When it comes to sports, our allegiances are simple. Being a Kansas City girl, this bar chick roots for the Chiefs, the Royals and the Wizards. The fall is all about football. But after the season is over, we turn our attention to hockey — more specifically, to our beloved Colorado Avalanche. So when the playoffs started in April, we…
Last Saturday, I rolled out of bed and right into a pile of red wiggler worms. Not literally, I’m happy to say. I mean, I made coffee, shaved and showered first. Then I went with a friend, the mystery novelist Lou Jane Temple, on an early morning tour of outdoor markets, starting with the new, all-organic Brookside Farmers Community Market…
In my sordid past, I was a huge fan of water pipes and collected quite a few, back in that post-hippie era when you could still find perfectly elegant glass hookahs and snazzy acrylic bongs at garage sales. Oh, yes, I’d sing along to Jefferson Airplane’s “Go Ask Alice” (Tell ’em a hookah smoking caterpillar/Has given you the call)…
SAT 5/31 If you can’t quite swing the Chicago or New Orleans Blues Festivals budgetwise, you can at least make the 25-minute river drive to Weston, a town that feels infinitely more distant from Kansas City thanks to its plentiful shade and relaxation. This year’s Weston Music Festival will be a daylong tunes-and-food affair by the comfortable stage outside…
SAT 5/31 “People are surprised that there’s a rich hip-hop culture in Kansas,” says 22-year-old filmmaker Jon Allen. He recently completed Looking for Today, a documentary on Lawrence’s thriving rap scene. “My whole idea with the video was that people on the outside can see it for what it is. It’s not the same as some of the stigmas…
MON- SAT You know what sucks? That adults can’t go to Kaleidoscope. Well, except during special family sessions. But adults who don’t have kids — especially adults who just happen to like trench coats — would look like total weirdos if they tried to attend. Some of us sort of remember what goes on in there, but only vaguely….
WED 6/4 People are at their best — and happiest — when they are chasing after one another. That’s according to Kate Schurman, the 23-year-old law-office manager who heads up the Tag Institute. Schurman has taken it upon herself to start a weekly tag night in Mill Creek Park (47th Street and J.C. Nichols Parkway) called Everybody Freeze! “I…
SAT 5/31 Two folkies serve up some sass tonight. Alix Olson, who tours the college and club circuits with her award-winning, spoken-word activist routine, is joined by guitar girl Pamela Means, a self-described “biracial, queer American female fighting for social change and revolution.” Olson and Means have similar far-left political views. But whereas Means has been known to bust a…
The male nude is an art icon older than Michelangelo yet as contemporary as the latest Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. A naked man is a different matter, something usually more titillating than artful. The 1997 film The Full Monty handled its climactic male nudity with exuberant grace. This Tuesday, as the Theater League’s season closer, the spirited musical adaptation…
Thursday, May 29, 2003 Michael Jackson might have made the zombie dance famous in his “Thriller” video, but it was Rah Booty who brought it to the middle of Baltimore Avenue in broad daylight at First Friday earlier this month. These anti-cheerleaders — cheerleaders because they sport little skirts and pom-poms, and anti because at least two of them sport…
It takes a creative genius to think up fake bangs, ones that always fall evenly and never need to be trimmed. Ones like Edith Head wore. The slightly cross-eyed lady didn’t just sport fake bangs. She also designed costumes for such films as The Birds, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Rear Window, Sabrina, The Ten Commandments…
You’ve been warned: This is a column about politics wherein a popular-culture critic (dunno what that is either, but says so on my tax returns) interviews a former rock journalist-turned-publicist-turned-band-manager-turned-record-label-executive about how the Democratic Party alienated everyone under the age of death. You may take this with a grain of salt; you may take it with an entire salt lick….
If Late Night Theatre fans thought blending Rosemary’s Baby and The Dick Van Dyke Show into Rosemarie’s Baby wasn’t odd enough, their wish is Late Night’s command. Now Late Night pollinates The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde’s brilliant comedy of manners and mistaken identities from 1899, with that guilty pleasure of the late ’70s Three’s Company. Dippy Chrissy,…
Public art is not for the faint of heart,” cautions Porter Arneill, the director of the Municipal Art Commission. Arneill, a sculptor who took office last August, directs his warning not toward audiences but toward artists. He’s spent the past few months advising them how to legally and safely design and install art that hangs above a roadway or…
It’s impossible to avoid comparing Tony Furtado to Bela Fleck, a fellow explorer in the rarified realm of ambitious banjo compositions. But Furtado gets that notoriously loud, cranky instrument to sing with even more soul. It makes just as much sense to link him with former Bad Liver Danny Barnes (with whom he shares an affinity for slide guitar), the…
“Harder-than-hard-living band that’s no stranger to sleaze seeks bass player for all around mayhem, sex-, drug- and rock-and-roll-fueled anarchy. Interests must include Whiskey and Porn, no exceptions. Only serious applicants need apply and/or are expected to survive.” Filthy Jim might soon place a help-wanted ad along these lines as Troy Richardson, who is heading for a gig with Jumbo’s…
Here are three good reasons to dig Robbie Fulks. First, after self-important alt-country poster boy Ryan Adams booted a fan who had shouted a request for Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69,” Fulks offered a ticket price’s worth of merchandise to anybody else who annoyed Adams midconcert in a similar manner. Second, Fulks is allegedly working on a Michael Jackson tribute…
Ever since country music was dragged kicking and screaming out the back door of the local honky tonk and propped up bound and gagged on the pop stage, underground artists such as Wayne Hancock have been trying to bring it back to where it belongs. Hancock pays homage to Texas tradition with his modern mixture of old-school western swing and…
Portland-by-way-of-San Francisco group Pleasure Forever’s sound was as dark as the Marlboro Man’s lungs on its 2001 self-titled debut. But on the new follow-up, Alter, the trio has lightened up. In an interview with Willamette Week, drummer David Clifford even cited Stone Roses, Jane’s Addiction and Oasis as reference points. He was probably half-joking, but quality time with Pleasure Forever’s…
Stoner trucker rawk for seventh-grade inner ids never disappoints — that motor-butter Ride the Lightning riffage just jells so well with garage-punk grease. The opening chords of the Dames’ Divorce will have all the kids in the neighborhood cramming into your dad’s girlfriend’s bathroom after school to smoke their first Kool Menthols, and the tune’s hooks will linger longer than…
Call it a quest, but songwriter Rich Mattson would likely shrug and just call it a career. After moving from his modest northern Minnesota hometown to the relatively brighter lights of the Twin Cities, Mattson has spent the past fifteen years making music. His latest creation, Ol’ Yeller — a stripped-down trio consisting of Mattson, bassist Dale Kallman and drummer…
Years before the 57th Street Rogue Dog Villians extended a musical invitation to get fucked up, the Cramps had already arrived at the party. The Cramps’ 1994 tune “Let’s Get Fucked Up” didn’t faze hardcore fans, who had long since adjusted to ribald inquiries such as “Can Your Pussy Do the Dog?” Formed in 1976, the Cramps’ big, black,…
Chalk it up to MTV saturation, glossy magazine fashion spreads or plain ol’ hype overkill, but the latest crop of garage/art/blues-rock bands don’t have quite the same sloppy subversiveness of their ancestors. What’s missing underneath their vintage threads and three-chord patchworks is a sense of danger, the feeling that one well-timed snarl could scatter children to hide behind their…
When it comes to freakier-than-thou credibility, it’s hard to top Sunshine Blind, a band that gloom godfathers Sisters of Mercy booted from a bill for looking “too gothic.” (For those unfamiliar with the Sisters, this is akin to Cher chiding a support act about its garish outfits or Eminem dismissing a tourmate for excessive profanity.) What makes this black-garbed calling…
