Hey There, Harvey Girl The Mystery Train gang, which winningly transforms the Union Café into a railroad crime scene, again presents murder with appetizers. As always, the script comes from local talent, and it’s threaded with Kansas City history. This time, the cheerfully unpredictable story is something about the decorous Harvey Girls traveling in an Old West dining car. Real-life…
Before and After Kevin McGraw refers to himself as a “junkyard guy.” Based on this show, the description is accurate. The title refers to the objects — metal traffic signs, skateboard pieces, tire treads, mudflaps — that McGraw frequently finds along the sides of roads. He incorporates these materials into photographs of assemblages he’s already made. There’s a bit of…
Two Kansas City artists on view at the Byron C. Cohen Gallery are in near opposition to each other. One artist’s work appears busy, complicated and nearly incomprehensible in its nest of lines, its bustle of paint splotches and splashes colliding in a delicately arranged mess. The other’s work creates a place that’s quiet and subdued, demanding to be inhabited…
When your bread’s buttered by field trips, including busloads from the No Myth Left Behind public schools of Kansas, you probably don’t need the Pitch pointing out that your latest production is both politically and religiously trenchant. So when it comes to the Coterie Theatre’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond, a winningly staged young-adult witch-trial drama that I’m tempted to…
If you are the type of person who enjoys seeing an attractive naked woman meet a hideous demise, there’s a scene in Final Destination 3 that will wear out the pause and rewind buttons on your DVD remote in a few months. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The Final Destination movies always kick off with a premonition of doom,…
It is often written of Harrison Ford that he’s the most profitable movie star in history, to the tune of some $3.8 billion in box-office receipts worldwide. Of course, once one subtracts from that total the first three Star Wars movies, the Indiana Jones trilogy and two outings as C.I.A. agent Jack Ryan, that number diminishes significantly — and so…
The morning after actor Philip Seymour Hoffman was nominated for an Academy Award for Capote, I was eating breakfast in the front dining room at Nichols Lunch (3906 Waddell) when I remembered a strange connection between Truman Capote and nearby 39th Street. Just around the corner from Nichols Lunch is a parking lot that’s adjacent to the nightclub Missie B’s….
Last autumn, I received an e-mail from a reader who’d had a little culinary culture shock after moving from Kansas City to Portland, Oregon. “One of the new food items that has intrigued me and my fiancé is the bento. Boy, did I feel like a true Midwesterner. They’re everywhere out here. And if you don’t know what they are,…
When Lisa drags him to a museum, Homer Simpson offers these immortal words: “Good things don’t end in -eum. They end in -mania or -teria.” We’d like to add that -tini and -rita are also acceptable suffixes. That’s what we discovered at Sharp’s 63rd Street Grill, which just debuted its Tour de Tini, in which 36 varieties of martinis represent…
Born out of a KJHK 90.7 party not so long ago, Hot Lunch is quickly proving itself to be an alternative to the long-lived Neon, which coincidentally started in the same room, albeit one with a different name (La Tasca, baby). KJ jocks Jay Wells, Kyle Garrison and Phil Torpey helm the turntables and computers, purporting to bring it with…
Although he has crafted beats for hip-hop’s finest (A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Pharcyde, Busta Rhymes, Common), the name J Dilla, aka Jay Dee, is still largely unknown outside of hip-hop’s cognoscenti. This should change in ’06. After two decades in the biz, Dilla here drops only the second album to be released under his own name, the…
Used to be that Belle & Sebastian could record an album, call it Straight Outta Preciousville, and know that the title was appropriate. But the Scottish septet’s sixth proper full-length turns out to be a solid pop record. Following the career-reviving exuberance of Dear Catastrophe Waitress, the band has chosen to follow the path of more enticing modern-day indie goofs…
Cover albums are generally the province of self-indulgence and creative ennui, wherein the revisionist attempts to relive a childhood fantasy or merely leech off other people’s ideas because he or she has nothing of importance to say. The Bold and the Brave — the recent collaboration between gloomy alt-rocker Will Oldham (under his moniker Bonnie Prince Billy) and ambient post-rock…
Knowing that Chan Marshall (sole proprietor of Cat Power) is notorious for onstage breakdowns and charmingly clumsy-sounding moments on record, it stands to reason that The Greatest, her most mature record yet, will polarize her cultish fanbase. On these dozen tracks, Marshall comes across more like a soul diva with a backing band than the singer-songwriter of past discs. This…
At first, the pronoun shifts are disorienting; it’s not often that you hear a bluesman singing about his — or, rather, “His” — arms. But a completely redeemed blues singer makes sense. The Rev. Jimmie Bratcher (by day, associate pastor of a church in St. Joseph) sings about moments in the life of a formerly desperate man — the moments…
Vedera Just when the general populace of Kansas City was getting used to Veda, the little indie darling had to go and change its name to Vedera. Keep in mind that it wasn’t exactly the band’s idea — a Los Angeles band with the same name and an angry attorney decided on its behalf. Still, the abrupt name revision makes…
Short of Hugh Hefner, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more restless, experimental senior citizen than Lee Konitz. At 78, the saxophone giant is a year younger than his fellow Chicago scion but arguably more vital and relevant. His albums in the past decade have included a recording of multitracked solo numbers, a symphony date and a trio set with…
Having recorded its tribute to Hunter S. Thompson, “Bat Country,” only a few days prior to the writer’s death, Avenged Sevenfold is shrouded in suspicion. The young So-Cal metal outfit shot onto MTV radar as though fired from the cannon from which Thompson’s ashes were blasted at his funeral. Did the band’s transition to a classic metal sound drive Thompson…
Maxeen Everything’s frantic about Maxeen: the trio’s Adam Ant backbeats and Clash-influenced swing, the race-car guitars that nick from garage-punk-era Police, and the fact that the group earned a record deal less than a year into its existence. But now that the California neo-new-wavers have landed on Warner Bros., things have slowed down a bit. The band’s new album isn’t…
With more than 232,000 MySpace friends, Canton, Ohio’s Relient K seems to have solved a problem plaguing so many underground Christian bands: taking the music out of the church and directing it at a mainstream audience. It also helps, of course, if your Christ-driven message is buried under vague lyrics and a heaping pile of some of the catchiest pop…
Valentine’s Classic Love Fest For lovers of meaningful, soulful rhythm and blues, nothing epitomizes February — or Valentine’s Day for that matter — more then an evening of head bobbing and body weaving to the tunes of the Stylistics, Bloodstone, and the Dramatics. The soul-tingling crooners of yesteryear bring funk, style and class to the ball, bellowing notes that’ll send…
The M’s exude big-city cool while playing catchy garage rock, meaning this group is to Chicago what the Strokes are to New York. Yet despite a critically touted debut and some prime opening slots (the New Pornographers, Wilco), the M’s remain under the radar. That’s where similarities with the never-underrated Strokes end. The Windy City quartet trades studied aloofness for…
A recent, very bad Discovery Channel special on the Bermuda Triangle explained the “rogue wave” phenomenon — when an inexplicably large and powerful sea swell occurs in the middle of the ocean completely out of the blue — as a possible reason why so many ships have disappeared in the region. We say balderdash to that, but huzzah to Rogue…
Cheers to Frank Black. Songs by this solo artist and Pixies frontman were the first anywhere to be sold legally on the Internet. That was eight years ago on eMusic.com, which now boasts the largest collection of independent music on the Web. To celebrate the sale of its millionth MP3, the site has released Hey-Live Pixies, an exclusive collection of…
