Need help deciding what to do this New Year’s Eve weekend? Well, I know of a party, but it’s a small thing, and they probably don’t want a whole bunch of people they don’t really know showing up, so, sorry, dude, but you’re on your own. Two! Thousand! Seven! Whoo! You might just camp out at the Record Bar for…
A funny old blues dude named Watermelon Slim (real name Bob Homans) talked with Pitch contributor Saby Reyes-Kulkarni recently. We weren’t able to run this in print due to all our astounding year-end wrap-up material, but it was too good not to at least run in pixels. Slim plays Knucklehead’s on New Year’s Eve with Rich Berry, Billy Ebeling and…
Our wish has been granted! Tonight at one80, starting around 10 p.m., DJ John Ingle hosts a JB tribute party. “A night dedicated to James Brown oriented music. All songs will contain James Brown samples, be performed by members of his band, or are recordings by the Godfather himself. ” Get up, get on up, and so forth. If you…
Post-holiday depression is as common as the rhinovirus, and it has many vectors: cold weather, neurotransmitter deficiencies, a sociopathic inability to empathize with other human beings. Psychiatrists recommend a therapeutic “cocktail” of pharmaceutical-grade antidepressants and live amateur musical performance. Consult your doctor about that first one. But for all of your amateur music needs, Eric Houser hosts the Wednesday Open-Mic…
Five schoolgirls, a throng of hecklers, no cops and not enough blood. That’s the final tally of Dougie Rosenbrook’s crucifixion, which happened just after midnight on December 29 in Case Park (see last week’s cover story). People who showed up expecting a freak show got what they were looking for, but those hoping to see a Mel Gibson-style gorefest went…
Jackass Number Two: Unrated (Paramount) The sequel to the dumb-ass jamboree makes its predecessor look plain and inoffensive. In short: more puke, more blood, more semen (from a horse), more shit, more piss, more everything. Oh, and it’s also the gayest movie ever, down to the last golden dildo and anal-inserted beer bong and leech attached to a testicle…
Imagine two game producers rushing down the hall. One wants to pitch a WW2 game, the other a sci-fi shooter. They round a corner, crash into each other, and their papers go flying everywhere — and in one of those great “You got chocolate in my peanut butter!” moments, Resistance: Fall of Man is born. That, or it’s just…
Scott Foundas’ Top 10 1. Army of Shadows 2. United 93 3. Letters From Iwo Jima 4. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu 5. Happy Feet 6. Inland Empire 7. Climates 8. Children of Men 9. A Prairie Home Companion 10. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby Rob Nelson’s Top 10 1. Army of Shadows 2. Iraq in Fragments 3….
Dashiell Hammett goes to high school — the perfect studio pitch. Yet after wowing ’em at the film fests, Rian Johnson’s knockout debut as writer and director, Brick, languished in theaters and on DVD. It took a bunk, as Hammett mighta said, and wound up wearing a wooden kimono. Johnson, who wrote Brick when he was 20 and shot it…
A car speeds down a forest road, only to be surrounded in an instant by armed crazies who materialize from the nearby woods. In the visual grammar of big-budget action films, the sequence that ensues should be a scattershot barrage of images accompanied by a Dolby clubbing: Wheels! Guns! Blood! Shriek! Fireball! Crash! Something different happens, though, when that…
James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments is a one-man production of startling audacity and aesthetic provocation. It isn’t just that Longley (Gaza Strip) worked unembedded in Iraq for two years after the start of the war, gaining access to Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds in wartime and risking his life at almost every turn. It’s that he used this occasion to make…
It’s official: Hollywood has run out of original ideas. If you thought 2006 was bad, just wait. In 2007, the studios will give up on birthing blockbusters and instead concentrate on cloning them, with sequel after sequel after sequel. Oh, and if the year of living sequentially doesn’t destroy the movie biz, then the expected labor strike (also a sequel)…
On an early December afternoon at the offices of Malpaso Productions, Clint Eastwood’s four Academy Awards have been placed into thick velvet carrying bags, and that famous poncho — the one Eastwood donned for Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy — is being folded into a large shipping box. But that doesn’t mean that Eastwood himself is packing it in. The…
For years, I’ve heard that menudo — the Mexican stew made from tripe (the lining of beef stomach), a calf’s foot, hominy and chiles — was a classic hangover cure. But when I was doing research on chili (see Café), I learned that it, too, is pretty good for short-circuiting the painful effects of too much boozing. Especially effective is…
It wasn’t bone-chilling, as winter nights go. But it was cold enough that I wished I’d worn a warmer jacket as I shivered outside Town Topic — the one that stays open 24 hours — and snuffed out a cigarette with my shoe. I’m not sure why I wasted half of a perfectly good Marlboro before walking through the…
Club 5401 For a DJ, there’s probably no gig more lucrative than being on a New Year’s Eve bill. Techno heavyweight Carl Cox reportedly played NYE 2000 in Australia, then immediately flew across the International Date Line to Hawaii to do it again. Ringing in 2007 for KC at 5401 (the lower level of Lucky Brewgrille in Mission) are…
Namelessnumberheadman Three-man local pop experiment Namelessnumberheadman has been off the radar these last few months — enough so that concerned fans and friends have taken to e-mail to find out if the band is even still together. Thankfully, the masterminds behind one of KC’s best acts are as together as ever. The band recently finished recording an album that…
Kirk Rundstrom Lawrence musician Kirk Rundstrom, surely one of cancer’s most defiant victims, keeps cranking out the albums. Lucky for us, it’s generally good stuff. His latest collection, a solo venture, is called Imperfect Spirals, and the compilation bears work forged in the fires of Rundstrom’s many other musical projects. There is present, for instance, a tinge of the…
Kelley Hunt Whether she’s writing music for a feature film, playing on A Prairie Home Companion or playing at yet another music festival, blues artist Kelley Hunt never seems to stop working. Saturday finds Hunt at the Uptown, where she’ll host her third-annual Rockin’ New Year’s Eve Eve party, a benefit for community radio station KKFI 90.1 . A Kansas…
The Chariot/ Flee the Seen Flee the Seen has played local shows on almost every holiday, but the group has donned seasonal regalia only for its Halloween gigs, and even then, procrastination led to last-minute costumes. (In 2005, the quartet sported bulky bear suits because those were the only matching outfits remaining for rental.) Singer Kim Anderson says the band…
Animals With Armour With Abileen officially disbanded, seasoned songwriter Heidi Phillips (also formerly of ’90s alt-rockers Frogpond) is trying something new: a supporting role. Her side-project-turned-only-project, Animals With Armour, plays its second show ever this weekend, with Phillips on guitar — but not vocals. Described by Phillips as “pop-punk with strange twists,” the band shares songwriting duties and thrives on…
Now is a bad time to be a giant music corporation, but ethically challenged music fans couldn’t ask for better days. Bootlegging has always been about catering directly to the fans, and the Internet breeds the best bootleggers yet: 10 million file sharers trading a billion and a half songs daily. With file sharing permanent enough now that you can…
In the pale light of the false dawn, our lord lies dead and enemies surround us — so lamented the old woman in the final stanzas of Beowulf, the original heavy-metal song. Eight hundred years later, the song remains the same. But to all those who fear the worst, we advocate repeated listenings of the following albums. Celtic Frost, Monotheist…
It was, according to no less an authority than The New York Times, the year rap went regional. There was plenty of recent evidence to support this claim, beginning with the suddenly paltry record sales racked up by some of hip-hop’s heaviest weights. There was historical evidence as well: Since the Dirty South shook off the bicoastal stranglehold of the…
