“Pray for us.” So ends a note Judd Apatow sent out last week to television critics who have been supportive of his series Undeclared, among the few half-hour comedies to debut last fall with any modicum of acclaim and expectation. Set at a northern California university and populated by awkward freshmen trying to find themselves (and someone to sleep…
“My mother warned me: If you marry outside the family, you’re going to have problems.” — Terry Bradshaw, during a hilarious interview with Bill Maas, Tim Grunhard and Frank Boal, WHB 810 “I am committed to running the Humana River Crown Plaza Marathon on November 2. All 26.2 miles. This is not a joke. I backed up my pledge with…
Steve Fleming stood in the University of Kansas basketball coaches’ office trying to persuade Jerry Green, the former KU assistant, that his fifth-grade son was not a weenie. Scott, his oldest son, had arrived at the Kansas summer basketball camp the day before. After the coaching staff took one look at his skinny, almost translucent limbs, they pointed him toward…
Though he lives in Kansas City, actor John Rensenhouse has been absent from these parts for a while. After six months in Montgomery, Alabama, with the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and another six doing plays in St. Louis and Cincinnati, he has been back in town only long enough to press his clothes and a few hands before his next gig:…
Nas’ 1992 debut, Illmatic, was an instant classic, a five-mic-rated masterpiece that had heads mentioning the Queens native in the same breath with supreme lyricists such as Rakim and Slick Rick. But his subsequent output, which includes three mediocre albums and a few failed side-projects, has done little to prove that he deserves such distinguished company. Stillmatic offers flashes of…
Matt Pryor doesn’t like you. He doesn’t want to talk to you. He doesn’t want to hang out with you. But don’t hate him. Give the Get Up Kids’ singer/guitarist half an hour of your time, and he’ll gladly open his heart in song. On his second solo outing under the moniker the New Amsterdams, Pryor goes it alone. The…
As roots music finds bigger and younger audiences among jam-band fans and Americana purists (to the consternation of each formerly distinct audience), the whole Robert Bradley experience makes more sense. Roots fans need Bradley, a blind 63-year-old former street musician — his soul, his blues and his ragged, gusting voice busting through like the headwaters of Randy Newman’s intonations. We…
Holstein is best defined in terms of what it’s not. The Lawrence-based quartet definitely isn’t alt-rock, nor is it metal or hip-hop, grunge or gritty punk. But Holstein is just about everything else, a sonic soup overflowing with random ingredients and exotic spices. The group’s debut, 1999’s quirkfest Menagerie, combined prog-rock, jazz fusion and what can only be classified as…
Doug Sahm was the Texas music scene’s Man of a Thousand Faces. From his days as “Little Doug Sahm,” the six-year-old steel guitarist; to his stint with bogus British Invasion hitmakers the Sir Douglas Quintet; to his years as a psychedelicized, hippie-haired redneck; to his final days with conjunto party band the Texas Tornadoes, Sahm was a soulful exponent of…
Kansas City is starting to thaw, which doesn’t just mean the eventual demise of the stubborn pint-sized glaciers that continue to line roadsides. It also signals the end of the cold front that settled in over local entertainment venues back in mid-December. The concert schedule hasn’t been totally encased in ice; instead, in a pattern familiar to followers of Kansas…
In a scene filled with musicians falling all over themselves (and others) trying to live up to a debauched rock image, Ghosty quietly stands alone. So does its music, which sets singer and guitarist Andrew Connor’s artful musings to a restrained rhythmic backdrop courtesy of drummer Richard Gintowt and bassist Jacob Baum. That’s not to say that the Lawrence-based trio…
As a college anthropology major, Shannon McNally has a keen interest in people-watching. And as a Long Island, New York, native, she’s always had a sizable population on which to practice her observational skills. But her years of experience couldn’t adequately prepare McNally for her first visit to Hollywood, home of Capitol Records, which would be releasing her debut album….
Donnie Darko, an eerie, heartbreaking portrait of a deeply troubled, perhaps psychotic adolescent, marks the feature debut of 26-year-old writer and director Richard Kelly. As emotionally rich as it is intellectually demanding, the movie succeeds despite several wayward plot developments thanks to Kelly’s firm grasp of his enigmatic and unsettling material and an extraordinary performance by Jake Gyllenhaal (October Sky,…
Those possessing a vampire’s keen senses may see through the Goth grunge of The Queen of the Damned to a deeper ideological conflict lurking beneath. On one side there’s novelist Anne Rice, sweepingly sensuous and profoundly humorless, who welcomed the cannibalization of her second and third bloodsucker books to create this distant cinematic sequel to Interview with the Vampire….
Tiger tales: Regarding Greg Hall’s “Tiger Lilies” (February 7): Normally I enjoy Hall’s column because it’s accurate and insightful. I especially enjoy the “Off the Couch” section because he points out inaccuracies and comments on them. I guess it’s my turn to correct some of his inaccuracies. Hall states that “Larry Eustachy took over an Iowa State basketball program in…
It’s Friday, February 15. Outside All Souls Unitarian Church is Chuck Tackett, the self-described overweight, black, gay “working-class stiff” (Letters, June 28, 2001), who is board president of radio station KKFI 90.1. Tonight, he’s the capitalist pig. Inside is Kansas City Star vice president for community affairs Lewis Diuguid — resplendent in a suit and tie. The antiwar columnist is…
A few weeks ago, Royel Griffith stacked a police report, her brother’s autopsy report and several newspaper clippings about his murder into a neat pile. For a long time, Griffith had planned to send the reports and a picture of her brother to producers of America’s Most Wanted, a national television show that helps crack unsolved murders, but grief derailed…
The inventory of Vaughn Flournoy’s getaway car was as follows: a box of personal files, a jewelry case and a dresser drawer full of pennies, all his grandmother’s; one knife, a personal keepsake of his own; and one hysterical girlfriend, again his own. The car itself, a burgundy 1990 Oldsmobile, also belonged to his grandmother, Lillian Thomas. But Thomas sat…
Kansas City, Kansas, finally appears poised to get its long-overdue renaissance. On February 11, The New York Times reported a 40 percent increase in job applications for people who want to teach school in places such as Kansas City, Kansas. The world’s paper of record attributes this newfound interest to “the sinking economy and a wave of soul-searching after…
I’ve always felt that the breaded, deep-fried pork tenderloin sandwich was a uniquely Midwestern dish, if only because it’s such a rarity on coastal menus. There might be a reason for that, says Karen Adler, owner of Kansas City-based Pig-Out Publications. “The big pork-producing states, like Iowa, supplied the Midwest cities, like Kansas City and St. Louis, with prime pork….
For a couple hundred years, William Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale was the wallflower at the Stratford prom, branded by critics and scholars as dramatically deceitful, with characters who acted from the writing more than from their hearts. But it has regained its status over the last several decades, finding numerous partners with which to dance to the theme of…
The signature dish at the Peppercorn Duck Club (see review) is roasted duck. It’s delicious. And fattening. And biblical. Yes, Bible scholars point out that in the lists of clean and unclean fish, seafood, poultry and insects (well, you never know) in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14, all birds are fair game except eagles, vultures, falcons, ravens, ostriches, owls, sea…
Anyone who has ever worked in the restaurant business has had a love-hate relationship with hectic “special occasion” nights like Valentine’s Day, which is traditionally one of the busiest nights for the food-service industry. A lot of diners venture out on such nights expecting culinary and service theatrics — but those are also notoriously busy evenings when many restaurants…
Christopher Sloan, the young actor who plays the master of ceremonies in the production of Cabaret that comes to the Music Hall this week, admittedly has big shoes to fill. In the role that brought fame to Joel Grey and, thirty years later, Alan Cummings, Sloan is in charge of the “Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome” number that opens what is…
