A Star Is Björk
With global overpopulation neatly intertwining with the advent of the home video camera, we have been afforded, as a species, several near-miracles. For instance, when supersonic jets explode, or when mobs impolitely loot and riot in urban centers, the common consumer can now document the event and sell it to the networks for our collective…
Paul Simon
What’s this? A new Paul Simon album with no lofty aspirations attached? No tongue kissing of South African culture? No Brazilian drum corps? No theatrical overload? Yep, You’re the One is as simple as they come, and it’s Simon’s most straightforward album since 1983’s Hearts and Bones. Not that his overachiever endeavors of the past…
Death of a Newsman
Unlike many of Joel Rose’s friends, Merle Pollis saw the first story. It was a tiny item, buried on page six in The Plain Dealer’s Metro section on Thursday, August 3. It didn’t say much, but it didn’t sound good. “A search warrant was served yesterday at the home of former WEWS Channel 5 Morning…
Critikill
This duo (singer Timmie Boose and multi-instrumentalist Craig Pearsall) makes music that sounds like no other band in Cleveland. Equal parts trip-hop, indie rock, drum ‘n’ bass, and industrial, Critikill has a unique sound that thankfully looks beyond the overplayed hard rock and punk inclinations of most local bands. Pearsall, who plays bass, keyboards, and…
The Unusual Suspect
When the phone rang that Friday morning, Lauren Reed could think of only one thing: Heart attack. Three days before, she felt — no, she knew — there was something wrong with her father. It wasn’t as if anything had set her off. He never had heart trouble and seemed perfectly healthy when she saw…
Tina Turner
You can never trust a diva. When Tina Turner rolled through town in March, she said it was the last time anyone would see her on such a large scale. But like David Bowie and many other two-faced superstars that have come before her, Turner’s retirement wasn’t a long-lived one. Turner’s making the rounds one…
How Old Are You?
While other candidates worked the room, state board of education aspirant Al Bailey sat quietly near the literature table. He looked serious, rapt even, as one opponent after another addressed the audience, often pressing the patience of the forum’s timekeeper. When it was finally his turn, Bailey nearly sprinted to the microphone, so excited was…
Rachel Z
New York-based jazz pianist Rachel Z (Nicolazzo) originally thought she’d wind up a classical musician. At two she was taking voice lessons, and by the age of nine she was studying piano. But after hearing Miles Davis’s Miles Smiles as a teenager, Rachel Z started improvising and joined a band that covered Joni Mitchell and…
Edge
The Plain Dealer increased its middle-aged-bald-guys-from-Florida quotient with the hiring of Managing Editor Tom O’Hara, who replaces Gary Clark. O’Hara and Chief Blue Pencil Doug Clifton worked with and competed against each other in South Florida. The pastel connection doesn’t bother us nearly as much as O’Hara’s fatuous quote in Tuesday’s PD: “Everybody is going…
New Bomb Turks
In a genre that hardly encourages longevity, Columbus’s punkmeisters the New Bomb Turks have churned out high-energy Midwest thrash for a solid decade since forming as students at Ohio State University in 1990. In that time, the Turks have amassed a devoted following and an impressive body of recorded work, from their early 7-inch raw…
Gorillas on Film
Experts agree that hitchhiker was Bigfoot: I read with some interest Laura Putre’s article on Don Keating and his bigfoot investigations of the last 15 years [“Wild About Hairy,” September 28]. Having known Don and Marc [Dewerth] for a couple of years now, I was a bit embarrassed for them at the insinuations of impropriety…
Tom Tom Club
Although the Tom Tom Club hasn’t released new music in the past eight years, it’s still getting airplay, as samples taken from its songs “Genius of Love” and “Pleasure of Love” have been used by Mariah Carey, LL Cool J, Puff Daddy, and Tupac Shakur. Carey even used the Club’s riffs on not one but…
Rock and a Hard Place
John Wesley Hall believes justice is a myth taught in classrooms, a fable found in law books, as imaginary as the unicorn and the mermaid. The Arkansas attorney mentions case after case in which he represented an innocent who wound up imprisoned or, worse, executed; in the course of a 30-minute interview, he mentions half…
Over the Top
Tara Giannini is one of the many contemporary artists who have not yet successfully mastered the art of eclecticism. It’s a much prized skill in these postmodern times, but it’s not nearly as easy as it sounds. The goal is to draw from the immense range of styles being practiced today (as well as those…
Ness Is a Mess
For those cynical rogues who keep scrapbooks chronicling great lapses in human taste, Eliot Ness in Cleveland is a treasure trove. This musical about a serial killer and the famous G-man even resorts to a decapitated head on a pile of body parts, which comes to life to crack witticisms about his slaughter. And in…
A Generous Spirit
There is some little quirk in human nature that tempts us to judge an artist’s personality through his works. For instance, who hasn’t felt she had a glimpse into Emily Brönte’s soul after reading Wuthering Heights or knew something of Van Gogh’s madness after viewing Starry Night? It’s apparently not enough for us to ponder…
Flat-Lined
Last winter was rough, they said, but this summer has been fierce. Three drownings, rainy weekends, and continuing competition from the more fashionable Warehouse District have really stuck it to businesses on the East Bank of the Flats, with Max & Erma’s being the most recent eatery to follow Fagan’s and the House of Brews…
Digital Drills
It would be easy to assume that, since Datach’i (Joseph Fraoli) grew up in the wealthy New York suburb of Westchester, he’s just another rich kid with a sampler and too much time on his hands. But Datach’i, whose second album, We Are Always Well Thank You, has the kind of experimental electronic beats normally…
Birth of the Cool
Normally, the Other Quartet, an avant-garde jazz group with an album out on Knitting Factory Records, would draw 25 people or less, due to the lack of interest in experimental jazz here. However, there’ll probably be a much larger crowd when the group plays on October 6 at the Happy Dog. The reason is that…
Hokey Poké
Most parents don’t have the faintest idea why their offspring flock to the oddball influx of next-generation toys. These strange idols, with their multimedia blitz of TV shows, movies, games, and figurines, seem to have the wee ones programmed, sending America’s youth into the toy aisles as if sustenance were now packaged by Nintendo and…
Soundbites
Remembered as much for its music as for the acts of depravity that took place behind the scenes, Led Zeppelin has left behind a legacy that’s understandably resilient. In a recent issue of Spin magazine, the “Shark Attack,” an episode in which a woman was reportedly fucked with a fish and covered in entrails at…
Artists in Residence
The image of a lone, mad artist slaving away in a studio long after dark to give voice to some vision or other needs a makeover, but it’ll take 48 Hours of Making Art to achieve it. The event this weekend at the B.K. Smith Gallery, on the campus of Lake Erie College in Painesville,…
Green Day
No one wants to watch Green Day grow up. Back in 1994, three bratty California kids named their breakout album Dookie and tossed off musical Molotov cocktails, sawing off punk’s rough edges and selling the pop-injected remains to suburban malcontents as slices of rebellion. The thrill lay in being 16 and giggling at the barely…
Sagging Bull
Meet the Parents has just enough class to make for Prestige Pop: Robert De Niro as star, Randy Newman as composer, Blythe Danner as wallpaper, Ben Stiller as schmuck. It has just enough “comedy” to qualify as crowd-pleaser: sight gags (Stiller chasing a cat across a roof before setting fire to an entire lawn), verbal…
Radiohead
Radiohead’s last album, 1998’s OK Computer, was one of the last commercially successful releases that mattered. An album that worked better as a whole than as a series of singles, it stood out as one of the few releases of the ’90s that had lasting artistic merit. The aftermath was that Radiohead became lauded as…
