Deadly Darling
Time changes the value of cultural artifacts. A 1936 Mickey Mouse watch was once a child’s trinket; 65 years later, it’s a priceless heirloom fit to finance a condominium. In 1956, Bad Seed, a stage adaptation of a literate horror novel, caused matinee ladies on Broadway to clutch their throats in terror. The prospect of…
We Like Mike
Mike’s Place is less a restaurant than it is a three-dimensional profile of owner Mike Kostensky. Oh sure, the much-modified former Dutch Pantry on the Kent-Brimfield line serves food — heaping platters of it, along with more than 140 brands of ice-cold beer. But you don’t have to be a Gestalt therapist to appreciate the…
Serving Up Hope
Join diners across the nation October 11 by stopping for a meal at your favorite restaurant and supporting the Windows of Hope Family Relief Fund. The event, which will provide direct assistance to families of restaurant employees lost in last month’s attacks on the World Trade Center, was organized by Windows on the World owner…
Windows of Hope
Following is a list of area restaurants participating in Windows of Hope on October 11, to benefit families of restaurant workers killed in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Information was complete as of press time. American Tavern & Eatery 440-349-3736 Becky’s Food & Spirits 216-621-0055 Bob Evans Restaurants all locations Brönte…
Come and Gone
Singer-guitarist Thalia Zedek, formerly of the indie rock band Come, waited two decades before finally deciding to strike out on her own. Now, the only one surprised at her amazing solo album, Been Here and Gone, is Zedek herself. “I just hadn’t really thought about doing it before,” says Zedek via phone from her Boston…
Eliot’s Mess
Author Steven Nickel still recalls his parents’ stern warnings not to play near the railroad tracks by Kingsbury Run. That’s where Cleveland’s most notorious murderer — the “Butcher of Kingsbury Run” — dumped the mutilated torsos of his victims. “A lot of times, it was the kids who found the bodies,” says Nickel, who grew…
Ltd. Means
Before Johnny “Rotten” Lydon tapped him to play in Public Image Ltd., John Wardle sold cheese in a street market and worked as a laborer. He and Lydon were friends “from before the punk thing started,” so when Lydon needed a bassist, he called upon Wardle, who eventually was christened “Jah Wobble.” “People tell me…
War: What It’s Good For
“Everyone forgot the risks they took — that they got sick and died,” says David Hansen, founder of Dobama’s Night Kitchen. They were the soldiers of the Gulf War, the high-tech “video-game war” of 1991. Then, as now, flags waved, and dormant patriotism was stirred. But victory came so swiftly that, when the war was…
Give Him the Rock
It’s the day after the Tribe clinched the division title, but pitcher Scott Radinsky isn’t recognized as one of the players who helped put the Indians back where they belong. “What’s that say on your T-shirt?” asks our pierced and tattooed waiter at the downtown Winking Lizard. Radinsky pulls back his tan jacket to expose…
Have at You!
After the next few apocalypses, hundreds of thousands of years from the moment we clever humans smugly call “now,” the great philosopher-scientists will gather to assemble the remaining traces of our present time and species. In particular, these evolved beings will find fascination in the structure of our crania, which will appear as flimsy vestigial…
Family Values Tour
Were it not for the well-publicized substance abuse and legal troubles of singer Scott Weiland, Stone Temple Pilots — the unlikely headliner for the tour Korn and Limp Bizkit founded — wouldn’t fit this bill. At least the band has grown over its five albums and several forced hiatuses, moving further into psychedelia and fulfilling…
Hairy Situation
Plot aside — way aside, as it’s almost a non-issue in a film that telegraphs its final scenes during its opening moments — Bandits is really about only one thing: Billy Bob Thornton and Bruce Willis’s bald heads. As Joe Blake (Willis) and Terry Collins (Thornton), two bank-robbing fugitives in search of retirement and a…
The Damned
In the rush to deify English punk’s earliest architects, the Damned have often been forgotten. While the Clash and the Sex Pistols harbor the bulk of the historical acclaim, it should be noted and remembered that it was the Damned who amassed the largest stockpile of punk-rock “firsts.” Theirs was the first punk album released…
Crouching . . . Monkey?
Thanks to his justly lauded work as action choreographer on The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, director Yuen Wo Ping is among the most famous creators of Hong Kong action in the U.S. In the wake of the latter film’s astonishing success, Miramax, with a prod from Quentin Tarantino, has wisely reissued Yuen’s 1993…
Neil Diamond
There never was a time when Neil Diamond, the Jewish Elvis, was completely free from ridicule. Lester Bangs’s hilarious Rolling Stone review of 1972’s Hot August Night — sending up Diamond as the unself-conscious Hollywood-damaged cornball he was and still is — proves Diamond was camp even then. But now the glamour’s gone, along with…
When Duty Didn’t Call
Cleveland Police Sergeant Cristino DeJesus had been on shift only a few hours January 3 when his cell phone rang. It was his brother-in-law, Timothy Moulder, and he needed help. Friends had spotted Moulder’s face on a Crime Stoppers flier that afternoon, he told DeJesus. He had no idea why he was wanted. After being…
Kelly Hogan
Kelly Hogan has triumphed over tragedy and excelled in her singing career, even as she tried to put it behind her. In the early ’90s, Hogan was the sultry frontwoman with the alt-country/cocktail act Jody Grind, an Atlanta quartet with a press kit full of great reviews and a line of major labels waiting to…
Take Their Word for It
Fresh off the phone, Ray Pierce bounces into the room. “I just turned three undecided voters around!” he declares with the boyish excitement of a political rookie. Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, seated nearby, doesn’t say a word. The promise of three new converts leaves her unmoved. By day’s end, Pierce will need 20,000 votes in…
The Strokes
It’s no major surprise that the Strokes are being hailed as the latest big thing to erupt from the storied New York music scene. The band easily evokes comparisons to the spare energy of the Velvet Underground, the punk ethic of the Ramones, and the lo-fi kitsch factor of Jonathan Richman. And as rooted in…
Lifting Waits
“Lift doesn’t work,” the RTA bus driver remarked casually. Ella Patterson, a small, swollen woman who pushes an oxygen tank in a cart, stood on the sidewalk, panic creeping onto her face. She couldn’t get her cart up the bus steps without the motorized lift. Patterson was trying to get home from the Kmart at…
Brothomstates
Warp Records has built its reputation by embracing the odd and the exceptional. Home to misfits such as Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and Autechre, the English label has continually opened its arms (and mind) to the world of eccentric electronica. Its latest label darling, the Finnish programmer Brothomstates, might embody a new benchmark for obscure instrumentalists.…
Accounts Deceivable?
To speak of accounting is a torture so severe, it should be adopted into the penal code. Son, I’m giving you the option of 16 years in Lucasville — or being seated next to an accountant at a dinner party. Which is why the matter has received so little attention in the Cleveland mayoral race,…
Julie Doiron
Singer Julie Doiron’s first band, Eric’s Trip, was New Brunswick’s bid for indie cred in the early ’90s. Her pigsqueals in “Blinded” on the band’s 1993 debut, Love Tara, were perhaps the decade’s flashpoint as far as aroused indie rock goes. It took no great stretch of the imagination to picture Doiron one day making…
Riders for Life? Wusses!
Sanctioned racing is where it’s at: I like to think of motorcycling as a noble sport, where rider skill is demonstrated on a racetrack. Dissidents like Riders for Life [“Danger Incorporated,” September 13] are tainting the public’s image of motorcycling. I ride a sport bike, and every time I pass a group of kids, they…
Saul Glennon
Led by 38-year-old singer Jack Rugan, Saul Glennon (the group is named after a Batman comic) promises to be Cleveland’s answer to Guided by Voices. Over the course of the last decade, Rugan has written several hundred songs, only a fraction of which have actually made it onto the band’s discs. With last year’s Music…
Arabian Knight
On October 3, there appeared in The New York Times an article about how movie studios are struggling to find new villains in a post-September 11 environment. Writer Rick Lyman rounded up the usual suspects: a few film producers, a couple of screenwriters and the requisite amount of film scholars, all of whom gathered to…
