We’ve been keeping our gimlet eyes on the über-clubs popping up around town. Even though the club scene is not our thing, we still have to laud ’em for opening in areas we hope will revitalize soon. Take Chakra, the relatively new place in the West Bottoms. We’d been meaning to check it out, but what finally got us out…
I had a strange reaction walking into Matadors, the two-week-old tapas restaurant and lounge that now inhabits 1815 West 39th Street. Earlier this year, the space was home to the ill-fated Joe D’s on 39th Street. That restaurant, owned by Jack Hanrahan, had been given a brash and loud makeover, wiping out any traces of the chic, elegant Café Allegro…
A couple of generations ago, when many neighborhood drugstores had lunch counters, a Kansas Citian never had to walk very far from home to get a good cheap meal. Cheap and, apparently, memorable. The jazz singer Queen Bey still lights up when she talks about the hot dogs at the downtown Woolworth’s. And my friend Thelma raves about the open-faced…
10/15-11/7 Suzan-Lori Parks claims that her play Topdog/Underdog, which opens at 8 p.m. Friday at the Unicorn Theatre (3828 Main), came to her as a “gift” and took only three days to write. Under most circumstances, we would expect the resulting literature to be, well, unimpressive. But Parks wasn’t working under the usual circumstances, and her efforts earned her a…
10/16-10/17 Michelle and J. LeRoy Beasley have been making art together for more than decade. She concentrates on painting; he creates masks reminiscent of African styles but with distinctly updated variations. “My masks draw inspiration from our own country, from people we see every day,” LeRoy says. “I just add a little more to it.” Their work is about harmony,…
%{}% FRI 10/15 The Royals opened October by sputtering to a franchise-worst record, and the Chiefs must win their remaining games this month just to reach .500. The Kansas City Outlaws, an expansion team that kicks off its inaugural United Hockey League season on October 15, may seem an unlikely savior for victory-starved sports fans. But the Outlaws, the first…
%{}% 10/15-10/21 Now in its 11th year, FilmFest Kansas City continues to provide screen time to movies that might not otherwise see the light of a projection bulb in this part of the country. This year’s festival boasts offerings from 23 countries; however, a striking number of the films have a connection to Kansas City’s jazz and blues heritage. Friday…
%{}% This season, MTV’s Road Rules ventured beyond its usual menu of extreme sports and sexual high jinks by positioning its sculpted cast members in the front window of a clothing store, naked except for some camouflaging body paint. Similarly, in its ongoing campaign to invigorate the downtown art scene, Kansas City’s Urban Culture Project turns empty storefronts into vessels…
%{}% Thursday, October 14 To some people, bluegrass is a form of music made by the relentless abuse of small, twangy, stringed instruments, and it conjures images of George Clooney and John Turturro running through a swamp. But to 1970 Southwest High School graduate Stephanie Ledgin, bluegrass is a way of life. For the past three decades, while Kansas City…
%{}% In the foreground of the picture are hastily thrown-off shoes, pants and T-shirts; behind them, a fuzzy, indistinguishable twosome in bed. Above the image floats a sentence: “You were more concerned with taking them off than folding them up.” The next page reads “It’s 10:00 a.m. Saturday morning. You’re meeting friends for brunch in an hour. And your khakis…
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,…
Five Locals, No Carbs, No Genomes, More Flavor In this show depicting work by five local artists — Jessica Johnson, Meredith Burton, Sean Semones, James Trotter and Pat Alexander — part of what you see is process. On the day of the opening, Johnson began drawing on the gallery wall as part of her installation. She was still at it…
%{}% It’s back to the future for the Kansas City Repertory Theatre, which opens under its new name with the 125-year-old Pirates of Penzance. Theaters like the Rep and the Arizona Theatre Company, which coproduces this staging, are attempting to shake Gilbert and Sullivan operettas such as this one free of their reputation as rosy-cheeked fare reserved for amateur opera…
%{}% At a cookout last month, I ran into my tall friend Ray. I am shortish, so when Ray and I talk, I stare directly into his chest. My vantage point was perfect for reading his T-shirt, which depicted an all-American girl — blond hair, blue eyes — holding a Raggedy Ann doll. Up top, the shirt said “Sure! You…
Jaku, the title of DJ Krush’s latest release, translates as peace and calm in his native Japanese. Though the mostly instrumental record includes plenty of placid passages and soothing samples, it isn’t the type of ambient fare that plays in chill-out rooms at raves. Aesop Rock and Mr. Lif appear for sharp cameos on robust hip-hop tracks, and potent percussion…
It was obvious that Miles Bonny and Joe Good — together Sounds Good — were eager to take their music to another level when the pair kicked off a new batch of material at the Money/Pacin release party. The new EP’s two title cuts, “Pacin” and “Money” (along with four tracks of equal or lesser value), serve as an appetizer…
Live, these guys burn it up so much, you can fry an egg on any stage they’re standing on. Yes, they jam, but they are grittier and heavier than the average jam band. And because they model their sense of interplay after classic jazz outfits, it’s unfair to dismiss Warren Haynes as a standard blues-rock guitarist and the rest of…
A recent unscientific study of commercially purchased Comets on Fire albums (OK, the “whiff test” at several friends’ places) has concluded that 94 percent of the jewel cases housing these discs bear the unmistakable scent of regular stem-and-seed separation operations. Marijuana, people. Blue Cathedral, the third album from this blazing psychedelic Santa Cruz, California, quintet, will almost certainly continue that…
It’s been almost seven years since Helmet broke up, and something is missing now that the group has been resurrected without cofounders John Stanier and Henry Bogdan. The constraints set by vocalist and guitarist Page Hamilton have always been so rigid that self-parody was inevitable. But Hamilton still sort of manages to avoid it here. Size Matters isn’t simply a…
Whether you consider her a peddler of precious, pretentious twaddle or an endless font of pure, Icelandic genius, you have to give Björk credit for eschewing the safe option. No other platinum-selling diva has had the guts to forge such idiosyncratic paths as this charismatic singer has done over the past 11 years. Now on her sixth post-Sugarcubes studio album,…
You already know the hype: two albums, Use Your Illusion style. One for the clubs and one for the ladies. Sweat is an apt title for an album dripping with desperation. Clearly, Nelly and his producers have exhausted their arsenal of surefire dance-floor packers — nothing on Sweat approaches the greatness of Nelly’s first two releases, on which the…
It is safe to say that no band on tour right now quite comes near the experience of a Captured By Robots show. The safest parallel would be to watch one of those animatronic pizza-parlor bands after you’ve taken a liberal dose of acid, then goad the band into developing a bad attitude toward the human race, until it…
Folk singer John Gorka remains one of the most passionate performers in a genre that knows no shortage of acoustic-toting troubadours. An accomplished guitarist who possesses a baritone deeper than Loch Ness, Gorka has quietly carved a niche as a purveyor of myriad styles, shifting effortlessly from traditional protest songs to blues and country in a blink. Whereas many…
There ain’t a damned thing youthful about Sonic Youth anymore. But that doesn’t mean the New York quintet has gone soft on us. Sonic Youth was poised for a popularity boost when it was tapped for a high-profile Lollapalooza outing this year, only to see the tour scrapped for lack of ticket sales. Undeterred, the group issued an uncompromising…
