The Kansas City Art Institute’s inquisitors arrived the first day of October. The five administrators journeyed from Creighton University in Omaha and art schools in Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine and Pennsylvania. Their job was to decide whether the degrees the Art Institute was awarding were worth the embossed paper they were printed on. The first night, the visitors shared drinks with…
Movies of the late 1940s and ’50s, such as The Stork Room and The Joker Is Wild, did for supper clubs what Saturday Night Fever did for disco in the 1970s: They made going out to eat, dance and hear music seem glamorous and sexy. When Shawn McClenny, the owner of Raoul’s Velvet Room (see Cafe,), took over that venue…
Sure, this town has nightclubs that serve food. But a supper club — an idea that hearkens back to the elegant joints of the 1940s and ’50s, with maître d’s and cigarette girls — is something classier. The concept behind Raoul’s Velvet Room obviously isn’t new. Some memorable upscale supper clubs lurk in Kansas City’s past (see Mouthing Off,)….
28 Thursday In anticipation of the weekend, you can find a mellow place to have a good time at the Cup and Saucer, 412-B Delaware, which can function as a coffee shop, a bar or a gallery. The artwork on display, Maggie McDaniel’s Energy Burn, is a collection of mixed-media works that combine ink, gesso and burned wood. The huge…
Julia Query started working as an exotic dancer at the Lusty Lady in San Francisco because she heard it was the hip, alternative, feminist place to strip. The idea of a feminist stripping job may sound laughable, but Query says that when women go to jobs where they are expected to wear makeup and cute suits and speak coyly…
In the 1950s, after the world had been made safe for democracy, Americans were terrified to discover that the world was safe for communism too. As Soviet scientific achievements propelled communists farther into space, we held on to what we had at home: color televisions, sewing machines, refrigerators and toaster ovens. But if a cozy fortress of a home…
With a new executive director, Shelley McThomas Bryant, as well as two new directors, the 2001 Heart of America Shakespeare Festival makes its ninth year one that ignores rules and regulations about keeping Shakespeare sacrosanct. “Shakespeare would roll over in his grave,” said one excited patron at the break in The Tempest, “but I love it.” There had been…
On the title track of his new album, Lee Roy Parnell sings, How can true love ever find us/if we’re just someone we’ve made up? No doubt that’s a question to which Parnell has given some serious thought over the past few years. In the early ’90s, Parnell was a serious country hit maker — seven Top 10s in half…
Plenty of recent action films have spawned throbbing, techno-heavy soundtracks, spurring audiences to visit dance floors to unleash the energy they’ve stored while vicariously enjoying a series of beatings. However, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was able to pull in bigger guns than its predecessors, scoring unreleased tracks from its top contributors whereas, say, The Matrix made do with album cuts….
Forget for a moment — or longer if possible — that the most conspicuous positive review so far published about the new R.E.M. disc, Reveal, was written by Rob Sheffield for Rolling Stone. A four-star nod from the man whose wit-free columns exist solely to nurse on the silicone tits of bare-midriff pop is about as redemptive as having Sinbad…
The catch phrase at this year’s OZZfest was “Give yourselves a hand” — as performer after performer saluted the tired troopers in the audience. (The actual quote was more like “Fucking give your fucking selves a fucking hand!” For the remainder of this article, however, gratituitous profanity will be eliminated from reports of stage banter — for brevity’s sake)….
There’s always been a gap between the albums reviewers like and the records people actually buy, but in recent years the term “critical darlings” has become synonymous with experimental or inaccessible musicians who display no regard for entertainment value. However, critics occasionally appreciate fun-loving hard-rock bands such as Queens of the Stone Age or Monster Magnet. Beloved by scribes (lead…
Veteran singer and much-covered (“Seven Bridges Road”) songwriter Steve Young is one of those artists whose cult followings among other musicians border on the worshipful. The kind of player and writer who transcends the fugitive life of the performer and retires to the meditative silence of a Zen master. But after a seven-year layoff between albums, Young came down off…
Now here’s a tricky one. Start with a busload of familiar and appealing stars, shacked up together for a couple of weeks in a house in the Hollywood Hills. Assign them their mission: to emulate themselves — sort of — while dutifully reminding us that human relationships can be complicated. Then set the tone (Celebrity meets The Celebration, only…
For almost two decades, Stanley Kubrick wanted to make a film based on Brian Aldiss’ 1969 short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” about a robot child named David who wants only to be “real” so Mummy and Daddy will love him. The late director envisioned “Super-Toys” as his own reworking of Pinocchio, and perhaps an extension of what he…
“It’s making me sick that anyone would take an opposite position just because they are in competition with someone. The Kansas City Star blew it. …I could be a cub reporter, an intern, and know that this is a gargantuan story. So what does The Star do? They bury it because we .” — Kevin Kietzman, complaining that KMBZ and…
Sports talk radio has a profound effect on how the rest of Kansas City media cover teams and athletes. Sometimes, that’s a bad thing. Last week, Kevin Kietzman, WHB’s part owner and afternoon talk show host, manufactured a big “scoop” that dominated local media for days. Suddenly, everyone was talking about building a new baseball stadium downtown after Kietzman gave…
Probe this: On June 19, Judge Dean Whipple ordered an investigation of the school board and district that might, perhaps, finally unearth just what the hell is wrong with them. Investigators will report to federal monitor Charles McClain, who is the focus of evil in the world, if Elma Warrick knows evil. McClain has angered Warrick and three other board…
By his own definition, Bruce Campbell is a “midgrade, kind of hammy actor”—a B-movie star, in other words, a man whose career unfolds, like a Swedish porn loop, on Cinemax in the wee small hours of the morning. When I mentioned to a handful of people I was writing about Bruce Campbell this week, they all responded with the…
Robert Lile has reached middle age behind bars, proclaiming himself innocent of kidnapping a seventeen-year-old girl and raping her in the backseat of his car eighteen years ago. When he was 25, he had consensual sex with the minor, he says, but the Kansas Department of Corrections calls that claim “failure to accept responsibility for his crimes.” Lile says he…
Because Bill Callahan, who records under the name Smog, delivers his songs in a detached, low voice that’s more posthypnotic suggestion than singing, folks lazily compare him to Leonard Cohen or Lou Reed. But Callahan lacks Reed’s grit and Cohen’s grace; his work employs neither the leathery colic that makes Reed the missing link between Dion and Cohen nor the…
Red, White and Boom remains a peculiar institution — an annual all-day festival that groups spectacularly disparate acts — but in the past two years it has evolved, offering more than a gawk-worthy freak lineup. Last year, the event delivered Melissa Etheridge, a revitalized Bon Jovi and poised-for-stardom attractions Destiny’s Child and Pink. 2001’s edition is basically a summer…
The centerpiece of Tim McGraw’s new album, Set This Circus Down, is “Things Change.” Some say it’s too rock ‘n’ roll/But it’s just good music if you can feel it in your soul, McGraw argues in retaliation to last year’s “Murder on Music Row,” the Alan Jackson and George Strait duet that charged the Nashville combine with mowing down the…
Only a band as star-crossed as Weezer could risk commercial suicide by making a pop album. But then, only a band as star-crossed as Weezer could become an arena-filling big shot by releasing a commercial flop and staying silent for a few years. Pinkerton, a record that mixed hard-edged melodies with lyrics that read like singer River Cuomo’s diary entries,…
