Whole Lotta Love It’s just too perfect that the Mormon Church’s Independence Visitors Center reopened around the same time HBO launched its advertising blitz for Big Love, a new show starring Bill Paxton as a polygamous husband living in suburban Utah. The show cleverly avoids any reference to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but the curious…
Early last week, this satire lovin’ sirloin discovered SaveOurOwners.com, a mock news Web site parodying the Save Our Stadiums campaign to renovate the Truman Sports Complex. The site was put up by a trio of supposedly filthy-rich aristocrats to express their support for the dollar-deprived owners of the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals, Lamar Hunt and David Glass. Save Our…
Twenty years ago, the Brookfield Building, at 11th Street and Baltimore in the heart of downtown Kansas City, was filled to near capacity. Today it stands empty, a victim of neglect. Its former tenants endured power outages, boiler trouble and tiring climbs up the stairwells when the elevators were down. “The services were bad,” says lawyer Stanley Wiles, who vacated…
Late on a Saturday at the Lucky Brewgrille, Leo Gayden stands across the dance floor from his rival, planning his attack. Leo has been breakdancing — or B-boying, to the insiders — for six years. But he can’t seem to prove his credibility to Kansas City’s established B-boy crews. The crews dominate hip-hop gatherings and B-boy battles. They roll their…
Base accusation: Jason West of Scottsdale, Arizona, took the time to write a contemptuous letter about a wounded vet and accuses the vet of being a spoiled immature punk (Letters, March 9). Unbelievable. I don’t even care what West’s credentials are — no one should figuratively spit on a wounded vet like that. When soldiers by the thousands are being…
A friend of mine, who is Myspace friends with the Lawrence sci-fi/glam/punk/transvestite group Vibralux received this Myspace bulletin from the group shortly after tornadic winds swept through the band’s hometown: NEWS: Due the tornado that hit Lawrence early Sunday morning, the Vibralux tour van has been demolished. Heavy winds from as many as three tornados tore down several trees and…
Possible entourage members, The Strokes You heard it here first. According to a leaked email, Jeff Fortier, a Lawrence man and big-time booking agent, has contacted the Record Bar requesting that his “entourage” be added to the guest list for Friday night’s Sonic Spectrum anniversary show. What’s interesting is who’s in Fortier’s entourage, and we’ve heard it’s going to be…
The Best of the Best of The Electric Company (Shout Factory) Breaking News (Palm) Buster Keaton: 65th-Anniversary Collection (Sony) The Californians (Hart Sharp) Curse Death & Spirit (Asia Vision) The Easter Bunny Is Comin’ to Town (Warner Bros.) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Warner Bros.) The House on Telegraph Hill (Fox) Jarhead (MCA) The John Wayne Ultimate Film…
Ask gamers of a certain age about Resident Evil, and a vivid memory springs to mind: They’re inching down a long, quiet hallway. Suddenly, a zombie dog crashes through a window. A ghostly howl. Insatiable jaws. Mommy, can you tuck me in tonight? The original Resident Evil pretty much single-handedly invented the genre of survival horror, spawning several sequels and…
The Tenants (Sony) Fifteen seconds into the video for “Nuthin but a G Thang,” it was obvious that Snoop Dog had charisma to spare. More than a decade later, with his performance as ’70s-era radical author Willie Spearmint, it’s official: The man can act. Snoop’s shambling, searing performance is just one reason The Tenants ends up better than it sounds…
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…
Get out of the malls and get a life. California artist Michael Barton Miller expresses that message in graphite-and-paper illustrations at the Greenlease Gallery. The show’s title — Extreme Extra Extra Large — may refer to ever-expanding malls or to the size of their shoppers or to Miller’s oversized drawings (most of which are around 70 inches by 80 inches)….
First there’s the blues, that rich yet simple howl hammering hurt into art. In this telling, the howl comes from Tee-Tot (Mississippi Charles Bevel), a black bluesman who wails “This is the Way I Do” out in front of an Alabama gas station. His voice all honeyed grit, Tee-Tot can’t help but attract admirers. Those include a white boy wanting…
If you remember the 1977 Wes Craven film The Hills Have Eyes, which was and remains a piece of Milwaukee-beer shit, it’s because (a) you had a memorable fuck-or-puke night at the aging neighborhood drive-in; (b) Michael Berryman’s uniquely hairless mug, which glared from video-store horror sections for decades, sucked you into a rental and still represents a moldy teenage…
A star who turned into a black hole somewhere between the release of The Wedding Planner and Sahara, Matthew McConaughey is better known of late for shooting tequila with Oprah and runnin’ around the sidelines of University of Texas football games like a cheerleader short a pompom. The onetime Vanity Fair cover boy —touted as the new Paul Newman the…
Café Casbah’s (see review, page 39) chef-owner Mohsen Movahed calls his cuisine “Mediterranean with, perhaps, some French influence.” The Iranian-born chef does serve a few dishes that are familiar to local Middle Eastern restaurants, like falafel and baba ghanouj. But his luscious soups and buttery-rich cream sauces would not have been unknown to American diners supping at Continental bistros at…
I was sitting in the middle of a cozy bistro tucked into a Johnson County strip center, and I thought of a skunk. Not just any mephitis mephitis but the suave, seductive cartoon skunk Pepé Le Pew. I was staring at the laminated, cream-colored menu for Café Casbah when I flashed on that horny little Parisian skunk pawing a terrified…
We’re not Catholic, but after waking up with a raging hangover the morning after Mardi Gras, we briefly considered giving up the booze for Lent. Of course, the key words in that sentence are briefly and not Catholic, so we just went back to sleep. For the first time in years, neither sleet nor snow pelted Kansas City on Mardi…
Despite its good-time grooves and muscular singing, Troost Avenue Blues — Danny Cox’s three-tracks-in-half-an-hour treatise on the street that “carve up this city” — is more field trip than club crawl, a nearly sociological examination of those crying, flying and dying just east of Holmes. At times, it’s close-up reportage, with police copters and explosions that Cox hopes are fireworks….
On her first proper album for Epitaph imprint Anti-, golden-throated New Pornographers moonlighter Neko Case continues in the vein of her 2002 alt-country masterpiece, Blacklisted. Much as she did on that brooding and beautiful record, Case touches here on the theme of God. It’s territory covered by many sirens before her, including Rosanne Cash and Jenny Lewis this year. On…
It’s no insignificant feat to take on the old no wave-downtown noise scene and emerge with something fascinating and fun for fans of mere music. This anthology is oddly accessible, though, dominated by big, complex rhythms — Certain General’s crystalline dub; Vortex Ost’s arid “Black Box Disco”; the trebly, geometric groove of the Del Byzantines (featuring future film director Jim…
In a music industry where the dreck rises to the top of the charts and the cream gets tagged as “cult,” it’s comforting to see Sparks persevere over the decades in spite of a mostly indifferent American audience. Fronted by the brothers Ron and Russell Mael, the Los Angeles group has fought the pricks for going on four decades, racking…
Comedian and hard rocker Jack Black sings on two cuts on the new Eagles of Death Metal album, Death by Sexy, and he appears in its forthcoming “I Want You So Hard” video. Based on this information alone, you might be able to ballpark what EODM sounds like; just to hammer it home, know that frontman Jesse “the Devil” Hughes…
