Paradigm comic creators Matthew Cashel and Jeremy Haun aren’t afraid to admit that they’ve seen an episode or two of Friends. Neither are their characters, Chris and Emma, who discuss an episode of the show as the story opens. Their inane conversation is interrupted when a stranger approaches and demands that Emma hand over her purse. She pulls a gun…
One day, years ago, Gregory Mcdonald was playing tennis with a man he’d known since they were both 12 years old. It was hot, the middle of summer, and Mcdonald was playing a good game—doing that tricky shit, making with the kind of moves that get under an opponent’s skin and leave a deep blister on a scorching afternoon….
“Are you kidding me? We’re sitting in the hotel room the night before, and we’re saying, ‘Just give me one win over Valpo, and we’ll beat the shit out of Oral Roberts. Uh … we’ll beat the heck out of them. Thank goodness this is my last show.” — Rich Zvosec, UMKC head coach, dreaming of beating Valpo and taking…
Coach Nolan Richardson took Arkansas to three Final Fours between 1990 and 1995. The Hogs won their only national championship under Richardson in 1994. Not even Bill Clinton had as many adoring fans in the Razorback State as Richardson had in the mid ’90s. Two weeks ago, that all disappeared. Richardson blew a gasket at a press conference and blamed…
With all the energy of a salsa club, the Coterie’s Black Butterfly, Jaguar Girl, Piñata Woman and Other Superhero Girls Like Me is not so much produced as rocket-launched. It is a blast. Created by Luis Alfaro from the writings of Latina poets Alma Cervantes, Sandra Munoz and Marisela Norte, it is a live, streaming encyclopedia of Latina teen-agers’…
As a potter shapes a pot, our lives are shaped by the objects we use — often thoughtlessly — every day. The emotional texture of a person’s day is affected by the sensation of a teacup’s rim on lips, sunlight inside a bowl, flowers in an urn … the innumerable rituals through which we organize our lives. The vessels,…
Altan is a six-piece, traditional Irish band with nine albums under its belt, so it’s reasonable to expect technical excellence from the group’s material. What’s wonderfully surprising about this album is that Altan also delivers the unexpected with every cut. The opening song, an ancient ballad about a 24-year-old woman married to a 14-year-old boy, begins as a complaint about…
Since 1963, the Chieftains have been making an argument for the continued vitality and influence of traditional Irish music. On this anthology of mostly little-known cuts from the band’s history, that argument is quite eloquently reinforced — when the group speaks for itself. However, the band peoples the album with so many guest stars that the range gets upstaged. Some…
The Get Up Kids, with its genre-defining mix of earnest emotion and catchy pop rock, is the local indie scene’s golden boy. The Anniversary, who played against type like Denzel Washington in Training Day on a gritty split EP with Superdrag before earning Rolling Stone’s affections with its bombastic ’70s-toasting full-length Your Majesty, earns the area’s silver medal. With…
After terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center on September 11, the United States government scrambled to restore the nation’s sense of security. It eventually dispatched thousands of soldiers to the country’s airports, and for travelers, the sight of armed guards restored at least a perception of order. Jane Cook, a part-time soldier with a National…
In anticipation of this year’s St. Patrick’s Day festivities, Sony/Legacy has remastered and reissued several classic Irish albums, just in time to help celebrate this hallowed holiday of the Irish and ophidiophobics everywhere. Put these records on, and revelers at your St. Patrick’s gathering will get their shamrocks off. The Best of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem chronicles the…
Nearly one year ago, on March 21, 2001, a teller at the United Missouri Bank branch at 14th and Grand found a disheveled man in his mid-fifties at her window. He wore an old red plaid work shirt and had comb marks in his greasy gray hair. His fingernails were long, and under his square black glasses was a grizzled…
Now that George W. Bush is more concerned with putting bombs on Afghans than he is about putting “food on your family,” the media have stopped laughing at his inarticulate ramblings. But last week’s Kansas City visit from White House communications director Karen Hughes persuaded us that the president just might have been taking the fall for her all along….
Village voice: Thanks to Deb Hipp for taking the time to update the community on what’s happening at KKFI 90.1 (“Broadcast Feuds,” March 7). As a member of Friends of Community Radio, I want to emphasize that our sole intention is to save 90.1 as a voice for communities in Kansas City who are excluded or underrepresented on commercial radio….
Ice Age posits a heretofore unfathomable question: Is it possible for computer-generated characters to go through the motions? Everything about this endeavor feels pilfered and stitched-together. There’s not an original bone in its entire furry body. Its story, about cuddly and mismatched mammals forced to raise and return a lost human baby to its own “herd,” is a cross…
In the entertainment industry’s rush to temper its appetite for violence after September 11, much of the media’s attention turned to the postponement of the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Collateral Damage. One of the less visible casualties appears this weekend at the Fourth Annual Jewish Film Festival. Joseph Cedar’s Time of Favor won six Israeli Academy Awards last year, including best…
It’s easy to get a recently dropped band to open up about its former label. Simple questions such as “Did you feel you were a low priority with Sony?” usually do the trick, after the laughter dies down. “That’s an understatement,” says bassist Nick Colby, the only member of the trio Ultimate Fakebook composed enough to respond to this sidesplitting…
Striding the earth clad in black from head to boot, fists clenched and speaking in rumbling tones of love and God and murder, Johnny Cash can seem more a tall tale than a man. If he’d performed and recorded during the first half of the twentieth century, he might have achieved the status of folk hero, like Babe Ruth or…
Not one picture of legendary Kansas City restaurateur Joe Gilbert hangs in the restaurant that bears his name, J. Gilbert’s Wood-Fired Steaks. If you want to see what the late Gilbert looked like, you’ll have to go to another chain’s steak house, the Capital Grille, where his oil portrait decorates the main dining room. In fact, the Capitol Grille…
For every diner who has a bad-waitress or -waiter story, servers take home at least a dozen awful-customer tales. This Sunday at Writers Place, servers unite for an afternoon of performances called The Customer Is Always Wrong, told with the sort of aplomb that only working in restaurants must foster. Writers Place executive director Lesa Blalock says that, though the…
Art Garfunkel, now entering his sixties, isn’t above laughing about his hair. “I’m most famous for my hair and my last name,” he says. “One’s squiggly, and the other’s awkward to pronounce. But neither one really has all that much to do with me. It’s kind of like the great cosmic joke.” (Fans who attend his show at the…
“Are we gonna play chicken here, Robert? Who’s gonna go first?” That’s Chris Moore talking, from the other end of a cell phone—the preferred means of communication for the Hollywood producer too afraid of standing still. Moore—a producer of Good Will Hunting and the American Pie films, partner with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon in the LivePlanet production company…
“The KU alumni — as much as they love Kansas basketball — if Roy doesn’t get to the Final Four this year, they are going to call for his head. They’re going to say the same old thing. ‘Roy can get us there, but he can’t win the big game.’ I have 104 wins in the ’90s . Big freaking…
The waiter glanced down at the message scrawled on the paper tablecloth in front of Dave Stewart at Zio’s and gave him a curious look. The words “I am hung” had been printed there in crayon. The soccer coach of Stewart’s twelve-year-old son’s team sat beside him and gave him a look you reserve for perverts and drug dealers. Stewart…
