“A Table Forgotten” by Faun Fables, from A Table Forgotten (Drag City): Those who fancy their pastoral folk music with a dash of weird will likely be enchanted by the theatric musings of Faun Fables. Traces of PJ Harvey and Tom Waits can be heard in the collaborations of Dawn McCarthy and Nils Frykdahl, a lovey-dovey songwriting duo who sound…
You want a history lesson? Take a class. You want clanging swords, sneering villains, storybook romance and bloody vengeance? Here’s a brawny old-school epic to make the CGI tumult of 300, Alexander and Troy look like sissy-boy slap parties. Russian director Sergei Bodrov (Prisoner of the Mountains) shrewdly casts this reverent telling of Genghis Khan’s early years not as the…
Mike Myers likes ice hockey. He also likes Deepak Chopra, a little bit too much. So he pulled together a bit of hockey and a whole lot of Chopra and called it a plot. Building a movie around the efforts of an also-ran celebrity guru to sort out the internal politics of the Toronto Maple Leafs was Myers’ first mistake….
As old Broadway shows are revived, new Broadway shows get spun from old movies so that new movies may be fashioned from ancient TV series. It’s an iron law of the culture industry that turns out to be a pleasant surprise in the case of Get Smart, the late-’60s sitcom retooled as a vehicle for Steve Carell. The most successful…
It’s probably a good thing Game On wasn’t around to review Ninja Gaiden when it hit Xbox in 2004 — we probably would’ve written “an awesome, brutal, majestic action masterpiece,” then filled the rest of the space with crude crayon drawings of ninjas. Because really, there’d be nothing else to say. It’s easier to ramble on about Ninja Gaiden II,…
The San Francisco punk-rock supergroup Me First and the Gimme Gimmes is going back in time (more than usual) for its forthcoming LP of covers, Have Another Ball. Out July 8, the band’s latest installment of ’60s and ’70s remakes features out-of-print B-sides and leftovers from its decade-old debut, including amped-up interpretations of Paul Simon, Diana Ross and Hall &…
The longtime retro jam master at the recently closed Jilly’s, Brian “Clockwerk” Scott, moved to Chicago in February to dive into the Windy City’s bigger, more diverse and more electronic-friendly DJ scene. After all, Scott may have gotten his local following making women dance to new wave and Michael Jackson records, but his preferred style keeps a little of that…
“The Hardest Part” by Olympic Size, from You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone (self-released): The first time I paid attention to Olympic Size was a Thursday in January at the Record Bar. It wasn’t the band I had come to see, but as Billy Smith and Kirsten Paludan harmonized on haunting folk-pop songs, I was touched. Sitting alone in the…
“Don’t Wait Up” by Antennas Up, from Antennas Up (self-released): When it comes to local bands, it’s easy to lose touch. Then one night, when you least expect it and you’re drunk as a skunk, you catch this one band in Westport and you’re all like, “Damn — you got hot.” Such is the case with Antennas Up, a slick…
“Dumb Smoke” by Singer, from Unhistories (Drag City): Fascinating guy, Rob A.A. Lowe. Without knowing him or who he is, you might spot him at a rock show, wandering around the crowd, a tall, gaunt black man with an unfettered mane of a beard, wearing a perfectly unaffected secondhand suit and a jaunty, tilted cap atop a prodigious ‘fro and…
It wouldn’t be fair to call Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant (see review) a saloon, though gourmands might insist that the venue’s emphasis is squarely on the booze (not just the house-brewed beers but also the $8.25 mojitos, margaritas and martinis) rather than the kitchen. I’ve written before about the American tradition of taverns offering a free lunch to encourage patrons…
Let me say this right off the bat: I came to Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant not to drink but to eat. After all, the first Missouri location for this Tennessee-based chain isn’t serving fried jalapeño poppers and patty melts. In addition to the usual saloon-variety offerings — chicken wings, pizza, burgers and steaks — the oversized Gordon Biersch menu lists…
Ollie Gates takes command of the room with a brief discussion about How Things Were. He’s at a recent daylong symposium convened by Kansas City Mayor Mark Funkhouser to talk about bringing economic development to the urban core. The place is a sun-soaked conference room on the top floor of the Central Library. The time is after lunch, when a…
Back in March, I wrote a column suggesting that Kansas City Councilman Terry Riley had found a way to supplement his income by billing travel expenses to the city and to his campaign committee. Now it appears that he has tried to clean up his books. I say “appears” not in an effort to be a weasel. I honestly don’t…
Dear Mexican: I recently went to a Los Angeles Dodgers game at Dodgers Stadium. It was good to see the familias having fun with their children, pero I then saw and heard something disturbing. There will always be rivalries in any sport, of course, pero the white people cheering for the St. Louis Cardinals would clap and cheer when their…
Martin, “All Aboard,” May 29 Let’s Get Moving Having recently moved here from the Washington, D.C., area, I can attest to the advantages of a metro commuter-rail system. Kudos to David Martin for a clear and logical plan — of course it makes sense to use the railroad infrastructure already in place. In Maryland, commuter trains run on CSX lines…
By CHARLES FERRUZZA Café Trio, officially turns four years old this month — if you don’t count the several months that Chris Youngers and Tai Nguyen spent operating their midtown restaurant as Pappagallo, the previous tenant at 3535 Broadway which Youngers and Nguyen bought out in 2003. But instead of celebrating that birthday with a bang, the young bistro owners…
