Atencion, salseros y salseras: The West Side has a new venue for you to show off your enchularia and your siete doble. Coda (1744 Broadway, 816-569-1747) hosts Salsa Night every Wednesday with local dance instructor Howard Carney. Groove and undulate in the Los Angeles, Miami or casino style with all levels of adults (it’s a 21-and-older thing) while indulging in…
Kansas City artist Betsy Barratt’s work might be characterized as outsider art. She filters figures of pinup models and such tattoo subjects as blood-red roses, skulls and gilded scrollwork through a folk artist’s sensibility. Immediate and striking, her archetypal subjects — calendar girls, Wonder Women and virgins Mary, often with ambiguous facial expressions — live within compositions that include text,…
Over six years, the annual Actors Equity Showcase of locally written short plays has grown richer and more unruly. It promises surprises yet has its own traditions. Chief among the latter is the unveiling of a new one-act from Ron Simonian, KC’s champ of low comedy, high concepts and laughs powerful enough to dash inhibitions. This year, Simonian takes on…
The August opening at the Late Show Gallery (1600 Cherry, 816-359-7174) features Rusty Leffel’s photography exhibit, Welcome to L.A., and Christian Simms’ Boys and Toys. “Simms is a graphic artist,” says Late Show owner Tom Deatherage. “He’s done these real hot, contemporary oil paintings of water pistols, missile launchers, hand grenades — toys for boys, basically.” And Leffel’s sepia urban…
Crossroads resident Tyler Coey combines traditional design and painting techniques with contemporary street art and hipster toy design, producing cool dimensional objects illuminated with an edgy, illustrative style. “There will be some designer vinyl,” Coey says. “Also, I’ve got a line of toys coming out for the South American children’s market — kid’s meal toys — so I’m hoping to…
Wouldn’t it be nice if the pace of life were more the speed of Rydell High School and if a chocolate shake during a ride in your convertible was an adequate date? If all you needed to carry with you on your night out was a plastic comb or a red lipstick instead of a BlackBerry, condoms and your maxed-out…
Why pick a specific war? At a certain level, one war-torn, bomb-devastated city is pretty much like the next, varying mostly in matters of climate, culture and local language. The human toll of societal breakdown in wartime is a pageant repeated by countries and experienced by soldiers throughout history. Matthew Eck’s debut novel, The Farther Shore, is a taut, convincing…
At 8:16 a.m. local time on August 6, 1945, the United States made history that no other nation has dared duplicate. At that moment, an Air Force pilot dropped the “Little Boy” nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing 140,000 citizens and scorching a mile of metropolis. Three days later, a second nuclear blast exterminated 70,000 Japanese in…
Using the expanse of land in front of your house to grow vegetables instead of grass is a concept that young people seem to go along with quicker than older folks, says Steve Mann, one of the founders of the KC Food Not Lawns collaborative. Whatever your age, Mann and his partner in environmental activism, Toby Grotz, will sell you…
Round-trip airline tickets from Kansas City to Dublin can run north of $1,000. Instead of visiting the Emerald Isle, you can always head to one of these authentic Irish pubs, where the craic is guaranteed.• O’Malley’s 1842 Pub (500 Welt in Weston, 816-640-5235). About 30 minutes north of KCI, this brewery-bar-restaurant complex offers its own Emerald Lager, Irish Style Bitter…
In 1969, we made good on every impossible notion and harebrained fantasy cooked up by thinkers, dreamers and madmen beginning with, say, H.G. Wells, proceeding through two generations raised on Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials, right up to JFK, who said that, by the end of the 1960s, we’d put a man on the moon. Well, we did it,…
Wednesday nights at the Foundry (424 Westport Road, 816-960-0866) may be one of the best-kept secrets in Westport. Cobra Strike with Martin Bush kicks off at 11 p.m. and lasts until the bar closes at 3 a.m. Local rock scenesters should recognize Bush as half of Audiovox and the frontman for Paper Cities. When he’s wearing his DJ hat, Bush…
Dear Mr. Obama: We know you’ve had some busy days since getting elected — when was it? Back around Christmas? But we think you’ve done a great job. (We thought the Gates thing was stupid, too!) And as a reward for your hard work in the Oval Office, we’ve prepared a special live-music extravaganza just for you. It’s happening Thursday,…
Step two in Francis Ford Coppola’s reinvention as a self-financed, off-Hollywood, personal filmmaker, Tetro — shot in carefully framed widescreen and sumptuous black-and-white chiaroscuro — is a marked advance over the Faustian, time-traveling absurdity Youth Without Youth (2007). Bennie Tetrocini (Alden Ehrenreich), an 18-year-old waiter on a luxury cruise ship, takes shore leave in Buenos Aires, looking for his long-lost…
Nebula must have evaded the truth-in-advertising brigade because there’s nothing nebulous about the group’s new album, Heavy Psych. With influences like Jimi Hendrix, Cream and Black Sabbath, the druggy disc might as well have appeared on the scene the first time we were putting men on the moon. Led by ex-Fu Manchu guitarist Eddie Glass and propelled by former Mondo…
Rare is the band that needs to post a message on its Web site asking, “Does anybody know where I could get some decent glock beaters?” Because when you’ve got two glockenspiel players in your seven-piece indie-punk orchestra, decent glock beaters are really key to the whole operation. Also rare is the band that can put out not just one…
It seems like most folks around these parts who knew Green Day way back when have fond memories of an earnest punk band that was perfectly happy playing for 20 people in podunk house venues. Now that the group is staging Broadway productions and writing concept albums with more bloated movements than Weezer’s red album, it’s reassuring to think that…
Glasvegas, a Scottish four-piece with ale-thick accents and midnight-black sunglasses, has been described as a one-band British invasion. The group is fronted by lead singer James Allan, who resembles a Clash-era Joe Strummer and sings with more than a hint of Elvis Costello’s throaty croon. Glasvegas takes arena-sized pop songs about crappy dads and thorny love through a bath of…
Trailing ill will for having trounced the critical favorite, Waltz With Bashir, for Best Foreign Film at last year’s Oscars, Yôjirô Takita’s stately Japanese movie Departures (a runaway hit at home) enters American theaters at a disadvantage. But this solemn chamber piece — about a depressive, young city cellist (former boy-band singer Masahiro Motoki) who discovers his vocation and his…
The Breeders have undergone several lineup changes over the years, with the only constant being Kim Deal’s membership and her ability to charm and confound in near equal parts. Early on, the Breeders crafted deft, angular pop with spiky, post-punk guitars that churned beneath infectious hooks. The music swayed in a dreamy, half-lidded gait prone to sudden bursts of energy….
Arguably one of the most successful independent hip-hop groups around, Atmosphere — a duo comprising Slug and Ant — has recently gone through significant changes in its overall sound. By adding more live instrumentation to its recordings instead of relying on commonly used samplers, Atmosphere has greatly expanded its music. Slug’s introspective lyrics remain more or less the same, but…
Anyone who has ever worked the front of the house in a busy dining room knows that the restaurant business is a form of theater — sometimes high drama, sometimes opéra bouffe. And staff and customers alike are part of the show. Flo’s Cabaret, which opened in April in the former Bar Natasha space, takes this concept to a new…
It was the best of movies. It was the worst of movies. Which is to say, there’s half of a great movie in Julie & Julia. Because Meryl Streep has already starred in one titled Julia (Fred Zinnemann’s feature in 1977), perhaps it was merely necessary to tack on the “Julie” half to distinguish Nora Ephron’s butter-basted effort from the…
There’s a giant hole in the crotch of Mean Melin’s pants. Seconds ago, he hoisted an imaginary guitar over and behind his head, strumming the invisible strings to Motorhead’s frantic metal anthem “Ace of Spades.” Then he dropped to his knees — and this became a bust-out performance. He’s the last one onstage at the Kansas City regional air guitar…
