Last night was pretty darned evil, I tell you what. First off, there was a $6 cover charge at the Record Bar to benefit some damned bike club. They’d had a bike race that began and ended at the RB and involved riding in pentagram-shaped routes all over the city. Evil. Then, the Pornhuskers played — but without all the…
Hope you’re having one hell of a 6/6/6. Dusting off the evil records and gory metal tees and visiting Sir Simon’s Pit of Darkness, first, no doubt. Or perhaps wearing a cross necklace and rocking out to Stryper, just in case. Or, better yet, both, as Pitch music writer and former music editor Andrew Miller more or less accomplished: I…
Grab onto Jesse Hughes’ stash. The Eagles of Death Metal last night at the Record Bar was one hell of a satisfying show. That band knows how to take all the bad parts about being at a crowded rock show — the sweat, the claustrophobia, the smoke, the drunken idiots — and turn those into the best parts about being…
I thought I was going out for a reasonably quiet nightcap when I left my apartment and headed down to Buzzard Beach a couple nights ago around 11:30. I figured I’d maybe see one or two people I knew, have a couple cold ones, a little diverting conversation, and then go home. Because no one ever told me that Wednesday…
Yes, you are. From the tipline… The people at AOL Cityguide must be smoking crack — or, more likely, not living in Kansas City. A hardcore band with the ironic name The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza is playing El Torreon in a couple of weeks. Evidently, the AOLers aren’t familiar at all with the all-ages metal venue, otherwise, they wouldn’t…
The Bette Davis Collection, Vol. 2 (Warner Bros.) A Fine Romance (Tango) Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (Dark Sky) Freedomland (Sony) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Fox) Hercules/Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules (Image) John Wayne: An American Icon Movie Collection (Universal) The Kids in the Hall: Complete Season 4 (A&E) Lifespan (Mondo Macabre) The Lon Chaney Collection: Four Rare Films…
If the creepy, self-flagellating albino monk in The Da Vinci Code really wanted to suffer, he’d drop his flesh-shredding cat-o’-nine-tails, pick up a controller, and play The Da Vinci Code videogame. It’s that bad. Now it can be told: The Da Vinci Code game is one of the crappiest, crap-lousy crap attacks of all time. Ironically, it’s so awesomely, awesomely…
Will & Grace: Series Finale (Lions Gate) The way this got hustled to shelves, mere days after Will Truman and Grace Adler said their mushy farewells, you’d think this were some classic adios — another M*A*S*H or Cheers wrap-up. Alas, it was just another Very Special Episode of a show that ran its course around the fourth season; Will wound…
Bus Stop The Barn Players kick off an ambitious summer season (coming soon: Schoolhouse Rock and Urinetown) with a revival of William Inge’s half-forgotten ’50s classic about troubled souls waiting out a blizzard in a Kansas diner. Inge’s drama has its dark corners, but it’ll be nice to remember what it was like when Kansas had real greasy spoons instead…
Faith Culture Collection At Grand Arts, Welsh artist Neal Rock’s gargantuan “Pingere Triptych” (pingere is Latin for paint, but also means depiction) straddles the line between sculpture, painting and installation. The three pieces — horizontally arranged and oddly fish-shaped — are constructed from Styrofoam and covered in pigmented silicon squeezed out of cake-icing bags. The results form interesting combinations of…
Sabrina Jones and Shellae Blackwell are walking along Central downtown. The Virginians are in Kansas City for the national convention of Neighborhoods, USA at Bartle Hall. As it turns out, their organization focuses on strengthening communities by doing things such as awarding beautification grants to neighborhoods. So Jones and Blackwell could not be more pleased to see Kansas City’s…
You know how in most romantic comedies, the best friends are nearly always more interesting than the actual leads we’re supposed to care about? The Break-Up doesn’t play that game. Vince Vaughn is the focus and the primary source of entertainment, which is all the more impressive when you consider that the supporting cast features Vincent D’Onofrio, Judy Davis, John…
There was a time when people moaned whenever Hollywood remade — and thus sucked the life out of — a classic movie. These days, Hollywood just sucks the life out of movies that weren’t that great in the first place. Ah, progress. Well, June 6, 2006, is upon us, which means it’s time to dust off The Omen. The original…
Back in my boozier years, my favorite saloon in Kansas City was The Ship at 411 East 10th Street. Inside, it looked like the deck of a Depression-era cruise ship, complete with portholes. In fact, it was so brilliantly designed that — at one time, anyway — a mechanism hidden behind one of the walls used levers and sand to…
A hundred years ago, if a night owl in Kansas City wanted something to eat at 3 a.m., the Metropolitan Hotel at the corner of Fifth Street and May was still serving food in its “first class restaurant … open 24 hours.” If one hungered for something more erotically charged, the top two floors of the Phoenix Hotel on Eighth…
After ordering a Boulevard Wheat at Lew’s during the Waldo Crawldo on May 18, we turned around and — da da dum! — spotted our nemesis: Captain Morgan himself, nefarious fake eyebrows and all. We’ve held a grudge against the Captain since he stood us up a couple of Halloweens ago. We wanted to follow him for this column…
Green Kansas Citians are hard-pressed to find friendlier confines than Jilly’s on Broadway — especially when it comes to house music. On the last three Fridays of each month at the event known simply as Green, resident DJs Jack and Jill (aka Mr. Nuro and Amjanda) throw down house music that gets deeper than a nuclear sub while hordes…
When a reviewer cites a band’s “maturity,” it frequently means the group has exchanged spontaneity and freshness for calculation and predictability. That’s certainly the case with the Peppers, whose latest has generated raves from easily pleased scribes, even though it’s basically two discs’ worth of been-there-done-that-better-in-the-past. Stadium features loads of material, but bulk is no substitute for creativity. “Dani California”…
Emmylou Harris has made a career of saving the asses of lesser singers, but in Mark Knopfler, she faces a Herculean task. He’s not a miserable vocalist; he’s merely inconsequential, which isn’t really a problem when you’re one of the shrewdest guitar players ever to don a headband. The two recorded their first duet album in stolen moments over seven…
If you’re between the ages of 14 and 35 and are still unaware of the new Gnarls Barkley record, we’d like to welcome you back from whatever rock you’ve been huddled beneath. An album-length summer jam with few contemporaries, St. Elsewhere is an unstoppable Frankenstein’s monster of musical styles. Kitchen-sink DJ wunderkind Danger Mouse continues his crusade of inspired collaborations,…
Suggesting that the drifty comedown years of the Alternative Nation are actually as deep a trove of great, forgotten bands as any period, this document of the New York trio Space Needle unearths a noise-pop band as serious about its pop as its noise. The opening “Eyes to the World” is an evenly matched contest between melody and obscurity —…
If your idea of a party includes banjos, fiddles and drunken Canadians, then Vancouver’s Clumsy Lovers are throwing your kind of hootenanny. The Lovers mash together progressive country, traditional rock and traditional bluegrass with a sly wink, a keen sense of the absurd and an observant eye trained on the Celtic roots of the music of the American South. With…
Even without squinting, you could easily mistake the Sam Roberts Band for Stillwater, that fictional amalgam of ’70s arena bands from Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous. Add a big musical splash of “Paperback Writer” and just a hint of Dylan and you get a song like the band’s “An American Draft Dodger in Thunder Bay” (from its brand-new CD, Chemical City),…
A summer hip-hop festival doesn’t have to be limited to just beats and rhymes. Along with a full day of performances by acts from all over the country, Mayday Beach 2006 includes a “pimp my ride” competition that awards prizes to the best crunk dancers and hottest bodies. And, of course, there’s a gratuitous bikini contest. Some of the acts…
