It’s one thing to sit back in your Shaker chair next to the clipper-ship-decorated Rumford fireplace in your Colonial-style house and read New England author Jennifer Haigh’s The Condition, a drama about a Cape Cod family’s disintegration. It’s yet another to actually drive out to Rainy Day Books (2706 West 53rd Street in Fairway, 913-384-3126) and hear the PEN/Hemingway Award-winning…
Repurposing objects to make art is hardly a new idea. Kansas City Art Institute grad Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell and Louise Nevelson (whose monolithic “End of Day: Nightscape IV” dominates a room in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Contemporary Art) are some of the more well-known artists who have employed this technique. But as our planet lurches closer to human and…
My first boyfriend was a juicer. Steroids were the drug of choice at my high school, having washed into the Canadian suburbs in the early ’90s on the same raft as crushed-velvet dresses. As described in Christopher Bell’s documentary, a similar phenomenon played out in his hometown of Poughkeepsie. All three Bell boys loved the World Wrestling Federation, worshipped Rambo…
I haven’t seen much at the movies in the past two years that has given me as much unbridled comic pleasure as the sight of Will Ferrell as the win-at-any-cost NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby, calling on Jesus, Tom Cruise and Oprah Winfrey to put out the psychosomatic flames engulfing his body in director Adam McKay’s 2006 Talladega Nights. Not much,…
The plan was simple: Send two correspondents out on the same night to Westport and the Power & Light District. Ever since the P&L opened this past spring, we’ve heard stories about how other local bars have suffered. We wanted to see whether the newest entertainment district in town has affected the city’s oldest entertainment district. Plus, we wanted to…
Howard Iceberg bops in the spotlight, breezy as a bar-worn shirt hung on the line to air out overnight. He chews his gum and strums his guitar, which is strapped at his waist, back down, its strings aimed at the ceiling: a six-string acoustic forced to live under the rules of mountain dulcimer. Iceberg steps to the mic and drawls…
Coldplay kicked off its Viva La Vida tour last week, and to celebrate, the London outfit has issued an unreleased track to its fans. Submit your e-mail address to Coldplay.com for a free download of “Death Will Never Conquer.” The song (which clocks in at just over a minute) features the band’s drummer, Will Champion, on vocals. According to the…
“Siberia,” by Alina Simone, from Prettier in the Dark (Fractured Discs): Whereas other singer-songwriters simply strum away, Alina Simone possesses an uncanny knack for suggesting rhythms and arrangements. You can practically hear other instruments around her guitar and voice, even though they’re not there, which makes Simone a joy to watch. For this show, she focuses on late Siberian underground…
Fastball’s 1998 album, All the Pain Money Can Buy, contains three casually perfect singles: “The Way,” “Fire Escape” and “Out of My Head.” The song titles might not be familiar, but the hooks probably are, even if you’ve forgotten to associate them with Fastball. The reverse also happens: Listeners assume unclaimed ditties from that era, such as Tal Bachman’s hit…
“Titus Andronicus,” by Titus Andronicus, from The Airing of Grievances (Troubleman Unlimited): The garage-punk band Titus Andronicus peddles that desirable catharsis brought on only by excessively loud rock music and empty pitchers of beer. From a distance, Titus might appear British: The band bills its music as “shoegaze,” takes its name from a Shakespeare tragedy and has a blokeish frontman…
With his soaring voice and arena-rock fluency, Todd Rundgren seemed destined for hit-after-hit superstardom when he released his third album, the entirely self-recorded Something/Anything, in 1972. Looking back, though, it was clear that Rundgren had too many experimental itches to scratch — and the progression of his career has arguably been more satisfying as a result. Sure, he routinely takes…
Rancid stakes its “closest thing to the Clash” credibility on its eclecticism. However, time constraints rendered the band’s range irrelevant during its past few area appearances, including a couple of Warped Tour cameos and a Liberty Hall concert that saw Rancid, hamstrung by singer Tim Armstrong’s flulike symptoms, valiantly tackling 20 songs in less than an hour. Given enough rope,…
“Everyone Wants To See You,” by the ACBs, from The ACBs (self-released): Creating the perfect pop song is a lot harder than it looks. Take the Beatles’ “Yesterday,” for example. Frequently considered the gold standard in pop songwriting, it was ranked by MTV and Rolling Stone as No. 1 on their list of all-time best songs in 2000. Not surprisingly,…
Until July 29. That’s when the blogger and author of the new hardback Waiter Rant can come forward. His publisher officially releases his book that day. Until then, I’m not allowed to tell you his name. In fact, I don’t even know it myself. “Can you just call me ‘The Waiter?’” he asked from his home during a phone conversation….
Oscar Wilde once wrote, “No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.” Similarly, it seems that sometimes a restaurant customer needs to suspend reality and take on the visual sensibility of an artist to really appreciate a dining experience. I like to imagine, for example, that every time…
Collisions Local playwright Bill Rogers’ one-act comic tragedy pits generations against each other in the glossy nonspace of a mall food court. In smartly parallel discussions, mall kids and mall-walking old folks separately lament the state of the world, crashing into dangerous topics: Iraq, immigration, homosexuality, Vietnam, Nagasaki and why Americans are so damned fat. The youth loiter in the…
Dear Readers: Gracias, merci, obrigado for the many submissions in my contest asking readers to argue, in 25 words, why corn tortillas are superior to flour, or vice versa. Below is the winner for Kansas City, along with winners from some of the other cities that carry The Mexican. Don’t like the winner? Why didn’t you enter, you lazy Mexican?…
It’s revolving-door time in the local TV news business. On July 5, veteran meteorologist Pete Grigsby gave his last weather report for KMBC Channel 9. The tanfastic, sharply dressed weather guy took a job as an administrator, teacher and PR person with the Blue Springs School District. KMBC reporter Chris Nagus is also leaving the station in August to join…
Feature: “Children Left Behind,” July 10 A Bigger Voice I am an audiologist in the Kansas City area who has just started working with children with auditory processing disorders. In oversimplified lay terms, it is dyslexia of hearing, and there is a high degree of comorbidity with autism. I get a little bit of flack within my own profession for…
Moe live at the Crossroads
