Knowing how important jazz is to the history of Kansas City, your proteinaceous pontificator has paid several visits to the American Jazz Museum at 18th Street and Vine, seeking to learn everything it can by gazing at Charlie Parker’s alto saxophone and Ella Fitzgerald’s American Express card. OK, maybe not exactly. The Strip will confess that over the last few…
Sitting in the bathtub, Aubrey Owen cradled her newborn daughter in her arms. She held the baby until the water in the tub turned from hot to cold. She pinched her baby’s feet, then checked for a heartbeat with her thumb. The baby wasn’t crying or gurgling. Nothing. Owen reached for a pair of scissors to cut the umbilical…
I think I aged 10 years this weekend. One day soon, the doctor’s going to say to me, “You’re only 33, but you’ve got the body of a 90-year-old.” And then he’ll say, “Will you hold it next to mine?” And I’ll get molested by an M.D. (who will later turn out to be just a lowly nurse practitioner) —…
One of the most exciting games in all of Kansas City, if not the world, is Jukebox Roulette at my favorite little dive, Dave’s Stagecoach Inn. On Thursday nights at 9, 10, and 11 p.m., bartender and jukebox overlord John Yuelkenbeck posts cryptic clues that point to a certain song on his 100-album-heavy jukebox. Play the song, and the entire…
I don’t like bar trivia. There’s no good place in the room when a trivia game is going on. Either you’re on the losing team, feeling stupid; or you’re on the winning team, absorbing everyone’s hate energy; or you’re on a middle-place team, anxious about catching up. Or, worst of all, you’re not on any team — you just came…
Tennessee Williams Film Collection (Warner Bros.) All that’s missing from this boxed set — six movies, one doc, eight discs — is a jar of sweat; even Williams is here, in a 1973 documentary. Then there’s Brando, Beatty, Newman, Taylor, Burton, Gardner, Leigh, Malden, Huston, Kazan — the last of the red hots, when they were burning at their sexed-up,…
BTK Killer (Lions Gate) Chubby Hubby Workout (On Air Video) Dinosaurs: The Complete First and Second Seasons (Disney) The Family Stone (Fox) Flight 93: The Movie (UAV) Jargo (Picture This!) King of Thieves (Picture This!) Last Holiday (Paramount) Lie With Me (Lance) Life in the Undergrowth (BBC) Misaki Chronicles: Volume 3 (ADV) Modern Romance (Sony) Monday Morning (Kino) Nathalie ….
The biggest innovation videogaming saw in the past decade or so was the invention of the “sandbox”: Programmers create settings and consequences, but give you, the user, free license to do with them what you want. Grand Theft Auto is certainly the best-known of these games. The carjackings, the hookers, the running-over of pedestrians — such things were incidental…
The Birds This crossdressed pantsing of Hitchcock’s classic gives us Late Night at its best … and worst. When the troupe members shake together Hollywood satire, chintzy drag glamour and bitchy wit in a cocktail of a half-dozen set pieces, the show’s a heady gas. Too often, however, this Birds substitutes showy pop references for actual jokes and relies heavily…
Empty Thoughts, Lame Excuses, and Decorative Lies Ryan Humphrey’s first solo museum exhibition consists of four pieces: “Vantasy,” the driver’s side of a tricked-out, 1971 C-10 Chevrolet van; “Honky Spaceship,” a battery-powered installation panel that pumps out the beats of Public Enemy and Run DMC; “Rear Window,” the tail section of a Ferrari mounted on plywood; and “Velocity of Transparent…
In his video works, Johannesburg, South Africa, artist William Kentridge examines the fuzzy line separating an individual’s interior and exterior worlds. Kentridge conveys his country’s deadly history of apartheid poetically and subtly through the dynamic art form of animation. In the two films on exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, stories unfold through a collection of loosely connected, haunting…
A toast, and a eulogy, for the Angry Young Artist, that truth-telling firebrand who denounces this world’s brutishness as if nobody else had discovered it. While most of us buckle beneath the horrors of modern existence, ultimately accepting things as they are, the AYA takes the world personally. The AYA chips away at this life and its cruelty, taking the…
Coming closer even than Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers to resembling the Chinese cover art for an Iron Butterfly album, Chen Kaige’s The Promise is psychedelia extremis. Hardly a minute of it passes without a concentrated dose of digital froufrou and lavish cartoon-poetic imagery: floating ocean goddesses, flying swordsmen, Final Fantasy waterscapes, horse manes dyed red. One can only…
Some customers may not know that the Thai House in Kansas City (see review) has different owners from the Thai House restaurant in Lawrence. But I’ll bet you a cheeseburger that there isn’t one diner in Kansas City who doesn’t know the difference between The American Restaurant in Crown Center and the American Bandstand Grill over at Interstate 435 and…
A few years ago, a friend of mine kicked her worthless boyfriend out of her house. Lock, stock and dirty sneakers. To remove this guy’s “negative aura” from her home, my friend dramatically walked through each room of the house with a burning smudge stick, waving smoke from the smoldering herb into every corner. For days afterward, she burned…
Of all the games we’re into (mind, role playing, Civil War battle re-enactments), trivia contests are the closest to our nerdy little hearts. So we’re elated that the Westport Flea Market now offers live trivia matches every Wednesday night, allowing all those random bits of knowledge that occupy too much of our brain space to finally be put to good…
Generally, the 10-year anniversary is the mile marker at which a band does its first covers album. Not so with the Wilders. With Throw Down, the Kansas City group actually escapes into new material after a decade of pillaging turn-of-the-century hymnals, ragged jug-band 78s, and obscure honky-tonk LPs in search of what its members describe as “tunes from the Golden…
The title of this Scottish post-rock outfit’s new album, Mr. Beast, is indicative of the band’s predilection for mixing raw amplifier noise with refined soundscaping as well as its skewed sense of humor. Unfortunately, the album doesn’t quite live up to its excellent name. On Beast, Mogwai doesn’t sound as urgent as it used to, perhaps because so many young…
Can you think of any other band that makes topics such as getting raped by evil spirits or the scary underbelly of government mind-control conspiracies come across like a good time? Even if you can, chances are it doesn’t come close to matching the zany flair of Cephalic Carnage, which obviously has a blast onstage but also seems 100 percent…
The first full-length release from the Old Haunts, Fallow Field, slapped together the band’s first two EPs and featured three different lineups. But don’t think that the Haunts haven’t gotten their shit together since then. The trio’s second release, Fuel on Fire, is due this May on Kill Rock Stars. The group deals in the defiant. Craig Extine’s voice, sometimes…
Danish psychobilly pioneers HorrorPops’ lead singer, Patricia Day, is pretty much what you’d get if Dr. Moreau cloned Gwen Stefani, cut her genes with a possessed Joan Jett, and then gave her a pair of monster-sized testicles. Consequently, listening to Day’s singing is like screwing around with that hot tattooed chick who everyone knows gives clap out like the French…
Widespread curfew-breaking greeted local product James Armbrust’s homecoming last summer with his San Diego buzz band, Louis XIV. Underage girls eagerly swallow bad-boy sleaze rock, a fact that the members of this proudly promiscuous, kinda-gross group might just consider ideal. By contrast, Armbrust’s former Gunfighter bandmate Jason Blackmore fronts the San Diego outfit Sirhan Sirhan, which favors an audience seasoned…
A raconteur is defined as someone who is good at telling stories. We had to look it up, but Detroit Rock City’s Jack White (the White Stripes) and Brendan Benson have a plan to boost the word’s popularity. Their new supergroup, which also includes members from Cincinnati’s the Greenhornes, won’t release Broken Boy Soldiers until May 16, but you can…
In conversation, Eddie Argos, 26-year-old singer and lyricist for British party band Art Brut, sounds like a Tickle-Me Benicio Del Toro. His telegraph-quick speech arrives in bursts. Even his chuckle has an accent. But on record, the magic of pop translates Argos’ self-effacing Bournemouth slur into an infectious yawp of glottal liberation. He’s the magnetic center of a band that,…
