You know what’s wrong with jazz in Kansas City? Shows like this. Don’t get me wrong — we should be proud that several in the pantheon of jazz greats got their humble starts here. But when tribute gigs garner more attention than the street-level folks busting ass on a regular basis to innovate and educate, we’re feeding the tourist-trap jazzers….
Viewers following the fifth season of The Sopranos may have been seduced already by the edgy psychedelia of Low Flying Owls. Apparently someone at HBO thought that some stylized retro-rock would be the perfect musical accompaniment to the whacking, bosom-watching, psychoanalysis, garbage removal and other stuff that those meaty Jersey mobsters do with their free time, so the band’s “Glad…
When a band cancels shows because its bass player blew up his teeth in a collision with a flying microphone, you know it’s for real. The Riverboat Gamblers bassist Pat Lillard’s post-trauma photo (above) is pure T-shirt material. He looks like a younger, gorier Alice Cooper, but the blood is real, and it took more than six hours of surgery…
Michael Burks sings his sensitive tales of bad behavior like a man waking up with his best friend’s wife the morning after said best friend stole his own wife away. In Burks’ complex blues fables, awful things happen. But what the hell — might as well make the best of it. When Burks sings I hope he’s worth my pain,…
The first time I ever had my heart bitch-slapped by a Willie Nelson tune, I was riding in the bed of a pickup truck, drinking an orange soda and crying my eyes out imagining what it must feel like to be a good-hearted woman in love with a good-timin’ man. This, of course, was before riding in truck beds was…
Don’t mess with Texas. That message leers from every other T-shirt in every other store window in the biggest state in the Confederacy. The playful dictum may be tongue-in-cheek, but those drawlin’, brawlin’ sonsabitches mean every cotton-pickin’ syllable. Texas frightens me. I can’t condone any locale where citizens may regularly mosey, usually either to an NRA meeting or to fetch…
Cyndi Lauper was right, by god. Girls really do just wanna have fun. But what about the guys? “We’re sick and tired of people telling us not to have any fun,” Mercury 2 declares from his perch onstage at the Bottleneck. “I want rock and roll! Now shout, ‘Bitch!’” The crowd obliges. Mercury very much appears to be having fun….
A package tour is often a dodgy endeavor filled with tag-along opening acts whose presence functions merely as an excuse for fans to arrive fashionably late or drink heavily until the headliner hits the stage. Talk to two bands anchoring the Aussie Invasion tour, however — the Vines and the Living End — and it’s clear that their jaunt with…
That Jersey Girl, the sixth film by writer-director Kevin Smith, is the least Kevin Smithy film he’s ever made will be welcome news to those exhausted by Smith’s everlasting obsession with fart jokes, comic books and his dick. It will be bad news to those enamored of Smith’s everlasting obsession with fart jokes, comic books and his dick. For the…
The Ladykillers is the second film in as many years made by Joel and Ethan Coen to fill space between pet projects. But even their recent paychecks reflect the brothers’ restlessness: Their movies have grown more manic and scattered, more fun than they ought to be and more engaging than they would have been in anyone else’s hands. Last year’s…
Please stand by: I am so sick and tired of the recent trend in our country, thanks in no small part to the Middle Ages mentality of our current U.S. leadership, to ignore so many fundamental and individual human legal rights. This KCTV Channel 5 reporter Steve Chamraz is just another sheep in the herd with no grasp of the…
In Arkansas City, Kansas, a tiny town south of Wichita, about 750 workers arrive each day at Creekstone Farms, a meatpacking plant built four years ago. Each day, they process nearly 1,000 cows from the company’s pastures in Kentucky, turning out not only thick, premium black angus steaks that will be served at upscale restaurants but also beef that will…
Jose Leon knows how to get things. “Somebody need a house? I reference to this guy,” he says cheerfully in a thick accent, holding up a Re/Max agent’s business card. As CEO of American Connection Services Inc., the 38-year-old Leon says he tries to help Kansas City’s immigrants negotiate our country’s unfamiliar customs and laws. His thick, ringed fingers roam…
How pretentious is this: We look a waiter and a bartender in the eye and ask for a drink menu or a list of specialty drinks, and both tell us straight out that there’s no such thing. OK, fair enough. We decide to stick to our standard Dewar’s and water. But then we spot someone holding a glass of thick,…
I received an e-mail the other day from someone at the Canyon Café (4626 Broadway) with an earth-shattering news update: The old yeasty breadsticks — which had been served with a pink, cream-cheese-based dip that reminded me of Kraft pimento cheese spread — are out; the new predinner snack is a basket of corn chips, sweet-potato chips and wonton chips…
My friend Betsy is a prim and proper lady with exquisite manners. She does like a stiff belt of Irish whiskey before dinner, but she never raises her voice and never complains if her beef is overcooked or her vegetables are soggy. She prefers dining in familiar, comfortable restaurants, so she was slightly discombobulated when I invited her for…
MON 3/22 In a millennium past, unhappy minstrel huns known as “grungies” noisily broke from the ranks of the wuss-metal paradigm. Like the ryders of Krom, these hair-flipping, flannel-donning, underemployed philistines pillaged the airwaves — not to mention people’s daughters — while making smack dealers and David Geffen as rich as Catholic kings. But like flaming meteors slapping into…
SAT 3/20 Jews are getting a lot of attention in the movies. From Jonathan Kesselman’s Hebrew Hammer (the Jewsploitation parody of Shaft) to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (a different, scary and less parodic kind of Jewsploitation), everyone wants a piece of the chosen people. Kansas Citians wanting to see a wide range of movies spotlighting many facets…
3/19-3/21 Mountain biking bunny-hopped into sporting prominence in the ’90s, with new bicycle manufacturers offering sturdy, multigeared machines that bridged the gap between rough-and-ready BMX and comparatively fragile road bikes. But locals soon learned that mountain biking isn’t as fun without the … mountains. All KC had to offer were wide multipurpose paths that forced riders to yield to pedestrians…
WED 3/24 It’s interesting how two little words — First Fridays — bring joy to some and fear to others. For those of you who have sworn off the double-f phrase, here’s one art opening that isn’t on a Friday and won’t provoke an anxiety attack. The Mattie Rhodes Art Center (1740 Jefferson Street, 816-417-2536) opens its Children’s Art Exhibit…
Last fall, we ran a story about a postmodern mime troupe from Chicago (“These Clowns …,” October 9, 2003). “Mimes: Who needs them?” we asked. “Well, maybe you do and you don’t even know it yet.” This was meant to be playful. Although we had interviewed the touring mimes and were impressed by what they had to say, we…
Thursday, March 18, 2004 If anybody is an expert in funding, it’s gotta be the members of the American Medical Student Association, who are in town for their annual convention. Most of these physicians-in-training are sinking into student-loan debt faster than you can say “annual percentage rate.” But it’s not about them. Physicians swear an oath that they will help…
Curator isn’t a title that Dalton Carter is comfortable with, even though he’s the organizing force behind this Friday’s Spontaneous Generation art and music exhibit at the Next Space gallery. “I’m not necessarily curating a lot of the work. I picked some artists that might have been interested in it, and it’s really up to them to do whatever…
“Most of the time, I try to stay invisible,” says Win, the teenage protagonist of Laurie Brooks’ marvelous new play, Everyday Heroes. Played with skin-flaying honesty by Sam Cordes, Win is the kind of kid who really isn’t all that thrilled with invisibility — or its contemporary opposite, fame, which flares brightly for him and then burns out by the…
