With a name like Heavenly States, it might seem as if this Bay area trio spends a lot of time smoking peyote and staring at the night sky trying to find Cookie Monster in the stars. Or maybe that’s just me. Either way, the Heavenly States moniker is a fair assessment of the band’s dreamy yet jangly pop-rock. At the…
To hell with Frank Sinatra. Suck a fat one, Luciano Pavarotti. Do the waiters at Olive Garden look lovelorn, starstruck or even happy to you? Enter Lacuna Coil, a band for every Italian who hears “Dominick, the Italian Christmas Donkey” and is provoked to put on black eyeliner and smash something with a crowbar. And not Pauly Walnuts’ kneecaps, either….
If you grew up in Fort Rock, Oregon, it’s possible you have blissful memories of the Oak Ridge Boys, warm recollections of backyard barbecues where the barefoot, beer-swilling yokels you called friends and family howled along to “Mountain Music.” That song would inspire fuzzy feelings for your days of yore and allow you to hold the boys from Oak Ridge…
You stick your right leg in … Huh? You stick your right leg out … What the fuck? You stick your right leg in, and you shake it all about … This is 644 Massachusetts Street, right? It was. Liberty Hall. November 19. The KJHK Waxclash. A take-no-prisoners, best-of-the-best turntable competition. A clash. A battle. A war. A full house…
Writers don’t get much credit in the entertainment business. Screenplay authors, for example, live in relative anonymity while the actors who prosper from their scripts become celebrities. But thanks to the popular backlash against committee-crafted pop product, musicians who write their own material now receive a disproportionate amount of credit. Somehow, mediocre singer-songwriters have become more credible than outstanding interpreters…
“I… uh … inadvertently blew up a gas station,” Tony Nozero says sheepishly. Come again? You blew up a gas station? Nozero, the drums portion of the trio Drums & Tuba, is trying to explain how the band’s latest release came to be titled Gas Up, Blow Up. Simple. He blew up a gas station. “I was in New York…
Bad Santa, in which Billy Bob Thornton plays a drunken department-store Santa who swears at children, pisses in public, chain-smokes and cracks safes on Christmas Eve, is the least sentimental holiday release ever made. No one is redeemed. No one comes to believe in the spirit of Christmas. No one experiences a Christmas miracle. You can’t see Bad Santa and…
In director Ron Howard’s The Missing, Tommy Lee Jones’ Samuel Jones takes his place among the oldest archetypes in the Western genre — the white man who has lived among the Indians till he has at last become one. This plot device, used in Hombre and Nevada Smith and myriad other movies, renders Samuel what the late Pauline Kael…
No shit: As a proud member of the Indian Mound Neighborhood Association (we adopted Budd Park a couple years back), I would like to thank you for your article last week (KC Strip, “Doggie Stylin’,” November 20). I have two little poop-breaths of my own, including Boo Boo, who, while blind as a bat, has enhanced shit-sniffing abilities at superpower…
As if the crush of pocket-change-carrying humanity filling the Country Club Plaza for this week’s lighting ceremony isn’t incentive enough for every panhandler in town to head there, the Strip has found even more reason why beggin’ fools can’t afford not to run immediately to the swank shopping district. A few weeks ago, the Strip was about to take advantage…
Volunteer youth football coach Kevin King was glad to comply when the Heart of America Pop Warner Football League asked him to fill out a consent form agreeing to a background check two years ago. The last thing he expected, after all, was to be wrongly branded a child molester. All during August 2001, King had held practices three nights…
There is nothing romantic about a gym. Oh, maybe the nineteen state-championship banners hanging over Wyandotte High School’s court — in honor of the third-winningest program in the country — are sexy to basketball purists. Proud alums say: If you don’t have game, you won’t play here. Teenage girls don’t care about banners. Most of the girls who showed up…
It’s common knowledge that dance clubs are the best places for late-night people watching. For, as we all learned in Footloose, dancing feet are the devil’s playthings, and when you factor in scantily dressed women, slick men, lots of alcohol and the “must fuck” vibe inherent in such places, the volatile mix is ripe for a snortfest. But when…
The two Golden Ox restaurants (the original in the West Bottoms and the suburban outpost in Overland Park) both closed last week, victims of the economy and — in the case of the Johnson County location, anyway — a glut of competition. Located at 7111 West 95th Street, the second Golden Ox had vastly superior steakhouse rivals to the north…
My late grandmother — the scandal of Richmond, Indiana — had some issues with boredom. She was married either six or seven times, depending on which of her ex-husbands she could remember on the day you asked. And as a child of the twentieth century, she had watched the evolution of mass entertainment from vaudeville to VCRs, with silent…
FRI 11/21 If the timing of the E.M.U. Theatre’s And Much of Madness, based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, seems off by a month, simply chalk it up to integrity. “We would have sold more tickets had we done it in October,” admits director Todd Schwartz, “but it simply wasn’t ready. Commercial concerns are not an E.M.U….
DAILY This is probably the only hair salon where patrons get upset when they don’t have to wait for a stylist. That’s because the reading material in the waiting area includes well-fingered copies of Playboy.The Haircut (3727 East Sixth Street in Lawrence, 785-856-9000) is a walk-in salon — for men only. But even though its ads depict naked women dancing…
SAT 11/22 His name was Mr. Owl, and he made kids all over this TV nation crave Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pops like no owl ever had before. He was f**king brilliant — definitely smarter than the rabbit who never was able to eat any Trix and much more dignified than that loopy Toucan Sam. Why? Because he wore glasses.Although…
ONGOING Galyan’s Trading Company, the sporting goods behemoth at 11801 Nall in Leawood, has a climbing wall that reaches 976 feet above sea level. Unfortunately for the serious climbing crowd, the base of this prefabricated wall starts at 933 feet above sea level. For the inexperienced climber, though, 43 feet is the perfect elevation: low enough not to be daunting…
THU 11/20 Seniors pay a dollar less to see the two movies featured at the November 20 Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee screening, but the bargain is offset by the threat posed by two-and-a-half hours of stroke-courting shaky camera work.Filmmaker Jesse Scolaro produced Manito (which Eric Eason directed) and also wrote and directed Deprivation; both earned praise on the festival circuit…
If you walked past Shari Schiller on the streets of KCK, you wouldn’t immediately peg her as someone capable of shattering windshields. She’s petite, soft-spoken and modestly clad in jeans and a T-shirt; only her spiky, blond hair hints at trouble. But get her behind the wheel of a 2002 Trans Am — its trunk filled with speakers — and…
Thursday, November 20, 2003 Thousands of years before Sting, Bono, Madonna, McG or even Cher, the Greeks were representing with single-word handles. Even before Jesus dropped the “Christ,” dudes such as Plato and Socrates had their street names boiled down to just syllables — and they’re still getting props centuries later. Rockhurst University senior Sarah Holland uses her first and…
By the time Marilyn Maye was nominated for a Grammy in 1965, pop music had swung away from Hit Parade tunes to rock and roll. With the Rolling Stones and the Beatles dominating the charts, the kind of timeless standards that Maye was recording appealed more to the older, hi-fi audience than to teens frugging away to “Land of 1,000…
Rapidly gaining, I’m told, on It’s a Wonderful Life’s long-held lead as the most repeated and remembered holiday movie is a relative latecomer, 1983’s A Christmas Story. But even though I can imbibe Christmas tales as heartily as anyone (especially Christmas in Connecticut, with its sharp edges and holiday-averse heroine, played by Barbara Stanwyck), I’ve never seen A Christmas Story….
