The Peter Allen tune “Everything Old Is New Again” would be a good theme song for The Bamboo Hut, which has survived seventy years by changing so little that it deserves to be retro-hip. In the case of the long-vacant Oldham Hotel in the River Market, a high-style makeover by designer and restaurateur Nick McNeil has turned the building’s first-floor…
In the fabulous 1948 movie Road House, Ida Lupino plays a tough-talking singer with a cigarette perpetually dangling from her ruby lips. She gets a job in one of those off-the-highway joints that’s part restaurant, part smoky saloon. Cornel Wilde, playing the roadhouse manager, sizes her up right away as “the new equipment.” And she was the only new…
31 Thursday Americans are going nuts for Japanese toys. Angelic Hello Kitty products can be as intimate as toilet paper dispensers, practical as cell phone carriers and catty as friend books that help clique members label all acquaintances correctly. But it’s sometimes helpful to remember that Japan is not only the birthplace of all that is cute and cartoonish;…
Lewis Black, who does the “Back in Black” segment on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, still laughs about his early stand-up routines. “Back when I was no good,” he recalls, “there was a guy who called out, ‘Why don’t you go home and gargle with razor blades?’ I was laughing so hard, I told him he won, that I…
The first shot in Oratorio of the Grotesques, op. 7 depicts a beautiful blond male, naked and cut like steel, lying on his back on a public bathroom floor. From there, who cares where the film goes — but the writer and director, St. Charles High School senior Tristan Cook, takes his Kan Film Festival entry in several directions…
Second to lawyers, perhaps no other professional group is more culturally maligned than nuns. From Sister Mary Ignatius_ to Agnes of God to jokes such as “What’s black and white and red all over? A nun rolling down a hill,” playwrights and comics have declared nuns fair game. Before Susan Sarandon’s complex portrayal of Sister Helen Prejean in Dead…
The Sprague Brothers should have made their debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, circa 1964. They would have broken huge, built up to an obscure but legendary 1967 appearance on the Smothers Brothers’ show, then disappeared. Never mind that taking out this CD unveils a photo of Chris and Frank Sprague, real life Penn and Teller-lookalike brothers, looking for all…
In case any doubt remained that the contemporary country music industry has no idea what it’s doing, Trick Pony settles the issue with a shotgun approach that still manages to miss the side of the barn by a country mile. The first few tracks of this debut, for example, are clearly shooting for an alternative country vibe. This isn’t necessarily…
New discs that promise all of an artist’s hits from a now-defunct record label are impossibly seductive, especially if that label’s obscure, and even more especially if the label art itself is completely retro-cool. If the artist is someone recognizable — in this case Buddy Guy’s now-departed blues partner — so much the better. Calling All Blues reveals the way…
It feels wrong to look a gift horse in the mouth when the horse is the gifted Joe Henry. But maybe now that Henry’s writing credit on sister-in-law Madonna’s “Don’t Tell Me” (included on Scar as the barely recognizable tango “Stop”) is earning him some royalties, the closer examination won’t hurt. Scar begs scrutiny but doesn’t always reward it. In…
The Dukes, a band named after a string of West Coast car clubs, titled its debut disc 2001: A Punk Oddessey, becoming the first group to take advantage of this timely opportunity. Unlike the epic Stanley Kubrick film that serves as the album’s namesake, The Dukes’ 2001 clocks in at a streamlined seventeen minutes, packing ten tunes into this…
It seems likely that progressive rock became so named because at one point its practitioners advanced music as an art form, creating complex soundscapes unlike anything that had preceded them. Unfortunately, prog-rock eventually became synonymous with ostentatious instrumental wanking and geeky wizards-and-warlocks subject matter. But some groups still deserve the compliment the genre’s name bestows. Chicago’s Cheer-Accident, with its extended…
Now that the mainstream swing craze is gone, daddy, gone, some of its temporary stars continue to haunt tiny clubs, pursue session work or reinvent themselves in musically fashionable ways. Cognizant of the fact that Dave Stephens, leader of the Klammy-winning Dave Stephens Swing Orchestra, hasn’t been making many public appearances of late, local music fans might have worried…
On paper, the reunion of the ’70s sonic guitar legends in Television would seem the pinnacle of the Noise Pop festival, held on the second weekend in May in Chicago. But the real climax came on the opening night of the five-day, fifty-act shindig, when Yo La Tengo shared the stage with Windy City indie institution Eleventh Dream Day. The…
You’re not supposed to feed a mogwai after midnight, but last night in Amsterdam somebody filled Stuart Braithwaite, guitarist for the frowning Scots quintet Mogwai, full of liquor. Nevertheless, as Braithwaite comes to the phone the next day, his thick Glaswegian brogue is no slower or less friendly (or, sadly, plainer to American ears) than usual. He’s not a fast…
Pearl Harbor isn’t really a movie at all, but a highlight reel prepared for a Jerry Bruckheimer career retrospective. The film is as impressive and as empty as any the producer has ever made, most of which seem to have been cut and pasted into it. There’s Top Gun: Two hotshot pilots, Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker…
“This year’s Royals team would probably beat the ’85 Royals team…. I can guarantee you this Royals team would beat the ’77 Royals team.” — Kevin Kietzman, in March of this year, WHB 810 “I was the only one saying in February and March that this team’s pitching was going to be terrible. Everybody else was predicting this was the…
Jamar Howard folds his angular six-foot-five-inch frame into a plush overstuffed chair in the great room of a luxurious six-bedroom Prairie Village home, casually answering his cell phone. Howard’s story was not supposed to take this fairy-tale turn. Fairy tales rarely come true for kids from Gary, Indiana. Especially a kid who has had almost no contact with a father…
Naming Rights Queer as folk: “Name Withheld Upon Request” (Letters, May 17) has the right to self-identify as he or she pleases, but it’s not his or her place to tell us homosexuals what to call ourselves. As for me, I prefer the label “queer.” And since I’m proud to be an openly queer man, you may print my name….
Day in and day out, the news tells how bad the Kansas City School District is — and to the kids it feels like a personal assault. “When you constantly hear people say you’re nothing, you go to a bad school, you’re stupid, that becomes pretty much all you know,” says Kaleena Rounds, valedictorian of Central High School. “A lot…
Tamra Davis is bound by contract not to discuss the film that, at this very moment, she’s editing for release next year. “I’m officially not supposed to do any press for it,” the director says sheepishly, so she offers a few off-the-record comments about the movie, a road-trip comedy-drama starring some newcomer named Britney Spears that’s tentatively titled What Are…
It is called the moment of metastasis. It is the time when a growth in a woman’s breast spreads to the rest of the body, firing off cancer cells like bombs. It is the moment when surgery alone no longer can solve the problem. Instead, treatment will require major surgery and multiple injections of chemicals. Even then, the cancer may…
One by one, the radio station’s board members file into Californos restaurant. A few nod grimly to each other. A KKFI 90.1 volunteer places a whirring tape recorder at the center of the table. As observers filter in, two women snap on their own recorders. These folks have learned to be cautious. A dark-eyed man and two women with black…
When a restaurant is located in a museum, it has a completely different vibe than if the museum actually is a restaurant, as is Chappell’s in North Kansas City. In the case of the much-loved Rozelle Court, the enclosed atrium inside the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, executive chef Dwight Hawkins and his crew have the creative challenge of putting together…
