A film starring Bob Dylan.” Even those who forgave the man for his disjointed 1978 home movie Renaldo and Clara would be hard-pressed to put five more frightening words into the same sentence. Dylan apologists, of course, will excuse Masked and Anonymous its myriad sins, chief among them rambling incoherence and deadpan tomfoolery. After all, Dylan has never made the…
When Nicolas Cage plays still and sullen — a man possessed by self-loathing and melancholy in Adaptation, say, or the landlocked angel in City of Angels — he comes off as drowsy. Cage has excelled in hyperactive parts that allow him to gesticulate spastically and detonate like a bomb. The part of Roy in Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men is…
Trash day: This is in response to Brooke Hawkins’ letter “Pool Sharks” (August 21). I have never been to the adult pool at Oceans of Fun, and I am not even an overweight lady who wears a thong, but what kind of pompous bitch writes a letter and makes comments about “overweight women” and “local trash”? I don’t live in…
In typical fashion, The (Red) Star blunted the forcefulness of President George W. Bush’s visit to town last week. In its front-page story on September 5, the liberal daily paper cattily pointed out that the majority of Americans aren’t happy with the president’s handling of the U.S. economy; in 40 column inches, it only hinted at the power of the…
Jesse Jones had been living at the Medicalodge Post-Acute Care Center, a nursing home at Greeley Avenue and 65th Street in Kansas City, Kansas, for just a month and a half when a nurse had to call an ambulance to take him to an emergency room. Jones’ condition seemed suddenly to have worsened. The 67-year-old was in bad shape…
In the fading summer light, a lone figure jogs around Sheffield Park, near the rusting freight houses in the Blue River Valley. His shirt clings to his chest in a low ring of sweat. Every few steps, he throws a few feeble punches into the sticky air. His fists feel like feathers. This is not a good day. There’s only…
At Le Fou Frog, we indulge in our Francophilia. Frog Pond In this zealous age of the Bush-Ashcroft New World Order, please don’t send us hate mail for the following statement: We are unabashed Francophiles. Our Francophilia was first foisted upon us by Night Ranger Dad, who signed us up for French lessons at a young age. (He not only…
I still get confused at the difference between Kansas City, North — the location of Jeremiah Johnson’s (see review, page 39) — and North Kansas City, which is a separate city with its own mayor and city council. But I completely understand the difference between a fast-food lunch and a more sophisticated but equally inexpensive afternoon meal, like the one…
Back in the early 1970s, Jeremiah was a bullfrog (in the inexplicably popular song recorded by Three Dog Night), but Jeremiah Johnson was Robert Redford. Well, in 1972, anyway, when he played the title role in Jeremiah Johnson, about a soldier who fled civilization in order to live a simple life trapping beaver but turned bloodthirsty, fighting a savage vendetta…
FRI 9/5 You don’t need us to tell you that on First Fridays, all of the Crossroads District galleries open their doors, and the streets surrounding 20th and Baltimore erupt into a party. When the weather allows it, there is always plenty of live entertainment outside. It’s usually something low-key, but in June we saw Eudora performing outside the Dolphin…
9/5-9/6 On a list of things people think about as they try to hold on to summer’s remaining pleasures, sandwiched between beer-soaked baseball games and the bikini-clad Watson’s girl, are movies at the drive-in. But drive-ins aren’t what they used to be. The Chucky Lou AV Club — which has long brought the trashy drive-in ethos to its late-night…
9/9-9/10 When psychologists rattle off common childhood fears, what’s often left off the list is The Wizard of Oz. Between the tornadoes, the flying monkeys and the creepily prescient crystal ball, the 1939 film still scares the bejesus out of kids. One key to the movie’s longevity (even Gone With the Wind, released the same year, isn’t aired annually)…
DAILY Living in a city can warp your sense of perspective. It’s easy to forget that sweeping ants off the porch is not really a taste of the outdoors and that a real walk generally encompasses more than the distance between the car and the front door. True, Kansas City is not your average concrete metropolis, but it’s still nice…
FRI 9/5 Walking through Staria Stine’s studio is like stepping inside a giant assemblage box. Bowls of seedpods and insect nests share shelf space with Woolworth’s-style plastic grapes and neatly catalogued fake fingernails. Though Stine’s collection is arranged for ease of use rather than for display, it looks compelling anyway. Consider four tiny vials standing side by side. The…
“All of the pins being stuck into things, it’s very much on the body. And then the steak knife against the leg….” Chuck Palahniuk is describing his new book, Diary. It isn’t pleasant. That’s something that gets Salon writer Laura Miller’s goat. “Imagine some crappy novels,” she writes. “Imagine that they’re all written in the same phony, repetitive, bombastic style…
Thursday, September 4 Want to hear the best story ever to include a ventriloquist? There used to be a ventriloquist whose act involved punishing his dummy by putting him in a box, at which point the dummy would “speak” using a skillfully muffled voice. After the ventriloquist died, his family couldn’t decide what to do with the dummy during the…
Grand Arts invited Catherine Chalmers to town, and now, as a result, the downtown gallery is full of cockroaches. It sounds crazy (and gross and wrong), but the little creepy crawlers are the muses for Chalmers’ new exhibit, American Cockroach. Used in her sculptures, videos, drawings and large-scale photography, Chalmers’ cockroaches are meant to encourage patrons to reconsider their…
Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero is the kind of play audiences might not want, but it’s a play they need. The show is weighty and thought-provoking — it tackles racial profiling, sexual harassment and the dangerous arrogance some law officers carry closer than their weapons — but it isn’t the least bit didactic or stuffy. That it’s also amusing and…
Like its Nebraska neighbor 311, Pomeroy seems immune to both critical barbs and the plummeting fortunes of genres similar to its own. The latest effort from these Lawrence transplants reveals no Identity crisis; Pomeroy still blends underground-style hip-hop, free-flowing funk and falsetto choruses. Not content merely to rap about rap the way many acts in the conscious crowd do, Pomeroy…
The mash-up phenomenon — in which lyrics and music from two different artists hook up for absurd one-song stands — has been raging for the past few years, but the Evolution Control Committee started it with 1993’s “Rebel without a Pause (Whipped Cream Mix).” On that platter, these Ohio pranksters spliced a rap from Public Enemy’s Chuck D to a…
Scottish quartet Serial P.O.P. commits the blunder of listing Derrick May, Scott Walker, Renegade Soundwave and the Fall as inspirations. So why does Serial P.O.P.’s debut album sound as if the band is auditioning to score a John Hughes flick, circa 1985? White Sex Male more closely recalls the lumbering arena rock of post-prime Psychedelic Furs and Simple Minds than…
In a nutshell, Kraftwerk drafted the late ’70s blueprint that Detroit’s Derrick May, Juan Atkins et al. erected into techno’s gleaming new metropolis and that electro-popsters Depeche Mode and Gary Numan took to the bank in the early ’80s. Oh, and Kraftwerk invented electro, too, on 1981’s Computer World (ask Afrika Bambaataa). Since then, Kraftwerk’s innovations have ceased, as 1986’s…
Check this out. On Everyone Deserves Music, Michael Franti proclaims: No life’s worth more than any other. Talk about old school! Granted, this sort of egalitarian premise still receives a good deal of lip service; depending on who’s doing the assuming, it’s an assumption about the world that’s variously termed Christian, humanist, civilized, democratic or American. But in practice, it’s…
With its ninth release, Quebec, Ween has obliterated any doubt that it’s the greatest drug band in the history of drugs and bands. The album spans the cosmos of aural, artificial bliss, from the metal scorcher “It’s Gonna Be a Long Night” (You bring the razor blade/I’ll bring the speed) to the airy, legalized, la-la-la land of “Zoloft” (Can feel…
