If Farraddays’ Restaurant, the upscale dining room at the Isle of Capri Casino is a good bet for the money, then its sibling restaurant, the all-you-can-eat Calypso, may seem like a treasure trove at about $18 a person (including tax) for dinner. And it may be — for a hungry diner with a passion for crab legs and shrimp —…
I might not know the difference between three-card stud and a royal flush, but I do know that the Isle of Capri is off of Italy’s Sorrentine peninsula, not floating somewhere in the Caribbean. That may be news to most people who visit the new Isle of Capri Casino, where the decor, the nightclub and the buffet restaurant all…
29 Thursday As Artrain, a traveling art museum on a train, rolls into Union Station at Pershing and Main at 2 p.m., Kansas City’s science geeks and artsy types come together in a beautifully quirky space-cadet convention of sorts. The train is filled with the paintings, drawings and prints of Artistry in Space, which celebrates artists who captured the…
“You can’t develop neighborhoods alone,” says el Dorado architect David Dowell. “There has to be a critical mass of like-minded people who are equally willing to put their feet in the murky water without knowing if piranhas are going to chew off their feet.” This is precisely the nature of the risk taken about fifteen years ago by artists…
The Tivoli theater has borrowed from one of New York’s most esteemed art houses, transplanting the Film Forum moniker from Houston Street to Manor Square to launch a Film Forum of its own. This Thursday, the theater starts a monthly film series intended to bring to local audiences “rarely seen films representing the best of world cinema,” says Tivoli…
In the decade since Stuart Ross wrote and originally directed and choreographed Forever Plaid in its New York debut, musical theater has ventured into territory much less precious. From Julie Taymor’s visually splendid The Lion King through Jonathan Larson’s quasi-tragic Rent to last year’s dual decadent versions of the cocaine-soaked, pansexual The Wild Party, theatergoers’ expectations have been finessed…
My nephew is learning the names of things: “truck,” “cat,” “Daddy,” “tree.” He points to a bur oak tree (Latin name Quercus macrocarpa), distinguished by large fringed acorn cups that resemble the spiny burrs on a chestnut. Pioneers planted bur oaks to shade the open prairie grasslands. But my nephew says only “tree.” Perhaps someday he’ll learn there are…
Rock and roll does not die; it merely gets recycled. The Gotohells know this better than anyone, having pilfered enough toys in the attic to build their own boogie-rockin’ beast. The Gotohells wear their influences (Aerosmith, The Stooges, MC5) so freely that their own musical identity fails to surface. There is a reason The Cult never seemed to be more…
Jaheim Hoagland delivers prison soul, a hardcore perspective on love and life sung by a young man whose emotions have been in lockdown. He opens his debut, Ghetto Love, with a skit about his release from the penitentiary. This sets the tone for the CD — R&B with a gangsta edge sung by a self-proclaimed roughneck. Jaheim’s deep, husky growl,…
Gretchen Peters has composed some of the finest country hits of the past decade (just for starters, think Martina McBride’s “Independence Day”), but she’s also a criminally neglected singer-songwriter in her own right. Her debut, 1996’s The Secret of Life, is populated by women who set out in search of freedom, find themselves instead and then, if they’re very lucky,…
Albums such as Eric B. & Rakim’s Paid In Full, Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Ice Cube’s Amerikkka’s Most Wanted inevitably emerge whenever hip-hop fans discuss the greatest rap albums ever made. Noticeably absent from any such debates are works by female artists (who, unfortunately, have made barely a blip on the…
It’s really quite perplexing that grunge disappeared so quickly and completely from the music landscape. While many styles that disappeared from the mainstream radar still thrive, or at least survive, in the underground, grunge is almost completely extinct. Perhaps groups decided to alter their sound out of reverence to the memory of Nirvana, or perhaps bands such as Creed, Staind…
“Does anyone remember laughter?” said The Cult’s pink-eyelined frontman, Ian Astbury, echoing a particularly ridiculous piece of Led Zeppelin concert banter with no evident irony. If anyone in the crowd at Stubb’s, a midsized outdoor concert venue/barbecue joint in Austin, Texas, had forgotten how to guffaw, Astbury’s Monkees-style tambourine antics and obtuse between-song commentary surely led them on the path…
Split Lip Rayfield released its third album on Bloodshot Records last month, and the record’s title, Never Make It Home, seems prescient and vaguely foreboding. After taking a few months off, the Wichita-based quartet will remain on the road until late September, playing bluegrass festivals in Alaska, Florida and Winfield, Kansas, along the way. Split Lip Rayfield recently played two…
Few rackets in local music are as tough as the rap game. Punk and indie bands get all the cred for keeping the underground alive, but like the local rock, blues and jazz contingents, these artists at least have a place to play and a chance, however slim, of getting a song on the radio. In other words, they have…
On the last song of Over the Rhine’s affecting new disc, Films for Radio, the eerily quiet “When I Go,” singer Karin Berqquist asks, Will it make a difference when I go? The other half of Over the Rhine, multi-instrumentalist Linford Detweiler, admits that a few months after Berqquist — his wife — wrote the song, “I asked her if…
Hollywood appears to be developing a healthy sense of humor about Valentine’s Day. In the new millennium, rather than dole out romantic trifles like Return to Me as per the usual plan, we’ve seen Valentine (bitter ex-nerd cuts beautiful people to bits), Hannibal (sadistic brain-eater as romantic hedonist) and now The Caveman’s Valentine, set on February 14 and featuring Samuel…
One of the most common yet harmless quirks of the human brain occurs when that one song gnaws away at you for hours or days on end. Whether Bach or Beck, it can be the stanza that won’t die — a melodious hiccup on the way to a migraine. That concept is blown to apocalyptic proportions in Go Shibata’s…
As its title suggests, Spy Kids is an action fantasy aimed primarily at the preteen/early-teen audience. For all its thrills — and it has plenty — it’s strictly a PG film … which is all the more surprising when you consider its source: Robert Rodriguez, master of bloody gunplay and monster films that sometimes push the boundaries of even…
“I like Posnanski a lot, but I’ll be honest, I’m not exactly sure what the point of this particular column was. Okay, so a whole bunch of people have been e-mailing Joe with enthusiastic thoughts about the 2001 Royals. So what? I guarantee you, every year I could find thousands of people who genuinely believe that the Cubs are going…
The last time this town’s baseball fans suffered so much manure was when Charles O. Finley, owner of the Kansas City Athletics during the 1960s, got the media’s goat by letting his mule loose in the press room at old Municipal Stadium. The baseball mascot crapped on everything in sight. Now, instead of Finley’s mule, we have Joe Posnanski braying…
Violent Femmes The beating generation: Oh, my God! I was SICK when I read about what those girls did to a “friend” (Deb Hipp’s “Tough Love,” March 15). A story like this makes me lose all respect for the justice system and basic faith in humanity. How could anyone commit such unspeakable acts and not get her ass thrown in…
Dog days: Things in Kansas City, Kansas, apparently have gotten so bad that God is the only answer. At least that’s what it looked like last Monday night, when incumbent mayor Carol Marinovich and challenger Elmer Sharp’s campaign manager were asked to take notes but not speak while members of the Wyandotte Interfaith Sponsoring Council held forth on a slew…
Ennio Morricone can tell you stories about each of his 400 children—where they were conceived, what they mean to him, why each one remains so singular and special he cannot and will not choose a favorite. He’s proud even of the orphans, the runts, the bastards, the children long ago born and forgotten, left abandoned and unloved by filmmakers and…
