If the most enduring proto-emo bands were the ones that wrote the best hooks, Smoking Popes was right there with the Promise Ring and the Get Up Kids. Like those groups, the Popes’ penchant for melody resided solely on the shoulders of a lead singer (Josh Caterer) with a consummate croon that drowned out his peer bands’ sneering. After a…
Ever wonder what life would be like if Kevin Bacon hadn’t saved America’s small-town kids from anti-dancing legislation? It might sound a bit like Thomas Bartlett’s song-for-song cover of the Footloose soundtrack. Along with fronting the New York outfit Doveman, Bartlett has tickled the ivories for Antony & the Johnsons, the National and David Byrne. Download his minimalist re-creation for…
A’ight, here’s the dizzle: The d-o-double gizzle Snoop Dogg is in KC this Saturdizzle. Snoopizzle is guarantizzled to pull out sweet summer jams such as “Drop It Like It’s Hot” and “Who Am I (What’s My Name?)” at this show, fo’ shizzle. Though he’s known for smoking lots of marijuizzle, Snoopizzle is far from a stoned slackizzle. He’s even improved…
“Danger Bird Blues” by Ad Astra Per Aspera, from Danger Bird Blues EP (Lovegarden Sounds/Sonic Unyon): While bands, labels and retailers are all looking for new, mostly digital ways of getting people to buy their music, one local record store has a different idea. In the age of the iPod, Love Garden is putting out a record. Packed in an…
Let’s be clear about one thing: Journey to the Center of the Earth is more a demo reel than a narrative feature. It’s a decent compendium of familiar look-at-me moments intended to show off the latest and greatest in 3-D filmmaking, in which the same thing’s shot twice, more or less merged into a blurry single image and rendered vaguely…
Directed by Anand Tucker with the same intelligent tact he brought to Hilary and Jackie, and cleanly adapted by David Nicholls from a brutally frank memoir by British writer Blake Morrison, this minor pleasure about an aggrieved son (Colin Firth in the Blake role) re-evaluating his relationship with his cantankerous old sod of a dying father (Jim Broadbent as Arthur…
Hollywood’s Endless Superhero Summer rolls on with the arrival of Hellboy II: The Golden Army from Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro. But before this review goes any further, I must confess — head hanging low in shame — that I haven’t read a comic book since I was 12 years old. That means I’ve never read a Hellboy comic,…
Arguing against beauty isn’t easy. But things of beauty can be hard to hang onto — they’re elusive and often aloof to social, economic and political realities. And showing beautiful work in a museum has its own complexities. As African-art historian Susan Vogel once wrote, “Almost nothing displayed in a museum was meant to be seen in one.” In museums,…
“1234” by Feist, from The Reminder (Polydor): You really can’t blame Feist for grabbing the solo reins and steering her career into ubiquity. After all, if you were a member of the 20-strong-and-counting Broken Social Scene — one of the many Canadian indie-rock groups that seem to employ 89 percent of the country’s young people — you’d look for ways…
Just when you think history has shifted permanently in one direction, you stumble upon something so amazing, it’s as if time has momentarily stopped. Case in point: the lunch counter at Fox’s Drug Store in Raytown. It not only may be the last operating drugstore soda fountain in the metro, but customers can still smoke there. Is it really 2008?…
When a beloved Kansas City, Missouri, restaurant tries to expand its customer base by opening a location on the Kansas side, there’s always the danger that something will be lost in translation. For every success story — Hereford House, the Bristol, Andre’s Confiserie Suisse — I can think of just as many failures, including Princess Gardens, Hannah Bistro, Michael Forbes…
At some point in the past 50 years, the mall replaced the public square as the gathering place for Americans. Now, as developers bilk us with P&L-style fake towns — mall-like public squares that replace the mall with an imagineered parody of all that the mall originally destroyed — the luckiest cities are enjoying a bit of old-fashioned, no-bullshit revitalization…
Sam Lindsey didn’t have therapy that morning, so the day began more leisurely than usual. The 3-year-old was up with his mother, Joyce Lindsey. By 7 a.m. he’d bathed, had breakfast and watched videos. Interactive time was especially important since he’d been diagnosed with the learning disorder apraxia; on this day, they used a Finding Nemo children’s book about the…
Every once in a while, I think I should start paying more attention to Jackson County politics. The Kansas City Star will update a lawsuit or a controversial contract, and I’ll make a silent pledge to start working the phone. The other day, I made a trip to the courthouse. I wanted to brush up on an incident that started…
Dear Mexican: What’s the fascination Mexicans have with Elvis? Good Roceando Tonight Dear Gabacho: Your question is spot-on, but it’s taken awhile for Elvis Presley to achieve icon status among Mexicans. As recounted in Eric Zolov’s 1999 book, Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture, the King largely sparked the roots of rock en español by inspiring groups such…
Questions about where Phill Kline calls home have lingered since Johnson County Republicans Republicans handed him the District Attorney’s Office in December 2006. Kansas law requires a DA to be a registered voter of the county, and everyone knew Kline wasn’t exactly spending his nights in JoCo. So here, at last, is the sordid history of the House of Kline….
Snoop Dog & 311
