SUN-FRI The inner peace that yoga practitioners aim to discover is attainable in an open, airy place — like the third floor of the Arts Incubator (115 West 18th Street), where Maya Yoga has set up shop. The walk upstairs through the Arts Incubator studios arouses curiosity, and the view of downtown — especially during dusky evening classes — inspires…
FRI 5/16 Caldecott Medal-winning children’s author and illustrator Brian Selznick is coming to town, and in honor of his visit, the folks at kids’ bookstore Reading Reptile (326 West 63rd Street) are letting their infectious imaginations run wild. Owners Pete Cowdin and Debbie Pettid have turned Selznick’s The Boy of a Thousand Faces into a mixed-media presentation involving live actors,…
FRI 5/16 There’s a Moonlight Canoe Float on the Kansas River — otherwise known as the Kaw — in Lawrence. Taking advantage of tonight’s full moon, riverkeeper Dave Murphy leads canoers down the Kaw, which is the only public canoeing stream in northern Kansas. The river stretches 170 miles from its origin in Junction City to its confluence with the…
SAT 5/17 Most book lovers have a neighborhood bookstore they treat as a second home. In midtown, you’ve got your poetry-writing liberals hanging out at Prospero’s, pipe-smoking atlas-collectors at Spivey’s and, at Bloomsday, mannered sorts showing appreciation for literary greats while contentedly nursing cups of coffee.Saturday’s Midtown Book Crawl offers an ideal opportunity to venture off your own turf. “It’s…
Yournovel.com is a Web site dispensing personalized romance novels, kind of like steamy adult Mad Libs. Purchasers insert their own names and details into a prewritten book, choosing either the suggestive “Mild” or the juicier “Wild” version of any given tale. When Janet Welch heard a radio announcement about the site’s short-story competition, she immediately knew she could do it….
Thursday, May 15, 2003 The rash of talent-seeking reality TV shows like American Idol and Star Search has folks dusting off karaoke machines that have been in storage along with Dyna-Mikes and gigantic Casio keyboards since 1992. At tonight’s Karaoke Invitational Showdown Showcase, crooning champions from area nightspots each perform one song, to be judged by local members of the…
This Friday’s party at Paragraph Gallery’s new downtown space isn’t like other art openings. The only colors on the walls are various layers of plaster in peach, green or brown that still line the pillars. But Hesse McGraw is throwing a party anyway — a festive gallery warming with a thirty-minute video loop combining silent shorts by seven or eight…
The Missouri Repertory Theatre’s production of Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink explores two periods in the relationship between England and India: imperialism and exotica. As directed by Risa Brainin and set-designed by Nayna Ramey, the stories are both onstage at the same time. The poet is Flora Crewe (Mary Beth Fisher), soaking up ambience and inspiration in a modest bungalow…
Fawad Khan’s artwork is a hybrid of Eastern and Western aesthetics — Islamic patterns and colors blend harmoniously with the New York City painter’s rough, representational line work and thin glazes of paint. “I was brought up by Eastern methods in a Western world,” Khan says, “therefore I consider myself neither here nor there — a hybrid of both,…
In high schools and colleges throughout America, small pockets of brooding, sensitive book readers harbor an intense love of British rock from yesterday and today. Some of these Anglophiles form bands to make music to sate their fellow Anglophiles’ ravenous hunger for more effete, stylish permutations on the Cure, Modern English, the Smiths and U2 (Irish, but let’s not quibble)….
As director for Fela Kuti’s massive bands from 1968 to ’79, Nigerian drummer Tony Allen laid the foundation for Afrobeat, a hypnotic, militant variation on James Brown’s epic funk jams. You might expect the venerable percussionist to rest on such a towering feat, but Allen’s no museum curator for this music; he strives to advance it. Following his killer 2001…
Felt Mountain, the first album from Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory, was a masterful example of seduction through musical restraint. Delicate throbs of down-tempo electronica pulsed ever so gently, in the style of a tantalizing James Bond theme, an underground, spy-noir-infested cabaret or a snow queen’s spooky, shimmering castle. Just three short years later, the UK duo banishes subtlety. Black…
Some people will tell you it’s not fair to peek at the lyrics while a record is playing, that following word by word robs the music of its mystery. That’s nonsense. The reason you should handle a lyric sheet like a handkerchief full of SARS is that the urge to read ahead can make a song feel much longer than…
The problem with being one of the heaviest bands on the planet (non-Swedish, death-metal division) is that once you’ve made it to the top of the misty mountain, there’s nothing left to destroy. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Ministry fused precise guitar thrash with distorted samples, military-time drum loops and unrelenting distorted vocals. But the group seemed to…
In the most nerve-racking scene of that definitive suspense shocker The Goonies, inattentive music student Andie plays name-that-note-or-die on a creepy, skeleton-keyed piano. (It’s a mystical, magical instrument, which is why she must press multiple keys to produce the single notes clearly marked on the score.) Every time she hits a clam, her demographically diverse, delinquent buddies lose a portion…
Those who despise integerockers such as Blink-182, Sum 41 or even Lawrence’s mi6 have Lagwagon to blame. The Santa Barbara, California, quintet helped father modern-day punk-pop, which infuses the high-octane pep of hardcore with mainstream music’s hooks-a-plenty catchiness. Unfortunately, the house that Lagwagon built also became a prison of sorts, one in which the band was left behind by…
Lawrence’s Appleseed Cast has been holed up in a local studio crafting its forthcoming effort, Two Conversations. To tide over fans who’ve waited patiently since 2001’s twin Low Level Owl discs, the band recently issued Lost Songs, a collection of tunes that fell through the cracks. Basic tracks for the material were recorded in 1999, following the departure of original…
Genius is rarely recognized in its own time. Brian Eno once said that not many people bought Velvet Underground records but everyone who did formed a band. Similarly, Unsane’s discs never sold exceptionally well, but the band’s infamous “Scrape” video planted the seeds for everything from backyard wrestling to Jackass. Created for $200, the clip paired footage of nasty skateboard…
The last time a boatload of local blues fans saw Bernard Allison, he was slip-slidin’ on the deck of a cruise ship. Three months after that trek, Allison docks at the Grand Emporium for the weekend, where he’ll join his recent nautical neighbors for a two-day reunion bash. Friday’s gig is a straightforward show; Saturday’s fanfare includes Amazing Grace’s barbecue…
Country music can’t win. Its stars once sang about snorting lines, shooting wayward women, drinking doubles and driving pickup trucks, predating death metal and gangsta rap by decades. But as urban ears became increasingly sensitive, the genre embraced nonthreatening pop. Unfortunately, pop reversed the hold, bear-hugging the genre and squeezing it until its once-distinctive voice fell silent. Jeff Bates, who…
Just as Pen & Pixel’s gaudy diamond-studded text and ornate imagery defined the album art of the assembly-line thug-rap era, Roger Dean’s swirly surrealist landscapes provided pinup fodder for the ’70s prog pack. Dean still says “Yes” when challenging outfits come calling, which is why he lent his brush to the debut disc from Seattle’s artful instrumental outfit Vermilion. On…
Former URB cover boy and Pittsburgh native Joshua Ryan creates the sort of sweeping “progressive house” that finds its way into the megaclub-filling sets of DJs such as Paul Oakenfold, Pete Tong and John Digweed. Fortunately for the cheese-intolerant, Ryan brings a rare subtlety and subliminal funk to a genre often devoid of both qualities. (He disses “lowbrow Eurotrance”…
The Grateful Dead, having performed about 3,000 shows during its career, is considered the consummate touring band. Truth is, though, that group’s got nothing on Reverend Horton Heat. “I’ve heard the Dead hold some kind of record, but we’ve been averaging something like 220 shows a year since 1986,” says the Reverend, aka Jim Heath. “You can do the math,…
Like the haunted galleon depicted on the cover of its debut full-length, the Decemberists’ songs — accordion-cloud sea chanteys, red-sky-at-night laments — seem to have sailed from some long-abandoned port. The simple, mostly acoustic arrangements complement songwriter Colin Meloy’s keenly anachronistic storytelling; you could be hearing his out-of-time tall tales in a ship’s hold or around a campfire after Antietam….
