Perv-Free Zone
When Vine Street News opened in 1975, Eastlake had no laws against porn shops operating near residential neighborhoods. The store sold magazines and videos and housed an adult arcade. For two decades, everything was swell. Then, in 1995, four dirtbags botched a robbery at the store, killing the security guard and wounding a clerk. Eight…
On Stage
La Turista — Almost 40 years ago, Sam Shepard wrote La Turista, a play that takes place in two temporary rooms inhabited by a young, white American couple adrift in the world and beset by difficulties both physical (sunburn, raging dysentery) and cultural. Written a decade before Shepard’s better known plays (True West, Buried Child),…
Nektar
To scores of fans, Nektar remains the most unsung hero of ’70s progressive rock. Though it never achieved the prominence of Yes, Genesis, or Pink Floyd, the band is still considered by its fans every bit the equal of those prog-rock icons — in sheer inventive energy, if not high-profile virtuosity. Formed in Hamburg in…
It’s Everywhere
It’s Everywhere Blame the pencilnecks: Crime is around every corner and under every rock. This city is swirling right down the toilet, and the cops can’t do enough to clean it up [“Loose Cannon,” September 8]. The one thing that really burns my ass is you media-know-it-all pencilnecks take heroes (like Daniel Jopek) and turn…
On View
NEW CIA Faculty Exhibition — This exhibition’s sole disappointment lies in the sheer variety of its media. Daniel Cuffaro’s industrial design of a plastic “Vick’s Cool Mist Humidifier” offers a marked contrast in materials to Kevin Kautenberger’s “Buoy/Stack,” made of beeswax, poplar, cedar, pollen, and mirror. Brent Kee Young’s “Trap,” based on an Asian fishing…
Tears for Fears
Even at Tears for Fears’ creative peak — their synth-blackened 1983 debut, The Hurting, and monster hits “Shout” and “Head Over Heels” from 1985’s Songs From the Big Chair — the group crafted pop songs brimming with sophisticated world-weariness. That same sense of stylish melancholy permeates the oft-delayed Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, the first…
Standing Up Guy
“Welcome to the black portion of the show,” says comedian Alonzo Bodden at the start of his stand-up act. “Yes, I am in fact black. I am not African American. I don’t make that kind of money yet.” Not yet. But as runner-up on NBC’s Last Comic Standing 2, Bodden’s stock certainly has risen over…
Toot Sweet
“Down by the station, early in the morning,” 19th-century train travelers passing through Kent probably could indeed have seen “the little pufferbellies all in a row.” Today, though, the double set of tracks that runs within spitting distance of the city’s circa-1875 Great Atlantic and Western Depot are mostly abandoned. Instead, rail fans and nostalgia…
Papa Roach
Cut their life into pieces, this is Papa Roach’s last resort. Rap-rock crescendoed around the band’s 2000 LP, Infest. Already seven years strong, the Northern California quartet had experience and chops: The mosh outburst in the otherwise-sappy “Broken Home” stands as one of the nü-metal movement’s truly heavy moments, and P-Roach’s contribution to the cracker-barrel…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, September 16 Around the Corner is celebrating its 30th anniversary this weekend with a bunch of free events. The venerable Lakewood bar kicks off festivities at 3 p.m. today by selling beer just like it did three decades ago — at dirt-cheap prices! There’s also free food. The first 500 people through the doors…
Turner’s Turn
Debuting last week, the new menu from Executive Chef Keoko Turner has raised some eyebrows among regulars at Vito’s Italian Grill (395 Aurora Road, Aurora, 330-562-6010). The document is filled not with eggplant parmesan or gnocchi Bolognese, but with such bistro classics as braised short ribs, roasted chicken, and “fork-tender” pork chops with cider demi-glace.…
Nelly
The official line on Nelly’s two new albums is that Sweat caters to the street, while Suit reveals his softer side. It’s an amusing thought — especially the idea that the St. Louis rapper, who’s made his fortune as a Band-Aid-wearing, R-rated version of Will Smith, has street bona fides that need burnishing. The truth…
Hip “Hop”
9/17-9/18 In his Superior Avenue coffeehouse, the Artefino Gallery Café, 3-D artist Hector Vega has hung mammoth bright green, red, and yellow abstracts on the walls and from the ceiling. He calls the collection United Colors of Artefino, and it’s one of the exhibits on the Urban Gallery Hop of works by more than 200…
Dead Boys Live
“I met Stiv Bators on a Saturday night at the Piccadilly, an old glam bar in Cleveland,” recalls Dead Boys guitarist Jimmy Zero. “The first thing he said to me was a really disgusting story that I’d rather leave off the record. But the next morning, we’re driving on West 25th, and there’re all these…
Miles Davis
A terse, staccato nightclub scene in the thriller Collateral revolves around Miles Davis and the notion of cool. When the intense, stylish hit man, Vincent (Tom Cruise), asks a jowly Davis-wannabe how he got into jazz, the guy cites Davis as his model. One time, the guy joined Davis on the bandstand and traded riffs.…
Pomp and Synthesizers
For months, Rick Ray had toyed with the concept of a progressive-music festival in Cleveland. No one’s done it before, he thought. Commercial radio won’t air it, and the only ones who give a damn about prog rock are college DJs. So Ray hopped onto his computer and fired off an e-mail to Byron Nemeth.…
Gold Standard
Back in January 2003, when the Donnas stormed MTV’s TRL with a performance of “Take It Off” — the lead single from their 2002 major-label debut, Spend the Night — the presence of real guitars and non-plastic women on the show disturbed the balance of the channel’s teen-pop-centered cosmos. Such gleeful disruption sums up the…
Boho Zen
The duo behind Boho Zen have played power pop in various Northeast Ohio acts together for decades, and they know how to write a song. They know how to tell a story too, as in “Drink Her Pretty”: “I don’t know what I was thinkin’/All I know is I love drinkin’/Everything I say is witty/And…
‘Cross Words
9/16-9/19 Nate Adams thrives on competition. The 20-year-old freestyle motocross rider from Arizona says it’s the awards and championships that fuel his game. “I like that feeling of butterflies and getting nervous,” he says. “I still get all that.” Adams competes at this week’s Gravity Games, which gathers most of extreme sports’ best boarders and…
Cure ‘Em All
Metallica used to get into fistfights onstage, turn dressing rooms into latrines, and rip through so many cans of beer that Alcoa stock would rise with each tour. So it’s little wonder that, two years ago, the band members paid $40,000 a month to a sports therapist to help them deal with each other. As…
Elysia
When talented young singer Elysia announces that “I do everything that I can do” toward the end of her debut, you might wish she’d do a little less. An actress, model, and aspiring pop star, Elysia would do well just to focus on her promising songwriting. As it is, the 17-year-old Avon Lake native’s career…
Capital Offense
WED 9/22 When he sat down a couple years ago to write Ultimate Punishment, Scott Turow had just made up his mind about the death penalty, an issue he’d never quite committed to. “It doesn’t deliver what it’s supposed to,” he says. “The death penalty is not a deterrent, and it doesn’t provide the moral…
Always a Butthole
Gibson “Gibby” Haynes hasn’t needed to update his résumé in decades, but he does have some prestigious distinctions under his belt. Amazingly, he scored a radio hit with his previous band, which had the once-unutterable name of the Butthole Surfers. He survived chemical-fueled years of onstage excess and bad nutrition with his considerable intellect intact.…
Days of Future Passed
Fortune smiles on groovy egregiousness. In the case of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the filmmakers’ investment in their weird visions is wildly unorthodox, but the payoff is oddly satisfying. The movie features myriad killer robots, raucous underwater dogfights, and Laurence Olivier’s best work since he died 15 years ago. Yes, the digital…
Monster Magnet
Even after a decade and a half of wide-screen riff rock, Monster Magnet frontman Dave Wyndorf still approaches his craft with the same wide-eyed wonder of a kid raiding his father’s Playboy collection. He sings of humping volcanoes and exploding heads, over guitars that shoot sparks like a Roman candle. On Monster Magnet’s latest, Monolithic…
Bar Made
SAT 9/18 Julie Johnson sometimes spends as much as 14 hours in a bar. As co-producer of The Show, she books a club, sets up cameras, and invites customers to watch the action unfold. “Although most everything is taped in the Akron-Cleveland area, we feature a skit from somewhere out of state,” says Johnson, who…
Art Rock Relapse
The legendary Akron art rockers of Tin Huey will release a new CD sampler, Sneak Peak: The Obscurity Series, at the Beachland Ballroom (15711 Waterloo Road) this Friday, September 17. The EP contains two songs each from a pair of upcoming full-length albums: an archival release and an LP of previously unreleased material, both of…
Into the Woods
Some of the year’s best performances can be found in Mean Creek, a small independent film and the auspicious feature debut of 31-year-old writer-director Jacob Aaron Estes. An ensemble drama with a relatively unknown cast, the film looks at six kids and what happens when an innocent prank goes awry. Rory Culkin (Signs, You Can…
Nebula
The boys of Nebula are known to bring rock with a lot of its accompanying roll in the thickest, heaviest, and skunkiest of stoner traditions. Yeah, “stoner rock” is probably just as vague a term as “emo,” but if you can picture a bunch of longhairs in beat-up leather jackets, passing around a joint in…
Entertain Your Brain
Brassbound skeptics may see the complex, provocative docudrama What the #$*! Do We Know!?, which poses the Big Questions of Life, as just another product of New Age self-absorption, an act of pompous navel-gazing that might best be confined to screenings at the local ashram. Certainly, these 108 minutes are singularly obsessed with large purpose…
Fat Joe and Terror Squad
Why did Terror Squad’s “Lean Back” dominate the charts all summer, racking up a three-month run that’s still going strong? Look no further than its subject matter and accompanying video, which introduced an anti-dance dance craze calculated to appeal to every guy whose repertoire of moves starts and ends with a self-conscious shuffle. Instructed by…
Hypocritical Oaths
If the tiny Québecois island of Sainte Marie-La Mauderne is any indication, Michael Moore was right: Canadians do not lock their front doors (an assertion he made in Bowling for Columbine). Of course, the 125 residents of this tiny fictional community have no need to: Murders are unheard-of here, and not only would a robber…
Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys
Think of Robert “Big Sandy” Williams as a preacher. And his gospel is that of the roots of rock and roll. Now we’re not talking about the “roots rock” of John Mellencamp or BoDeans here, but the musical building-blocks that formed rock’s foundation: western swing, country, doo-wop, R&B, and rockabilly. Since 1988, Big Sandy and…
Dead Wrong
Tim Markley doesn’t seem like someone who’d murder an elderly neighbor. At 41, he’s bald and slight of frame, favoring tropical shirts and jokes so corny they require rim shots. A fireman by trade, he prides himself on saving lives. “It’s my job to make sure everybody goes home,” he says. Which made it all…
Wet Kisses
There is nothing mysterious or subdued about Stacy Peralta’s enthusiasms. A product of Southern California’s vivid beach scene, he’s been a surfer since boyhood and was a professional skateboarder in the ’70s before he started making documentaries about the defining moments of those sports. The phenomenally successful Dogtown and Z-Boys was an unabashed valentine to…
The Silos
Seventeen years ago, the Silos’ first full-length album, Cuba, was such a critical favorite that bandleader Walter Salas-Humara barely missed being labeled the father of alt-country. Not that the title would interest him. But how perfect would it be if the twang-filled genre actually sprang from a group named after such an obvious farm staple?…
Tough Sell
Tracey Kirksey still remembers the Y that never was. Sitting in her office, she runs her fingers over the colorful architect’s drawings, imagining the building brought to life — parents jogging on new treadmills, children doing homework in bright, clean rooms. The YMCA of Greater Cleveland was promising a new, $12 million building to replace…
Go Frock Yourself
“Put a man in a dress,” P.T. Barnum once said, “and the world will beat a path to your door.” Actually, Barnum never said it — but the truth of the statement cannot be denied. From Marilyn Manson to Milton Berle, countless guys have donned high heels and eyeliner to draw attention to their acts,…
Sahara Hotnights
The Swedish Jennie bombs in Sahara Hotnights came to American attention in 2002 as the female counterpart to the Hives, whose frontman, Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist, dates lead singer Maria Andersson. On their kick-ass third album, Kiss & Tell, the Saharas get away from that easy comparison, sharpening the hooks in their wily garage-pop tunes and…
Jack the Wife
William Blake was not an easy man. He was domineering, opinionated, passionate, a lawyer with the ego to match. “I liked him and I didn’t like him,” his widow, Christine, says bluntly. His was not a prosperous practice. He had a tendency to violate the highest rule of law: Make sure your clients can pay.…
Jokers Wilde
One of the most frequently performed plays in the English language is Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. And that’s a good thing, because it’s virtually impossible to overdose on Wilde’s fabulously bitchy dialogue, with its razor-wire putdowns that figuratively lop off heads. This play of mistaken identities amid England’s idle aristocracy is so…
These Arms Are Snakes
Seattle’s These Arms Are Snakes are responsible for one of last year’s most exciting debuts, the blistering and elaborate EP This Is Meant to Hurt You. This fall, Jade Tree will unleash the band’s full-length follow-up, the enigmatically titled Oxeneers or The Lion Sleeps When Its Antelope Go Home. If last year’s offering is any…
