Saturday night fever doesn’t get any better than this: a claustrophobic dance floor, sweat-laced bodies, and the sounds of Michael Jackson bumpin’ the speakers. But Michael Jackson? What has his music done for us lately? Yes, Jackson has been obscure during the past few years. But in the hands of mad DJ Maxx, Jackson sounds as good as new. Maxx,…
An Emotional Massacre sounds severe. But it’s hard to take an event run by a kid wearing checkered Vans too seriously — especially when his artist’s statement reads, “I want to laugh at myself, or at others.” Fortunately, the self-mockery practiced by Cody Critcheloe and a few other artists could save their show from pretentiousness. Critcheloe’s video is one of…
The institution that is Missouri Repertory Theatre’s A Christmas Carol began during the 1981-82 season. Actors who now stroll the stage as the parents of teenagers were teenagers themselves, perhaps dreaming of some day putting a show this big on that pie-in-the-sky résumé inspired by high school drama. And now that playing a Mr. Cratchit is a reality for those…
Christmastime is here, but for the first time, Charlie Brown’s father will not be around to watch his depressed, round-headed child celebrate the holiday. He will not be in front of the television next week to watch his little boy seek psychiatric help from a nickel-grubbing girl who diagnoses her patient with pantophobia, “the fear of everything.” He will not…
The Unicorn Theatre’s misguided, sometimes surprisingly banal production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch has one unmistakably redeeming feature: the central performance of Rick Hammerly as the eponymous rock star of his/her dreams. Playing a German transplant to Junction City, Kansas, whose sex-reassignment surgery turned into a cruel mistake, Hammerly is at once incensed, bitter, witty, vulnerable, and omnipotent. His…
Life on Earth sounds mundane enough to most people, but to a musician such as former Lawrence and current San Francisco resident Ben Tuttle, even everyday experiences take on profound meaning. For starters, there’s the way Tuttle introduces the players in Life on Earth, including himself: “The group is held together by the subterranean Phil Crain on the electric and…
I don’t get it: Just because this Bacon fellow makes a few movies about the handicapped (Tremors, Footloose, etc.), that gives him the right to park his musical disabilities anyplace he pleases? Does that mean Big Jeter and Co. can show up on his Hollywood doorstep pitching my retarded cousin Bo’s harebrained scenarios, like Bludgeoned: The Bob Crane Story? Mr….
Sara Evans’ third album should’ve been called The Vanishing of Sara. Its actual title, Born to Fly, is frustratingly ironic. Rather than announcing a woman poised to soar free from the pack, it instead documents the subsuming of a talented young singer to the denaturing demands of country radio. It’s a familiar story by now: A country act debuts with…
One of my earliest music memories is of Odetta singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hand.” Not just that song — Odetta singing it. God-world-hand: Odetta made the equation elementary. Every selection from Odetta’s Absolutely the Best is just as fulfilling, and a similar collection from fellow “folk revivalists” Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee is almost as strong….
As anybody who gave the Columbine tragedy more than a soundbite’s worth of attention knows, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris didn’t like Marilyn Manson’s music. They found Manson “too mainstream,” preferring the industrial sounds of KMFDM (German for “one song, 20 albums”). Manson still seethes at the public crucifixion he endured from an unruly scapegoat-craving mob of parents and politicians,…
Most first bands are so embarrassing — reliant on covers and/or a selection of bad songs in a then-trendy genre — that the participants quickly “forget” or refuse to admit that they were involved with such projects. Still, everyone has to start somewhere, including Kansas City’s The Sound and the Fury, which weathered a tuneless growing-pains era to become a…
There are, one would imagine, few greater feelings for a young band than making critics eat their words. In May, Spin trashed Papa Roach’s Infest, giving it a “3” (out of 10) and declaring it “bland to the bone.” Six months and 3 million records later, after tours with Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Eminem, as well as a high-profile slot…
In autumn 1993, just after Nirvana’s In Utero and Pearl Jam’s Vs. caused the last midnight lines of post-adolescents to form at record stores, the funniest album announcement of all time was made: Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell. But it turns out that keeping sequel-making off the list of things he wouldn’t do for…
Fascinating and engrossing on every conceivable level, the beautifully constructed feature-length documentary Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport opens with the mournful sound of a train and images of toys and books sitting untouched in what was once a child’s bedroom. As the credit sequence ends, an elderly woman addresses an unseen interviewer, recalling the day in…
Murphy and Pryor. Skywalker and Kenobi. Amos and Zeppelin. Regardless of the creative universe, the maverick apprentice tends to stride off into territory beyond the edges of the master’s map. So it is with Alan Rudolph, whose career blossomed after serving as assistant director to Robert Altman on Nashville in 1975 and sharing writing credit with him on Buffalo…
About halfway through the megabudget mountain-climbing adventure Vertical Limit, even the most rugged, thrill-hungry disaster movie fans may find themselves going numb. Not from the howling weather on the icy faces of K2, in the Himalayas, where the action supposedly takes place. Not from oxygen deprivation. Not even from stretches of dialogue so crudely written and screamingly delivered that…
Campus Crusade Thou shalt not think: Many thanks to Deb Hipp for a well-researched, well-written article on the International Churches of Christ (“The Church of the Poison Mind,” November 23). An especially large thank-you to those ex-members who courageously shared the stories of their journey to, in, and past the ICC movement. I spent most of my 20s involved with…
She’s thrown down the glove: Kansas City boxing goddess Sumya Anani is in a weird state of suspended animation. She was supposed to fight Britt VanBuskirk — the only woman who has ever beaten her — at Park Place Hotel this weekend, but the match has been postponed indefinitely, with no other matchups in sight. Yet her promoters at Tony…
Natalya Lowther grabs a fistful of tan dirt from her Pinwheel Farm and squeezes. It packs like wet snow, the wrinkles of her fingers still visible when she opens her hand. “Sandy silt loam” is the technical name for the soil left on her 11-acre farm over thousands of years of Kansas River flooding. Its granules are so fine, they…
“Burlington is always bragging about being the catfish capital of the world. Well, it’s high time we got a beautiful woman to take over from the catfish.” — Rosemary Williams, Burlington resident and “former virgin” from Virgil, Kansas On a Wednesday night in August, Jeannie Bates slipped into a tuxedo jacket and a leather thong with three strands of rhinestones….
Steak ‘n’ wail: I’m sure I wasn’t the only one crying crocodile tears when the 11-year-old Walt Bodine’s Steakhouse closed its doors in August as part of the Hotel Phillips’ $23 million renovation. During the restaurant’s final few years, there was only one word to describe the food and the service: awful. My last meal in the old-fashioned dining room…
