Come Back to the 9 to 5, Dolly Parton, Dolly Parton With one show left to go in a 10th-anniversary season that at times has seemed too celebratory, Late Night Theatre seems hungry again. Writer-director David Wayne Reed has marshaled everything that Late Night does well: the glorious get-ups, the bawdy puns, the dizzy set pieces that fizz as if…
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…
After the terrorist bombings in London in July 2005, Eric Kaiser began painting. It was summertime, when people are supposed to be on holiday, enjoying themselves, and Kaiser paired people on vacation with the stark images after the bombings. A year later, Kaiser created a series of paintings titled We Know but Don’t Want to Believe What We Know, now…
Since long before Horatio Alger fibbed that our luck and pluck would make us all titans of industry, tales of Americans by Americans have peddled the myth of heroic agency. Through sheer will, we envision ourselves a nation of Madonnas, each of us starting with nothing but do-it-yourself greatness. Me, I’d just like to have health insurance. Two fundamental untruths…
Snakes on a Plane represents the ideal of contemporary major-studio filmmaking — that is, major-studio marketing. Who needs word-of-mouth screenings or critics when you can sell the four-word pitch as written on a napkin? It points to a future that takes all the guesswork out of moviegoing. A major-studio release will be a referendum on the titular concept, and the…
Little Miss Sunshine is a rickety vehicle that travels mostly downhill, just like the shambling VW van its hapless characters steer from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach. It’s beyond comprehension how this antic extended sitcom from first-time feature makers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris left Sundance with an eight-figure deal and reams of enthralled press clippings. The grating black comedy about…
I last saw chef Michael Peterson three years ago, when he was still overseeing the kitchen at the ill-fated (doomed, actually) Plaza restaurant-coffeehouse-saloon Segafredo Zanetti Espresso. He all but vanished after that fiasco — I hoped he was writing a novel inspired by his wild experiences there. I didn’t hear a word about him until last spring, when it was…
Apparently, Brookside has its own distinct smell. I didn’t know about it until the day I had lunch at The Classic Cookie Café with my friends Debbie and Bob. We sat down at a tiny table and started removing the festive little blue ribbons tied around our paper napkins — a decorative touch I hadn’t seen since my little sister’s…
Of all the “how we met” stories we’ve heard, the tale of how Sam and Jackie became friends trumps ’em all. “We met through a horrible cokehead stripper,” said Sam, a lovely blonde. “Who took my car to buy drugs.” Top that, bitches! She and Jackie were sitting at the bar of Embassy, the new food-drinkery located at the intersection…
Lots of DJs are comfortable with promoting their music to a certain demographic. That¹s why you see the same old farts glow-sticking at every ³legal² rave since 2001. Aptly, Saturday brings Rejuvenate , a new monthly event at Club Liquid in Lawrence, thrown by Tony Markham and DJ Skizm (KC Collective) and GO! The night aims to get fresh…
Thanks to years of dour bands, electro-industrial fans are conditioned to expect the melancholy. The Kansas City duo Inside the Far initially delivers. The promisingly titled track “Anger Spins the Empire” opens with ominous programmed percussion, tribal drumbeats and symphonic synthesizers, but when Michael Trinkler’s tame riffs and Christy Trinkler’s multitracked vocals appear at the one-minute mark, the song…
Near the close of This Alibi’s otherwise instrumental debut disc, a man intones, When it all goes dark, all you have left is what you can hear. You have to trust in that. It’s an apt epigram for a disorienting listening experience. This immersing EP’s impact dwarfs its 25-minute duration. After an ambient introductory track, This Alibi unravels a thick…
Remember that great novel J.D. Salinger wrote after The Catcher in the Rye? Of course you don’t. For some artists, penning a second great masterpiece is next to impossible. For Cursive frontman Tim Kasher, his challenge was even more perplexing: Following up the post-punk perfection of Domestica and delightfully twisted fairy tales of The Ugly Organ would mean reinventing himself…
This year marks Lawrence’s third North vs. South, the now-annual “hard pop” mashup that brings together musicians from Minneapolis and Austin to battle for fortune and glory — but without any actual pecuniary reward. Each year has marked an additional venue and a growing lineup — at last count, there were 49 acts playing at the 2006 event. The festival…
Not since Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off have suburban Chicago teens enjoyed so much attention. Case in point: Wilmette’s Fall Out Boy, McHenry’s Alkaline Trio and the Audition, whose emo-tinged, ‘burb-blastin’ pop-punk earned it a place on this summer’s Warped Tour alongside Victory Records labelmates Spitalfield and Aiden. There’s nothing here you wouldn’t expect, either…
When the rest of the world was learning to play “Minuet” in third-grade Intro to Violin, Owen Pallett was nowhere near the strings. Instead, he played piano and studied composition before teaching himself violin after college. Yet strings instructors should still cite Pallett as impetus to practice: His solo symphony project, Final Fantasy, is a heart-wrenching arrangement of weeping violin…
A member of the latter contingency in the North vs. South band battle, Cat Scientist cooks up a smart and wacky blend of engaging dance tunes in its aural laboratory. You’ll probably recognize ax man and recent Austin Hall of Fame inductee Bill Anderson; he’s usually seen around here twanging and slaying with raucous country punkers the Meat Purveyors (who…
When singer-songwriter Alejandro Escovedo starts off his latest album, The Boxing Mirror, with the line Have another drink on me, he’s not raising his glass in some tired gesture of drunken cool. Instead, he’s referring to the pathos — and, ultimately, the respect — of someone brought to his knees by excess. Though Escovedo recently gave up saturnalian excess due…
“I’m pretty fucking delusional,” Lions frontman Matt Drenik told ATX Magazine in May. Maybe he should’ve said ballsy. Drenik built a badass metal band in a month, climbed to the top of the Austin, Texas, music scene and booked a release party — all before setting foot in the studio to record his band’s first album, in three sultry weeks…
We were bummed to learn that the riot grrls of Sleater-Kinney have decided to call it quits. At what seemed to be the peak of its career, the Portland trio played its final show together last week. But if you never got a chance to experience the group live, you’re in luck. Earlier this month, S-K performed in Washington, D.C.,…
“Indie rock doesn’t really interest me anymore,” Ghosty frontman Andrew Connor says. Though Grow Up or Sleep In caught the (mostly) affectionate attention of everyone from Wayne Coyne to The Washington Post (the album was also released to acclaim in Europe and Australia last spring), this homegrown quintet has distanced itself musically from the layered, heavily produced sound so characteristic…
The Embarrassment’s story was so completely screenplay-ready. John Nichols, the band’s singer and organist (who’s been working for an airline since ’83), explains their archetypal band story like this: “Through the Village Voice and Rolling Stone, we could see there was a music scene going at Max’s Kansas City in New York — Blondie was starting up, and Television. “You…
You can never be sure what¹ll happen when you bring scads of local musicians together, give them free liqour, then invite them to sit through an awards ceremony where only a few of them will be handed a trophy. Fortunately, Midwesterners are brought up to be respectful of one another, so the evening of the Pitch Music Awards ceremony last…
Kirk Rundstrom, songwriter, singer and guitarist for the Wichita, Kansas, punkgrass band Split Lip Rayfield, has built a career on country travesties of drinking, drugs and devastation. The band’s graphic songs mock and make merry with death, like some trailer-park Día de Los Muertos pageant. The band, featuring Eric Mardis on banjo, Wayne Gottstine on mandolin and Jeff Eaton on…
