19 Thursday Against Design recently opened at the Kemper, 4420 Warwick, and a new exhibit has opened alongside it: Picture This, a photography exhibition that includes some of the most important names in the medium over the course of the twentieth century. Museum visitors can see works by such artists as Lisette Model, Aaron Siskind, Garry Winogrand and Manuel…
Over the past few years, the Country Club Plaza’s building boom has created a handful of restaurants so lavish in decor and scale — The Cheesecake Factory, McCormick & Schmick’s, The Capital Grille — that the older residents of this increasingly touristy district are starting to look shabby by contrast. And in the case of Fedora Cafe & Bar, time…
There’s no foie gras or cassoulet on the menu at Fedora Cafe & Bar (see review), as there might be in a true European-style bistro, but diners can order roasted duck — a dish beloved in France but still regarded warily by most Kansas City diners. “There’s the perception that it’s high in fat, which it is,” says chef Peter…
The new, independently owned Bluebird Bistro (see review) is cool partly by virtue of the original tile floors and tin ceilings of its very old building. So there’s a certain irony in that the latest corporate restaurant on the Plaza, Buca di Beppo, has to manufacture its hip retro decor. The Minneapolis-based chain’s second Kansas City location (the first is…
Most vegetarian restaurants have an image problem. Most people think of serious vegetarian restaurants — the ones that serve only healthy vegetable and grain dishes — as humorless, unattractive places that serve highly nutritious but tasteless food. And with zero sex appeal. This perception isn’t completely based in fantasy: During the apex of the “whole foods” movement of the…
12 Thursday Driving along Main Street between midtown and the Plaza, Kansas City’s massive commuting population ought to have noticed amid the dated billboards a more inflammatory (and possibly more relevant) sign that reads “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT.” This sign by Jenny Holzer originally was part of her “truisms” series, in which she displayed her own words…
“What becomes a legend most?” asked the infamous pre-PETA ads for Blackglama fur coats, depicting such great dames as Lillian Hellman and Joan Crawford. If the word “legend” has lost its meaning (“The legends of Dawson’s Creek soon in Entertainment Weekly!”), a star such as Chita Rivera returns to the term all of its forty-carat luster. “I’ve always loved…
What do you mean you can’t find the Tsil Cafe on 39th Street? Topeka novelist Thomas Fox Averill, who has set his first novel, Secrets of the Tsil Cafe, in a fictional two-story brick building on Kansas City’s busiest restaurant corridor, knows exactly where it is. The 52-year-old English professor at Washburn University chose the 39th Street neighborhood as…
Sitting the history books during high school in Kansas City, Kansas, never fazed Christina Anderson; they were just there, to be read, memorized and regurgitated onto tests or essays. It was when she got to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, that she noticed something was awry. “I realized how much was lacking,” she says. “I realized how there were…
Clocking in at just over 52 minutes, Sepultura’s Nation is a concise and visionary statement from a band that knows precisely what it wants to say. Ironically, that clarity might disappoint some fans used to this Brazilian band’s history of experimental song structures and global rhythms. The majority of these fifteen cuts are melodically straightforward (and even, at first glance,…
India.Arie opens her debut album, Acoustic Soul, by giving props to her musical ancestors: Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye and Donny Hathaway. She then proceeds to honor these pioneers with fifteen tracks that cleverly represent their musical legacy, ending the disc with a stirring five-minute tribute to Stevie Wonder. But don’t get it twisted — this soul sista ain’t a copycat….
It’s one thing to believe that pop punk, a realm of commercially viable albums and corporate-sponsored tours, can remain a bastion for the same nihilistic, up-the-system rhetoric delivered by the genre’s pricklier, less-melodic ancestors. It’s quite another for a band that operates within this arena to create a politically oriented concept album in a heavy-handed attempt to give this belief…
When Whiskeytown emerged in 1995, it was obvious that frontman Ryan Adams owed a substantial debt to pre- and postpunk alt-country heroes Gram Parsons and Uncle Tupelo. But he had his own stories to tell too. Specifically, the group’s debut, Faithless Street, and its masterpiece follow-up, Stranger’s Almanac, detailed a depressed and depressing South of rural towns where the mines,…
A year shy of fifty, Tom Petty has reached the position also held by old tourmate Bob Dylan: No longer dependent on a current release to draw audiences, Petty and his Heartbreakers are a destination unto themselves, a quiet institution. Petty’s sound is so consistent that having a favorite Petty album is almost redundant. When someone asks whom you listen…
Ah, summer, that blissful time of year when skeletons of venerable bands hit amphitheaters despite featuring as few as one or two members from the lineups that brought the groups fame. Coasting through shows, half-assing it through older material and playing incongruous new songs, these impostors tarnish the brand name that their more talented predecessors took years to develop. On…
Moaning Lisa’s gig on Saturday, June 30, at the Pyro Room, which had been on the calendar for weeks, figured to be a typical weekend show, with a decent crowd and an upbeat atmosphere. However, two days before the concert, ML frontman David George heard a bit of news that made him envision a fiery, riotous scene — and not…
Makah Nation, Neah Bay, Washington A cool spring evening envelops a cedar-plank house overlooking the rocky beach in the Makah whaling village of Ozette. Inside, a young boy sleeps on a wooden bench. A toy bow and arrow lie next to his head. Nearby, a woman tends the fires in the home of the whaling chief, his relatives and his…
As the Kansas City Wizards prepared to face the Chicago Fire in soccer at Arrowhead Stadium on Independence Day, two rows of Sudanese refugees stood for the national anthem. A TV cameraman hovered nearby, panning their faces, searching their dark eyes for some emotion to punctuate a happy ending to the story of these refugees’ tragic flight from their villages…
Party out of bounds: Weekend nights in Westport now resemble a police state more than ever, with cop-erected barricades keeping underage loiterers out of the streets. But the celebrated crowd-control techniques have made for some cranky shoppers who just need to pick up a little salami and Cool Whip at Westport’s 24-hour grocery store. “My boyfriend and I went to…
Brush Off Art and soul: Kendrick Blackwood’s article “Bad Impressions” (June 28) is an accurate account of what really goes on at the Kansas City Art Institute. In the fall of 1993, I entered KCAI. I was 35, unemployed, bankrupt and depressed and already had an undergraduate degree from a state university. My goal was to start a new life…
“We’re still running around in our pajamas and haven’t played a game yet, but the thing that’s most exciting to me is that I think this defense is going to be very, very good. … Offensively we’re going to be sound.” — Al Saunders, Chiefs offensive coordinator, WHB 810 “If you ever want to see a beautiful thing, come by…
The Road Home is the tenth feature from Zhang Yimou, still the mainland Chinese director best known to international audiences. (His closest competition is Chen Kaige, who made Farewell My Concubine and Temptress Moon.) His latest film has a number of things going for it: It represents a synthesis of Zhang’s two contrary stylistic tendencies; also it centers on…
Back in her early teens, Reese Witherspoon proved herself a terrific actress in her big-screen debut, Man in the Moon in 1991. Since then, she’s done first-rate work in such critical hits as Pleasantville, cult faves such as Freeway and Election and underrated gems such as Best Laid Plans. So how is it she now finds herself stuck in…
Masks were made to disguise, and from ancient times people have associated the mask with deceit and vice. Today, masks bring to mind thieves, Halloween and scary metal groups, suggesting this item’s reputation has improved little. But don’t fear Lagbaja, the troupe of twelve touring musicians from Nigeria that’s on its first extended foray into the United States in…
