Because Far Easterners evidently aren’t familiar with Southern American dietary staples, the Japanese release of SoundsGood’s Biscuits & Gravy will be titled Midnight Music. But you don’t have to go through customs to enjoy Joe Good’s soon-to-be-released collection of solo material, out in the near future on Mac Lethal’s new label, Black Clover Records. You can catch an early glimpse…
Five years after Aimee Mann’s songs inspired director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia and eventually became its soundtrack, the melancholy singer has provided the soundtrack for The Forgotten Arm — except this film was never released or even produced. It exists only in Mann’s mind. The concept album tells the story of a carnival worker who falls for a down-on-his-luck boxer,…
The VooDoo Lounge at Harrah’s Casino is the only venue I’ve been to that screams Rock Star! and All-You-Can-Eat-Steak-and-Shrimp Buffet! so loudly — and in the same breath. Like a drunken, debauched, rich, over-the-hill, sequin-clad heiress in heat, the VooDoo Lounge was meant to be conquered by a high-dollar U2 tribute band, and I was meant to be there when…
There’s a scene early in House Concerts: The Home Invasion Tour that can be found in a lot of music documentaries these days — that moment in which all continuity ceases and suddenly the filmmaking process itself becomes the subject of discussion. With each passing documentary it becomes an increasingly clumsy way of addressing the fundamental flaw of such projects:…
A stunt like that: Regarding Justin Kendall’s “Screen Test” (January 19): The article cracked me up, but in my anti-geek defense, I have to point out that I have not collected Evel Knievel toys since I was 7 — I just still have the Evel Knievel toys left over from when I was 7. Also, I didn’t sell them, and…
Hip-hop MC Priceless Diamonds describes herself as a “boss bitch” who grew up boosting clothes and turning the occasional trick. She’s no angel, but she’s got advice. So listen up, y’all. Morgan Freeman’s been bad-mouthing Black History Month, saying it trivializes and patronizes African-American culture. You agree? I just feel honored, you know, that they do respect the black culture…
The Strip doesn’t envy Wichita pastor Michael Clark. About a year ago, the cops arrived at Clark’s church, Christ Lutheran, with a search warrant. They had identified church president Dennis Rader as the BTK serial killer. After his capture, Rader admitted to murdering 10 people in a reign of terror dating back to 1974. Police finally caught up with BTK…
Kansas City’s best night of the year is the mass celebration honoring Martin Luther King Jr. at St. Stephen Baptist Church at Truman and Paseo. For someone like me who makes MLK Day rather than Easter her once-a-year trip to church, the message is good, the music righteous, the politician-watching prime. Any candidate who wants black votes better show up,…
KPRS 103.3 DJ Sean Tyler greets employees at the midtown Cell-U-All Wireless with chest-high handshakes and brief embraces. The afternoon-drive host at Hot 103.3 Jamz wears a New York Mets cap and a leather jacket. He swigs a white-chocolate mocha he picked up on the way to the store. “I hate coffee,” he says, “but Starbucks is like crack.” Upon…
It’s embarrassing: five years of foreign-language classes, followed by four years of speaking only English. (The exchange with that cab driver in Puerto Vallarta doesn’t really count.) Enter Conversando, a free discussion group at the Irene H. Ruiz Biblioteca de las Americas (2017 West Pennway) that gets together from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. each Tuesday to practice and improve Spanish-speaking…
Adventures of Superman: The Complete Second Season (Warner Bros.) Asylum (Paramount) Casino (MCA) Celebrity Mix (TLA) Final Destination: Scared 2 Death Pack (New Line) Gendernauts (First Run) Ghost in the Machine (Anchor Bay) Industrial Strength Keaton (Mackinac Media) Jamie Foxx Presents Laffapalooza! 6 (Image) Junebug (Sony) Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman — The Complete Second Season (Warner…
Movie-based videogames have a well-deserved reputation for sucking. Ever since Atari’s E.T. — a game so ill-conceived that thousands of unsold cartridges were dumped en masse in the desert, creating the crappiest buried treasure of all time — Hollywood tie-ins have bombed big-time. Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie aims to finally change that. As its…
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Magnolia) The best two hours you’ll ever spend learning about accounting, Enron is one part civics lesson, one part Greek tragedy, and one part political cartoon. Director Alex Gibney makes no pretense of objectivity; he wants you to hiss and boo at Ken Lay and the other Snidely Whiplashes as they tie…
The meek have inherited the earth. The Hollywood chunk of it, anyway. In our entertainment culture, geeks have achieved such power that our sympathies are consistently directed to them. At the end of a thousand ’80s movies, when the football hero is knocked into a pool, a pile of manure or the bosoms of the dean’s wife, we cheer; even…
Decelerate At the opening reception for Decelerate, a stranger with a wide, deranged grin pulled us over to Jacob El Hanani’s drawings and said, “They’re just doodles. I mean, he made the same marks over and over. What’s the point?” Never mind that El Hanani’s work is insanely detailed, that one piece can take years to finish. Never mind that…
The American poet Wallace Stevens’ most well-known work is probably “Anecdote of the Jar.” In it, Stevens describes a man-made object — the jar — as “taking dominion everywhere” once the narrator places it in the Earth’s soil. So powerful is the jar’s influence in the unkempt environment of a Tennessee hill, for instance, that “The wilderness rose up…
The critical consensus has Match Point as Woody Allen’s finest film since … oh, let’s see … Bullets Over Broadway, is it? Or maybe Sweet and Lowdown? One forgets where the good stuff left off, because there’s been so much bad stuff since. It’s not difficult to understand the accolades and affection slathered on Match Point: It resembles one of…
America — and, by extension, Hollywood — has an obsession with innocence and its loss. Every generation has its Moment When Everything Changed, from Pearl Harbor to JFK’s assassination to 9/11. The impact takes a while to settle in, then people forget again, and future generations are similarly traumatized. But if you really want to talk about clashes of…
It was a Pitch reader who turned me on to La Filipina Café (see review, page 33), for which I’m grateful because I don’t venture over to Gladstone all that often. But I do try to cross over to Kansas City, Kansas, more frequently. There’s still a lot of uncharted culinary territory — for this adventurous diner, anyway — in…
Years ago, there was a little Filipino restaurant at 33rd Street and Gillham Road called the Manila Café. It’s now a gay bar. A couple of years later, one of the Manila Café chefs took a job cooking in a Middle Eastern joint at 36th Street and Broadway, serving a couple of native Filipino dishes, such as adobo chicken…
When it comes to crashing a wake, we recommend pre-drinking, then bringing some trusty sidekicks to diminish that pesky ghoulish feeling. Sadly, we neglected the pre-gaming part, but we certainly had our Research Assistants at our side when we visited Flo’s Polk-A-Dot Lounge for a gathering in honor of 55-year-old Craig Strayer, who died of a heart attack on December…
Experienced DJs can push a room’s temperature to equatorial extremes, and the effect intensifies exponentially when they infuse genuine tropical sounds. When Omaha’s Brent Crampton and 1924 Main’s resident spinner, Tyrone Blea, team up for Friday’s free “Summer Samba,” the heat waves could encompass several blocks, register on Doppler radar and ignite any unstable substance. (So go easy on the…
X-Dash sure does takes his craft seriously — we’ll give him that. On his aptly titled CD, Workaholic, over horn-and-string production by Will the Weirdo, X name-drops every influential MC from Run DMC and Jay-Z to Tech N9ne, Mac Lethal and Da’ Poppa, deadpanning, I need a Lil’ Mo/Just give me a Lil’ Flip/Just give me a lil’ bit/Just give…
Ryan Adams is totally asking for it. For a man whose claim to fame is an inflated ego, releasing three albums in one calendar year isn’t exactly the path back to modesty. Worst part is, you can’t even be pissed. Each album is strong, striking and beautiful. The most recent release, 29, is a quiet record, and though some may…
