Dear Michael Powell: This meat patty is writing to you, head of this ever-lovin’ country’s Federal Communications Commission, in order to file a formal complaint. You see, this red-blooded protector of decency has noticed that in recent months, your FCC has been taking public complaints about offensive broadcasts over our airwaves a lot more seriously, and we think this is…
At the entrance to the International Academy of Science, a sign on a gate welcomes a visitor to “Science Mountain” — which is odd, because the area outside Independence is neither mountainous nor particularly known for scientific research. A few digits are punched into a keypad, and the gate swings open. Then a visitor drives on a winding road…
Tsunami Relief Fund
Empire CD Release Party
Unwed Wednesday
Neon Party
After declaring our luv for office parties and wingmen in our past two columns, who knew the two would collide in a Hyatt Regency Crown Center ballroom? The setting: the December 21 World’s Largest Office Party, a bafflingly named event that involved similar shindigs in other cities (yet on different days) for charity. Not one to pass up an opportunity…
When I saw the so-called beef “steaks” at Ted’s Montana Grill (see review), which aren’t exactly what I would call thick and juicy, I flashed back to a simpler place and time, when I was too poor to have a cow over inexpensive cuts of beef. During my college years, I was so broke that an outing to a cheap…
If I were still boozing it up, I could say that I recently spent some time wasting away in Celebrityville. No, not Los Angeles but the corner of Wyandotte County where the Legends Shopping Center — the name says it all, doesn’t it? — is home to the newly opened Cheeseburger in Paradise (partly owned by singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett) and…
It’s been almost seven years since Jerry Seinfeld’s sitcom went off the air. We wonder if he regrets quitting now that he’s performing in cities like Topeka. But hey — we’ll take it. Catch him at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Performing Arts Center (214 Southeast Eighth Street); call 785-234-4545. — Annie Fischer Berliners Bare Welcome to the Kit Kat…
FRI 1/14 Mark Sheinkman’s immense ideas can’t be contained on canvas. Even his “Thirty Foot Drawing” and his outdoor billboards feel abbreviated. His striking patterns seem to start at random points before stretching invisibly yet infinitely in all directions. Early in his career, Sheinkman used incisions and erasure to make white-line designs on black-granite backdrops. Later, he began using oil…
SAT 1/15 — Sarah Smarsh Counting Crows THU 1/13 Birdwatchers, or people bored with numbering the hobos at the library, can help with the statewide Kansas Winter Bird Count from 9 to 11 a.m. or 1 to 3 p.m. Thursday at the Mr. and Mrs. F.L. Schlagle Library (4051 West Drive, Kansas City, Kansas). To register, call 913-299-2384. — Annie…
THU 1/13 Though most metro counties voted against a bistate tax that would have bankrolled stadium improvements and the performing arts, local sports fans and culture enthusiasts still have hope. Only alarmists think the Royals and Chiefs will pack up and leave, the athletic exodus accompanied by sorrowful string arrangements until the Kansas City Symphony dies from insufficient funding. Still,…
When we told one of our art-minded friends we were writing about Alexis Rockman, her response may have summed up the difficulty in explaining his work: “So very disturbing. Definitely interesting, but so deeply weird.” We’ll attempt to elucidate. Rockman paints the natural world, but not in a traditional charming landscape or still-life-with-flowers-and-fruit sort of way. Instead, Rockman’s recent…
Thursday, January 13 When we hear the words jump and Grand Marquis in the same sentence, it’s usually in the context of our old college roommate calling us to rescue his dead-Mercury-drivin’ ass from a Wal-Mart parking lot. But in the context of local jazz, Grand Marquis means the best jump-and-jive band to come out of Kansas City since…
Now is the winter of our rock discontent. Though there are many fine artists at work on the scene, most bands either try so hard to be convincing that they come across as utterly ridiculous (Dashboard Confessional), or they employ the irony shtick so copiously that they lose all their potency (Modest Mouse). We weren’t alive back then, but damn…
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…
If money is the root of all evil, the American Heartland Theatre’s Affluenza! is deliciously fertile in its wickedness. The worship of wealth has long been a prosperous theme of pop culture, whether it comes from Bette Davis in The Little Foxes or Adam Sandler in Mr. Deeds. However low- or highbrow, it’s money in the bank. This is certainly…
I get a call every single Thursday to go with someone to Neon. It’s big, it’s popular, and it’s all-around eclectic. It also has morphed from the ’80s night at La Tasca to the sweaty, buzzed, strange amalgamation of genres that it is today. Neon attracts everyone — weathered scenesters, frat boys, teenage goth chicks — and the crowd co-exists…
Abileen bored me to tears when the band played at (cough) the Pitch Music Awards show in August. Granted, I was slipping into a Coors Light coma at the time. And the band did take the stage after some serious sensory overload from the Marching Cobras. And I also knew little about Heidi Phillips or Frogpond — the esteemed band…
As a Smashing Pumpkin, drummer Jimmy Chamberlin undercut his bombastic backbeat with a smack habit that got him fired. But his Complex cuts alternative rock with jazz à la Weather Report, Bitches Brew and Tortoise to produce something coolly unstoppable. Pummeling, rolling, sometimes just pattering, Chamberlin and co-writer and bassist Billy Mohler pave jazzy, jammy instrumentals that act like unusually…
Any band with two bearded members and a handle like Black Mountain had better be ladling heavy on the metal or the psych gravy. But on this debut, the chameleonic Vancouver fivesome is lovin’ the 1970s. Oh, we can’t stand/Your modern music/We feel afflicted, singer Stephen McBean moans on the saxophone-and-drums swells of “Modern Music.” Then things get retro on…
