“You’ve got a team full of guys who are just happy to come out to the ballpark. You’ve got a team full of guys who are just happy to have a kid ask them for an autograph. You’ve got a team full of guys who are just happy to have a chick come up to them in a bar and…
When teams perform as poorly as the Royals and the Chiefs have in recent years, bored fans resort to debating what constitutes a real sports fan. Is it the guy who graciously rises from his seat behind the Royals’ dugout to applaud the dejected home pitcher shuffling from the mound after chucking sixteen consecutive balls? Or is it the person…
With the same kind of license-to-amuse party planning that Steve Martin used to create his play Picasso at the Lapin Agile, local playwright Jacqee Gafford throws an entertaining soiree of her own at Just Off Broadway. Whereas Martin creatively brought Einstein, Picasso and even Elvis Presley to a French bistro, Harlem Knights posits an afternoon of beer, hooch and…
There’s a scene in the extraordinary Jon Jost film All the Vermeers in New York in which a stressed-out stockbroker solemnly claims that if he hadn’t been able to gaze regularly at Vermeer’s timeless paintings, he “would have gone off the deep end a long time ago.” The statement is less movie fiction than life fact. A ten-year study…
Trent Reznor’s angst-ridden anthems for the sullen and downtrodden arrive only once every four or five years. That’s not just because it’s difficult to discover twelve or fifteen new and distinct ways to depict violent alienation but also because of his underrated attention to subtlety. With his vocal variations, he’s created new gradients between distress and despair, between fear and…
One of the great ironies of twentieth-century popular music is that machines helped us create more fully human art. Thanks to the development of the microphone, singers could croon conversationally instead of shouting to be heard, and they could phrase in ways that highlighted the distinctive textures and nuances of their voices. As technology advanced, recordings became warmer and more…
In its least appealing cartoon in recent memory, The New Yorker printed a drawing of a smoking man and a bare-chested woman in bed together. “Mind if I journal?” the woman asks, retrieving a book and pencil from her nightstand. What makes the image troubling isn’t its hoary setup or its baldly Playboy-like inclusion of pen-and-ink nipples but the way…
In 1985, Lionel Richie greeted each of his five American Music Awards with an incredulous “outrageous!” That simultaneously started a short-lived phrase-craze among his fans and sounded the death knell for that totally ’80s expression as a hip exclamation among teens. By contrast, Tech N9ne has marked each victory in the Pitch Music Awards’ Rap/R&B category with a newly minted…
When Greg Conchola talks about how he found the crucial songwriting partner that would crystallize his band, Diamante, he’s essentially telling a funny story about how he met his girlfriend. But there’s something else going on here, something at the heart of what he’s all about. It was three years ago at the Shawnee Park Cinco de Mayo festival….
Put some heart in your art, or don’t do it, Archetype’s I.D. urges on “Signal.” It’s a sentiment that could serve as a manifesto for the Lawrence hip-hop duo. Eschewing the Alizé-swilling, bitch-slapping, thug-life gestures pervasive in local and national rap, I.D. (Isaac Diehl) and his partner-in-rhyme, Nezbeat (Jeremy Nesbitt), have carved a niche for themselves in the enlightened…
Say this about World Wrestling Federation honcho Vince McMahon: He knows what his fans want. Few movies have ever been as specifically tailored to an existing audience as The Scorpion King, in which McMahon’s champion, the Rock, wears a loincloth and goes by the name Mathayus. McMahon executive-produced the film, and it shows. The movie is an episode of…
The perpetrators of the new Sandra Bullock vehicle Murder by Numbers could be hauled in on a number of charges, including plagiarism and child abuse. But their most obvious crime is first-degree dullness, giving us a thriller without thrills and a mystery devoid of urgent questions. This merely bloody piece of business spends two long, long hours in a…
Reading is fundamental: With his piece on former basketball player Kevin Ross, Greg Hall has proven to be both a sucker for a sob story and a journalist who doesn’t spend much time checking facts (“Post Graduate,” April 11). While I’m delighted to learn that Ross is now reading and helping kids, it’s too bad he’s still trying to play…
By all accounts, Kansas City is the only place in the world that covers up holes in its streets with 8-foot-by-12-foot, 3,000-pound, inch-thick steel plates and leaves them on the asphalt forever. Whose ass is at fault? On April 4, Mayor Kay Barnes convened a ServiceFirst meeting with the water- and street-department brain trusts to try to get them to…
The Downtown Church of Christ is in a long and low brick building that has done duty as a skating rink, a bowling alley and a nightclub. The building, at 27th and Troost, became a church in 1987. On Sundays, the Reverend Wes Anderson leads sermons in the “auditorium,” a windowless room with twenty pews, refurbished oak floors and a…
The kid in the black pants looks scared. Like he signed up for a thumb war and suddenly finds himself at Gallipoli. The kid is big, about 210 pounds at twenty years old, but it’s his young eyes that seem to carry most of that weight right now. Of the sixteen competitors in this World Pankration Federation Midwest Open tournament,…
Like many baby boomers whose culinary tastes were influenced by what they saw advertised on TV during the 1960s and ’70s, I still get weird cravings for snacks I haven’t bought in years (Jiffy Pop popcorn, Hostess Snowballs, Pixie Sticks) or, even worse, for bizarre treats that aren’t even made anymore (Fizzy tablets, Space Food Sticks and Shake-A-Pudding). It’s…
That’s it all about … MelBee? OK, the Burt Bacharach song is really “What’s It All About, Alfie?” and if Lloyd Booth, owner of the three-week-old MelBee’s Bar & Restaurant (6120 Johnson Drive) had singers tinkling the keys at the grand piano in the center of his dining room, patrons could sing along to the 1966 hit. But Booth prefers…
Bees come in three-pound packages. Former beekeeper Susan Macdonald Bray remembers picking up her first bee shipment when she was in high school. Postal workers called to tell her parents that the post office would stay open long enough for them to come and get the shipment; the bees, they insisted, were not staying in the post office overnight. Beekeepers…
Independent restaurateurs like Tom Macaluso (see review) are having a harder time filling seats since the September 11 attack sent the economy reeling. For David Rabinovitz, owner of the thirteen-year-old Metropolis restaurant in Westport, the combination of “the economy, equipment breaking down, negative publicity about Westport and 2,000 new restaurant seats — in chain restaurants — opening in Midtown in…
If you’re going to name a restaurant after yourself, you either have delusions of grandeur or don’t give a damn what people think about you. Or both. In the case of Macaluso’s, at the corner of 39th and Terrace, there couldn’t have been any other option. The restaurant’s owner, Tom Macaluso, already had a reputation as a “personality,” and…
The Kansas City Friends of Jung is a collective of smart people. Dedicated to preserving Carl Jung’s psychoanalytic theories, the group (which has a mailing list of 2,000 members) hosts not only yearlong classes but also a lecture series. The next speaker to step behind the podium is New Orleans-based Jungian analyst Battle Bell III, who discusses the concept…
On a good day, Mark Cuban might respond to a journalist’s query with a terse, unpunctuated e-mail that reads like something dashed off by a hostage while his captors are in the can. It’s understandable: The man’s running the Dallas Mavericks, investing in movie distribution and exhibition companies, sticking it to NBA commissioner David Stern about bad officiating, getting daring…
“The wild rumor buzzing around TV circles these days is that Metro Sports and new anchor Dave Stewart have tried to pitch a somewhat syndicated sportscast for the 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. slots on the local television stations. The rumor has had enough bite to throw a scare into some local sports reporters and anchors, who pointed a finger…
