A refreshingly subtle globetrotting take on seasonal standards, Pamela Bruner’s On Christmas Morn, released by the Lawrence-based label Dragondream, sets her soaring voice to a series of enchanting low-key arrangements. Bruner’s graceful work on the Celtic harp brings fresh charm to the familiar melodies of “Ukrainian Carol” and “Greensleeves,” while her pure, versatile vocals drive “Lo, How a Rose” and…
If there’s a theater on the other side, there is a good chance The Sanders Family would be the biggest hit on the pearly gates circuit. In the sanctuary of the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in Mount Pleasant, North Carolina, on Christmas Eve 1941 (just 18 days after Pearl Harbor), the title characters make up a show-business family whose…
Trayce Riley found out about Kwanzaa seven years ago when she attended a holiday event at Chick Elementary, her son’s school. The seven-day wintertime celebration of community and culture among African-Americans was invented in 1965, after the Watts riots called attention to a greater need for unity in the black community. But it wasn’t until the 18th & Vine district…
Included in the traveling exhibition Color and Fire: Defining Moments in Studio Ceramics, 1950-2000, which just arrived at the Kemper Museum from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is a piece by local potter Ken Ferguson alongside that of another local artist, Jim Leedy, one of the founders of Kansas City’s now-lively Crossroads District. Ferguson’s work is easy…
21 Thursday If fake eyelashes are better than real lashes and wigs are superior to hair, it follows that spinning records is better than strumming guitars and singing. For adherents to the cocktail-lounge group Combustible Edison’s “Doctrine of Inauthenticity,” tonight’s show at The Pub, 1727 McGee, promises to be an extravaganza of simulated pleasures, with tiki dolls reigning supreme….
There really was a half-moon — a mezzaluna — in the starless sky on the cold night I first visited the downtown restaurant Mezzaluna. The restaurant is across the street from the abandoned Jones Store, where display windows thick with dust have become billboards full of graffiti. Although I had advised her to park on the street, one of my…
The beat goes on: Kansas City now has two restaurants called Mezzaluna, but it’s a pretty common name for Italian restaurants across the country. The best-known Mezzaluna was the restaurant on San Vicente in Los Angeles, where waiter Ron Goldman worked until the fateful night of June 12, 1994, when he drove to the home of Nicole Brown Simpson to…
Contained within a care package sent by C.D. Payne is a self-penned press release introducing the author as “the Rodney Dangerfield of comic novelists,” complete with a picture of the bug-eyed comedian and his shopworn catchphrase “I can’t get no respect.” As it turns out, this is the letter Payne sends out with all copies of his novels and plays,…
Christina Aguilera’s biggest problem thus far in her career has been working with subpar material, so unleashing her booming voice on a disc’s worth of tried and true Christmas standards would seem to be an ideal solution. Indeed, Aguilera shines on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” as she moves up and down the scales with enough flair to dazzle…
Given the sheer abundance of Christmas songs in existence, it might seem as if all conceivable yuletide themes have been exhausted. However, Dale Watson covers new ground in an amusing manner, sharing a cell with a down-on-his-luck Saint Nick, loaning Santa his semi, and proving Christmas-morning anticipation isn’t just for present-craving kids by delivering a tune about a lover who…
As the song says, don’t fear the reaper. It’s a waste of time and energy to do so, especially when another dread-worthy menace lurks much closer to home. Fear instead Kansas City’s Robico and the Deathray Angels, a crew whose sole desire is to irreversibly corrupt your very immortal soul. To bear witness to one of its shows is to…
All David George wants for Christmas is a new transmission, a new contract, and new copies of his band Moaning Lisa’s 2000 release, Wonderful, to sell at shows. He’d like it if his rhythm section remained unchanged for a while, he’d like a trailer to haul gear behind his van, and he’d like a more supportive local scene. But all…
It’s where Walter Huston found paradise at the end of The Treasure of Sierra Madre, where the murdering lovers Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw rode into the sunset at the end of The Getaway, and where Thelma and Louise were headed when they ended up at the Grand Canyon. There are dozens, probably hundreds, of other examples. Mexico is the…
In Hollywood, all it takes is one big hit. Sandra Bullock’s ticket to stardom was the 1994 sleeper Speed, a rip-roaring action/crime thriller that elevated costar Keanu Reeves to similar megawatt status. With her cute girl-next-door looks and ingratiating physical klutziness, Bullock established an instant rapport with audiences. That perception of adorableness was further enhanced by her next two…
The Family Man offers but a slight variation on the threadbare holiday theme of what life might have been like had Our Hero followed a different path — or never been born. Not only is it a redo of It’s a Wonderful Life — complete with an angel (played by a dreadlocked Don Cheadle, slumming it in this big-screen sitcom)…
Here you will find the ingredients required to spin an audience into throes of fuzzy warm-heartedness — the hope, the compassion, the joie de vivre — all blended with the skill of a consummate confectioner. Much like a box of sweets with a convenient guide inside the lid, Lasse Hallström’s new Chocolat contains no surprises, just a perfectly arranged assortment…
During the summer of 1994, while most of the world was greeting Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump with dewy eyes and outstretched arms, this critic was grinning his fool head off at a very different tale of a lost, lone hero. While a featherweight Tom Hanks bumbled his lobotomized way through misty boomer memories, the late Brandon Lee was conscientiously…
For slightly more than a decade, Chinese martial arts films have — directly and indirectly — gained a growing audience in America. Now the genre may find its greatest breakthrough coming from an unlikely source — director Ang Lee, best known for such comedy-dramas of social manners as Sense and Sensibility, The Wedding Banquet, and The Ice Storm. In…
Naked Lunch Body heat: For a publication that portrays itself as progressive, I found Deb Hipp’s cover story on Miss Nude America decidedly unprogressive (“Even Cowgirls Win It Nude,” December 7). To profile a woman achieving fame and success (?) through her body is as old as the Rosetta stone. In a time when women are making strides in science,…
Sleigh hells: Elves might be good at making toys, but they’re lousy at making cities. So Santa Claus planned to visit the metro area last week with a wish list for city fathers. Written with the help of dozens of youngsters in Kansas City, Kansas, the list asked for fun stuff that any town should have. “Wyandotte County is a…
Brother Louis Rodemann doesn’t ask his visitors how they ended up hungry and penniless as they pass through his door at Holy Family House on 31st Street. He doesn’t check for criminal backgrounds before he serves them dinner from his kitchen six nights a week. Like Dorothy Day — who in 1933 founded the Catholic Worker Movement, to which…
The collision that sent waves of pain jolting through Ernest Brown’s body was more of a nudge, the kind of physical contact an elephant might experience when a bird lands on its butt. At 7 feet and 255 pounds, Brown is not easily mistaken for an elephant. But on the basketball court, he is a natural force, a potentially immovable…
Like gifts stashed under a tree, newly purchased street lamps wrapped in cardboard lay in the grass for several days at Penn Valley Community College. Soon they will be up and burning brightly as plans to improve security on campus continue unfolding. Those improvements — including the addition of surveillance cameras — might not be enough, however, says a Penn…
Fair warning: Enough time has passed that it’s OK to discuss the ending of writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. Those who have not yet seen the film and intend to might want to keep on moving. Or perhaps not: To reveal the ending, all 180 or so seconds of it, is not to spoil the 105 minutes that precede…
