It was Easter Sunday of 1997, and David Thayer had just come home from a family feast at his grandparents’ house when his phone rang. It was his buddy, Elmo Wilcox, who was whooping it up at D.J.’s Bar on State Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas. Wilcox wanted to take his prized bike — a 1980 Harley Sturgiss Wideglide with…
Thank God for old Jews with shaky hands and the inability to tell this word (G-O-R-E) from this one (B-U-C-H-A-N-A-N). Without them—and Survivor Richard Hatch, that self-proclaimed “fat naked fag” who, as is turns out, is just a really concerned parent and not at all, uh, abusive—it would have been damned near impossible to turn on the TV during much…
The year of eating dangerously: New Year’s Eve, one of the busiest nights in the restaurant industry (right up there with Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day), gets a double workout in the next few weeks. Most restaurants will celebrate with traditional New Year’s Eve dinners on December 31. And many area Chinese restaurants will observe the Chinese New Year, which…
A friend of mine remembers only one thing about his dim sum experience at Bo Ling’s: the braised chicken feet. “Okay, so it’s Sunday morning,” he recalls, “and I’m hungover and sitting at a booth with a bunch of friends who are eating everything in sight. I take a taste of this and that, but nothing really looks that…
28 Thursday Sandra Scolnik’s paintings at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 4420 Warwick, are eerily reminiscent of the movie The Shining, in which twins appear at every turn. The effect is duplicated several times in the Scolnik exhibit, where realistic yet slightly off-kilter and cramped interior spaces are populated by sets of twins and quadruplets, often posing in…
Bill Shapiro, the host of Cypress Avenue on KCUR 89.3, isn’t sure he knows what rock and roll is anymore. Shapiro now thinks of Cypress Avenue as a pop music show. That can include anything but opera, he says. This Saturday’s show, airing from noon until 2 p.m., is Shapiro’s 22nd end-of-the-year installment. He used to call it a…
New Year’s Eve festivities start early — really early — for anyone who wants to celebrate in quiet contemplation instead of the usual debauchery. The doors to the one-month-old Rime (pronounced ree-may) Buddhist Center open at 5:30 a.m. on Sunday for the 15th annual Meditation for World Peace. The event gives visitors a chance to see Kansas City’s newest…
When Christine Morrison left jobs at American Heartland Theatre and Quality Hill Playhouse to work at Commerce Bank, she knew she’d still have to find a way to satisfy that theater itch. She soon found her solution on the Web, in March starting KCTheatre.com, a local online magazine. Morrison’s initiative offers daily updates on the performances filling Kansas City’s…
The holidays are the perfect time to catch up with friends and relatives, patch up old wounds, and attempt to rid yourself of vices by crafting New Year’s resolutions. As psychologists will tell you, the holidays’ combined stress of shopping and travel can send families that were teetering on the brink of disaster over the edge. Unfortunately for fans of…
Music fans hoping to avoid corny canned renditions of “Auld Lang Syne” and misguided DJs who spin Prince’s “1999” in a futile attempt to stir up the millennial mayhem that failed to materialize last year have plenty of options this year. In addition to Arthur Dodge’s triumphant homecoming in Lawrence, the Grand Emporium’s blues bash starring Anson Funderburgh and the…
For their second consecutive holiday offering, the Beastie Boys have brought to market the first rock or rap DVD to fully explore the new medium’s capabilities — that is, the first one worth buying, let alone watching more than once. After a successful experiment with a two-CD survey of their career made available in both a predetermined edition and a…
Arthur Dodge has lived in Nashville only three months, but his answering machine shows how well he’s blending: “I’m busy writing a hit. Leave a message.” Dodge, until recently a rough-hewn staple of the local scene, set out for Music City to do just that. “I’ve had some small meetings,” Dodge says by telephone from his new home just south…
Assessing the merits of Quills, the lusty new feature by director Philip Kaufman (Henry and June), one is tempted to seek correlative characters from popular movies to illustrate just how radical this business is not. In Kaufman’s film — affectionately constructed upon a screenplay by Doug Wright, who adapts his award-winning play — we discover a fairly standard dichotomy:…
The moods of Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me are so artfully mingled that it’s difficult to get a fix on this highly personal independent feature. Set in a quiet little town in upstate New York’s lovely Catskill Mountains, it is at once a drama about the unresolved traumas of childhood and a sly comedy about how sibling…
On Guard An officer and a gentleman: As a student at Penn Valley Community College at night, I sincerely appreciate Tony Moton’s efforts to cover the story of campus security and bring this issue to the public (“Officer Friendly,” December 14). If Penn Valley were really concerned about safety, they wouldn’t have fired Mike Wead, as he was such a…
Games people play: What secrets lurk in the hearts of Kansas Lottery officials? Adultery? Homosexuality? Inquiring minds at GTECH want to know. The billion-dollar company shares a building with the scratch-and-wish agency in Topeka and manages much of the lottery’s business. It won’t rest until it’s running every state-sponsored numbers racket, however, and three former GTECH supervisors have told a…
Lamar Hunt, the Chiefs’ out-of-touch, er, out-of-town owner, has extended General Manager Carl Peterson’s original five-year Super Bowl plan into a no-end-in-sight death march by hiring Peterson on for another five years. So what do Lamar Hunt’s bosses think of enduring another half decade of Peterson’s football leadership after twelve fruitless years? Hunt has more bosses than anybody in the…
The hip-hop generation is getting older, and Vinyl Exams is the perfect tool to help aging heads reminisce. More important, Vinyl Exams, which flashes back to the “golden era” of hip-hop with a collection of rare jams, helps new jacks respect the culture’s pioneers by providing an interactive history lesson. The CD features 12 songs, often neglected by music historians,…
The Grinch could have saved himself a lot of trouble and elaborate planning if he’d abandoned his ill-fated holiday-snatching scheme and chosen instead to broadcast the soundtrack to his flick Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas over Whoville radio. The Whos would have been put to sleep immediately for the holidays by the disc’s bland selections. Smash Mouth proves…
With Mountain High, Valley Low, one of the best albums released last year, and her urban-radio hit “Open My Heart,” Yolanda Adams became one of contemporary gospel’s hottest singers. On the strength of her recent mainstream commercial success, Adams has recorded a Christmas record, Christmas With Yolanda Adams. This project might have been much more interesting if she had recorded…
Holiday albums are generally played for only a month or so each year, and considering how annoying most of the songs on these records are, that’s probably for the best. However, leave it to the hippies to take this time-honored tradition of turning good tidings into bad tunes and turn it on its head. On this double-disc live set, artists…
There are two kinds of Christmas discs: The diva showcase (a category broad enough to include Garth Brooks and Neil Diamond) and the variety pack. Most of each are insufferable because the sound of sleigh bells can’t drown out the “ka-ching!” of the Christmas cash register. The successful compilations, then, are made listenable by making the songs sound like a…
Sarah McLachlan fans looking for a glad tide-me-over until her next album will rejoice in this compilation of Canadian acts strolling through holiday standards. The disc opens with a satisfying rendering of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” with Barenaked Ladies’ Ed Robertson, Steven Page, and McLachlan making like Peter, Paul, and Mary. McLachlan turns up later with a crackerjack cover…
If seeing fans and bands exert dangerous amounts of energy during OZZfest — on one of the hottest days of the year last August — wasn’t enough to convince skeptics that the metal crowd is tough, seeing Darkside and its followers brave the other side of the weather spectrum should have erased all doubt. The group dodged the worst conditions,…
