Osteria Hysteria
It’s already hard to score a table at tiny Osteria di Valerio & Al (408 West St. Clair Avenue, 216-685-9490), and it probably won’t be much longer before the whole city has discovered its gracious atmosphere, orchestrated by mâitre d’ Marco Rossi, and its marvelous menu, created by Chef Michael Annandono. Annandono trained for several…
Shock Value
For the past year and a half, Mushroomhead has held practices in an old warehouse in North Olmsted. The rehearsals are mini-concerts, performed without the usual makeup and costumes, before friends and fans. You know a band’s big when even its rehearsals are crowded. For Mushroomhead, which has been playing sold-out shows in Cleveland since…
Struttin’ With Stutz
Under the red glow of Cinemark’s neon signs, singer-bassist Stutz Bearcat and his group, the Armstrong Bearcat Band, are playing on the patio of the Quaker Steak & Lube. Someone tells Bearcat that it’s a little girl’s eighth birthday. “You’ve got a long way to catch up with me, Hon,” says Bearcat, who’s also celebrating…
Rock and — Roll Tape!
“We want you to go crazy for about a minute,” yells David Spero. “Here they are — Godsmack. Go nuts!” The members of Godsmack are actually still in their dressing room, but this show is being taped for MTV, so reality is virtual. It’s more important that the crowd appear pumped for the pre-show footage.…
Tool
Tool’s current commercial success was anything but inevitable. In 1993, the band appeared on the second stage at Lollapalooza, playing its peculiar brand of prog-rock-influenced metal between forgettable alternative rock bands and performance artists. It spent the subsequent years caught in a record label squabble that led to speculation about a breakup. Tool certainly wasn’t…
Left Behind
The Italian film Bread and Tulips is a first cousin once removed of the American comedy Home Alone. A tremendous hit in Italy (it won nine Donatello awards last year, the Italian equivalent of the Oscars), it concerns a woman who, on a bus holiday with her family, accidentally gets left behind at a rest…
Jay-Z & the Roc-A-Fella Family
Prolific rapper Jay-Z just released his third album in two years. Even by hip-hop’s relatively quick turnaround schedule, this is pretty impressive. Even more remarkable, he’s managed two modern rap classics in the process: “Big Pimpin'” (from Vol. 3 . . . Life and Times of S. Carter) and “I Just Wanna Love U” (from…
Northern Composure
After winning five separate Audience Awards and other honors at various gay and lesbian film festivals over the past year, Thomas Bezucha’s Big Eden has finally opened in general release. You don’t have to be an expert on the history of gay cinema to see why — or even to be gay to enjoy it.…
Backstreet Boys
Two years ago, the Backstreet Boys were kings of the teen-pop heap. But everything changed last November when the members of the Florida factory-manufactured boy band decided to become “men” and released Black & Blue, a tougher, updated version of its radio-ready sound — or so went the plan. Judging from the relatively lackluster sales…
Mistakes by the Lake
As a Cleveland State student in the mid-’80s, Councilman Michael Dolan dated a woman who attended Syracuse University. For $20, he could buy a standby ticket and fly one-way to upstate New York on Peoples Express, the Greyhound of the airways. The commuter jets at Burke Lakefront Airport were always full, Dolan says. Peoples Express…
Vue
On its debut album, 1999’s “The Death of a Girl” EP, San Francisco’s Vue put forth a degenerate wail with glammed-out pretenses. There was enough eyeliner between them to draw a pentagram on the side of Godsmack’s private plane. While this fivesome resided in the dark triangle where more righteous souls fear to tread, its…
Danger Incorporated
Forty-some motorcycles clog the tiny parking lot of a Subway in Akron. There are no Harleys here — just small sport bikes with garish paint jobs, fast enough to zip from Akron to Cleveland in under a half-hour. A Harley couldn’t keep up. Tony Pines — a.k.a. Chubb Fresh — is in an agitated state.…
Bob Dylan
At 60, Bob Dylan’s voice is permanently croaky. But that doesn’t stop him from evoking such antecedents as pretty boy Rudy Vallee and obscure minstrelman Emmett Miller. Backed by a band that includes Austin guitar hotshot Charlie Sexton and former Sir Douglas Quintet keyboardman Augie Meyer, Dylan sounds comfortable here, commanding blues in the fierce…
Much Ado About Mocha
The two shops began in the ’70s, in places far from hip — one in rainy Seattle and the other on the East Side of Cleveland. Seattle’s began because its founders tired of coffee from a can and wanted real beans. Cleveland’s, in a converted garage off Coventry Road, was inspired by an adage recent…
Slayer
From the beginning, Slayer has looked into the darkest crevasses of the human psyche. To this day, 1986’s Reign in Blood stands as one of the best speed-metal records of all time: Using strong language, repulsive imagery, and block-heavy riffs, it put the casual listener into an appropriately uncomfortable position. Truly countercultural, the band elevates…
Wait Watching
The rewarding experience of waiting long hours during flight delays has just gotten better. Last week, Hopkins International announced a partnership with InMotion Pictures. For the pleasantly overpriced fee of $10 a day, travelers can now rent a portable DVD player and a movie, catch a flick, and even drop it off at another airport.…
Ben Folds
“Let me tell you all what it’s like/Being male, middle class, and white/It’s a bitch/If you don’t believe it/listen up to my new CD,” Ben Folds sings in the title tune of Rockin’ the Suburbs, his first album without the Ben Folds Five, the trio he fronted for most of the ’90s. And while Folds…
Feel His Pain
The cold-bloodedness of some entertainment journalists is a thing to be admired; they’ve balls for brains, which gets you far in this profession. The Hollywood press corps’ cynicism is the source of its strength, and God bless the famous fool who plays along, answering every crooked question with the straightest of faces. It’s all in…
Gerald Levert
Gerald Levert’s got the smooth, sweet-talkin’ loverman thing down so well by now that he can practically sing an entire album without breaking a sweat or even thinking twice about what he’s saying. And on Gerald’s World, his latest album, he’s as smooth and sweet-talkin’ as ever. But there’s something automatic about it all, a…
All God’s Children
I stare. Outside the window above my computer screen, rose hips on thorny stems are barely moving, making tiny anticipatory nods to a soft morning breeze. My wife calls down for me to come right away, something terrible at the edge of her voice. On the way up the stairs, I hear an awful sob…
Access Cleveland
When a musician — any musician — talks shop in your basement, his tunes tend to take on greater meaning. At least that’s what Tommy Wiggins hopes to prove with his cable-access shows Words & Music and Crooked River Groove, both of which are devoted to featuring Cleveland musicians. “There’s absolutely nothing like this that…
A Word From Charter One
“Jim Crow” was a low blow: On behalf of the 2,000 Cleveland employees of Charter One, we take great exception to “The Bank of Jim Crow” [August 16]. The article misrepresents our record, our commitment to fair lending, and our successful role in providing lending and other products and services that meet the needs of…
Schlockstock
Cleveland in the ’60s and ’70s was paradise for B-movie lovers. Thanks to a gaggle of local TV movie hosts, fans could be sated every weekend with hours of horror, sci-fi, and exploitation films. And that didn’t include the plethora of drive-ins and small independent grind-house theaters, with offerings like Dracula’s Dog, Track of the…
Women in Love
If you look up Stop Kiss on the Internet, you’ll note that productions are spreading to every major city like the latest dance sensation. That’s because it’s impossible not to be drawn to its kindly humanism. Here is the sweetest kind of anomaly: a film noir of the soul. Like film noir, this play has…
All Bases Covered
Faced with yet another sports movie in which a group of lovably troubled kids triumphs over adversity, it’s easier to scoff and grumble than to feel even partially uplifted. So let’s do it — let’s scoff and grumble. At least for a moment. In Brian Robbins’s Hardball, a degenerate gambler who owes bent-nosed, bat-wielding Chicago…
Spanish Nice
The dapper staffers at Viva Barcelona put on a floor show of sorts. They glide through the handsome dining room, unobtrusive and ever vigilant that no tabletop should go uncrumbed, no empty plate go unremoved. Sometimes an entire cadre of them, in their tuxedos and bow ties, winds through the room like a slender black-and-white…
