Beached Wails
Great Beach Boys songs — and there are actually dozens of them — are magical. Forget for a moment the harmonic complexity of Brian Wilson’s compositions, the sophistication of his arrangements, and the grandeur of his and legendary producer Phil Spector’s productions. Technical analysis of the Beach Boys repertoire doesn’t explain why the band’s music…
Lake Eerie Tales
On Johnson’s Island in Lake Erie near Marblehead Peninsula, strange things happen after sunset. A thick fog settles on the ground like a foot of snow. A statue of a larger-than-life soldier stands on a granite block and marks the entrance to the island’s cemetery. Far off, a bugle plays reveille, but no one is…
Beautiful Mess
San Francisco musical collage absurdists Mr. Bungle have a penchant for magnifying the eerie in the normal and the normal in the eerie. But while the quintet’s first two releases offered manic music for attention-deficient musicians, California, the band’s most recent album, is in fact even more traditional pop than much of the output of…
Tickets to Ride
To a soundtrack of 1920s music, passengers shuffle on board an open-air streetcar, eager to experience what the brochure calls a “ride into history.” Motorman Alex Bruchac, who normally works restoring and repairing the cars, drives today. “Does anyone here speak Spanish?” he calls out. One man raises his hand. “You are the only person…
Renaissance Man
Guitarist Ritchie Blackmore has left behind the hard rock of Rainbow and Deep Purple to play Renaissance music, calling his new band Blackmore’s Night and opting for airy mandolins, feathery tambourines, and jaunty harpsichords. So why did this fair man on the silver mountain seek quieter ground in the valley below? On the surface, it…
Nic at Night
Bringing Out the Dead. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Screenplay by Paul Schrader, based on the novel by Joe Connelly. Starring Nicolas Cage, Patricia Arquette, John Goodman, Ving Rhames, Tom Sizemore, Marc Anthony, Mary Beth Hurt, and Cliff Curtis.
Livewire
ZZ Top Lynyrd Skynyrd CSU Convocation Center October 12 Redneck rock ain’t dead yet. The pairing of ZZ Top and Lynyrd Skynyrd — a combination that, according to a press release hyping the show, “truly defines American rock and roll at its best” — would have made for a great arena show, say, 25 years…
“If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?”
Growing up, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was the closest thing I had to a paternal mentor, the only authoritative voice I consistently trusted. Novel after freakish, scattershot, infinitely humane novel, the man provided tools to identify and cope with the daily horrors of America — this vast sea of garbage exploited by rotten-hearted men. Vonnegut scrawled…
Playback
Handsome Boy Modeling School So . . . How’s Your Girl? (Tommy Boy) Good hip-hop really hasn’t died at the end of the ’90s, it’s just reshuffled and ended up somewhere a little north of the underground. Let the suburban kids and mainstream playas have their No Limit army and ruff-ryding flavors of the month;…
Batwit
The everyman hero of the horror movie Bats, a small-town Texas sheriff played by Lou Diamond Phillips, is given an odd character trait. After he and some other people have barricaded themselves into a school building and are awaiting attack by a flock of mutant killer bats terrorizing his little desert town, the sheriff drops…
Soundbites
Local photojournalist Anastasia Pantsios shot her first concert some thirty years ago (Jefferson Airplane in Chicago) and has taken photos almost continually since then, but has never had a solo show. Her first solo photo exhibit, Lyrical Spirits: The Music Photography of Anastasia Pantsios, opens this Saturday at the Kelly Randall Gallery (2678 West 14th…
The Wedding Swinger
Since there is no way to talk about The Best Man without eventually invoking the phrase “Spike Lee’s cousin,” let’s just get it out of the way: The Best Man is the directorial debut of Malcolm D. Lee, who is Spike Lee’s cousin. Having worked on various S. Lee films, M.D. Lee strikes out on…
Comrades in Crime
All Gene Gontmakner needs is a telephone and a credit card machine. His chutzpah, double-talk, and bullshit will take care of the rest. With a telephone headset crowning his frosted hair and earring, Gont- makner is hard at work trying to placate another dissatisfied customer. He has a ready supply of apologies and excuses for…
Signs of War
The area’s largest billboard company, whose job is to turn heads, is upset by all the attention its signs are generating these days. That’s because the new interest is coming from the City of Cleveland, not passing motorists. Last month, the city hit Phoenix-based Eller Media with 199 zoning and building code violations against billboards…
Edge
Splatt!! The dirty tricks have started early in next year’s county sheriff race, prompted by straight-shootin’ Gerry McFaul’s comment last week that, if his son Kevin were involved in drug trafficking, he’d “kick his ass until his nose bleeds.” An anonymous fax sent out over the weekend reprised McFaul’s mixed metaphor and posed the overheated…
Justice Denied
At the end of The Young Man From Atlanta, Horton Foote’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, postage-stamp-sized masterpiece at Ensemble Theatre, Will and Lily Kidder, a couple who are supposed to be enjoying their golden years, stand forlornly in the new house they can no longer afford, contemplating returning to their former jobs and facing the fact that…
A Charmed Life
The charm of Frederic Bonin Pissarro’s work seems, at first glance, to be a borrowed charm. In the manner of nineteenth-century French impressionist artists like his famous great-grandfather Camille Pissarro, these vividly colored views of Parisian cafés, Sunday promenades, and peaceful landscapes suggest a world where urbanization and war have been successfully held at bay.…
Hatched and Dispatched
Thunder Knocking on the Door is a gaudy showboat, a blues musical paddling its way to Broadway with the ferocity of a heat-seeking torpedo. Between the strut and sashay of Keb’ Mo’ and Anderson Edwards’s blues-and-rock-puréed-in-a-blender score, Keith Glover’s book makes half-hearted attempts at forging a new myth with odd substitutions: the Delta in place…
Encore
Murder on the Nile.For reviewers of equity theater, a whole different set of criteria is in effect for community performances. When an actor has his lines down, it’s a major triumph. If a plot isn’t mangled beyond recognition and if the costumes and sets bear some relationship to the play, we can sing “Hallelujah.” Yet…
A Mentor Marvel
Mmm . . . duck livers. The rich, creamy little morsels don’t show up on area menus very often, although they should. When properly prepared, they are mild-flavored and melt-in-your-mouth tender, as well as delicious and nutritious. So when a dinner companion and I recently spotted not one but two tantalizing duck-liver appetizers on Molinari’s…
Side Dish
After seven years in business, restaurateur Marco Rossi closed his popular Villa D’Estes in Little Italy last December to relocate to bigger, more trendy digs in downtown’s Warehouse District. Last spring, along with business partner Gene Zannoni, he took over 8,000 square feet on the ground floor of the historic Otis Building, at the corner…
