Wow. We thought our FM (freak magnet) powers were strong, but after reading your entries in our Worst/Cheesiest Pickup Line Contest, we realize that we’ve somehow navigated the seamy underbelly of KC nightlife relatively unscathed. For that, we’re eminently thankful. The entries fell into four categories. There’s the Standard Prosaic, a line so clichéd that its utterer must be mocked…
All things must change, or, as they say in Paris, toutes les choses doivent changer. This week, Overland Park’s Café Paris (7070 West 105th Street) lowered the French tricolor flag, metaphorically, when it changed its name — and menu — to Hannah Bistro Café. The concept change occurred two weeks after the original Hannah Bistro Café (3895 State Line) locked…
Long before Victor Fontana became Kansas City’s first celebrity restaurateur, he was a somebody. As far back as the early 1960s, female workers at downtown’s old Unitog factory would see the tall, hazel-eyed Victor at Frank’s Place — his father’s little restaurant and saloon at 18th and Cherry — and say to each other, “He looks like a movie…
THU 6/26 Mind’s Eye Theatre, which has made a colorful splash on the theater scene with A Clockwork Orange and The Rocky Horror Show, lends its support to a Kansas City premiere at Just Off Broadway Theater this week. The plot of Michael Perricone’s The Last White Family on Dorchester Road concerns a washed-up porn star in his late…
FRI 6/27 Jilly’s is quite the anomaly. When it opened as Pauly’s, it was a lone hipster hangout in a quiet stretch of downtown. On Fridays, it would fill up with people dancing to rare funk and soul records. With no foot traffic to speak of, Pauly’s grew on word of mouth alone. Then Pauly’s became Jilly’s and Jilly’s changed…
WED 7/2 There’s probably no convention as fraught with excitement as the International Brotherhood of Magicians convention. Where else might conversations range from sawing women into pieces to fitting ten birds into a top hat? And, most important, what happens when a whopping 1,000 magicians all get drunk in a hotel bar? The answers remain as secret as the levitation…
FRI 6/27 Summer in Kansas City sees lots of outdoor bar-b-que, BBQ, and even bar-B-Q cookoffs. But in Lenexa, where the preferred misspelling is barbeque, the competition is the official Kansas state championship. The Great Lenexa Barbeque Battle draws 170 teams of smokers to woo and fatten judges of seven categories: brisket, pork, ribs, sausage, chicken, whole animal and miscellaneous….
SAT 6/28 Bill McKelvey studied botany and ecology in college, worked for the Forest Service and became adept at the fine art of rare plant surveys. He was a professional, with a career in ecological restoration — which he says means asking what a piece of land was like before it was developed, then “returning that land to the…
Arnie Johnson has been playing music across the Midwest for more than thirty years. He’s never had a hit record, but on any given Saturday night his devotees are traversing a hardwood floor somewhere, two-stepping to the twangy sound of Arnie Johnson and the Midnight Special. “I’ve had some people follow me everywhere for 25 years,” says Arnie, a…
Thursday, June 26, 2003 In honor of the number 26 — significant because of its standing as the number of letters in our fine, civilized alphabet — we recommend a trip to see Spellbound. If you want to go totally spelling-bee crazy while you’re at it, read Bee Season, Myla Goldberg’s novel about a once-mediocre girl who discovers that…
Don’t be fooled by the availability of a videotape called Shvitz! My Yiddisheh Exercise Video, with weight-lifting instruction in Yiddish set to some of the finest klezmer music recorded in recent years. Were it not for the English subtitles, the audience that might appreciate this tape would be far past its weight-lifting prime. Most young adults who know any Yiddish…
Two years ago, a first-time filmmaker named Andrew Jarecki paid a visit to the Concord, Massachusetts, home of a man who might draw him a road map to his future. Jarecki arrived at the house, belonging to a Pulitzer Prize-winning child psychiatrist, after already traveling a circuitous route and taking an unimaginable detour. In 2000, Jarecki was in the…
With the exception of West Side Story and Gypsy, there’s not a musical I’ve seen more often than Bat Boy. I took in the original Off-Broadway production at New York’s Union Square Theatre three times (with never one understudy in view) and saw it here in December when it blew away all of the Unicorn’s box office records. With…
It’s a fundamental truth of human psychology: Anger boiled down to its rawest form is an impenetrable sadness. When he first appears onstage at the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival, Jason Chanos’ Hamlet is held hostage by his melancholia, but he’s about to replace it with something hotter and easier to express. It doesn’t take him long to get…
One fateful winter evening back in 1995, Erica Spitzer Rasmussen had an epiphany in her bathtub. Earlier that day, she and her college-level drawing students had taken a field trip to draw animals in a dairy barn, where they observed the birth of a calf. Shortly after the delivery, the mother cow gulped down the placenta, totally grossing out…
The cover of American Analog Set’s new Promise of Love is brown, and so is the music — too inorganic to be blue, too lightly played to be black. Set leader Andrew Kenny turned his attention from work on a biochemistry Ph.D. at Columbia to make the new album, and the result sounds more lab-grown than usual. The best…
Entering its fourth year of existence, the Kansas City, Kansas, Street Blues Festival has become one of this area’s premier summer musical events as well as the best bet for anyone aiming to discover the wealth of local blues lore. The festival dares to draw its lineup almost exclusively from artists with strong Kansas City ties. The result so…
If Tim Rutili and Ben Massarella’s first band, Chicago’s Red Red Meat, fell into the Rolling Stones-gone-small-stage-gibbon-whoop-crazy category, Califone is an extended foray into “Angie” territory. For ex-elementary students of a certain era, the name “Califone” should ring bells; it’s the brand of those cranky record-player sound systems that teachers used to have to carefully synchronize with filmstrips, a level…
On its new self-titled disc, Supagroup brags, Whatever you do, we’re gonna do you one better. And if whatever refers to rock in the most unironic of senses, then dude might just be right. Forget the Swedes’ garage revival, enough with the nü-metal mooks already — Supagroup just wants to rock because to rock is to live. The sound could…
Recently, a fair number of local music enthusiasts made a bittersweet discovery about Split Lip Rayfield. They learned that the boisterous bluegrass rebels had filled the Bottleneck to capacity, which was great news for the band. But it meant that fans who hadn’t secured advance tickets had driven to Lawrence in vain. Fortunately, second chances sometimes come quickly. The spurned…
Before becoming a household name, the White Stripes were already well on their way to the big time. The Detroit-based duo had released three critically acclaimed releases, appeared on every late-night talk show and toured with the likes of Pavement and Sleater-Kinney. Then Jack and Meg White released a video for “Fell in Love With a Girl,” and the rest…
After fourteen years of creative cacophony, Season to Risk is taking a possibly permanent “leave of absence.” That’s disconcerting news, especially because the group’s last recorded effort, 2001’s The Shattering, was a turbulent triumph. But even if S2R never returns from its hiatus, its farewell gigs should leave witnesses with vivid memories. On the first night, relatively newly formed…
After defining the parameters of underground hip-hop in 1998 as half of Black Star, Talib Kweli has since dedicated himself to shredding those parameters, renouncing the asceticism of minimalist beats and “positive” raps. Kweli’s 2002 disc was his most iconoclastic album yet, but the achievement was a matter of degree — not, as he proclaims, of Quality. On his first…
If your name is Robert Williams, the obvious choice for a nickname is Big Sandy. How else to distinguish yourself from the countless other Robert Williamses in the phone book, especially the crooners operating California-based Texas-swing and rockabilly groups? Williams’ Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys works the kind of open-all-night vibe that keeps groups booked year-round, regardless of trend….
