Topic: Berlin cover songs. J.S.: I remade “Take My Breath Away” because it was such a special song for me and Nick. We had our first kiss to it. Music influences. JS: Everybody from Stevie Wonder to Amy Grant. Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion … all the big voices. Initial expectations for Newlyweds. JS: I thought of it as…
Jay-Z is one lucky bastard. I’m not talking about the money, the fame or the fact that he can eat sweet, syrupy Belgian waffles off Beyonce’s fun bags whenever he feels like it. No, he is a lucky bastard because he has 99 problems — but a bitch ain’t one. Conversely, many a Kansas City musician will readily inform you…
A personal invitation to join Sigur Rós on tour would be an answered prayer for most up-and-coming ambient artists. But when that fantasy actually happened to San Diego musician Jimmy LaValle, his response was a tad unexpected. You see, he really wasn’t that familiar with Sigur Rós. “I had heard of them,” says LaValle, the one-man band known as the…
It’s always the quiet ones you need to keep an eye on. You know how it is — the cops nab some maniac for chopping up a few coeds, and when the local news trots out the befuddled neighbors, they always say something like, “He just kept to himself. He was so dang quiet! Ain’t that right, Marge?” The same…
Anchorman, cowritten by its star, Will Ferrell, plays like a series of strung-together outtakes. There’s a vague plot about the fall and rise of a San Diego newsman whose polyester suits are brighter than he is, but this doesn’t propel the movie forward so much as keep it from spilling off the edges of the screen and soaking the audience….
Behold what is, in theory, the thinking person’s ideal summer blockbuster. King Arthur features some of the planet’s most beautiful people gallantly galloping and bashing each other with all manner of implements amid lush vistas and robustly appointed sets. Add an intriguing historical pedigree and apparently unprecedented narrative convention, which plunks this Arthur and his knights into what a…
Memory is a wonderful thing if you don’t have to deal with the past,” declares French Celine (Julie Delpy) to her erstwhile American one-night-stand, Jesse (Ethan Hawke), in Before Sunset, the meandering but reasonably charming follow-up to the duo’s 1995 Euromance Before Sunrise. Passionate hearts bold enough to retain their memories of the 1990s may recall that these star-crossed Gen-Xers…
It’s one of the oldest stories in cinema: A man is kidnapped, and his family waits at home to hear word while law-enforcement types try to figure out what’s going on. A plan is developed to deal with the situation, but then something unexpected happens that screws things up. If a big studio (as opposed to a big studio’s…
Skoal: I recently read Patrick McCahon’s scathing letter to the editor regarding Jen Chen’s Night Ranger column (Letters, June 24). I might be mistaken, but I am not under the impression that Chen is a shameless drunk who is incapable of enjoying life without drinking. To my knowledge (correct me if I’m wrong) she writes a column reviewing local clubs…
Squeezed into Cinemark’s jam-packed Palace Theater like a beef sausage in its casing, the Strip marveled at how the liberal crowd reacted on the opening night of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. There were cheers from the lefties, for example, when a Marine corporal fresh from fighting in Iraq tells Moore that he’d rather go to prison than be shipped back…
At high speed, the winds can get pushy, but 23-year-old Brian Malicoat’s four-wheeler moved steadily over blacktop as he drove along North Broadway Road a few hours before sunset on May 12. He hunkered low over the machine’s handlebars, shifting his body weight forward, leaning into oncoming turns. The all-terrain vehicle, a Yamaha 660R Raptor, growled like a hot rod….
On a Friday evening in late May, telephones were ringing in Atchison, Kansas. They rang all over the small industrial and farm towns of Platte County in Missouri, too. Folks got the call in Parkville and around Platte Woods. The phone rang at Jody Jones’ place, a fenced-in house with yellow siding on a street paved with Atchison’s nostalgic red…
We stumbled in late to work one Friday morning with the kind of hangover where you can practically smell the alcohol fumes emanating off your logy self. Now, we’ve heard about studies that say hangovers cost a workplace an ungodly amount of money in decreased productivity, and we’re living proof of this. If we weren’t so fucking tired, we’d be…
Fried chicken is one of those all-American dishes, like apple pie, barbecue and Hostess Twinkies. But does it represent an America of another time? While I was writing my review of The Overlook and its deep-fried chicken (see review, page xx), I realized that, as much as I like to eat fried food, I don’t really order it that often,…
One of my favorite childhood memories is triggered by a fried chicken dinner. It was a dish that my parents both loved but that my mother had no talent or interest in making. So every few weeks, we would pile into Daddy’s flamboyant, cherry-colored Cadillac and drive for what seemed like forever — it was actually about 30 minutes —…
6/29-7/3 The American Revolution and its most beloved — and, in one case, besmirched — characters make up the latest offering from Commedia Sans Arte at Just Off Broadway. A troupe of comic actors and street performers with Renaissance Festival credentials, Commedia Sans Arte’s show In a Minute, Men! combines sketches, songs and “general silliness” into something it calls a…
FRI 7/2 I wanted to call it ‘Blessed Is He Who Is Not Offended,’ but by the time I thought of that, I already had the cards printed,” Kansas City artist Dylan Mortimer says of his one-night-only performance piece Cautionary Church. The cards are the same bright-yellow and orange of road-construction signs and carry the warning label “Spiritual content may…
7/3-7/4 Neighborhood fireworks displays are always the most fun. They’re more dangerous, so it’s more entertaining to observe drunken bottle-rocket wars. But there are some official fireworks displays that offer big-budget bang without the burn. On Saturday, the Kansas City Wizards shoot their display after the 7:30 p.m. game against the Dallas Burn (don’t be alarmed by the team’s name)…
FRI 7/2 About a year ago, a few dozen social and political activists decided it was time to create a central resource for the Kansas City community — or at least those who agreed with them. On Friday, the idea becomes reality when the Crossroads Infoshop and Radical Bookstore (1830 Locust, next to the MoMo Gallery) opens its red door…
The legacy of the Chucky Lou A/V Club and its myriad incarnations lives on. In the beginning, there was Film Fetish, a members-only, after-hours movie-screening party, subsequently renamed the Big Jeter A/V Club. The spawn of the eponymous hillbilly funk band Big Jeter, the club put on shows at the Top Two Theater (5909 Johnson Drive in Mission), where each…
Thursday, June 1 Those who reinvent architectural spaces, we salute you. In Denver, for example, promoters have turned a cathedral into a dance club. In Atlantic City, New Jersey, there’s an old boardwalk casino that skaters have transformed into an indoor skateboard park. In our very own downtown, we have an old bank that’s now used by artists. All the…
Record store employees get all the breaks. Aside from just being cooler than the rest of us civilians, they get first dibs on the gems in the new-arrivals bin and discounts to skim the cream off the top. Joseph Powell may be guilty of these crimes, but he and two other Music Exchange employees have instituted a new cultural-enrichment program…
Annie For all its utility as a punch line, Annie is a rock-solid piece of musical theater. Its source is the comic strip about a feisty little redheaded orphan who’s adopted by rich mogul Daddy Warbucks. Though it’s a publicity stunt at first, Annie and Warbucks eventually build the foundation of an unconventional family. Directing is local theater veteran Donna…
Avenue of the Arts “Silly” seems to be the overwhelming theme of this year’s Avenue of the Arts, a temporary installation of six public-art pieces along Central Avenue downtown. Kansas City Art Institute printmaking teacher Laura Berman’s “Cowboys and Indians” has a ‘zine-aesthetic-meets-the-USDA’s-latest-fruit-campaign feel, along with a 1950s-nostalgia twist: Large-scale, black-and-white, photocopy-quality images of children in cowboy and Indian costumes…
