Evidently, some people had paid cash money to ring in the season with KEM, Tank and THE ONE AND ONLY BOBBY BROWN this Saturday at Starlight Theatre. Well, the concert’s been canceled, so these mysterious Bobby Brown/KEM/Tank fans will have to go and get a refund. My first thought upon reading this news, however, was, The one and only…
Here’s a guest Plog from Gina Kaufmann, the Pitch’s former calendar editor and SeeSaw columnist. A moment of silence, please. Mott-ly died yesterday. He wouldn’t want more than a moment of your silence. But that one moment? He deserves it. I met Mott-ly five or six years ago. He didn’t mention that he was an artist. He was a…
Cursive, with the Show is the Rainbow. Wednesday, May 30, at the Bottleneck. Review by Crystal K. Wiebe I keep dooming myself to draggy Thursdays by hitting up Lawrence shows on Wednesday nights. Last week it was the Album Leaf at the Jackpot (atmospheric rock that turned out too mellow for me). Last night, it was Cursive at the…
The appeal of a sport is its unambiguous gauge for success: One cannot spin a loss. That is not exactly true, however, of the Northern League, whose overly complicated measurements of success can confuse. The T-Bones have one of the worst overall records in the Northern League, but the boys can still clinch a playoff spot by finishing with…
There hasn’t been a new episode of Sex and the City since 2004, but that doesn’t stop people from referencing the ultimate girl-dish show every time someone brings up a woman’s perspective on sex. Meanwhile, the envelope-pushing subjects that brought the show such attention back then — the Rabbit, farting during sex, power lesbians, foot fetishists — now seem…
Riots at New York City’s Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969, ignited one fierce revolution. An estimated 2,000 lesbians, gays and transgenders broke into a mêlée against police officers there to arrest the bar’s employees and anyone dressed in drag. The sisters had never banded together that way before, and this day begat the hundreds of pride festivals now…
You played with your pack all weekend — at bars, restaurants and all kinds of fun places that rudely discriminate against your most loyal companion. Today, it’s your dog’s turn to run around on you. Let the mutt off its leash from 10 a.m. to noon today at Penn Valley Dog Park (31st Street and Wyandotte), where the canine…
The Moon Marble Company (600 East Front Street in Bonner Springs) is fronted by a large retail space stocked with colorful glass marbles — 1 million of them, according to owner Bruce Breslow. Ten years ago, he was a carpenter. After making some wooden game boards, he decided he needed glass marbles to use as game pieces. The bulk…
In West African societies, the griot is a storyteller and a keeper of village traditions. Malian and American photographers took the concept to another level by handing cameras to 22 sixth-graders in Malian villages. The resulting pictures tell stories of Malian daily life to the world. Fresh from the Smithsonian, Visual Griots of Mali: Photography by African Youth is…
Last weekend, as Jerry Bruckheimer’s pirates were once again storming the international box office, the Cannes Film Festival (May 16-27) bestowed its two top prizes on a gut-wrenching Romanian movie about backroom abortion and a plaintive Japanese drama about a sad old man who wants to dig his own grave. In addition, there were awards for a two-and-a-half-hour study of…
Cannes, France — The Coen brothers’ pulpy, ultimately pretentious neo-western No Country for Old Men screened early in the Cannes Film Festival and, by the end, had maintained its standing as the most widely approved Yankee feature to bow here since Pulp Fiction (though it didn’t win any awards). Once again, the appeal of a bloody, well-crafted thriller with intimations…
Cannes, France — The 60th Cannes Film Festival was a generous one — and so was its jury, bestowing the Palme d’Or on the least heralded, most critically acclaimed movie in an unusually strong competition, namely Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. Mungiu’s skillfully directed, superbly acted account of two naive college girls in search…
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Above the Law (Genius) The Andy Griffith Show: Complete Series Collection (Paramount) Big Train: Seasons One and Two (BBC Warner) Biography: Legends of the Silver Screen (A&E) Circle of Iron: 2-Disc Special Edition (Blue Underground) The Closer: The Complete Second Season (Warner Bros.) Drive Thru (Lionsgate) The Foursome (Universal) Free Zone (New Yorker) F Troop: The Complete Second Season (Warner…
Dating games have come a long way since the days when Chuck Woolery invited mullet-sporting contestants to bump uglies on Love Connection. In Japan, the “dating simulator” video game craze has raged stronger than a schoolboy’s hormones since the early ’90s. But here in America — where our gaming interests lean more toward Rambo than Romeo — reception to…
Hannibal Rising (Weinstein) Pointless beyond belief, Hannibal Rising serves more as a cautionary tale than horror story. Made for $50 mil, the movie pocketed half that during its U.S. run and likely wound up in the red — an appropriate adios for a franchise starring a peripheral character better served by shadows than spotlight. For grim, mercenary reasons, Thomas…
Bullshit uplift notwithstanding, this world sometimes can be super, especially for all of us sharing a here-and-now with musical-theater dynamo Spencer Brown. When he beams, which is often, his nose crinkles up, his wide eyes narrow and audiences beam back. You find yourself rooting for him, relishing his screechy speaking voice and his powerful upper singing register. He’s right up…
For a while, I’ve had a theory that the American Heartland Theatre’s special brand of unchallenging uplift was right in line with what’s happened to contemporary country music, our culture’s fount of feel-good, tear-jerker, audience-flattering corn pone designed to make focus groups clap hands and shit flags. At the Heartland, as on KFKF 94.1, everything’s all right in America…
Subversive works. Subversive stirs up, gets things done, sets people moving and undermines the status quo. Max Key’s paintings are fueled by his subversive impulses. Key, a graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute, writes that the work on display at the Fahrenheit Gallery forced him to reacquaint himself with art history. “I have been studying dated interior design…
Cannes, France —”Whaddya love about it so much?” Abel Ferrara — director of the strip-club-set Go Go Tales, my favorite film at Cannes — is interviewing the interviewer. Well, I say it’s consistent with the Ferrara oeuvre — King of New York, Bad Lieutenant, Dangerous Game, et cetera — in that it’s about performance, about struggling to make one’s mark…
I never gave much thought to the subject of health insurance until, in October of 2005, an odd swelling in my groin prompted me to make one of my infrequent trips to the doctor’s office. A referral to a urologist and one ultrasound later, the diagnosis was indisputable: testicular cancer. By Thanksgiving, I’d gone under the knife and rid myself…
Cannes, France — Sometimes the competition is actually competitive. No one disputes that the official section at the 60th Cannes Film Festival has been the strongest in recent memory. The heavy favorites are the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men; Julian Schnabel’s surprisingly restrained and bizarrely chic French-language adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s harrowing post-stroke memoir, The Diving Bell and…
Cannes, France—The Cannes Film Festival is chiefly revered as a showcase for prolific, careerist auteurs, so the appearance of Savage Grace, the first feature in 15 years by New Queer Cinema co-instigator Tom Kalin (Swoon), was certainly striking — not that a film in which Julianne Moore stars as a woman who’s fucked and then killed by her gay son…
Cannes, France—The world’s preeminent film festival celebrated its 60th birthday party — the opening banquet catered by the world’s hippest, or is that once-hippest? — filmmaker. Hardly the disaster many feared, but far from the triumph others anticipated, Wong Kar-wai’s first English-language feature, My Blueberry Nights — starring Norah Jones as an itinerant waitress working her way across the…
