Spider Powers
Spider Rock, a solitary column of red sandstone, towers 800 feet above the eastern floor of Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly. According to Navajo beliefs, the rock’s craggy peak was home to Spider Woman, who created the tribe’s 12 major gods there. She also taught her people how to weave, and her consort, Spider Man, showed…
Various Artists
Perhaps the most onomatopoeic genre description in existence, “blip-hop” describes the squiggles and squeaks adventurous electronic outfits use to communicate. In the hands of rhythm-minded DJs, these sounds can be pounded into patterns, creating water-drop-steady beats. Basically, said musicians become machines, speaking in a computer-derived language that becomes casual and conversational with practice. These aren’t…
War Games
Looking at Second City’s latest ads, which showcase onetime supernova, now super-dead alum Chris Farley, you may wonder whether this vaunted legacy has any relevance to sketch comedy in Cleveland. After all, unless you’re planning a trip to Chicago circa 1988, Farley’s just not much good for a laugh anymore. But for timely, homegrown sketch…
Hayshaker Jones
The worst thing about this otherwise excellent Northeast Ohio quintet is its name, which sticks to the teeth like a bite of overripe sweet corn. Unlike countless No Depression romantics, however, Hayshaker Jones deserves the comparison that its sound immediately recalls — Gram Parsons, a figure of country cool second to none. Like that brilliant…
Something Like a Dame
While attending college down in New Orleans back in the ’80s, Jeffery Roberson decided to major in drag. Following the advice of Gypsy’s band of strippers, who claimed “You gotta have a gimmick,” he fashioned Varla Jean Merman — the so-called love child of Ethel Merman herself and Ernest Borgnine — and wrote I’ve Got…
Delhi Style
It probably isn’t true, as a companion insists, that the quality of the fare at an Indian restaurant must be inversely proportional to the smartness of its decor. Yet there is no doubt that some of Greater Cleveland’s most authentic Indian cooking is being served up in little eateries that will never, ever win a…
Virtual Dish
Pity the poor restaurateur. Back in the day, all it took was a flowerpot and a well-swept foyer for an eatery to entice a potential patron. But now the art of seducing a diner has a new dimension: a digital one. No longer does it suffice to have a handsome, well-maintained entryway; restaurant owners are…
How to $ucceed in Business
American Greetings has sent many regrets over the last four years. The greeting card maker’s stock has fallen 70 percent from its 1998 perch. Plans to go public with the dot-com unit were abandoned. Hundreds of workers lost jobs. And in May, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged former President Ed Fruchtenbaum with fraud in…
Revenge of the Nerd
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs didn’t even have a CD released when the hype started more than a year ago. They were just an amazing live band from New York, basking in all the retro-rock hype of late. Pundits exclaimed that they blew the White Stripes off the stage. Even Rolling Stone was chapping its lips…
Bed-Panning for Gold
Six nursing homes in Cuyahoga County provide substandard care, according to state health inspectors. But if any of the six were sued for neglect or abuse, a new law allows the homes to suppress inspection results as evidence. The law also shortens the statute of limitations, dictates who can bring a suit on behalf of…
From Russia With a Hunka Burnin’ Love
If perestroika had a musical theme song, the Red Elvises would be its ideal authors. Touting themselves as “Kick-Ass Rock and Roll From Siberia,” the Red Elvises translate surf rock and rockabilly into the Cyrillic alphabet, then celebrate the eternal rock dreams of pretty girls, fun times, and the dance party that never ends. The…
Clean Sweep
The attorneys streaming in and out of the Rockefeller Building barely notice the two figures huddled a few feet from the door. But the conversation is heated. “If they find out I’m talking to you, I’ll get treated like shit,” a cleaning woman confides to Dennis Dingow, a Service Employees International Union rep. The union…
Crown Affair
Until recently, the Anniversary was often crowded into the same dry space under the emo umbrella as its Kansas City scenemates, the Get Up Kids — a purgatory where sensitive souls wailed, while carnival-style keyboards mocked their pain. Those tragicomic figures made mirth out of misery, like Charlie Brown entertaining the “Peanuts” gallery with his…
Low Plains Grifters
In the 1980s and early ’90s, every day felt like Halloween to Honda executives. Only instead of neighbors, they visited hundreds of Honda dealers. Instead of candy, they collected kickbacks. There were cash-stuffed suitcases, Rolls-Royces, Rolex watches, yachts — at least $15 million in graft changed hands. “The dealers treated us like kings,” one senior…
Conductive Energy
Seeing how our knowledge of classical music pretty much begins with scores for Bugs Bunny cartoons and ends with the intro to Megadeth’s “Symphony of Destruction,” it’s little wonder that renowned New York conductor Jonathan Sheffer is feeling a little hostile toward us writer types. “I want to take the critics and slap them,” he…
Trivisonno Goes Ballistic
Don’t blame the host for bad talk radio: Your recent article about the sorry state of AM talk radio [“Battle of the Blowhards,” September 11] really was exemplified recently when Mike Trivisonno interviewed a weapons expert. Although the guest was a very knowledgeable man, Mike asked, “How do you make a nuclear bomb? I mean,…
Acid Mothers Temple
It’s been years since someone has had the guts, ego, and lack of irony to take on the mantle held by the likes of Jimi Hendrix and (the overrated) Eric Clapton. But leave it to the country that brought us the larger-than-life stompings of Godzilla and Rodan to resurrect the guitar god. Acid Mothers Temple…
Hayride to Heck
There are kinder, gentler Halloween chills going on at Lake Metroparks this year. For the parents who don’t want to cradle their crying little ones in their laps all night, Haunted Hayrides offers a horrorfest that’s much less, well, horrific. “We’re the alternative to the blood-and-guts haunted houses,” says the event’s director, Brian Fowler. “The…
Immortal Lee County Killers
There’s a bumper crop of talented white boys doing the Muddy Waters shuffle these days, but the hyperelectric Immortal Lee County Killers are the ones sounding dangerously close to short-circuiting every time someone plugs them in. It’s not just the band’s name, or the fact they’re from a small southern town (Auburn, Lee County, Alabama),…
Scare Master
“Most people don’t realize how much goes into producing a haunted house,” says local makeup artist Jason Blaszczak. No kidding. Blaszczak’s pus-filled, blood-soaked, and incredibly lifelike (or is that deathlike?) creations are a far scream from the department-store latex ghoul and werewolf masks of our youth. “It’s very tedious and time-consuming,” he admits. The blood…
Rilo Kiley
Coming out of the burgeoning L.A. rock scene and released by Saddle Creek (the label du jour in suddenly happening Omaha), Rilo Kiley is at the nexus of two of the hottest movements right now. The band’s excellent sophomore LP, The Execution of All Things, reveals that Rilo Kiley is the best thing coming out…
Tapeheads
Much like a psychic, a cinema critic must look through a movie and see the other side. In the case of the new thriller The Ring — remake of the 1998 Japanese hit, Ringu — the formative forces swim into focus without effort. There’s a Dreamworks boardroom, some executives exclaiming that Shrek can’t be expected…
Pavement
This 140-minute deluxe reissue makes a high-priced fetish of aging hipsters’ nostalgia for indie rock’s lo-fi heyday — and why not? After all, Pavement was never innocent about its fetishes, and this 1992 debut is often celebrated as these California boys’ greatest glory, precisely because it was the one time their romantic obsessions bloomed as…
Tickle Me Elmo
As pharmacologist Elmo McElroy in Formula 51, Samuel L. Jackson initially sports a seriously silly fake Afro along with hippy-dippy threads that make him look like some sort of flower-power cult leader. When next we see him, it’s 30 years later, and he’s got cornrows and is inexplicably wearing a kilt. Whether or not you…
Ash
Never mind that the Irish quartet Ash seems to be a perennial darling of the British music press, wears its Star Wars obsession on its sleeve, and is almost dangerously photogenic. Ash’s musical output still remains memorable amid the quirks. What started in the mid-’90s as sugary pop-punk inspired by the likes of the Buzzcocks…
Women Behaving Badly
Ordinarily it would seem pretty odious to put so fine a point on this, but what the hey: Gather up your gay friends, because here’s a movie they’re going to dig, dig, dig. Well, probably, anyway. That general demographic seems to be the target audience of the radical, whimsical French import 8 Women, a musical…
Hand of Doom
The best thing about Hand of Doom, the hot new quasi-celebrity Black Sabbath tribute band, is the cheesecake photo of frontwoman Melissa Auf Der Maur adorning the cover of its debut live disc. Her back is to the camera. Her arms are outstretched. Her pants are suitably tight for the occasion. There. We said it.…
Alice Unchained
I might as well just come out and say it: Spirited Away is the best movie I’ve seen all year. Though it would be a masterpiece in any language, Hayao Miyazaki’s animated spectacular (and Japan’s highest-grossing film ever) is being released by Disney simultaneously in two versions — one in the original Japanese, with subtitles,…
Jets to Brazil
Jets to Brazil’s third album, Perfecting Loneliness, sees under-the-radar veterans achieve the state of grace that contemporary indie rockers spend so much time striving for. Former Jawbreaker singer-guitarist Blake Schwarzenbach heads up these survivors of ’90s pre-emo, playing the role of the enlightened Gen Xer with a good bead on his relationship with his parents…
