Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (Lucasfilm Ltd.) The final installment of the Star Wars saga actually plays better at home: You can watch it, then pop in the original trilogy and chart the evolution of Anakin, and have it all actually make sense. Though it’s still a blue-screen wonderland, with too much going on and not much…
Assassins Bringing hell to the chiefs in this challenging Stephen Sondheim show is a who’s who of the American damned, among them Booth, Oswald, Hinckley and Leon Czolgosz, the Republican-turned-anarchist whose last words, uttered just before his execution for gunning down William McKinley, still chill: “I killed the president because he was the enemy of … the good working people….
Baseball Project We don’t know a whole lot about baseball. Nonetheless, we like Mike Hill’s drawings, which document and track three seasons of Red Sox players’ performances. For each season, the artist uses a different system for logging various outcomes, and each is painstakingly etched out over the course of several months’ worth of ballgames. Walking into the gallery filled…
The material in the Kansas City Flatfile show at the H&R Block Artspace is exhaustive: the work of 141 area artists — up to 10 pieces each — stored in cabinets that visitors can pore over at their leisure. Artspace staffers have pulled approximately 60 pieces to actually exhibit, and future guest curators (including Charlotte Street Foundation national advisor and…
Right now, teenagers on cell phones are flipping through the Delia’s clothing catalog, their pens circling some of the 22 skull-adorned girlie garments and accessories for sale there. Twenty-two! But not scary skulls. These are fashionably cartoonish skulls you can mix and match using the Web site’s “make the outfit” feature. Many of the skulls on handbags and throw pillows…
For years, now, the badness of musicals has been the subject of musicals. This isn’t to say that musicals are bad — just that their producers think them corny and unsophisticated and insist upon reassuring us at every step that musicals are stupid and that we’re whip-smart for knowing this. This has given us the anti-musical, the song-and-dance show…
SUN 11/6 Sunday may be a day of rest, but faithful E! watchers know that it’s also the day of choice for awards shows. And Kansas City’s gallery crowd knows that our own art-world equivalent is the Charlotte Street Awards Exhibition. Every year, the Charlotte Street Foundation honors local artists with cash grants of $8,500 — and exposure, for…
11/5-11/13 In The Turn of the Screw, a young governess is convinced that the two orphaned children in her care are haunted by malevolent ghosts from the family’s past. She seeks to exorcise them — but is made to feel neurotic and irrational in the process. Now we remember why we always hated baby-sitting. Based on the Henry James novel,…
SUN 11/6 In the late ’80s, Raiders gear dominated urban fashion. N.W.A.’s villains sported the menacing attire, as did the politically conscious good guys in Public Enemy. (The rappers were more intimidating than the on-field hulks who shared their uniform preferences.) But then Raiders fans graduated to grotesquely ugly mask-and-spikes ensembles that made them look like closing-time casualties at the…
THU 11/3 Jackson Katz was an all-state high school football player, and he’s still an imposing figure. But though posters for his Thursday-night presentation at the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s University Center (50th Street and Rockhill Road) depict bulging biceps reminiscent of a steroids-studded slugger, Katz isn’t interested in making men more stereotypically manly. In works such as his film…
Hamza Walker loves his job. As the director of education for the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, he’s an esteemed curator and respected essayist. (There’s also his mysterious attraction to actor Patrick Swayze, but more on that later.) Anyway, people have noticed. Praise has come from some high places: The New York Times declared him one of the…
Thursday, November 3 A media announcement tells us that Crosby Kemper III is hosting a “special event” Sunday for Tibetan scholar Achok Rinpoche — but we aren’t allowed to come. It’s invitation-only. Well, screw it — we can meet the master on our own today through Sunday at Unity Temple on the Plaza (707 West 47th Street). The fourth…
Unlike those who fear impertinence — say, Sunday school teachers or the fundamentalists who reared him — Brian Flemming takes questions. Even when he’s already asking the tough ones himself. So when Open Circle’s Spiritual Cinema Series unveils The God Who Wasn’t There, Flemming’s new documentary, he’ll be around afterward to discuss his contention that Jesus Christ never existed. He…
Writer and director Noah Baumbach has made three light films — one so slight (1997’s party-hopping Highball), it didn’t see release until five years after its completion, and even then it snuck onto video-store shelves credited to a pseudonymous writer and director. None of his previous work — not even his co-writing credit with Wes Anderson on The Life Aquatic…
If Jarhead, director Sam Mendes and writer William Broyles Jr.’s adaptation of Anthony Swofford’s 2003 Gulf War memoir, seems at all familiar — like, say, a DJ’s mash-up of Full Metal Jacket and Three Kings — there’s good reason for it. Swofford, 20 years old during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, writes in his book of his and his fellow…
At 2:30 a.m. on a Monday, the Night Ranger batphone rang, rousing us from slumber. On the other end of the line was Mercury, lead singer for the glam drag band Vibralux. He and his cohorts had just played a show at the Hurricane, and he was drunk-dialing us to give us shit for not being there. We stayed…
For all the readers who have called or e-mailed about the future of the proposed Cuban restaurant and salsa club Caliente — the brainchild of developer Kerry Duffin and chef Peter Castillo, scheduled to open this month in a 103-year-old building at 103 West 19th Street — I finally have an answer: hoy no, mañana sí. On October 25, the…
One of the many bizarre idiosyncrasies I love about daytime TV soap operas is the dearth of restaurant scenes in the fictional cities and towns inhabited by the characters. No matter if the occasion is dressy or laid-back, the residents of Pine Valley, Genoa City, Springfield or Oakdale always seem to be eating in the same restaurant. Oakdale, the…
Local music fans have spent years clamoring for Lawrence-based Danny Pound’s solo debut — but not as many as the mid-’70s sound of Surer Days suggests. Pound’s drought dates back to 1997, when his post-Vitreous Humor project, the Regrets, released its only album. Surer Days possesses a time-capsule quality, as if it were recently rescued from collectors-only inaccessibility. Pound’s blues…
It would be fittingly ironic — but unfortunate — if Pavement, which was rescued from the possessive clutches of indie-rock hipsters late in its career, were handed over to a new set of hipsters with this set of modern jazz interpretations of the band’s work. One is naturally wary of the inherent calculation behind artistic decisions like this — especially…
In just three years, the Fiery Furnaces have mastered the fine art of Ritalin rock, with three albums of genre-as-buffet music that offer weirdness without sacrificing intelligence. The only thing that outpaces the songwriting and musical skills of siblings Matthew and Eleanor Friedberg is their impatience to get to something new. With Rehearsing My Choir, that hunger for singular ideas…
Every album is a soundtrack waiting to happen. For example, Steal Yer Heart, the latest album from Seattle retro-punk band the Briefs, could follow a day in the life of a broken-hearted, ADD-suffering accountant named Gary. Our protagonist wouldn’t necessarily need to ape the Briefs’ eccentric fashion sense, but a quirky sense of humor and a penchant for pogo dancing…
That 31 Knots has shared the stage with the likes of Modest Mouse, the Liars and Q and not U comes as no surprise. Every note, every measure, in this Portland, Oregon, trio’s repertoire has its roots in a stagemate’s shtick — Modest Mouse’s vocal urgency, the Liars’ abruptness, Q’s sonic experimentation. But 31 Knots isn’t necessarily unoriginal — far…
Bobby Conn sure is a goofy bastard. Case in point: “Never Get Ahead,” from his latest effort, Live Classics Vol. 1 — a funky, falsettofied anti-corporate diatribe featuring Conn and his Glass Gypsies melding the disco track from the Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back,” a frantic electric violin and the lyrics You’re never gonna get ahead givin’ head to…
