I flipped on KCUR 89.3 last week in time to hear an NPR interview with former New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl (who will appear at Unity Temple on May 22 to promote her new book, Comfort Me With Apples). Reichl was talking about educating her palate to better write about food. For example, since her contemporaries didn’t…
3 Thursday Tonight and tomorrow night at the Lied Center, 15th and Crestline in Lawrence, the University Dance Company performs an impressive lineup of dance variations staged by five world-renowned choreographers. The program is so cosmopolitan that dance lovers might begin to wonder whether they made a wrong turn on the way, veering off to the East Coast by accident….
When the Troost Community Market opens for the season on Saturday, it will begin its third year of transforming the northeast corner of Linwood and Troost into a hub of commerce and goodwill. As one project of the Troost Corridor Community Association — a group whose other efforts to rehabilitate the area include beautification and economic development — the market…
Just because Katherine Pope and Heather Nania are into clothes doesn’t mean they’ve been influenced by a lifetime of fashion magazines. (“I just started looking at them,” Nania notes.) In fact, they both wear comfortable pants and plain shirts as they work in their mannequin-filled studio, preparing for a May 3 show at The Cube. They’ll be showing forty…
The director of the Unicorn Theatre’s Mud, River, Stone, Darryl V. Jones, writes in a program insert that his life has been “a collage of contradictions.” He says that, though born black, he has been told that he “doesn’t sound black” and, perhaps most confusing, that he is “black, but not black enough.” So it’s understandable that Jones has…
Few bands in ’90s rock attained the legendary status of the Melvins. Founded in 1985, the group was an obvious influence on fellow Aberdeen, Washington, native Kurt Cobain and subsequently on grunge, the genre that dominated the decade. The Melvins then were heralded in the press as the band that made the man who saved rock, and even though they…
At first, it’s easy enough for cynics to dismiss the fact that nineteen-year-old Corinna racked up hundreds of write-in votes in the Klammies categories for Best Folk Artist and Best Female Vocalist. After all, anyone with a Girl Scout’s knack for door-to-door marketing could drum up neighborhood support or, as Corinna did, showcase her songs at a variety of Olathe…
What the fuck is the world of rock coming to? Prince won’t perform songs that contain curse words (i.e., all the good ones); indie labels have to call to smooth things over with club owners after a band gives the doorman “too much attitude”; a Bay Area punk rock band can’t get played on some college radio stations because the…
It’s five days before St. Patrick’s Day, and Jane Wiedlin has green hair. This makes her easier to spot than fellow Go-Go Charlotte Caffey, who is dressed in black and exudes an appeal closer to soccer mom than girl-band guitarist. The pair are barnstorming Midwestern radio stations two months ahead of the first Go-Go’s album in seventeen years, due May…
John Mayall is ready for his close-up. The veteran British blues champion — who thirty years ago was confident enough of his star status that Jack Bruce, future Cream bass player, complained that Mayall underpaid his backup musicians and hogged the only bed on the tour van — is fighting a legacy that threatens to be snubbed by immortality. “It’s…
After Eric Schaeffer made the 1996 amiable date movie If Lucy Fell with a pre-Sex and the City Sarah Jessica Parker, it would have been forgivable had he continued in this vein. Movie marketing is about presenting flattering images of young hipsters to young hipsters. Schaeffer may have had the opportunity to repeat himself and, like the studly ball…
Currently sitting in a very peaceful meditational facility. First time here. The location (which shall remain unnamed so as to maintain nondenominational vibe) was selected specifically for the loving creation of this review, as it provides an almost perfect contrast to The Center of the World, the new motion picture from acclaimed director Wayne Wang (The Joy Luck Club,…
Mouse in the House Disney world: I read with interest Casey Logan’s article “Cast System” (March 29). I’ve worked for Disney Direct Marketing since September 1999. Prior to that, I was a social worker for twenty years. I was gradually pushed out of my profession because of downsizing due to managed care and management’s ability to obtain younger social workers…
True colors: Incredibly, no one guffawed in Judge Dean “Wimpy” Whipple’s federal courtroom Friday when he ordered the Kansas City school board to stop holding secret meetings. In his own secret meeting with lawyers a day earlier, he’d decided not to make the board’s Filthy Five explain in open court why they’d convened an illegal session to fire Superintendent Benjamin…
Last thing first. At this very moment, Chris Carter sits behind his desk in the Ten Thirteen Production offices, on the 20th Century Fox lot in Studio City, California, finishing the final X-Files episode of this season. The show’s creator has just one scene left to write—the very last—and that is how he will spend the rest of today: figuring…
On the night of Wednesday, April 18, Sandy Smith of Sacramento, California, retired to her Kansas City hotel room and flipped on the early news, which was hot with reports of the firing of school Superintendent Benjamin Demps. “It was a little déjà vu,” she says. “We thought, ‘Oh my goodness, it’s just like the old days for us.’” Hours…
Eleven-year-old Anthony Kimball’s neighborhood offers few places to play. He lives in Rosedale, a working-class district in southeast Kansas City, Kansas. Some days he hops on a bike and winds his way to the park at Southwest Boulevard and Eighth Street, where he usually can find kids of all ages squeezing every drop of fun out of the day. But…
