It’s lunchtime at Scuola Vita Nuova, and Gina Valente mingles among the third-, fourth- and fifth-graders as though she were hosting a cocktail party. Fewer than one hundred students are enrolled in the charter school, and as principal, Valente knows them all by name. Some even run up to hug Valente, who might be better known to the rest of…
There’s no business like show business — unless you’re talking “eatertainment,” a word coined to describe the Benihana of Tokyo Japanese steakhouse chain. While it’s a stretch to call Kansas City’s teppan-yaki steakhouses — such as the new Suki — “dinner theaters,” they do offer comic entertainment along with the meal. The entertainment, however, is on a par with the…
Soon after a young Japanese immigrant named Rocky Aioki opened his first teppan-yaki steakhouse, Benihana of Tokyo, in New York City in 1964, he dubbed the then-novel concept “dinner theater.” And it was a show: Customers were seated around a shiny, white-hot grill, where they watched a specially trained chef cut and chop vegetables and meat, flip eggs and…
22 Thursday Carlos Mencia’s humor is offensive — “equal-opportunity offensive,” as he puts it. That doesn’t mean that audience members who hear his Take a Joke, America act at Stanford & Sons Comedy Club, 504 Westport Road, won’t laugh. Mencia is a funny guy, and his delivery is so convincing that even the sensitive, thoughtful people who disagree with…
Kansas and Missouri have seen their share of presidential politics. Harry Truman grew up in Independence, Bob Dole ran for president four years ago and John Ashcroft’s cabinet nomination raised a stink nationwide. But in an act of campaign-reforming performance art, Claire Joyce and Kate Legere begin their 2004 presidential campaign tour this week (in celebration of President’s Day). And…
Aeros is a dance performance, even though the dancers “are not at all dancers,” says choreographer Daniel Ezralow. “Dance doesn’t exist in their training.” But they are trained — as gymnasts, gold-medal-holding gymnasts from the National Romanian Team. Aeros presented challenges for Ezralow and his collaborators, David Parsons and Moses Pendleton. But the idea — that bodies capable of…
Since she wrote the play Stop Kiss, Diana Son has been guilty by association, caught in that Kafkaesque feeling of being charged as a criminal without a shred of evidence. “A lot of people assume I’m gay from the play,” she said in a recent online chat with dramaturge Sarah Ruskin. “A lot of people assume I’m gay because…
Blame Blood, Sweat & Tears and Spyro Gyra for ruining the word “fusion”; since the heyday of those groups, uttering the word brings thoughts of endless wank-offery, followed by the image of some dude soloing with a stupid just-lost-a-pinkie-to-his-hedge-clippers look on his face. However, if you erase the word’s association with the misguided late-’60s/early-’70s jazz-rock genre, the idea of “fusion”…
Stewart Francke is a white, Detroit-based singer/songwriter who’s made one of the finest soul albums in recent memory. Previously, Francke’s music sounded a bit like Jackson Browne dancing with Southside Johnny. On What We Talk of … When We Talk, he expands his horizons, calling out to the giants of ’70s soul who confronted issues of race and class with…
Many of today’s popular rap-metal bands bring to mind John Cusack’s character in the 1985 film Better Off Dead. In that movie, Cusack’s character gets dumped by his girlfriend, struggles with teenage angst and decides to kill himself. Normally, suicide is a tragic subject, but Cusack’s character doesn’t have deep emotional wounds — he’s just had a bad day and…
To Conquer possesses the power to lull listeners into a semiconscious state, and while that’s not always a compliment, it’s intended as high praise in this case. Painful, excruciating boredom can turn spectators into drooling zombies, but so can soothing, throbbing repetitive stimulation, the kind provided by a trained masseuse or a talented drone band. Featuring such decorated local musicians…
For many years, the vast majority of musicians could not afford to release an album without significant support from a record label. Internet idealists now predict a world in which record labels are obsolete and consumers browse search engines, using all-inclusive lists of bands to weed out the good from the bad — even if the Ninth Circuit Court of…
Maybe you could write a story about how obsolete we are,” Kill Creek’s Scott Born suggested when the Pitch initially approached him about featuring his fifteen-year-old group. It was a typical Kill Creek response to this sort of attention, really, falling right in line with the flavor of the band’s songs. On the one hand, there’s the introspective, self-effacing Kill…
In these short-attention-span-oriented times, concept albums have become rare. Today’s top-selling albums often offer some sort of unifying theme (Hallmark-variety vows of love, threats of violence against lesser hip-hop artists, angst-filled revelations about a troubled childhood), but these releases rarely tell a story from beginning to end. To many music fans, the near-extinction of concept records is cause for celebration,…
Just when you thought all the four-letter-word band names were taken, along comes VAST. But the real swear word in rock is “modesty”; despite the fact that VAST is a pretentious acronym for something that sounds as though it belongs at the local multiplex — Visual Audio Sensory Theater — songwriter Jon Crosby exudes humility. “I used to think I…
It’s Saturday night at Tootsie’s at 18th and Main, where a couple of women walk hand in hand through the bar’s smoky haze. The dance floor fills with moving female bodies. Groups of friends — mostly women — sit at tables, sipping beer and trading stories. But the sapphic sanctuary is not as idyllic as it seems. At one table,…
The Saturday before Valentine’s Day, 25 Kansas City-area labor activists turned up the heat on America’s card giant, Hallmark Cards Inc., berating the company for heartless indifference toward Mexican workers who make the shiny gift bags sold in card shops (“Hall of Shame,” August 17, 2000). The demonstrators — many of them from nonprofit groups, churches and unions — rallied…
It was to have been a routine stop on a routine press tour, yet another town in which the actress was to show up, chit and chat with the local media about her movie, then move on—the traveling salesman getting the word out, moving The Product. Denver, Dallas, San Francisco, Your Town Here—all stops along the circuitous route from set…
Paste this: Voters might have let them keep their signs by rejecting the anti-billboard Proposition A last November, but Missouri’s sign erectors have apparently gotten the message that their billboards are ugly. Why else would the Missouri Outdoor Advertising Association lobby for legislation that will, as the association’s lawyer, Bill May, puts it, “encourage voluntary removal” of roadside signs “by…
The most memorable moment of the Kansas Jayhawks’ season so far occurred February 3 during the second half of a 16-point win over Texas inside the comfy confines of Allen Fieldhouse. Drew Gooden failed to move quickly enough on defense to stop the Texas postman from scoring. Then a referee whistled Gooden for fouling the Longhorn. Coach Roy Williams leapt…
“Eric may be the most unappreciated player we’ve had here in a long time. I think we have to live with the fact that sometimes Eric does not go hang up on the rafter and dunk it with his toes. He does not give you that.” — Roy Williams, Lawrence Journal-World GH: Coach Roy has babied Eric Chenowith for four…
It’s almst impossible to know what to make of Monkeybone after one viewing; there’s so much going on in this dreamland of stop-motion and computer-generated animation and celebrity cameos that you have trouble keeping up with it. Indeed, like a half-remembered dream, the movie’s often so overwhelming that even its dull, dead moments (of which there are many, unfortunately)…
The twentieth century is replete with examples of unconscionable crimes carried out in the name of some quasi-political, military or religious cause — acts of such misguided judgment and mindless brutality that they seem to cross an invisible threshold of decency, morality and understanding. The My Lai massacre of 1968, in which American GIs gunned down more than 500 Vietnamese…
On the Ball He got game: Thanks for including Greg Hall regularly. His Sportswaves Web site was my favorite morning fix. I particularly enjoy the Off the Couch quotes and comments at the end. Never understood how someone could listen to all that talk radio, but he seems to pick out the best and/or most interesting quotes from the week….
