I was wheeling a shopping cart through the vast retail cavern known as Costco (241 East Linwood) when I ran into a friend who was wandering aimlessly around, eating bite-sized strips of teriyaki-flavored beef jerky. “Are you shopping,” I asked him, “or cruising?” “Neither,” he answered, “I’m here for my afternoon snack.” He confessed that whenever he’s hungry and bored,…
I’ve heard a couple of old folk tales about dragonflies. One is that the insect has the power to sew together the lips of the wicked. A Southern legend explains that the bug’s regional name, “snake doctor,” comes from the dragonfly’s role in warning a serpent about impending danger. I have a few words of warning myself for the stylish…
6/17-6/18 The Full Circle Theatre Company deals exclusively with serious issues — its stated mission is “to evoke social change” — but that doesn’t mean it always takes itself seriously. Its latest production, Latins Anonymous, resembles sketch shows such as In Living Color more than it does preachy political rallies. The satirical script pushes stereotypes to absurd extremes, demonstrating that…
FRI 6/17 During this month’s Third Friday festivities, the art will be intensely moving. For real. Keelan Whitmore of the Kansas City Ballet (a rising star, we hear) tackles directing duty in the multimedia work Quixotic. The hourlong performance blends dancers from the ballet, Wylliams/ Henry Danse Theatre and other area companies and incorporates video, fashion and music. “It’s the…
6/18-6/19 The Kansas City Radio Control Association flies model aircraft, and not the dinky kind. Flights start at 9 a.m. Saturday at the Pattern Contest, and plane spotters are welcome at Fleming Park Field (two miles east of Interstate 470 and Highway 291 on Woods Chapel Road). See www.kcradiocontrol.org. — Rebecca Braverman Hope Floats Everybody loves a parade — especially…
MON 6/20 Though the Farallon Islands are just 20 miles from downtown San Francisco, it takes months of bureaucratic wrangling and several hours by boat to actually set foot on them. Long declared off-limits to everyone but a few biologists, the Farallons and their shark season, when dozens of great white sharks bigger than buses return to feed on the…
Dusty LaBeth had his groin muscle removed, just so he could keep riding bulls. Back in 2001, when his groin was still intact, the professional bull rider and Kansas native was ranked tenth in the world. He climbed onto the fiercest bulls, which can weigh up to a ton but can leap and twist like cats, and stayed on for…
Thursday, June 16 Listen, our cousin’s wedding is coming up, and we need a date. Stat. So all we’re doing today is looking to pick up at the Bourgeois Pig (6 East Ninth Street, Lawrence; 785-843-1001) during its Bloomsday celebration and reading. We won’t pretend to have any other motive if you won’t pretend to have read James Joyce’s Ulysses,…
Flipping through Debbie Stoller’s Stitch ‘n Bitch Nation is like looking at a really cool catalog. There’s a teeny cardigan for babies with mini-tattoo motifs, a sassily striped dog sweater and a Joan Jett doll. But you don’t have to shell out loads of cash or order any of these goods by phone. You can knit them all yourself. Before…
This town may have 18th and Vine and Chuck Haddix, but Kansas City celebrates its musical history with all the zest Tule Lake, California, brings to showing off its old Japanese internment camp. Years back, a friend was setting off for a semester abroad and wanted to bring a piece of Kansas City to her host family. “Maybe some…
In the early ’90s, when computer-assisted composers started straying from metronomic dance beats into free-form territory, scene observers posited that electronic music was becoming the new jazz. No artist has done as much to cement that connection as Meat Beat Manifesto maestro Jack Dangers. His early work merged hip-hop beats with industrial-rock elements, pioneering the drum-‘n’-bass movement. After dabbling with…
On first listen, the debut full-length from this Kansas City downer-rock quartet is lugubrious and repetitive, the songs a series of spirited efforts and exhausted collapses, like the process of moving a sofa up a spiral staircase. Making the going even tougher is the weakened, defeated singing of Andrew Ashby, who — though his lyrics strive for candor — seems…
The first offering from TrueSpittaz Entertainment’s Titanium Frame includes some of the city’s master wordsmiths spitting fire over an assortment of ill beats, courtesy of Titanium Frame’s beat-making alter ego, Skills Lane. The result is The Bottom Line, a 15-song disc securely entrenched in KC lore. Play-school raps are not the norm on this opus; varying degrees of tongue-talented MCs,…
Maybe every great band should be forced to spend a decade apart upon completion of its best album. Compulsory semi-retirement wouldn’t guarantee a masterpiece for reunited acts, but the Go-Betweens are proof that an Indian summer is no less warm and thrilling for not having been forecast. Three albums into a revival that began in 1999, songwriters Grant McLennan and…
How far from current rock trends can a band be without actually sounding outdated? The answer is the space between, say, gaseous Coldplay or icy Franz Ferdinand and the warm earth that Teenage Fanclub has been tending since 1991’s much-hyped breakthrough, Bandwagonesque. This year’s model, Man-Made, is moodier and more sophisticated than the original, but only by subtle turns. Whereas…
St. Louis trio Riddle of Steel does its thing with unabashed gusto — its thing being fantastic feats of guitar virtuosity and dynamic derring-do, à la Jawbox. The band has hooks galore and the talent to make them zing, though on Got This Feelin’ it often powers on a bit too far, as if the three players can’t quite resist…
When Deana Carter visited Kansas City two years ago, she played Verizon Wireless Amphitheater, pretty much the default tour stop for platinum-selling country stars. Whereas alt-country artists play local rock clubs, the genuine toast-of-Nashville twangers either end up at arenas (with the genre’s up-and-coming talents employed as warmup acts) or, if they’re pushing 70, casinos. So it’s difficult at first…
An award contender for longest and most pretentious song title, Fall Out Boy is among the best the Warped Tour has to offer this year. At least that’s what the band’s coveted North Stage slot is supposed to convey. These pretty punks from the suburbs are part of a long tradition of Chicagoland power pop. The Cheap Trick of the…
The Hold Steady’s songs conjure up punk-rock dives that smell like armpits, slutty women with crooked smiles, fistfights between drunks who can barely stand up, and shlubs hanging out at house parties long after they’ve ended. It’s sentimental stuff that longs for more glorious times and celebrates them to the point of fiction. Craig Finn, who used to front the…
Guttural, juke-joint blues songs — the kind that shake the moonshine from your ass pocket and transform your fists into the devil sign — aren’t immune to the trite sway of nostalgia and romanticism. We like our Southern blues-rockers bestial and destructive; if we can’t have that, then mullets, bandanas and a Skynyrd or Stevie Ray lick will do. Though…
There was a time when being a jazz singer and a pop vocalist were one and the same. Try to pull that stunt now, however, and most misguided purists will paint a giant target on your back and proceed to relentlessly pelt you with their own archaic reasoning as to why the two titles are mutually exclusive. Thankfully, former Kansas…
Rock snobs keep him in the footnotes, and aging ’60s blowhards call him a swamp-rockin’ villain, but the 35th anniversary of the fabled Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour is a prime time to restore Okla-homeboy Leon Russell to the critical pedestal. Russell, a sonic triple threat and then some, put the Byrds on the map as a Wrecking Crew…
With Kansas legislators up in arms about the monkey-to-man debate, we at the Pitch feel obligated not to hold the truth back from our readers. So huddle up for a little lesson on evolution: Starting off just across the Mississippi from St. Louis in Belleville, Illinois, as Jeff Tweedy’s post-Uncle Tupelo side project, Wilco began as a decent enough amalgam…
Punk’s first famous bassist was incompetent at the instrument, placing the bar for the genre so low that future players would have to tunnel themselves into molten mantle to avoid meeting the mark. On a spectrum between Sid Vicious (0) and, say, Dream Theater’s John Myung (10), most punk bassists rate about a 5, playing with impressive agility and minimal…
