On the Yellow Brick Road
The hipster wisdom about America in the 1950s held that the entire war-weary nation was at political and spiritual rest, straitjacketed by conformity and loath to utter a peep of protest — not even when Joe McCarthy went hunting for communists from the bowels of Hollywood to the feed stores of Iowa. The only voices…
Seeing Green
Looking for a novel idea for your holiday party libations? Replace the cut crystal punch bowl with a kettle, dim the lights, and indulge in the drink of artists and vampires. Absinthe, known to its 19th-century indulgents as “the green fairy,” was a favorite of Edgar Allan Poe and “The Scream” painter Edvard Munch, who…
The Curse of Kirtland
In autumn, Kirtland blazes with a terrible beauty. The gnarled trees, aflame with ruin, circle the village like a golden wall, and the winding roads turn back upon themselves. A blighted barn — its cornice crumbled, its color erased by the wind — waits for nightfall to squeeze the dying sun through its milky eye.…
Grisly Bared
When the remains of Marilyn Sheppard were exhumed a few weeks ago, macabre press reports describing the condition of the decomposed body added another chapter to an already dramatic case, ensuring that this 45-year-old crime won’t be forgotten soon. Few people have longer memories for crime than Albert Borowitz, a Harvard-educated Cleveland lawyer who donated…
Terror tour
Every day, thousands of unsuspecting Clevelanders pass by sites of unspeakable horror. Parks, flowery memorials, and asphalt paving may fool the unwary, but they can’t hide what lies beneath — a legacy of charred corpses, gangland shootings, bodies chopped like raw meat or blown to bloody bits. Scary movies and haunted houses will do for…
Edge
Happy Holidays! The giving season arrives early this year at Medical Mutual, where the hike from a 37.5-hour work week to 40 hours begins on November 1. “It is essential that we work harder and smarter in order to win in the marketplace,” CEO Kent Clapp urges in a pep-talk memo announcing the move. Hourly…
Monster Magnate
The bleak white storefront has no sign, and the windows are obscured by paint. Most people driving past would assume the building was vacant, though dim lights reveal activity from shadowy figures. Inside, visitors are confronted by tall shelves stacked with dismembered arms, rotting torsos, and a variety of bloody appendages. One wall proudly displays…
Say It With Feeling
There is an ongoing debate in the art world about which is more powerful — paint on a flat surface or the arrangement of shapes in actual space. Stated another way, is sculpture intrinsically superior to painting? It’s fitting that a gallery affiliated with a university should tackle this academic question, but, ultimately, work stands…
Preaching to the Converted
Permeating the crisp October air, along with the mulled cider and burning leaves, is the alternating aura of status quo and tongue-in-cheek subversion. Cleveland theatergoers of opposing values have a chance to satiate their interests with two current productions. At the Jewish Community Center, paunchy papas and slightly graying mamas in Saks sweaters, who made…
Encore
Thunder Knocking on the Door. Presently docked at the Great Lakes Theater Festival, 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. Colored lights frantically blink each entrance and exit like a Christmas tree having a nervous breakdown. Swivel-hipped actors/blues…
Escape From the ´Chain’ Gang
Sometimes it seems that “upscale” chain restaurants — those squat brick fortresses of glossy illustrated menus, Tiffany-style hanging lamps, and cookie-cutter meals — are threatening to take over Northeast Ohio’s casual dining scene. True, the chains’ ability to deliver predictable meals at moderate prices, in a clean, not to say sterile, atmosphere, makes them a…
Side Dish
Haunt Cuisine Looking for someplace a little different this Halloween weekend? Featured here are three historic restaurants with so much atmosphere it’s scary. In the German Separatist town of Zoar, about 60 miles south of Lake Erie on the Ohio and Erie Canal, a modest inn was erected in 1829 to serve the needs of…
Holiday Horrors
Smell that in the air? It’s that frightening time of year creeping up on us and breathing down our necks once again. And, no, we’re not talking about Halloween. It’s an even more chilling season — the record companies’ annual Christmas CD release schedule. It’s never too early to get the product onto shelves –…
Out of Africa
Since his migration from the gospel and funk of his Bay Area adolescence to the freeform loft scene of New York, tenor saxophonist and bass clarinetist David Murray has amassed a prodigious discography — the majority of it under his own name. His volcanic tenor and popping, agile bass clarinet have been recorded in so…
Eve of Destruction
Two years ago, the career of rapper Eve Jihan Jeffers appeared to be on the cusp of something great. Jeffers, who started performing when she was still a teenager, had done her time competing in high school talent shows and playing local clubs in her hometown of Philadelphia. She even stripped for a short time…
Livewire
Ben Folds Five Train Agora October 20 With only a piano, drums, and bass, Ben Folds Five has continued to outrun the novelty label that’s naturally attached to its simplistic, guitarless formula. But if last Wednesday’s show at the Agora is any indication, the band has begun to lose some ground. After the mainstream alternative…
Playback
Stone Temple Pilots No. 4 (Atlantic) Like their last three albums, No. 4, the unimaginatively titled fourth album from Stone Temple Pilots, kicks around the post-grunge landscape forged, and since abandoned, by their contemporaries. The muddy guitars, the murky melodies, the slinking rhythms — they’re all here, chugging along at the end of the millennium…
Soundbites
Two things about Halloween are constant: It falls on October 31, and any band with a theatrical element to its live show will be playing a gig. Every day is Halloween for GWAR, a group of Virginia Commonwealth students who dress up in latex monster costumes and shower their audiences with fake blood and bodily…
Straight Ahead With David Lynch
Pay attention now, because there seems to be some confusion about this: David Lynch is a serious person — a strange person, yes, but a serious person, and a very serious artist. He is not something cute and adorable, like Alfred Hitchcock, the jovial emcee of our collective nightmares. Nor is he just another director…
