Even though we’ve previously heckled Harpo’s for being rich in fratmosphere, we’ve recently realized that many of our own embarrassing drunken antics over the years have been inextricably linked to that bar. For example, it was the only bar in town that rejected our obviously fake ID back in college. Later, after we were legal, there was the requisite make-out…
One of the more frequent call-in complaints restaurant critics hear on KCUR 89.3’s The Walt Bodine Show isn’t about food or service but about restaurants being too noisy. For a long time I brushed off the gripes as petty irritations, but lately I’ve noticed a new trend in local restaurants: background music played at ridiculously loud levels. What gives? Is…
Zen has become such a hip word over the past three decades that it’s now attached to all kinds of things that have nothing to do with enlightenment, including alarm clocks, acoustic cables, Internet search engines, and rolling papers. In Italian, zen means the same thing it does in English: meditation, coming from the early Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese…
SAT 7/19 The Hypothetical 7 comedy troupe is actually a ten. Need proof? Its ten members perform at 8 p.m. today to celebrate a decade of improvisational and sketch comedy. The group took shape in 1993 within the theater department at the University of Kansas. Founding member Matthew Reiss says ten years together have lent the comedians a special rapport…
SUN 7/20 Steve Simpson knows movies. As a collector of obscure old trailers and a longtime projectionist at the Tivoli, he’s no casual moviegoer. He also knows Troost — he’s lived near the street for some time. Enter Charles Monroe, head of the Troost Corridor Community Association. When Simpson and Monroe got together, a beautiful tradition began: Troost Movies, projected…
THU 7/17 A long, long time ago, kids were content to roll miniature cars around on the floor. They had no remote controls and didn’t shoot rockets, but the little die-cast cars birthed generations of gearheads and NASCAR fans. Today, toy maker Mattel describes its Hot Wheels as a “global lifestyle brand” that extends to video games, DVDs and the…
TUE 7/22 Brian Gosewisch has shot animals with a gun and with a camera. He prefers the camera. Raised in the Midwest, Gosewisch excelled at hunting and fishing as a child but enjoyed observing more than killing. When he was fourteen, his mom bought him a Kodak disc camera, and he set out on a different sort of hunt. “Anyone…
THU 7/17 There are a million hard-luck stories set in New York City, but Thoroughly Modern Millie isn’t one of them. The musical is about a girl from Salina, Kansas, who’s still picking hay from her teeth when she hits the pavement in 1922. In short order, though, she becomes a secretary (a glamorous post at the time) by day…
Inside a dense nylon forest of tall, blue, inflated columns, it’s easy to imagine existing in a different reality. This might be what it feels like, for example, to be an electron moving through the circuits of a sentient artificial intelligence. More likely, though, you’re probably just a visitor walking through Lee Boroson’s sculpture “Slurry” at the Ulrich Museum of…
Thursday, July 17, 2003 We recommend the reading and signing of High Strung by Quinn Dalton for several reasons. First, the author and the book have great names. (Please note that if the female author’s first and last names are reversed, you have a very plausible man’s name.) Second, the main character in High Strung is incredibly likeable. Worried that…
And you thought airbrushing was condemned to shopping malls and the state fair. Bob Bond is keeping alive the old-school trade of pinstriping and airbrushing on automobiles. From his Blue Springs shop, he kicks out cartoon mascots, antique gold-leaf restoration and hot-rod graphics, all by hand. (Anyone wanting to embellish a new cruiser with some ghost flames should consult…
Yeah, yeah — downtown is dead. Most people leave at 5 p.m. Friday and don’t come back until Monday. I don’t have to be told. I was once walking downtown on a Sunday, the lone pedestrian, when I heard a voice call out for someone named Rachel. My name isn’t Rachel, but I turned around anyway because I couldn’t imagine…
In a world so high-tech that you can chat with an Icelandic soul mate while downloading the latest Matrix sequel, it’s easy to forget the power that radio once held. In the 1940s, Franklin Roosevelt made the radio a collective hearth, offering fireside chats to salve a queasy nation. The concerts, comedies and serials of the day were precursors to…
In the mid-’90s, England was birthing moody, beat-heavy, chanteuse-fronted outfits with the same gusto Detroit brings to cloning its scuzzy Iggy impersonators. But whether they were creating soundtracks to imaginary spy films or the waiting area of methadone clinics, most of those acts were essentially one-and-done affairs. Morcheeba, however, managed to survive and modestly thrive because it wasn’t afraid to…
Black Sabbath’s greatest contribution to hard rock was its realization that lumbering dirges could be just as heavy, if not more so, than flashy thrash blitzkriegs. Sometimes spooky lyrics need room to breathe and riffs need space to sprawl. Majaedus has mastered molasses metal. Ryan Red Corn’s shouts seem stretched, as if they’re being played back in slow motion, while…
Recent liberal arts grad? Uh-huh. Looking for a gig that won’t make you feel like you nodded off and woke up in Office Space? Of course. Chronically underemployed? (Sorry — “freelance writer”?) Bingo. Yeah, well, there’s good news. The job fairy has carved out one more niche for overeducated slackers like you. Now, with a little effort, a few well-placed…
That line about what you get when you play a country song backward — your house, wife and dog returned to you — was never very funny. (Besides, play a Toby Keith song backward and what you get back isn’t a home, spouse or pet but rather the United Nations and a bill for back dues.) But Grandaddy frontman Jason…
The members of Morning 40 Federation, more a low-rent Mardi Gras krewe than a band, live by a simple manifesto: Those who would live life reasonably would search out and consume a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor each morning — before they brush their teeth, take a leak or do anything else. This group of New Orleans miscreants, equally influenced…
When Phish rolls into town, it will have been exactly 1,025 days since its last appearance in the KC area. Although the general public could care less about such a triviality, rest assured that many of the jam-band followers who have this date circled on their calendars can rattle off such facts with mind-numbing speed. The rest, however, will be…
For those who like their metal served with operatic vocals and extended musical forays into the guitar stratosphere, there is no better matchup this summer than that of and Queensryche and Dream Theater. The former helped keep this ’70s-flavored genre on its feet in the 1980s, submitting a string of prog-metal concept albums that worshipful fans still dissect. Though the…
Victoria Williams might be the only musician ever to have a career launched by a battle with multiple sclerosis. The fund-raising 1993 tribute album Sweet Relief featured Pearl Jam, Lou Reed and Soul Asylum and outsold its recipient’s entire catalog. Two years ago the vocalist earned critical raves for Sings Some Ol’ Songs, a collection of traditional tunes rendered in…
In a concert season hindered by slumping sales, ho-hum lineups and meager turnouts, an all-star rap tour dubbed Rock the Mic is proving to be one of the summer’s hottest tickets. That probably has a lot to do with the superstar headliners, who are among the shiniest stars in hip-hop’s galaxy. 50 Cent is arguably the genre’s biggest name of…
Now this … this is a bill for anyone who ever ached for Stephen Bishop’s guitar-strumming, chicken-bearing Belushi victim in Animal House. Jeff Hanson (pictured) and Denison Witmer simply have more nerve endings than you or I — they’re extremely sensitive. But there’s nothing wrong with that if it results in an album as fine as Hanson’s Son. The…
Anthrax will be in Lawrence in early August to play an old-school-heavy thrash set, but fans of all things loud and abrasive don’t have to wait that long for someone to bring the noise. Sonic assassin Emil Beaulieau, the dean of dissonance, headlines a din-tense lineup that also includes Rhode Island’s experimental trailblazer Prurient; local dance-beat destroyers Curse of Dick…
