When it comes to dessert, or dolci, in Italian restaurants, the ubiquitious tiramisu has easily surpassed spumoni in popularity. Plenty of restaurants, such as Tony Ferrara’s, still serve spumoni; though it was originally a frozen blend of sweetened marscapone cheese, rum and candied citron, most of us recognize it as a pink and green ice cream dish, sometimes made with…
If you want to know what a small town Kansas City really is, throw a name at Tony Ferrara. Chances are the 49-year-old restaurateur has met, waited on, cooked for, hired, fired or otherwise worked with the person. It’s “Six Degrees of Tony”: Ferrara either knows someone you know or knows someone who knows the person you know. So…
14 Thursday The Delilah who is coming to town today to speak at 7:30 p.m. at Unity Temple on the Plaza, 707 W. 47th Street, isn’t the chick who cut Samson’s hair when he had done such a studly job of growing it all those years. This Delilah, like the one in the Bible, uses no surname, which reminds…
Alive with luminous colors and hyperactive abstract forms, Stan Brakhage’s most recent hand-painted films are more reminiscent of Jupiter than of the yawning prairie. Yet Brakhage insists that his art is firmly rooted in images of the wheat fields around Winfield, Kansas, where he spent much of his childhood and where he helped his grandmother make Christmas decorations from any…
Cocoa Peru, a much-loved drag queen, once told massive crowds at New York City’s Wigstock Festival (a celebration of cross-dressing) about her childhood flair for girly hats. As a little boy, Cocoa had owned a hat with a pom-pom on top. The kids at school would take it and toss it back and forth in a vicious game of keep-away….
Will and Grace and their purr-fectly catty sidekicks, Jack and Karen, are such exceptionally realized characters partly because they’re contained within a television screen. Will and Grace the movie would allow them to go further than they already do (Will would get laid, for example) but likely would tank — their performances would be glaringly artificial, leaving audiences saying, “But…
Chris King’s noontime oldies show on KPRS 103.3 notwithstanding, you’re about as likely to hear “old-school jams” on today’s urban contemporary radio as you are to hear DMX cooing a love ballad. That’s particularly true of the music’s grittiest, blues-based side, which hasn’t been a consistent radio presence since Stax closed its doors a quarter-century ago. However, in working-class clubs…
When an underground band impacts the mainstream, interest usually trickles back to its influences. Nirvana moved a lot of Melvins and Meat Puppets records, and Green Day and The Offspring pointed young punks toward the Sex Pistols, TSOL and Social Distortion. When riot grrrl reached the peak of its popularity, music critics directed Bikini Kill fans toward pioneering all-female outfits…
Tammy Cochran has just released the sort of mainstream country debut Nashville wasn’t supposed to have in it anymore. A thirty-something divorcée from rural Ohio, Cochran has a stunning voice that’s muscular and 21st-century twangy, and her recordings of love and loss clearly have gleaned wisdom from the old records even though they can’t be mistaken for anything but right…
In his liner notes to this essential reissue, writer David Fricke cites Robyn Hitchcock’s four Bs — The Beatles, Syd Barrett, Captain Beefheart and The Byrds — as the axis around which the singer’s nascent songwriting revolved. Indeed, The Soft Boys’ 1979 disc, A Can of Bees, is a slightly too-shaken vessel of those influences. But in 1980, Hitchcock, guitarist…
When Black Sabbath is on the bill, OZZfest essentially becomes a Black Sabbath concert with a day’s worth of openers. Even in 1999, when the festival boasted an amazing lineup (System of a Down, Deftones, Slayer at its best), Black Sabbath dwarfed all warm-up acts by delivering tight renditions of some of the best rock songs ever written. When the…
About three years ago, Travis Keller created a Web site to display his photography. An avid music fan, Keller soon posted an interview with Ink & Dagger, a band that included several of his friends from the Los Angeles area, and expanded to reviewing discs once record labels added his site to their promo mailing list. By 1999, the fledgling…
It’s happening. Grunge — not only dead and buried but now also fossilized — is being dug up and examined by young musicians. And discarded all over again. Not that nostalgia for grunge is any better than the sound itself, but where one could have expected the oily detritus of Nirvana, early Smashing Pumpkins and Mudhoney to one day fuel…
Slipknot fans might be nervous, having seen the pattern before: Band develops a unique sound, gets ignored by radio and MTV, tours the nation with more vigor than a presidential candidate, earns record sales, respect and a rabid fanbase by doing things its own way, then, without warning, becomes part of the machine it had been fighting. Sometimes the group…
In a year inundated with massive movies, it’s a pleasant surprise to note that a truly spectacular adventure has arrived in the form of a Disney cartoon called Atlantis: The Lost Empire. It’s a terrific movie, full of Jules Verne-style designs and Victorian charm, a masterfully crafted visual feast presented in Cinemascope. Codirectors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise don’t make…
Brian Mossman and the Fine Arts Group of Theatres open their Halfway to Hollywood festival this weekend. The festival already is — in breadth alone — one of the city’s major cultural events. Over ten days, the festival screens more than fifty films that are, in the tradition of proper wedding etiquette, a mix of the old and new,…
“They better fix Jermaine Dye’s attitude because he’s the bad apple on the Royals right now. He’s been telling everybody that he’s out of here and that he’s going to be like Johnny Damon and go somewhere else and make a lot of money. He’s playing like his heart’s not in it.” — Dave Stewart, KQRC 98.9 “Jermaine is one…
If a minor league hockey franchise goes out of business and nobody notices, does it mean we need another one to replace it? The Kansas City Blades ceased operation with a whimper and a shrug on June 4, eleven years after the team first skated into town as a member of the now-disbanded International Hockey League. The silence heard ’round…
Urban Legends Back to the future: Regarding C.J. Janovy’s “Future Schlock” (June 7): I have lived in downtown Kansas City on Quality Hill for almost three years now, so whenever I see an article in the Pitch on that subject, it catches my eye. I think all of the things the article mentions are good ideas, especially having the performing…
If Thom Yorke were the type to address his doubters in song, After years of waiting/nothing came, the opening lines to Radiohead’s Amnesiac, might go down with Kurt Cobain’s Teenage angst has paid off well/now I’m bored and old as a classic half-sarcastic, half self-deprecating salvo. For that matter, Yorke’s refrain Get off my case could be interpreted as a…
The words “Calexico, California,” bring to mind a tawdry, lawless border town, but in reality Calexico is a sleepy burg set just close enough to Mexicali to witness that real-life rough-and-tumble town’s zesty existence without having to live it. On the other hand, the Tucson, Arizona-based duo Calexico, which features John Convertino (of the pioneering Americana act Giant Sand) and…
Some music critics appear to have succumbed to the dumbing down of songwriting, lashing out at groups that dare to eschew hummable harmonies and the verse-chorus-verse format. Radiohead dared to challenge the rules with Kid A, and scores of the band’s former champions reacted by branding the album unlistenable. Tool expanded upon its unassailable sonic foundation with the sprawling masterpiece…
Rappin’ ain’t easy. Scribble a few lines. Do they rhyme? Is the verbiage hot? Will your wordplay rock a party? Difficult, isn’t it? Just ask Angie Martinez. Homegirl is a terrific radio personality, and her platform happens to be New York’s Hot 97 FM, the nation’s top urban radio station. But just because she displays spunk and wit when spinning…
On Love Songs for Machines, electronic musician Jake Mandell identifies his computer as the object of his affection. Did he not see 2001: A Space Odyssey? Did he not see The Matrix? If Mandell had seen the early ’80s films Heartbeeps and Electric Dreams from the short-lived computer woo genre, he would know that these kinds of stories always end…
