Alan Ball’s concept for the brilliant HBO series Six Feet Under is so obvious it’s a wonder it had never been done before: a show about the mystery of life set under a cloud of ever-present death. But it took Ball’s skewed view of suburbia (as previously seen in his American Beauty) and a cast of extraordinary actors like…
No one denies that a man’s head was smashed in, most likely with a camera tripod, on June 29, 1978, in an Arizona hotel room. No one denies that this same man was a porno freak, a maker and watcher and star of homemade sex films. No one denies he had been doing it for years—since the 1960s, at…
“That was a game that the Kansas City Chiefs in the past would have lost — and I was on the Chiefs teams that would have lost it.” — Tim Grunhard, after the Chiefs’ comeback win over the Jets, WHB 810 “What Curtis Martin did to on the field today is illegal in 37 states. Apparently, New York isn’t one…
A few years back, Sports Illustrated dubbed Nebraska’s faithful the greatest college football fans in the land. Writers often describe them as “classy.” This year, and probably over the next few autumns, they finally get to prove it. Of course, classy is a relative term. For forty consecutive autumns, people clad in red polyester suits and funny little red hats…
Colors are light waves. The length of each wave determines its color — red has the longest wavelength and violet the shortest. They bounce off an object and hit the retina of the human eye, creating the illusion of color. Colors assist society in its mundane functions: Red, green and yellow signals, for example, control the flow of traffic; on…
With the covers of both Rolling Stone and Spin trumpeting the return of rock and roll, readers might begin to wonder: How many guitar-playing, garage-rocking, skinny white hipsters does the world really need? Exactly five, if that skinny white collective is the Pattern, which recently has emerged as the genre’s West Coast delegate. The Pattern boasts ex-members of the PeeChees,…
In the liner notes to this retrospective, Brian Transeau (BT) comes off as the Yanni of DJs. Looking like a prettier version of Kaeto Kaelin, he writes that he was inspired by long walks and the work of Deepak Chopra. Among his influences, he cites Depeche Mode and Debussy. He seems to come from a relatively privileged Maryland background; he…
Perhaps the most onomatopoeic genre description in existence, blip-hop describes the squiggles and squeaks adventurous electronic outfits use to communicate. In the hands of a rhythm-minded DJ, these sounds can be pounded into patterns, creating water-drop-steady beats. Abstract artists might scramble the pitches and frequencies of such transmissions, improvising to compose cyber-jazz. However, the musicians on Luaka Bop’s blip-hop compilation,…
Being Kid Rock’s corn-fed sidekick is no enviable task, sort of the showbiz equivalent of being an assistant crack whore at a dollar-an-hour motel. But playing second fiddle to metalli-rap’s most annoying superstar also comes with some perks, namely the license to release one’s own brand of twisted, brown trucker-rock. In 2000, Uncle Kracker scored a surprise hit with the…
There’s a good reason most self-respecting local music fans won’t set foot inside Abe & Jake’s Landing. Actually there are seventeen, all found on Sound Check Vol. 1, the first and presumably last collection of forgettable Heartland frat-bar tripe from the Lawrence watering hole. The self-proclaimed homeboys in Pomeroy kick suburban ballistics on “Elevate,” blending all the irksome qualities of…
It’s clear now that Mitch Albom is the angel of death. The sports columnist became a cottage industry when Tuesdays With Morrie, a sentimental memoir of time spent with his ALS-afflicted mentor, scored on the best-seller list. Morrie, of course, died. More recently, Albom collaborated with Warren Zevon — a songwriter who wields the heartstring only as a garrote —…
Itzhak Perlman is the most recognizable violinist in the world not simply because he’s among the best but also because he’s expanded his territory. He has appeared on Sesame Street and Late Show with David Letterman and played on the Schindler’s List and Music of the Heart film soundtracks. Since his first performance on Ed Sullivan’s show, in 1958,…
If Bach or Mozart had been born a century or two later, they might have earned a place alongside Bird, ‘Trane, Monk and Miles in the great pantheon of singularly named jazz giants. The extemporaneous compositional skills of these renowned composers have been muted by a few centuries’ worth of concert-hall canonization, but Kansas City troubadour Gerald Trimble seeks to…
Having played with everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to Steely Dan, alto saxophonist Phil Woods possesses wide-ranging talent. But aside from a brief flirtation with fusion and the more avant-garde elements of jazz in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Woods has dedicated his career — and his unmistakable sound — to the spirit of hard bop. Predating the early efforts…
When indie heroes Versus went on hiatus last year, guitarist James Baluyut took center stage and handcrafted one of underground music’s most debated releases, +/-‘s appropriately named Self-Titled Long-Playing Debut. Rather than relying on Versus’ jangling rockboy swagger, Baluyut constructed +/-‘s futuristic folk around his sleepyhead falsetto and animated it with a melange of starkly ambient drum-machine patterns, fluttering…
Though it might seem that Mike Patton has enough to keep him busy (Mr. Bungle, Fantomas, Tomahawk and his record label, Ipecac), music’s most prolific provocateur still finds time to lend his elastic voice to numerous pet projects. Most recently, the former Faith No More frontman lent his rhythmic yelps, guttural growls and operatic elegance to the Dillinger Escape Plan’s…
True love is a blessing/True love is a curse, begins one song on Johnny Dowd’s latest disc, The Pawnbroker’s Wife, and though he addresses the highs (largely in past tense), he’s more comfortable scraping emotion’s depths. A discomforting collection of tar-toned tunes, The Pawnbroker’s Wife explores a decaying relationship over a harrowing holiday season. (A robotic version of “Jingle Bells,”…
Last year, Tool used unsettling animation, freakish contortionists and radically revised editions of its epic compositions to surpass audience expectations with a riveting concert/art exhibit. On Wednesday, October 16, the country’s most elaborate off-Broadway stage show returns to Kemper Arena with an exponentially enhanced light show and overhauled backdrops. Maynard James Keenan, metal’s most versatile vocalist, suffered from a tiring…
Prairie Village-based pianist Eldar Djangirov plays original compositions — subtle, supremely sequenced songs without immediate hooks — and area audiences go wild. Fans drop their jaws at every fluid flourish, point in amazement at every smooth sweep of the keys and applaud ecstatically at the end of each piece. It’s almost enough to place Kansas City’s jazz-town reputation in…
The annual event that generates the most money for 90.7 KJHK might surprise you. The University of Kansas’ on-campus station is best known for well-worn college-rock traditions such as Day on the Hill and the Farmer’s Ball, but its annual DJ Battle has quickly become the biggest contributor to its meager coffers. Now in its fourth and largest installment,…
Burgeoning rock movements make strange bedfellows. Rip-hop hacks Limp Bizkit and graceful noisemakers Deftones have little in common but their nü-metal category, and though Pearl Jam shared the grunge umbrella with Nirvana, its arena-anthem bombast and earnest emoting was antithetical to that trio’s sardonic, pissed-off punk. The “rock revival” has become the latest genre to include incongruous bands, with the…
Among the more preposterous rumors spread by Harry Knowles, whose Ain’t It Cool News movie-biz-gossip Web site garners undue attention from studios too craven to do their own thinking, was that reclusive director Terrence Malick was working on an adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye. Of course, J.D. Salinger would never allow such a thing. And anyway, Catcher has…
Good Lord, there hasn’t been this much blond hair onscreen since the Von Trapp children sang and danced their way across the Alps in The Sound of Music. The fact that these latest golden locks belong to the likes of Michelle Pfeiffer, Robin Wright Penn and Renée Zellweger suggests that this, too, is going to be one big ol’…
Hey, Jehudah: Thank you for presenting an in-depth article on the Temple B’nai Jehudah problems (T.R. Witcher’s “Temple Tantrum,” September 26). He interviewed many people and presented a nonbiased presentation. Ev Gelb Kansas City, Missouri Car Wars Brawl in the family: Regarding Angela Angotti’s letter in the October 3 issue: It is unfortunate after the printing of Allie Johnson’s “Hell…
