All That Jazz: Special Music Edition (Fox) The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour (Image) Back Stage (Strand) Bong Water (First Look) The Brady Bunch: The Complete Series (Paramount) Charlotte’s Web (Paramount) Copying Beethoven (MGM) Dancing With the Stars: Cardio Dance (Lions Gate) Entourage: Season Three, Part One (HBO) Jump In!: Freestyle Edition (Disney) Law & Order: The Fifth Year (Universal)…
A video game about birds flying biplanes makes as much sense as a game about fish captaining submarines, but there are far bigger gripes to be found in Wing Island for the Wii. “In a world ruled by birds,” explains the manual’s grim version of the future, Sparrow Wing Jr. runs an airplane-for-hire business. Though some of his flock are…
Twin Peaks: The Second Season (Paramount) Here it is, perhaps the most infamous shark-jump in TV history. The first season of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s comedy-horror-mystery-soap caused a cultural frenzy of “damn good coffee” quips and questions about who murdered prom queen and town doorknob Laura Palmer. It’s also maybe the single finest season of television ever. Season…
The first surprise hits before you sit down. To get to Studio 116, the black-box space where the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s graduate theater department is staging Present Laughter with a brittle elegance, you must burrow several floors beneath the Kansas City Repertory Theatre into the halls of subterranean academia. Passing Coke-machine lounges and pegboards thick with summer-stock fliers,…
Lest we imagine that the publishing industry went to hell only after James Frey and J.T. Leroy clambered onboard, here comes Lasse Hallström to remind us of a literary dustup emblematic of a much earlier nadir for American mendacity. The Hoax parses the rise and fall of faker Clifford Irving — a stalled minor writer who shot to fame…
There exists some debate about audience familiarity with the term grindhouse and even a certain confusion about the origin of the word itself — whether it refers to the movies that made up a gilded age of exploitation cinema or to the all-night urban theaters in which they were regularly shown. It matters little, though, for so richly evocative…
Chefs come, and chefs go. Most of the time, I’m sorry when chefs I admire pack up their knives and move to another city. I actually went into a brief state of mourning several years ago at the departure of charismatic Mike Saluzzi, who was last seen in the kitchen of the now-defunct Altizio’s Italian Restaurant in Overland Park. Saluzzi…
It isn’t often that the Spanish word tapas shows up on a menu at a Japanese restaurant. Then again, the five-month-old One Bite Japanese Grill isn’t like any other restaurant. Don’t let the name fool you — it’s not a teppen-yaki steakhouse with manic chefs flipping eggs and shrimp over hot grills. And it’s not a sushi joint. Back…
DJ AM is best known for having dated actress Nicole Richie and having lived about as glamorous a life as a DJ could dream of. AM has made a name for himself as a premier celebrity DJ, a role that most heads may regard with suspicion. As for skills on the decks, KC’s own DJ Spinstyles saw AM play…
Singer-songwriter Geoff Koch, a Mizzou dropout and Red Lobster bartender from the St. Louis suburbs, has the perfect background for a heart-on-sleeve tunesmith, right? The 27-year-old composer of two albums is in the midst of a brief tour that has stopped at South By Southwest and less glamorous locales such as the Goofy Foot Lodge in Omaha. “Although, now I’m…
Compact disc sales are so scant anymore that it’s to Yo La Tengo’s credit — and benefit — that the New Jersey trio’s live sets remain so chummy, engrossing and incendiary, especially when Ira Kaplan goes all medieval on a keyboard or furiously masturbates his guitar’s whammy bar. Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNew have spent this decade cruising a…
“Tough Girl” by Open Hand from You and Me (Trustkill): It seems unlikely that a band as fluid as Open Hand could ever truly reach maturity, but if anyone in the band feels like doing some laurel-resting, now might be a good time. In less than four years, the Los Angeles foursome has gone from being the redheaded stepchild (a…
With a voice that could make angels weep, it’s hard to believe that Neko Case was too shy to step out from behind the kit of her first band, Maow. Case’s first couple of albums concentrated on country, taking advantage of her soulful, Loretta Lynn-recalling pipes. Last year’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood tacks gracefully toward the indie pop of…
“Small Talk” by The Ponys from Turn the Lights Out (Matador): The Ponys’ Matador Records debut, Turn the Lights Out, is an early best-of-2007 candidate, but the dirty-cool collection could probably have earned the same accolades in 1977. Recalling proto-punk acts such as the Fall and Television, the album showcases dark, woozy, reverb-laden garage rock with hands-off production and minimal…
Postpunk isn’t just for dance-club fiends and trenchcoated loners anymore. Sometimes this stuff just rocks, and hard. Witness the re-emergence of Mission of Burma and the ascendance of Australian trio Love of Diagrams. On Mosaic Guitarist Luke Horton, bassist Antonia Selbach and drummer Monika Fikerle — all taking turns at the microphone — delight in beefing up and fuzz-pedaling the…
“Annie McGee” by Sterilize Stereo from Bugs and Daymares (self-released): From a band named Sterilize Stereo, one would expect punk rock, maybe, or some kind of minimalist German techno. One would be wrong. This fledgling KC-Lawrence band sounds like gypsy freak folkers doing numbers from a lost 1930s protest musical. Though the instrumentation is unconventional — bowed cello instead of…
Evolution is just a theory, Allen Epley quips cryptically at the beginning of Shiner’s just-reissued 1999 EP, Making Love. Musically speaking, though, this recording provides evidence in favor of evolution. Making Love opens with four live tracks, split evenly between Shiner’s first two full-lengths, Splay and Lula Divinia. Several of Shiner’s signature elements —eerie, swirling guitars; Epley’s hazily tuneful delivery;…
Writer’s block has rarely been a problem for Sage Francis. The slam-poet turned rapper crafts his best rhymes out of political angst, and lately he’s had plenty of material. His MySpace page is streaming “Civil Obedience,” the first single from his upcoming LP, Human the Death Dance. Along with guest vocals from Jolie Holland, his second LP under the Epitaph…
Introducing tonight’s bachelors, in no particular order. One is a don in the Puerto Rican Costa Nostra. The second is a one-time trap star who likes to call himself “The Snowman.” Our final bachelor is proud of his resemblance to his daddy and always rolls with cash money. Why should I go out with you? No. 1: Psychopathic wordplay, schizophrenic…
Portraying the role of Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar has a way of bringing out the rock god in even the humblest of backup musicians. Over the past two decades, guitarist and banjo wiz Eric Mardis has carved out a niche as one of Kansas’ most esteemed sidemen with his contributions to Split Lip Rayfield, Satan’s Jeweled Crown, the Hearers,…
Dave “Chilidog” Crawford is a big guy with a baby face, a pocketful of untapped musical genius and a long-standing reputation as a sly-talkin’ rabble-rouser. If you haunt midtown, you may have seen him causing a ruckus at dives such as D.B. Cooper’s and Chez Charlie. For example, a recent night out with Chilidog for some karaoke at Cooper’s began…
On the first Saturday night at the newly reopened 75th Street Brewery>, we were sitting at the curved end of the bar when an older guy in a logoed button-down white shirt leaned over from a couple of stools away. “Would you like a ticket to the Home Show?” he earnestly asked, offering us a piece of paper. Uh, let…
There’s a new breed of DJ. One that’s all about the party anthem. That term may be more associated with songs such as “Kids in America” than anything in the realm of DJing. But spinners in this school mix records familiar and obscure — laying a gangsta rap a cappella over a robotic Daft Punk beat, for example — to…
Dear Mexican: Why should Mexican nationals have more of a right to stay in this country than Chinese, Somalis or others who can’t cross an open land border and must thus wait on the bureaucracy like everybody else? 700 Miles Isn’t Long Enough Dear 700 Miles: ‘Cause this land once belonged to Mexico — kidding! In reality, I’m not sure…
