If I can’t change the people around me, Chuck D once rapped, I change the people around me. In a large-scale twist on the Public Enemy leader’s line, Tech N9ne decided that if he couldn’t draw a big-enough audience to revolutionize the rap game, he needed to overhaul the system. So he launched the Fuck the Industry (or, as…
The Daybirds’ latest record entered the charts at No. 1, knocking Now 12, on which the band also appears, down a slot. Girls shriek and women faint when a Daybird is sighted. At the conclusion of its concerts, a laundry cart must routinely be dispatched to stealthily fetch the guys and safely deliver them to their hotel. Speaking of hotels,…
American music magazines suck. Rolls off the tongue, don’t it? These days it’s rolling off everyone’s. Saunter down the length of a magazine rack and scowl at the teen-pop hoochie starlets, the drooling trendpigism (“The Strokes! The Hives! The White Stripes!”), the vapid rock star puff pieces, the gutless CD reviews. No innovation. No passion. No balls. No brains. No…
Fantasy is at its best when it ennobles our reality, and at the movies this year, no fantastic adventure towers above The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The second installment of J.R.R. Tolkien’s delightful yarn is adapted just as handily as last year’s The Fellowship of the Ring, but in a shift from that film’s generous pacing and…
Martin Scorsese’s latest epic of the streets, Gangs of New York, means to show us how a great metropolis was forged in the midnineteenth-century cauldrons of unbridled greed, ethnic violence and the Civil War — the city as wild frontier. That’s a tall order, and the filmmaker’s ambition looks oversized, if not unmanageable, right from the start, when he…
Seat yourself: Casey Logan’s Kansas City Strip about the new arena was right (December 12). If we are going to spend money to build an arena, let us build one. Let us build a 22,000-24,000-seat arena so we can attract the Final Four once in a while. An 18,000-seat arena will only place us on par with the Miamis of…
Now that the Clinton stink has finally been completely fumigated from the White House, Kansas City’s most quintessential company has once again been honored with a contract to design the presidential Christmas card. Hallmark has been making Christmas cards for presidents since 1953, when Kansas son Dwight D. Eisenhower launched the tradition. So it’s pleasantly nostalgic to know that our…
On September 29, Olathe police arrested Robert Michael Tyler, a Johnson County sheriff’s deputy, for domestic battery. Then they booked him into the jail where he still works as a guard. Olathe officers had gone to Tyler’s home that night in response to a complaint about a noisy altercation. Inside the house, they found his wife, Brenda, crying, with scrapes…
It’s December 24, 2001. United Methodist Church of the Resurrection is full. Eighteen hundred people, from infants in the arms of their mothers to grandfathers wrapped in sweaters, fill the chairs on the floor and in the balcony. Two hundred more sit in chairs lined up in the entryway, watching the service on two mounted monitors. They sing the anthems…
It generally takes awhile for trends to reach the Midwest from either coast. Well, we take that back. If it’s a stupid trend — the one-sleeved shirt, for example — then stores like Deb or 5-7-9 will instantaneously reproduce it like a bad virus, enabling teen and adult skanks to delude themselves into thinking they look like extras from Charlie’s…
An acquaintance of mine, Sally, is the ex-wife of one local fireman and the mother of another. She says no community is more tightly knit. “If you’re buying a house, you find a fireman with a real estate license. If you’re having construction done, you hire a fireman with those skills to do it.” And now, if you’re hungry, you…
When the economy went sour in the late ’80s, a kind of culinary artistry called nouvelle cuisine — dinner as a tiny but visually elegant creation — fell out of favor faster than the decade’s other over-the-top trends, including Boy George and Dynasty. Suddenly, lowbrow comfort food was stylish again, with hefty portions of unglamorous, homestyle dishes replacing those…
When idealistic entrepreneurs have tried to open dance clubs in the Kansas City area in recent years — and there have been several — they’ve discovered that this heartland hub throws up enough roadblocks to make such jollity nearly impossible. Enter Footloose jokes and spirited Bible Belt bashing, all set to the tune of a Kenny Loggins hullabaloo. In truth,…
Fifteen years ago, Matthew Stevens saw a dwarf walk into a Paris café carrying a picture of a cat. None of the locals paid any attention to him. But Stevens did. He recorded the scene in his memory. Now president of the Independent Filmmakers Coalition of Kansas City, Stevens has entered a short film about that encounter in the IFC’s…
Notes from a network executive’s forthcoming biography, pilfered from the desk of an editor at a major publishing house. This was hard to read, as it was scribbled in crayon on the back of a copy of Highlights taken from a pediatrician’s office. From page 412: “Last week, I met Jim Belushi, whose brother was apparently some famous dead guy…
November 10 was a Sunday like any other in Johnson County. SUVs ambled past one another at a leisurely, weekend pace as families headed to Target, Organized Living and Bed, Bath and Beyond. Cars steadily replaced one another in strip-mall lots, and abundant groceries were purchased by many. Undoubtedly, a cul-de-sac or two was mistaken for a through street. But…
“MVP … it’s an award that brings a lot of attention. Payday.” — Priest Holmes, Fox GH: Holmes is having the greatest season of any offensive player in the Chiefs’ forty-year history. As he spoke the word payday, he turned and looked directly into the camera lens. Carl Peterson has frittered away millions on draft-pick busts and free-agent has-beens. Holmes…
Buck O’Neil blew out the candles on his 91st birthday cake last month and had one wish. The local Negro Leagues baseball legend asked that 9,100 people visit the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum at 18th and Vine during the month of November. Despite an aggressive, monthlong advertising campaign and free admission near the end, only about 4,500 made it through…
Stephen King’s Carrie seems to have nine lives. Brian De Palma’s trippy 1976 film version spawned a wretched remake in the ’90s, an even more unnecessary sequel and the recent three-hour TV movie. Late Night Theatre goes back to De Palma with its newest homage, A Scarrie Carrie Christmas Carol, including a reference to his opening credit scene with the…
During a trip to New York in May 2001, I saw Bat Boy and Urinetown on the same day and was euphoric about this new direction in musical theater. The creators of these shows love musicals but have stuffed theirs with themes that upset the notion of what musicals are supposed to be about. The story of a cave-dwelling…
Former Living Colour guitar hero Vernon Reid and DJ Logic (Medeski Martin & Wood sideman and leader of Project Logic) toiled on and off for more than a decade on Front End Lifter. This doubtlessly contributed to the disc’s schizoid nature; these Black Rock Coalition vets run through genres like Spinal Tap went through drummers. Throughout Front End Lifter, the…
This is a fork in the road … there’s nowhere to go, Joan Osborne announces at the start of How Sweet It Is. As on every track here, she’s singing one of her soul-music favorites from the ’60s and ’70s (in this case, the Spinners’ “I’ll Be Around”), a focus inspired, no doubt, by her recent work with session legends…
Clearer water, clearer air, clearer thinking: Music fans in idyllic New Zealand have made Bic Runga a star in her home country. She deserves the attention. Beautiful Collision, the 26-year-old singer’s second album, is the sort of accomplished, intelligent, melodic disc that used to roll off record presses regularly before labels expected their female acts to turn tricks on MTV…
In these post-everything times, good camp is hard to find. Nothing undercuts mockery quite like objects of derision that winkingly acknowledge the cheesiness of their work, or worse, seem to have created their work for the sole purpose of inciting listener animosity. That’s why Blind Guardian and Symphony X are beautiful in their gaudiness. Rarely have such ripe subjects for…
