Every Saturday afternoon, the Big Losers play on a perfect basketball court — a blacktop church lot with the 3-point line defined in the same gleaming white as the parking spaces. The B-league rec team, named with great prescience before its winless inaugural season, engages in three-on-three battles in which enthusiasm and camaraderie far outshine athletic ability. Yet this perfect…
There are two kinds of fishing. First, there’s the fishing that most of us know and love. It involves vests, floppy hats and hours of languid, beer-soaked conversation before dinner bites, just as the sun goes down, and the good times move from the boat to the grill. What’s the other fishing? Real fishing. The thing people are out there…
It comes as no surprise that summer is when Kansas City designers most ceremoniously trot out their wares. Because in the winter, clothes have work to do. They have to keep you from getting frostbitten. They have no choice but to cover you completely. In the summer, however, if we let them, our clothes can party like crazy. Instead…
The folks at the Hurricane (4048 Broadway, 816-753-0884) are no dummies. To get us to pony up $5 at the door for an 8 p.m. Hope House benefit Thursday, they’re selling us unlimited beer for an additional $5. Good move, considering the entertainment is rockabilly. Just kidding. Kinda. — Annie Fischer Fit for a King Quality Hill arranges a Tapestry…
FRI 5/20 Max Key’s “Hard Spring,” one of his most recent large-scale oil paintings, contrasts an ornate, wallpaper-style floral print with the sort of radiantly surreal horticulture that thrived in Salvador Dali’s garden. Like most of the 2005 Charlotte Street Foundation Award-winner’s work, this piece juxtaposes a casual, decorative re-creation of nature with a hyper-realistic take on the same…
SAT 5/21 Midwestern kayakers looking to paddle turbulent stretches are pretty much sunk when it comes to mellow Mo-Kan geography. The closest our landscape comes to white water may be those artificially agitated currents at Oceans of Fun. But the amusement park doesn’t allow boats. Nicoya Helms, a freestyle kayaking enthusiast and member of the seemingly oxymoronic Kansas Whitewater Association,…
SUN 5/22 By any standards, Jonathan Holden leads a good life. The Kansas State University professor has written 17 books, won National Endowment for the Arts creative-writing fellowships and served on the committee that selects the Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry. But by a poet’s standards, Jonathan Holden is a heroic figure. Already a distinguished professor and poet-in-residence, Holden…
Dave Attell is hung over. Stop the presses. The comedian and host of the bleary-eyed cable-TV bacchanal Insomniac is nursing a wrecking-ball hangover on a day off from his stand-up tour. His hair-of-the-dog cure, other than talking to the Pitch, is quite simple. “I’d typically say drink more,” Attell says. “But what works best for me is a nice, greasy…
Thursday, May 19 Sometimes we have to remind ourselves that our job is not so difficult, that our days are nothing compared with the arduous hours clocked by Lizzie Grubman, owner of the public relations agency that bears her name. During the run of Power Girls, Grubman’s MTV reality show, we couldn’t help but surf over for gems such as…
Jared Panick has a problem with artists’ egos. “I see shows all the time, and there are always ‘featured artists.’ Their name is big — their name is huge,” he says. “It’s like it’s the name that makes people take an interest instead of the artwork or the concept or the actual ideas going on there.” The Paragraph intern and…
The Child Left Behind What seems to make Full Frontal Comedy’s improvisational-comedy shows a cut above the rest can be found in its unabashed embrace of estrogen. Founder and director Tina Morrison is funny in a natural, unforced way, and usual troupe member Stasha Case has great timing that comes from her frequent theater performances. Coming next in a season…
Rebecca Dolan When we reflect on the last 23 years in an attempt to locate just which version of ourselves we would consider the most awkward and insecure, the answer is glaringly obvious. Seventh grade, when we considered oversized BUM sweatshirts haute couture? Sadly, no. Sophomore year, when we chopped our long blond locks into a seriously misinformed pageboy? Close,…
Last week, Donald Glaude hosted a lingerie party in Seattle that included Playboy playmates as guest DJs. Even though the lineup at the KC-area event known as Cyclone lacks a certain titillation factor, Glaude will act exactly the same, jumping when his low-end-driven crescendos reach their climaxes and making expressions more befitting a rubber-faced physical comedian than a mixing master….
Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo repeatedly refers to mental deficiencies in his latest lyrics, including two twists on the phrase I’m insane. Given the uneven songwriting on Make Believe, this might be a medical disclaimer from the Harvard-educated enigma rather than a literary device. In his slavish pursuit of end rhymes, he adds superfluous words (So I apologize to you/And anyone…
It remains a widely held misconception among white Americans that the right to be a rock star is listed among the articles of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The fact that this ideal has yet to be fulfilled makes it patently unfair that Juliette (Natural Born Killers) Lewis, already a famous actress, should also get her own…
Something about the resolutely oblique Pavement made you wonder if it was just the beer and cynicism doing the talking. But if you squinted just right at the band’s wastrel anthems, something was being said. It was something about the absurdity of rock and roll, of suburbs or — at Pavement’s most diffuse — of life in general, but it…
A revivalist band with the name Davies in its moniker is begging for Kinks comparisons. The Deathray Davies have yet to produce anything as classic as “You Really Got Me,” but its fifth effort is a rockin’ good time. Adding bright horns to a mix that already includes the usual accoutrements plus a swinging Vox organ, the Texas quintet has…
Common is short for Common Sense, the clunky moniker that Lonnie Rashid Lynn Jr. took back before he had a sense for how words sound together. These days, he flows effortlessly, but that’s not why you spin him. Rather, he’s a vibe man, layering electro-jazz and ’70s soul over Kanye beats. The sound is so relaxed that it’s less likely…
You know all that dark matter scientists can’t locate, that cosmological mystery meat that makes up 25 percent of all existence? It’s here, people, in “Let’s Call It Love,” an 11-minute colossus of riffs and wailing that announces, at last, that the women of Sleater-Kinney are unashamed to be the real rock heroes they should have become a decade ago….
There are lots of Mike Johnsons in the phone book, but we’ll wager that few possess this particular Mike Johnson’s world-weary baritone, and that none of them have anything close to his sterling musical pedigree. You might know the Oregon native as the guy who replaced Lou Barlow on bass in Dinosaur Jr. in 1991. Going back even further, you…
Patience is a virtue, but many musicians who require patience aren’t interested in helping their fans become emotional receptors of Wagnerian Sturm und Drang. Instead, they’re aiming to impress them (through virtuoso midsong solos that bear no melodic resemblance to their parent songs) or punish them (to preserve esoteric standing). By contrast, the Swedish septet Cult of Luna’s 12-minute epics…
When exactly did the Beach Boys become not-the-Beach Boys? Arguably around 1967, when Brian Wilson — who had stopped touring with the group three years earlier — completed the core tracks of his conceptual coming-of-age-in-California tale, Smile. He knew the crowning touch would be the vocal blend of his beach brethren Carl and Dennis, cousin Mike Love, and friend Al…
Our beloved Wilders have officially graduated from local-hero status. With barely two weeks’ notice, the group went all “nationally acclaimed” and entered the no-day-job world of festival favorites across the country — not just in places such as the Greeley, Colorado, Bluegrass Roundup and the Grey Fox Festival in Ancramdale, New York, but also on the big stages at the…
Of Montreal, of course, isn’t of Montreal at all. This will probably be a good thing once the Arcade Fire-driven Montreal-mania reaches its zenith and the backlash begins. For now, the band seems quite comfy in its Athens, Georgia, home. (Baseball Weekly-driven rumors that the band members were going to rename themselves “Of Washington, D.C.” this spring proved unfounded.) The…
