It’s 2 p.m. and I’m drinking at work! Beer, beer, beer, beer, beer. I love beer. It makes me fat, and when I drink too much, I hit on ho’s and get my ass kicked by their boyfriends. That’s why I love it! I may become the first person in white collar Kansas City history (recent, at least, and not…
With every Olympics, it seems, we learn about a new sport. Last winter, we were mesmerized by the biathlon, the event that combines skiing and skeet. But we’re truly charmed by curling, a game that requires players to throw stones on the ice. Learn to curl tonight with the Kansas City Curling Club’s 5:50 class at Pepsi Ice Midwest (12140…
Loose Park (52nd Street and Wornall) provides outdoor sanctuary from the summer sun, with its spray park (which dissuades visitors from dipping into the rose garden’s centerpiece fountain) and shaded pondside paths. On July 10, the park unveiled a Japanese Tearoom, an entirely enclosed attraction, albeit one with a view of its own secluded, exotic garden. A five-years-in-the-making joint…
Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that authors are now taking a proactive role in developing audio versions of their books, hoping to attract new fans with multivoice interpretations, as opposed to the single-narrator style of yore. Mystery writer Julian Rubenstein enlisted the help of Tommy Ramone and actor Eric Bogosian; hipster idol Sarah Vowell hit up Catherine…
2005 Academy Award Nominated Short Films (Magnolia) Animaniacs: Volume 1 (Warner Bros.) Ask the Dust (Paramount) Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! (ThinkFilm) The Benchwarmers (Sony) Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story (Shout! Factory) Bogie & Bacall: The Signature Collection (Warner Bros.) Chappelle’s Show: The Lost Episodes (Paramount) Electric Shadows (First Run) Final Destination 3 (New Line) Hudson Hawk: 15th Anniversary Edition…
%{}% Flight sims — games that emulate the experience of being in a cockpit — are plenty popular on PCs, but have never taken off on home consoles. This is partly due to their inherent complexity. When it comes to recreating an entire cockpit’s worth of buttons, levers, and gizmos, the keyboard is much better suited than a game pad….
%{}% Feed (TLA) Remember the old jokes about “What’s grosser than gross”? The makers of Feed do, as they prove in the first 10 minutes — one-upping their opening scene featuring a voluntary victim of cannibalism by bringing in a guy who gets nekkid and shoves cheeseburgers down the throat of his 800-pound, lingerie-clad, bedridden girlfriend. The film follows an…
Fiddler on the Roof We’ve heard great things about Neal Benari’s Tevye in this New Theatre import of the Broadway revival. The show that brought the shtetl to American pop, Fiddler deserves to be reclaimed from high schools and kitsch; it’s the rare musical that means something to people who don’t care about theater. I’ve heard “Sunrise, Sunset” reduce everyone…
Elissa Armstrong: Objects of Innocence and Experience Lawrence artist Elissa Armstrong takes the lighthearted concept of “sit-arounds” (or “set-arounds,” depending on how rural your accent is) —decorative objects, including porcelain unicorns, free-standing arrangements of dried flowers and Precious Moments figurines — and flips it on its innocent little head. For this show, the Alfred University-educated ceramist (and University of Kansas…
%{}% I know about trash in the urban core of Kansas City. My yard is often littered with the remnants of someone’s late-night feast from 7-Eleven or QT. I find Cheetos bags, Twinkies wrappers, cigarette cartons and Big Gulp containers in the azaleas. Empty beer cans and Styrofoam cups blow down my quiet street in the early morning breeze, creating…
%{}% Before I come out and call the Kansas City Actor’s Theatre’s treatment of Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July the best play I’ve seen this year, let me lay out what such a sweeping statement doesn’t mean. This is not a perfect show, not the most powerful you’ll ever see. It’s not one that you’ll recall thankfully from your deathbed,…
For 35 years, Woody Allen was a long shot to stray into the Bronx or Staten Island, much less the alien reaches of London. The creator of Manhattan has always been joined to his chosen borough like pastrami on rye, so when he ventured abroad last year to direct the intriguing morality tale Match Point, moviegoers were taken aback. George…
%{}% Michael Mann’s Miami Vice is like a car that’s been stripped of everything but its two bucket seats and rebuilt from the ground up. The protagonists are a pair of detectives named Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), and a cover of Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” finds its way onto the soundtrack, but so…
At last count, there were roughly 150 hotels and motels in the greater metropolitan area, ranging from the ritzy InterContinental Hotel on the Plaza (average room rate: $300) to the lowdown Capri Motel on the Paseo (about $45 a night). Back in 1926, when the revolving doors at the President Hotel started spinning at 1329 Baltimore, the city directory listed…
%{}% This is a tale of one hotel and two restaurants. The hotel is the recently — and beautifully — renovated Hilton President, which had been one of Kansas City’s great beauties in her day, before time and neglect pushed her nearly to the brink of oblivion. By the time this old broad turned 76, the 14-story hotel had endured…
%{}% “Ladies, this is the reason why a man’s back should be waxed,” announced a guy at Daddy’s, the bear bar at 17th Street and Main. We watched, transfixed, as he caressed the lush pelt of a shirtless man sitting on a bar stool. Because the Night Ranger was the only lady (and we use this term loosely) in the…
%{}% Diplo Philadelphia-bred DJs seem to have a habit of annihilating KC and Lawrence clubs. Even though we’re warning you here that Diplo is going to spin records at The Granada on Saturday, you still won’t be ready. Diplo is best-known for introducing Rio de Janeiro’s native crunk music, baile funk (think Portuguese chanting over bass-heavy Miami instrumentals), to America…
%{}% We first encountered Nelly Furtado on 2000’s swooping “I’m Like a Bird,” one of the millennium’s first great singles and also the link between the Christina Aguileras and Michelle Branches of the world. Now, here’s Furtado, a new mother, declaring herself Loose on an album of straight-ahead Timbaland beats and eyebrow-raising detours into bedrooms. Whoa, Nelly! Has Furtado slapped…
%{}% Inventing punk was a dirty job. You had to make up new rules for the guitar, cram your hairy appendages into ladies’ pumps and lingerie, get hooked on hard drugs, and squeeze Howlin’ Wolf and the Shangri-Las into the same three minutes. That routine shortened the lives of two New York Dolls and probably contributed to the death of…
%{}% When Ann Arbor, Michigan, trio Awesome Color rocks, it shifts gears into one of two speeds: a relentlessly repetitive, scratchy chug-a-lunge (the majority of this self-titled debut) or a relentlessly repetitive, scratchy chug-a-lunge (“Animal”) in which singer and ax-wielder Derek Stanton spasmodically communes with his inner guitar god while drummer Allison Busch and bassist Michael Troutman keep the rhythm…
%{}% Bored with genres? Then New Heavy’s your album. Brooklyn three-piece Dub Trio contrasts quick, tight, guitar-driven metal with big, open patches of serene reggae beats and keyboards and very few vocals. With Stu Brooks on bass, keyboards and dubs alongside D.P. Holmes on guitar, keyboards and dubs and Joe Tomino on drums, keyboards and (you guessed it) dubs, you…
%{}% Andrew Ashby always wears his big ol’ bitter heart on his flannel sleeve as he fronts resident tear-in-your-beer rock and rollers the String and Return. But when he started writing material for solo gigs, his songs took on a sunnier, more resigned approach. “The Caves emerged out of the quieter, less-crowded acoustic songs I had been working up,” Ashby…
%{}% Austin, Texas, band Broken Teeth knows that people are into rock and roll because, at heart, all they really wanna do is get drunk, fuck, fight and break shit (usually in that order). So why be subtle about it? Consult, for example, these lyrics from “Stick It In”: I wanna smell your breath/I wanna love you to death/I wanna…
%{}% For two years, Rancid drifted from its goal of generally being, according to its official Web site, “a public nuisance.” The punk band that took the Clash’s attitude and made it epic abruptly emerged from its hiatus four months ago by launching a worldwide summer tour and promising an album inside a year. Heavy bass leads, ska-centered rhythms and…
