Edge
It may be Medical, but it ain’t Mutual. While the insurance giant rewards its sales staff with trips abroad and an accused sexual harasser with a $20,000-a-month consulting deal, rank-and-file employees face a pay cut next year. The company is expected to change its 37.5-hour work week to 40 hours as of January 1, shaving…
A Handful of Crumbs
Karamu is one of those theaters that can’t bear the strain of success. Every time its season starts cooking with gas, with torchy tap fests and plangent folk plays, some pompous bureaucrat blows out the flame, periodically tossing out the seasoned pros and causing a regression back to sloppy, self-indulgent melodramas such as Crumbs From…
Bean There, Done That
The sun glinted off my minivan’s windows like flames bouncing off Xena’s shield, as we dodged the boisterous hordes overflowing the streets and drove into the very belly of the beast. Oh, all right. Maybe pulling into Harry Corvairs’s downtown parking lot during an Indians game isn’t that dramatic. But it can be a challenge…
Forever Young
Louise Bourgeois, the French-born artist whose well-known surrealist sculptures from the mid-’40s suggested white and sky-blue surfboards leaning toward one another as if engaged in conversation, is enjoying a productive Indian summer. In 1992 she was the only woman to be included in the Guggenheim Museum’s inaugural show for its Soho branch. A spry 88,…
Behold the Mustard
The staff at the Mustard Seed Market and Café’s new Solon location (6025 Kruse Drive, 440-519-3663) should be laying out the welcome mats any minute: The upscale grocery and restaurant, specializing in organic produce, free-range meats, and preservative-free seafood, plans a “soft” opening for October 11 and a grand-opening celebration for October 21. Executive Chef…
Never too Old to Tango
Guitarist Ariel Sanzo sounds like a typical modern rock musician when he talks about his inspirations. Like any American kid who came of age in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Sanzo, who grew up in Buenos Aires and plays in both a three-piece punk group named Pez and the renowned ensemble Los Fabulosos Cadillacs,…
The High Road to Hooters
Oleander lead singer Thomas Flowers sounds defensive. He takes every topic of conversation back to why his Sacramento, California band isn’t ripping off other grunge acts. Since the current alternative rock scene consists of throwaway, faceless guitar bands that are as interchangeable as Legos and whose transitory careers pale in comparison to such talents as…
Straight Outta the Toilet
Think you’ve got tough career choices? Consider this: Bloodhound Gang lead singer Jimmy Pop Ali, who holds a degree in mass communications from Temple University, was offered a record contract and an internship with radio shock jock Howard Stern on the same day. Yikes. It’s the ultimate potty humor enthusiast’s existential moral dilemma. Does he…
Playback
Mary J. Blige Mary (MCA) Ever since her 1992 debut, What’s the 411?, super soul sista Mary J. Blige has been looking for both the perfect beat and a way of making a huge personal life statement. That she hasn’t quite found either yet has made for some invigorating if somewhat repetitive listening. The three…
They Saved Ghoulardi’s Beard
Now that the Browns are losing by a comfortable margin, we turn to more important sport: a fight over a fright wig and a glue-on goatee. A matter that threatens to forever cast a pall on Cleveland’s B-movie legacy, or at least find a creative new way to bore us to tears. Let us turn…
Soundbites
Photographer Daniel Kramer was in town last week to promote his exhibit of Bob Dylan photographs, which will be on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum through January 9. The more than forty photos in the series were taken in 1964-’65, right as Dylan was on the cusp of fame,…
Planet Henry
While sex and greed have been all but accepted as dull commonplace in the lives of our public figures, Cleveland anchorman Ted Henry indulges in a private activity that varies slightly from the six-and-eleven norm. During downtime, the carefully coifed newsman has been known to shed his navy blue suit and straitlaced television demeanor, kick…
A Sleeper Pic
Insomniacs, rejoice! During the first several decades of Sydney Pollack’s bloated, interminable Random Hearts, your eyelids will droop, your pulse and respiration will slow, and you’ll get that eight-dollar nap you’ve been craving. Once the credits roll and the lights come up, you’ll awaken refreshed, undisturbed by vague dreams about an erstwhile mesmerizing actor mumbling…
Lots o’ Libido
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! The repressed Irish Catholic schoolgirl that Molly Shannon plays on Saturday Night Live is certainly not everyone’s cup of glee. But there’s no denying the tug she exerts on anyone whose past is littered with the dry husks of Latin verbs and memories of nuns swinging big rulers. Shannon’s klutzy Mary…
Deadly Drifter
There’s a long tradition of stories about mysterious drifters who arrive in a small town and either create trouble or catalyze an explosion of long-simmering problems. Mark Twain used that hook, as have Dashiell Hammett (Red Harvest), Akira Kurosawa (Yojimbo), and Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars). Now Hampton Fancher — best known for his…
Hidden History
Off Euclid Avenue, past a rusted gate and down a narrow alley paved with centenarian bricks, a battered steel door clings achingly to its hinges. The door swings open to expose an elevator shaft, dark as a throat, with bricks slick from the morning rain and a history just as slippery. Many years ago, this…
Black Ink
The Press Club of Cleveland’s April luncheon was a congenial affair — not at all what anyone expected. Representatives of five local African American newspapers had convened to toss around the topic “Cleveland’s African American Press: a Healthy Range of Voices or a Recipe for Instability?” At some point during the previous six months, media…
