Columbine Harvester
If you’re a fan of the baseball cap-wearin’, Nader-votin’, muckrakin’, best-sellin’, corporation-confrontin’ son of a gun known as Michael Moore, all you need to know about his latest film, Bowling for Columbine, is that it’s more of the same. You know, the mix of easy humor, political potshots, attempts (some successful, most not) at interviewing…
Something Corporate
Something Corporate writes piano-humping power ballads so gooey, giant wheels of cheese rain down on concertgoers during live performances. Without warning or provocation, a comically oversized block of Gouda can knock you unconscious as you stand transfixed by what is, in essence, the ultimate high school loser revenge fantasy. Observe: nerdy chump — forced into…
Crawl Cate Crawl
Give Tom Tykwer a lot of credit for knowing that he can’t possibly outdo Run Lola Run, his frenetic breakthrough that made critics cheer and took MTV pacing to a whole new level, blending animation with live action, still photos and alternate realities in a way that made sense and raised the viewer’s adrenaline levels.…
Jello Biafra
Jello Biafra’s scathing brand of political commentary won’t pass for comfort food in troubled times: Gooey, patriotic pabulum is best left to star-spangled yokels like Lee Greenwood or Alan Jackson. But the guy takes his anti-punditry as seriously as any free-speech proponent out there. He also has a knack for turning his personal unease into…
Whose Truth?
Once more, it all boils down to the stamps — which, if you have seen Stanley Donen’s 1963 comic thriller Charade, nearly ruins the last 10 minutes of Jonathan Demme’s remake, The Truth About Charlie. But Demme isn’t at all concerned with such mundane things as shock-’em finales; he won’t be bound by the stultifying…
Calexico
Nearly two and a half years since the release of Calexico’s last full-length, The Hot Rail, fans of the band have been contenting themselves for far too long with dribs and drabs of the duo. An EP, mostly containing remixes; the odd collaboration (with Broadcast, for example); some live singles; and covers that inevitably number…
True Dat
CHARACTERS Russell Simmons: He is 45, wears a white baseball cap, a T-shirt with the words “40 Acres and a Bentley” on the back and a sweat suit manufactured by the $300 million clothing company, Phat Farm, he started a decade ago. Russell, teeth as white and big as freshly minted tombstones, is a man…
Foo Fighters
Dave Grohl’s powderkeg drumming added a layer of sinew to the Queens of the Stone Age’s latest album, and performing that band’s brusque, baked rock seems to have inspired Grohl to muscle-up his full-time outfit as well. Which is the way it should always be with this band. The Foos have long existed as an…
School Daze
At his best, playwright Eric Coble has a penchant for skewering human foibles ranging from avarice to xenophobia. Armed with a biting wit and a strong sense of moral urgency, he easily lays claim to being Northeast Ohio’s own Jonathan Swift. His latest theatrical Gulliver is Bright Ideas, which is the first locally written script…
Sigur Ros
Recordings of whale calls aren’t for everyone. Neither is Iceland’s Sigur Ros. But those hooked on this majestic symphonic rock quartet — whose glacial sound mixes and matches Radiohead, My Bloody Valentine, and various 4AD atmosphereniks — are unlikely to find any other group even remotely similar. Which doesn’t necessarily make any of Sigur Ros’s…
Boy Toy
Long before college frosh conducted navel-gazing group musings, people wondered about Art and Love. But the scribes committed to exploring these venerable themes today tend to be of the glossy Nora Ephron ilk (cue the Gershwin). So it’s welcome when a clever misanthrope like Neil LaBute (best known for In the Company of Men, the…
Rod Stewart
It may comfort some that Rod Stewart has a new home with Clive Davis, the legendary record mogul behind J Records. Davis’s impressive track record — he’s responsible for hits by everyone from Aretha to Aerosmith to Alicia Keys — suggests Stewart may score this time out. The songwriting is impeccable, spanning Kern, Gershwin, and…
Simple Gifts
Eating in an earth-friendly way is a concept that can unnerve even those of us who’ve long abandoned the fear of all things soy. But Wooster’s South Market Bistro, which opened in July, is one more reminder that we can find environmentally sound agricultural practices and mindful living in the same place as stellar food…
Amon Tobin
Trustworthy sources say Anglo-Brazilian producer Amon Tobin sells more records than any other Ninja Tune artist. What makes this factoid surprising is the sheer strangeness of Tobin’s music. Neither intended for chillout rooms nor suitable for moving moneymakers, his tracks are the sonic analogue to Salvador Dali’s paintings: maniacally detailed, profoundly disturbing, and as surreal…
Holy Crêpe!
For decades, if you were a Clevelander in search of crêpes, you’d have to bone up on your Berlitz and book a flight. Fortunately, local Francophiles, and others looking for a way to end an Atkins diet with a wallop, now have another option. Artist, costume designer, and exotically named crêpe maker Denajua is now…
Badly Drawn Boy
“If you look out the side of the plane,” says a muffled airplane-pilot voice at the onset of Damon Gough’s third album under his cringe-inducing stage name, “you’ll see a cloud that looks exactly like Badly Drawn Boy.” And if you keep listening to Have You Fed the Fish?, you’ll hear a record that sounds…
Hip-Hop’s High Ground
You can tell from the rumble in Chali 2na’s voice that the no-nonsense MC has had enough of the “alternative” talk. He knows damn well what’s truly alternative when it comes to hip-hop. “That bling-bling shit,” he fumes. That’s alternative. In the last decade, rappers and rockers have reacted similarly to the “alternative” tag. In…
Brian Straw
Anyone who knows the difference between early Papa M and late Palace should also know about this darling of Cleveland’s “post-rock” underground. Brian Straw’s standard performance alternates between slow, soft singer-songwriter drones and bursts of manipulated electric guitar feedback, a combination that goes down like a glass of warm milk spiked with a spoonful of…
Getting On With It
Imperial Teen formed in San Francisco in 1995, and it’s been dodging fame like a bullet ever since. Or so you have to figure: After all, the band — composed of Roddy Bottum, Lynne Perko, Jone Stebbins, and Will Schwartz, multi-instrumentalists all — signed a major-label record deal about, oh, 10 minutes after playing its…
Raw Dogz
In the intro to an early cut on the Raw Dogz’s gritty debut, young MC Dime is toying with his dog, which suddenly grows mean. “Shit, motherfucker turned on me,” Dime exclaims. Listening to the neophyte rapper follow such profanity with rugged rhymes that promise to leave foes “laying there bleedin’ like a used Tampax,”…
Shamrockers
In the liner notes for Flogging Molly’s latest album, Drunken Lullabies, frontman Dave King thanks all the people you’d expect him to thank: family, friends, contacts, his wife Gina, his son Graham (for making him feel older), all the great people he’s met on the road through the years. He also thanks Mike McCarthy and…
Vice Is Good
“Oh please,” he says with the tone of one who’s just been asked a really stupid question. His name really isn’t Mike, but we’ll call him that anyway. He’s an East Side bookie. Guys in his trade take a modest approach to getting their names in the paper. We’re asking Mike about a new bill…
Shanghai Surprise
Danny Frye is a towering 6-foot-3 rocker whose arms are colored by more ink than The Sunday New York Times. And so maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that he tends to freak out the occasional Chinese tourist. “When I was mastering our record in Nashville, I was walking down the street, and this Chinese…
Wall of Voodoo
It was August of 1991, and either the stars over Tremont were arranged in an especially loopy connect-the-dots that month, or everybody’s shrink was off clamdigging in Cape Cod. Whatever the reason, the artists were losing it. These ordinarily zenlike types were brawling in barrooms, while others — typically rock-solid — were suffering existential breakdowns.…
A Death in the Family
It is with great sadness, and a loud beer belch, that we mourn the loss of Stepsister, long one of Cleveland’s finest, most remorseless rock bands. They recently disbanded after founder Tom Dark and his brother Scott Eakin quit the group over personality rifts with bassist Tony Erba. In the meantime, Erba and guitarists Aaron…
And Justice for Mo
Lieutenant governor may be the stupidest job in Ohio politics, but you can’t beat the face time. Lieutenants make earnest public-service announcements. They hold press conferences for the evening news. Their mugs beam out from placards at highway rest stops. It’s enough to launch a career. Just ask Maureen O’Connor. Four years ago, she was…
Gator Baiter
“The only person who can get their head ripped off by a gator is me,” says Ted McRae, a man who should know. McRae, a.k.a. T.M. the Gator Guy, shoves his cranium into the mouths of 10-foot reptiles, every day and twice on weekends, as part of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.…
The Misfits
Say what you will about the controversial decision of Misfits bassist (and bankroller) Jerry Only to resurrect the band without its mastermind, New Jersey’s self-styled Prince of Darkness, frontman Glenn Danzig. The move saved one of punk’s great catalogs from gathering dust on the shelf. After a decade-long legal battle for the rights to the…
The Flap Over Big Boxes
Well-muscled retailers make fearsome foes: Martin Kuz’s article [“The Wal-Mart Menace,” September 4] was remarkable — well researched and telling it convincingly like it is. I feel you may not have been able to find the website of New York attorney Carl Person at www.lawmall.com/bookcase, which documents the efforts we have made over five years…
Avast, Ye Rubberheads!
Producer Joel Silver makes movies to win audiences, not awards, and Ghost Ship — created under the Dark Castle horror banner with Silver’s Tales From the Crypt partners Robert Zemeckis and Gilbert Adler — opens with a hook both gripping and revealing. It’s 1962, aboard the Italian luxury liner Antonia Graza, and from soup to…
Radian/Pan American/Signer
Understanding how someone could have already gotten bored with the sound of laptop punks cruising techno clubs for gray-noise kicks is the first step in leading disenchanted listeners out of the darkness. So, then, let this international triple bill be that doorway. It’s certainly the softcore counterattack, the flipside of the digital extreme. Got a…
After the Knockdown
It’s late afternoon, but Joe DiSalvo is just getting to work. In a basement in Old Brooklyn, he changes into shorts and a T-shirt, binds his fists in yellow handwraps, and stretches his muscled frame. Another day at the office. Another afternoon practicing the art of beating people senseless. Another step toward redemption. Gianchetti’s Gym…
The New Deal
A decade or so later, it’s easy to mock the observational humor style of Jerry Seinfeld, as what was once innovative has become the stand-up cliché. Seinfeld knows it, too, which is why, after his eponymous sitcom ended, he did one last big HBO special and then formally retired all his own material to start…
Beck
The reams of ecstatic reviews that followed the release of Beck’s despondent Sea Change are all deserved, except for one major caveat: The disc’s sea of salty tears is no truer an artistic expression than the web of artifice Beck once spun to earn his fame. If anything, Beck’s confessional outpouring in these uniquely troubled…
Listen Up, Parents
Julie Williams remembers the night in 1994 when her 20-year-old son, Jim, told her he had been diagnosed with HIV. They sat down and talked about his future, and they agreed that Jim would fight the virus head-on, despite his doctor’s poor prognosis. “At first, it was very hard, because we were afraid to confide…
