Festival season in Kansas City rages on in late September, the month of Hispanic Heritage, and the little fiesta that could is back for a 24th go-round. The history of Fiesta Hispana dates back to 1980, when local Hispanic leaders organized a Mexican street festival in a two-block section of Southwest Boulevard. As the years went by, more and…
Pink Floyd reunited for a six-song set at 2005’s Live 8 concert, but primary songwriters Roger Waters and David Gilmour quashed rumors of future tours, and even the big, round lure of the group’s 40th anniversary this year hasn’t prompted another one-off concert. Targeting fans who aren’t satisfied by Waters’ and Gilmour’s solo gigs, tribute acts replicate concerts from Floyd’s…
To all those who complain about Kansas City being backward and who aspire to move somewhere more progressive: Here’s one more event that’s making the metro a little more like a West Coast city. Portland is where Sarah Gibson, one of the owners of Crossroads-based Acme Bicycle Co., got the idea for Mocktail Hour, a monthly shindig at one…
With its mansionlike appearance, the Writers Place (3607 Pennsylvania, 816-753-1090) offers an idyllic vision of a world where scribes are society’s upper crust. They feast on fine wines and cheeses and read to attentive audiences; they autograph books and teach workshops. Attend any of the venue’s events, and you’ll begin to wonder why our society is in such a TV…
In the past few years, the one-time disreputables at Minds Eye Theatre have cleaned up real nice, staging hard-edged but serious dramas in winning and on-the-cheap productions. Now, Minds Eye is giddily pissing respectability away at the local premiere of Tom Eyen’s exploitation spoof Women Behind Bars. Director Sara Crow says, “Some of the shows we do, I want…
Warning: The following sentence contains the loathsome word eclectic. The Urban Culture Project brings its arts-endowing street cred to what must be something like its 520th Third Friday Exhibition Series with the usual proliferation of eclectic art displays and performances. Quixotic Performance Fusion comes to La Esquina (1000 West 25th Street, 816-221-5115). Assistant Director Kate Hackman says, “They’re a…
Jonesing for a gently used stereo and some tunes to go with it? Check out the For Your Ears Only sale in Buildings 1 and 2 of the Douglas County Fairgrounds (2120 Harper in Lawrence). The sale is a fundraiser for Audio-Reader, a reading and information service for the blind and visually impaired. Some 10,000 pieces — stereos, amps, albums…
Unless Frank Black is ever elected president, one-man Lawrence act This Is My Condition will never cross over to the mainstream. But when Craig Comstock gets behind his jury-rigged, guitar-laden drum set and begins flailing away and screaming occasional lyrics into a condenser microphone, people stop and listen — regardless of whether they’re more familiar with George Brett than…
Barn dancing may not be the new ballroom dancing, but it could be a new way to spend a Saturday night. Twice a month, fellers swing their partners round and round to live, old-time fiddle music in midtown and Merriam. Organizer Laura Bogue, of the arts alliance CrossCurrents, says the crowd has swelled to 80 people, with an age range…
Carolyn Raasch spends 44 weeks of every year planning for the eight weeks between September and the end of October. As a pumpkin farmer, she plants in spring and then waits for the rush. “You do a year’s worth of business in eight weeks,” says Raasch, who has been operating Carolyn’s Country Cousins Pumpkin Patch at 17607 Northeast 52nd…
Five years ago, the notion of a Kansas City Fashion Week may have seemed like a highfalutin coastal affectation. But now, Carman Stalker and others believe that this city — with its stylish boutiques and more globally oriented overall sensibility — is ready for its own fashion week, albeit a four-day one. From 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. today,…
Dominique Elkind studied painting at the Kansas City Art Institute, where she dealt with various pigments and color-design principles. Yet her current work is monochromatic. “If I do color things, I usually think of them as studies for the drawings,” she says. “I kind of feel like I work backwards — the drawing is the actual work, and color…
War imagery has streamed into American living rooms since Vietnam, but now conflict and its aftermath can be witnessed at the click of a mouse. The University of Kansas’ Dole Institute presentation “World Hot Spots: What Google Earth and Geography Tell Us About War, Peace and the Environment” comes on the heels of Crisis in Darfur, a feature that Google…
Ah, the power of cotton-Lycra blends. Modern technology allots us comfortable wash-and-wear separates, minus the metal boning and the itchiness of the girdles and wool suits of yesterday. Though this is righteous, we’ve turned into a society of jeans-and-T-shirt slobs. No more gussying up. No more Sunday best. No more white tea gloves or silk-lined chapeaus. Well, the folks at…
What a historical novel does that a regular history book can’t do is focus on the footnotes. A general history of architecture would devote significant attention to the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the man behind the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Only passing reference would be made of the tumultuous affair Wright had with a married woman…
Beyond the Gates (Fox) Blade: House of Chthon (New Line) The Boss of It All (IFC) Boston Legal: Season Three (Fox) Brothers and Sisters: The Complete First Season (Buena Vista) Catherine Deneuve: Essentials (Wellspring) The Condemned (Lionsgate) Deliverance: Deluxe Edition (Warner Bros.) Family Guy: Volume Five (Fox) Flashdance: Special Collector’s Edition (Paramount) Ghost Whisperer: The Second Season (Paramount) L’Iceberg (First…
In space, no one can hear you scream, Jumpin’ Jesus, this is one of the greatest games ever! But that doesn’t mean you won’t try during Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Hard-core gamers know Metroid’s star, bounty-hunter babe Samus Aran, has been kicking ass since 1986 — back when Lara Croft was but a gleam in her Tomb Raidin’ daddy’s…
(Paramount) For all its camp-classic status as the ultimate disco-fever dream, John Badham’s movie truly is remarkable — a foul-mouthed, mean-streets masterpiece that just happens to feature a Bee Gees score that spreads like melted cheese 30 years later. And, of course, it contains the greatest performance in John Travolta’s up-and-down-and-downer career. It’s a thing of beauty, really —…
Orly Cogan and Elizabeth Huey Tiered white cake, sprinkle-sotted doughnuts, whipped meringue, cakes erupting with perfectly spherical maraschinos, crosshatched apple pie, cupcakes beckoning with a bright confetti of fixings. Orly Cogan makes pretty pastries from doilies, macramé, ribbons, pom-poms and yarn, all with the impeccable presentation of a perfectionist home-ec-teacher-cum-pastry-chef. This table of inedible treats is the physical centerpiece of…
Bad Dates With this one-woman, one-stage comedy comes a pistol shot heralding the start of the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s first two-stage season. The ol’ stage at UMKC remains the home of the Rep’s patented splashy takes on the canon, whereas the new Copaken indulges in the “intimate.” A friendly little show, interested in shoes and clothes and the troubles…
Consider the “Dominant Male of the Blue-Striped Variety.” It consists of two taxidermic deer heads linked by an exaggeratedly long crocheted sweater sleeve. As the opening piece, this work by Houston artist Elaine Bradford implies the delicious visual and conceptual punning we might find inside the exhibition Raised in Craftivity. First, though, we have to look past the original…
The exemplary achievements of the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival succeeded by one of two means: narrowing the gap between author and subject in pursuit of intimate effects, or else working distance into the material and profiting from the vantage. Contemporary neorealism at its most confident and alert, Chop Shop finds writer-director Ramin Bahrani so thoroughly immersed in a…
Even the most adamantly anti-war movies about American soldiers returning from Vietnam — Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978) and Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989) — redeemed their mangled, embittered grunts through the love of good women, devoted parents, political resistance or all of the above. You can’t pin that kind of ending on the Iraq war,…
David Cronenberg is the most provocative, original and consistently excellent North American director of his generation. From Videodrome (1983) through A History of Violence (2005) — not Scorsese, Spielberg or even David Lynch has enjoyed a comparable run. A rhapsodic movie directed with considerable formal intelligence and brooding power from an original screenplay by Steven Knight, Eastern Promises is…
