Collective, it’s a once-a-month workshop/cabaret for writers…
The Dropkick Murphys
Waving the Irish flag in the name of Boston, the Dropkick Murphys began as a four-piece punk group and have gone on to record unreleased songs by Woody Guthrie. Frontman Al Barr says it’s not that much of a stretch. “The Pete Seegers, the Woody Guthries of the world, they were the Joe Strummers of…
Cold Hard Cash
TV — Making Of: Walk the Line: This behind-the-scenes peek at the upcoming Johnny Cash biopic features reflections by Joaquin Phoenix (who stars as the Man in Black) and Reese Witherspoon (as wife June Carter). The special — airing at 10:30 p.m. Friday on CMT — also takes a look at the country-music legend’s made-for-the-movies…
Capsule reviews of current area art exhibitions.
NEW Christopher Duffy: Do I Know You? — There’s a giant electric contraption slowly spinning fragments of mirror in a jar, like ice cubes in a glass; images created using sheets of paper as oversized cigarette filters; a messy but inert machine that sucks up paint and turns it into piles of red, yellow, and…
The Dwarves
No doubt, gentle reader, reports of violence elicit from you an appropriate sense of sympathy for the victim. Except, of course, when said victim is Dwarves frontman Blag Dahlia. Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age has pleaded no contest to two charges of misdemeanor battery against Dahlia, the singer known for drunken 15-minute…
Remaking Petro
When the SEC warned Jim Petro that Bureau of Workers’ Comp investors were ripping off the state with exorbitant fees, he did what attorneys general do in these parts: He smiled, nodded his head, then went back to trading state contracts for campaign contributions. But the subsequent embarrassment of Coingate delivered an epiphany of sorts:…
Let Them Eat Cake
Somewhere within the Italian Café’s bland beige walls lurks an enticing restaurant. We savored it in a bowl of buttery steamed mussels and again in a trio of lush, sausage-stuffed cannelloni — and we nearly fell off our chair over it in a slice of freshly made Frangelico cake, as sweetly sophisticated as any fine…
Front 242
Very few bands still active in the industrial rock scene are spoken of in the reverent, hushed tones that Front 242 elicits. The Brussels, Belgium four-piece of Daniel B., Patrick Codenys, Jean-Luc De Meyer, and Richard 23 helped place WaxTrax! Records on the map with a signature fusion of rigid beats, creative sampling, and a…
Flaming the Fan
Take me out to the bull game: “Jilted Lovers” [October 19] may be the most idiotic article I have ever read. While you may have some faint knowledge of baseball economics, your conclusions about baseball, the Indians, and their fans are nonsensical. To begin, witness three recent world champions — Florida, Anaheim, and Arizona –…
Booming Is Business
What would those long-gone explosives handlers from the Austin Powder Company think of their general store today? Renovated, expanded, and stocked with leather couches and cappuccino machines, the circa-1890 building in Glenwillow Village (in the southeast corner of Cuyahoga County) reopened in September as part of a casually upscale dining complex. Now, the Austin Powder…
Disturbed
Disturbed is underrated; it’s that simple. Five years ago, the band’s first album mixed electronic beats and synth textures with crunching guitars. The group was abetted by a frontman, David Draiman, who seemed to let his inner orangutan out at all the right moments. They were more KMFDM than Korn, but got lumped in with…
In the Flesh
You really don’t need to hear the Fleshtones’ new album, Beachhead, to know what it sounds like. Like each of the veteran garage rockers’ previous albums, it offers three-chord guitar riffs wrapped in two-minute blasts of feedback and electricity. You should also know that the Fleshtones (now approaching their 30th year) are the bridge between…
Gotta Love It
Merging heavy metal’s satanic symbol with love’s shorthand icon, the heartagram ranks among modern music’s most popular designs. “The symbol is better known than the actual music of our band,” says H.I.M. singer Ville Valo, who invented the emblem. Hundreds of H.I.M. fans, including MTV stunt dude Bam Margera and members of the groups Killswitch…
The Kat’s M.E.O.W.
The Kat’s M.E.O.W. — that’s short for Music Empowering Ohio’s Women — is a night out with the girls, and these are the area’s top eight women that you’d want to spend a night out with, assuming you’re into reverent but thoroughly modern takes on the blues. As a benefit for the women’s shelter Genesis…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, November 10 Tonight’s Slam It! program at the Museum of Contemporary Art pits junior Wordsworths against each other onstage, using techniques, rhymes, and styles they honed at a series of workshops over the past six weeks. They’ve already busted rhymes on a CD and contributed hip-hop-like poetry to a chapbook, but the slam itself…
Underwater Dance Club
When George Bush claimed something to the effect that there was “no way we could have known that the levees would break,” our first thought was to compile a mixtape for Dubya of the hundreds of songs detailing New Orleans’ eventual watery demise for just that reason — our two favorites being “The Big One’s…
Draw the Line
Cleveland loves Aerosmith — if you listen to classic rock radio, chances are good that you heard some in the last hour — so Cleveland loves Aerosmith tribute band Draw the Line. And even more importantly, Aerosmith loves Draw the Line. The Boston-based tribute band has performed live with members of the original down-and-dirty hard-rock…
Funny Business
Just 18 months ago, comedian Dave Arena’s audience was made up of a small legion of family and friends who sat around his kitchen table in Westlake. The deeper he reached into his gag bag, the more the self-employed money manager dreamed of taking his act on the road. Only one thing stopped him: “Everyone…
Critical Fatwa
We are arbiters of music, not ideals. So all hail Crass, who made great music in spite of its goofball politics. From the silly socialism of Rage Against the Machine to the street capitalism of 50 Cent, the music is the message. So we do not deliver a fatwa against Prussian Blue, the newest teen…
Bob Mould
By surviving a groundbreaking group (Hüsker Dü) and then forming a band that’s more lucrative and almost as influential (Sugar), Bob Mould has had as impressive a career as anyone of the post-punk era. His solo releases, though, have found him fumbling for reconciliation between his various roles as midwestern everyman, pop aficionado, and gay-club…
Cover Boy
FRI 11/11 Singer-songwriter Butch Walker might have just made the biggest mistake of his career. Last month, he released Cover Me Badd, a live EP (available only on iTunes) consisting of various cover songs. It rocketed into the online music service’s top 10. Now, the 35-year-old Walker — a Los Angeles vet who fronted ’90s…
Sound Advice
Apocalyptic industrial combo Filament 38 is all about darkening the dance floor with savage beats and harsh rhythms. Main man Ash keeps us in the loop on the best machine music. What have you been listening to lately? I’ve been listening to a lot of Destroid, Future Prophecies; Evil’s Toy, XTC Implant; Agonoize, Evil Gets…
Bury Your Dead
Bury Your Dead is one of those New England hardcore bands that always puts on an energetic live show, conjuring mosh pits violent enough to pass for a rugby scrum. So Victory Records decided the best thing to do was to offer up a live disc: Alive, a CD/DVD combo of 12 brutal songs. There’s…
The Main Course
SUN 11/13 We’re not sure whether frozen poultry is enough to entice youngsters to get out and run Sunday morning. But Josh Ritchie, who’s hosting the Walsh Turkey Trot, sure hopes that’s what kids are into these days, since prizes for the junior races (made up of children ages 14 and younger) are Thanksgiving turkeys.…
Money Where Your Mouth Is
Band: Plasma for Guns (www.plasmaforguns.com) Hometown: Cleveland Sounds like: “Contentious fun” Fun fact: “We switch instruments during our set. Whatever instrument I use when writing a song is the instrument I’ll play when we play the song live, so I move from guitar to bass to drums. It catches people off guard. After we played…
Various Artists
This year has already featured its share of mediocre G-Unit-related product, so it was hard to expect the soundtrack to 50 Cent’s rags-to-riches film to be any different. But this collection of short, punchy songs is 50’s most consistent project since his debut, giving small nods to the maturity he self-consciously attempted on The Massacre…
Elf Life
FRI 11/11 In R.A. Salvatore’s latest book, Promise of the Witch-King, an assassin and his elf companion travel through a land filled with demons. “In a fantasy world, your heroes can save a town,” he says. “I love a world where good and evil are defined and you can do something about it. It’s very…
Last Word
“I ain’t even in Ohio, and I can tell you that Hatecore Inc. isn’t just one of the most underrated bands in your scene, it’s one of the most brutal bands, period. People are jaded about what real hardcore/metal is supposed to sound like, due to all the jazz musicians turned metalheads, but gimme a…
Wilco
From the ashes of Uncle Tupelo, Wilco has become one of America’s finest rock bands, its constantly evolving sound a seamless mix of country, folk, and jolting blues that retains its urgency even during quieter moments. Not surprisingly, the group has also grown into a potent live act, thanks in large part to newcomer Nels…
Man of Action
WED 11/16 As much as Jim D’Amico relishes yucking it up onstage, the Cleveland comic prefers sitting in a director’s chair. “I love stand-up, but you reach only so many people. Film is more durable,” he says. “But I don’t get in front of the camera. I have what you call a great radio face.”…
Survival of the Sickest
Sometimes truly awful stuff rules, like microwaved burritos, deadly NASCAR collisions, and Teen Wolf. Vying to join that hallowed list is the first annual Horriblefest, a three-day punk-rock blowout beginning Thursday, when some of the most vile, weird, depraved, and kick-ass bands in the land will converge on Cleveland. Oh, man. This could be even…
Jahcoozi
Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: Yes, Jahcoozi’s singer is from Sri Lanka, the group does play a glitched-up brand of electro, and all its label-sanctioned press materials mention M.I.A. by name. But the similarities between the two artists are, as that brief description might suggest, fleeting. For one thing, there’s not…
Street Fighters
Rockstar Games has a winning recipe: Blend a nuanced story with a rich environment, add a dash of sensational marketing, then drench the confection in blood. What else would you expect from the publisher that gave us Grand Theft Auto? Rockstar’s latest release, The Warriors, proves that the bad boys of gaming can’t — or…
Love at First Fight
Keira Knightley, who is all of 20 but has the grace and poise of someone a good decade older, probably considers herself the luckiest lass in all the world at present. Just as Pride & Prejudice begins filling the cineplex with dewy, hopeless romantics who can’t get enough of Jane Austen, her other fall film,…
Hanson
Remember the first time you ever heard “MMMBop”? How completely ridiculous yet incessantly catchy it was? How some of your first make-out sessions were soundtracked by the stringing swell of “I Will Come to You”? How you would waste entire high school marching-band practices jokingly dancing and singing “Where’s the Love?” with the tuba section,…
Pete McDonald
If the long drive to the Kent State Folk Festival is too much, Collinwood has top-notch folk on display this weekend, when singer-songwriter Pete McDonald will release the immaculate Here and Gone. On his second album, the Chardon-based folk rocker sings about the difficulty of being true to yourself when you still haven’t found out…
Our top DVD picks for the week of November 8
Bang Rajan (Hart Sharp) Big Fish: Special Edition (Columbia/Tristar) Blue Collar TV: Season 1, Volume 1 (Warner Bros.) Burn (Columbia/Tristar) Christmas With the Kranks (Sony) Cronicas (UMVD) Edward Scissorhands: Anniversary Edition (Fox) 50 Cent: Refuse to Die (New Line) Jumanji: Deluxe Edition (Columbia/Tristar) La Dolce Vita: Deluxe Collector’s Edition (Koch Lorber) Lady Sings the Blues…
Aboard Game
Pay attention, Disney: This is how you do a family film right. Neither pandering nor dull, Zathura plays exactly like a no-limits replica of the kind of space adventure that imaginative kids might enact, left to their own devices. Assuming there’s no XBox to distract them, naturally. Loosely based on Chris Van Allsburg’s sequel to…
‘Drums Go National
Cleveland’s hottest hip-hop production team just went national, providing a beat for one of the biggest rappers in the game. Collectively known as the Kickdrums, Alex Fitts (formerly Fitty) and Matt “Tilla” Pentilla (formerly MTilla) are featured on Interscope’s just-released Get Rich or Die Tryin’ soundtrack, providing a beat for multiplatinum rap star 50 Cent…
Gil Mantera’s Party Dream
Subtlety and nuance aren’t normally expected from a man who wears a loincloth and glues a ’70s-porn ‘stache to his upper lip. But on Bloodsongs, Gil Mantera, along with his ever-antagonistic brother the Ultimate Donny, leaves most of the goofing around for their stage show. Their latest release, a textured, contagious LP, makes the case…
Blessed Are the Buttmunches
Beavis and Butt-head: The Mike Judge Collection, Volume One (Paramount) This three-disc, 40-episode volume chronicling Beavis and Butt-head’s early years will come as a relief to anyone who was stuck in a teenage wasteland when the MTV series first hit the air; turns out, we weren’t just stoned — this stuff is still funny. A…
Off the Tracks
Moviegoers with a taste for nasty villains will get all they can handle from the heavy in Swedish director Mikael Håfstrom’s Derailed. Philippe LaRoche — played with obvious relish by a craggy-faced Vincent Cassel — is not the kind of effete Frenchman you find reading poetry in the corner bistro while he sips a nice…
Tristeza
Good band names can be hard to come by. Budding groups have to come up with something catchy and unique that nails their sound exactly. For instance, there’s San Diego-based indie group Tristeza, whose moniker sticks in your brainpan and also describes the emotional makeup behind many of its songs. (The word is Spanish for…
