After seven years of planning and construction, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art opens its new American Indian galleries today. Among the 200 or so pieces that will be on display are nearly three dozen objects — masks, totem poles and textiles among them — donated by Morton and Estelle Sosland. The Soslands have deep ties to the museum; they also…
Let’s face it. In this part of the country, The Wizard of Oz is played out. Yeah, yeah, yeah — L. Frank Baum wrote a great story, and MGM filmed it beautifully. But if we must endure one more “Oh, you’re not in Kansas anymore, ha ha!” from a coastal schmuck (who doesn’t know the difference between Kansas and Missouri),…
With a résumé that includes newspapers in Philadelphia, San Jose and Oakland, journalist Steve Lopez had street cred well before Robert Downey Jr. portrayed a liberties-taken version of him onscreen. Since May 2001, the Los Angeles Times columnist has long demonstrated a knack for unearthing stories far off the beaten paths of greater Los Angeles. He is best known, however,…
Nonviolent demonstrators — 70,000 of them — holding only candles against soldiers with machine guns and tanks? That’s just crazy enough that it might work. And it did in Leipzig, where East German authorities had expected to quash the rising freedom movement but soon realized that the socialist GDR regime was being very politely shown the door. To celebrate the…
Although the show seems very silly and light by modern standards, Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera H.M.S. Pinafore was the long-running Cats or Phantom of the Opera of its day, lasting for more than 570 performances after its opening in 1878. The rollicking romance — about a poor sailor in love with the captain’s daughter — has never lost favor…
As the years go on and the canon of rock and roll expands, some shadows grow longer and others altogether disappear. And yet the harmonies that Art Garfunkel created as part of Simon and Garfunkel have endured, and it’s rare to see the duo’s status as important artists questioned. Songs such as “The Boxer,” “Mrs. Robinson” and “The Sound of…
Realizing that he had only scratched the surface in his 2005 book, The Areas of My Expertise — notwithstanding the most comprehensive list of hobo names ever assembled — The Daily Show Resident Expert John Hodgman quickly commenced work on its follow-up, 2008’s More Information Than You Require. At last, the world’s collected knowledge is available to us in two…
Nothing spells ferocity like genetics. Those who agree should head to Lawrence tonight. At 7:30 p.m., the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange will use movement, video and soundscape to explore science. The multimedia dance event, Ferocious Beauty: Genome, will leap across the research frontier at the Lied Center of Kansas (1600 Stewart, 785-864-2787) with choreography by award-winning Lerman, who worked with…
A 1960s revolutionary, an expert on John Brown and a University of Kansas economics professor will chew on an important political question today: Is violence more effective for the right than the left? Their perspectives are important. As a leader of Students for a Democratic Society and the Weathermen, activist Mark Rudd sought social reform by any means necessary, but…
Rife with corporate restaurants, highway roadhouses and mom-and-pop dive bars, Independence has few entertainment options for the young, local rock-and-roll set. Enter Damage Control (815 North Noland Road in Independence, 816-461-1117), a strip-mall saloon that caters to those who want loud, live music and cheap beer at night, plus lunch and $2 happy-hour specials during the day. Occupying the same…
When frog noises, a multi-perspective video about an eclipse and a famous cellist playing a 220-year-old instrument all converge in one place, the result is either a cacophonous disaster or a delight for the senses. Count on the latter at ArtSounds most recent inter-art mash-up, called Intermedia. From 7:30 to 8:30 tonight, in the Epperson Auditorium in Vanderslice Hall (4415…
From the Ground Up is a solo exhibition featuring new large-scale sculpture by Kansas-based artist Mark Cowardin. This two-month showing opens with a public reception from 2-4pm. The artist will take part in a casual discussion starting at 3 p.m. Nov. 8-Jan. 3, 2009 Tags: kansas, Night & Day
VISAGE MACABRE: an aesthetically pleasing event with high standards of fashion and art. Fabulous and fresh emerging fashions are combined with dark and distorted mask sculpture, interweaving human with animal forms into the decorative stylings of couture. Local designers Melissa Birdsong, Nataliya Meyer, and Halliday Bertram will present their new lines with masked models. Masks by Bissex, Storck, Werner &…
Though it began as an afterthought, the gallery at 1819 Central has attracted some impressive artists in just four months of existence. Displayed so far: photographer Lisa Law; screen printer Jeff Wood and painter George Frayne. Coming soon: the digital art of Mark Mothersbaugh. The thread that ties these artists together is music. Mothersbaugh, scheduled for an exhibition and video…
Just over a year ago, friends of musician Abigail Henderson rallied to help her defray the cost of the expensive cancer treatments she was undergoing. And in true Kansas City fashion, that first benefit show, called Apocalypse Meow, rocked. Now Henderson is cancer-free, and it’s time for another round of musical fundraising. Taking place Saturday at Crosstown Station with a…
For those who doubt that a receding hairline and a beer gut can be sexy, Har Mar Superstar has something to show you. The brief-baring, Los Angeles-based artist otherwise known as Sean Tillmann seems to further hone his outrageously delicious groove with each album, and his fourth full-length, Dark Touches, may be his best one yet. There aren’t too many…
Adulthood is a dumb condition that affects way too many people in today’s world. That’s a fact that Art Brut is well aware of, and the British band is taking a strong offense against it. The group’s latest salvo is Art Brut vs. Satan, another batch of ridiculously catchy songs about music, girls, drinking too much and arrested development’s other…
Sure, Dirty Projectors may look like a pretentious NYC art-pop band but, well, it pretty much is. However, based on the band’s latest release, the enlarged ego that frontman Dave Longstreth displays in interviews is totally deserved. Bitte Orca is really fucking good. There’s an African pop influence in the guitar lines; an R&B groove in the drums and vocals…
Calvin Broadus, popularly known as Snoop Dogg, was recently named creative chairman of Priority Records. The appointment marks the continued evolution of the veteran rap artist whom many view as the progenitor of gangster rap, a hip-hop subgenre that has dominated popular music for more than a decade. The multi-platinum rapper, who once faced charges related to a drive-by shooting…
It’s really saying something to call 20009 (say it “two-thousand-ousand-nine”) Drakkar Sauna’s weirdest work to date. For the past six years or so, Wallace Cochran and Jeff Stolz have perfected a merry strangeness while singing rattly, circus-wagon folk songs about bears, spears, wolf tits and obscure historical figures such as would-have-been president-napper John Surrat (on 2006’s Jabraham Lincoln). The duo…
Trampled Under Foot siblings Nick, Kris and Danielle Schnebelen lend their considerable blues talents as Rick Patterson’s backup band on Beat a Demon. But it’s Patterson’s sharp-toned blues-guitar playing that catches the ear here. His vocals are fine; they’re pretty much your standard baritone blues with growls that you hear in the bars. The songs work, too — basic blues…
In her broad outlines, Claireece Precious Jones, the central figure of director Lee Daniels’ Precious, risks sounding like the epitome of ghetto cliché: an obese, illiterate 16-year-old; physically and psychologically abused by her mother; repeatedly raped by her father. Based on the 1996 best-seller Push by African-American poet Sapphire, Daniels’ film adopts an aesthetic that is often more grotesque than…
This documentary about the virtues of biofuel relies heavily on the life of director-evangelist-narrator Joshua Tickell. Born in Australia, Tickell moved as a boy to Louisiana’s “cancer alley,” where gasoline refineries regularly befoul the bayous with accidentally-on-purpose spills. Or so the class-action lawyers tell Tickell. There’s not a single (even moderately) dissenting voice in Fuel; you’re either on the biodiesel…
Anne Fontaine’s Coco Before Chanel gives us belle époque Coco. It opens in 1893 with a grim scene of the 10-year-old waif and her sister unceremoniously dumped at an orphanage, and it ends around World War I, a few years before the Chanel empire is launched. The Coco of Fontaine’s project, adequately performed by Audrey Tautou, dramatizes Chanel’s most fundamental…
