Can you feel that twinge of jealousy? Well, good. Because we should take a good, hard look at our little sister city to the west and admire its fully functioning jazz festival while we figure out how to get one of our own back in town. What our buddies at the Topeka Jazz Festival have figured out over the past…
Passage isn’t really hip-hop. He’s Anticon. And like Anticon labelmates Why and Themselves, his rant-raps fall outside of the bling-studded box associated with Generation BET. Passage (David Bryant) brings a little bit of everything to his recent album The Forcefield Kids. Backdrops range from dank and subterranean to brutally minimal, from acoustic pastoral to refreshingly Grey Album incongruous. On the…
Everyone who has chilled with a group of destitute kids in Poland and then written a song about it stand up. Everybody who has started a record label and land-conservation group that releases Neutral Milk Hotel records and transforms a former Girl Scout campsite into a self-sustained village and nature preserve on the outskirts of Athens, Georgia, raise your right…
Fuck convention. Sometimes you just have to make music. Bang two rocks together, howl at the moon or kick down a Snoop Dogg cover on the mandolin if you have to. For the members of the Gourds, it really doesn’t matter. It’s all about the hootenanny. And the dancing. Maybe some pretty women, too. Did I mention the drinking? And…
PD: How’s Hollywood? KA: It’s beautiful. We’ve had a wonderful week. Are things more surreal on the Sunset Strip than, say, at the Blue Room? Did you say surreal? I guess I never really thought about it like that. But they are definitely different. What do you do with your free time in Hollywood? I really don’t have much free…
Jim Kilroy must be stopped. The man is dedicated, relentless and ambitious. And your firearms are useless against him. Which is why I intended to take the bullet. I would dive in front of you and take 25 bands at five venues in seven hours on the opening night of Kilroy’s Kansas City Rock and Metal Fest. I had even…
I really despise musicals and operas and poetry,” Mike Skinner (aka the Streets) recently told NME. “I wanted to make a great rap album, and inadvertently I’ve made an opera, a musical and poetry.” And Skinner is partly right. The Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come for Free (released May 18) isn’t exactly a great rap album, but it is…
Dear Chris Carrabba: Hi, this is Annie. Um, I feel kind of weird writing this letter to you. I interviewed you a few weeks ago, and I don’t normally do this kind of thing — violating the whole journalist-subject, objective-distance thing, you know. However, I couldn’t help but scribble some words to you after our brief talk. I mean, you…
Sitting through Raising Helen is an exercise in frustration because somewhere inside this big heap of Hollywood nothing is a something (someone, actually) worth saving and savoring. Her name is Joan Cusack. Always a supporting player but never a star, despite her grace and warmth and charm even in the tiniest of parts, she’s like a session musician who makes…
Don’t take my space: Finally, someone who agrees with me! An arena downtown? PLEASE! (KC Strip, “How Suite It Is,” May 20) I know they’re trying to bring life back to downtown, but building an arena will not solve the problem. You build this arena, and it will take at least three parking lots away. Downtown does not have very…
The dude directing cars in the parking lot is barefoot. A shoeless, long-haired attendant is a welcome sight in a place where one would expect cops and Secret Service agents. The scene could happen only in Lawrence: Hundreds of people standing in the merciless sun outside Allen Fieldhouse on May 21 are there to see a president, but that hasn’t…
Turner White left his post running Union Station and Science City this week, but the effects of his lousy management will be felt for a long time. Here’s how the Strip knows. Way back when this sermonizing sirloin was tenderizin’ itself in that great meat-packing plant known as graduate school, it found a really cool part-time job. For three years,…
On May 17, Research Medical Center laid off the director of its diabetes center, Ann Kellett, a move the facility’s lead physician, Bruce Henson, says is just part of the hospital’s plan to jettison the center itself. A year ago, Research Medical Center was one of 13 hospitals owned by nonprofit Health Midwest that were acquired by for-profit HCA Inc….
The atmosphere had turned a bit too pious for 337’s taste. The irreverent 27-year-old, whose real name is Desmond Jones, had taken the stage at the Blue Room, a hallowed place normally dedicated to the cult of jazz and its aging congregation of fans. But this was the one night of the month the hall in the historic 18th…
We’ve done a lot of random things under the influence, but our fondest memories are of an impromptu intoxicated trip to Las Vegas. This happened while we were living in Colorado. After happy-hour margaritas (at a place where there was a two-marg limit because they were so strong — word on the street was that Everclear was the secret ingredient)…
The one-year-old Fenton’s (see review, page 33) is trying to make it in a location seemingly cursed; two prior restaurants have failed in the same space. But sometimes restaurateurs just can’t overcome the combination of bad luck and bad location. On May 15, French-born restaurateur Patrick Quillec finally said adieu to the Hannah Bistro Café that he opened in 2002…
Call Nancy Drew! Telegraph the Hardy Boys! There’s a mystery waiting to be solved at Leawood’s Town Center Plaza. A restaurant there is seemingly cursed, despite many noble attempts to turn it into a crowd pleaser. Its location seems great — the free-standing building, built in 1998 to house The Uptown Café, was designed with beaconlike conspicuousness in mind (especially…
When you have to write that all-important “What I Did Last Summer” essay in September, is it going to include entries such as “Played Xbox for the entire month of July,” or is it going to say “Tweaked at the Danger Mouse show, took tequila shots with Sammy Hagar, got that NOFX tattoo on my ass crack, and became a…
Kansas City was tucked in and snoring long before I pulled up to 1823 Highland Avenue. It was Saturday night. Or maybe Sunday morning. Didn’t matter. It was that blurry time of night when conjecture is pointless. There’s no half-assing an all-night bender. You’re either down or you’re not. You’re either in or you’re out. And I was in….
The whole point of summer vacation is doing nothing, or as close to it as possible. Stretching out full-length on scorching sand, a sighing emerald lawn, a porch swing, a deck chair, a chaise longue, rearranging knees and elbows to find the best pose for turning pages with one hand while holding a glass or a bottle with the…
MAY Baadasssss! STARRING: Mario Van Peebles, Nia Long, David Alan Grier, Ossie Davis DIRECTOR: Mario Van Peebles WRITERS: Mario Van Peebles, Dennis Haggerty PREMISE: Playing his daddy Melvin, Mario dramatizes the trials and tribulations surrounding the production of the 1971 hit Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. OUTLOOK: Why the five S’s? Because the Motion Picture Association of America won’t allow the…
If the summer movie season is our annual time for escapism, last summer’s audiences escaped most often with the likes of Hulk, Terminator 3 and The Matrix Reloaded. Those titles ended, respectively, with a homeless and penniless hero, the end of life on earth as we know it, and our messianic figure sent into a coma. Was this really…
I started with a collection of industrial lubricants and a vintage kitchen canister labeled “Grease.” Todd Karnahan picked up the container at some flea market, thinking he’d whip up a batch of homemade hair goo and give it to a friend — “another hardcore greaser like me,” he says — for Christmas. An inveterate DIYer with punk-rock roots and a…
Some people love the appeal of organized sport — camaraderie, matching jerseys, that kind of thing. But some don’t. If you aren’t into showing up at the same place at the same time week after week, you will not join a bocce league — no matter how much you love the sport. But that’s OK — as long as you…
