Thursday, July 21 We don’t know anything about Herbert Hoover, the 31st president, except that he’s the subject of Hal Wert’s recent book Hoover, The Fishing President. We’re angling (get it?) to find out more about him, or at least what he used for bait. Wert speaks tonight at 7:30 at the University of Kansas’ Robert J. Dole Institute of…
Rio Bravo? Gay. The Searchers? Gay. One-Eyed Jacks? Please. So says Chris Packard, a former Topekan who teaches literature at New York University and recently published Queer Cowboys and Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century Literature. As part of the Kansas City Gay and Lesbian Film and Video Festival, Packard reads Sunday from his new book and introduces clips…
The Bad Seedling Late Night gives its standard treatment to ’50s horror flick The Bad Seed, the tale of a homicidal 8-year-old girl, here played by a 6-foot-tall man. Expect cross-dressing, sight-gags and lots of raunchy (and sometimes groaningly obvious) double entendres. But the show offers more than that. Ron Megee’s script rises above the schtick, and both Megee and…
Bend Debra Di Blasi’s abstract paintings are about math and communication — superstring theory, to be specific. Anne Austin Pearce’s ink-on-vellum creations — called Rhetorical Black Holes — look like cells under a microscope, only prettier, with a pink-dominated color scheme that says “spring” in a way that nothing you observed in your 10th-grade chemistry class ever could have. But…
This one’s simple. If you think a musical production of Debbie Does Dallas sounds like your kind of thing, it probably is, and you should hustle on down to Just Off Broadway before it’s gone this weekend. That out of the way, let’s talk Chekhov. Outside of your loan is past due, there’s nothing students of creative writing hear more…
Though no one has really complained, we think it’s probably time to take a break from Kabal — at least for a week — and turn our attention to a weekly party presided over by some of the working-stiff DJs who provide booty-shakin’ sanctuaries to people who find themselves suddenly and inexplicably drink-in-hand on a weekday night. In contrast…
Even for a death-metal band, Soilent Green was unusually hateful. In its songs, the band took gruesome pride in subjecting lustful whores to violent acts, like a Victorian slasher. The malevolence sounded genuine, too: This was a documentary-gritty Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer in a genre stocked with shoddy, ludicrous Friday the 13th sequels. In 2001, Soilent Green survived…
Harem marks the first solo turn from James “Wooden Wand” Toth, and it turns out sunburned solitude suits him better than the unfortunately all-over-the-place psych he and backing act Vanishing Voice have liberally released (CDR-style) over the past couple of years. Here Toth treads a more certain path — restrained, sometimes hypnotic psych-folk — with the dazed, peculiar mien of…
Robert Gomez’s guitar is comfortable wherever it lands, whether in the slither of the Dallas-based dance combo Rob G and the Latin Pimps, the tight conservatory jazz in the Robert Gomez Trio, or the diffuse sunshine in the “Morning on the Brownstone Stoop” songwriter jazz perfected by Norah Jones. (Jones, not coincidentally, contributes backing vocals to “Happiness Today,” one…
Leave it to Bob Mould to employ that same silly vocal effect that Cher used on “Believe” and make it sound perfectly respectable. On the fittingly titled Body of Song, Mould explores the various phases he’s traversed throughout his career (the postpunk sound of Husker Du, the guitar-driven power pop of Sugar, the acoustic introspection of Workbook, the electronica of…
Throw Rag’s headquarters, the 376-square-mile Salton Sea, in California, reeks to high heaven with rotting fish and decaying algae, and it serves as sanctuary to homicidal meth tweakers with names like Pooh Bear who threaten would-be police informants with genital-chewing by a rabid weasel. Such filth, danger and twisted humor feed Throw Rag’s self-coined “sailor rock,” a careening muck…
Some Christian bands address their beliefs in a subtle fashion. Casual listeners might not notice the mysteriously capitalized pronouns on the lyric sheet or the curiously platonic phrasing of their pledges of devotion. By contrast, Carbondale, Illinois’ Convicted leaves no doubt about its spiritual affiliation. Its latest album, Under God, combines roaring riffs with explicit overtures such as Deliver…
Britney and Kevin, Tom and Katie, and all other gratingly ubiquitous celebri-couples, please turn your attention to Avril Lavigne and Sum 41 frontman Deryck Whibley. Engaged since late June, these lovestruck Canadians aren’t making a big deal about being crazy stupid for each other. No paparazzi-ready affectionate outbursts of questionable motive. No reality show documenting the marriage of the pop-punk…
We always thought our hyperactive and violent reaction to garage rock was some kind of freaky psychological irregularity — until that crazy barroom brawl erupted between the White Stripes’ Jack White and the Von Bondies’ Jason Stollsteimer. Escaping with only a cut finger, the pugilistic White handed Stollsteimer a broken nose and a couple of black eyes. It was…
After a 12-year hiatus and a canceled Kansas City concert, Billy Idol figures it’s a nice day to start again. “Super Overdrive,” from his comeback album, Devil’s Playground, summons all the essential elements from his ’80s heyday — the sexual commands (ride my rocket), the cocky passages (Does he still have the magic?/Yes, he does), the searing Steve Stevens riffs….
Being a little crazy in New York is nothing new, but resident space cadet Beans is bringing hip-hop into a brave new world with a schizophrenic delivery of futuristic beats and light-speed lyrics that teeter on the edge of sanity. On “Diamond Halo Grenade,” he nervously twitches, With your cheap pet tricks/Barking bravado like super chickens/More harmless than drowned kittens/Cold…
Eminently suspicious character Ian Svenonius has gone through more postures than an art-class model. In fact, there’s something un-American about the clothes-consciousness and over-the-top hipness of his bands, including Nation of Ulysses, the Make-Up and Weird War. The band’s new album, Illuminated by the Light, has the feel of one of those pop-culture-fiending Japanese or Scandinavian bands, winding its tendrils…
Celebrity feuds are always fun, but musicians frequently bring ordinary disagreements to new levels of self-aggrandizement — anyone remember the media-savvy tiff between Oasis and Blur? Take the more recent newsworthy beef between the Killers’ Brandon Flowers and the Bravery’s Sam Endicott. It allegedly began when Endicott said that he and his band didn’t like being compared to the Killers….
It ain’t easy being Journey. In an age when irony is an essential bit of cultural currency, the mulleted head of Journey has been perpetually on the pike. The band’s power ballads and populist rockers, once unmovable from the charts, are now seen as remnant cock-rockin’ cheese. In an interview with Pitch sister paper the Cleveland Scene, Jason Pettigrew, editor…
There’s a perfect moment in the beginning of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. At a resort in southern France, the young, radiant American actress Rosemary Hoyt has just befriended the group of rich expats whose decline into alcoholism, infidelity and madness she will witness and (to an extent) participate in throughout the rest of the novel. The moment…
Something happens to an audience — Roger Miller describes it as a “chemical dance in the back of their skulls” — when seasoned, creative musicians come together and throw away all the rules except the one that dictates play good. Combined with some wicked abstract film, the results should be stunning. Miller is the guitarist for the influential, kickass Boston…
Going to the theater this summer has been like stepping into a time machine and finding that your fondest childhood memories have been retooled by cynics and sadists. Bewitched, Herbie: Fully Loaded, last week’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and now Bad News Bears are meant to be gobbled like comfort food by wistful thirtysomethings weaned on the originals, but…
It should come as no surprise that the hero and heroine of the new Michael Bay action extravaganza are clones. You don’t get to be a Hollywood hitmeister like Bay without indulging in formulas, and the characters that Star Wars hero Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson (Lost in Translation) play in The Island bear a striking resemblance to the…
Ken doll: Thanks for Kendrick Blackwood’s “Independence Square” (July 7), and thanks to Ken McClain for trying to bring some respectability and class to Independence. It’s obvious he has genuine intent for revitalizing a city that others forgot. It appears Mr. McClain provides more vision, passion and contribution to our city than his detractors combined. Robert K. Briggs Independence Independence’s…
