Kaw Valley Arts and Humanities is partnering with the United Way of Wyandotte County to sponsor a holiday art sale. Support and Celebrate: the Art and Soul of the Community brings thirty Metropolitan Kansas City artists/artisans together to provide four hours of browsing, shopping, music and holiday hors d’oeuvres. Fri., Nov. 13, 4-8 p.m., 2009 Tags: Kansas City, Night &…
Featuring all original musical performances by Alacartoona and the acting (and singing) talents of Andy Garrison, Vi Tran and Katie Gilchrist, Bought and Souled is a comedic exploration of the relationship between money and art. What would you do with a million dollars? What would you do for a million dollars? When Alacartoona tangles with a devilish agent and his…
Aaron Sutton’s latest solo art exhibit, As Above So Below, features two years of created artwork that portrays the concept of everything that exists in space is what we hold within ourselves and everything that we hold within ourselves exists in space. Nov. 13-Jan. 5, 2009 Tags: Aaron Sutton, Night & Day
Feature: “Historian in Chief,” October 29 History’s Historians Perhaps it was just a sloppy headline, but to say one person can “reshape” the rich heritage of the black experience in Kansas City does those who have spent a lifetime preserving that heritage a grave disservice. Thanks to people such as Jane Flynn, who, with the Historic Kansas City Foundation, saved…
On The Way They Make Me Feel, Kansas City singer Angela Hagenbach puts her vocal burnish on the songs of legendary composers Michel Legrand, Johnny Mandel and the late Henry Mancini. Hagenbach’s dark, sultry voice is perfect for this material, 11 songs drenched in a romantic vibe with touches of 1960s-styled nightclub jazz, dappled with Hagenbach’s trademark Brazilian flourishes. The…
Atlanta-based electronic trio Evol Intent traverses jagged, stuttering IDM (think Aphex Twin), trancey ambient pulses that waver between pretty and dark, and dance-floor breakbeats that race across an array of vocal samples and raps. It’s a surprisingly vital blend that fuels Intent’s full-length debut, Era of Diversion. It’s all represented here: repetitive, rave-inspired mixes, such as the nearly six-minute “Odd…
When John Nolan’s band, Straylight Run, plays in Lawrence, you can pretty much count on an enthusiastic young crowd, and many will know the words to all of the songs. Probably not nearly as many know that he lives just down the street, having relocated from Long Island, New York, to Lawrence with his Kansas-rooted wife, Camille. Nolan is perfectly…
If record stores were still thriving, the King Khan & BBQ Show would be about the hottest thing since the White Stripes. But this duo’s primal, savage garage rock is stuff that emanates from two guys who collect Velvet Underground, Sonics, Zombies, Jon Spencer, and Flat Duo Jets records like they’re going out of style (which they’re obviously not). Downloading the…
Those who thought the Mars Volta was complex and strange will probably feel even more challenged by Zechs Marquise. Formed in 2003 by two brothers of Mars Volta co-founder Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and rounded out by two childhood friends, Zechs Marquise walks a similarly impressionistic path — unsurprising, considering that drummer Marcel Rodriguez-Lopez also plays percussion in the Mars Volta. Marcel…
It’s not often that a hip-hop album begins with a tortured plea to a higher power. Yet such is the anomalous case on “Show Me a God,” the first track on K.O.D., Tech N9ne’s newest album. Not that the opening song, or any of the 23 tracks on the darkly visceral album, will surprise Tech’s massive fanbase. Kansas City’s most…
The debut album from Kansas City band Kick Kick has much the same appeal as a vending-machine novelty purchased for a quarter outside a supermarket: sparkly, weird and cheap but strangely cherishable. Kick Kick has recently gained local notoriety for its over-the-top and frequently awkward performances. (The band’s interpretive dancer and occasional singer, “Flashy Thundercat,” embodies the capsule-toy aesthetic a…
Seven months after its theatrical release in the U.K. and two months after its DVD debut there, Pirate Radio washes ashore with most of its better bits excised. Paying homage to the renegade DJs spinning rock and roll from ships anchored in the North Sea in the 1960s, writer-director Richard Curtis now has a hodgepodge of scenes that amount to…
We call it soccer, but for the Brits, it’s football and it’s damn serious business. From 1968 to 1974, Brian Clough (Michael Sheen), a manager/coach from the tiny town of Derby, and his assistant manager, Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall), turned a third-rate club into a division champ. That success wasn’t nearly as sweet as getting to take over Leeds United,…
Completing his multi-film vendetta against the world’s tourist trade, German-born director Roland Emmerich sends the mother of all storms to level the Washington Monument, the Eiffel Tower and a priest-filled Vatican City, among other locales, in his newest end-times thriller, 2012. From Independence Day (1996) to The Day After Tomorrow (2004), taking down famous landmarks has become Emmerich’s cinematic signature,…
A couple of weeks ago, Jeremy Lillig, director of marketing and public relations for the local Friends of Chamber Music, contacted me to see if I had any interest in talking to the chief architect of the Music Genome Project, which is the driving force behind Pandora Radio. The Friends of Chamber Music was bringing in Nolan Gasser to give…
On a recent Thursday night in midtown, a bearded and bespectacled Jimmy Fitzner sits down in a creaky wooden chair with his guitar. The 27-year-old is the last to arrive but the first to get down to business, if you can even call it that. “I’m pretty sure that this is not a song, but it might be a song,”…
I recently stopped in to take a look at Fran’s Classic Diner, the new 24-hour restaurant in the Power & Light District, and I decided it’s really a diner in name only. It looks much more like a spiffy 1960s airport coffee shop — that’s actually part of its charm — complete with porthole windows peeking into the kitchen. The…
A few alternate titles come to mind for Without Place — Without Time — Without Body, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s tantalizing but ultimately inert rice-and-pollen meditation by the hermitic German minimalist Wolfgang Laib. Perhaps Without Spoon — Without Fork — Without Butter, for example, or maybe Economies of Scale. Or: Without Laib. The Nelson-Atkins’ exhibition notes read, “In the…
Stiff and brilliant, studded with the greatest of poetry and names that are to history what stars are to the heavens, Murder in the Cathedral is a masterpiece as curious as it is great. T.S. Eliot’s retelling of the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket, it’s full of chanting, sermons and ancient ritual steeped in mystery. Kind of like Mass. That’s…
A mobile-home park and a cemetery count as landmarks in Blue Summit, Missouri, an unincorporated pocket of Jackson County between Kansas City and Independence. A community of 700, Blue Summit relies on volunteers for fire protection. The concept of a volunteer fire department conjures images of neighbors putting down dinner forks and racing out the door at siren’s call. The…
Dear Mexican: Whenever I see an ad for a Mexican ramera, they always describe themselves as “spicy.” Are Mexican women hiding habañeros in their panochas? Concha Curious Dear Gabacho: “I wish I could say that ‘Mexican Spitfire’ Lupe Vélez was to blame for the ‘spicy’ epithet so often associated with Mexican femme pulchritude,” says William Nericcio, author of Tex(t)-Mex: Seductive…
Victorians invented table tennis as an after-dinner entertainment. Really. The net was a standing line of books on a dining table, and they called it “whiff-whaff.” It was a phenomenon, and it was a game for the gentry. Whiff-whaff Wimbledon had to be played in whiff-whaff whites (kidding … maybe). Thankfully, the United States, the engine of democracy that it…
Let’s Paint TV is what happens when untreated hyperactivity and hyper-creativity collide and form a supernova of high-octane artistry, multitasking and unscripted entertainment. The host of the live Internet TV show, Los Angeles artist and YouTuber John Kilduff, paints, blends drinks, teaches about haircuts, plays the ukulele and takes poorly screened phone calls simultaneously while wearing a suit and running…
As part of its exhibit Saving the Little Brown Monkey: The True Wartime Escape of Margret and H.A. Rey, local celebrities read from Curious George books tonight at the Jewish Community Center. Get there early to look at the exhibit in the center’s art gallery, which includes watercolors and archival materials chronicling the mischievous George and his creators’ flight from…
