The Play House on Trial
Why not call on character witnesses? Kathryn DeLong’s article “Season of Discontent” [September 4] missed a unique opportunity. Had I known that you were interested in interviewing artists who “have a stake in local theater,” I could have put you in touch with dozens of professional theater artists who regularly work at the Play House.…
Melt-Banana
Despite their name, these Tokyo noisesmiths are more about melting frontal lobes than fruit. Who knows what it is about Japanese culture that can provoke a response as extreme as that country’s thriving underground noise scene? Perhaps it’s the claustrophobia of intense overpopulation, a strong cultural conservatism, or all the artifice that comes with a…
Semi-Tough
Buses were not made for football players. The Cleveland Lions pretzel into their seats like giant jack-in-the-boxes. Each toss and turn is a useless grab at comfort. Everyone was supposed to be at the Lakefront Lines parking lot by 5 a.m. A half-hour later, the bus still idles as new-age jazz oozes from the speakers.…
Various Artists
Filled with lackluster covers, the average tribute album isn’t worth the CD it’s burned on. Rise Above, however, not only deserves your entertainment dollars, but it forwards them to a good cause. (Visit www.WM3.org for details about the controversial case.) Rise Above’s definitive hardcore is essential and authentic. Latter-day Black Flag vocalist and album producer…
Springtime for Mel
It takes chutzpah to adapt a comedy-classic movie for the stage, where nuance is scarce. It takes adroitness to rework the original’s witty rapid-fire dialogue into a musical, a genre typically light on narrative. And it takes ingenuity not only to pull it off, but also to snag a dozen Tony Awards, which The Producers…
The Apples in Stereo
As if there were any doubt after 2000’s effervescent The Discovery of the World Inside the Moone, this short sugar blast is where Robert Schneider and his musical companions definitively transcend their ’60s dream-pop niche. This time, they do it by copping the spirit of the hard retro-rock trend, compacting Schneider’s high, nasal vocals and…
The Big Deal
It’s fitting that filmmaking brothers Anthony and Joe Russo would pick a family restaurant in Little Italy to meet in. Their debut feature film, Welcome to Collinwood, which they wrote and directed, is filled with tasty ethnic vignettes and local color. Set “somewhere in Cleveland” (as its opening title card informs us), Collinwood, which was…
Squarepusher
Squarepusher (a.k.a. British electronica maverick Tom Jenkinson) led off his last album with “My Red Hot Car,” one of the catchiest and pop-hook-laden dance tunes of 2001. Following that moment of clarity, however, said disc, Go Plastic, dissolved into a synapse-melting pile of 200-mph breakbeats and cut-up noise that, at its most coherent, sounded like…
Flesh for Fantasy
The not-so-great American pastime of serial killing has splattered pop culture in recent years, but from the biopics of America’s Most Unwanted to the nervy theatricality of Anthony Perkins, Kevin Spacey, or even David Byrne (whose Talking Heads song “Psycho Killer” says it all), only one legend stands out as definitive: that of Hannibal “the…
Various Artists
There are few moments in current popular culture as delicious as watching a washed-up Martha Quinn shilling on a late-night infomercial for Time-Life’s Sounds of the ’80s collection. When asked what it was like to be an MTV VJ back in the day, the former party animal sniffs unconsciously, rubbing a finger along the bottom…
Ohio Players
Honestly, I’ve never been much into schmaltzy movies about the old neighborhood. The whole scene seems pretty hellish: all that cutesy talk about this good old street or that once-hoppin’ nightclub. Therefore, when it’s announced that there’s a movie called Welcome to Collinwood, about a bunch of Hollywood actors playing shticky “old neighborhood” characters, I’m…
Mike Farley
“Although it has yet to make a dent outside its native Ohio, the Michael Stanley Band is competent, though it’s hampered by the lack of a unique sound,” began the Michael Stanley entry in the world’s first comprehensive guide to rock albums, 1979’s Rolling Stone Record Guide. A generation later, it would seem the kindest…
Dawson’s Crossing
This is not how he’s supposed to talk. These are not things he’s supposed to say. These are not things he’s supposed to do. Not the Teen People poster boy, the YM golden child. Not the WB heartthrob. But there he is, anyway, snorting, guzzling, toking, dealing, stumbling, grinding, moaning, screaming, bleeding. There he is…
Cheatin’ Art
The Cleveland Play House opened its season by channeling the patrician glamour of Katharine Hepburn; for an encore, it’s evoking the ramshackle fun of the Grand Ole Opry in Lost Highway: The Music and Legend of Hank Williams. It’s a pretext to resurrect country music’s favorite martyr from his early grave, so he can once…
Numbers Game
The room is a knockout. The staffers are gracious. And Executive Chef Chris Feuerborn’s mostly Mediterranean menu strikes an attention-getting balance between the classic and the contemporary. We just wish that, when we paid our visits, the food at Mad 4 You had been as consistently precise and interesting as the surroundings. Of course, the…
Welcome to Doyle’s Town
Sure, we grieved when chef Steve Parris left his post at the Fulton Bar & Grill (1835 Fulton Road, 216-694-2122) earlier this year. But a recent visit to the funky little Ohio City restaurant and bar helped turn our frown upside down: When it comes to exciting, unusual, and creative fare, the Fulton’s new executive…
Room at the Top
The mohawks are expected, the smiles aren’t. It’s a Thursday night at Peabody’s, and the Vacancies have been tapped to warm up the crowd for the show’s headliners, British punk vets the Vibrators. The 100 or so in attendance might be there for sneering English punk, but for now they’re getting surly rock and roll,…
Kentucky Disco Ball
Unless you’re friends with puppets or you know the ice cream man, you probably won’t find a more enjoyably inconsequential way to spend your Monday night this week than with Louisville, Kentucky’s VHS or Beta, a quartet of disco survivalists determined to fill a darkening world with the brightest, most vivid bonhomie four nerdy guys…
Greyboy
When Andreas Stevens, the San Diego trip-hop DJ otherwise known as Greyboy, started producing his own beats for Ubiquity Records in the early ’90s, he recruited Karl Denson and a handful of other jazz musicians to spice things up by laying down some lush instrumentals on top of his breakbeat concoctions. The collaboration eventually led…
Road Scholars
When David Settje finished his doctorate in history at Kent State, he knew exactly what to expect among the ranks of the educated elite: a lot of time in his ’95 Chevy Cavalier. Thanks to a glut of newly minted Ph.D.s, full-time jobs in college history departments are the spotted lynx of the academic world…
Soundbites
We were only ten minutes into the media preview party for Modä, the hip new Ohio City nightclub, when we started feeling like Jamie Lee Curtis in The Fog. As Columbus DJ Shell, positioned at a huge concave platform, began spinning and an elaborate lighting rig got going, Modä’s 1,500-gallon cryogenics machine began spewing a…
Food Comes From Crops
The State of Ohio is spending half a million dollars to remind folks that corn doesn’t grow on trees. It shoots from stalks in the ground. This fact and other mysteries of the universe are revealed in a television campaign sponsored by the Ohio Department of Agriculture. Two 15-second commercials, airing across the state through…
Blue Rodeo
There are certainly more important reasons for Canadians to ask what’s wrong with America than the inability of Blue Rodeo to make a dent in sales on this side of the border. But consider that this roots-rock band’s albums routinely ship gold and reach platinum in short order in its native country and you, too,…
R.I.P. Tommy Lee
A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon some startling news: The citizens of North Royalton, Berea, and Elyria appear to finally be losing interest in hair-metal music. “We’re just not getting the crowds we used to,” laments Lori Ludeman, assistant promoter at the Flying Machine metal club in Lorain. Seven years ago, a Quiet Riot…
Mark Eitzel
Like the Screaming Trees’ Mark Lanegan and the Afghan Wigs’ Greg Dulli, former American Music Club songwriter and vocalist Mark Eitzel has a husky baritone that gels nicely with his literate lyrics of emotional self-evisceration. Tales of drunken abandon and the inevitable laments that follow, once liquor’s cloudy veil evaporates, don’t hit so poignantly when…
