Before Matthew Limon joined the ranks of prisoners at the Ellsworth Correctional Facility in Kansas, he probably would not have marched for gay rights. He probably never would have signed a petition on gay-rights issues or subscribed to a gay magazine. And after he gets out of jail, he still might not do any of those things. But since Limon…
We first met Dan Krulewich — also known as the balloon-hat man — when our friend got us a balloon hat in the shape of a bear with a giant cock (“A Cure for What Ales You,” November 13). We encountered him again when we tried to buy Tony Gonzalez a naked-lady balloon hat in Chiefs colors (“Blow Me Up,”…
Way back in 2003, I said sayonara to several restaurants, including a few I really liked: Scavuzzo’s, the original Hannah Bistro and Metropolis. I was less tearful about bidding adieu to a couple of joints that I thought stunk, like Fedora Café & Bar — which bore scant resemblance to the vibrant, exciting bistro it had been in the 1980s…
There’s an unspoken truth in the dining business that goes something like this: If two friends open a restaurant together, they won’t be friends for long. Remember the old I Love Lucy episode in which Lucy and Ricky Ricardo buy a little diner with their best friends Fred and Ethel Mertz? Within days, the two couples hate each other….
THU 1/15 Hopefully when the City Theatre of Independence mounts the musical version of the Don Quixote story, Man of La Mancha, performers will be spared the woes of others who have tackled the tale. Terry Gilliam’s take on Cervantes’ Don Quixote — starring Johnny Depp for the few days that shooting actually took place — is the fascinating fiasco…
SAT 1/17 Casino Rueda — a more flamboyant version of square dancing, with better music? Pretty much, or so it seems. Casino Rueda is dancing with two or more couples exchanging partners in a wheel (rueda) formation, salsa music playing all the while. Partner exchanges are good for the duration of the dance — but don’t try to take…
FRI 1/16 Oh, dude, spiders make our freaking skin crawl. You never know when one of those little bastards is gonna drop from the ceiling and fill a limb with venom. Maybe if more of them were like Anansi, they wouldn’t get smashed in a Kleenex and summarily flushed down the toilet. Most arachnids inject flesh-dissolving toxins into anyone who…
FRI 1/16 Dino Delevski is kicking some serious ass for the Comets. For two years straight, the 27-year-old forward scored more goals than anyone in the league, netting himself consecutive Spalding scoring titles and MVP awards. After collecting a hat trick in last year’s All-Star Game, the Macedonian Menace was voted game MVP. This guy just gives and gives. At…
1/17-1/18 Remember back in high school when all the kids in art class got to listen to college rock on the hip teacher’s stereo and paint while the rest of us furiously scrawled lecture notes? If we could turn back time, we’d drop one of those honors classes and try our hand at printmaking or maybe even sculpture. Lucky for…
When Anita Dixon thinks about Martin Luther King Jr., she has this to say: “Yes, we shall overcome. Now. OK? Now.” A good start would be to relearn about the civil-rights movement. We know, you learned all about the shit that went down in Birmingham, Alabama, in, like, eleventh grade. You know all about Rosa Parks and the bus. Tired…
Thursday, January 15, 2003 So you’re going to Neon, the ’80s-themed dance party at the Bottleneck (737 New Hampshire Street in Lawrence), but you don’t have any decent Reagan-era gear. An easy fix is to yuppify yourself. It’s kind of a cop-out, but it gets the job done. Head down to the thrift store and get an Izod shirt, pleated…
Ask Ken “the Captain” Eller why he’s called “Piping’s Ambassador to the World” and you can practically hear him blush through the phone line. “You know,” he says, then stammers, chuckles and sighs. He finally admits that he doesn’t know exactly where it came from. The best he can figure is that maybe it has something to do with the…
In 1998, Frank Sinatra didn’t die — he just joined Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley in that exclusive society of celebrities who keep coming back from the grave. This past fall, a virtual Sinatra crooned at New York’s Radio City Music Hall in the necrophilous Sinatra: His Voice, His World, His Way. Through technology that blew…
Must have been some fire that Obie Trice saved Eminem from. Getting a helping hand from your buddies is one thing, but when your debut solo effort is crammed with a veritable who’s who of rap, you must be living right. Trice (who made his name guesting on releases from his Shady Records peers) finally takes the spotlight, and the…
Neptunes producer Chad Hugo knows there’s soul in music other than hip-hop, and he extracts it from Ethiopian-born Kenna with synthesizers as spartan and chilly as Music for the Masses-era Depeche Mode. Kenna and Hugo hang a thick mist of urgency over music that traverses influences ranging from Duran Duran, the Cure, the Cars and the Eurythmics. Openly derivative yet…
Question for Pro-Pain: In the entire history of rock music, when has the cover-album concept ever really worked? GNR’s The Spaghetti Incident? RATM’s Renegades? Pat Boone’s In a Metal Mood? Make your arguments if you must, but cover albums are never essential entries in even the best band’s catalog. So what inspired the New York metal quartet to issue this…
Here she comes again, that friend you love whom the world loves, too. But the world loves the her she became, not the her from way back when, and it’s heartbreaking, in a way, to see her emphasize all the things she wasn’t at first but perhaps inevitably became: uptown instead of down-home, glitzy instead of bric-a-brac, inviolable pop icon…
Being the jump-to-conclusions pain in the ass that I am, I was ready to heap equal parts praise and scorn on Cousin Gabriel — the praise for some relatively refined work, the scorn for a tad too much effort in the We’re (Trying to Be) Mysteriously Tortured department. But as Eyesore made its revolutions, it grew on me — like…
Compared to the spiky art rock and shape-shifting funk of the first four Talking Heads albums, David Byrne’s solo career has been mostly lackluster. Aside from his sampladelic innovations with Brian Eno on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and his sizzling score to Twyla Tharp’s dance piece The Catherine Wheel (both 1981), nothing in Byrne’s canon matches his…
Being a Robert Pollard fanatic must feel like a full-time job. Reading and sending Postal Blowfish messages, loading nuggets of the Guided by Voices frontman’s off-the-cuff pop onto iPods, tracking down and acquiring related limited-edition singles and albums, plotting best-of tapes, trading bootlegs, buying additional shelving — not to mention actually listening to all of those dang songs Pollard keeps…
When it comes to jazz legends, we’re all on a single-name basis: Miles, Bird, Trane, Ella, Dizzy and, of course, Monk. Yet that level of fame can be a tough burden for the progeny of those giants who have chosen to carry on the family business. For drummer, vocalist, composer and bandleader T.S. Monk, son of the gifted pianist, it’s…
So long as freshman girls roam freely along the college campuses of this nation, so too shall the Samples travel to each of its cities, bestowing unto the girls music that inspires them to hug each other and the environment with equal fervor. Not a bad gig for a band that got the boot from its record label mere months…
We wanna do it with the Internet. And by “it,” we mean it. Don’t be such a fucking prude. At the very least, we wanna grope the Internet in a coat closet during a bar mitzvah after-party, put a cherry-sized hickey on the Internet’s neck and get the Internet grounded for the next six weeks for, in Mom Internet’s words,…
Though known mostly for Willie Nelson and other countrified acts, central Texas has pumped out more than its share of fiery, punk-influenced bands: the Butthole Surfers, Kissinger, And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead. Now along comes the Spiders. Though not quite as sonically adventurous or quirky as its Austin-area predecessors, the band more than makes up…
