Sunday brunch at Copeland’s Famous New Orleans Restaurant (see review, page 39) was one of the more expensive — and disappointing — morning meals I’ve experienced. But there was more agony and less ecstasy when I went searching for the cheapest brunch in town. I love cheap, but not when it smells bad. As a recovering smoker, I have some…
I don’t pretend to be an expert on the cuisine of New Orleans, though I’ve visited that city — legendary for its Cajun and Creole dishes — twice and barely survived an orgy of eating both times. On the more recent trip, I was still chomping on a warm beignet as my plane took off from Louis Armstrong International Airport….
9/10-10/10 The music at Quality Hill Playhouse this weekend makes a few detours around what audiences might expect from a show called Songs From the Silver Screen. For this cabaret review, director J. Kent Barnhart has culled such classics as the Judy Garland hit “You Made Me Love You” and a healthy smattering of Gershwin. However, he’s also snatched a…
SAT 9/11 The Late Night Theatre folks have a knack for launching their shows with style. No one who attended the Eve of Destruction party at the former Old Chelsea site will ever forget it, especially given its eerily prescient date: September 10, 2001. So to help grease the wheels hauling in David Wayne Reed’s world premiere of Mother Trucker…
SAT 9/11 Monarch tagging has nothing to do with sticking a paper label on the breast of a foppish royal dandy. Instead, it’s the scientific method of identifying butterflies for the purpose of tracking their population and migration routes as they flutter their way through our latitude. The butterfly followers at Monarch Watch provide hands-on tagging demonstrations and lots of…
9/10-9/12 Frisbee flickers have a new place to pitch their platters. Kansas City’s Northeast neighborhood now boasts a 10-hole disc golf course. The latest course, carved out of a thicket of overgrown brush by members of the Kansas City Flying Disc Club and workers from the Kansas City Parks Department, opens this weekend. Experts will be there to dispense pointers…
To get a clear picture of what you’ll be dealing with when you pick up Jason Ryberg’s Open Letter (To Dark Gods of the Ancient World), turn to the trio of opening quotes by country singer Hank Williams, martial artist Bruce Lee and 16th-century painter Michelangelo Caravaggio. That Ryberg mines profundity from the first two and turns the latter…
Thursday, September 9 We’ve met some Kansans we might call lifeless, but this is something different entirely. Wylene Dunbar’s latest novel, My Life With Corpses, is narrated by a Kansas girl (the aptly named Oz) raised by a family of dead people. Throughout the book, she reflects upon her childhood and the dangers she faced while maturing: the risks of…
The staffers at the Sunflower Outdoor and Bike Shop have an arduous task ahead of them. So they lock the doors, order pizza, pop open a few beers and settle in to watch thirty VHS tapes of short clips from mountain films. They grade the teasers using an informal rating scale: good, decent and sucked. From these clips, they decide…
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…
Matthew Barney is so hot right now. His epic, five-film Cremaster Cycle finished its European tour early in 2003, followed by a 3-month run at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. His nightmare-weird images cover the pages of art publications everywhere. He’s dating Bjork. And with Cremaster 1 and 2, he’s sold out the first evening of the Nelson-Atkins…
Fully Committed Former Kansas Citian Jason Chanos returns to the multifaceted role he originally played at the Unicorn Theatre in the summer of 2002. He mainly plays Sam, a struggling New York actor who pays the bills by serving as a trendy restaurant’s reservations agent. Where the comedy gets interesting is in Chanos’ metamorphosis into more than three dozen…
Rich white folks took it on the chin this summer in the Missouri Repertory Theatre’s Living Out, a play about how difficult it is to find good domestic help these days. But what might have been good ironic fun only turned out to be pretentious and dull. So we wondered if, with Eric Coble’s Bright Ideas, the Unicorn Theatre…
The song “Dream Sequence” pretty much sums up what’s happening on this debut by Mars Volta guitarist Omar A. Rodriguez-Lopez, which is half of the soundtrack to a film he’s in the process of making. Ghostly drones swoop, then withdraw. Rattles shake ominously. Guitars wail and mumble, then lock into subliminal grooves or flame out. Honorary membership in the Buena…
Richard Gintowt finds himself in an awkward position on Middletown, his sophomore effort under the name OK Jones. Gintowt is a local music journalist (Lawrence.com) and musician. And anytime a professional pundit decides to create the very thing he critiques, he’s setting himself up for a smackdown. The only way out is to make an album so great that it’s…
Having shamelessly imitated ’60s British pop and ’70s LSD psychedelia (among other styles) for about a decade, it was only a matter of time until members of the collective formerly known as Elephant 6 would set its sights on the shaggy college rock that was all the rage when its members were cutting their musical teeth. The summer’s gone/It is…
It’s fitting that this veteran duo, unsung for bringing electronica to mainstream (or at least to alt-rock) acceptance, would open its farewell album without a drum beat, usually a key Orbital element. Blue Album holds few surprises for those familiar with its predecessor, The Untogether. But other than “You Lot,” a compelling plea for planetary responsibility, the overall mood is…
Any gangsta rapper worth his weight in 20-inch rims has to make a prison album. Unfortunately, Shyne never really launched his music career before getting hit with a 10-year bid for his involvement in an altercation at a New York City nightclub. P. Diddy, who originally signed Shyne to Bad Boy, was indicted for his alleged role in the same…
R. Kelly neutered is no more boring than R. Kelly with his hard-ons — his ass-hounding was always by-the-numbers. Whether those numbers included 14-year-olds is something for the courts to ponder; this twin-disc I-didn’t-molest-nobody record (better than Jacko’s!) is more than enough for mulling. Happy People is all retro grooves and unintentionally comic “uplift” inspired by Marvin Gaye and Frankie…
Welcome aboard Air Farina Flight 3000, service from San Francisco to Kansas City with a brief stop in Chicago. Our in-flight entertainment will be provided by Mark Farina, a man who refers to himself as a “modern-day traveling minstrel” and whose Web site is oddly devoted to re-creating an airport terminal. Naturally, Farina will be your captain this evening. The…
Nicknames are funny things. They’re hardly ever endearing — that is, unless you happen to be a shaggy-haired, fat, bearded mandolin virtuoso with a hankering for taking any musical style you can get your hands on and twisting it around your instrument until it fits like a glove. In that case, a name like David “Dawg” Grisman just makes sense….
Let’s face it, people — categories are becoming useless. The so-called jam-band crowd has been among the first to embrace this. The Slip may appropriately be compared to the Flecktones and String Cheese Incident, but like those acts, this band is too distinct for easy references or a homogenous following. And though the Slip is also a fixture on jazz-festival…
Alvin Youngblood Hart isn’t one of those memorize-the-78 acoustic bluesmen — not that there’s anything wrong with that. Strictly speaking, in fact, Hart is not just a bluesman, though he’s been nominated for a blues Grammy and won a Handy Award. In the tradition of Taj Mahal (or Leadbelly, for that matter), the Memphis-based Hart reserves the right to electrify…
If you’re still mourning the demise of the mighty Jesus Lizard (5 years removed, I know I am) or At the Drive-In, then let the frenetic post-punk roar of These Arms Are Snakes salve those wounds. Like the former, these guys enjoy lobbing twang-hardcore guitar grenades over a rhythm section that locks into tight, pummeling grooves while the singer (Steve…
