A couple of First Fridays ago, we were merrily walking around, plastic airline cups of wine in hand, when we stopped short at a provocative sight: In the parking lot across from Zin was a beer-and-wine garden. Orange plastic netting marked off its turf, and a rather large number of people stood around high-topped tables with tablecloths. We stared, aghast….
Six or seven years ago, when I used to give a damn about having a waistline, I used to work out with a personal trainer who thought pizza was the worst possible thing any human could ingest. “It’s baked fat!” she screamed. Well, I suppose it is, but every once in a while I absolutely crave it, cholesterol be damned….
If you have some spare spinach around, say $225,000 or so, and want to buy Kansas City’s original vegetarian restaurant, the building is for sale at the corner of Ninth Street and Tracy. The front windows are boarded up, and the second-floor windows, which gaze out from a long-neglected ballroom, are open to the elements. But this solidly constructed…
9/30-10/4 In one of the more ambitious multimedia mergers in recent memory, Elicit fuses seemingly disparate disciplines to illustrate the inner workings of one woman’s brain. Each of the production’s 11 scenes represents an individual idea or emotion, and though the separate sections don’t follow a cause-and-effect format, they all address a unifying theme: the complexity of female characters…
10/2-10/3 In Lost in Translation in which Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) wanders into the ikebana class, we feel a little catch in our breath. She’s completely displaced but trying to be brave and remain composed; her modest insecurity strikes a chord with the women around her. We think she might have felt more comfortable taking flower-arranging lessons at Johnson County…
SAT 10/2 Some decidedly nonapathetic teenagers have organized Capital City Clash, a community festival to benefit a mural painting project in Tennessee Town, a historic neighborhood in Topeka. To make a day of it, score lunch at the chili cookoff at noon, check out local musicians of all sorts throughout the afternoon and find dinner at the Soul Food…
10/6-10/10 </b “People think, Midwest? There’s not Latinos there,” according to Elisa Gonzales, project coordinator for the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. For the first time, the organization convenes its biennial national conference outside Texas — right here in Kansas City. “This conference will show the dynamic of Latinos in the Midwest. It will show the community…
Mark Salzman is not the kind of writer who locks himself in his study ten hours a day, agonizing over every sentence, refusing to eat until he’s found le mot juste. Rather, Salzman is the kind of writer who wraps a towel around his head, clamps down unplugged headphones on top of it to block out all noise, and fashions…
Thursday, September 30 Men and women have lived together since the dawn of humanity, yet they still don’t know how to get along. Are we not evolved? Do chimpanzees quibble over whose turn it is to clean the melon rinds out of the sleeping nest? Does the lioness ever say to her lion, “You’re not going out in that…
The pinup has made a lot of progress since those oily calendars in the men’s room at the corner gas station, where Miss July demonstrated a profound affinity for spare tires. Considering local artist Jennifer Janesko’s age (early 30s) and gender, it might seem she’d be unfamiliar with — or would have an aversion to — such images. In…
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…
Amelia Bedelia Over the course of thirty Amelia Bedelia books, author Peggy Parish put her titular housekeeper in the employ of various dotty families. The domestic’s most notable trait is her literal, concrete take on the world; she’s the kind of person who, when told to strike a match, hits one with a hammer. For Theatre for Young America’s production,…
Though it was written and is set in the late 1950s, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is still relevant when it comes to certain African-American experiences today. Hansberry’s prescience was staggering, and her play is one of those classics that caters to all without talking down to any. The InPlay production at Just Off Broadway does it justice….
Speaking in Tongues completes Gene Simmons’ transition from demon-bat rock god to David Lee Roth-like bag of gas. This 65-minute DVD offers a soulless romp through all things Gene, straining to give his shallow existence a whiff of meaning and importance. It’s all everywhere and nowhere at the same time — a smarmy spoken-word performance in Australia, a self-aggrandizing tour…
It was a producer who said “no one buys albums for who the producer is,” which, to an extent, is true. But you don’t have to be a music geek or even know who the late Tom Dowd was to have a great time with this film. All you need is an interest in music and how it’s made. Dowd…
One of the funniest segments on this two-disc set comes in the form of old hand-held camera footage showing Dismember lead singer Matti Karki chastising an audience member for pogoing. “Hey!” he shouts. “At a death metal concert you bang your head! At punk shows you can pogo!” Death metal bands can all too easily seem like they’re kicking a…
A hell of a lot of interesting things have come out of Scotland. The Loch Ness Monster. Trainspotting. Dudes in skirts. Haggis. And don’t forget that infamous Brit-rock that makes American girls swoon over tortured musicians with lilting accents. Take, for example, the boys in Travis, in all their foreign goodness. What could be better than listening to the group’s…
It’s understandable if the sight of Woody Harrelson during the opening credits scares you away from this film, but you can be assured that the guy doesn’t rear his head once after that. Misleadingly marketed as a concert film, the confusing Bridge to Havana is still worth checking out for the uniqueness of its premise. Basically, a bunch of American…
With the release of its fifth proper full-length, the Brooklyn-by-way-of-Athens, Georgia, collective the Mendoza Line leaps from the merely ambitious to the conceptual. Fortune, released domestically in August after months of positive press in England, examines the American socioeconomic landscape from various narrative points of view, some home-grown, others fomented by foreign characters emigrating to the United States. Sound dull?…
Walter Salas-Humara, the consistent common denominator of the Silos, has the kind of voice that makes an audience hang slack-jawed onto every word. He’s been telling stories (sometimes bleak, sometimes merely melancholy) of the “What happened to that guy and/or girl I used to be?” variety for decades now. Or at least long enough to land him on the influences…
Yo La Tengo doesn’t have time to mess around with clever show names — such as July’s local “Fuck Bush” benefit — with Election Day looming ever closer. And so with a similar sentiment but a much more cumbersome title, the ever-eclectic rock warhorses are bringing “The Tour of Swing States to Try and Help Get John Kerry Elected” across…
I’ve got an idea. Let’s shit-can the political debates this year. After all, isn’t everyone tired of listening to these guys yet? Instead, how about we put partisan musicians up there? Something tells me that Alice Cooper going all Point/Counterpoint with Barbra Streisand (“Babs, you ignorant slut …”) or the Boss trading tit for tat with Toby Keith (“Sir, I’ve…
Janis Joplin is a dirty little homewrecker. I realize that the old coot has been decomposing for more than three decades, but that didn’t stop the shrew from nearly ruining my wedding. Her and that ne’er-do-well she always used to hang around. What was his name? Bobbie McGillicuddy? Ah, Bobbie McGee. “Me and Bobbie McGee” to be exact, the song…
Electrelane’s debut disc, Rock It to the Moon, was almost entirely instrumental, a maze of atmospheric tangents and swirling guitar countermelodies. Neither as virtuosic as King Crimson’s symphonic suites nor as urgently catchy as an average television drama theme, and too focused for ambient electronica or free jazz but not groove-oriented enough for new wave, Electrelane’s initial output fused wordless…
