Califone’s latest, Roots & Crowns, could have been named Cinema and Burglary, after the two things that most affected the band during the making of the album. Bandleader Tim Rutili and multi-instrumentalist Jim Becker both worked on film soundtracks prior to sitting down to shape Roots. Then, after starting the album, Califone became the latest victims of gear theft from…
My dad’s an English professor who specializes in early American literature. He’s fascinated by the Puritans, who came over from England to set up a holy “city on a hill,” a New Jerusalem in accordance with their strict Protestant beliefs. As soon as they figured out how to survive, they killed a bunch of Indians, wrote theocratic laws and were…
Mike Tuley sports an Errol Flynn mustache and a curly shock of auburn hair. The suave new facial hair can’t disguise the bandleader’s nervous energy, though. He spills Scott Edwards’ beer trying to pull a napkin from beneath it in an attempt at prestidigitation. Ad Astra Per Aspera is like that. It surprises you. The longtime Lawrence group’s dynamic glows…
Jazz District Redevelopment Corporation President Denise E. Gilmore may say it’s a “new day for 18th and Vine,” but it is the same old mess. Why can’t we focus on the positive? One reason is the vast amount of tax incentives used for downtown redevelopment and virtually none going to the east side for anything other than residential projects. Why…
We’ve been curious about all those Sonic cups we’ve spotted lately on the tops of cars around Kansas City. Surely all those sugar-laden shakes aren’t leading people to forget their Sonic Blasts en masse. So when we spotted a driver the other day with a signature red Sonic cup on top of his car, we pulled over to ask about…
Self-proclaimed “DJ Driver” Mark de Shark generously carts rockers home post-performance, presumably so they can waste themselves onstage without having to worry about local transportation after the show. Imagine the firsthand accounts garnered from the back of his vehicle. We doubt we’re alone in our familiarity with en route, you know, activity — and who hasn’t succumbed once (often) to…
After just a year in business, the Crossroads skivvies boutique Shuttlecocks closed September 23. Owner Chadwick Brooks plans to reopen it this week as an online-only store at Myshuttlecocks.com, in hopes of erecting a larger audience. Brooks, who goes onstage at the Late Night Theatre as alter-ego Candy, recently explained how macho hang-ups torpedoed his closet-sized shop. The Pitch:…
Dear Mexican: I have a stupid, unemployed, gang-bangin’ 16-year-old cousin who already dropped out of school, and I’m pretty sure most Mexicans are related to somebody who fits that description. About eight months ago, he knocked up a girl around his age, so last week I was dragged to their extremely festive baby shower. All my relatives were so happy…
Too much time has passed without an official eulogy for Ray’s Video. The store, at 3324 Main, closed down sometime in late summer, and the Strip has been composing itself ever since. OK, it’s been procrastinating, waiting for one of the other meat-headed commentators in this town to note the place’s passing. Oh, sure, Ray’s still exists in some form….
Last week, the Pitch visited Garnett, Kansas, a town where residents had chipped in to build a $46 million plant that cooks corn into ethanol. They believed that the plant would provide jobs that would keep Garnett’s young people from moving away, that it would promote business and provide farmers with financial stability. But Garnett has seen little benefit…
The bathroom at CBGBs could, for better or worse, provide inspiration to El Torreon’s new tenants. Today brings some big news on the all-ages front, which we were talking about only yesterday. The Ice House dudes are relocating to El Torreon, which has been closed all summer following a liquor permit fiasco. Now, I’ve been in the “Radiant El Torreon…
Hello Stranger’s Juliette (center) at least made some friends at Buzzard Beach. Boozeday Tuesday has moved out of Mike’s. That means if you’re an old fart who likes early shows (often featuring the best local bands and occasional out-of-towners like the Drams), the best time to catch them regularly is now from 8 to 10 p.m. at the Brick. Tonight’s…
After Sex (New Yorker) Bob & Tom Radio: The Comedy Tour (Image) The Boris Karloff Collection (Universal) Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (Strand) 8th & Ocean: The Complete First Season (Paramount) Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema (Wolfe) Gilmore Girls: The Complete Sixth Season (Warner Bros.) Go for Zucker (First Run) Grease: Rockin’ Rydell Edition (Paramount) Inner Sanctum…
LocoRoco arrived with impossibly high expectations. This ridiculously cute new game for the PlayStation Portable debuted as a demo in April, and since then, the gaming press has tripped over itself to anoint it the successor to Katamari Damacy or Guitar Hero. Now the game’s finally here, and at first glance, it more than lives up to the hype….
The Proposition (First Look) There’s an old saying about Ginger Rogers doing everything that Fred Astaire did, only backward and in heels. This Australian Western seems to be saying something similar about gritty American Westerns: You think that’s hard? Try living in the Outback. The Proposition mucks about in dust, blood and moral ambiguity with all the cheerfulness of a…
Cloud 9 Once again, UMKC’s theater department, which boasts budget and talent to rival any local theater, offers a show more daring than almost anyone else’s. Caryl Churchill’s lunatic inquisition into the late British empire pretzels time, place and gender to cover a century of sex and power in colonial Africa and Tony Blair’s London. Through Oct. 1 at Studio…
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…
Michael Jones McKean has Mark Twain on the brain. In the poetically titled Riverboat Lovesongs for the Ghost Whale Regatta, the Houston artist imaginatively re-creates romantic nautical scenes and lets the viewer in on his secrets. Though it’s a convoluted and expansive tale that McKean tells, this is one of the most creative installations we’ve encountered. As if it…
Back in college, I organized my curriculum expressly to avoid the 16th-century morality play Everyman. But last week, anticipating Philip blue owl Hooser’s musical production, I was curious. I imagined that, after the show, my mind would be reeling with Big Ideas. Here’s a play in which God, angry at man for “living without dread in worldly prosperity,” dispatches…
According to its publicity, bringing Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel All the King’s Men to the screen again has always been “a cherished dream” of executive producer James Carville — suggesting a lurking sense of payback frustration with the insubstantial legacy of the real populist Southerner that Carville himself helped elect president. But first, let’s consider the project from the…
Even curriculum clutchers might rather leave a child behind than let her learn from Half Nelson’s Mr. Dunne (Ryan Gosling), a Brooklyn junior high teacher whose off-the-cuff history lessons are based — brace yourselves, Bushies — on dialectical theory. History is change, and change, the white teacher tells the kids, most of whom are black, is the result of…
No one ever said that opening a new restaurant was easy — and Casey Adams, the owner of the beautiful but still unfinished Nara at 1617 Main has learned that lesson well. Nara was tentatively scheduled to begin serving Japanese fare in August and even scheduled a “grand opening premiere” on August 8 to benefit Harvesters. Alas, the debut had…
It was 8 a.m., and not a soul was in the nonsmoking room at Jerry’s Woodswether Café. But half a dozen folks were eating breakfast in the front room, where there’s a black-plastic or green-glass ashtray on every table. None of the patrons were smoking, though, including me. The main dining room at Jerry’s is more popular because there’s vitality…
If there’s one rule of bar-hopping that we should have learned by now, it’s that you never wear flip-flops to a drinking establishment. You just never know what might splatter or step on your foot. In our case, it was a wastoidal brunette shod in wedge heels. There’s drunk, and then there’s sloppy drunk, and she was way beyond the…
