A few weeks ago, the music and fashion mogul formerly known as P. Diddy gave himself another name change. The former Sean Combs, who launched his career as Puff Daddy, then reinvented his image as P. Diddy four years ago (after being acquitted of gun charges and announcing to the media that he needed to make a “fresh start”), last…
9/9-9/10 Luci Harper developed an eye for experimental short films when she was a student at the University of Iowa. When she moved to Kansas City, she realized there was a void in local exposure — one she wanted to fill. “No one else was really doing what I had in mind,” Harper says. “So I decided to start my…
SAT 9/10 At Dance in the Park, area dance troupes show off the traditional (ballet, modern) and the not-so-traditional (hip-hop, swing) at Roanoke Park (just north of 39th Street and Roanoke Road). There’s international flavor, too, with Middle Eastern dance and Brazilian capoeira. Performances start at 6:30 p.m. — Rebecca Braverman Mountain Do Watch the outdoors from the inside. 9/9-9/10…
9/8-9/11 Eighteenth and Vine boasts a rich musical history, but “Goin’ to Kansas City” immortalizes another intersection. “People around the world know the line about standing on the corner of 12th Street and Vine,” says Anita Dixon, president of the Cultural Convention and Visitors Service. Marking song and site alike, the CCVS unveils a piano-shaped park called Kansas City Plaza…
In Kerouac’s On the Road, Sal Paradise had Dean Moriarty. On television, Seinfeld had Kramer. Male friendships that are one-part total weirdo have long fascinated. And now a real-life take on the theme has been documented on camera. Long Island native Chris Daleo is the force behind the lens in Why Neal, screening at the Kansas International Film Festival, which…
Thursday, September 8 We know it’s not college basketball season yet, but this year we’re totally over the hordes of (Bill) Self-obsessed fans of KU’s men’s team. Instead we’ve got our eyes on the women’s squad, helmed by Bonnie Henrickson. After ending her first season as head coach, the Jayhawks placed eighth in the Big 12 Conference — the highest…
At last month’s opening reception for Now Read On: Jesse Howard & Roger Brown at the H&R Block Artspace, we met a woman with long, straight hair and small, round glasses. She excitedly recounted attending a previous lecture by Eleanor Heartney, one of the contributors to the show’s catalog. Our new acquaintance had found the New York-based art writer and…
The screams rip out onto 18th Street, along with clattering, smashing, groans, thuds, and swearing of such ferocity that the neutered old words every fourth-grader knows sear once more. It’s bad shit going down. An old guy, weather-beaten and apparently homeless, trundling past with a dolly, idles for a second to listen. His face pinches up. “Don’t go in…
America the Beautiful Brandon Friend gets American culture. His mixed-media works include cow-riding Olsen twins, their ever-smiling faces affixed to naked, surgically enhanced bodies. Other pieces prominently feature creepy baby-doll heads, school photos of awkward teenagers, and boy-on-boy action, and all are rendered in a recognizable style of collage, with photography and paint successfully working in tension throughout the canvases….
For most Kansas Citians, First Fridays last only one fleeting night a month. But for Crossroads denizens, there are preparations to be made. Parking spots must be claimed early (or not at all). Dogs plagued with performance anxiety must be walked early enough to do their business without an audience. That vigilante crosswalk you’ve been determined to paint at 20th…
The somnolent slack-key-guitar songs at Hawaiian luaus encourage the passive enjoyment of exotic hula choreography and the paradise backdrop. When these parties move inside, however, DJs switch to propulsive, motion-inducing music because being a staid spectator at a nightclub can be more depressing than relaxing. Kabal’s third-annual luau lines up house-music heavyweights Paul DeMatteo, Bill Pile and DJ Ataxic,…
For the record, local Latin-jazz ensemble Abatería hails from Columbia. No, not Colombia — Columbia. Columbia, Missouri. And the lead singer? Originally she’s from Costa Rica, but she grew up in Cuba. No, not the island with all the cigars — Missouri, again. Contrary to what their geographic origins may seem to indicate, Melania Bruner and company are completely…
Blackalicious has spent the past decade earning a sturdy reputation as one of hip-hop’s most inventive duos. Since the group’s beginnings with DJ Shadow’s Solesides Crew, Chief Xcel’s multilayered beats have provided the perfect platform for Gift of Gab’s rapid-fire repertoire, leaving jaws slack with tracks such as “Alphabet Aerobics” and “Chemical Calisthenics.” But since 2002’s Blazing Arrow, both members…
That the Perishers are coming to town again, after their April opening spot with Sarah McLachlan at Kemper Arena, is wonderful. But that they’re playing the Grand Emporium — where we could, if we were not just insane but also dangerous, reach up and wrap our arms around the legs of singer and guitarist Ola Klüft and sob through the…
Shaking Tree’s name pops up in “Everywhere,” a song from its latest CD, Familiar, as a reference to rustling leaves before a storm (putting the kibosh on rumors that the band is named after the moment in Cool Hand Luke when Paul Newman rattles the shrubbery during his escape). Yet this Lawrence band isn’t an approaching storm; it has been…
When Kurt Cobain pulled the trigger in 1994, he scattered a whole lot more than brain matter and the remnants of grunge — the chance for Seattle to once again reach the apex of alternative went with him, too. Now, more than a decade later, the pioneering Minus the Bear and its accompanying four albums — including the recently released…
Originally a bedroom-demo partnership, Happy Bullets was born two years ago, when founders and core members Timothy Ruble and Jason Roberts had a wow-we-have-the-same-taste-in-records moment. Now a full band, the Bullets have released their debut, The Vice and Virtue Ministry, a playful sendup of, well, a lot of things, that touches on imagery from British high society more than once….
Bear no ill will toward Big & Rich regarding its song-title coinage of the pop-culture proverb “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy).” Aside from the overuse of the phrase, the song is actually a catchy little listen by a couple of guys clearly having a good time holding nothing sacred — save maybe their country-music roots. Rather, blame those running…
Beyond obvious nostalgia (and having the same first name), the pairing of classic-rock veterans John Fogerty and John Mellencamp makes a certain amount of sense. Consider that both drink from the well of rich American musical styles: country, bluegrass, folk. Remember that both got undeservedly overshadowed by their higher-profile peers — Springsteen and Petty in Mellencamp’s case, the Beatles and…
A former Mr. America who bends steel bars with his teeth during his shows, Jon Mikl Thor makes Henry Rollins and Glenn Danzig look like pencil-necked geeks. Not only does he resemble the muscular title star of The Rocky Horror Picture Show; his insanely catchy (emphasis on insane) glam-metal songs resemble that movie’s soundtrack. On this year’s Thor Against…
Since the demise of the Monty Python troupe, Brothers Grimm director Terry Gilliam has spent his directorial career creating a world where the real and the surreal co-exist. Twenty years after Gilliam’s satirical take on the future in Brazil, Montreal’s the Arcade Fire is putting its own dreamy spin on the 1930s Ary Baroso-Ed Russel song that inspired the film’s…
Let’s get something straight: Those little iPod earbuds you’re sporting suck. Crammed in your ears, telltale white cords dangling down, pumping bad sound into your head — they aren’t so much headphones as they are painful little status symbols. Plus, the little bastards break easy. You can do better. I’m not going to tell you which headphones to buy. (For…
“THE MOST HATED MAN IN THE WORLD IS HATED WITHOUT A CAUSE — PRODUCE YOUR CAUSE.” So wrote self-proclaimed “Outlaw” Jesse Howard (1885-1983), a self-taught artist who placed hundreds of intense, block-lettered signs on Sorehead Hill, his property in Fulton, Missouri, to broadcast his uncompromising, confrontational perspective. It takes time to reconcile Howard’s work, now on display at the H&R…
In 1998, the Sierra Club reported that Kansas City was number five on a list of the ten cities most threatened by sprawl. That’s only one of many studies ringing the doomsday bell against the gas-guzzling, environment-trampling ways of our city’s outward expansion. In What’s the Matter With Kansas, Thomas Frank posits that “Johnson County is a vast suburban empire,…
