If the blues is supposed to be downtrodden music that causes people to shed tears in their beers, someone forgot to send the memo to Lil’ Ed Williams. Backed by the Blues Imperials, a raucous, party-style band with a flair for funk, the Chicago slide-guitar master is more likely to make you dance than dissolve in a puddle of…
The Prairie Dogg finds the dirt on enjoying guns, art and Bjork with drummer Steve “Skinny” Felton of Mushroomhead. PD: Excited to kick off the tour in Kansas City? SF: Kansas City rocks. I’ve come down a couple times to visit my girlfriend, who lives in Blue Springs. A tour-stop romance? Believe it or not, when we rolled through town…
“She’s going to be superfamous, isn’t she?” As loaded questions go, this one packs a full clip. The woman firing it is sitting against the wall in a candlelit loft on the top floor of a crumbling brick building in the River Market. The room is filled with hipsters and amateur humanitarians, but the woman’s aim is directed at Krystle…
Tupac Shakur is dead. But given the circumstances — he was mortally wounded in Las Vegas in 1996 — Tupac remains surprisingly prolific. Albums such as The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, R U Still Down? (Remember Me), Still I Rise, Until the End of Time and Better Dayz have been keeping it real for Pac’s fans since…
“Music geek!” Ani DiFranco says, playfully mocking me. I’ve just told her that sometimes I buy albums based on who the producer is. Surprisingly, after an entire career of not working with producers per se (she has coproduced for several years with her estranged husband and creative partner, Andrew Gilchrist), DiFranco say she’s ready to work with one, especially after…
William H. Macy’s plain-vanilla features and hangdog screen demeanor have served him well. A splendid character actor with a gift for the telling gesture, he is certainly not many casting directors’ idea of a leading man. But in The Cooler, Macy gets his shot. As bewildered loser Bernie Lootz (those ungainly syllables don’t exactly suggest James Bond), he earns a…
Not a lot of people know this, but our word actress is derived from the Greek phrase strumpetos luckyos, meaning “prostitute who somehow landed an agent.” The reason that this etymological root remains largely unappreciated is that it is entirely fake, fabricated for the purpose of irritating a lot of people. If your ire is sufficiently provoked by the…
Fix-it Kit: Joe Miller’s story about local Democrats sucking up to Kit Bond is very instructive (“Dude, Where’s the Party?” January 8). Magnify the situation to a national scope and you begin to understand why Republicans hold a death grip on power in this country. Do Democrats really care anymore whether or not they win elections? Or do they feel…
The hayseeds just north of us will get out of their pickup trucks long enough to hold their caucuses on January 19, and once again the daily newspapers will squawk about how important Iowa’s primary is to the Democratic Party’s nomination process. TV and daily print pundits will tell us that Iowa’s vote will have some effect on the New…
Lawrence resident Mike Cuenca knew that his message had to be clear. He knew it had to be direct, poignant and concise. He knew that, according to contest rules, it had to make the case that policies of President George W. Bush have put the United States in peril — and it had to do so in exactly thirty…
BASE jumping in Kansas City seemed like an urban myth. In the past year, a group of local jumpers invited the Pitch to half a dozen attempted parachute leaps from buildings and other high structures, but they never happened. Once, a reporter was summoned when a local jumper concealed himself in a building, ready to go, but a maintenance crew…
Awhile back, the Night Ranger ran a contest asking readers to send in their most sordid or weird sports experiences under the influence (“Personal Fouls,” November 6). As we enter one of the greatest months of the year — the NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl — what better time to reveal the winners? We gathered a panel of research…
Now that all of the traditional New Year’s Eve hoopla is out of the way for another 357 days, it’s time to focus on the Chinese New Year, which rings in the Year of the Monkey on January 22. Restaurateur Richard Ng, of the Bo Ling’s empire, always celebrates the holiday at his four establishments. But, he notes, the festivities…
Like a lot of baby boomers who came of age during the 1970s, my only connection to Vietnam was through the TV coverage of a long military conflict that raised the hackles of everyone I knew. I later realized that I wasn’t alone in my lack of knowledge and understanding about the embattled country. America’s most legendary food writer,…
WED 1/14 We’ll warn you right now: The Locust is not for the faint of heart. The San Diego four-piece assaults listeners with a jumble of spazzed-out guitar noise, seemingly out-of-control blast-beats, gurgling Moog keyboard mutations and feverish screams. For the uninitiated, it’s a sonic mess. For fans of the Butthole Surfers, Ruins or even Captain Beefheart, the Locust…
WED 1/14 Among this year’s most intoxicating film footage was the recycled material found in Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans. What started as a movie about the world of party clowns in New York became — through some alarming sexual molestation charges and the Friedmans’ home movies — an open invitation to observe the disintegration of a family. The art…
THU 1/15 It’s no Pulitzer Prize, but for aspiring authors between five and twelve years old, the 11th Annual Young Writers Contest is a strong start. The competition invites fresh talent to submit works of fiction, poetry and biography to the Reading Reptile (328 West 63rd Street) or any Johnson County Library Children’s Desk by January 15. A panel of…
DAILY In the wintertime, you just can’t count on good weather for tennis. And it’s a sport for which the weather matters. You need blood flowing to your fingertips if you hope to maneuver the wily construction that is the tennis racket. When asked whether gloves help, one local tennis instructor and former NCAA player told us that gloves are…
TUE 1/13 Readers were once considered loners of the nonrebel variety. But somewhere along the way, reading became much more cool, as did glasses — both developments occurring too late to help us through middle school. Take, for example, BookCrossing.com, which Kansas City’s Ron Hornbaker started in 2001. People use it to register books they can no longer fit on…
The men who run the bowling alley in the basement of the St. John’s Catholic Club in Strawberry Hill are George, Mike and Charlie (though Charlie, a gentle man with tinted glasses, also answers to Jake — he’s not sure why). They don’t bowl anymore, but they used to. That was in the old times. All of them make frequent…
Thursday, January 8, 2004 Fondue is fun — a slogan to remember. But fondue is also kind of expensive. It’s a dish that basically comes down to melting stuff and dipping other stuff in it, which can be accomplished with a microwave, albeit with a lot less dignity. So if you’ve wanted to check out the Melting Pot on the…
Say you want to live a Bridget Jones lifestyle — no, not necessarily the “Why can’t I get a man?” part. We’re thinking about an urban tribe of witty girlfriends (and a token gay male) — a support system for discussing, among other things, your dating woes. Sadly, it’s a universal truth that the older you get, the harder it…
Alien Ant Farm found fame the old-fashioned way: It latched onto a novelty tune and rammed it up America’s ass. But the SoCal quintet’s follow-up single, “Movies,” showed that it had a dribble of substance, albeit of the sub-Linkin Park variety. The band toured hard, gave 100 percent at shows and tried not to take itself too seriously. All was…
Fourteen tracks split over two discs and sold separately at ten bucks a pop is a far cry from the overstuffed generosity of J-Live’s The Best Part and All of the Above. But it’s a relief that now — finally — he seems unburdened by aspiring genius and is content to make stirring and accessible independent hip-hop. Always Has Been,…
