With Kansas City’s downtown about to undergo a most ambitious face-lift, the Strip can’t help getting misty-eyed thinking about how this town is about to experience its own version of the American dream. You know what this chuck steak is talking about. The great belief that defines this worthy nation and its hardworking people. The dream that says it doesn’t…
Derrick Barnes just wanted to go home again. Home for him was Hallmark, where in August 1999 he had become the first full-time African-American male writer on the company’s payroll. (The company already employed a black editor and black freelance writers.) Hallmark hired Barnes soon after he graduated from Jackson State University in Mississippi. And after only 6 months on…
When a child claims abuse, adults are supposed to listen. This past spring, however, when 12 adults spent 3 weeks listening to an adolescent girl’s accusations that her father had molested her, 11 of them found it hard to believe. Her father has served 5 years in jail because of those allegations. He remains imprisoned because of a shoddy investigation…
Yes, I have to confess that I cringed when I paid my $55 lunch bill — at least that included a tip — at Circe (see review, page 37) for a $14 hamburger, a $10 plate of fish and chips, an iced tea and two desserts. Oddly enough, a few days later I had a similar lunch at a downtown…
Given the unofficial Night Ranger motto — “We go to these places so you don’t have to” — how could we not do our civic duty by checking out Johnny Dare’s? Sure, we were curious about Mr. Dare’s new trailer-trash-themed biker bar, which sounded like it would either be a skanktastic good time or an experience that would scar our…
On this summer’s beefcake blockbuster Troy, Odysseus (played by British actor and former welder Sean Bean) gets short shrift because much of the Greek action hero’s adventures — according to Homer, anyway — happened after the fall of Troy. War may be hell, but poor Odysseus actually had a much tougher time just getting home, thanks to near-fatal confrontations with…
FRI 8/13 Paula Vogel is one of those playwrights who tackles tough issues and light fare with equal success — she’s earned a Pulitzer Prize, two Obie awards and several other accolades. One of the big winners was her early-’90s play The Baltimore Waltz, which opens this week at the Alanz Theatre at 624 East 63rd Street. At once…
ONGOING When roller derby started in 1935, it was a 57,000-lap couple skate meant to represent the distance between Los Angeles and New York. In the years since, men were removed, violence was added and another American art form was born. Now roller derby is back in vogue, and the newly formed KC Roller Warriors are here to represent. Practicing…
THU 8/12 Just when you thought this town couldn’t get any hipper, they went and formed a backgammon club. Its mission: to unite those who would preserve this ancient game, this sacred forebear of Parcheesi. However, oh righteous hipster, you should know that the battlefield onto which you will tread has been around for about 5,000 years. The Egyptians who…
FRI 8/13 Edward Gorey’s book The Curious Sofa is a bit like Alice in Wonderland. But rather than meeting queens and caterpillars, Gorey’s ingenue mixes with “exceptionally well-made youths,” a husband and wife with wooden legs, and the said couch, among others. All fine and good in a picture book, but when staged, a playfully pornographic piece such as Sofa…
There are more haunted houses than unhaunted ones, according to local psychic and ghost hunter Sueanne Pool. This, she says, is because the day of reckoning foretold in the Bible hasn’t come, so for the moment, there’s no heaven and no hell. The souls of the deceased are just hanging around — more than likely in people’s homes, especially if…
Thursday, August 12 When a film’s end credits begin to roll, that’s usually our cue to stumble out of the dark theater, trying not to trip over half-full popcorn tubs and buckets of Coke. (It’s like there’s some sort of unwritten rule that moviegoers don’t have to throw away their own trash.) When the credits of Napoleon Dynamite begin…
Larry Flynt wasn’t always interested in politics. The porn kingpin admits that had he not been targeted for various forms of harassment over the past 30 years, he probably would be less inclined to spend his time and money exposing what he considers the government’s biggest lies and hypocrisies. “I’ve been dragged through most of the courts in the land,…
Polly Apfelbaum Like any good artist, Polly Apfelbaum makes complex work. But it is also dazzlingly beautiful, which in the past has caused some snooty art-world folk to dismiss it as mere décor. “People don’t want you to deal with beauty,” Apfelbaum says. “I was interested in the decorative arts. I was interested in the everyday. Screw you. If it…
It’s nearly impossible to escape the title and show information for Boundary Creatures at the Kansas City Jewish Museum’s Epsten Gallery at Village Shalom. It’s spelled out in huge, black, serif letters in the upper-right corner of the one-room gallery, only inches away from the nearest artwork. Eileen Garry, the museum’s director, says the gigantic font is necessary because…
Kansas City crooner Boy Big went national with an appearance on Gangstarr’s “Nice Girl, Wrong Place,” which juxtaposed the singer’s buttery vocals with Guru’s laconic rapping. The song helped establish Boy Big as a purveyor of the new-school soul that is grounded in R&B and capped off with a heaping of hip-hop spice. That hardly original concept is extended to…
Billy Ebeling’s time as the smiling, long-haired fixture on the porch at The Crossing is over, but those days are still audible in the understated blues, zydeco, country and bluegrass hybrid found on A Thing for You. Ebeling has been around long enough to inhale genres, and with songs like “Pass the Hat”(acoustic string band blues), “All the Way to…
It’s not hard to rack up a new high score playing the “Spot the Influence” game while listening to Mystic Jaguar … Attack!!!! The Stella Link manages to re-create and combine the dueling feedback of Quicksand, the prog-rock jamming of Slint and the angst-inspired melodies of Sunny Day Real Estate. But it fails to create anything new. The spacious, musing…
Pixel Panda keeps things deliberately obscure on its full-length debut, The Nation of Symmetry. Buried in a blender of guitars, keyboards and jack-rabbit beats are the tag-team vocals of Do-Yun Kim and Nicholas Seider. One utilizes straightforward stylings; the other screeches like a weasel caught in a lawnmower blade. Burning through 14 songs in less than 30 minutes (only one…
The New Tragedies inadvertently conjure a vivid soundtrack to a teen-angst dreamscape within the first minute of their new EP. The four songs sound ready-made for whatever hot new Spelling drama Fox has cooked up. Like the Gin Blossoms but more easy listening — if you can imagine that — the first track, “Her Majesty,” is ideal for that I-found-the-one-but-oh-shit-I-totally-fucked-it-up…
On the surface, the Old Canes’ Early Morning Hymns is a happy, upbeat album. Play it in a room full of unsuspecting test subjects, and the mood is instantly elevated. Even those who are seated tend to dance, tapping toes and treating the tops of their own knees as drums. But the fast pace and generally rockin’ feel of the…
Garaj Mahal is a band for listeners able to mainline Bela Fleck without experiencing irregular breathing or bulging eyes. This four-piece “jam-band supergroup” — whose collabos include Chick Corea, Sting and Fleck — is an exercise in musicians going wacko with technicality by marrying complex jazz parts to a groove you can shake it to. Even if jam bands or…
It’s no surprise that Nashville tastemakers have radically undervalued talented singer and guitarist Robbie Fulks. After all, the Columbia University alum is far more intelligent than your average country bumpkin, and he’s unafraid to tackle serious topics such as addiction and Susanna Hoffs — occasionally within the same song. Fulks is renowned for the black comedy that steeps his best…
David Bowie is sidelined by a bum ticker and Britney had the doors to her Hotel Onyx closed by a bum knee, but the worse thing that could happen on the Acoustic Planet Tour is a busted string. Such is the contrast between the jam scene and the industry mainstream. Whereas the big-ticket tours have languished in the summer heat,…
