What do you do when your band is totally unabashed about copying AC/DC? If you’re Rhino Bucket, you hire the Australian rock institution’s former drummer, Simon Wright, of course. Wright may be an on-again, off-again member of the Bucket, but singer Georg Dolivo still channels Bon Scott better than a psychic medium on an especially good day. The band’s secret…
This first feature by character actor and theater director Terry Kinney addresses, once again, America’s apparent surfeit of sweet-souled losers and eccentrics, replete with rueful indie Muzak. Cooper (Matthew Broderick), a Chicago newspaperman still held back at work by a recent concussion, returns to hometown rural Missourah to check up on a precarious relation. Old Uncle Rollie (Alan Alda) has…
“Get the Bucket to the Well” by the People’s Liberation Big Band, from Beginners (Tzigane): The musicians that compose the People’s Liberation Big Band could all make top dollar playing tux-bucks-sucks jazz gigs, but they happily put their wallets aside to create some of the most out-there music Kansas City has to offer. As though supporting Sun Ra or Frank…
“Everybody Move” by Tech N9ne, from Killer (Strange Music) It’s hard not to admire the audacity of an artist who, after clawing his way up from the underground to the brink of the big time, not only makes his would-be breakthrough half tribute to Michael Jackson’s Thriller and half parody of it, but also loads it up as a 32-track…
“Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad” performed by Becky Barta, from Crazy … and Then Some (self-released): In country music, the best singers are often the ones who have been around the block a few times. Willie Nelson, Loretta Lynn and Johnny Cash all lived life’s hard lessons and released much of their best material in their golden years. For…
The last time I wrote about larger-than-life (and blonder-than-blond) chef Marshall Roth, he had left one high-profile restaurant job for another (“Checkout Time,” December 13, 2007). Roth resigned as executive chef for the Hotel Phillips to take on the role of culinary consultant for Entertainment Concept Investors, the Cordish Company’s restaurant-and-club division. But the tall, spiky-haired chef is on the…
Sarah’s, the bright and brash downtown bistro at 18th Street and Grand, generated a lot of buzz when it opened last winter. And not all of it was about flamboyant chef-owner Sarah Walker. I ate there only once, joining a few co-workers for lunch in May. It was a good lunch, and chef Walker’s menu, though limited, was surprisingly sophisticated….
Chakaia Booker’s exhibition at the Kemper stinks. But in a good way. You know how some people like the acrid smell of tires, fresh tar or bus exhaust? That kind of bitter smell can seem oddly pleasing. It reminds me of going into tire stores with my father when I was little. Not that shopping for tires was a lot…
The story of a black man tricked into strangling his white wife because she’s careless with her hanky, Othello isn’t bring-the-kids-and-pack-a-basket fare, but I applaud director Sidonie Garrett and the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival for daring it. The sex and murder probably upset nobody these days, but the play’s brute treatment of race — particularly the villain Iago’s irrational…
The assignment was a throwaway: Shoot a rah-rah video for Barkley’s biggest client — Sonic Drive-In. The feel-good film would be propaganda for the Oklahoma City-based fast-food chain’s 2002 convention of owners and vendors. The Kansas City advertising agency dumped the project on the creative team of Matt McKay and Pat Piper. Aw, man, McKay thought. He would rather have…
They had to know. The Cordish Company, the East Coast developer of downtown’s Power & Light District, has banned white T-shirts. Also prohibited: shorts that fall below the knees, athletic jerseys, work boots and chains. Cordish officials must have known that such a ban would lead to allegations of racial bias. The day of reckoning arrived on June 19. Responding…
Dear Mexican: Whenever I have an immigration debate with my Chicano hermanos, who support open borders and get angry at any type of immigration control, they don’t seem to understand the basic laws of economics, such as the fact that migrant workers who pick fruit, work in construction and do other blue-collar jobs can never demand wage increases as long…
The McClatchy Company has dropped 80 percent in value since purchasing Knight-Ridder, which owned The Kansas City Star. That’s what’s known in business school as a clusterfuck. Plunging ad revenue has forced McClatchy to make cuts. The company is reducing personnel by attrition, early retirement and plain ol’ firings. Star publisher Mark Zieman has said he expects his newsroom to…
Plog: “George Carlin in Hell, Phelps-Roper says,” June 24 Phelps vs. Carlin I know there’s no convincing to be done here; otherwise, it totally counteracts all of George Carlin’s work as challenging the First Amendment — and Shirley Phelps-Roper’s, too. However, I would feel much more comfortable if the Plog entry about the Phelps family’s response to Carlin’s death was…
