Whether it’s made of 50 bamboo flutes and a lone Tuvan throat singer or fashioned from finely tuned silence, the music called minimalism defies easy definition. But whatever its hallmarks — stuttering repetition here, bracing atonality there, emphasis on brevity — one thing is certain: Plenty of this stuff is srlsly awsm. For proof, the NewEar Contemporary Chamber Ensemble offers…
The first Santa-Cali-Gon Days Festival was held in 1940 to celebrate the unique heritage of the City of Independence as the starting point of the Santa Fe, California, and Oregon Trails. A second celebration was held after World War II in 1947. The event would not be held again until 1973. The festival, then called Three Trails Days, featured a…
This new series, which provides a public platform for “internet jockeying,” kicks off with INFOBAHN EPISODE I: SECRET, featuring selections by Dirk Cowan, Lisa Marie Evans, Ari Fish, Miguel Rivera, Paul Shortt and DeAnna Skedel. The evening also features a screening of While We Were Working, a one-hour program of YouTube selections curated by artists Eric Fleischauer (Chicago) and Robert…
In its Lakewood Art Gallery, Truman Medical Center for the Healing Arts will host 21 pieces of the Expressions of Courage traveling art exhibit during the months of September and October. The 21 pieces are chosen by curators from the Society for the Arts in Healthcare for display in a traveling art exhibition comprised of winning entries from the past…
Back when artist and musician Cody Critcheloe was a high-school student in Lewisport, Kentucky, he first conceived Ssion, his decade-long project combining punk music and aesthetics with performance art. Now Critcheloe, a Vice blog contributor and Charlotte Street Award winner, has written and directed Boy, a Ssion feature film debuting tonight at a 7:30 screening at Tivoli Cinemas (4050 Pennsylvania,…
• Juxtapoz-subscribing fans of the lowbrow art movement should be apprised that Mercy Seat Tattoo (210 East 16th Street, 816-421-4833) is one-stop First Friday shopping for regionally inflected pop surrealism and bold, vivid works befitting the gallery space of, well, a tattoo parlor. Tonight from 7 to 10, Chicago painter Ellen Greene opens Baby, Remember My Name, a William T….
At a time when everything seems more expensive, the biggest annual get-down in the metro is as cheap as it ever was. “We’re really proud about the fact that the Kansas City Irish Festival is affordable. We haven’t raised prices in seven years,” says spokeswoman Laren Mahoney. Admission to the three-day celebration at Crown Center Square (2450 Grand), which starts…
Those of you with an all-encompassing aesthetic streak, the kind that applies to both mind and body (we’re looking at you, Descartes), will find yourselves right at home during Anne Garney’s art opening at the new Scott Fitness. Garney’s paintings, city landscapes inspired by fauvism and impressionism, might at first seem out of place among treadmills and weight machines, but…
Celebrate KC’s blue-collar roots from noon to midnight today and Sunday at the ninth-annual Kowtown Custom Greaserama. The Boulevard Drive-In (1051 Merriam Lane, 913-262-2414) plays host to around 50 food, clothing and art vendors and eight musical acts (including a rare appearance by Sister Mary Rotten Crotch) playing punk, rockabilly and country. Get a look at Lily’s Greasy Gallery (a…
It’s rare that a theater is as aptly named as the Fishtank, Corrie Van Ausdal’s new-ish Crossroads performance studio at 1715 Wyandotte, where audiences peer from the street as life unfolds behind the storefront windows. Van Ausdal, alt-clown extraordinaire Heidi Van and the Hybrid Collective are working the windows in a new show, an original follow-up to Hybrid’s excellent indoor…
Spinning one’s wheels isn’t usually a good thing. But when smoke curls out from under them, and people are holding beers in the air and going wild while someone’s car stereo is disrupting your heartbeat — well, that’s fun. Today, area motorheads roll into the Kansas City International Raceway (8201 Noland Road) for a celebration of imported cars, gasoline, testosterone,…
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Web site credits hardworking New York carpenter Peter J. McGuire with founding Labor Day in 1882. He is said to have characterized his fellow workers as those “who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold.” Today, most American workers do their grandeur carving in a figurative way, but whether they…
Leave biker stereotypes in the dust. With a focus on lower cost and better fuel efficiency, newer motorcycle models are smaller and more user-friendly than ever. Gauge your own fuel efficiency at these particularly biker-friendly spots on Tuesday nights. • Hooters (6411 Barry Road, 816-584-8900). Obey speed limits while going north on Interstate 29 to get to the wings and…
Like people, improv scenes are special little snowflakes. Ideas that spring from the collective mind of troupes such as Babel Fish, Tantrum, Improv-Abilities and the Trip Fives are likely to be concepts that nobody ever put together in just the same way. This year’s Kansas City Improv Festival is all about this moment of reckless creation. Starting tonight, the metro’s…
The Kansas City Symphony returns to The Theatre in the Park at Shawnee Mission Park for the 27th consecutive year to present a free Labor Day Weekend concert. The Symphony’s Bruno Walter Associate Conductor Steven Jarvi will lead a program celebrating American music – from West Side Story and South Pacific to Star Trek and Superman. Sat., Sept. 5, 7…
For its September exhibition, Pi Gallery is featuring New works by Kendall Kerr, Nancy Alemifar and Kyle Shepard. Convergence, new works by Kendall Kerr and Nancy Alemifar, will be on the main floor of the gallery. Blue Collar Bikers, photographs by Kyle Shepard, will be on the second floor of the gallery. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Starts: Sept. 5. Continues…
When it came to celebrating Charlie Parker’s birthday on Saturday, August 29, Kansas Citians had two main options: the First-Annual Yardbird Jazz & Film Festival at the American Jazz Museum and, just around the corner, the Bird Lives Festival at the Mutual Musicians Foundation. Many people might have thought that the two events were part of the same festival. But…
Named after one of the wealthiest communities in New Jersey, Mantoloking, the third release from local group the Sexy Accident, is rich in pop intricacies and full of rhyming nuggets. Froggy-voiced frontman Jesse Kates’ heartfelt and slightly gooey lyrics are complemented by jangly guitars and chugging low end, in the vein of ’90s alt-pop acts like Toad the Wet Sprocket…
Mike Judge’s latest is a sequel of sorts to Office Space, the story of what computer programmer Peter Gibbons might have become 10 years after he decided it was no longer enough to clean up someone else’s mess. Joel Reynolds (Jason Bateman) is Peter rewritten as self-made and flourishing, the owner of a modest food-extract manufacturing company he created out…
If you don’t stay sharp, you might miss the best show of the year, namely, Tuesday’s shindig in Lawrence with Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros. One listen to the group’s new disc, Up From Below, and you’ll be awash in good feelings. With a warm, analog-tape sound that speaks to a strong Mamas and Papas influence and positive vibrations…
Portland, Oregon-based the Dandy Warhols are touring in support of the recently issued original version of their 2002 album Welcome to the Monkey House. In 2001, mean old Capitol Records took the original Russell Elavedo-engineered version away and glammed it up with big, meaty synthesizers and mixing work by Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes. It’s actually great. But it wasn’t…
The forthrightly activist but fun-loving documentary The Cove has a natural hero and reformed sinner in Richard O’Barry, a former trainer of dolphins for the popular 1960s television series Flipper, who now spends his days slipping into Japan in silly disguises, getting arrested by undercover police, or being attacked by irate fishermen at the pretty cove where dolphins are culled…
Chrissy Murderbot makes party music, pure and simple. Garnering a growing buzz for his hard-hitting tracks with sick beats, funky hooks and bursts of weirdness, this Kansas City-born, Chicago-based DJ and producer (whose real name is Christopher Shively) is laying out his new self-titled LP in early September. From the screaming vomit-green of the album cover to the eighth-grade text-message…
It wasn’t that long ago that a Blink-182/Weezer double billing seemed as laughable as the Ramones opening for Toto. (Don’t laugh — it really happened.) But time has conspired to bring the reigning kings of So-Cal pop punk and the titans of pro-nerd rock together at last. And based on recent Weezer songs, such as future wedding classics “I’m Your…
