Sleepytime Gorilla Museum can turn crowded, smoky bars into eerie, disjointed dreams. It plays monster music, as if Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things were collaborating with Mr. Hyde versions of the members of King Crimson. The band writhes and jerks as it plays, sometimes gazing distantly into space, sometimes glaring, catlike, at some unseen object just beyond the crowd. There…
Certain bands fit into certain musical styles quite neatly, working within the boundaries established by their genre of choice. And for the most part, they’re fine with it. It’s what they do. Few and far between are the groups that set out to destroy their genres from the inside out. Add to that limited list Milemarker, an alleged emo band…
The Kansas City/St. Louis rivalry continues to rage, and unfortunately, the Cardinal city has landed several unanswered blows in the past year or two. Their major-league hockey team is hot; our minor-league squad bit the dust. Their football and baseball teams are perennially powerful; we’re stuck in “wait until next year” mode. Even in the hip-hop arena, St. Louis rubs…
Years ago, I worked in a restaurant that had opened in a Midtown neighborhood that was considered dicey at the time. The block-long stretch of shops looked run-down, parking was inconvenient and it was far enough north of the Plaza to be considered dangerous by the suburbanites who use 47th Street as their symbolic Maginot Line: Beyond the Plaza was…
I don’t know how long it would have taken me to stumble upon the Malay Café in Kansas City’s Northland if a reader, Dr. James Waddick, hadn’t e-mailed me a few weeks ago. He praised the two-month-old restaurant’s Malaysian food but ended with a caveat: “Try it, but don’t tell anyone.” Now that I’ve become infatuated with the peculiar…
“I don’t remember things,” Rebecca Walker writes at the beginning of Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self. That’s shaky ground for an autobiography — after all, an author must have memories if she intends to write memoirs. But Walker, who is the daughter of famed black “womanist” writer Alice Walker and white civil rights lawyer Mel Leventhal,…
Few Korean movies make it to American screens. Sopyonje — showing this Sunday as the first movie in the Spencer Museum’s Korean/Japanese Film Festival — is impossible to track down at local video stores. That’s a big part of why it’s in the festival. “It’s the oldest, most traditional film we’re showing,” says film-selection committee member Nancy Hope. “It’s…
It should be so easy to hate this man sitting on a couch in a high-priced hotel suite, this man sharing his bottle of Evian. He is, after all, a demon dressed head to toe (or tail?) in slate gray, the Satan of Cinema. Attacking him has long been regular bloodsport among journalists to whom he represents the very…
“I anticipate that we’ll be 22nd, 23rd or 24th again next year.” — Carl Peterson, Metro Sports GH: Peterson was talking about where the Chiefs would rank among NFL teams in ticket pricing, but he could just as easily have been forecasting his team’s dismal performance. “Do you realize this team hasn’t won a game in January in eight years?…
Following the Kansas City Chiefs’ worst season in his thirteen years as club president, CEO and head screwup Carl Peterson announced that ticket prices would once again rise. “Everybody in the league is doing it,” explained a straight-faced Peterson during the team’s wrap-up press conference last week. This is akin to the guy who designed the Grandview triangle asking for…
If they were individually polled, toddlers in the audience for the Paul Mesner Puppets’ Aesop’s Fables might have varying opinions about the play. But during the show, their screams of delight are so uninhibited and unanimous that it seems as if they’re all on the same carnival ride. As a fox leaps for succulent grapes hanging high above his…
What Dali does with time, Zen Guerilla does with the sounds of the urban underground. This Delaware-based group, which fuses soul, Delta blues, gospel and garage rock, sounds as big as its singer, Marcus Durant, who stands 6-foot-seven (perhaps six-foot-nine with his afro fluffed). Its songs cut to the marrow without providing the lollipop that normally follows such an inoculative…
“The Get Up Kids have gotten significantly worse over time,” declares Jonas4263, an amateur Amazon.com reviewer who gave Eudora one star out of five. Now, as many of Jonas’ fellow guest critics also pointed out, the album in question is a B-sides/covers compilation, not a new disc. And as its Liberty Hall show last month revealed, the band is headed…
As the “world’s greatest dribbler,” Harlem Globetrotter Marques Haynes made many trips to Kansas City in the 1940s and ’50s, but he never got to stay at downtown’s Muehlebach Hotel. “The Muehlebach?” Haynes roars with laughter. “Where did you say you were from, boy?” “Those were times when we stayed in black-owned facilities or in people’s homes and slept two…
he economic fallout from the September 11 attacks has hurt the business of several upscale Kansas City restaurants — but it’s had a positive impact on neighborhood joints like O’Neill’s Restaurant & Bar (see review) and its closest Missouri counterpart, the four-year-old Governor Stumpy’s Grill House (341 East Gregory), which is also owned by an Irish-American proprietor, Kevin Ryan. “It…
The first time I tried to eat dinner at O’Neill’s Restaurant and Bar, I got there early, at 6 p.m. on the dot. The joint was already packed. “There’s a thirty-minute wait,” said the peppy hostess, who was standing at a podium near the front door. I hesitated for a minute, wondering whether I could bear to mill around…
With the onset of cold weather, some Kansas Citians may want to retract a few bold late-November wishes for frosty mornings. But Scott Hoober, who leads local Sierra Club outings, isn’t among them. While his neighbors insulate their windows and drag out extra blankets, Hoober is busy organizing the Sierra Club’s Winter Camp-out near Clinton Lake this Saturday night….
If there is “a potential killer in every school,” as playwright William Mastrosimone believes, one can only hope he or she has the opportunity to see Bang Bang You’re Dead. The brutal show, which Mastrosimone insists be performed by teenagers for teenagers, is this year’s production by the Metropolitan Youth Company of the Missouri Repertory Theatre. Risa Brainin, who cofounded…
“The Globetrotters helped break down a lot of racial barriers across the country. Ten to fifteen thousand people would come out to see us play, and I would say that 98 percent of those people were white in those days.” — Tex Harrison, former player and current coach of the Globetrotters “Lee Hunt recruited Bill Laurie to Memphis , and…
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” exhorts the Wizard of Oz after Toto exposes him as a natural rather than supernatural being. It is significant that the only character in the film who isn’t fooled by illusion is a dog. More significant is that viewers actually heed the Wizard’s edict and suspend disbelief for the remainder…
Eurodisco: at its worst, the nursery that coddled the Eurotrash culture of the ’80s; at its best, the fountainhead for some of the lustiest, most bizarrely pulsating cyborg dance tunes in history. Ninety-eight percent of these transcontinental oddities remain submerged in club-music backwaters where they belong, but tracks such as “Supernature,” by French outfit Cerrone, and “From Here to Eternity,”…
Each of Dan the Automator’s high-profile concept albums has been a palimpsest, with remnants of his earlier records shining through his new work. Even a cursory listen to Deltron 3030, Dan’s get-together with Del Tha Funkee Homosapien and Kid Koala, reveals similarities with his Kool Keith-assisted Dr. Octagon project. His Gorillaz disc often overlaps with Deltron, and Lovage: Music to…
There are better synth-pop songwriters than Richard James (stage name: Aphex Twin). There are better electronic-music composers, better drum ‘n’ bass programmers, better ambient musicians, better found-sound collectors. But none has combined these elements as well as Aphex Twin did on 1997’s Richard D. James Album. His records to that point had alternately whispered dilettante and genius, but James screamed…
Three days a week, for one hour, Bill Herron can trade his 8-foot-square cell for a fenced dog run. That cage is twice as long as his cell, but half as wide. Three times a week, Herron has a chance to breathe fresh air for a change. But it is also a chance to be hit with flying shit or…
