After a 3-year hiatus, Garden State stoner-rock powerhouse Monster Magnet returns with its sixth release and a new lineup, delivering a supercharged kick in the ass for anyone in its way. The group has risen in popularity thanks to heavy, guitar-driven lap-dance ditties such as “Negasonic Teenage Warhead” and “Space Lord,” proving that the whole sex, drugs and rock-and-roll trifecta…
Folk used to mean what pop used to mean, but more so: It wasn’t just what folks liked; it was what folks could make themselves. What’s impressive about youngish old folkie Mason Jennings is the way he and his kinda bluesy, kinda jazzy, kinda McCartney trio makes rich, relaxed folk sound like something shrugged off instead of sweated over, like…
David Byrne’s work with Talking Heads was all about control, paranoia and icy calm. In contrast, his solo career has been filled with colorful experiments, dizzying world beats and … icy calm. Touring in support of Grown Backwards, which some are calling his most accessible post-Heads effort to date, Byrne is backed by a crack nine-piece band capable of moving…
I have taken my share of liberties. I have cracked the Liberty Bell. I have stroked the Liberty Memorial. I have hooted from the balcony in Liberty Hall. And I’m even confident that I know the man who shot Liberty Valance. But Liberty, Missouri, is another story. About the only time I venture north of the river is to catch…
avid Byrne has done it right. Destined to live high on the hog by way of Talking Heads royalties until the day he dies, the adventurous quirkmeister has been nothing but ballsy since his seminal new-wave outfit parted ways. You may not like everything he’s tried since his career apex, but complacency has, to his credit, been Byrne’s worst enemy….
Beware the ugly lights. They come on after last call, when the weary bartender flips a switch. Just like that, the unforgiving, fluorescent glow of reality slaughters the dusky charm of your favorite joint. The desirables you’ve been checking out at the end of the bar are reduced to tragic boozers. The band members — who just minutes ago were…
You’ve got your year-old Harvey Keitel drama, and you’ve got your French psychosexual controversy bait from 2002. Where are you? You’re either flipping through the upper reaches of premium cable or lining up for another frustrating local attempt at a film festival. From Friday, September 10, through Wednesday, September 15, the fourth annual Halfway to Hollywood event, now called the…
The future is almost here — at least according to screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (Pandaemonium) and director Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People), two cinematic visionaries whose combined vision in Code 46 sparks tremendous intrigue and unrest. At once a weirdly familiar sci-fi trip, a bleak romance, a treatise on technology run amok, and a hot sirocco of mood,…
Couple off: I must take a bit of exception with the letter written by David Montgomery in your August 26 issue. While he may be right that marriage is a religious institution, and there are very few religions that condone homosexuality, those few are protected by the laws of our land. Let’s take a quick peek at the first clause…
Cool or Embarrassing? Sam’s club: “It was Brownback who laid out more specific policy goals. On the subject of opposition to abortion, Mr. Brownback argued that many women who choose abortion were unaware of what he said was the pain the procedure caused a fetus. His call for women contemplating abortions to be offered anesthetics for the fetus referred to…
Paseo High School teacher Joplin Sell contacted the Strip last week to tell this curious cutlet what really happened at the Kansas City, Missouri, School District’s back-to-school rally last month. The district has taken heat for its lavish August “convocations” in the past. Last year, the much-maligned, bloated bureaucracy was criticized for spending more than $20,000 (about half of it…
In 1988, a young man in Kansas City named Chris Bryson dabbled with the wrong things, dealt with the wrong people and one night trusted the wrong man, who clubbed him, raped him and injected his throat with Drano. For the better part of a week, Bryson endured what can only be described as a living hell. He was strapped…
When we first heard that D.B. Cooper’s opened at 6 a.m., we immediately started planning the bender of all benders. We would start our night at midnight or so, drink until last call at 3, then go to the Mutual Musician’s Foundation for the post-3 a.m. shift before heading to D.B.’s at 6. However, when we proposed this to our…
Shortly after it was announced last March that Hallmark’s dining division, Culinary Concepts LLC, was turning over three of its Crown Center operations — Crayola Café, Golden Harvest Bakery and Milano — to the management of the Hyatt, the bets were on the table: How long would it take for Milano’s handsome and talented executive chef, John Korycki, to find…
One of the finest cooks I’ve ever known was my late Sicilian grandmother, the tireless Palma, who didn’t see cooking as an art form. It was just another domestic talent she had mastered, like sewing, keeping a clean house or stretching a dollar. “She liked cooking and was very inventive and creative,” recalls my Aunt Mary. “But she was burdened…
9/3-9/26 In the 1950s camp classic The Bad Seed, a little girl overlooked for a school prize rejects the Bible verse about turning the other cheek and kills the medal’s recipient instead. If the intricacies of suburban vengeance have changed at all over the past half-century, no one bothered to tell playwright Eric Coble, whose black comedy Bright Ideas opens…
WED 9/8 Whenever we hear Matthew Barney’s name, we tend to think of sex — raw, hungry, male-dominated sex, with bulging goat men and Scottish warriors whose mouths are stuffed with bloody cloths. The first film in his celebrated Cremaster Cycle, however, is all about the sisters. Cremaster 1 is set in Bronco Stadium in Boise, Idaho, and in…
9/3-9/5 Kansas City’s first Irish immigrants came here to work, digging streets and laying railroads in the 1850s. A century and a half later, however, their descendants gather to party at the Kansas City Irish Fest. Predictably, food abounds. And more than twenty musical acts from around the world supply traditional jig music and Celtic rock. Dance instructors are on-site…
9/3-9/6 Poindexters are primping their pompadours and cuffing their jeans in anticipation of the Kowtown Custom Greaserama, which kicks off with a block party at 7 p.m. Friday at Harry’s Country Club (112 Missouri Avenue). “People are coming from all over the country to show off their cars this weekend,” says Russ Williams, founder of World WideRetro.com (which sponsors this…
Karate’s not just for that skinny, quiet kid down the block anymore. More adults are taking up the sport. Everyone, after all, knows that it improves flexibility, coordination, muscle strength and reflexes, and that it gives practitioners a mental edge by increasing their confidence, patience and relaxation. But 39-year-old Dirk Cowan, for example, took up karate a couple of years…
Thursday, September 2 If work-mandated happy hours make you feel a little cagey, check out Business After Hours all on your own. The Hispanic Chamber of Commerce hosts the monthly networking event from 5 to 7:30 p.m. at the Kansas City Zoo’s African Marketplace Boat House (6800 Zoo Drive). You can demonstrate some serious initiative by distributing business cards…
It’s the macho man’s worst nightmare — a group of empowered, feminist, Latina poets auctioning off good-looking men to raise money for their artistic enterprise. “They’re all hot,” Las Poetas cofounder Jackie Madrigal says of the meat on the bidding block. “But it’s not just objectification of men. We want to show the rest of the nation that we have…
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…
Where do you go to see an artist in swim trunks? This isn’t a joke or a riddle. You go to the pool. Not a pool. The pool. I’m not allowed to tell you where it is, because most of the people who go there aren’t the apartment residents who are supposed to get exclusive access to this sunbathing…
