Although Decemberists vocalist Colin Meloy went on a solo tour this past winter, Picaresque, the Portland, Oregon, band’s third album, is arguably its lushest yet. The nuanced production of Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla finally matches Meloy’s obsession with detail: Horns, strings and accordion drift in and out of the hook-laden mix with the poetic deftness of a calligrapher’s…
This year marks the tenth anniversary of both Unsane’s “Scrape” video, which paired the New York band’s brutal noise with vivid footage of gnarly skateboarding injuries, and the first Warped Tour, which treated extreme athletes and pop-punk groups as co-headliners. These days, the Warped Tour has reduced sports to sideshow status, but in one local skater party, the connection between…
It’s not like he means to do it, but sometimes he doesn’t have much of a choice. You see, Bob Schneider is a songwriter — and a pretty prolific one at that — and he’s not going to let a little thing like stylistic pigeonholing slow him down. In a recent interview with the Pitch, Schneider talked about his musical…
I moved to Kansas City two years ago with my prospects at absolute zero. I came because my wife got into grad school here, and my own Ph.D. applications had fallen on the doorsteps of prestigious research institutions all over the country like cigarette ash to be farted away by a stray mutt. With a master’s degree in English on…
I’m not from Kansas City, nor have I ever been there. I’ll admit that I’ve never even considered visiting, if you press me on the issue. No reason, really, other than that I don’t eat barbecue (I’m a vegetarian), the pro basketball team left years ago (to Sacramento — that’s gotta sting) and I already live in one landlocked…
The Upside of Anger belongs to Joan Allen, who plays Terry Wolfmeyer, a wife abandoned by her husband and left to pick up the pieces and collect them in a giant bottle of vodka. Terry possesses the cold, composed visage of a woman struggling to keep it together. Through her pale, glowing skin you can see her blood simmering, kept…
If nothing else, Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, co-directed with Frank Miller, will be remembered as the most faithful comic-book adaptation ever put on film (or high-definition video, anyway). Rodriguez uses Miller’s hypernoir serial as storyboards for the movie — his first in seven years that’s not an entry in his Spy Kids franchise or his El Mariachi trilogy. On a…
Majority whipped: Regarding Nick Johnson’s letter from March 17, he writes: “And in a matter of belief, don’t sheer numbers matter? It make sense to me that if millions upon millions believe something, it deserves a chance just to be heard. From a Gallup poll: In 1990, the population of the United States was 250 million, with 175 million Christians….
Jimmy the Fetus Hey, kids, Jimmy the Fetus here, your guide to moral values in the Midwest, helping everyone see that what we learned in Sunday school really does matter. Dear Jimmy: I was wondering if you’ve thought about writing a living will so your loved ones will know what to do if you end up hooked to a machine….
When controversial Leawood weight-loss surgeon Timothy Sifers died at his home in mid-March, he left behind a tangle of unresolved lawsuits and legal bills — and several plaintiffs who now won’t be able to face him in court. But Sifers’ online obituary guest book is also filled with messages from formerly fat patients who say he saved their lives. For…
Donna Ozuna-Trout, the woman who, along with her husband, is awaiting trial for allegedly mailing poisoned baked goods to her neighbors, the family of Edwardsville Mayor Stephanie Eickhoff, returned to jail last week after reportedly threatening to obtain firearms and harm the Eickhoffs. Since July, Ozuna-Trout and her husband, Ralph Trout, have been out of jail on bond while they…
Over the past couple of weeks, the Strip blanched as it watched an intensely private matter that was tearing a family apart become living-room theater for a country of peeping Toms. We felt sympathy for both sides in the dispute. We hated the way Terri Schiavo’s husband, Michael Schiavo, was being demonized by asshats with their agendas hanging out, but…
Thanks to the Internet, high school just got way more cruel. Fuck u carrie!! Ur 100% slut! And u like to play w/ur self! IN CLASS, AT LUNCH, AND BY UR SELF!!! The schoolyard has always been about rumors and name-calling. But as technology tweaks the way we work, shop and breed, so, too, does it revolutionize the writing on…
We’re not really huge St. Patrick’s Day fans. It’s kinda like New Year’s Eve: Widespread lushery and kissing are encouraged, but it also brings out the amateur drinkers in droves, and they puke in the streets, crash into (or pee on) your car or, possibly, shoot people at a parade. Which is why the city and parade organizers clamped down…
One nice benefit of working as a restaurant reviewer is that I can take friends along with me to dinner, although there’s always a caveat: I pick the restaurant, and I get to taste everyone’s food. But there are nights when I get turned down flat. It happened recently when I wanted to go to the Marrakesh Café (7528 West…
Long before Abba’s bouncy 1975 single “Mamma Mia!” became the inspiration for a touring stage musical, the phrase (which translates as mother mine) was part of the American pop vernacular thanks to a 1969 Alka-Seltzer commercial. I can barely remember the ad (which apparently had an actor flubbing the line “Mamma mia, that’s a spicy meatball” so many times…
3/24-3/26 British playwright Sarah Kane has had great press lately, including recent raves for her play 4.48 Psychosis in The New York Times. Alas, all that’s lost on Kane, who killed herself at age 28 in 1999, before her last play was ever staged. The writer’s work debuts in Kansas City this weekend when Cinnamon Eye Productions mounts Kane’s Crave…
THU 3/24 Nelson Peery’s was the only black family in the rural Minnesota town where he grew up. The son of a postal worker, Peery rode rails as a teenage hobo during the Great Depression. And during World War II, he noticed how the democratic ideals he and his comrades were fighting for abroad didn’t necessarily apply to everyone back…
MON 3/28 At Monday’s Kansas City Outlaws game against the Fort Wayne Komets (7 p.m. at Kemper Arena, 1800 Genessee), $15 or $18 buys a ticket, a soda, a hot dog, peanuts and a Jesse James bobblehead. Beat that, March Madness bastards. Call 816-268-1600 for tickets. — Jason Harper Garden Party Sow the seeds of love. ONGOING Recent Saturdays…
SAT 3/26 The Donkey Show — Kansas City’s vaudevillian, animal-attire-intensive variety forum for local talent — provides concertgoers an alternative to stylistically static three-band bills. Now that the increasingly successful spectacle has reached its sixth installment, the founding promoters have launched a spinoff. On the hooves of the latest mule revue comes Bootleggers Union: Local 816, a concert series extolling…
We never would have predicted that the same writer-director whose corpulent muse, Divine, infamously ate a fresh dog turd in the 1972 film Pink Flamingos would one day find a welcome mat unfurled on Broadway. But that’s the remarkable arc of John Waters, the adorably trashy filmmaker whose 1988 movie Hairspray became the big, fat, family-friendly, Tony Award-winning musical of…
Thursday, March 24 The American male begins as an incredulous Fred Savage, swashbuckles through adolescence in hopes of becoming a heroic Westley, then, sooner than he’d perhaps like, becomes the drunken, quixotic, occasionally pathetic Inigo Montoya. (After that, it’s on to Peter Falk.) Though our father may not have been murdered by a six-fingered man, and though we may…
As a rule of thumb, bar bouncers are either enormous or frightening — or both — the better to deter unruly behavior or end it quickly when it does. Lara Thurn, self-described “doormanatrix” for The Brick, is neither colossal nor intimidating. However, Thurn, who is easily recognizable with a mohawk and a fondness for rockin’ the overalls, makes up for…
Clue: The Musical Though a long-forgotten film version probably didn’t help sales of the classic board game all that much, it’s logical to think that Clue: The Musical couldn’t hurt. Variety called it “saucy, bright and loony,” surely in reference to such songs as “Corridors and Halls” and the fact that, at each performance, there can be one of 216…
