We recently visited the mecca of Kansas City nightlife establishments, and now we can retire happy. Yep, that’s right — we went to Funky Town. Because we’re fans of cheesy theme bars — especially those of the retrorific ’70s and ’80s variety — we can’t believe it’s taken us so long to check it out. For some reason, though, we…
When longtime Kansas Citians nostalgically recall the glory days of downtown Kansas City — the movie palaces, the shopping, the restaurants — they tend to gloss over one of the less pleasant aspects of the urban core’s history. Downtown’s most alluring attractions were strictly segregated for the first half of the 20th century. Jazz singer Queen Bey vividly remembers sitting…
When Thelma Oliver decided to leave her job as a manager at the Grand Street Café and open her own restaurant, she told Grand Street’s owners, Paul Khoury and Bill Crooks, that she had already found the perfect location for her new place: the long-vacant dining room at 1111 Main Street. “They both looked at me and said, ‘You’ve got…
SAT 7/2 The folks at Jerry’s Bait Shop don’t demand that patrons remove their clothes after they get drunk. The atmosphere just seems to merit it. “We don’t have to encourage them,” says manager Christian Ragen. “It’s in the air. It just happens that way. That’s why we love it here.” It’s why we love it there, too — so…
FRI 7/1 To us, a boarded-up summer cottage conveys nothing beyond a vacant house. But to Tessa Windt, a Canadian-born artist who lives in Pittsburgh, covering up an object or closing it off says something about dormancy, envelopment and mourning. Windt tells the Pitch that she has always been compelled by the mutability of cloth. That’s evident in her…
FRI 7/1 Unlike football fans (who can throw a few spirals in the parking lot) and baseball fans (who have dugouts to swarm), racing fans have little opportunity to emulate their heroes or watch them up close. So Friday’s IndyCar Fanfest in Westport is a perfect opportunity for racing enthusiasts to fulfill their fuel-soaked fantasies. Starting at 3 p.m., the…
7/2-7/3 Somehow, Kansas City has for decades managed to straddle a river without putting on a proper river festival. Annual river-related shindigs are a staple in just about every U.S. city with a moving body of water. Without a truly desirable, accommodating bank on which to congregate, though, Kansas Citians have been sorely out of touch with their mighty…
The Kansas City Hash House Harriers, who have dedicated themselves to an activity called “hashing,” claim to have been around since the 1980s, though the practice itself dates back to a bunch of bored, boozy Brits living in what’s now Malaysia, circa 1938. Albert Stephen Ignatius Gispert and his fellow expatriates invented a game in which a person designated as…
Thursday, June 30 Contemporary dance continues to cut a wide swath through Kansas City and Lawrence. The latest offering is tonight’s Duex, choreographed by recent University of Kansas graduate Beau Hancock, at 8 p.m. at the Olive Gallery and Art Supply (15 East Eighth Street in Lawrence, 785-331-4114). A founding member of the Lawrence-based Bowery Dancers, Hancock offers excerpts from…
Artist Jay Norton doesn’t do subtle — at least not these days. He has been known to take breaks from painting pieces such as “Maybe She’s Born With It” (an American flag with a portrait of a burqa-clad woman and the Maybelline slogan), but politics creep back in. Especially now. “I’m not exactly happy with what I see going on…
Ghada Amer Barbie clothes always have some kind of ridiculous waistband tailored to the fashionable doll’s strangely shaped torso. Ken’s midsection is no less bizarre. Nothing highlights this more clearly than seeing Barbie and Ken clothes enlarged to fit real people. One of Ghada Amer’s most well-known early pieces — “Barbie Aime Ken, Ken Aime Barbie (Barbie Loves Ken, Ken…
These last awful weeks, the one pleasure of my jogs has been watching the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival stage go up in Southmoreland Park, always a relief as I emerge heatstroked and headachey from the Art Institute lawn and its eyesores. The set fits in. Its cobbled villa sits snugly among the trees and dribbly creek, and the…
It was a lucky coincidence. A few short days after seeing the Past in Reverse contemporary Asian art show at the Kemper Museum, I heard a segment on Public Radio International’s Studio 360 about notions of “cute.” Interviewers discussed cuteness with sources such as a psychiatrist who has found that we don’t love big eyes just because of their…
When party guests approach house DJs and ask them to play something a little more accessible, such as a track with vocal hooks, snobbish spinners recoil at the request. Coming from one of the genre’s leading producers, however, such demands carry more weight. After years as a go-to mixer for labels such as Om and Naked, San Francisco’s Andy Caldwell…
In the Buzzcocks’ sly “Nostalgia,” Pete Shelley sang about surfing on a wave of nostalgia for an age yet to come, but for most backward-looking bands of recent decades, the ’60s will do just fine. And ’60s necrophilia is practically a tradition compared with the current ’80s vogue, which explains why it’s getting so damned good. Band of Bees does…
If you were to take the past quarter-century’s pop culture and reduce it to 70 minutes, it would sound something like Radio Fryer. Creating an alternate universe where the Beastie Boys pass the mike to John Lennon, the Peanuts gang throws down to Cypress Hill and Michael Jackson joins the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army, Mike Relm’s danceable time capsule…
Too old-school for alt-country hipsters, too off-kilter for staunch traditionalists, Dwight Yoakam has always been a man in search of a niche. Blame the Vain will piss off both sides of the audience, but it’s one of Yoakam’s sprightliest in years. By hiring a new band and taking the production reins from longtime collaborator Pete Anderson, Yoakam catches fire, no…
From the swampy, shambled, drunken, broken, blues- and jazzfest-ridden streets of New Orleans comes the most romantic, stately and, hell, best band to come out of the South since R.E.M. (from whose 1988 song this band takes its name). On its second full-length, World Leader Pretend keeps its influences in its pockets (not on its sleeves) as it delivers an…
Somewhere along the line, the Pixel Panda earned something of a bad reputation in Lawrence. Maybe it was the panda masks, or perhaps the over-the-top sassy banter of the singers. Either way, people typically fail to mention the music, which isn’t bad at all. On the Panda’s 2004 full-length, The Nation of Symmetry, the tradeoff vocals of screamer Do Yun…
The Pitch Music Awards ballot was decided by 22 area critics, promoters, journalists and club owners, none of whom, evidently, share much in the way of common taste with KMXV “Mix” 93.3. To wit, none of the area acts competing for the opening slot at the station’s Red, White & Boom festival are on the PMA ballot. Which is…
When Weezer came on the scene in 1994, the band was a bromide for teenagers still reeling from the death of Kurt Cobain. Released just over a month after Cobain committed suicide, the Blue Album cooled the fallout from the grunge explosion. With his whimsical yet sincere lyrics, Rivers Cuomo was telling us to slow down, warning us that we…
In her own subtle way, Carol van Dijk was a sex symbol — the early-’90s indie dream girlfriend for anyone with the good sense to be afraid of Liz Phair. Shall we count the ways? The main singer-songwriter for the Dutch quartet Bettie Serveert has a slightly smoky voice made from the same ringing stuff of icons, but none of…
The South has its “chitlin circuit,” but the ruts in the Midwest’s rural roots route keep growing deeper, and John Dee Graham is the man who cut ’em, driving beat-up vans from Austin to Minneapolis and back every three months or so. One of those guys who’s been the same age for 20 years, Graham offers hard-edged, heart-churning, grown-up wisdom…
Splitting the difference between the Black Crowes and Counting Crows, Shurman sneaks crackling Southern-rock riffs into jangly alt-country tunes. The radio-friendly group name-checks Tom Petty in its lyrics and thanks Hootie and the Blowfish in its liner notes, but the dozens-deep pile of domestic beer cans in the group’s practice-space photo pegs its most prominent influence. The songs on Shurman’s…
