When it comes to organized forms of dancing, we’re hopelessly uncoordinated. Sure, we’re good at drunkenly doing such cheezoid moves as the robot, the sprinkler, the shopping cart, the lap dance … er, what? Anyway, when it comes to moving our hands and feet in a coordinated pattern, it’s not a thing of beauty. Even scarier, we were attempting to…
Chef Jason Bowers got to work at 5 a.m. to start working on the inventory at Café Trocadero (401 East 31st Street) on May 17, but he had an uneasy feeling about his future at the 15-month-old restaurant. “The handwriting had been on the wall for a while,” he says. “The owners had done a 180-degree turn on me, going…
Call it a coincidence, but on the same day that I filled the gas tank for $1.97 a gallon and grumbled about it all morning, I read a news story about a hotel restaurant in New York City offering a $1,000 lobster-and-caviar omelet. Before I could even ponder such insanity, I knocked a pile of old magazines off my…
TUE 6/1 Trying to distinguish between gore metal and death metal — two of the most extreme and obnoxious forms of music known to man — requires a surprising degree of insight. Death metal and gore metal are virtually twins. But gore metal is death metal’s messier — OK, grosser — and more disturbed little brother. Those brave enough…
SUN 5/30 Considering that the kids’ bookstore Reading Reptile (328 West 63rd Street) has a spokesman named A. Bitterman who talks about his time in prison and demands that people “READ, DAMMIT,” Jules Feiffer’s appearance there Sunday makes perfect sense. The 75-year-old cartoonist, author and screenwriter is as well known for his children’s books as he is for writing…
SAT 5/29 Are you suffering from football withdrawal symptoms? Feeling aimless on Sundays? Counting down the months until the Chiefs’ season opener? (Yeah, that’s 112 days — 2,688 hours — what of it?) If so, here’s something to tide you over until autumn: the National Women’s Football League. Our home team, the KC Krunch, operates under the same rules…
SUN 5/30 We’re a little uncomfortable about the idea of lazing around on a blanket under the night sky listening to “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Stars and Stripes Forever” when so many of our fellow Americans are agonizing over the war in Iraq and are so deeply divided over the looming presidential election. Nonetheless, we understand the significance of Memorial…
Let’s say your side’s got the executive branch, the House, the Senate, a plurality of the Supreme Court justices, a couple of cable channels, The Wall Street Journal, the bulk of AM gasbags, every major corporation and is even now engaged in, er, “hands on” promulgation of its beliefs in two separate desert kingdoms. How would you feel? If you’re…
Thursday, May 27 We are fascinated by the online origami culture. True enthusiasts have chat groups such as Yahoo’s Paperwonders, on which members post origami-sculpture pictures of themselves. There are origami comedians, with origami humor we can’t pretend to understand. Then there are creepy fans of Origami Underground — “the place to find erotic origami on the Web.” Locally,…
Trouble Sisters, the flier reads. Spinning rock records for your asses. Do our asses want rock? Our asses want nothing more in all the world. Wednesday nights at the Point, while sporty types watch televised athletics upstairs, Venus Starr and Jessie Mathews take over a dim corner of the basement, playing rock classic and current, metal and punk. The ladies…
Crash It’s been almost a year to the day since the European-style theater troupe Princess Squid Productions last staged a show. Called Furies, the 40-minute piece was kind of scholarly but also a moving and visually captivating tale about what it means to be an actor. One of that show’s creators and performers, Heidi Van Middlesworth, stars in the…
The African Art Experience It isn’t often that Kansas City audiences have a chance to see a collection of non-Western art as diverse as the one on display at the Belger Arts Center. The majority of the pieces in The African Art Experience are three-dimensional objects made of wood, clay, metal or natural materials such as woven and dyed textiles….
Kansas City has been good to Forbidden Broadway, Gerard Alessandrini’s parody of bloated big-time musicals that’s been evolving since its 1982 New York debut. In turn, Forbidden Broadway has been very good to Kansas City-bred actors such as Cathy Barnett, Becky Barta and Don Richard. All three have done the show here and across the continent, including Barta’s engagement…
If First Friday art openings in the Crossroads are popular for singles to meet and hook up, then Saturday-morning art openings in Leawood are trendy for people who have settled down and begun to reproduce. Next to a pond near the Leawood City Park entrance, a three-piece jazz combo played underneath a picnic shelter for the dedication of Kansas…
Cheap Trick is no has-been. At least not live. So it’s disheartening to watch the band act like it’s irretrievably stuck in the past. Japan as the focal point is itself a concession to kitschdom. Yeah, the Far East was first to embrace the band, but there’s more to Cheap Trick’s history than At Budokan. To make matters worse, most…
If not for the success of 8 Mile, it’s questionable whether Battle for L.A. would have been green-lighted in the first place. Whereas the popular Eminem vehicle was heavy on pathos and relatively light on music, Battle, as its name implies, focuses almost exclusively on freestyle rap scraps. The footage of oral one-upsmanship is certainly entertaining, but director Darren Doane…
If you’re looking to peek into metal’s future, this is a good place to start. Relapse is in the vanguard of underground metal labels, and it’s the driving force behind the Contamination festival and its accompanying compilation CDs and package tours. This DVD chronicles 4 hours of highlights from a two-day festival at the Trocadero in Philadelphia. Not everyone on…
When Bruce Springsteen released The Rising, he maintained that it was never meant to be an album about 9/11. Rather, it addressed the aftermath. And in all of music’s attempts to capture the raw emotion and paranoid uncertainty of that period, his is the only one to stick. Even Toby Keith’s flag-waving, shit-kicking threat never went beyond novelty. In the…
Any Nirvana buff worth his faded Smiley T-shirt can tell you that Bleach was recorded for the princely sum of $606.17 — which might be more than it cost to produce all 12 clips found on the Sub Pop Video Network: Program 1, originally released on VHS during the salad days of 1991. And that’s perfect — how could big…
Let’s be blunt. If Kelly Osbourne’s father weren’t the fucking Prince of Darkness, there is no way she would be allowed anywhere near a stage. Her debut, Shut Up, was full of sugarcoated rock ProTooled into submission, a fact made obvious by this trip to London. Ozzy’s daughter and her band look fantastic — Kelly resembles a young Courtney Love…
Bugger the Buggles. Yes, we know “Video Killed the Radio Star” was the first video to air on MTV. But who had the second video, smart guy? Todd Rundgren. Oh, yeah, him. The underground rock star who has plied his trade for 34 years. Garage rock and glam? He’s done it. He’s also deftly revealed the looming chasm that constitutes…
When Rancid side-project Lars Frederiksen and the Bastards issued its debut album, many assumed it was just another vanity project. So it was a pleasant surprise to discover that Frederiksen had made one of the more stellar recent punk efforts. Ever since, mohawked pundits the planet over have been itching for a follow-up. With Viking due at the end of…
Dark Lotus is a horrorcore “supergroup” composed of the biggest “stars” on the Psychopathic Records roster. Members of Insane Clown Posse, Twiztid, ABK and Blaze Ya Dead Homie are the leaves of the Lotus. But whereas ICP’s last album was rock-oriented to a fault, Dark Lotus is centered squarely on hip-hop. This tour features the usual carnival of carnage onstage,…
You know it’s time for the antichrist’s all-skate whenever one-man cabaret act Voodoo Organist lugs in his synths, theremin and dementia and gets to rocking you Vincent Price-on-Thriller-style. Instead of settling for some kind of hoodoo kitsch, Voodoo Organist achieves a rarified seediness with crushed velvet and complicated drinks and songs about sex-bombs and strung-out friends, all delivered with the…
