White Man’s Burden
Marty Gitlin is a white guy. This is not a good thing if you’re a sports writer in Northeast Ohio, he believes. For years he toiled at outer-burb newspapers, most recently at the News-Herald in Willoughby. This is not a good thing either. Despite the righteousness tumbling from their pages, small dailies tend to embrace…
Sex Games
As everyone past the age of 22 knows, sex usually isn’t about pleasure. Sex is about dealing with various levels of failure and somehow emerging on the other side with a semi-enjoyable orgasm and as few emotional scars as possible. This parade of insecurity begins immediately — is he/she cute enough for me to be…
Pennywise
Like Noam Chomsky in Dickies, Pennywise has always spiked its jet-engine punk with social commentary. But on 2001’s Land of the Free?, the Cali quartet looked at the White House and saw red, upping the political invective with an album full of fist-in-the-air fight songs taking the President to task. The breakneck Bush beatdown continues…
Sexual Healing
Cleveland continues to assist the cause of better sex through chemistry. A few months ago, Scene reported that area hospitals were testing possible female equivalents of Viagra (“Just for Her,” April 13). But the pharmaceutical industry is not yet finished stirring men’s loins. MetroHealth is now calling for participants to test Cialis, a drug purported…
Mild Applause
A recent visit to Bravo! Cucina Italiana (a free-standing building at the west end of Woodmere’s Eton Collection; 28889 Chagrin Boulevard, 216-360-0099) confirms our suspicions: Residents of Beachwood, Woodmere, and other tony East Side suburbs never cook. How else explain the fact that every one of the joint’s 260-plus seats was full at 8 p.m.…
Superchunk
Superchunk is something of an American counterpart to Britain’s Buzzcocks: Mac McCaughan’s adolescently high, just-this-side-of-whiny vocals mix well with the buzz-saw guitars, steady-as-a-redwood bass playing, and propulsive drum-bashing. This two-CD collection of mostly singles and compilation tracks from 1995-2001 finds the main aspects of Superchunk’s sound still firmly in place. But don’t get the notion…
Letters to the Editor
World-class Bland Born-and-bred brain-drain dregs: One of Northeast Ohio’s most enduring bad habits is its propensity for hiring born-and-bred locals, like Dennis Eckart, for big-ticket jobs [“Honey, I Shrunk the City!,” August 13]. Despite all the hot air about “world-class” this and “world-class” that, the area does have a world-class inferiority complex that encourages the…
Hot Stuff
Scott Harris was worried. Co-owner of Za-Za Food and Drink, a two-year-old restaurant at Cedar Center shopping center, Harris watched helplessly as the temperature in his tiny kitchen climbed toward 140 degrees. The ventilation system had crashed, the BTUs were piling up, and at one point, Harris says, the thought crossed his mind that the…
Kraftwerk
On Kraftwerk’s first studio release in a dozen years, the band expands on the theme of its 1983 single “Tour de France,” which immortalized the event with a rhythm built out of heavy breathing and vocodered vocals referring to the main points along the race. Tour de France Soundtracks takes a look at various elements…
She’s Alright
Most artists welcome the stopgap greatest-hits package. Not Jo Dee Messina. “It really wasn’t my idea,” she sighs. Her Greatest Hits set, released in May, debuted at No. 1 on the country chart and gave her some breathing room with fans awaiting a new album (it’s been three years since her last one, Burn). “It…
Punks in the Pasture
Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder, when it comes to sharing pints with Greg Miller. He’s the frontman for the Cowslingers, the country-punk cut-ups who turn dry heaves into high art. “You cannot be afraid to make a jackass out of yourself,” Miller explains between swigs of Newcastle at Wilbert’s on a…
The Six Parts Seven/ The Black Keys
Going from the Six Parts Seven’s affecting lull to the Black Keys’ snaggletooth blues is like chasing Chianti with Wild Turkey. But despite their wildly divergent sounds, the bands are united in drawing national attention to the area’s underground scene. The Six Parts Seven turn in one of their finest moments in the 10-minute “A…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, September 4 Sex Money KISS. There couldn’t be a more appropriate title for Gene Simmons’s new memoir. The tongue-wagging, blood-spurting KISS bassist claims to have bedded thousands of women, and his band’s endless farewell tour is more about the Benjamins than the music. The book itself reads like a self-help manual, with Simmons dropping…
Liquid Mix-up
Hip-hop hitmakers the Neptunes are so busy that one-half of the white-hot duo can’t even make it to most of the shows scheduled for the group’s current headlining tour. But even though Chad Hugo, the musical mind of the Neptunes, is staying home and taking the Brian Wilson role, composing and recording songs for the…
A.U.G.
Here’s some urban poetry for yo’ ass: “I do not/Give a fuck/Because I’m high.” Artists — both multiplatinum and unsigned — have dropped variations on that theme for years, and A.U.G. spins the chestnut with undeniable charm. With respect to the nation’s many gifted Caucasian MCs, the greatest example of A.U.G.’s skill is that he…
Club Kids
THU 9/4 Adam Tomlinson likes to see his friends move up the corporate ladder. As president of the Cleveland Professional 20/30 Club, the 24-year-old salesman holds court at the group’s social powwows, which take place on the first Thursday of every month. At the tiki bar on the Velvet Dog’s top deck, as many as…
Hungry Like a Wolf
To those who consider drinking Budweiser a sacrament, the arrival of Andrew W.K. may as well have been the coming of a shaggy-haired savior. A deity clothed in dirty white, he spread the gospel of the almighty party with his 2002 album, I Get Wet, providing testosterone-charged salutes to alcoholic shenanigans (“We Want Fun”), maniacal…
Facts of Life
In Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star, David Spade plays a washed-up, one-time kid actor who stumbles upon a potentially career-revitalizing role. In order to prepare for an audition — which requires him to play a “normal guy” — Dickie hires a family to provide him with the childhood he never had. Spade didn’t go to…
Birth Day
The Cleveland-born, New York-based avant-garde jazz trio Birth has been tapped to headline WRUW-FM 91.1’s 22nd Studio-A-Rama, the Case Western Reserve station’s annual celebration of local music. One of the city’s best music events, Studio-A-Rama takes place in the Mather Courtyard on the Case campus, where an abundance of beer, coolers, blankets, and eats makes…
Bend It Like Parnell’s
SAT 9/6 There’s no place like home for Declan Synnott — even if it’s on a wide-screen TV at Parnell’s Pub, via European Soccer Matches. Every weekend, between September and June, the native Irishman fires up his bar’s televisions to air the sport’s weekly games. In the first match of the season Saturday, Ireland takes…
Cubanismo
Led by trumpeter Jesús Alemañy, Cubanismo released its debut in 1997 — the same year Buena Vista Social Club opened American ears to bounding Afro-Cuban rhythms and richly melodic jazz bounce. Like the Social Club’s famed septuagenarians, Cubanismo layers a mesh of dance syncopations from the ’40s and ’50s beneath an array of supple horns…
They’ll Tumble 4 U
THU 9/4 The tots at Borders’ Toddler Tumblin’ Storytime do more than just sit cross-legged on the floor while a grown-up reads books to them. They dance. They sing. They jump. And the leader of the interactive event wants the kids to dance, sing, and jump. “We really want them to get involved,” says Gil…
The Derailers
His dad might have been only a weekend warrior, but Ed Adkins is on the frontline of the battle to keep the “western” in country-western. Adkins, a native of Roundhead, Ohio, a tiny burg between Kenton and Wapakoneta, followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a musician influenced by the old man’s country crooners (Faron Young…
Let’s Get It On
9/5-9/7 Show some respect, and you’ll get more dates. Tell your sex partners they’re always right, and you’ll get laid more often. That’s the gospel according to California psychologist William Glasser, who lectures this weekend at The Journey: A Mind, Body & Soul Expo. The sanity-fest is three days’ worth of workshops and programs on…
Bow Wow
Despite the preponderance of adult themes, hip-hop has its share of child stars, who don’t mind getting a G rating while they’re making those G’s. But the former Lil’ Bow Wow isn’t one of them. The 16-year-old MC has been ahead of the game since he was spotted rhyming in Columbus by Snoop Dogg a…
Family Matters
9/5-9/28 Walter-Eugene Grodzik’s “real job” is teaching acting and directing at a small college in Washington. But he’s returning home to Cleveland to direct the Ohio premiere of Kimberly Akimbo — a dark comedy, laced with shrewd satire, about a teenage girl who’s the sanest member of her family — at Dobama Theatre. The show…
The Bellrays
Don’t bother asking Lisa Kekaula and Bob Vennum about the “return of rock and roll” currently celebrated by the mainstream music press. The married co-founders of the Bellrays will inform you that you’re quite late to the party. The 12-year-old band’s latest disc, Raw Collection, compiles previously unreleased material and out-of-print vinyl-only releases, and aptly…
Angst in Their Pants
Most will deny it, but inside every grown man lurks a hypersensitive adolescent girl. Allow me to tell you all about mine and to share some of my poetry . . . Whoa! Relax. Put away that gun. Just making the point that, in the case of director Catherine Hardwicke’s debut feature, Thirteen, it doesn’t…
Denali
Denali hangs out with the hardcore kids, both by label (they’re on Philly-based Jade Tree) and by association (bassist/keyboardist Keeley Davis and drummer Jonathan Fuller are also members of slow-burners Engine Down), but their music strays far from the scream-slash-repeat blueprint of the genre. Classically trained vocalist-guitarist-keyboardist Maura Davis possesses a warbling voice plucked from…
Sucks, Dickie
The 1990-’95 run of Saturday Night Live, when the show was a playground populated by the likes of Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, Dana Carvey, Chris Rock, Chris Farley, Kevin Nealon, Mike Myers, and David Spade, was a low point in a show with a longer history of making you groan than of making you laugh.…
Ramblin’ Jack Elliott
When Ramblin’ Jack Elliott met Woody Guthrie in 1951, he was ready for a mentor — and apparently the legendary Depression-era troubadour and drifter was ready for a student. Already possessed of a romantic runaway’s résumé that included work as a rodeo hand, roughneck, and truck driver, the Brooklyn-born Elliott absorbed Guthrie’s songs, mannerisms, and…
Ohio’s Education Cowboy
Industrialist and charter school entrepreneur David Brennan — seen here yukking it up with state legislators in 2001 — wears cowboy hats in tribute to a moment of self-congratulations. In 1986, Brennan bought a steel mill in Alabama. The locals took him for a Yankee carpetbagger, a scoundrel. A reporter asked Brennan how it felt…
Habitat for Inhumanity
The last thing the Roman Catholic Church needs at this point is another exposé of its misdeeds. The shock of the pedophilia scandals and of the official coverups isn’t going away anytime soon. Collection-plate revenues continue to dwindle as the lawsuits multiply, and even many fervent Catholics are questioning their church — if not their…
Cober
Though Cober has supported accomplished goth outfits such as Gene Loves Jezebel and Faith & Disease, the band is more noticeably influenced by alternative music of the early ’90s. The ferocity of Babes in Toyland’s Kat Bjelland and the lyrical soul-wrenching of Juliana Hatfield echo in the whispers and wails of frontwoman Sheila Bommakanti. She’s…
Patient Zero
Electa Montgomery should have known better. After all, someone had done it to her. Testing positive for HIV at the Cleveland Clinic in 2001 was a devastating surprise. She was not promiscuous or an IV drug user, so she was pretty sure she’d unknowingly contracted the virus from a former boyfriend. She was given a…
Shanghai Surprise
Just when a cynic might think there are no more Holocaust stories to be told, yet another undiscovered perspective pops up on local screens. But even if you’ve seen The Pianist and The Fighter and Night and Fog, there is still Shanghai Ghetto, a documentary by Dana Janklowicz-Mann and Amir Mann, to remind you that…
June Carter Cash
This CD, finished only weeks before June Carter Cash died of cancer in May, is a must-have for any serious country-music fan — and not necessarily for the quality of the music. Carter Cash’s voice was all but gone by the time this was recorded. But that’s hardly the point. This is a celebration of…
Bad Apples
Last year, creditors began hounding Glenn Rondo, a desk clerk at a downtown Columbus hotel. Rondo didn’t understand the attention; he paid his bills. Finally, a debt collector asked if he was aware of a Dale Diddle. The name was barely familiar. The Holiday Inn where Rondo works once employed a myopic shuttle driver named…
Shakes the Clowns
Confrontational, in-your-face comedy never seems to lose its attraction — and for good reason. We’re all so saturated on a daily basis with bloated political and corporate lies that it’s refreshing when our cultural shibboleths are stripped bare. Take, for instance, the ubiquitous bus-mounted warning not to shake a baby. Now, no one of right…
Seal
In many ways, Seal’s first two albums were Trevor Horn’s pinnacle as a producer; after summoning artificial glory for groups like Frankie Goes to Hollywood, he created something truly glorious when paired with an artist of Seal’s caliber. A rift between the two exposed some disturbing chinks in their pristine, futuristic soul on 1998’s Human…
