You just don’t mess with the Kemper family’s sheep. The American Royal found that out in 1999, after Kansas Citians (goaded by morning disk jockeys) raised hell because the livestock show’s organizers wouldn’t let socialite animal lover Mary “BeBe” Kemper have her way with the lamb she’d bought for a record bid of $23,500. She wanted to return Skidgee to…
Poor sports: If the Royals think that hiring Tony Peña will attract more Hispanics to Kauffman Stadium, they will be disappointed (Greg Hall’s “A Royal Peña,” May 23). A bad product will appeal to few people, regardless of their ethnicity. Did hiring Hal McCrae increase the African-American fanbase? Hardly. Truth is, the Royals have never made a real effort to…
The opening credit sequence of Windtalkers — a montage of Monument Valley — instantly evokes memories of the opening of director John Woo’s previous film, Mission Impossible 2, in which Tom Cruise was dangling off a rock. It is the last moment of similarity between the two. Windtalkers is a World War II epic based on a fascinating and…
The plot of The Bourne Identity is astonishingly straightforward. It is bereft of twists, free of the gaping plot holes that swallow confused viewers. This adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s 1980 novel, written by Tony Gilroy and William Blake Herron and directed by Doug Liman (Go and Swingers), is almost anachronistic, a remnant of 1970s spy-game dramas — Three Days of…
Viewed from the street, the Pink House, 1131 Tennessee, is nothing special: A nondescript, shrimp-hued dwelling located in Lawrence’s ragtag student ghetto. A handful of kids hangs out on the front porch, smoking cigarettes and talking music in hushed tones. Step inside, and it’s a whole different world. A throng of local music pundits are sweating it out in the…
Asking hip-hop performers to attempt avant-garde art is like requesting professional wrestlers to openly support gay rights: Neither noble effort promises to go over well with the established fanbase. Granted, there are more than enough socially conscious lyricists who don’t mind showing the rest of the rap world that, contrary to Ice Cube’s timeless message, life has more to offer…
The most famous Italian-Americans in this country aren’t the Sopranos but the survivors, larger-than-life personalities who cleverly reinvented themselves to survive each shift in popular culture. The obvious examples are performers — Madonna Ciccone, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin — who, by both lucky breaks and savvy choices, anticipated changes in style, fashion and the media and remained stars long after…
“America was never innocent,” writes James Ellroy (now a resident of Mission Hills) in the introduction to his 1995 political thriller American Tabloid. “We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets.” The Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction, as Ellroy is known to his cult following, is as unsentimental about his writing career as…
Richard Ng isn’t a vegetarian — “unless,” he says, “I’m traveling in China. Then, for sanitation reasons, I usually stick with vegetable dishes.” But Ng, who co-owns the Bo Ling’s restaurant dynasty with his wife, Theresa, is discovering that a growing community of noncarnivores lives in the area, and he’s making vegetarian cuisine a bigger part of his business. In…
It’s one of the great ironies of the modern-day smut biz that it took a boob burglar like Joe Francis to shake Hugh Hefner’s once-mighty empire to its creaky knees. Francis is all of 28, which means he wasn’t born the first time Hef bagged triplets on the merry-go-round bed. Just a few years ago, around the time Hef was…
“I think Tony Peña’s going to be a fine interview. And we’ll have him on. never said that we’re not going to have him on. He never said that. He’s been on, and he’ll be on again. He may not be someone like a regular scheduled guest. We don’t get in bed with the manager anyway.” — Todd Leabo, responding…
More than sixty years ago, the St. Louis Board of Education demanded the firing of Dizzy Dean, broadcaster for that city’s Cardinals and Browns, because of his use of the word ain’t. Dean refused to clean up his radio language. “Let the English teachers teach English, and I will teach baseball,” said the Hall of Fame pitcher. Too bad today’s…
When the CEOs of America’s largest corporations see their salaries rise 440 percent in ten years while layoffs and cutbacks leave their employees hurting, the obvious question is: What’s wrong with this picture? Maria Antonia Andujar and her new company, Theatre of Relativity, propose some answers with “a multimedia sketch produced by a collaboration of European and American artists”…
As computer-based music composers learn the ins and outs of their instrument, one startling reality shines above all others: Anything is possible. No sound is forbidden or unattainable (a crow’s-caw rhythm?), no orchestration too cost-prohibitive (a 275-violin synthetic string section?), no keyboard configuration unattainable (a seventeen-note chord?). With so much available, where does one draw parameters? Most electronic composers draw…
In the liner notes to the fourth effort from Denver’s the Czars, guitarist Roger Green is credited with “grooveology.” George Clinton won’t be losing any sleep: The Czars don’t have a funky bone in their musical body. Instead, the quintet settles into a batch of midtempo space-rock that meanders in search of something that resembles originality. Singer and pianist John…
With Phish “on hiatus” (though the constant buzz of fall tour rumors is starting to resemble a thick swarm of gnats on the third day of a weekend-long run at Deer Creek), the jam-band community has had a chance to grow and diversify. The String Cheese Incident and Widespread Panic filled the amphitheater void, while smaller venues have thrown open…
The stage companion to Tom Waits’ Alice has yet to reach our shores, but it’s hard to believe it could fulfill the promise of a playwright-musician marriage better than the album. Kathleen Brennan has influenced Tom Waits’ music ever since they met in 1980, and though only two albums have been actual stage musicals, all of them have used skewed…
Last year, a former area resident with a crazy-white-hip-hop-kid persona introduced his homeys, including a behemoth roughly four times his size, to the music world. Later this summer, a Kansas City resident whose white-rap-fanatic act earns him daily airtime — on a rock station — will debut his own crew, including a mammoth rhymer. That’s where the similarities between Marshall…
For the most part, mainstream rap has lost its lyricists. No one drops social commentary like Public Enemy back in the day, and only a precious few MCs even engage in meaningful wordplay. On the radio, it’s all about shout-outs, catchphrases and random street talk. So when an artist comes along who can balance a potent flow with commercial…
During the late ’70s and early ’80s, David Lee Roth was the archetypal hard-rock star — the blueprint by which all other hair farmers were designed. With his high-flying karate kicks, skintight spandex, lion’s-mane hair and banshee wail, Roth’s persona offered yowling yin to Eddie Van Halen’s yang. And though the mainstream dismissed him years ago as a clownish bozo,…
So this is what it’s come to: another week, another terrorist-with-a-suitcase-nuke movie. Last Friday it was up to Ben Affleck to save the world from nuclear annihilation, an unsavory proposition. This Friday, it’s Chris Rock’s turn to disarm a briefcase bomb, James Bond-style, before it levels Grand Central Station and half of Manhattan. It’s as though 9/11 never happened as…
It’s no surprise that the Louisiana-born novelist Rebecca Wells has seen her wildly popular books (six million copies in print) translated into eighteen languages. She’s no deep-thinking stylist, but she has an unfailing gift for injecting Southern sentimentality, low-grade neurosis and mischievous charm into stories that deftly strum the heartstrings of women everywhere — even in Yankeedom. The star-laden…
Ebony and irony: I just read Greg Hall’s article about how the Royals are trying to advertise to Kansas City’s Hispanic community (“A Royal Peña,” May 23). Call me closed-minded, but I don’t think that any sports team should advertise to any ethnic group. It just doesn’t make sense. Blacks and Hispanics are going to go to a game if…
If more journalists were as bold as Tom Fox, the Catholic church’s sex-and-secrecy scandal might have gone supernova during Ronald Reagan’s administration instead of during Dick Cheney’s. Fox was editor of the National Catholic Reporter back in 1985; now he’s publisher at the independent weekly, which has been headquartered on Armour Boulevard in Midtown since the 1960s. “We were seeing…
