Breaking Balls
One June afternoon, equipment managers pushed a cart around the Indians’ clubhouse and left bats in the pitchers’ lockers. The next week, the Tribe was scheduled to play in Pittsburgh, a National League city, where pitchers hit for themselves. The pitching staff drifted into the clubhouse after pregame workouts and found the bats. Their forced…
DJ Swamp
“The best noisemakers are not necessarily the best peacemakers,” declares a sputtering sample on DJ Swamp’s debut. Indeed, amity is not the forte of the racket-lusting Swamp. Last time the Cleveland native was in town, opening for the Crystal Method at the Agora last summer, he scratched records into vinyl bits, then spun the shattered…
A Quiet Trauma
As she watched the twin towers crumble on TV, Mirela Hadzikadunic wasn’t reminded of a disaster movie. She was reminded of her life. Long ago, her blissfully mundane youth was shattered by war in her hometown of Sarajevo. Against a backdrop of explosions and air raids, even the blue brilliance of a clear sky took…
The Complaint Department
An aspiring politico sticks up for his cowstituents: This letter serves as a formal complaint about Laura Putre’s article “Front Door Blues” [September 20]. The first thing that puzzles me is the fact that Laura met with me on four or more occasions, and during these interviews, she always took notes. I do not understand…
Emmy or Not to Emmy?
On November 4, some 1,800 television personalities–actors, writers, producers, show-runners, network executives–will, finally, parade into a Los Angeles theater to award their peers and themselves for a job well done. They will, at long last, hand out the golden statues known as Emmy, just as it has been done every year since the award was…
Still in the Game
Believe it or not, there was once a time when Greater Clevelanders could pretty much count on one hand the number of exciting, forward-looking restaurants on the Northeast Ohio landscape. There was Sammy’s, of course (where I first discovered rack of lamb), and the Ohio City Tavern (ditto for Oysters Rockefeller). And in sleepy little…
Eating Takes a Beating
In cities like New York and Chicago — where business travel and entertainment account for a generous serving of daily revenue — restaurants are taking it on the chin. The one-two punch of a generally cooling economy combined with the collective loss of appetite following the events of September 11 have seen foodservice sales lagging…
High Times
From Biz Markie’s pained, passing-a-kidney-stone howl to Shock G’s plastic schnoz, hip-hop once made a point of balancing its fatalism with facetiousness. But then the potholes in De La Soul’s lawn became the graves in which N.W.A.’s dead homiez were buried, and nowadays, hip-hop is as stern as the frown frozen upon Suge Knight’s mug.…
Hearing Voices
Los Straitjackets have never done anything by degrees. When they formed as a surf-guitar/twangabilly instrumental band in 1988, they birthed the absolute best act in the genre. When they later took a hiatus, it was six years long. When they looked for a stage persona, they settled on garish Mexican wrestling masks to make their…
Roughhouses
It was a night of high irony. Literally. As Snoop Dogg puffed on a blunt the size of the ass end of a pool cue onstage at the Agora Theatre on a recent Tuesday, his fans were subjected to security almost as tight as his joints were rolled. Snoop blew marijuana smoke rings in the…
Pukka in Paradise
From July 1997 to July 1998, Stephen and Margaret Watterson and their cat Pukka took what many would consider the voyage of a lifetime. The Bay Village couple sailed their 30-foot sailboat, Witch of Endor (from the Captain Horatio Hornblower series, a favorite of Stephen’s childhood), from Sandusky to the Florida Keys and back, a…
My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult
Thirteen years after unleashing its razor-sharp, eardrum-blasting electronic dance music upon an unsuspecting populace, the uncomfortably titled My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult is still dry-humping the leg of a mostly uninterested public. Initially formed as an experimental film project, the Kult has never made much headway into the mainstream — although it did…
Lady Killers
Want to play pro football? This could be your chance. Open tryouts are coming up this week for a local professional football expansion team. Think you’ve got the moves? Great. Got the size, the speed, the smarts to play at the pro level? Good. Think you’ve got the balls for it? That could be a…
Metallennium
Originally billed as the world’s loudest rock festival, Metallennium’s growl has been reduced to a meager yelp. Plagued by show cancellations, band cancellations — the tour lost four of its top-tier acts — and a generally depressed vibe following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the current lineup doesn’t pack near…
Dust and Bones
If you’re looking to see Snoop Dogg kick some boo-tay, as an undead drug dealer with lycanthropic tendencies in Ernest Dickerson’s new horror movie Bones, you’ll have to wait at least an hour before the dead guy’s body gets up and about again. And when it finally does happen, the killings are often abrupt and…
Momus
Momus is odd like Beck, but he’s been that way much longer — since 1982, believe it or not. And even though his grooves aren’t nearly as funky as they are folky, Momus still swings — in a very queer way — with nearly as much verve as the more famous Beck. But whereas Beck…
Happy and Gay
Julie Davis’s All Over the Guy is yet another entry in the ever-growing genre of gay romantic comedy. It’s a step in the right direction that such films have become commonplace enough that they have to stand on their merits as part of the traditions of romantic comedies in general, as well as of the…
Luther Vandross
Luther Vandross has never had difficulty crossing over. At the same time, he has never lost his base in the black community. Since the Manhattan native began his professional career as sideman for David Bowie, Bette Midler, the Average White Band, and Barbra Streisand, Vandross has become known for his velvet voice, gender-free, unambiguous tenderness,…
Three Girls and a Marching Band
When marching-band director Tyrone Brown asks his Jackie Robinson Steppers, “Are you motivated?”, he’s not so much inquiring as presenting a challenge. It’s the middle of a sweltering summer in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, where tensions, temptations, and distractions are omnipresent. Synchronizing 60 players — while diverting some of them from becoming playahs — is…
Ozzy Osbourne
“I’m not the kind of person you think I am/I’m not the Antichrist or the iron man,” Ozzy Osbourne bleats at the onset of this, his eighth studio effort. And you have to give him credit: After better than three decades of lapping up his own urine and snorting fire ants, Ozzy still manages to…
Drama in Parma
When Michelle Stys feels her sanity slipping, she pops in a motivational tape and lets the wisdom wash over her:”In matters of style, swim with the currents . . . In matters of principle, stand like a rock.” — Thomas Jefferson Stys smiles blissfully as she intones the words, her voice filling the Parma City…
Leonard Cohen
On his first studio album in nearly a decade, Leonard Cohen sounds as if the downtime spent since his last effort was precisely that. Granted, Cohen’s never been a ray of vocal sunshine, but his dark, whisper-sung growl is more somber and turgid than ever on Ten New Songs. In the past, Cohen’s sandpaper vocal…
Lone Wolf
“You couldn’t say nothing about the mayor at all. You couldn’t even breathe the mayor. Those boys would pounce on you. They were like raving wolves.” That’s how Councilwoman Fannie Lewis remembers the early years of Mike White’s reign, when his loyal protégés, Bill Patmon and Jeff Johnson, enforced the mayor’s political will at City…
Fugazi
“I never, ever had it in my mind that I wanted to be a part of the record industry, because I still contend that the record industry is an insidious affair. It’s this terrible collision between art and commerce, and it will always be that way,” Fugazi singer/guitarist Ian MacKaye once told The Onion. And…
