Death Becomes Her
The day the Free Times died, Editor David Eden told The New York Post: “We were the star of the Village Voice chain.” Forgive the guy for talking like a moron. When faced with failure, it’s human nature to lie to yourself. No one wants responsibility for garroting a 10-year tradition. No one wants to…
Bone Thugs Disharmony
With dozens of people onstage, bodies weren’t lacking at Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s recent sold-out show at the Odeon. Hell, entire football teams are assembled with fewer people, not to mention the Gary Coleman Fan Club. Still, despite the abundance of glowering females and towel-waving roughnecks crowding the stage, someone was missing. It was Bizzy Bone, Bone…
Times Have Changed
A paper dies, a city loses: I want to say goodbye. The Free Times was an excellent source for news, arts, and entertainment. I am sad to see it go. Last week, I spent two nights at the Grog Shop, celebrating the 10th anniversary. A couple of days later, I picked up the Free Times,…
Rasputina
It’s been a long time since Rasputina rocked and rolled — though not as long as its Victorian-era costumes might imply. But even after a lengthy hiatus, the all-female trio’s hard-corset blend of gothic imagery, black humor, stark strings, and curiously modern industrial effects still seems fresh and charming. Never lapsing into Renaissance festival-style self-parody,…
Welcome to the 1950s
Last summer, Parma safety director Bob Dybzinski may have set a local record for onerous doublespeak by trying to pass off a Ukrainian American cop as a minority hire. The city had just received a ton of bad press for hiring a white-as-Wonder Bread police candidate over a black recruit with a better score. Desperate…
Nelly
Against all expectations, the two biggest rappers of the 21st century come from America’s left-for-dead center. The Midwest, the one region of the country that produced almost no hip-hop stars in the last century, now offers up both Detroit’s Eminem and St. Louis’s Nelly. In part, these very different entertainers got big by playing opposing…
Learning to Crawl
Despite having tended bar in Lakewood for the past seven years, Nicki Mason didn’t understand what the big fuss was about Madison Avenue. Until she looked through her camera lens. Since April, Mason has lugged her digital camcorder through the gauntlet of 22 bars on the street, from the Shamrock at the eastern edge of…
Lucky Dube
Lucky Dube began his recording career nearly 20 years ago, singing traditional Zulu Mbaqanga music. But the influences of Jamaican superstars such as Bob Marley and Peter Tosh were soon to have a strong impact on the native South African. After embracing the spirituality of Rastafari, Dube changed gears and started singing reggae music. An…
Hoppy Rails
Those who hop aboard the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad this Friday will find, um, hops on board. In honor of Oktoberfest, the third annual Beer-Tasting Train offers refined brew and the opportunity to drink it in a moving vehicle without being tailed by those pesky blue and red lights. Much like the vino-based events where…
Mortician
Back in the 1980s, director David Lynch created a cartoon revolving around “The Angriest Dog in the World,” a chained-up, perpetually growling mutt who, according to its creator, was “bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis.” Will Rahmer, Mortician’s vocalist, makes a sound not unlike the growling of…
School Daze
Roger Avary’s screenplay for The Rules of Attraction is a remarkable work of literature: the disassembly and reconstruction of an impenetrable book by Bret Easton Ellis; a simplification and amplification of the 1987 novel’s attack on the bored, beautiful, and wealthy; a streamlined and mainlined version of a story originally told by some two dozen…
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones’ 1960s catalog has been treated with little respect over the years. Take ABKCO’s abysmal Stones CD series issued back in 1986. Some tracks were mastered on the wrong speed. Worse yet, ABKCO used the Stones’ inferior U.S. catalog as the basis of the collection, rather than the original British albums. (It was…
Foster Pussycat
Good Lord, there hasn’t been this much blond hair onscreen since the Von Trapp children sang and danced their way across the Alps in The Sound of Music. The fact that these golden locks belong to the likes of Michelle Pfeiffer, Robin Wright Penn, and Renée Zellweger suggests that this, too, is going to be…
Tom Petty
Tom Petty’s as pissed as a millionaire gets, meaning you’d better take this (ahem) concept album about rock and roll corruption with a grain of salt the size of Mike Campbell. What happens when this album, financed by a multinational, gets airplay? Will it be considered victory or surrender, ironic or just inevitable? Because what…
Crazy Taxi
In the last few years — more or less since the failure of The Messenger, his embarrassing Joan of Arc epic — former wunderkind director Luc Besson has become a fantastically prolific writer/producer. (The Internet Movie Database claims he has nine projects lined up for next year.) His latest, The Transporter — a swift if…
Nile
Every last conceit that makes heavy metal both goofy and great is encapsulated on Nile’s fourth full-length, the colossal In Their Darkened Shrines. Sure, it may be hard for those who can’t recite Brendan Fraser’s lines in The Mummy from memory to suppress chuckles at these guys’ preoccupation with Egyptian mythology, which leads them to…
Son Set
Those Reservoir Dogs are proving hard to shake, and in Knockaround Guys — which could be renamed Knockoff Guys — the comparisons to other contemporary pulp fictions fly fast and furious. Herein — thanks in part to Quentin Tarantino’s producer, Lawrence Bender — are contained such familiar elements as the shticky members of the makeshift…
Abdullah
When Abdullah frontman Jeff Shirilla wails, “I feel like my thoughts are no longer my own” early on his band’s superb second album, he’s giving voice to what has to be the biggest caveat of retro-minded stoner rock: the preoccupation with nostalgia at the expense of anything resembling an original thought. He does so inadvertently,…
Out of Focus?
No one denies that a man’s head was smashed in, most likely with a camera tripod, on June 29, 1978, in an Arizona hotel room. No one denies that this same man was a porno freak, a maker and watcher and star of homemade sex films. No one denies he had been doing it for…
Mel on Wheels
Half a century ago, Mel Brooks honed his unique style of Yiddish-inflected parody with his tenure as a writer on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. In subsequent years, his classic work, ranging from Blazing Saddles — recall the cowpokes farting around the campfire — to Young Frankenstein, demonstrated a flair for anarchy rooted in…
The New Jazz Standard
It’s a warm evening in early fall, and Vina Noté; in University Circle is hopping. Jazzman Glenn Holmes is laying it down with fellow members of the Eric Gould Trio, while a table of Cleveland Orchestra musicians, still tuxedoed from a performance at nearby Severance Hall, groove appreciatively in response. How they can hear general…
Lolapalooza
Relax, hipsters; your favorite haunt is back in business and swankier than ever. After a two-week hiatus for remodeling, Lola (900 Literary Road, 216-771-5652) reopened last week with a gala party attended by nearly 400 of owners Liz and Michael Symon’s closest friends. The celebration also marked the debut of Upstairs at Lola, a former…
Fields of Dreams
When they gathered to break ground, the mayor predicted it would create 200 jobs. The Chamber of Commerce director likened it to an art museum, its future tenants to masterpieces. The community college president said it would take on Silicon Valley. Two years later, Sheffield Village’s business park has a road, paid for by a…
The Hot Rock
Imagine it’s still mid-August and you’re trying to do what every other warm-blooded animal is trying to do — escape the heat. Being a human animal, and an American one at that, you go down to your suburban googleplex to catch the latest escapist product from Hollywood, which at this moment happens to be Vin…
The Photograph
The morning of December 3, 1996, brought relief for Theodore Georgekopoulos. The night before, a fire sparked in the building where he lived with his fiancée, Olga Suhre. A faulty electrical heater may have been to blame. Worse, they thought their insurance may have lapsed. But the next morning, Suhre spoke with their insurance agent,…
Without Clearance
What burbles through the veins of the online underground soon enough trickles into the mainstream, and by the time The New York Times comes sniffing around, the trend has usually passed its expiration date. Yesterday’s Brand New Thing is today’s forgotten fad. Seems like only yesterday we were praising Freelance Hellraiser’s miraculous mash-up — “A…
Tattoo Snafu
Don Folmer flings off the tie and black coat he wore for his meeting with the Cleveland Board of Zoning Appeals. From beneath his starched collar pops a tattoo of a Japanese flower. Inky mosaics crawl out from under his shirt cuffs. “This one’s taking your money; the other one’s cutting your throat,” he booms…
Born Annoying
“You guys, man, you’ve gotta get organized,” Jimmy Urine, lead singer of Mindless Self Indulgence, says scornfully, chiding an unruly and mostly hostile audience. “When I say, ‘We,’ you say, ‘Suck.'” After following through with this call-and-response several times, Urine tags “Dick” on the end of the exchange. That concert snippet, an accurate portrait of…
