The University of Kansas Medical Center’s Community Outreach Program and the Rosedale Development Association will present Pet Palooza to highlight the health benefits of owning a pet and promote responsible pet ownership, including pet safety, grooming, and nutrition. Sat., May 2, 10 a.m.-2 p.m., 2009 Tags: Night & Day, Rosedale Development Association, University of Kansas Medical Center
The Kansas City Public Library’s Off-the-Wall film series kicks off in May with John Carpenter’s 1988 aliens-walk-among-us cult classic, They Live. How do we know it’s a cult classic? Because The Onion says so, and that’s good enough for us. Scott Tobias, movie editor for the satirical newspaper and the man behind its A.V. Club’s New Cult Canon online essays,…
With hair slicked back and plaid western shirts tucked behind leather belt buckles, Adam Lee and Johnny Kenepaske are a couple of dapper-looking dudes. Under stage lights — or in the corner of a living room, depending on the gig — with guitars strapped on, stomping out one of their homespun honky-tonk tunes, their two-man band, Adam Lee and the…
Pianist Mark Lowrey says an improvisational recording is a snapshot of a moment in time. The moment in which this first, self-titled release from Lowrey’s trio was captured — with former UMKC Conservatory classmates Zack Albetta (drums) and Ben Leifer (bass) — must have been a good time to be alive. Recorded on a single November day in 2008, this…
Every once in a while, a guy with an acoustic guitar comes along whose guy-with-an-acoustic-guitar thing makes you hate the genre a little less. Langhorne Slim and William Elliott Whitmore come to mind as two recent examples, and now we can add Lawrence’s Rusty Scott to that list. Scott’s debut full-length, Yonder Goes the Light, is right on the money…
As a teen, Richard Lloyd hung out with Jimi Hendrix, who was teaching guitar lessons to Lloyd’s friend Velvert Turner. Later, Lloyd developed a close friendship with schoolmate and future Wailers guitarist Albert Anderson. Lloyd wasn’t long for high school, dropping out and kicking around from Boston to Los Angeles before returning to New York to found Television with Tom…
If you had to sum up Neil Young’s career in one word, “steadfast” would be a pretty good adjective. From Farm Aid in the 1980s to his scathing look at the Bush era on 2006’s Living With War, Young has always practiced what he protested. Nowadays, the tetchy Mr. Shakey has taken his current cause — green-powered automobiles — to…
As good as some of the songs on Day & Age are, the Killers’ third record seemed to elicit more shrugs than gushes. Perhaps it was the neo-Pet Shop Boys syrup of the first single, “Human,” or the squirrel-pelt shoulder pads that Brandon Flowers wore on Saturday Night Live. Either way, it wasn’t a half-bad album — probably a better…
When Tom Petty sang, You got a heart so big/It could crush this town, he could have been talking about Merle Zuel — in more ways than one. When Zuel, a longtime heart-condition sufferer, got a transplant in February 2007 at St. Luke’s Hospital, his original ticker was about twice the size of the normal human heart, breaking the hospital’s…
Like many rappers in the area, Hyper Sniper seems to take his conceptual cues from Tech N9ne. The cover art of his latest full-length, The Last Living American Patriot, finds the face of the husky white rapper camouflaged with a putrid-looking green substance — a sort of externalized sinus infection. The message: Sniper is sick. His brooding, downcast glare completes…
As William, a taciturn senior who seems to be planning for his final days, veteran character actor and former Elvis Presley bodyguard Red West takes center stage in Goodbye Solo, co-written and directed by Ramin Bahrani. Here, the title character (newcomer Souléymane Sy Savané) is a Senegalese-born taxi driver who cruises the streets of Winston-Salem. Solo gives a ride to…
With Elvis Perkins in Dearland (the album and the band), throwback songsmith Elvis Perkins successfully dodges the dangers of a second-album sinkhole by letting his band help at the wheel. Evolving the singer-songwritery suggestions of his breakthrough debut, Ash Wednesday, In Dearland has a Bob Dylan-and-the-Band feel: rustic, communal and wise. It was even recorded near the Band’s old backwoods…
Matthew McConaughey stars as NYC photographer Connor Mead, who tries to convince his brother that marriage is an oppressive institution. One of the bridesmaids is childhood friend Jenny (Jennifer Garner). Director Mark Waters helms Ghosts of Girlfriends Past like a wedding video shot by a drunk cousin. His task isn’t made any easier with a script by Jon Lucas and…
Though they came to prominence in the first throes of the U.K. punk explosion, Eddie & the Hot Rods have more in common with the hopped-up R&B of British pub rock than the four-on-the-floor squall of punk contemporaries such as the Damned or Stiff Little Fingers. Like a less grimy New York Dolls, the Hot Rods survey a footloose shimmy…
As a big band leader, Brad Cox never wanted to be in the company of totalitarians such as Joseph Stalin. “I want the band to be a return to socialism’s beginnings,” Cox says. That’s why, in 2006, he changed the name of the 14-member ensemble he had formed several years earlier from Brad Cox’s Big Band to the People’s Liberation…
So I was sitting in a coffeehouse last week, trying to read a magazine, when I happened to overhear the woman sitting in back of me discuss, in passionate detail, a meal she had eaten the night before. She described each course in the same way that a friend of mine — a sensualist and a complete roué — talks…
Kansas City photographer Mike Sinclair approaches city parks determined to recognize equal beauty in pastoral landscapes and prosaic scenery. By shooting the easily ignored corners of our public green spaces along with more stylish sites, he suggests how parks shore up a city’s well-being. Sinclair borrows his title from American social history. The City Beautiful movement — out of which…
Bare, the potent new musical at the Unicorn, tells a familiar story — Catholic-school boys struggling with their sexuality — in a familiar form. What’s surprising about it isn’t the turns of its plot or the way, by the end, a tickle of feeling, inspired by the first act, becomes a cascade. It’s that a musical so doggedly conventional can…
Nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2008, Russian actor and director Nikita Mikhalkov’s engrossing 12 is finally in theaters. This revamp of 12 Angry Men takes place in post-communist Moscow. Various sectors of modern Russian society are uniformly represented by late-middle-aged males, with Mikhalkov as the foreman. The workingmen embody Russia’s past; over the course of a…
Charlie Arnot’s dining options are limited today. He keeps an office in a nondescript business complex with few other tenants near Kansas City International Airport, so he can get in and out of town quickly. The restaurants around here are the same as everywhere else in the country — an Arby’s, a Taco Bell, a KFC, a Dairy Queen. People…
In last week’s just-in-time-for-Earth-Day cover story, “Piling On,” staff writer Carolyn Szczepanski dug into the metro’s garbage business and found cause for concern as well as cautious optimism. She also uncovered some pungent local history that wouldn’t fit when we hauled the story to the curb. Nobody likes trash day, of course. But even with bag limits and a confusing…
Dear Readers: As you drinko por Cinco this May 5, please take around this column, listing songs that mariachis will actually, gladly play instead of having to glumly strum through the umpteenth “La Bamba” and “Guantanamera.” The following eclectic choices (and reasoning) came from hundreds submitted by wabs and savvy gabachos; make sure to knock back the Herradura but por…
Title: CHEERLEADING! Authors: Pauline Finberg and Peter Filichia Publisher: Scholastic Date: 1983 Discovered at: Used book store in Winnipeg, Manitoba The cover promises: Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, takes on many forms. Representative quote: “How’s your enunciation? If you have a tendency to say ‘comin’ ’ instead of ‘coming,’ ‘jist’ instead of ‘just,’ and ‘whoosh’ instead of ‘wish,’ it’s time…
Town Without Pity: “Bunch of Teabaggers,” April 23 Tea’d Off Scott Wilson, what race baiting did you encounter at the April 15 tea party? Sure, most in attendance were white and over 30. Does that automatically signal “racist” in your view? Does any and every disagreement with government signify “racism” now that a person of color sits in the Oval…
