No one is entirely sure what happened that September night in 1997 except that the man’s name was Michael Burke. Maxine Jones’ adult son called her to the window of her apartment in the twelve-story Central Park Towers. Jones (whose name has been changed for this story) looked out her window. In the alley across Tenth Street was Burke, talking…
Kansas City doesn’t have many wine bars like the new Boozefish (see review). But it was home to the oldest one in the country, according to Joe DiGiovanni, owner of Joe D’s Wine Bar and Café (6227 Brookside Plaza). DiGiovanni’s namesake bar and restaurant will turn sixteen this year; its predecessor in the same location (a former gas station) was…
When I first heard the story of why young restaurateurs Maija Diethelm and Caine Kreimendahl decided to call their cozy Westport wine bar Boozefish, I could almost envision the scene taking place in a movie. Not a particularly good movie, but a postpubescent comedy like American Pie 2 or Coed Fever. Their idea to blend the slangy name for…
When Robby Barnett and his cofounders started Pilobolus Dance Theatre in 1971, they had virtually no dance experience. But they wanted to create shows that would leave dance aficionados and audience members who couldn’t care less about pas de bourrees equally amazed. “It’s not esoteric,” Barnett says of his company’s work. Yet in the same breath, he notes that…
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s winter Electromediascope series, CyberCinema, shows how mutually agreeable the relationship between artists and the Internet has become. Zoe Beloff’s interactive installation Zoe’s Word (www.zoebeloff.com) is one of dozens of pieces in the three-week program. She describes herself as “a filmmaker who sometimes works with digital media.” Electromediascope’s cocurators Patrick Clancy and Gwen Widmer project…
“Fred White’s and Paul Splittorff’s commentary of college basketball leaves a lot to be desired. A lot. They suck. Wayne Simien was called Tony Simien. Dwight Gooden was out there. The commentating was awful. These guys are baseball guys who should stick with baseball. It nearly ruined a great college basketball game. You had two baseball guys who didn’t know…
Greg Jones, the only head football coach Park Hill South High School has ever known, is gone. Jones quit his job at the four-year-old school halfway through the school year and headed south to Van Buren High School in western Arkansas. Jones has aspirations of becoming a college football coach someday, and he succumbed to the temptations of the Razorback…
The first striking thing about the Unicorn’s production of Suzan-Lori Parks’ In the Blood is how the set spills from wall to wall and then some. Set designer Atif Rome’s makeshift home beneath a rusted-out bridge is flecked with graffiti and grime and scattered with the detritus of people’s lives. Cats, which was set in a junkyard, looked similar…
Audience members who are unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s Hamlet might not know the play any better after experiencing the Evaporated Milk Society’s production at the New Fahrenheit Gallery in the West Bottoms. But what an experience it is. Director Randall Kent Cohn breaks the play into a ninety-minute melange of separate but equal set pieces; the text is the catalyst…
Critics and codgers continue to debate the merits of revisionist jazz historicism, a near-endless cycle that only exacerbates the valuation of classic reissues over original efforts (with due blame falling on Ken Burns’ shoulders for this current round of dead-horse beating). Meanwhile, another urban and urbane jazz renaissance is quietly gathering momentum. The trippy funk-injected stylings of groups such as…
With their choice of a highway-sign cover shot for the North Mississippi Allstar’s 51 Phantom, brothers Luther and Cody Dickinson seem to understand the long road that stretches out before them. The talented guitarist and drummer team with bassist Chris Chew to explore what lies at the crossroads of Southern gospel, Memphis rockabilly, Delta blues and straight-ahead rock. The Allstars’…
For all its fist pumping, red-star brandishing, onstage defecating and strident kvetching, punk rock has produced perhaps two protest songs from the past fifteen years that could actually get average listeners off their asses. And not from the obvious suspects: Fugazi has some buried in there, but you need a postmodern decoder ring to figure them out; and if International…
Donald Lovell, a sturdy 49-year-old asbestos-removal specialist with a silver ponytail and a ready grin, has played blues around town over the past decade and a half, since relocating to Kansas City from western Oklahoma. About two years ago, he met fellow fortysomethings Don Hockensmith and Lonnie Kilgore and started kicking out ZZ Top and Rolling Stones tunes in…
Whatever happened to good old-fashioned rock and roll? It’s a disturbing mystery, one that’s gone unsolved as too-cute kids and bands that bastardize the primal simplicity of the three-chord monster with hip-hop and/or distracting made-for-MTV gimmicks clutter the radio. Worse yet, some groups choose to rock out in an oxymoronically pleasant fashion, heading toward pastures all pansy and “spiritual.”…
It’s astonishing how open Screen Gems has been about screening Slackers for reviewers. Dim, youth-oriented sex comedies like this often slip into theaters under cover of darkness. Not that critical appraisal really matters to such films; if it did, Freddie Prinze Jr. would be working along Santa Monica Boulevard rather than on the big screen. The fact that a studio…
You’ve got to hand it to any romantic comedy that makes The Mexican and Sweet November seem like enduring classics. Birthday Girl, the slipshod sophomore effort from Jez Butterworth (Mojo), has been sitting on the shelf since its original release date of September 2000, and no doubt its present arrival involves what we’ll call the Kidman Factor. The celebrated…
Bright lights, dead city: I love this town. I have lived here since 1980. However, my friends and I are tired of reading articles like C.J. Janovy’s “Cheers!” (January 17) and Casey Logan’s “It Only Takes a Spark” (January 3) and seeing how Kansas City’s own bureaucracy is stifling the urban growth it so desperately needs and supposedly favors. I…
David Fenley, head of the Blackwell Sanders Peper Martin law firm, reportedly believes that leveling the Plaza’s charming old Park Lane Apartments to clear the way for his own fancy office building is no insult to Mayor Kay Barnes and her new posse of downtown development gurus. Fenley could move his 450 local workers into the old Federal Reserve Bank…
A little branch of Line Creek sneaks past Terri Helt’s Northland home, caressing stream banks overgrown by brush and trees — shingle oak, black locust, honey locust and white-trunk sycamores. Beyond, horse stables stand at the edge of a large pasture. The view could legally be devoured by single-family homes, but a developer wants much more on the property: 256…
The twin colossi of mid-twentieth-century country music are Hank and Lefty. (See? I don’t even need to use their last names.) But while this honky-tonkin’ pair is entrenched in the public consciousness as country music incarnate, and while Nashville has seen fit the past several years to pay tribute to such outside agitators as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles,…
When Heart’s Ann Wilson purred Oooh, barracuda, it did more than cue a rollicking riff progression — it sparked a revolution, assuring a generation of female guitarists that folk wasn’t their only option. Twenty-five years later, Anika Zappe exudes similar confidence while singing Hemi-fuckin’-Cuda, declaring her Denver-based band’s name in a phrase that’s nearly a rhythmic match for the “Barracuda”…
When I’ve had enough, I’ll get a pickup truck, and I’ll drive away, Johnette Napolitano sang liltingly in 1987’s “True,” Concrete Blonde’s signature manifesto of sincerity. Six years later, she got fed up with her L.A. trio, drove her pickup to Paris, and, from the sound of Group Therapy, did a helluva lot of living and growing. The result is…
During the confusing moments immediately following a cataclysm, particularly one with a high death toll, people evince a variety of behaviors, some predictable, others bizarre. There’s praying, the quest for divine intervention. (“Dear God, please don’t let that happen to me!”) There’s sex, the quest for companionship, comfort or, on a primal level, reproduction to replace lost lives. There’s…
Talk long enough with any television exec over 55, and sooner or later he’ll get around to mentioning the La Brea Tar Pits, that enormous shimmering stinkhole in Los Angeles where the liquefied remains of some 660 species of organisms still burble. These old-timers, with skin light brown and pockets pale green, see themselves as the real L.A. dinosaurs—living…
