Is it a problem that we make the same resolutions year after year? They usually go something like this: Stop getting plastered every other night at happy hours that turn into seven-hour drinkfests and Stop behaving sluttishly while at seven-hour drinkfests. Is it any wonder that such resolutions seem to expire … um … right about now, less than a…
When the weather is cold and nasty, my all-time favorite comfort food — mostly because it involves so little labor on my part — is a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup. It’s a culinary marriage that Campbell’s Soup has promoted for years. Leave it to Bill Crooks and Paul Khoury, the founders of Kansas City’s PB&J…
Without confessing too many details, I’ll admit this: The downtown Hereford House and I were conceived in the same year, and it’s a tossup which of us is aging less gracefully. We probably both need face-lifts, though the Hereford House dining rooms did get a new coat of semigloss, tomato-red paint a couple of years ago. That not only…
1/28-1/29 If songwriter Harold Arlen had written only “Stormy Weather” and “Over the Rainbow,” his reputation would be solid. That he wrote more than 400 other tunes gives license to the 8 p.m. tribute show Friday and Saturday at Johnson County Community College’s Carlsen Center (12345 College Boulevard in Overland Park, 913-469-4445). Over the Rainbow is certain to elate more…
THU 1/27 Before moving to Lawrence and forming the hilarious, backwoodsy band Drakkar Sauna, John Wallace Cochran wrote and directed a surrealistic comedy about a black-market-medical-oddity collector hired to find a videotape of some poor kid failing Gowers’ test. For the pediatrically uninitiated, Gowers’ sign test is one in which a doctor watches a child rise from lying down to…
MON 1/31 Things look grim for the Missouri Tigers. The team is flirting with a .500 record — probably not good enough to earn it an invitation to March Madness. According to early bracket models, surging UMKC has become a more popular pick than Mizzou for the NCAA Tournament. Meanwhile, the Kansas Jayhawks are cruising, thanks to a scrappy…
FRI 1/28 For everything, there is a season. But we’re pretty sure the area pacifists who organized a Season for Nonviolence aren’t suggesting that there is also a season for violence. Rather, they hope to promote the proliferation of peace from January 30 to April 4, the respective anniversaries of Mohandas Gandhi’s and Martin Luther King Jr’s. assassinations. The…
The year it all came together was the year it all fell apart. The body count in Vietnam hit its peak, the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations symbolized the death of summers of freedom and love, and the youthful idealism that launched a generation’s defining movements was losing ground to something equally American: violence. On the streets of…
Thursday, January 27 Though we do enjoy the Country Club Plaza, we’ve found that the attraction has a penchant for extinguishing life forms that don’t fit into the upscale-retail experience. One lesser-known victim of the Plaza’s playa hating was the Kansas City Juggling Club, whose members performed there in the late ’80s and early ’90s until, according to the group’s…
Andy Warhol’s greatest artistic creation was Andy Warhol. Despite his staggering output, it’s impossible to look at anything he created and not see his bemused face, his trademark expression of paranoia and bliss caught in the pop of a flashbulb. Though Warhol is most famous for his silkscreens of such pop icons as Elvis and Marilyn Monroe and for…
Affluenza! High praise goes to director Mark Ciglar and the bountifully gifted cast of James Sherman’s smart, tart comedy about the poisonous effects of having too much money. Sherman’s choice to write the show in rhyming couplets, à la Moliere, is distracting only until the ear gets used to it — then it becomes damned clever. Of the uniformly winning…
Roberto Juarez: They Entered the Road How we choose to memorialize the dead often has something a little, well, dead about it. Monuments and plaques are fine and dandy, but how do they give us any clue about someone’s life? Roberto Juarez attempts to answer that question in this collection of five paintings, each one titled in tribute to a…
In certain company, my low opinion of Denzel Washington’s acting or Toni Morrison’s writing would inspire mutiny. But does calling Washington a one-note movie star and Morrison a superfluously mystical hack — not to mention those potentially coded words certain company — make me a racist? Of course not. Give me 50 Cent over John Mayer any day. Still,…
It’s been 30 seconds, max, since you rang the doorbell (or timbre, as the sign in Spanish reads) at 3520 Garner and introduced yourself to Isabella Weaver. She has already hugged you, told you she likes you, told you something rather personal and accurate about your life, and invited you into her living room. “Sit down and don’t move,” she…
You couldn’t possibly need another reason to love the Pitch. But … oh … OK. I’ll give you one more. We are going to send one lucky local DJ to perform at the Ultra Music Festival during the Winter Music Conference in Miami on March 26. That’s right. You. Perform. Ultra Music Festival. As in one lucky winner will…
Marty Johnson immersed himself in music, making up for missed mayhem after his recent return from military service in Germany. In Boomstick, his better-known band, Johnson’s bass lines undulate with unstable intensity. Johnson brings equal energy to his drumming duties in the newly formed Wave On Barrage, pounding out profoundly resonant rhythms. Both groups are power trios, but they share…
It’s understandable if you immediately think: OHMUHGAWD, LES CLAYPOOL AND DANNY CAREY FROM TOOL ARE PLAYING WITH ADRIAN BELEW AS A POWER TRIO, MAN! But before you run to the record store with your head on fire, be aware that Belew’s distinguished guests appear only on the first three tracks. Although this “supergroup” collaboration isn’t entirely a rip-off, you wouldn’t…
It’s no surprise that the new album from a band just signed to Sub Pop should be referred to in critical quarters as “a rock record.” But although Low isn’t a rock band (or at least has never easily been characterized as one), it turns out that the trio, which once wrote languid essays in atmospherics, has become the most…
Dear Fred Schneider: It’s been 13 years since the B-52s recorded Good Stuff, 11 since that nightclub scene in The Flinstones, 9 since Just Fred. And where are you now, Señor Rock Lobster? Lounging on a dog-shaped Art Deco couch, sipping a cosmopolitan? Contemplating a dip in your lavender, rhinestone-studded pool? Screening calls from Kate Pierson? It’s time to come…
Dr. Dre protégés have included a lithe drawler with his own lizzingo, a bratty Barbie boy with serious skills, and a slug-scarred former thug. Add to the pantheon Jayceon “The Game” Taylor, a Compton rapper who took five shots of his own back in 2001. Taylor literally has West Coast rap in his blood — assuming the ink from his…
Bands of this nature usually wear their cynicism on their sleeves and boast names ending with words like consortium or conspiracy. But Beep Beep is an exception. The group’s silly, ineffectual name belies the screechy sass of Chris Hughes and the go-anywhere, do-anything guitar of Eric Bremberger. Not as vocally melodic as Q and Not U but similarly danceable, Beep…
With a name like your eighth-grade lab partner who made it big in software and a look from the John Holmes Visits Piggly Wiggly home tapes, Donavon Frankenreiter could be the poster boy for the carefully remodeled soft-’70s niche. Frankenreiter was doing just fine as a world-renowned surfer. Then Jack Johnson and G. Love discovered his charming songwriting and welcomed…
The Reverend Horton Heat showed up 15 years ago to inject pop culture with a needed dose of sacrilege. The Legendary Shack Shakers arrive — not a moment too soon — to up the ante with rockabilly that misappropriates zeal from the church. Finding redemption in rock-and-roll sin is a formula that has been beaten into the floorboards, but these…
With an ironic name that screams “dodgeball scarred me” and a member whose microphone moniker pays tribute to pop-punk pansies Schleprock, Gym Class Heroes sound like a wimpy freaks-and-geeks ensemble. Instead, this New York quartet concocts surprisingly solid grooves, building on soul-sprinkled guitar, wicked drums and bass lines massive enough to pop up on Geiger counters. In terms of rhyme…
