In 2006, the pop singles market continued to dominate, in no small part because the pick-to-click mentality of online music stores and ring-tone sites gave consumers unparalleled freedom to choose their own musical adventure. What suffered in the meantime, though, was the quality of pop-rock albums. These platters frequently spawned great singles — Justin Timberlake, K.T. Tunstall, the Rapture, Pearl…
Local hip-hop got love from both sides of the state line in 2006. Thanks to the success of ongoing events such as Hip-Hop & Hot Wings at the Peanut downtown and the rise of HipHopKC.com, which now shoulders the responsibility of the KC-Lawrence online community, performers are finding greater resources and a larger fanbase. The metro’s sound has always been…
This was the year of the CD-release party. But plenty of good bands and artists were out there gigging their asses off or cooking up mad rock crank in their home studios for display on MySpace. Here are some tunes from the year’s best nonalbum-releasing local rollers. Brad Hodgson, “Runs On Blood”: We’re thinking In the Pines leader Brad Hodgson…
This year, a slew of amazing records came out that mostly (or only) Kansas City music fans got to enjoy. And this is during a time when the traditional, album-oriented global music scene is giving way to a song-based download culture. So cheers to the bands below, all of which looked adversity in the face and cut records that would…
Viva la Verga Dear Mexican: I’m a Spanish-language student struggling with tenses and the gender of nouns. The other day, some friends and I were discussing street slang, and the word verga (penis) came up (no pun intended). It occurred to me that the definitive symbol of masculinity ends in the feminine a. What’s up with that? Dazed and (Gender)…
“Going Gondola,” December 7 Piping Hot The feature asking clothing designers to weigh in on the gondolier’s uniform was brilliant! Georgianna Londre’s entry was the only one that really hit the mark. The gondola attendant will hand out moist towelettes and peppermints and have lights in the piping of the uniform! Recent advances in LEDs have made that entirely feasible….
Amid the furor over Phill Kline’s new job as Johnson County District Attorney, we’ve wondered what will become of one of Kline’s key staffers in the Kansas Attorney General’s Office: Bryan J. Brown, head of the Consumer Protection Division. Brown was arrested multiple times for misdemeanors during abortion protests in Wichita in 1991 and had been an attorney for the…
The annual Strong Ale Festival in Parkville December 2 featured more than 20 brews well above the 5 percent alcohol in a watery can of Bud. But it was neither the mind-numbing potency of the beer nor the frigid temperature on the rooftop deck where the event was held that drove the crowd to primitive chants. It was because small…
No doubt, 2006 will go down as the year when Kansas finally helped make intelligent design a phrase that everybody now defines as idiotic attack on science. And it will be remembered as the year when Missouri went from crimson to reddish-blue by helping tip the scales in the U.S. Senate. We wanted to hear firsthand from those who were…
The 21st century way to travel is to keep a laptop handy or a wireless Blackberry whatsit tucked up under the scrotum at all times. But the only innovations I’m carrying on my person is a pair of underwear turned inside out (forgot to bring enough…again) and fleece pants — artificial fleece pants. Witchcraft! That’s why this blog hasn’t been…
While plying their dollars toward Jukebox Roulette and drinking themselves into a respectable stupor, patrons at Dave’s Stagecoach Inn last night learned of the death of the man for whom the bar is named, owner Dave Golad. His death was of natural causes. Golad opened the bar in 1952 where Fitz’s Blarney Stone is today. In 1972, he moved the…
In my latest column, I made a couple of half-blunders. Jeremy Willis: The owner of Datura Records (home to Approach, Archetype and Deep Thinkers) wouldn’t explain his affiliation with Black Clover to me, but he was the one who introduced Eilert to Mac and Joe. Jeremy e-mailed me the following yesterday after I’d gone home: I actually need to let…
Eye Candy Last year’s Home for the Holidays play date at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (4420 Warwick, 816-753-5784) saw kids getting crafty with aluminum foil — an appropriate medium, given the season’s penchant for sparkle and shine, but one ultimately inspired by host Miles Neidinger, a Charlotte Street Award-winning artist who transforms mundane materials (coat hangers, coffee…
Aside from that new ball, NBA Live 07 may be the worst product to bear the league’s name this year. The new basketball game from Electronic Arts is so glitchy that scores of buyers launched an online petition demanding a do-over. Luckily for the rest of us, consumers have a choice when it comes to NBA sims (we’re looking…
When the Levees Broke (HBO) Spike Lee’s four-part doc, easily the best nonfiction film of 2006, gets a fifth part on DVD: a 105-minute epilogue that reveals just how little has changed since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in August 2005. Featuring new interviews with the displaced and the displeased, it also contains among the most harrowing tidbits heretofore…
Christmas All Over the Place Inspired by New York’s Paper Bag Players, Theatre for Young America’s holiday throw-down is like a gifted kids’ art class brought to life: The show’s wiggle-worms and musical fir trees are built from paper bags, craft paper and cardboard boxes. This celebration of creative recycling is appropriate for kids of preschool age and older. Mornings…
Michael Eastman: Landscapes Michael Eastman’s large-format color photographs of mountains, roads and fields are like velvet; they seem to absorb light rather than reflect it. Above the land, multihued clouds loom and evoke different moods — sometimes menace, with bruise colors indicating a brewing storm; other times serenity, as when sunlight outlines black clouds over a pasture where cows are…
You know all those movies stacked in your Netflix queue? The crowd pleasers, the award winners, the ones in which Ben Stiller is embarrassed on a toilet or Don Cheadle teaches us that genocide is totally a bad thing? Devil Fetus is better. And so’s Shanty Tramp. In fact, so is everything else that Gary Huggins has screened in the…
Bankrupt and brain-damaged in Rocky V, a bout fought so long ago that the other Bush was still sucker-punching Saddam, Sylvester Stallone’s titular pugilist returns to issue another beating in Rocky Balboa. How much punishment can an audience take? Even 007 gets his license renewed by younger models every decade, but not Rocky, who now has arthritis in his neck,…
It took Norman Mailer seven years and 1,282 pages to write 1991’s Harlot’s Ghost: A Novel of the CIA, and it took me about 12 years to actually finish reading it. So director Robert De Niro and screenwriter Eric Roth can be forgiven for taking two hours and 40 minutes to tell their CIA story, The Good Shepherd. But…
It is said that a great actor or actress can “bring down the house,” but before I saw (and heard) the 25-year-old American Idol finalist Jennifer Hudson in the film version of the 1981 Broadway musical Dreamgirls, I couldn’t recall the last time I truly feared for the architectural stability of a movie theater. When Hudson, in her film debut,…
Years ago, I worked with a very funny lady named Lois Levitch, who told me a story about getting a waffle iron as a wedding gift. “I used it to make waffles at home a couple of times,” she said, “until I had a revelation. If I wanted really good waffles, I would really enjoy eating them a lot more…
India was in the headlines last week for two very different reasons: nuclear weapons and love torpedoes. The top news articles reported a landmark deal between India and the United States that will allow this country to sell fuel and nuclear technology to New Delhi. That story cast a long shadow over the smaller news item reported by the…
Mr. Nuro’s Winter Wonderland assembles several KC DJs who made the club scene what it was in 2006. This Friday, Balanca’s serves up two floors of electronic dance music. Downstairs, J Fortune and cQuence are expected to spin the neuro-funk and liquid-funk subgenres of drum-‘n’-bass, and DJ OE and Tactic bring much slower, broken beats. Blindman plays infectious records of…
