I know some of you have very strong opinions about who should be the mayor of McDonald’s. And I’m not talking about those among you who are addicted to FourSquare and informing the rest of us that you are nailing down a Quarter Pounder, again. I’m referring to the online movement, Bringbackthemayor.com, likely started by someone in Generation X, that…
The Black Lips are coming to town, folks, which can only mean one thing: you’re about to get sprayed with beer, spit, silly string and (hopefully) vomit if you’re anywhere near the Beaumont’s stage on April 26. The Lips are widely known for its disgustingly awesome live shows, which can (and have) included stripping, spitting, and drinking one’s own piss…
The Kansas City Star reports that Off the Vine Design & Cellar (4949 W. 119th St.) in Overland Park will close at the end of the month. The wine shop and design store opened in the Hawthorne Plaza shopping center three years ago. The store’s wine inventory is 50 percent off, and the home-decor items are 50 to 75 percent…
Hearts of Darkness and Rex Hobart and the Misery Boys team up for a genre-melding bill on Saturday night at Davey’s Uptown. Here’s a video of local MC and Hearts of Darkness frontman Les Izmore spouting some verse out the window of someone’s loft. Why? “Some key people asked me to start doing them again,” Izmore says. “Plus, I have…
I’ve wasted quite a few words in the last few months trying to say what Chris Jones, one of the best magazine journalists working today, summed up in one little declaration on Monday, writing about The Kansas City Star’s departed sports columnist: “Jason Whitlock has no soul.” He went on from there, trying his best to steer aspiring writers away…
Two of country music’s finest are coming to town on Thursday, March 10. On the heels of receiving Kennedy Center Honors this past December alongside Paul McCartney, Oprah Winfrey, composer Jerry Herman, and dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones, Haggard is planning on recording an album with Kristofferson and Willie Nelson called The Musketeers. “I’m sure if we’re healthy and…
Forgive us for this brief dunk into Entertainment Tonight territory, but according to blog Celebitchy.com, Kirstie Alley hauled her saddlebags to Wichita, Kansas, for a new weight-loss regimen. Which is sort of like going to Las Vegas to get sober, but to each her own. According to a KWCH12 Eyewitness News story, Alley’s sister teaches Zumba in Wichita and suggested…
Festering mounds of uncollected trash. Potholes big enough to swallow a Suburban. Broad-daylight purse snatchings with no cops in sight. These are the scenes that Kansas City, Missouri, leaders want to have haunting the minds of voters come April 5, when an election will determine the fate of the city’s annual allowance: the earnings tax. The “e-tax,” which collects 1…
This latest American movie with demonic possession as a major theme (at least a dozen have been widely released in half as many years), The Rite introduces the exorcist, Father Lucas (Anthony Hopkins), as a workaday healer tending to the daily needs of Roman families. The plot is propelled by Lucas’ initiation of a young American apostate, Michael (Colin O’Donoghue),…
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s first film since he split from screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga — with whom he created Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel — stays in one place (Barcelona) and follows one main character (Javier Bardem’s Uxbal) in a linear storyline. Beyond dying of prostate cancer, Uxbal must contend with a bipolar wife who’s sleeping with his brother; serve as…
This Mike Leigh film concerns a year in the life of Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), the happiest post-middle-aged married couple in the whole of the London suburbs. Unfolding in four episodes pegged to the seasons, the arc of Another Year covers the widening gulf between Tom and Gerri’s contentment and the increasingly desperation of their family and…
When the MPAA handed Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine an NC-17 rating in the fall, cynics suggested that the so-called “kiss of death” was better publicity for the gently experimental marriage drama than anything that distributor Harvey Weinstein could buy. The rating was downgraded to an R, without any cuts, after Weinstein reportedly appeared in front of the appeals board. But…
Infected Mushroom, an Israeli psy-trance group now based in Los Angeles and fronted by Amit Duvedevani and Erez Eisen, is nothing if not prolific. Since forming in 1996, IM has dropped seven albums, appeared on more than three-dozen compilations, and rocked clubs from Moscow to Milan. The darkly rhythmic mix of trance and phat beats issued so far is the…
Langhorne Slim’s love affair with Lawrence is now several years old, but the honeymoon isn’t over. The folk troubadour stops through local venues at least once a year, but his tent-revival fervor never lessens. Slim’s lighthearted acoustic tunes hearken back to the joyful optimism and frank sorrow of 1960s and ’70s folk acts. On his latest release, 2009’s Be Set…
Free-form and hardcore come together in Lawrence’s mainstay one-man band This Is My Condition. Craig Comstock, who’s been playing on the local scene as a solo act since 2003, has fashioned his own brand of indie rawcore, which is noisy as hell. With drums, pedals and the occasional addition of an improv saxophonist, Comstock wrenches a sound from his instruments…
Bacon Shoe walks the very fine line between parody and insult. (And the group does it in costume, too, including a pair of — well, never mind.) This weirdo troupe is among the most absurd local acts ever to hit a stage. The art-performance hip-hop trio — composed of an MC, who waxes unpoetic about sex, and two cohorts revealed…
When a friend of mine heard that local restaurateurs James Westphal and Mark Kelpe — creators of McCoy’s Public House and the Foundry, among others — planned to change the concept of One80, their four-year-old restaurant, he knew what to name the new place. “Since it used to be a clothing store called Natural Wear,” he said, “it should be…
Dear Mexican: A few years ago, I moved to Tucson. In said city, I noticed that there were little piles of stuff accumulated on the medians of the main roads. It looks like Dia de la Muertos paraphernalia — I’m not so gringo as to not know what’s up. These little piles of beads are obviously memorials to deceased family…
When asked about his body of work, Lou Reed once replied that he had been rewriting the same song for a long time. “Except my bullshit is worth most people’s diamonds,” the legend famously qualified. The search for the same intuitive understanding of artistic reinvention is at the core of the unfolding story of Kansas City’s O, Giant Man. Chris…
In a basic gray T-shirt, khakis and combat boots, the very fit and close-cropped Marc Wolf could pass for an off-duty military man himself. His stance is alert but at ease, his eyes watchful and luminous — the eyes of a listener. For three years Wolf listened to 200 people on both sides of the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t…
UPDATE January 24, 9:05PM: Here’s another video from Mac, since his last one was taken down from YouTube for showing an illustration of a nipple. Check it out after the jump.Viral hounds, you’ve probably already seen this video, in which a “pale kid” — his name is George Watsky — raps, well, fast. Here’s what PopEater says about the kid:…
