Attention area weathermen: Two leaders of the quiet storm are rolling into town. Luther Vandross and Gerald Levert (pictured) bring their own special brands of loverman soul, with Vandross’ crooned romantic ballads and Levert’s serenades setting the scene after romance has moved to private quarters. Lyrically, Vandross and Levert always promote paying attention to the ladies, so don’t sleep on…
A quick search reveals that this is the third band to use the moniker “the Spiders” — it’s just too good a name to resist. The first Spiders was a New Orleans R&B party band in the ’50s, the second a Japanese British Invasion band (no kidding) and the third — this group — a rawk-and-squawk group from the Austin,…
The Uptown Theater’s marquee broadcasts Kansas City’s continuing relevance as a tour stop for major musical talents. Bringing star power to an otherwise unremarkable stretch of Broadway, the sign announces: Robert Plant! No Doubt! Dolly Parton! B.B. King! The Uptown’s signature architectural feature seldom touts KC residents, though, except for an occasional betrothed couple. But that might start to…
Slug stares blankly through half-mast eyelids, drool en route from his gaping mouth like a delayed-reaction stream at an outdoor water fountain. Dark circles surround his sunken eyes, giving the impression that sleep-deprivation is kicking his ass. The camera clicks, capturing the driver’s-license-from-hell image that will decorate the cover of his hip-hop duo Atmosphere’s album God Loves Ugly. Soon after,…
Further stretching the geographical borders of the Nelson’s decade-old Electromediascope film series, curators Patrick Clancy and Gwen Widmer have pulled Contemporary African Film & Video from below the equator. The program “is pervaded by a strong sense of poetry and shifting relationships between the individual and community,” Clancy says. “One senses that something new is under way.” The loveliest…
When Robin Williams was America’s favorite funnyman in films like Mrs. Doubtfire, it always felt a little strange admitting that the guy seemed kinda creepy. When he got serious in irritating tearjerkers such as Hook and What Dreams May Come, it was certainly in vogue to proclaim him annoying, but few people seemed to admit that there was a…
Period piece: I think Deb Hipp’s tampon story is very sweet and funny, and I am impressed with this fellow who has such a healthy attitude toward menstruation (“Feminine High Jinks,” August 22). However, for me, the article was a little too cute and feel-good about a topic that is actually a huge problem — the health impact of tampons….
UMKC Chancellor Martha Gilliland doesn’t have to wonder who her friends and enemies are. Friends include Max Skidmore, the UMKC professor who chairs a committee that gave Gilliland the Policy Studies Organization’s 2002 Hubert H. Humphrey Award. Enemies pass resolutions of “no confidence,” which UMKC’s School of Biological Sciences did, voting 33-4 with two abstentions. Gilliland’s purported resemblance to Triple…
On September 27, Ronald Arthur Alexander Augustus Griesacker will be a free man, more or less, but probably not a Freeman — because that’s what got him thrown into prison 43 months ago. Griesacker was supposed get his wrists slapped a little bit harder: He was sentenced in February 1999 to 57 months without parole on nine counts of…
World War II’s B-24 Liberator bomber was most vulnerable when it was dropping its explosive cargo. During the eleven seconds it took the giant plane’s doors to open, then the five minutes that might have passed while it dropped a dozen 500-pound bombs and pulled out, the B-24 had to survive the lightning attacks of Japanese Zero fighter planes and…
In 1978, the year the first Machine Shed restaurant (see review) opened in Davenport, Iowa, a full-time house builder and construction worker in Kansas, Tim Schierman, had a bright, rural-themed idea of his own. The previous year, the mountain-music-loving former hippie had left his radio gig at KOPN 89.5 in Columbia, Missouri (“I was playing all the kinds of music…
I have a new vision of hell: I die, I pass through The Light and find myself dressed in black pants, a black apron, a tan shirt and a brown tie. And I start a never-ending shift as a waiter at the Kansas Machine Shed, hauling out tray after tray of “fixin’s” to hordes of ravenous, overweight customers. I’m…
When St. Louis-based photographer Michael Eastman went to Cuba for the first time, in 1999, he saw a beautiful building. He was studying it, thinking about how he might like to capture it on film, when he noticed a giant hole in its majestic green roof. Intrigued, he paid the building’s owner — Isabella — to let him inside…
In the 1940 movie Dance, Girl, Dance — this week’s installment in the Kansas City, Kansas, Public Library’s 16-millimeter film series known as The RKO Story — Lucille Ball plays a character, Bubbles, who would make Lucy Ricardo blush. When her hula dancing makes a booking agent smile, she gets a top-dollar gig in a burlesque show, but she has…
One day long ago—or not, because no one except he and a rare few know the precise date—an actor dove into the ocean to save a drowning boy. He did not want to do it, but he had no choice. They gave him none, those who gathered around and expected him to do it. After all, he was their…
“Baseball would have never been the same if we had walked out.” — Steve Kline, St. Louis Cardinals’ player representative, the Associated Press GH: That’s what I was hoping for. The new four-year agreement between the players’ union and the owners simply means more of the same for the Kansas City Royals. “I always hold Kansas City to a higher…
What would you give a first-year football coach who gets whipped at home in his debut by something called Bowling Green and then loses four of the last five games of a 4-7 campaign — with the final loss an embarrassing 55-7 beating at Michigan State? If you’re Mike Alden, Missouri’s snappily attired athletic director, you hand coach Gary Pinkel…
Dirty Blonde, Claudia Shear’s play about the legend that was Mae West, is like a hearty combination platter served with benevolence, wit and a side of arsenic. It dabbles in territory patented by the tabloidy E! True Hollywood Story while coasting through a moving, bittersweet love story. It’s almost a new genre: the docucomedy. In less-competent hands than Shear’s…
At first glance, California pop-punk outfit (and mi6 labelmate) Tsunami Bomb recalls every other speed-melody act out there playing short, sharp songs that are just a little too cute ‘n’ catchy for their own good. Dig a little deeper, however, and you’ll find yourself slowly drawn in by the Bomb’s wide-eyed, earnest approach. Even the most paint-by-numbers punk (“Roundabout,” “Take…
Spanish guitar has long been a favored seasoning in dance music, both because of its haunting ambience and because it complements a Latin rhythm like no other instrument. This acoustic/electronic contrast works well — keyboard washes and hip-hop beats enhance the poignancy of flesh-thumbed nylon strings. But guitarist/songwriter/producer Carlos Villalobos doesn’t just add Spanish guitar to dance music; he fashions…
On its 2000 debut, Coldplay sounded like a band that took Radiohead’s “Knives Out” a bit too literally, slicing and dicing that group’s sound to bits, trimming away all the ambition in favor of sheer digestibility. Ironically, it only made Coldplay that much harder to swallow — especially with a singer who sounds like a British Dave Matthews and a…
This is the sound of drowning in your own lungs. This is concussion and suffocation, the shambolic waste of the perpetual drunk thrashing desperately to stay afloat and swallowing greedily when he slips under the surface. This is the hacking, dry-heaving moment of willful, welcome negation. This is the long unbroken stare into crusted weary eyes that wonder at still…
Having been dumped by Reprise Records and reacquired by Sub Pop (the label that launched the quartet more than a decade ago), Mudhoney seems less concerned about commercial success than ever — no small feat for an act that’s built a whole career on evading limelight hype. In fact, Translucent goes out of its way to keep everyone but purists…
This debut album by the British trio X-Press 2 includes all but one of the group’s club hits, and it’s easy to hear why each cut thrived on the dance floor. Throughout the album, X-Press 2 weaves a tapestry of bubbling, pulsing and percolating arpeggios, and no one intuitively sees more potential in an arpeggio than a DJ. Any two…
