Who says dead authors can’t be a good time? OK, Sylvia Plath sticking her head in an oven isn’t funny, but reports of Mark Twain’s death were greatly exaggerated, and Roland Barthes declared the “death” of the “author” while “using” quotation marks. And though no one is going to die (or even “die”) tonight at the Brick (1727 McGee, 816-421-1634),…
Most of the year, fashion models are elegant things of beauty, strutting down runways in impossibly high heels. Not so on Halloween weekend. Fashion Monsters IV: A Nightmare on Mass Street, the annual fall fashion show at Lawrence’s Replay Lounge (946 Massachusetts, 785-749-7676), takes a turn toward the creepy. The event features creations by seven local designers and wares from…
A Nightmare on 31st Street turns Martini Corner into — well, it’s back to the fishnets on the “sexy” end of the “spooky-sexy” Halloween spectrum. Saturday from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m., the Monaco (334 East 31st Street, 816-753-5990) puts on a party including a midnight body-paint fashion show followed by a public costume contest. For more information, see martinicorner.com….
Get into a Mexican spirit by eating some tacos. They come cheap at Jalapeños Mexican Restaurant (6318 Brookside Plaza, 816 523-5462) every Monday. Stuff two corn shells with beef or chicken for the price of one ($2.65 and $2.85, respectively). Wash them down with $1.50 domestic draws. For most people, two tacos are enough to “get you,” according to Jalepeños…
Internationally renowned for her site-specific, multimedia installations, Jessica Stockholder, professor and director of graduate studies in sculpture, Yale School of Art, will be the speaker for the third annual Jerome Nerman Lecture Series Tue., Nov. 2, 7 p.m., 2010 Tags: Jessica Stockholder, Night & Day, Yale School of Art
Quixotic Fusion will be on stage with its full-length performance, Lux Esalare, which tells a mesmerizing story of choices and possibility, with incredible dance, live music, video projections and aerial artistry. Fri., Oct. 29, 8 p.m.; Sat., Oct. 30, 8 p.m., 2010 Tags: Night & Day
The quirkiest, most creative artsy party people in the Crossroads are throwing a Halloween party. This is Whoop Dee Doo, so anything goes, really. But as you figure out what you’re going to wear, know that you won’t see crazier costumes this Halloweekend anywhere else in the city. Fri., Oct. 29, 10 p.m.-3 a.m., 2010 Tags: halloween, Night & Day
Dress up your dog for a costume contest benefiting Olathe Animal Shelter. Entry is $7 per dog in advance or $10 day of show. Sat., Oct. 30, 11 a.m., 2010 Tags: Night & Day, Olathe
Bri Lauterbach, BFA 2008 Printmaking Kansas City Art Institute, pursues a handmade existence, growing her own vegetables, heading a bicycle collective, and reclaiming a condemned house in North Kansas City. Lauterbach translates her daily activities into precise, organized, highly detailed works on paper in pen and pencil featuring theoretical gardens, half built structures, and evocative word play. Additionally, Lauterbach makes…
UMKC Department of Communication Studies and the Westport Regional Business League will present two silent horror film classics. Nosferatu is earliest surviving screen adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel German director F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent horror masterpiece. With VAMPYR, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer’s brilliance at achieving mesmerizing atmosphere and austere, profoundly unsettling imagery was for once applied to the…
Beatles-inspired dance “The Long and Winding Road” opens an evening of magical mixed repertoire performed by Houston Ballet II. Sat., Oct. 30, 8 p.m., 2010 Tags: Houston Ballet, Night & Day, the beatles
During the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon extolled a “silent majority” of older voters who disagreed with protesters. Decades later, there still may be a silent majority consisting of a new generation disturbed and amused by screaming Tea Party participants and bloviating cable news hosts. Today’s younger voters do pay attention to national affairs, provided the news is presented by someone…
Once upon a time, long, long ago, theater was not drab kitchen-sink family dramas or Mamet-like brute realism. It was fantastical. It was carnivalesque. It was theatrical. Commedia dell’Arte, the spectacular stage tradition that flourished in Italy and France from the Renaissance onward, featured outlandish characters, magical settings, elaborate costumes and incredible masks. These days Commedia dell’Arte is rarely performed,…
Tyler Perry’s movie For Colored Girls is based on Ntozake Shange’s play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. Unlike the original play which featured only seven women known by colors performing the collection of 20 poems, the movie has given each of the 20 characters names. Each of the poems deal with intense issues…
In celebration of the Kansas City Art Institute’s 125th Anniversary, three Kansas City-based artists were each invited to create site-specific installations (respectively) within three of the Nerman Museum’s second-floor galleries. Rachel Hayes (fiber 1999) and Miles Neidinger (sculpture 2000) both received BFA degrees from KCAI, while Anne Lindberg was a former assistant professor (1990-99) in the Institute’s Foundations Department. Each…
The Living Room continues its streak of tough dramas with its fourth production, Beirut. Written in 1987, Beirut’s story of plague and dangerous desire is an allegory for the AIDS epidemic. At the time, AIDS was even more than a death sentence; it also meant ostracism. And this subject wasn’t insignificant to the playwright, Alan Bowne. He died of AIDS…
Dear Mexican: I was a history major at the University of Arizona in Tucson, which I believe was part of the Gadsden Purchase, the last piece of old Mexico the U.S. “acquired.” That got me thinking: What was the citizenship status of all Mexicans/gringos who lived in parts of Mexico “acquired” by the United States in that big piece of…
Sometimes success isn’t about changing the game. It’s about mastering the finer details of the hustle. Dutch Newman, a 24-year-old Kansas City rapper, has already conquered the online hustle of social networking. Consider his vitals. Facebook: 2,316 friends. Twitter: 1,531 followers. Then consider that Newman dropped his first album only two weeks ago. “Man, I don’t even know most of…
When local Tea Partiers gathered on Tax Day and went looking for politicians to share their outrage, Kevin Yoder, a state representative who lives in Overland Park, showed up with his fists clenched. Yoder dusted off his Aggrieved Citizen playbook and gave the CommunityAmerica Ballpark crowd what they wanted to hear: “We are being eaten alive by entitlements in this…
When a play is set on Christmas Eve, in Ireland, with a quartet of jolly drunks, one expects the hot buttered rum of forced cheer and the over-rich, half-tasty, half-nauseating eggnog of unearned catharsis. Instead, with Seafarer, the triumphant first joint production of the Unicorn and KC Actors Theatre, what we get is a gulp of potent, exhilarating spirits. Conor…
The little-told story of a small but growing nonviolent opposition movement among rural West Bank Palestinians gets an airing in Julia Bacha’s mostly fair-minded documentary. Budrus tells of one village’s struggle to push back the Israeli security barrier that would uproot its olive trees, raze its cemetery, and cut off contact with the rest of the occupied territories. Using footage…
A very, very loose and highly symbolic adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void is both a lame fusion of stoner lifestyle, sexual fetish and philosophical inquiry, and a technical achievement not easily dismissed. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) is a young, drug-dealing American in Tokyo with an unusually close relationship with his stripper sister, Linda…
Amir Bar-Lev’s assiduous, furious documentary about the Army’s craven coverup of the death, by friendly fire, of former NFL player Pat Tillman in Afghanistan in 2004 — and the exploitation of his corpse for recruitment purposes — is a withering assessment of U.S. military culture. Unlike recent Afghan war doc Restrepo, Bar-Lev’s film feigns no pretense of neutrality. War is…
Fox Searchlight’s Amelia flamed out spectacularly last October, but the studio is trying again to grab awards-season honors with another biopic starring and executive-produced by Hilary Swank. Gone are Amelia’s patrician enunciation and smartly tailored Depression-era trousers. As Conviction’s Betty Anne Waters, a Massachusetts high school dropout and single mom who put herself through law school to exonerate her brother,…
