Thursday, November 17 Whenever we’ve been to Blonde (100 Ward Parkway), the Plaza’s newest nightclub, nothing especially interesting has happened. No cat-fights, no illicit affairs and definitely no celebrity sightings — not like a couple of weeks ago, when a friend of a friend caught Ashlee Simpson’s ex-boyfriend Ryan Cabrera making out with Paris Hilton’s BFF Kimberly Stewart (Rod’s baby…
Agnes Smedley’s life was more intriguing than fiction. Born in Osgood, Missouri, in the early 1890s, Smedley worked with Margaret Sanger to promote women’s rights and birth control and traveled to revolutions in India and China. (Her involvement in the latter got her investigated by Sen. Joseph McCarthy at the start of the Cold War.) She successfully fought off accusations…
As You Like It Expect garlands and jerkins aplenty as Avila University offers up that most amenable of titles and most unapologetic of crowd pleasers. Just so we’re clear: This one’s the Shakespeare comedy involving angry dukes, an enchanted forest and great heaps of cross-dressing (which doesn’t exactly narrow things down, does it?). It’s the story of Rosalind-in-drag and weary…
The Brainsex Showdown Squatting in the Kansas City Art Institute’s new Crossroads digs, printmaking students perform that moving rite of passage: showing off their cool stuff. KCAI instructors Jes Owings, James Woodfill and Oz McGuire curate a department show that, Owings says, explores the “distinction between merchandise and fine art.” So, Megan Rains’ “Pillow” speaks to our eternal teen angst,…
For anyone still buying that red-state-versus-blue-state cant, consider the following: This weekend, in a century-old church a couple of blocks from the Johnson County courthouse in Olathe — the town ID’d by the New Republic a few years back as the center of America’s Christian conservatism — patrons of the arts will be invited to entertain the musical question…
The America depicted in Michael Eastman’s American Photographs doesn’t really exist in any vital sense. Eastman finds and records a country that was alive once but is quickly fading. His pictures serve as a eulogy to a bygone era. “Shotgun House, New Orleans” looms over the entire show like a ghost. Before Hurricane Katrina hit, this was simply a…
Once upon a time, there was a Kansas City band called Invisible Sea. I saw them at Davey’s — a guy and a girl singer (both looked terrified to be onstage) and a keyboard player with a big, black, curly mane of hair who was totally into it but whose instruments were inaudible. But wonders never cease in Cowtown. From…
Some MCs are dancers and dodgers — they’re like Barry Sanders on the microphone, and it’s hard to get a grip on them. Bun B is not one of those rappers. As befits his stocky frame, he’s more in the vein of Jerome Bettis and Larry Csonka, a human cannonball who moves piles of humanity with raw, directed power. And…
Proof that Madonna’s handlers have given up on her: Nobody stepped in and slapped the gap-toothed smile off her face when she insisted on rhyming the words York and dork. Well, at least she isn’t trying to sound smart this time. On Confessions on a Dance Floor, Madonna makes progress in returning to form after the preachy, pale American Life,…
In today’s Clap Your Death Cab Say Arcade Fire-centric indie-rock world, everything old becomes new again. And then it’s recycled, copied, imitated and squeezed dry of any original meaning or intent. So at first, it’s understandable that the Living Blue’s first full-length for Minty Fresh might cause a cynical reaction — especially since Fire, Blood, Water’s influences are obviously cobbled…
We Yanks aren’t used to pure musicality and outright gimmickry in the same package. But in the UK — that magical place where eccentricity has been elevated to a virtue — the Super Furry Animals have been high-charting contenders since their 1996 debut, despite, or maybe because of, entire albums sung in Welsh and concerts played in yeti costumes and…
Among the Brits who started out blues-wailin’ in the late ’60s — the Who, Led Zeppelin, Clapton — and went on to rule arenas in the ’70s, Jethro Tull was the one that got dropped on its head as a baby. Tull’s only permanent member, Ian Anderson, always acts like he was born in a circle of mushrooms in…
Gormandizing a diverse buffet of Stooges, the Clash, Sonic Youth and Smokey Robinson, GoGoGo Airheart devours, digests and shits out a sound like nobody else. Despite hailing from sun-drenched San Diego, the band’s sound is raw, lo-fi and East Coast. GoGoGo does frantic best — Mike Vermillion has the vocal sass to match (to have schooled, actually) Chris Hughes of…
Tony Bennett Oh suuuuure, ya dig Tony Bennett now. He’s the hip, suave 79-year-old who’s widely recognized — especially now that Ol’ Blue Eyes and the Velvet Fog are gone — as the last of the great jazz-informed pop crooners who ruled charts and hearts beginning in the mid-20th century. But where the hell were you in the late ’70s,…
With song titles such as “Positive Hardcore, Go,” 25 Ta Life has something to say about the state of the mosh pit. Since the release of 1999’s seminal Friendship, Loyalty, Commitment, the band has furthered its mission of unifying the hardcore scene under a positive banner, spreading a message of working-class progressivism rather than fueling the mindsets of militant, straight-edge…
Never heard of the Hearers? Well, they haven’t heard of you, either. They were too busy holed up in basements, figuring out how best to pervert the formula for classic Americana in ways that would still yield songs. Soon to be released on local label Anodyne Records, the Hearers’ second album, Don’t Make the Captain Cry, sounds like, well, a…
It’s been two years since Elliott Smith’s apparent suicide, but Web-savvy fans are working hard to immortalize him with a free and seemingly endless supply of unreleased material. Elliott smithbsides.com has posted more than a hundred downloadable demos, rarities and out-of-print B-sides as well as tracks that didn’t make the posthumous release of From a Basement on the Hill, including…
The Dwarves bring their signature brand of outrageously vulgar hardcore punk rock to KC this week. The group’s Web site brags that its 1990 album, Blood, Guts and Pussy — featuring naked women and a midget drenched in animal blood on the cover and tales of STDs, prostitution and statutory rape inside — was named by Spin magazine as the…
Milemarker, which just released its fifth album, Ominosity, was one of the first groups to merge heavy punk guitars with synthesizers. With his self-published introspective ‘zine, Burn Collector, the first nine installments of which are now available in a book, singer Al Burian presaged another omnipresent modern movement: the blog. However, he won’t be transferring his thoughts about relationships, degrading…
This week’s cover story deals with a side of hip-hop where beefs are settled in battles of wits, not bullets; where anyone who fronts like a gangsta gets laughed off the stage; where spitting four-syllable words is cool and bragging about selling rocks is not. That scene’s leading local artists — Mac Lethal, Approach, DJs Konsept and Sku, SoundsGood, Reach,…
Sometimes it takes a jarring catastrophe to make things right. When you’re My Morning Jacket, catastrophe takes the form of a breakup. It comes after three achingly beautiful albums and close to a decade of paying your dues, touring at increasingly large venues for growing crowds. It comes while critics are busy drooling about the deeply soulful, reverb-drenched sound of…
It seems like so much nitpicking, but why is the Johnny Cash biopic called Walk the Line when a far better name would have been Ring of Fire? James Mangold, co-writer and director, might argue that he chose the former because of its lyrics dealing with the temptations that crop up when a man loves a woman who ain’t his…
The part with the dragon is really cool. Might as well cut to the chase, right? It’s not as though you need anybody to tell you the basic premise of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. If you somehow missed the previous three Potter movies, this won’t likely be the one to break your pattern. So you probably want…
City limit: I had to smile when reading Alisha Patterson’s letter in the November 10 edition of the Pitch. Alisha isn’t the only one who is glad she doesn’t live in Lubbock, Texas — 200,000 residents of Lubbock (including this one) are glad she moved, too! And Alisha, next time you reference a song (“Texas in My Rearview Mirror”), please…
