Only a couple of months ago, it looked as though Donald Miller had a publishing home run on his hands—a thoughtful, exhilarating, inclusive book about World War II scheduled to hit stores just as Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ Band of Brothers was finishing its critically lauded run on HBO. His work was—no, it is—nothing short of a publishing milestone:…
“This is the way we are going to do business: We’ve decided if it’s in a public forum, if it’s newsworthy, we’re going to play it , and we’re going to let you folks see what goes on around professional sports. I don’t see any reason why we in the media should sweep stories under the carpet and protect the…
How do you shut up the biggest mouth in Kansas City sports-talk radio? Wave a tape recorder in Jason Whitlock’s face and ask whether he is negotiating to move his radio show from WHB 810 to KMBZ 980 and there compete head-to-head against his current radio boss, Kevin Kietzman (Kansas City Strip, November 15). “Get the fuck away from me,”…
Truck driving once was among the most popular topics in country music. Nowadays, you can tune in your local country station for weeks without finding so much as a skid mark’s worth of evidence that the genre ever existed. That’s why Truck Driver’s Boogie, which collects twenty such over-the-road standards, is such an important reissue. The trucking genre geared up…
Name something that’s better than the Klassic Kinks. Miniskirts? Not short enough. Cherry-chocolate layer cake? Not sweet enough. Two hundred pages by J.D. Salinger? Ray Davies could paint existential dysfunction as richly in three minutes. In the mid and late ’60s, Dave Davies’ riffs sprouted switchblades in brother Ray’s sad, literate pop gardens for tunes as tough, soulful, compact and…
Just two albums into her career, Macy Gray has earned frequent comparisons to the legends: Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Janis Joplin. But while the Canton, Ohio, native displays traits of each performer, she has also developed her own distinctive style, which combines an oddball-cool attitude, quirky songwriting and an alternately husky and helium-filled voice. On The Id, Gray reveals a…
Rumor has it that Cave In (pictured) drove away scores of melodyphobes at a metal festival by launching into one of its catchy new creations. Having exiled those of little faith, Cave In treated the survivors to a cranium-cracking recital of its cacophonous classic Until Your Heart Stops in its entirety. After ripping through its aggressive old-school material, the band…
Let’s say you’re a member of an up-and-coming Kansas City-based group, one with a couple of EPs and some touring experience under its belt. Looking for a late-in-the-year showcase gig, you spot Tuesday, November 27, and savor the possibility. Everyone will be back from holiday travel — check. People who recently have gorged themselves on leftovers and ditched their visiting…
Though they’re given to showy signs of support — letter-writing campaigns to music magazines begging for cover stories and countless request calls to radio stations — Tool fans don’t seem willing to give their idol the benefit of the doubt when it comes to selecting an opening act. An eclectic list of groups, all of them handpicked by the headliner,…
If you’re a college freshman, don’t read this. Just grab your newfound peers and go see Richard Linklater’s new movie, Waking Life, then head off to one of those ethereal late-night dining establishments for which you’ll desperately pine once the real world gets hold of you. Discuss. For others, this project may amount to an almost perfect “desert island” movie;…
Tour de Farce Won’t God protect him? I read about “Bibleman” (Kansas City Strip, November 8) and thought I would take a look on the Web to see more about him. Noticed that he has cancelled his “tour” due to security concerns. I suppose Olathe will be more secure for him. But you have to wonder why he cancels his…
Every now and then the people in charge of spending our tax dollars do something so certifiably silly that it leaves us dumbfounded. Oops. Sorry about the plagiarism in that first paragraph. Rich Hood, Missouri’s brand-new, $97,000-a-year government spokesman, wrote that sentence back in October 1998 when he was still editorial page editor at The Kansas City Star. Hey, we…
Dominec Serrone was pissed. He’d begun his slow boil a few years earlier, but the Kansas City Fire Department’s deputy chief of special operations was still simmering on October 15. That was when he dressed down Missouri congresswoman Karen McCarthy and Kansas congressman Dennis Moore at a bioterrorism confab at KU Med Center. If a terrorist really wanted to torture…
Hispanic community leaders are struggling to be heard in the Kansas City School District, where racial tension between whites and blacks has long dominated politics and undermined education. The biggest concern is that Hispanic students are finding it tough to hang on in the district beyond sixth grade. About 3,370 Latino children — more than 60 percent of the total…
Buddy Taylor paced the red carpet in an office above Missie B’s, the midtown gay bar famous for drag shows. Pacing was a habit that fall of 1999, as Taylor absentmindedly walked miles across the floor. He worked nights as female impersonator Belle Starr, a big-haired blonde whose performances produced a dependable income and raised tens of thousands of dollars…
Long before Platters (see review) thought of offering an all-you-can-eat “sampling” of different creations dished out by wandering servers, restaurateur Lidia Matticchio Bastianich, of Lidia’s (101 West 22nd Street), was sending her staff out of the kitchen with oversized cooking pans heaped with pasta. Lidia’s typically showcases three unique offerings each day (on a recent Wednesday, it was trenette in…
It was hard to explain the Platters concept to my friend Karen, a restaurant snob. Karen’s blue eyes grew bigger than saucers when I tried a dramatic interpretation to describe how, at the two-month-old restaurant in the newly-restored Hotel Phillips, diners get four different entrees simultaneously. To enhance my verbal description, I also performed a mime to demonstrate how…
Illustrator Mark Ulriksen isn’t going to tell aspiring young artists who attend his Hallmark symposium about a charmed path that led him to his current job illustrating for publications such as Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker. In fact, he remembers being asked to sketch a story for Sports Illustrated more than ten times before the magazine’s art director…
In the 1950s, while atomic bomb tests were being conducted in painted deserts across the Southwest, small motels in the region advertised: “Come Here — Great Views!” Hundreds of nuclear families took the bait, cramming their kids into station wagons to witness the explosions. When Scott Seiffert read about these perverse vacation spots, he couldn’t resist turning the subject…
“Every news hack and media wanna-be is on my Turkey Bowl team. All of these guys who have nothing going on in their careers want to be associated with this event. Todd Romero, Neal Jones, Brad Porter, Dave Stewart and Jeffrey Flanagan. Do you know how desperate these guys are? Brad Porter, I make fun of this guy. I spend…
Al Bohl, the University of Kansas’ rookie athletic director, has declared that the successor to football coach Terry Allen (“Dead Meat,” August 16) will be the best person for the job — regardless of name or pedigree. “Someone may say you’ve got to have a proven guy,” says Bohl, before invoking the name of the University of Oklahoma’s improbably…
A woman picks up a thin book of poetry, ruffles the pages and inhales deeply, as though she were smelling a bouquet of lilacs. A man pulls a compact architecture book off the shelf and weighs it in his hands, then strokes the cover as if it were the coat of a prized mare. A child sits on the…
Now that the Nunsense franchise is into its fourth chapter, with a fifth on the way, creator Dan Goggin can claim bragging rights: He has single-handedly made nuns into a dominant force in American musical comedy. And judging from his Christmas version, Nuncrackers, at American Heartland Theatre, he’s not getting lazy at all. He’s writing real show tunes even…
I’m not the kind of person you think I am/I’m not the Antichrist or the Iron Man, Ozzy Osbourne bleats at the onset of this, his eighth studio effort. And you have to give him credit: After more than three decades of lapping up his own urine and snorting fire ants, Ozzy still manages to shock. Only now, it’s no…
