“There’s a Reason” by A.A. Bondy Though few outside the indie circuit recognized Verbena, critics and fans hailed the group as the second coming of Nirvana. The comparison was easy to see — and not just because former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl produced the band’s 1999 major-label debut, Into the Pink. When Verbena emerged from Birmingham, Alabama, in the late…
The title of Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, also known as the acclaimed drama that didn’t get nominated for this year’s foreign-language Oscar, refers to the length of the pregnancy that a college student named Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) seeks to terminate in a midsize Romanian town circa 1987, when Nicolae Ceausescu is still in…
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros.) Beautifully shot, masterfully acted, and 19 hours too long, Assassination is an uneven mix of the artful and the arty that never had a shot at bringing in the audience that Brad Pitt’s chiseled melon should’ve delivered. Pitt is great, playing fellow Missourian Jesse James as a…
Dear Mexican: I’ve often wondered how Mexicans would react if 25 million piss-poor Chinamen snuck into Mexico and took up residence. Would they be greeted with open arms? Or would they be greeted by armed men? And I’d bet a sack of pesos they wouldn’t be given free health care, free schooling and Mexican driver’s licenses, either. Bi-Coastal Curious Dear…
My friend Ned likes to hang out in art galleries. He likes to discuss the arts — well, he likes to argue about them — with artists, gallery owners, collectors, and unwary culture lovers who wander into many of the Crossroads’ lively art venues. Last week, he took me to lunch at one of his favorite hangouts, the Pi art…
You know how, when you’re deep in the interior of a large, encyclopedic museum, you can feel detached from the rest of the world, like those dispossessed and encased objects around you? Craig Subler’s work evokes that feeling. In this exhibition at Byron Cohen, the past Charlotte Street Foundation award winner presents 11 works from the past three years,…
Miles Bonny, producer, DJ and cultural philosopher, has a theory as to why the mainstream dinner crowd at the Spitfire Grill feels so comfortable with the atmosphere that his records induce. “Throughout history, the current black artist has often been looked at by older white people as being scary or too foreign, and they stay away from it,” he says….
Before showtime, as purplish light bathed a stony-walled Dunsinane and its impressive drawbridge, word spread through the crowd: “The actors are going to be switching parts sometimes,” a high school girl whispered. Her friend didn’t buy it, but a nearby mother did. She stood up, seized her husband’s hand, and swept across the theater, apologizing as she passed: “My…
Blue Gallery Aaron Morgan Brown’s oil-on-canvas paintings are spectacular evocations of the technique used on television shows such as Cops in which faces are obscured with an undulating matrix of flesh-colored blobs. These large compositions read like photographic scenes that have been similarly obscured and then copied in painstaking detail. The effect is intriguing and funny; Brown’s work has an…
Improv Thunderdome The rules of this make-it-up-as-you-go cage match haven’t changed: Three teams compete for 30 minutes apiece, with the audience’s favorite advancing to the finals this spring. In Round 1 last month, the funniest, most ambitious team rightly advanced after reducing the sell-out crowd to sinus-clearing laughter. Round 2 features what might be the three most ambitious improv formats…
Across the Universe (Sony) The Apartment: Collector’s Edition (MGM) The Aristocats: Special Edition (Disney) Blonde and Blonder (First Look) Boy Meets Girl (Unearthed) Drive-In Cult Classics: 8 Movie Collection (Navarre) Feast of Love (MGM) Fierce People (Lionsgate) The Jane Austen Book Club (Sony) Midnight Express 30th Anniversary Edition (Sony)Psychotronica: Volumes 1, 2 & 3 (VCI) Rosemary & Thyme: The Complete…
%{}% By CHRIS PACKHAM • SNOWPOCALYPSE NOW: “Any man brave enough to fight with his guts strapped on him can drink from Katie Horner’s canteen any day.” Uh… “Charlie don’t snowboard.” I can only remember one other Col. Kilgore quote, but I’m trying to avoid saying “I love the smell of Bryan Busby in the morning.” Because I totally do…
By JEN CHEN Last Saturday, the NBC Nightly News ran this story about Starbucks’ woes and mentioned how Broadway Café outlasted its Starbuckian neighbor in Westport. The NBC story came on the heels of this New York Times article that essentially said the same thing. NBC even quoted the same go-to business consultant wonk, Geoff Vuleta, who appears a little…
Meet the new Lewis W. Diuguid, a man of mystery and shadow. Categories: News Tags: Kansas City Star, Lewis W. Diuguid, mystery, Olan Mills
By ERIC BARTON Big stars apparently eat big burgers. In Manhattan for a stop on his comedy tour, Will Farrell watched the Super Bowl at Kite’s, an Aggieville old standard. He ordered the joint’s new “Three-Pound Cheeseburger in Paradise,” which he quickly picked up and took a few bites from. Farrell came in wearing a K-State sweatshirt, says Kris…
Kansas City, meet the finalists for this year’s Pitch Ultra Music DJ Contest. These fellas will battle on Friday, February 22, at NV, with 30-minute sets starting at 8:30 p.m. DJ Sku MySpace: /djsku Click here to download Sku’s mix. Follow the link to meet the other finalists. Categories: Music Tags: ultra music
By NADIA PFLAUM Approximation of the van in question. A volunteer with the Sen. Barack Obama campaign (who happens to be a former police officer) just called to say that two of the five-passenger vans being used to transport campaign volunteers were pulled over by Kansas City, Missouri, police. The occupants were handcuffed, our tipster says. According to Officer Darin…
The music of a New Orleans-style marching band rang out at 7 a.m. in the Westside neighborhood this morning, and you know what that means. Mardi Gras! There are club crawls in Westport and around various blues clubs, but 18th Street is where it’s at. Or is it? Last year, as with previous years, folks gathered and got their…
Local graffiti artist Don “Scribe” Ross has done a Hallmark advert. In it, the artist, whose murals depicting signature cartoon animals are all over midtown, is shown making a commissioned mural, time-lapse style. Then Scribe does his version of the Hallmark logo. Miles Bonny does the music. Thoughts? Categories: Music Tags: hallmark, miles bonny, Scribe, YouTube
By ERIC BARTON Kansas City Star columnists recently had the chance to have their mugshots retaken, leading to this less-than-flattering photo of Jeneé “Fabulous” Osterheldt. Unfortunately, not everyone followed Jeneé’s lead. So we’ve doctored up our own photos of the Star’s scribes. First up, old-timer C.W. Gusewelle gets the mullet treatment. Categories: News Tags: C.W. Gusewelle, Kansas City Star, mullet,…
%{}% By CHRIS PACKHAM • It’s Super Tuesday! So go to your polling place for a chance to win valuable prizes. • GOOD NEWS: We’ve achieved perfect racial equality in Missouri. And it’s about damn time, what with all the imbalanced scales, plus the injustice. You know the injustice I’m talking about — the kind we don’t have anymore! Therefore,…
Shout Outs A couple weeks ago, Mos Def brought a six-piece band to the University of Michigan to pay tribute to the late J Dilla. Download the 90-minute performance at Rappers I Know, here. Speaking of tributes, Mos Def’s frequent cohort Talib Kweli recently teamed up with Kanye West for an ode to mothers. The track didn’t make it on…
By CHRIS PACKHAM ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FOOTBALL? • The Giants beat the Patriots 17-14 in Super Bowl Roman Numeral XLII, %{}%news you may have seen elsewhere — for instance, on the Super Bowl. • The Funkhouser campaign is busily filing amended campaign finance reports. It looks tentatively like they’ve made their previous embarrassing $80,000 discrepancy vanish via…
By PETER RUGG Are so few people reading that it has come to this to get them interested? In what his press release describes as “an effort to encourage the public to read the book Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace, One School at a Time,” Steve Oakes is undergoing a three-day fast. Oakes — a…
