Monday night film series, featuring movies starring Fred Astaire. Schedule as follows: June 2 – Top Hat June 9 – You Were Never Lovelier June 16 – Let’s Dance June 23 – The Bandwagon June 30 – Funny Face. Mondays, 6:30 p.m. Starts: June 2. Continues through June 30, 2008 Tags: Fred Astaire, Night & Day
KC CLAY GUILD provides the clay, the instruction and the soft drinks, YOU provide the talent and imagination. Sat., June 28, 4 p.m., 2008 Tags: 2815, Night & Day
Sordid Lives tells the story of Texas’ trashiest family. Peg, the matriarch, has just died after a tragic accent during a romantic rendezvous with GW, the husband of her daughter LaVonda’s best friend Noleta. GW’s wife Noleta wants revenge, Peg’s other daughter Latrelle wants to live in denial, Sissy wants a cigarette and Juanita wants her Vacation Bible School chicken…
Neither a traditional biography of Lincoln nor a conventional exhibit on the Civil War, Lincoln: The Constitution and the Civil War explores how Lincoln met the enormous challenges of the Civil War and why his very human struggle still matters to us today. From families with young children to Civil War buffs and history scholars, everyone will find something engaging…
The regal stone sculptures that have taken up residence at Powell Gardens soar as high as 11 feet tall and weigh as much as 5,000 pounds. But the sturdy art that makes up Chapungu: Nature, Man and Myth is cut from a centuries-old culture strained by contemporary upheaval. For their inspiration, the Zimbabwean artists draw on iconic images of family…
The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art at Johnson County Community College (12345 College Boulevard in Overland Park) brings a touch of the Southwest to town today with its new show, Unfolding Tradition: Rio Grande Textiles, which spotlights the work of master weavers, including Irvin and Lisa Trujillo. Irvin Trujillo comes from a long line of Spanish-style weavers. His family has…
In recent years, protest singers have become more synonymous with Rage Against the Machine and Green Day than Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan (who never owned up to the title anyway). But Woody was the originator, the ruffian who sang directly to union workers and fruit pickers and Dust Bowl sufferers. If you’re gonna sing about morality, you might as…
Manhattan, Kansas’ annual Country Stampede music festival is a veritable Woodstock for the honky-tonk crowd, attracting droves of country-music lovers to western Kansas to let down their hair and kick up their boot heels. This year promises to be no different, and Manhattan’s own Flint Hills Human Rights Project hosts its own celebration to coincide. Hoedown at the Rainbow Ranch…
Hat brim pulled down to the tops of his cheeks, fingerless gloves ready to protect his palms from dance-floor hazards and baggy jeans stuffed into unlaced white hightops, Shane Sparks is the very model of a modern major dance general. The star choreographer has worked with the likes of Omarion and Lindsay Lohan and invented the “freak nasty” dance for…
Jeff Buckley’s intimate reading of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” ranks among music history’s most fascinating examples of posthumous popularity. Thanks to the song’s ubiquitous presence as a tragic mood-setter in TV montages as well as its growing status as a go-to live cover, Buckley’s “Hallelujah” reached platinum status in April, almost 11 years after his death. Buckley completed only one album…
There’s no shortage of biodiesel-curious motorists in Lawrence, but until four months ago, the nearest pump was in Topeka. The February opening of Zarco 66 Earth Friendly Fuels (900 Iowa, 785-832-0029) signaled a groundswell of interest in biodiesel and ethanol and offered an incentive for area residents to invest in flex-fuel vehicles. In addition to pumping soybean-tinted black gold, the…
Technically, Marilyn Monroe isn’t the star of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Jane Russell’s character, Dorothy Shaw, delivers the movie’s wittiest line, and the dramatic arc stays with her. When asked about her second-billing status, Monroe reportedly said, “Well, whatever I am, I’m still the blonde.” Really, this 1953 adaptation of a Broadway hit works best as a dual showcase, a nearly…
Sometimes a sport comes along that is so intriguing, it demands attention — but is too obscure to warrant space on cable TV. Gaelic football is soccer for players who want to use all their appendages. As in soccer, players use their feet to advance the ball in attempts to score goals. Unlike soccer, players can strike the ball with…
So you’ve decided to get a concealed-carry permit. Good for you! Hey, cowboy, hold on — don’t stuff your gun down the front of your pants. Didn’t your mother teach you any better than that? A good holster and an extremely stiff belt are generally the way to go, but you can pick up all of the relevant information, as…
Pay no heed to those chlorine-crazed aquaphiles who insist that the best way to beat the heat is to fight the crowd and the blazing sun at your local swimming pool. And forget about paying full price to escape to the arctic refuge of the cinema, where the popcorn lobby has succeeded in passing rising food-production costs on to you….
The Village of Loch Lloyd seems impervious to the pain others are suffering due to $4-a-gallon gas and falling home prices. Developers of the gated community in northern Cass County recently announced that Tom Watson will redesign the golf course and add new holes. More fairways mean more ostentatious houses; the developers say Watson’s work will open up 220 residential…
Chris & Don: A Love Story Tina Mascara and Guido Santi’s documentary is a charming, illuminating portrait of the complex and storied queer romance between literary icon Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy, who met on a Santa Monica beach in 1952, when Bachardy was a teenager and Isherwood 30 years his senior. Quilted from black-and-white home-movie clips, animated sequences…
Many will attempt to describe WALL-E with a one-liner. It’s R2-D2 in love, 2001: A Space Odyssey starring the Little Tramp, An Inconvenient Truth meets Idiocracy on its way to Toy Story. But none of these do justice to a film that’s both breathtakingly majestic and heartbreakingly intimate. For a good long while, it’s also bereft of dialogue save the…
“Home Sweet Reality” by Uncle Monk, from Uncle Monk (Airday Records): Who can walk into a music shop, look around at the guitars and drums and keyboards and basses, and not feel their hands tingle with possibility? The old and new electrics, the gleaming acoustics, the amps waiting to growl power chords or hum diminished sevenths — there’s something in…
Of the summer’s many revenge-of-the-nerd fulfillment fantasies — from The Incredible Hulk to The Foot Fist Way — Wanted stands the best chance of dislodging Fight Club from young men’s Facebook pages. It has the same dizzying flipbook style, the same kicky ultraviolence, the same undeniable appeal of payback and — best of all — no irony. Fed up with…
British plantation owner and colonialist Henry Moores (Linus Roache) cavorts with his Indian mistress, Sajani (Nandita Das), as he makes plans to expand his operations. But his life begins to unravel: Labor unrest thwarts his plan to build a transport road as his sharp-eyed wife (the wonderfully headstrong Jennifer Ehle) joins him in India and Sajani’s brutal husband becomes suspicious….
”March of the Dead” by I Love You, from Drone, Drugs and Harmony (self-released): Like fellow locals Ad Astra Per Aspera, Kansas City’s promising I Love You thrashes about in the secret playroom between punk and indie rock, where the kids dress in rags and are given chemistry sets at a dangerously early age. Drummer Jeff Schlette and guitarist, singer…
Since its inception in 1995, the Vans Warped Tour has been a forum for teenage kids to see all the bands they like in one day. Any pretensions of it actually being “punk” are dwarfed by corporate sponsorships, exorbitant concession prices and a lack of progressive or original bands. Now that attendees of the early Warped tours are old enough…
“The Way I Am” by Ingrid Michaelson, from Girls and Boys (Cabin 24): Ingrid Michaelson may well be the poster child for the modern independent singer-songwriter: Upload some songs to MySpace, attract the attention of well-connected industry types and — bada bing! — hear your songs on Grey’s Anatomy (“Keep Breathing”) and at Old Navy (“The Way I Am”). The…
