ONGOING Consider it the yoga backlash. For a while, it was cool to be all spiritual and introspective. Mastering Downward Dog was our greatest feat since … OK, we never actually mastered Downward Dog. Details. But now there’s a new kid in town. And this kid could kick yoga’s ass. We’re referring to dodge ball. The players in the Kansas…
THU 4/8 Anthony Swofford was one of the few. There’s a legend that the nickname “Jarhead” was coined after the Mason Jar Company stopped making jars to make helmets for Marines in World War II. That’s a negative. Author Anthony Swofford traces the term to the high and tight haircuts that make Marines’ heads look like jars. Swofford should…
Aaron Chilen, a 20-year-old skateboard videographer, knows how to pick a winner. Since last August, Chilen’s steady hand has been recording the booze-addled, testosterone-fueled antics of Kansas City skaters for his newest video, Through Being Nice, the hotly anticipated sequel to The Nicey Nice Nice Project. What separates this effort from Nicey is that besides local talent, Chilen is…
Thursday, April 8 If Shakespeare’s Henry V had been set in the United States circa 1986, we think old Hal might have been a lot like Andrew McCarthy in Pretty in Pink. In that version, the smart, popular, cool kid, unfortunately capable of the odd moral slip-up, redeems himself in time for prom (or the war with France) and becomes…
The little statue at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is striking: a 7-inch bronze of a warrior, its wounded right leg gushing red-copper blood and sporting a makeshift bandage in silver. The man depicted in Figure of a Barbarian has an intense look of determination and pain clouding his face. Robert Cohon, the Nelson’s ancient-art curator, says Barbarian (which…
Amazing Grace The transcultural Rainbow’s End Theatre that took over the old Theatre for Young America space at the Mission Center mall stages Shay Youngblood’s adaptation of Mary Hoffman’s book Amazing Grace. Heroines from Joan of Arc to Hiawatha spin out of the inventive title character’s imagination — even Peter Pan, though her classmates try to squelch that one…
George Catlin and His Indian Gallery Back in the 1830s, George Catlin made his first trip west from St. Louis, recording his observations of American Indian Plains tribes by sketching and painting their portraits, ceremonies and landscapes. During Catlin’s lifetime, representatives from the U.S. government (which was busy passing the Indian Removal Act) ignored his efforts to sell them his…
This might be news to James Dean and Miles Davis, but the Yoruba people of Nigeria invented cool. They call it itutu, and someone who possesses this mystic quality is generous and calm, possessing a sense of certainty. There’s plenty about African art that the Western mind might not comprehend. For example, the Yoruba find beauty in the average,…
Easterday upstaged its alt-pop peers in Kansas City between 1993 and 1995 by emphasizing well-written material over foaming-at-the-mouth showmanship. Behind frontman Scott Easterday, the quartet’s taut, passionate approach balanced intelligent chord progressions and breezy time signatures with lyrics that made you think twice. Songs such as “John F. Kennedy’s Birthday” and “Jean Niedieu” also emphasized Easterday’s calling card: the punchy…
Canadians are lucky bastards. Take, for instance, the country-pop sextet Emerson Drive. Had it been American, the band’s formative years might have been spent bickering over choreography. (“I said half-shuffle, twirl, then full-shuffle, dickweed!”) Instead, the group’s early years were spent on the road, playing clubs from Vancouver to Halifax. We doubt it even had a stylist. But how the…
Kansas City’s once irreproachable reputation as a jazz town is kept barely intact these days by the few remaining vestiges that continue the tradition, albeit as what French composer Erik Satie once called musique d’ameublement — furniture music. But beyond the dinnertime din, the music thrives, thanks to dedicated musicians like local bassist Bill McKemy. The battle to bring experimentation…
Cory Morrow is among the growing cadre of young Texas songwriters anchored by his longtime collaborators, Pat Green and Jack Ingram. Morrow boasts the standard Lone Star résumé — dropping out of college (Texas Tech) and paying dues in rough Lubbock venues — and has subsequently earned a few nods from CMT. But he’ll need a few more years…
Azure Ray speaks to souls who find tear-inducing transcendence in afternoon tea, Cat Power and Bronte; novels. In other words, Orenda Fink and Maria Taylor emote lacy poetry with intuitive grace as if they were speaking a secret language only the best of female friends understand. The pair achieve this synergy with a potent combination of honey-smooth vocals (think a…
Here we go again. Rufio is yet another band born of the So-Cal pop-punk implosion. Wide-eyed, fast guitars and hard drums lace up to (could it be?) whiny, nasal vocals in songs about misery, hopelessness and waiting for the next best thing. It would be moot to argue whether or not this is grating. The real question is if this…
No less a luminary than “Little” Steven Van Zandt — radio host, E Street Band guitarist and Sopranos mobster Silvio Dante — has been hyping Seattle retro punks Boss Martians. Van Zandt even featured the band’s “I Am Your Radio” during the “Coolest Song in the World” segment of his Underground Garage cult radio program. Unleashing walls of distortion, blazing…
If Black Rebel Motorcycle Club looks and sounds like a band that swiped its name from a 1950s biker flick, that’s because it did. And like that swaggering slice of celluloid, Marlon Brando’s The Wild One, B.R.M.C. adopts a defiantly cool stance for modern America. The Los Angeles trio made its debut in 1998 with its instant-classic self-titled album, then…
Brian Auger still insists on lugging around his Hammond B-3. The sucker weighs 300 pounds and is nearly obsolete, but no fan of soul, gospel or jazz would argue against using the organ. Auger himself had an epiphany the first time he heard one, and it’s not hard to hear why he hangs on to his. It’s the catalyst behind…
I don’t really like to dance. At least not in public. And if you’re (a) a guy, (b) heterosexual and (c) sober, there is a good chance that you don’t, either. But if somebody is waving (a) a gun, (b) a pitchfork or (c) an Abba record in your face, there is a good chance that you will indeed dance,…
The Prairie Dogg finds the dirt on GoGo, Georgia and Gimpy with guitar goddess Amber Valentine from Jucifer. PD: How many people and/or animals are in the Jucifer entourage? AV: Let’s see, we have five thousand, three hundred and … no. There’s Ed and I. We have one roadie, Eric, and two dogs. The big one is GoGo, who is…
Fry bread sucks. I mean no offense. No disrespect to a staple of the American Indian diet. But it sort of tastes like an elephant ear after a carnie has licked off all the good stuff. Don’t get me wrong. I have no real heritage of my own to speak of. I come from a long line of preachers, farmers…
Clayton Gavin and Randy Weaver have a lot in common: seething hatred for the government, advocating armed reprisal against law enforcement, espousing separatist rhetoric. In a different world, they might have been conscientious comrades. They could have cursed Uncle Sam at Little League games, burned effigies at family barbecues, cleaned their rifles on the porch swing and made beautiful music…
The Suicide Girls are hot. So hot that the touring troupe of tattooed burlesque dancers recently performed a headlining slot at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas. But though their routines — a drag-king take on “Big Spender,” a pimps-and-hos costume-ball rendition of Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Got Your Money” — were capably choreographed, the cut-and-pasties combination…
Tim Fairchild and I are not on the same wavelength. I think his band performs a good deal of songs about robots. And even though I try to make it clear that I like songs about robots — in particular, Grandaddy songs about robots — the band’s guitarist disputes my theory at the outset. “Are there really that many robot…
It’s a measure of continual cultural desensitization that The Girl Next Door plays like a remake of 1983’s Risky Business, yet very little of it feels risky. Twenty years on, the notion of a high school student getting involved in the sex-for-pay business seems almost cute, not dangerous. Anyone at all familiar with “adult” materials will recognize the title as…
