FRI 1/7 Support the arts, blah, blah, blah. The graduates who explode out of the doors of the Kansas City Art Institute to scramble like baby sea turtles toward the ocean of artistic success have chosen their perilous path. Why should we feel obligated to help them? Because Kansas City has a fucking amazing group of young artists in its…
For Chris Shields, it wasn’t ska music or the Who album-cum-Mod film Quadrophenia that delivered him into the arms of the scooter lifestyle. It was the crappy economy. “I bought my first scooter to save on gas money,” he says. “When it got stolen, I started looking for another one and just kind of fell into the culture.” Two years…
Thursday, January 6 According to Literacy Kansas City, approximately 225,000 metro adults are functionally illiterate, reading below the fifth-grade level; 20 percent can’t read a newspaper article, fill out paperwork at the doctor’s office or read a story to their children. If you’re looking for some noble work, the nonprofit organization, which helps adults and older teens improve their reading…
People love watching fights. The combat need not be especially skillful (schoolkids are typically riveted to sloppy skirmishes at recess) or enhanced with a coherent plot and decent actors (Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme still draw cult audiences) or even ethical (starving vagrants pawing at each other on video for the amusement of cretins). Indeed, wherever fists are pummeling…
Christmas in Song Whether your holiday play list veers toward traditional carols or the pop of Bing Crosby and Eartha Kitt, you should be sated by Quality Hill Playhouse’s annual Christmas show. Joining pianist and master of ceremonies J. Kent Barnhart are Sylvia Stoner, Matt Leisy and, following a last-minute casting change, Toni Gates-Grantham. Last year’s audiences reportedly leapt to…
Diane Arbus, Family Albums The mother who challenged compulsory prayer in public schools. The doctor who treated poverty and its side effects (hunger, parasites) as diseases needing cures. Diane Arbus assembled these and many other figures for Family Albums, a project the photographer left uncompleted before her death. We recognize some of the subjects for their blood relationships: Lee Harvey…
There’s no photography exhibit so enthralling as an ordinary family album. When Diane Arbus — whose Family Albums is on display at the Spencer Museum in Lawrence through January 16 — photographed a family of sharecroppers on their lopsided front porch, she recognized how difficult it must have been for them to pose for a family photo that all might…
With live bands, it’s usually essential that all members attend a performance. At the very least, the group’s most popular presence must take the stage to avoid repercussions, such as refund demands or riots. After all, fans holding tickets to a Cure concert wouldn’t be satisfied with a solo set from Perry Bamonte. But the rules differ with DJ duos,…
Anyone can spot hip. Lou Reed: hip. Kim Gordon: hip. Miles Davis: überhip. But poet Walt Whitman? In Hip: The History, author John Leland establishes a framework for hip that encompasses music, art, politics, clothing, drugs and literature. And he asserts that Whitman was America’s first hipster and that Leaves of Grass was the “founding hipster manifesto.” Leland contends that…
The documentary Some Kind of Monster captures the tribulations of Metallica as band members record St. Anger and hire a shrink to keep from killing one another. Monster has been applauded for its unprecedented look into Metallica, much to the chagrin of Joel McIver, who had zero access to the band for his book Justice for All: The Truth About…
Not to worry if you heard a guttural, bellowing ho ho hughhhhrrrrrrrr coming down your chimney over the holidays — it just meant that Santa was about to make the metalhead in your house smile for the next several months. Fans of extreme music might take issue with how this book focuses on a mere eight bands (Napalm Death, Carcass,…
A writer friend of mine faithfully buys every novel Douglas Copeland writes, because Copeland’s work represents such a totemic level of substandard hackery that it necessarily demands attention to preclude imitation. Anyone who has skimmed Billy Corgan’s lyrics knows that he’s almost poetry’s Copeland. But minus the former Smashing Pumpkins leader’s hot-cross chordage, Blinking With Fists — Corgan’s poetry collection…
Bob Dylan has been a closed book for more than four decades. But with the publication of Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan finally steps from behind the curtain and reveals that he has never thought of himself as anything special. “I really was never any more than what I was,” Dylan writes, “a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist…
Until now, Kelpie has largely managed to stay off the national radar, preferring instead to hide out in Lawrence. But that’s beginning to change; the playful, guitar-driven band is touring the Midwest and opening for the likes of the Dresden Dolls. The things that set Kelpie apart as a live act are its earnest energy and its complete lack of…
The holidays don’t stop until we’ve once again celebrated the birth of the King. No, the other one. Truly it is this event that makes this the most wondrous time of the year: friends and family gathering to decorate the Elvis tree and join in a celebratory chorus of Elvis carols before sitting down to a delicious traditional dinner of…
It takes a hefty set of cajones to name a variety show after a back-alley bacchanal involving swarthy chicas getting plowed by a burro. But hell, it’s an attention grabber. And the lineup for Donkey Show 5 is eclectic enough to turn heads on its own — a puppet, a magician, drag queens, half-naked chicks dancing, a little bluegrass music…
Don’t be fooled by the prominent Deathwish Records symbol on the back of Halfacre Gunroom’s criminally overlooked 2004 debut album, Wrecked, or the group’s propensity for tossing out covers of Belle & Sebastian and Pulp. Unlike hardcore labelmates Converge and Some Girls, these Memphis boys bleed pure country heartache and whiskey-soaked melancholy. Vocalist Bryan Hartley drawls with the wisdom found…
Hatebreed creates soundtracks for skydiving, with its gruff lyrics providing the confidence boost and its blistering intensity mirroring the adrenaline rush. After all, Vin Diesel parachute-tested the Connecticut band’s “I Will Be Heard” in XXX’s signature scene. Agnostic Front apparently plays the kind of hardcore that makes people mosh in museums while a freakish female mauls a broken-toothed man in…
Hey, 2004. You fucking suck. Hard. I’m not talking about genocide in Sudan, war in Iraq, elections in America, hurricanes in Florida, tsunamis in Asia, Martha Stewart in the hoosegow, Captain Kangaroo in a pine box or any of the innumerable other reasons that would normally provoke sensible citizens to hawk a fat loogie on the historical stain you’ve left…
Nostradamus was a chump. Sure, he predicted the rise of the Nazis and the fall of mankind. But what has he done for us lately? Bubkus. And as the future gets darker by the minute — killer tsunamis, rampant warfare, the cancellation of Method & Red — we need new prophets to lead us into the abyss. So keep your…
The Get Up Kids have broken up. Just kidding. All of you emo orphans can put down the straight razors. And you scoffing scenesters can stick the corks back in those champagne bottles. The band isn’t dead yet. Not that the rumor mill has stopped churning out piping-hot reports for the better part of the past six months of the…
Why you are going to Ramle?” The R gurgled in the back of the security inspector’s throat as she ran me through the mandatory security grilling that awaits all who venture to Israel. Everyone landing in the Holy Land is under suspicion. The inspector’s tone is the ball-busting cadence that comes standard with an interrogation. It becomes more familiar each…
At first glance, White Noise looks like one more supernatural thriller aimed at the audience that’s easily scared and easily parted from its hard-earned cash. It will be lumped in among the Rings, Grudges, Otherses and other gotcha creepshows inhabited by rancorous ghosts and pissed-off ghouls out to off those who done ’em wrong when they were still corporeal…
Editor’s note: We take it all back. Dimebag Darrell Abbott was the most awesome guitarist — no, make that the greatest musician of any type — who ever lived. The Pitch was completely out of line to suggest in its December 23 issue that some of the latter-day adulation for the murdered Damageplan and Pantera guitarist might have reached ridiculous…
