Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Hello, Mr. Hundert. If we can judge by the new Kevin Kline vehicle, The Emperor’s Club, the notions remain alive (if not particularly well) that a self-sacrificing boarding-school teacher can enrich the lives of his students while subsisting in relative emotional misery himself — and that the terrible furies of adolescence are reduced by a knowledge…
The tragedy is that even those who should have known better didn’t know at all; how could they? Their names weren’t listed, their contributions weren’t cited, their influences weren’t credited, so even those who wore out the grooves had no idea who they were listening to. Names like bassist James Jamerson, keyboardists Joe Hunter and Johnny Griffith and Earl…
Writer-director Todd Haynes’ loving recreation of a Douglas Sirk-style B-movie is a puzzling affair. Watching Far From Heaven is like taking a trip back in time — not to the real world of 1957 but to the reel ’50s of All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind. Haynes’ homage is to a film genre, and he has captured…
Second only to a film critic in terms of style and prowess, James Bond is still the ultimate action hero, and in Die Another Day, the twentieth official entry in the forty-year-old Bond franchise, the Irish Pierce Brosnan — though sorely lacking Welshman Timothy Dalton’s darker edge — now fully owns the character. He smartly incorporates Scottish Sean Connery’s…
We knew it was 1970: Regarding Greg Hall’s “Off the Couch”: When will Chiefs fans stop living in the past? All I hear about is how dumb it was to trade some guy five years ago and how great the Super Bowl teams were. What is amusing is that some of the same people can’t tell you when the Chiefs…
At noon last Wednesday, the Muehlebach Hotel ballroom was filled with the city’s brightest minds. The invited speaker for the Kansas City Area Development Council’s annual luncheon was economic It-Boy Richard Florida, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who has written in recent Star editorials that to be really prosperous, a city must be tolerant and attract a “creative class” of…
When the Kansas State Insane Asylum in Osawatomie, Kansas — a small town fifty miles south of Kansas City — opened in 1866, one of the first patients to arrive was a woman from the western part of the state. She’d been hauled more than 100 miles across the prairie in a wagon, with her hands and feet tied…
Heather Beaven had worked as a U.S. Navy code breaker and as a bartender. But what she really wanted was to become a bureaucrat. The 29-year-old Kansas City native was living in Florida and had been working in the adult education and training field for seven years when she learned of a high-level job opening for a director of employment…
Anthony Young stood on a patch of grass, unaware that he was breaking the rules. He was waiting for a bus to take him from his Overland Park workplace to his Hyde Park home, from suburban day to urban night, Town Center to the Troost Corridor. He waited on the grass for good reason: To stand on the concrete meant…
No cuisine is more nourishing to the spirit on a frosty Sunday afternoon than soul food. That’s why the city’s best-known purveyors of Southern-style cooking — Three Friends (2461 Prospect), the Peachtree Buffet (6800 Eastwood Trafficway) and the Cornbread Café (1350 East Meyer Boulevard) — are bustling with the after-church crowd within minutes of opening their doors on Sundays. It’s…
Restaurants hit middle age faster than people do, thanks to heavy wear and tear on almost every surface — from the fabric on the booths to the steel in the exhaust fans. If a restaurant survives a decade, it’s solidly into middle age; by the time it reaches thirty, it’s geriatric. This theory makes the 99-year-old Savoy Grill the…
It may come as a surprise that Postville, Iowa, is home to more rabbis per capita than any other city in the United States. It came as a surprise to Stephen Bloom, anyway. Tired of being a reporter in San Francisco, Bloom put his family in their 1979 Volvo and drove to Iowa City, where Bloom had been offered…
When you get a heart design in the milk atop a latte at Broadway Café, don’t get too excited. The barista does not necessarily want to make out with you. Making latte art is a zenlike activity for these baristas. They’re part of a rare breed who can make coffee drinks so expertly that, using a single stream of milk,…
It’s quiet on 17th and Summit. It’s the night before Halloween, and the hush that’s fallen over this downtown strip is oddly calming. Inside the Your Face gallery, people are talking and laughing, smoking cigarettes and grinding them out on the floor. There is no furniture — not even a countertop — so there’s no place to put ashtrays….
“Tony Gonzalez is supposed to be the best tight end in football, and Julian Peterson just dominated him all day long. You’ve got a guy who is supposed to be the best, and he can’t get open? We always hear about him being double teamed and triple teamed. No, he was not double teamed. Peterson just blanketed him. If you’re…
As the game clock melted toward zeros on Friday night, Blue Springs High School faced a 21-10 loss to crosstown rival Blue Springs South. Ryan White, the 5-foot-8-inch, 250-pound senior tackle for Blue Springs, stormed up and down the Wildcats’ sideline, fury boiling from his pores. He ripped off his helmet and repeatedly slammed his naked forehead against the chest…
Like a barnyard version of VH1’s Behind the Music, Theatre for Young America’s Chicken Little is a warning about the perils of stardom. Written and directed by Gene Mackey with a country pop score by Cheryl Benge, the show is energetic and sweet without being frenzied and cloying. It opens with a song by the Chicken Littles, a washboard-and-guitar band…
Holiday stress can make quivering Jell-O out of the strongest citizens. Robert Fulgham, whose essays about the ironies of being a grown-up formed the best-selling book and musical All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, is in familiar territory with the seasonal tales that make up Uh-Oh, Here Comes Christmas. But the American Heartland’s show is like…
Once upon a time, an instrumental trio called Oxes teamed up with a potty-mouthed outfit known as Arab on Radar for a split 10-inch record. At least, that’s what everyone thought. Instead, Oxes spent a side of songs doing a spot-on impression of Arab on Radar. The mimicry succeeded in fooling fans of both bands. Therein lies the problem: Oxes…
Anyone not living under a rock during the ’90s already owns the albums from which Nirvana’s tracks were culled, except the lone unreleased gem, “You Know You’re Right.” (And that song, a vivid, foot-in-the-casket thrill ride that’s better than anything released by active bands this year, could easily be downloaded or taped from the radio.) Nirvana’s dubious origins are well-documented:…
Kansas City has always been fertile ground for up-and-coming jazz vocalists — the difference is that these days they seldom stay in town. Sultry songbird Karrin Allyson flew the KC coop for the bright lights of New York, proving that at least the local scene can still be an effective steppingstone for dedicated and talented artists. Following her acclaimed, Grammy-nominated…
It’s easy to get hooked on Lone Star songwriters; all the newly reissued Townes Van Zandt records are clearly proof of somebody’s addiction. If it’s smart, guitar-driven and Texan, odds are it’s worth the price of admission. These two discs, from artists Texophiles adore, illustrate an older master sliding slightly and a younger master coming back strong. There are a…
Christina Aguilera’s problem has always been overcompensation. On her debut, the young waif was so eager to show off her pipes that she mostly sounded horribly overwrought and warbly, like Mariah Carey hopped up on diet pills. On her sultry new second album, Aguilera is just as eager, only now it’s to distance herself from career-imperiling teen pop and revel…
The grass isn’t always bluer on the other side. On his eleventh solo release, Jerry Douglas’ curiosity might have gotten the best of him. Lookout for Hope hops from blues rock to Celtic folk to post-bop jazz, showcasing not only Douglas’ immense talent as an instrumentalist and composer but also his eclectic taste. A legendary studio player who’s appeared on…
