Seems like it was only days ago that I posted the sometimes-usual, what-to-do-this-weekend stuff. What can I say, it’s been a slow week. I haven’t seen any sort of musical performance (not counting karaoke at DB Cooper’s on Wednesday) since last Sunday, when Ghosty paid admirable tribute to Big Star. I feel so out of the loop. Don’t ask me…
Just a quick note: the latest is up. It’s only, like, 22 minutes long this time — the length of my average first date. Also, Jen Chen and I will be on 90.1 KKFI today from 12:30 pm, along with David Wayne Reed and “Anything Goes” host and Pitch restaurant critic Charles Ferruzza, imploring you to give that poor and…
Nara (1617 Main, 816-221-6272), Kansas City’s latest downtown hot spot, just made an otherwise sleepy weeknight a whole lot cooler. The posh Japanese bar and restaurant hosts Taiko Tuesday, an evening of mad-cheap sake, martinis and DJ Steve Thorell’s tasty jams. Thorell usually instigates wild dance parties at Blonde (Wednesdays), the Grand Emporium (“Essential Saturdays”) and Karma (Fridays). But…
In the films of Joel and Ethan Coen, the establishment is often represented by a fat man in an expensive suit. “The bums will always lose!” shouts the expensively suited Jeffrey Lebowski. As the titular character of The Big Lebowski, David Huddleston’s blustery, self-important philanthropist — with his plaque-covered vanity wall, his obsequious personal assistant and his young trophy wife…
Guitar Hero never purported to be the equivalent of an Air Force flight simulator for aspiring musicians. It’s an addictive, button-pressing challenge. Nonetheless, whiny critics argue that the PlayStation 2 phenomenon makes virtuosity too easy. Where were they when Crazy Taxi made crazy taxi-ing too easy? Or when the difficulty of rolling a little monkey inside a plastic ball…
Longtime KC diners may remember George’s Cheese and Sausage Shop, the Main Street restaurant that Hungarian cook George Detsios (above at right) operated with his mother. Tables from that eatery now serve customers at Grinders (417 East 18th Street, 816-472-5454), and on Monday nights, the elfin chef does, too. Starting at about 7 p.m., the 75-year-old Detsios personally presents…
Bow (Tartan) Comeback Season (First Look) Curse of the Golden Flower (Sony) The Eden Formula (Westlake) The Addams Family: Volume 2 (MGM) Errol Flynn: The Signature Collection, Volume 2 (Warner Bros.) Fantastic Four: World’s Greatest Heroes, Volume 1 (Fox) Following Sean (New Video Group) Hacking Democracy (Docurama) Happy Feet (Warner Bros.) Little Dieter Needs to Fly (Starz) Mo’Nique’s F.A.T. Chance:…
In the poem “In Just-,” E.E. Cummings described the world as “mud-luscious” and “puddle-wonderful” — words so perfectly befitting MotorStorm’s gorgeously sloppy off-road hijinks, the game’s designers probably had them tacked up on a wall somewhere. And had Cummings paid $60 for MotorStorm, the verbally inventive (and upper-case averse) poet probably would have this to say: “i think i…
Children of Men (Universal) Set in a tomorrow that looks like yesterday, Alfonso Cuarón’s wrenching adaptation of P.D. James’ novel feels more like documentary than fiction. In the movie’s world, women have gone barren, and immigrants are tossed into prison camps; it’s the proverbial nightmare to which we might actually wake up sooner than later. Starring Clive Owen as…
The American Songbook: Music of the 1950s The latest Quality Hill Playhouse cabaret revue might sound like the same old same old, but that’s probably true only for those with a grudge against consistent excellence. This time, J. Kent Barnhart’s crooning quartet revels in the last decade in which their beloved American songbook was steadily adding new chapters. Expect highlights…
Lyrical Legacy: the Prints of Karen Kunc This career survey includes many of Karen Kunc’s small wood veneer folios, screen-printed with matrices of color. These bold forms and vivid colors didn’t just happen, but they reveal so organically that it’s almost possible to overlook the mastery of her technique. “History Book” intrigues with its proliferation of media: screenprint, watercolor, etching,…
For some artists, language — oral and written — is an Achilles’ heel because they tend to think visually and abstractly. Yet May Tveit incorporates language to pithy effect. Her works at Review Studios are in fact language-based: cartoonlike thought bubbles with text in each shape. The exhibition’s title, Inner Package, is a shipping term indicating that there is…
On a good night like last Saturday, improv can be so riotous that your stomach hurts and you can’t help crying with uncontrollable laughter. Other nights, improv can suck. I mean in the colloquial sense, even though the usage has never made literal sense to me — isn’t to suck an act of giving pleasure? Anyway, it even sucked at…
Packed with female book-club members, a screening of Mira Nair’s The Namesake left no doubt about the film’s target audience. If anyone’s going to flock to this warm and likable tale, it’s going to be women, yet it seems a pity to confine the movie behind the bars of a chick flick. Dividing its time between the fortunes of a…
At various times over the past decade, David Fincher, Sam Mendes and Michael Mann were slated to direct Scott Frank’s screenplay for The Lookout, about a brain-damaged high school hockey stud who gets smooth-talked by distant acquaintances into robbing a small-town bank. That Frank — best known for straightening and sharpening the tangled lines of Elmore Leonard’s novels Get…
When I told a friend about Em Chamas Brazilian Grill (see review), she was scandalized at the idea of tossing down $35 for an all-you-can-eat dinner that didn’t include drinks, dessert or gratuity. My friend is a frugal soul. “The cost of one dinner there would pay for my monthly cable bill,” she told me. I know that feeling. There…
You know I’m a sucker for those four magical words: all you can eat. I even like the words when they’re attached to a third-rate Chinese buffet or one of those seemingly lavish but not so good casino spreads. Just hand me a plate and point me in the direction of a buffet table, and I’m in hog heaven….
Kansas Citian J Fortune’s Funkadelic series of drum-‘n’-bass parties at Balanca’s have offered us more than a couple of fine dance events over the past six months. After Fortune’s Friday weekly at the Hangout last year, which started out hot and then fizzled, we all learned that Kansas City can’t yet support drum-‘n’-bass every weekend. But Fortune’s Cali Funkadelic party…
If not by choice, Talib Kweli is still alt-rap’s golden child. He isn’t an actor like his Black Star partner, Mos Def, nor has he scored that breakthrough single, despite high-profile productions from Kanye West, the Neptunes and Just Blaze on 2004’s The Beautiful Struggle. None other than Jay-Z gave his skills props in “Moment of Clarity,” but, perhaps a…
The band name Explosions in the Sky might seem a little grandiose, but really, it’s too specific — the all-instrumental Texas quartet explodes pretty much everywhere it goes, from sold-out concert halls to the band’s four critically drooled-upon full-lengths. (The latest and greatest, All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone, arrived in mid-February.) Oddly enough, all that bombastic noise rock…
If the Flaming Lips are Oklahoma’s Willy Wonka, then the Starlight Mints are the Sooner State’s wide-eyed Charlie Bucket. The band plugged away in relative obscurity until a golden-ticket tour with the Lips introduced its quirky chamber pop to a national audience. It’s been a candy-factory adventure ever since, with 2006’s Drowaton throwing everything and the kitchen sink into the…
The dismantling of Washington, D.C.’s Pussy Galore yielded ’90s hipster groups Boss Hog, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Royal Trux, the latter starring Galore guitarist Neil Michael Hagerty. Trux’s early work, released on Chicago’s Drag City label, was a grimy cacophony slopped together by the doped-up Hagerty and his partner, yowler Jennifer Herrema. The pair cleaned up, and the music…
“Red Cloud” by Sterling Witt from Sea Things (Bright Orange Records): We’re sure that Kansas City singer-songwriter and artist Sterling Witt is a nice guy, one of those whimsical artistic types who has an eye for interesting junk and gives his friends homemade gifts on random occasions. In fact, we’d rather old Sterling had sent us a nifty little homespun…
“Where Are You Going?” by Walter Alias from Examples of the Cataclysmic (self-released): A band that calls its album Examples of the Cataclysmic obviously is thinking big. Walter Alias, a KC transplant from Branson, Missouri, describes its sweeping sound as “cinematic,” and it’s not hard to imagine the quartet’s swelling choruses set against some critical moment in a movie about…
