American’s newest first family of bluegrass, Grammy nominated Cherryholmes sound is made up of hard-driving instrumental virtuosity and explosive vocal harmonies. The family band consists of Mom, Pop and their four children performing a mixture of original songs and carefully chosen classics. Perfect for all ages. Fri., Oct. 10, 7 p.m., 2008 Tags: Cherryholmes, Night & Day
Influenced by the Southern rock of Lynyrd Skynyrd and other artists such as U2 and Rich Mullins, Third Day was originally formed by vocalist Mac Powell and acoustic guitarist Mark Lee. The duo added bassist Tai Anderson and drummer David Carr from another local band, and recorded some demos. Third Day’s live shows gradually built a loyal fan base, and…
In Dawn of the Dead, zombies famously took to the mall, staggering in their brainless zombie way through shops and food courts in search of fulfillment through consumption (brain consumption, but still). One supposes that this was meant to make a point. Starting tonight, Ron Megee and his zombies terrorize Crown Center for the Coterie Theatre’s second Halloween engagement of…
You might think, based on the words and pictures of many local media outlets, that Kansas City, Kansas, has its fair share of demons already. It is unfairly maligned as a province of crime and decay. It is hazed as the beer-can-strewn backyard of rural racing fans. But the truth is that KCK offers a great deal more than that….
New York City is too expensive, and Paris is full of fascists — truly, the new grassroots bohemia begins in flyover country. Since 1992, the Writers Place has supported Kansas City’s literary community and connected authors and would-be authors. Tonight it hosts the Bohemian Ball, a fundraiser featuring food, drinks and the smartest silent auction in the city. Local writers…
Sweet summer flings may soon freeze, but love and dreams linger with the opening of the Kansas City Ballet’s 51st fall season, today through Sunday. Showcasing three works each night at the Lyric Theatre (1029 Central), the season begins with Naughty Boy, from choreographer Trey McIntyre, Wichita native and one of People magazine’s “25 Hottest Bachelors” in 2003. Navigating the…
In a new show opening today at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (4525 Oak, 816-751-1278), a solitary character known as Everyman employs fantastic contraptions to patch holes in the sky, lasso clouds, control rain machines, chase storms and manipulate soil. One image shows Everyman attempting to lift and move a stretch of grass the way one might reposition a rug….
When 24-year-old Danielle Burgess of Lee’s Summit finally met a group of young people who had also survived colon cancer, she felt like a character on the television show Heroes. “We all have this weird thing about us that we share,” says Burgess, who beat the disease in her junior year of high school. Burgess and 12 other colon-cancer crushers…
As ESPN commercials seem to imply, Monday Night Football is the antidote for the oncoming shittiness of another vacuous week. So what if your job sucks and your printer jams? There always will be three hours of drinking, cheering and merriment at the end of the rainbow. Even if you don’t care about the game, there are tantalizing spectacles to…
Synesthesia is a condition characterized by sensory overlap in which one sensory input, such as a sound, stimulates a second sensory pathway, such as color visualization. Thus, for some people, certain sounds actually have color, giving those people a precious gift and making them like special snowflakes. Or are they? A new study by Canadian researchers suggests that the condition…
Shotgun enthusiasts use molded pigeons for target practice as they await the day when live game goes flying by. People with bad tempers but no firearms prefer throwing vases to shooting clay pigeons. For the less destructive among us, the Kansas City Clay Guild holds Raku Night at its headquarters (200 West 74th Street), starting at 4 p.m. Raku is…
The 2007 movie Lars and the Real Girl depicts the sweet sadness of an awkward guy’s romance with a sex doll. Watch Out, a new film directed by Kansas-based provocateur Steve Balderson, lurks on the seedier end of the movies-about-inflatable-fuck-toys spectrum. Interpreting a line from the trailer (“The only way to survive is to love yourself”) in the most graphic…
Maybe you’ve seen 1,000 movies. Maybe not. (You can’t count all six times you’ve watched the last hour of Malice on TNT while waiting for your jeans to dry.) But if you want to speak with authority about the 392 movies you have seen, consider girding your gut reactions by reading film expert David Thomson, who is in town tonight….
(7042 West 76th Street, 913-341-0076). This Jayhawk-friendly bar has four different kinds of Free State Brewery beer on tap for $4 a pint on Sundays. Also on special today: $5 domestic pitchers, $4 Bloody Marys, $2 domestic pints and 90-cent wings. Mondays-Fridays, 2008 Tags: 29, Night & Day
(7324 West 80th Street, 913-652-9494). This University of Iowa-loving bar has $2.50 22-ounce domestic drafts and $3.50 selections from its premium Bloody Mary bar, with 35 items to add to your concoction. Mondays-Fridays, 2008 Tags: Night & Day, University of Iowa-loving
The Irish musical tradition made its first pitch during the Great Famine, explains Rory O’Connor, founding member of Celtic Fringe, a Kansas City nonprofit that promotes Irish cultural awareness. For families anchored by poverty to the Irish countryside, music and dancing offered an ethereal respite from profound material absences. “You’d gather up in someone’s house,” O’Connor says, to enjoy entertainment…
The story of Syracuse running back Ernie Davis — the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy, in 1961, two years before he succumbed to leukemia — is absolutely worthy of a big-screen retelling. Davis, who died before ever playing a down alongside Jim Brown for the Cleveland Browns, has almost become a footnote — an inspirational fairy tale. Based…
In the four years since the last Split Lip Rayfield record, the band had to overcome the loss of founding member Kirk Rundstrom to cancer. In that respect, I’ll Be Around is an affirmation of the band’s 14-year journey and the scars its gas-tank bass and three surviving members have accumulated. The fifth album is vintage Split Lip Rayfield: equal…
Beginning with the sound of a needle dropping on a scratchy LP, Trystyl’s latest is an insider’s record, made for and by crate diggers and notebook poets. Over Trystyl’s smooth, ice-cream-with-spinkles production — electronic plus East Coast hip-hop and soul plus a passion for old records — guest rappers dish on the hard-knock life of the underground hero and how…
In the Old Testament book of Job, after a description of the flawless title character, who is about to get screwed out of his own skin, Satan pays a visit to God. The Lord said to Satan, “Where have you come from?” Satan answered the Lord, “From roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it.” I often…
Think of Starfucker as a peculiarly Portland, Oregon, answer to neo-wave dance acts like Klaxons, the Teenagers and Hot Chip. The group’s fey, friendly, fractured electro-pop sews cloudy Northwestern indie-pop lilt to burbling banks of plinking synths. Unlike its international compatriots, the trio’s sauntering, hook-lined, lo-fi bounce is probably more at home in dorms and bedrooms than the club. There’s…
Randy Newman has reached an age (he’ll be 65 next month) and stature (Oscar, Grammys, Emmys, boxed set) at which some have begun to suggest that he has transcended the role of acerbic entertainer to become a classic American wit and social critic. The Los Angeles Times, for example, has likened him to Mark Twain. Good call — listening to…
If A Place to Bury Strangers were one of the presidential candidates, the hypnotic trio would be John McCain. Politics notwithstanding, this Brooklyn band, like the Straight Talk Express, tends to noisily echo the past more than strut into the future. Suturing syncopated drum loops with eerie synthesizers and bandaging the oozy mess with a glittery, distorted feedback, A Place…
Septuagenarian Czech filmmaker Jirí Menzel’s latest boasts the same darkly sarcastic and lyrically absurdist trademarks that fellow Czech new-wavers Milos Forman and Vera Chytilová were known for in the 1960s. But I Served the King of England is hardly past its prime. It might even be timeless. After years in a Czech prison, the grizzled everyman, Jan (Oldrich Kaiser), is…
