Smug moralizing, leaden irony, Old Testament punishments – yup, it’s Lars von Trier. Oh, and cocks. So many cocks. And vaginas. And whip-welted asses. And grim fucking. And solemn pronouncements about fucking. What else could this be but Nymphomaniac, the Danish writer-director’s visually brilliant, intellectually infuriating four-hour sexual Scheherazade? Well, nothing. Unless you count all the other formally thrilling but…
Mom is dead. The house is filled with acquaintances. So you head to the basement rec room and get high. Seems reasonable. But singing an upbeat pop song about smoking “Pot at a Funeral” — sample lyric: Pot at a funeral might seem unusual but so is today — while playing with an oversized childhood teddy bear and bouncing around…
New York is about to get a package deal. Jonathan Jensen — actor, singer and theater administrator — and his wife, actress Jessica Jensen, are headed east together. The Kauffman Center’s director of patron services has been busy behind the scenes downtown, but he has also kept a foot on the stage and a hand in theater projects. On the…
Local Natives After spending two months opening for Kings of Leon, L.A.’s Local Natives might be relieved to headline its own tour, which kicked off earlier this month. The five-piece specializes in a far more sensitive brand of indie rock, after all, with its three-part harmonies and gentle, washing melodies. Last year’s Hummingbird was a generally pleasing assembly of those…
On Monday, October 21, 2013, Greg Farmer, senior assistant managing editor of The Kansas City Star, placed a rare call to Karen Dillon. He wanted to know when Dillon would be in the office that day. Good reporters are invariably compared with canines: “dogged,” a “pit bull,” a “bulldog.” Dillon belongs to this breed; she’s the kind of journalist whom…
t has been 24 years since the psych-rock band Loop released its third and final album, the classic A Gilded Eternity. Right after Eternity hit the charts, the London foursome — founding lead singer and guitarist Robert Hampson, guitarist Scott Dowson, drummer John Wills and bassist Neil Mackay — abruptly called it quits. There was a simple explanation: The men…
Recognized for his contributions to jazz fusion, guitarist Jerry Hahn has toured with the Fifth Dimension, and recorded with Paul Simon and jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton. These days, Hahn can be heard Sunday nights in the new downstairs listening room at Green Lady Lounge. From an intimate red-draped stage with exquisite sound, you find yourself drawn in by his playing…
It’s 6:30 on a Sunday evening, and Various Blonde’s Josh Allen is a half-hour late to our interview. I don’t mind. We’re meeting at the Black & Gold Tavern, where there’s plenty of beer. Allen, who works as a bartender, is probably used to keeping Sundays to himself. Certainly he’s used to keeping Various Blonde to himself. Allen very much…
It started with a ghost. Charlotte Street curator-in-residence Danny Orendorff divined the subject for his latest exhibition, The Stench of Rotting Flowers, from a haunting photograph of a now-deceased glamour-puss. The photograph in question, Peter Hujar’s haunting “Candy Darling on Her Deathbed,” captures one of Andy Warhol’s superstars posing in her hospital bed, facing death with flowers and flawless lipstick….
“It sounds so leisurely,” Mary Roach says. “Like sailing down the Danube – a picturesque adventure.” The journey she’s telling me about isn’t a river cruise, though, but a float trip down the alimentary canal. That’s the subject of the author’s most recent book, Gulp, newly issued in softcover. It’s the word canal that causes confusion, she says. That anatomical…
Tuesday morning’s Kansas City Terminal Advisory Group meeting cleared up one thing: The appointed task force studying the future of KCI will make an official recommendation after a volley of contradictory news reports. More than a week after the Kansas City Business Journal quoted KTAG co-chairman Bob Berkebile saying the group didn’t have enough information to make a specific recommendation, the other…
For more than three decades, the hotel formerly known as the Hyatt Regency Kansas City had three popular dining rooms for its hotel guests and local patrons: a classy, revolving venue called Skies; the stylish Peppercorn Duck Club; and the mezzanine-level Terrace restaurant (which had, in the early 1980s, the most popular Sunday brunch in the metro). When the Hyatt…
Lick it up. Kiss, a rock group with an enthusiasm for money that borders on the grotesque, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame earlier this month. That should help soften the blow from the cancellation, two years ago, of Gene Simmons’ despicable and fake reality TV show about his family. For Kansas Citians, there’s a new…
The much-awaited Westport cocktail lounge created by popular local bartender Beau Williams and his wife, Keely Edgington, Julep Cocktail Club, officially opens at 5 p.m. Friday, April 25, at 4141 Pennsylvania – the entrance actually faces Archibald Street – around the corner from Port Fonda. The 90-seat lounge (the venue’s capacity is 140 people, Edgington says, “so there’s plenty of standing room”)…
ZZ Top first appeared in Kansas City in 1975, stopping at Memorial Hall in Kansas City, Kansas. Since then, the famously bearded band, responsible for more classic-rock hits than you may even know are theirs, have kept the KC area on their regular list of stops, even once playing at Allen Fieldhouse in Lawrence. The perennially touring band’s 2014 appearance…
Last night, The Pitch reported that two of Kansas City’s more iconoclastic chefs, Ray “Pete” Peterman and Kelli Daniels, had taken new jobs in the metro. Peterman is taking a break from running a full-service restaurant’s kitchen (he was last at Blue Grotto in Brookside) and will be replacing baker Jason Provo as the head of Baked in Kansas City’s…
A good rule of thumb when following state government holds that if some piece of legislative action from a low-profile lawmaker seems like a publicity stunt, it probably is. That hypothesis has proven out a number of times this year, starting with Kansas state Rep. Charles Macheers’ truncated effort at passing pro-discrimination legislation in Kansas to Missouri state Sen. Wayne Wallingford’s attempt to…
Those who had the opportunity to see the Beatles perform back in the ’60s were extremely fortunate – but between the screaming of the legions of fans and inadequate stage sound equipment, the experience surely left a lot to be desired. Have you ever tried watching the Shea Stadium performance? The nonstop screaming of the crowd makes it nearly unbearable…
Today’s topic: Urinating. Pee Party is an irregular column in which we investigate restrooms around town. Some people out there – repugnant snobs, I call them; preposterous fools, I call them! – ghettoize Town Topic to the ranks of “drunk food.” But Town Topic is to be enjoyed all day, in both sobriety and intoxication. Why else would it be…
You might have guessed that Swedish metal band Ghost – or Ghost B.C., as it is now known in this country – didn’t get popular by handing out lollipops and kissing babies. The six-piece is led by pope-parodying Papa Emeritus II, who prefers gothic garb and skeletal makeup to a white sheet. The Papa leads an order of five Nameless…
Two of Kansas City’s more peripatetic chefs, Ray “Pete” Peterman and Kelli Daniels, have recently started new jobs in the metro: Peterman, who took over the pizza kitchen at the Blue Grotto in Brookside in January, has been hired as the chief bread baker for the three-month-old bakery and restaurant, Baked in Kansas City at 706 Westport Road. He completed his job…
This year, we wanted to focus on capturing Record Store Day around Lawrence and Kansas City. We sent writers to Love Garden Sounds, Mills Record Company and Vinyl Renaissance. If you didn’t make it out, here’s your chance to live vicariously. Mills Record Company owner Judy Mills described her Record Store Day parking-lot concert as “all my favorite bands playing a show I…
