Arts & Entertainment >>

• Best Free Entertainment
  Troost Movies
  The best things about seeing movies at the drive-in are sprawling out on a lawn chair or truck bed, and the fact that you get to enjoy summer nights instead of spending them in over-air-conditioned multiplexes. This summer, that happened at numerous spots throughout the city as grassroots... More >>
• Best Purveyors of Cheer
  Rah! Booty
  If you've ever heard cheerleaders root for "equestrian masturbation," you've undoubtedly witnessed the spectacle that is Rah! Booty. The words to this particular cheer? I straddle [clap clap clap] The saddle [clap clap clap] ... Then the squad bursts into song -- to the tune of the Beach Boys'... More >>
• Best Theater Experiment
  Furies
  In a forty-minute melange of sights, sounds and words, Michael Andrew Smith, Heidi Van Middlesworth and Katie Gilchrist offered a theatrical performance piece that could have come from the vaults of Yoko Ono in her Fluxus period of the 1960s. It was hypnotic watching these three talents pull... More >>
• Best Installation
  Happiness by Haegeen Kim
  Last spring, former Kansas City artist Haegeen Kim covered the entire floor of a room in the Urban Culture Project's Bank Gallery (basically an empty storefront at 11th Street and Baltimore) with Happiness, a sculpture composed of hundreds of Day-Glo, Fruit Loop-colored paper rings. The... More >>
• Best Violence
  A Clockwork Orange, presented by Mind's Eye at Just Off Broadway
  We know: No violence is probably deserving of a "best of." Still, think of how, with Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese dipped his brush into the blood, semen and spit of New York City streets and devised a masterpiece of American alienation. The Mind's Eye production of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork... More >>
• Best Painting Show
  Midwest Narratives by Bruce Erikson
  Baroque artists such as Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi were the cinematographers of their day, using dramatic shadows and light within a composition to help tell a story. Four hundred years later, Bruce Erikson, a painter and former professor of art at Washington University in St. Louis,... More >>
• Best Use of Art in a Play
  The Shape of Things at the Unicorn Theatre
  In Neil LaBute's pungent black comedy The Shape of Things, which the Unicorn mounted last fall, an ambitious art student descends into a graduate thesis from hell -- at least for her boyfriend, who, unbeknownst to him, becomes her art piece. If postmodern artists can have themselves shot in the... More >>
• Best Group Show
  Is/Was
  Like the before-and-after pictures in a weight-loss advertisement, Joseph Nease Gallery's Is/Was documented a transformation in two steps. The show paired a current piece from each exhibitor with an artwork created five years ago. Some artists' work was barely recognizable -- Susan White's... More >>
• Best Debut
  Steven Harlan
  According to his sketchy bio, Steven Harlan saw a Late Night Theatre show once upon a time and thought he might try experiencing the lunacy from the other side of the footlights. By the time he found himself on stage this past May, playing John Ritter's Jack character from Three's Company,... More >>
• Best Folk Artist
  Jennifer Field
  Jennifer Field, who considers herself a self-taught folk artist, creates collages of landscapes and abstractions by riveting together scraps of metal from old cookie tins. Her otherworldly artwork is inspired by visions she receives while meditating, which she calls "snapshots of the inner... More >>
• Best Local Writer
  Robert Stewart
  Tall, lanky, low-key Robert Stewart is a mass of contradictions: He teaches professional writing at the University of Missouri-Kansas City but doesn't consider himself a snooty scholar (the son of a St. Louis plumber, he once worked as a plumber's assistant himself); he's proud of his... More >>
• Best Artist
  Dylan Mortimer
  Dylan Mortimer uses the basic graphic vocabulary found on signs and in instruction manuals to tackle complex issues of faith and religion. The absurd notion that such a simplification is even possible makes his work funny, allowing believers as well as nonbelievers a way to appreciate work with... More >>
• Best Art Exhibit
  Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
  In the 1830s, American landscape artist Thomas Cole created a series he called The Course of Empire, five paintings detailing the story of a civilization's rise and its eventual demise because of pride and corruption. Inspired by Cole, Jean Lowe paints landscapes following the development of... More >>
• Best Fliers
  DJG Design
  Danny J. Gibson is DJG Design. He collects things -- all kinds of things -- but mostly trash. Not trash as in kitschy stuff at yard sales, and not trash as in the carton that used to hold the milk he finished off this morning with his cereal. Trash as in stuff in trash cans. He's a janitor with... More >>
• Best Alter ego
  Kelley Seda's "Mo"
  Local comic-book artist Kelley Seda has a little secret. When she's not Kelley, author and illustrator of the fabulous Rare Creature series, she's Mo, author and illustrator of a strip called "Chortles." We mention this because people should know that when they've run out of precious yet cynical... More >>
• Best Weekend to Get Grossed Out
  September 5-7
  The early fall weekend of September 5-7 was jam-packed with fun things to do, but somehow it all amounted to one gross-out session after another. First there was the Chucky Lou AV Club-sponsored Sleaze Fest at Boulevard Drive-In, which screened old, schlocky movies with subjects such as killer... More >>
• Best Film Festival
  Halfway to Hollywood
  Honestly, what other festival in town is going to bring you silent, black-and-white, erotic short films? That bold move alone would have been enough to win our endorsement. But it wasn't enough for festival coordinators, who also brought special-effects gurus Ray Harryhausen (Jason and the... More >>
• Best Temporary Public Art Sculpture
  "Dielectric Screen," by Derek Porter Studios
  During its four-year run, the annual Avenue of the Arts temporary sculpture exhibition has been hit-and-miss. Some of the works have been mind-blowing; others have blown chunks. But every year, there's been at least one piece that's made the whole exercise worthwhile. This year's champ was... More >>
• Best Unintentionally Perfect Timing for a Film Screening
  Schmelvis, March 23 at the Jewish Film Festival
  When Jewish Film Festival organizers scheduled their event for March, nobody knew that a war with Iraq would have just begun. And even if someone had considered that possibility, it is unlikely that Schmelvis: In Search of the King's Jewish Roots would have struck anyone as globally significant.... More >>
• Best Reading by an Author We Want to Hang Out With
  Alexandra Fuller
  Alexandra Fuller is downright charming. That is the main thing we learned when she read from her autobiographical new book, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. The book is about Fuller's childhood in Africa, where her parents -- drunken Brits who clung to their white supremacy in the face of... More >>
• Best Local Anthology
  Show and Tell by the Comics Creators Network
  As a follow-up to Sequence, the four-gallery sequential-art extravaganza that took the West Bottoms by storm in May, the Comics Creators Network (under the direction of Mark Stinson) set about making a print anthology of the work included in the exhibit -- including a few extras by other... More >>
• Best Special Effects
  A Scarrie Carrie Christmas Carol
  The apocalyptic prom scene in Brian De Palma's Carrie literally brought the house down around the title heroine and all her heartless tormenters. Ditto the recreation of the danse macabre in Late Night Theatre's A Scarrie Carrie Christmas Carol. On a budget stretched as tight as Joan Rivers'... More >>
• Best Use of Play in their Art
  Schoolhouse Rock Live Too!
  With Schoolhouse Rock Live Too! last April, set designer and director Ron Megee filled the Coterie space with every conceivable sliver of pop culture and filled his actors with an infectious amount of levity. Child psychologists (good ones, anyway) will tell you that play is for play's sake --... More >>
• Best Sex
  The Vagina Monologues
  Eve Ensler's HBO version of her landmark theatrical piece The Vagina Monologues captured the variety and scope of the tales therein but came off as a bit of grandstanding. Proving it benefits immensely from a cast of sharp actresses, Theater League's production at the Folly in May was the real... More >>
• Best New Direction For a Local Artist
  Tammi Kennedy's Animal Heads
  Tammi Kennedy has been using Scotch tape to make translucent shells of chairs for so long that we can't remember when she started. But her stunning pieces never cease to amaze everyone, which is why curators keep including them in group shows year after year. This year, without warning, Kennedy... More >>
• Best Comedy
  The Triumph of Love at the Missouri Repertory Theatre
  As adapted and directed by Stephen Wadsworth, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux's classic about a woman who hides her gender and her agenda in order to snag a princely catch became a farce of the highest caliber. With lovely design work -- from set designer Thomas Lynch and costume designer... More >>
• Best Musical
  Smokey Joe's Café at the American Heartland Theatre
  OK, so Smokey Joe's Cafe played a gazillion performances on Broadway and features a song that begins with "I'm goin' to Kansas City." Yet we never really felt compelled to see it, finding such excuses as "It's a revue" or "There's no story, no plot." Then, in March, the American Heartland... More >>
• Best Supporting Actress in a Musical
  Victoria Barbee
  Victoria Barbee's last noteworthy musical role was a tiny turn in Late Night Theatre's adventurous interpretation of Sweet Charity back in the Old Chelsea days. So we knew she could play a hooker. What we were stupidly unaware of was her ability to command a stage. Swathed in a cascade of red... More >>
• Best Supporting Actor in a Musical
  Richard Ruiz
  Some people guffawed and others yawned when the Rep announced Guys and Dolls for its 2002-03 season. That old thing? But thanks to Ruiz, who played the roly-poly gambler Nicely Nicely, the January show had some spectacularly theatrical scenes, all of them featuring him front and center. He... More >>
• Best Supporting Actress in a Play
  Donette Coleman-Reese
  Having set Nothing Comes to Sleepers on the day Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated, playwright and director Jacqee Gafford knew she had to massage the inherent drama delicately. What could be more offensive than a rotten play about such an event? For this summer production at the InPlay... More >>
• Best Supporting Actor in a Play
  Dan Donohue
  Without saying a word or even showing his face, Dan Donohue managed to steal the show from a group of well-traveled actors in Triumph of Love. Like other plays of the period, the classic French comedy required a mute harlequin to help entangle the principal players in webs of their own making.... More >>
• Best Actress in a Musical
  Lori Blalock
  In a performance that channeled Ethel Merman through June Cleaver, Lori Blalock nearly stole the first production of Bat Boy at the Unicorn from her razor-fanged costar Seth Golay. The challenge of playing the benevolent housewife was to pump up the absurdities of the story while remaining... More >>
• Best Actor in a Musical
  Seth Golay
  After competently playing clean-cut lads in vanilla shows such as Forever Plaid, in December Seth Golay fearlessly bit into something meatier with the Unicorn's Bat Boy and proved he could carry a show -- twice, if you count the revival in June. Playing a feral creature -- half-human and... More >>
• Best Actress in a Comedy
  Elizabeth Robbins
  Playing one of three sisters historically at odds with each other but, for these two hours, even more so as they gather to bury their mother, Elizabeth Robbins was delightfully droll this past March in the Unicorn's The Memory of Water. Whether smoking reefer or having well-orchestrated fits of... More >>
• Best Actor in a Comedy
  Henry Vick
  Opening the Unicorn's current season in August, Kenneth Lonergan's Lobby Hero straddled a fine line between comedy and drama -- and was a huge success on both levels. That was primarily due to Henry Vick's performance as a security guard wrestling with his conscience and his burgeoning... More >>
• Best Docent
  John Magnum Buchanan III
  With his good-natured grin and hospitable demeanor, John Buchanan would make a perfect Wal-Mart greeter. But that would be such a waste of the doctorate in African-American art history he's working on at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Buchanan, the former registrar at the Mississippi... More >>
• Best Actor in a Drama
  Jason Chanos
  Shakespearean scholars or purists have their favorite Hamlets for reasons too academic to understand or too personal to be shared in mixed company. All we know is that the Shakespeare Festival's Jason Chanos was magnetic personifying the great Dane as a wayward teen fed up with his dysfunctional... More >>
• Best Actor/Actress (1 Comment)
  Lynn King
  "I been a drifter all my life," Lynn King said as the Unicorn's Bee-Luther-Hatchee opened last May -- and audiences were instantly hooked by her mammoth stage presence. King played a woman at two stages in her life: a senior citizen rich with stories about what it means to be a black female in... More >>
• Best Director
  Mark Robbins
  Though Thomas Gibbon's script occasionally emitted a tired preachiness, Bee-Luther-Hatchee was just as often insightful about the testy relationships between blacks and whites in today's professional and cultural arenas. Mark Robbins might not have been the obvious person to direct it -- we were... More >>
• Best Ensemble in a Hit
  Smokey Joe's Café at the American Heartland Theatre
  The cast of this Lieber and Stoller revue was a mix of ages and races, with the latter never given any consideration when it came to who was singing a love song to whom. With women such as Lori Blalock and Victoria Barbee and relative male neophytes like Darryl E. Calmese Jr., the energy of... More >>
• Best Ensemble in a Miss
  A ... My Name Will Always Be Alice
  Though this feminist-slanted musical revue skewed toward the obvious or the syrupy, playing like the most-talked-about show of 1979, the May run of A ... My Name Will Always Be Alice starred the most talented female cast ever corralled on Quality Hill's stage. Teri Adams, Cathy Barnett, Deb... More >>
• Best Play
  Hamlet
  Sidonie Garrett's first full season as artistic director of the Shakespeare Festival ended on a giddy high with her beautiful and moving take on Hamlet. A strong cast and a judicious edit kept this version moving along between a canter and a gallop without giving the tragedy -- or its surprising... More >>
• Best Kazoo-Playing Fool
  J. Ashley Miller
  J. Ashley Miller's voice is reminiscent of Will Oldham's, only more cheerful. The sound of his backup band -- the Golden Calves -- is the sound a twangy pop band would make on painkillers: slowed down and kinda wacky, but still essentially upbeat, humming with energy at its own leisurely pace.... More >>
• Best Way to Get Young People Involved in the Symphony
  Pink Martini, with the Kansas City Symphony, March 7 and 8
  The marketing campaign for this double-date performance started impressively, with smartly designed minimalist fliers available at Crossroads art galleries. Such gestures must have made their mark; the audience at Pink Martini's performances with the Kansas City Symphony displayed an impressive... More >>
• Best Way to Get Young People Involved in Opera
  One False Move at Penn Valley Community College Theater, March 8
  The Lyric Opera made all the right moves in presenting composer Susan Kander's compelling One False Move, which starred an all-female cast of high school and middle school students. The Lyric kept the performance short (it clocked in under an hour), the dialogue snappy ("you bitch" sounds... More >>
• Best Underappreciated Art Venue
  The Spencer Museum of Art
  For Kansas City residents, the Spencer Museum is a bit of a trek. Aside from that, we can't figure out why this venue's exhibition schedules aren't magnetically attached to area refrigerators, like all those Kemper and Nelson calendars. With exhibits ranging from a Polaroid show compiled from... More >>
• Best New Weekly Music Event
  DJs Take Control at Jilly's
  One week, you've got Mark Southerland doing his ambient tape-jockey routine with old 8-tracks, and the next, DJ Crochet is spinning girl punk-pop from the '80s and '90s, getting the crowd riled up with a little Siouxsie and the Banshees. Where the hell are you that this makes sense? You are at... More >>
• Best Event for AudioVisual Geeks
  Tool
  No band rules the slide-projector set like Tool. Its compositions, rhythmic labyrinths of trigonometric drum taps, intense crescendos and multiple melodies convert heavy music into an impenetrable equation, and song titles such as "Parabola" seal the deal. In concert, the quartet sounds like... More >>
• Best Jock Jams
  The Kansas City Royals
  At Chiefs games, fans must endure the likes of Kid Rock and the Scorpions blasting through stadium speakers. Granted, Royals fans must survive their own Scorpion bite whenever Mike MacDougal enters the game to that whirlwind of wimpiness known as "Rock You Like a Hurricane," but there are plenty... More >>
• Best Haunted House
  Main Street Morgue when Insane Clown Posse's in the house
  The Main Street Morgue might not be the most frightening haunted house in town, but it offered the best evening of fright-wig entertainment last October when it was taken over by psychopathic clowns. Detroit rap-rock jesters Insane Clown Posse appeared at the Morgue as part of a unique... More >>
• Best Drag Show
  Vibralux
  Four sullen dudes wearing jeans and T-shirts and playing rock music can be a real drag. Vibralux knows this. That's why the Lawrence quartet concocted a splashy and trashy live show that breathed fire onto the local scene. With its pancake makeup, platform boots, feather boas, black-mesh... More >>
• Best Dressed Band
  The Ssion
  Whether dressing in odd, mismatched knit swatches taped to their bodies or as barnyard animals (a chicken, a bag of oats, a cow and a lion with a giant vagina, birthing canal included), members of the wacky punk-rock outfit called the Ssion are always a sight to behold. Contributing to the sense... More >>
• Best Place to Go Deaf
  Y.J.'s Snack Bar
  Y.J.'s owner David Ford isn't a sadist; he just really likes music, and his hearing's not all that great. Maybe that's why the music at Y.J.'s -- both live and recorded -- is so loud. But it's always in the best possible taste, ranging from stuff we could all sing along to in our sleep to stuff... More >>
• Best Letter-Page Shout-Outs
  Murder Dog Magazine
  Based in Vallejo, California, Murder Dog (available locally at Streetside Records and Recycled Sounds) devotes a jaw-dropping amount of space to the Kansas City scene. In one issue alone, the glossy mag covered Court Dog, Vell Bakardy, S to the B, Big Bear, Hobo Tone, Lejo, Romeo Ryonell,... More >>
• Best Off-the-Wall Interviews
  John Bersuch, Dandercroft
  Zines in which local musicians discuss local music with other local musicians can be a roaring bore. To spice things up, Minds Under Cover musician John Bersuch keeps artists on their toes with inquiries about interplanetary incest, fast-food restroom trysts and other unorthodox interview... More >>
• Best Accompaniment for Home-Remodeling Projects
  KCUR 89.3 on Saturday Afternoons
  You can't change CDs when your hands are coated with drywall goo. Plus, who wants to climb down a ladder to pick out new tunes when you're in the middle of painting a ceiling? Better to just turn on the radio and let the random sounds wash over you. Not just any radio. The last thing a person... More >>
• Best Use of Empty Downtown Retail Spaces
  Urban Culture Project
  In The Rise of the Creative Class, author Richard Florida sets out to prove that artists are cool and that a large number of them gathering in one place will make that place cool. Inspired by this, David Hughes and the Urban Culture Project team of architects, artists and musicians became legal... More >>
• Best Battle
  KJHK DJ Battle
  Through its first two rounds, KJHK 90.7's DJ Battle operated as smoothly as Big Daddy Kane. More than a dozen DJs showcased their scratching and mixing skills, and judges scored participants on style, originality and arrangement. During the first interlude, B-boys and B-girls started breakin' on... More >>
• Best St. Patrick's Show
  Trailer Bride and Rex Hobart & the Misery Boys
  A ready-made St. Pat's Day attraction, Trailer Bride opened with a back-catalog tune in which it asks St. Pat himself to drive the human kind of snakes out of town. The band's set contained not much jig but plenty of saw, with singer Melissa Swingle making good use of the eerie... More >>
• Best Alternative to a Twentieth High School Reunion
  X
  The X concert on July 17 felt like old-home week for the grown-up punk set, a reunion of one-time scenesters who were listening to the influential band way back in 1983. Back then, lyrics such as Honest to goodness, the bars weren't open this morning/They must have been votin' for the president... More >>
• Best People-Watching Concert
  Cramps
  Like any old-school punk show, this Cramps gig drew some long-lost folks out of the woodwork. But there were plenty of attractions of more recent vintage, such as the Rah! Booty cheerleaders and professional event interrupters Dirty Force, who led an impromptu marching-band parade so freaky that... More >>
• Best Benefit Concert
  Lawrence Schools Foundation Benefit
  The local music scene has heart. Too much goddamn heart. Benefit concerts are a dime a three-dozen around here. Yeah, they support good causes and all, but musical welfare is generally of little benefit to the audience. This year, a do-gooder event at Liberty Hall actually gave the crowd... More >>
• Best Jazz Show
  Greg Osby with Jason Moran
  Pairing two of the most exciting artists in jazz, alto-sax standout Greg Osby and mind-blowing pianist Jason Moran, this gig showcased all that the American Jazz Museum's Blue Room can be. There's not a bad seat in the house, so every spectator had a vivid view of the improvisational masters at... More >>
• Best Local Jazz Album
  Om Nidrah by Bill McKemy
  Former Malachy Papers bassist Bill McKemy's debut disc, Duende, stuck to straightforward short-song structures, with mixed results. The tunes impressed even in their abbreviated form but felt as though they'd been snuffed shy of their full potential. For Om Nidrah, McKemy went into the studio... More >>
• Best Underground Promoter
  Edwin Morales
  At the head of the Lawrence-based promotion team Downplay, Edwin Morales strives to give a voice to underground hip-hop and electronica artists. Using relatively fresh concepts such as street teams and heavy online networking and age-old tactics such as hardcore flier-posting, Morales and... More >>
• Best Tuesday Night Fallback
  Tulipana Tuesdays at the Empire Room
  Because touring bands often reserve weekend slots for larger cities, Kansas City gets more than its share of off-night entertainment options. But even during dry spells, the out-and-about set can always enjoy indie, electronic and avant-garde sounds both fresh and obscure at the Empire Room.... More >>
• Best Local Package Tour
  Limited Liability Tour
  Last month, the Limited Liability Tour attempted to show the rest of the country what we already knew: Our region bubbles with undiscovered hip-hop greatness. The tour united four area showstoppers, underscoring the variety and artistry of these disparate talents. KC's Mac Lethal is a... More >>
• Best Pairing of Artists
  Jay Gould Stuckey and Rachel Frank in Rapt
  With this summer's Rapt, Fahrenheit Gallery proprietor Peregrine Honig made an unlikely yet successful coupling. Los Angeles artist Jay Gould Stuckey rubber-stamps and scribbles swarms of airplanes across brightly colored paper in chaotic patterns, and recent Kansas City Art Institute graduate... More >>
• Best New Goth Spot
  The Bunker
  "The new home of cock!" announces a sign outside this appealingly dingy dive on 40 Highway. That humorously mangled declaration reinforces the dangers of placing signs with rearrangeable letters within arm's reach of misfits (a lesson the Walgreens on Broadway learned long ago). But even though... More >>
• Best Hip-Hop Night
  Project Groove at the Pool Room
  With its low ceiling, muddy PA and a lighting rig that could be powered by a couple of D-cell batteries, the Pool Room is an unlikely venue for live music. But for the last year or so, the watering hole at 925 Iowa in Lawrence has been home to Project Groove, a consistently excellent showcase... More >>
• Best Hip-Hop Beef
  Platinumized vs. Lock-N-Load
  In the world of rap music, beefs are as common as sniffles during allergy season -- Biggie vs. Tupac, Jay-Z vs. Nas and Eminem vs. nearly everyone on the planet. This year, a couple of locals created some offstage fireworks of their own. Lock-N-Load, a record company known for glossy R&B and... More >>
• Best Commercial Radio Personality
  Lazlo, KRBZ 96.5
  The Buzz's personalities are often much more appealing than its playlists. But when Lazlo's on the air, from 3 to 7 p.m. weekdays, listeners get both amusing banter and the occasional off-the-beaten-path selection (Sunny Day Real Estate, Sugarcubes, Stone Roses) from the DJ's personal... More >>
• Best Stupid Morning Show Craze
  "The Peanut Butter and Jelly Song,"

  KCHZ 95.7

  The music is computer-based, spastic and really only music in the technical sense (think radio jingle); the lyrics are unintelligible and, more to the point, unintelligent (peanut butter and jelly and a baseball bat!); and the overall effect is juvenile, alien and as undeserving of its existence... More >>
• Best Cover Band
  Unknown Pleasures
  As modern music's leading distiller of depression in danceable form, Joy Division makes for a hard act to imitate. It's particularly difficult to capture the dual nature of the band's late frontman, Ian Curtis, whose choppy choreography thinly disguised the crippling pain that ultimately led to... More >>
• Best Annoying Hit
  "Girl Roommate" by Anything But Joey
  Anything But Joey scored a local smash with its superslick single "Girl Roommate," a sugar-pop confection that left area scenesters divided. Some loved it, others detested it, but few could deny that it was a damn catchy tune -- perhaps a little too catchy. As with the musical Hades that was... More >>
• Best Anti-war Song
  "Pass the Ammo" by Mac Lethal
  When the United States invaded Iraq, most musical acts cowered from public debate. It's hard to blame them -- vocal dissenters were met with declining record sales, bans by backward radio stations and red-faced critiques from right-wing cable gadflies. But outspoken KC rapper Mac Lethal tackled... More >>
• Best Reason To Stop Hating The Get Up Kids
  New Amsterdams' Worse for the Wear
  The Get Up Kids are the area's most cherished and most denigrated band. Few can refute that these five KC kids helped godfather the explosive emo movement, but the quintet's standoffish demeanor and its maudlin 2001 full-length On a Wire earned it plenty of outspoken detractors. Many had written... More >>
• Best Rock-Star Move
  Moaning Lisa Heads to Los Angeles
  With his turbo-mussed hair, sunglasses-at-night cool and good-times tunes, Moaning Lisa's David George has always been an L.A. rocker trapped in a Midwest scene. Now, his group is finally taking a shot at Startown, making the move in late October. Scenesters with appetites for angst never... More >>
• Best Student Show
  Tensions
  Last June, when hundreds of fiber artists descended upon the Kansas City Art Institute campus for the Surface Design Association Conference, fiber students seized the opportunity to show their handiwork to such a dignified audience. For Student Curator Zac Johnson, selecting and hanging the... More >>
• Best Bon Voyage
  Trophy Wives
  From the start, the final performance of Kansas City rockers the Trophy Wives had all the makings of a dramatic exit. Rather than setting aside personal differences for the sake of one last set, band members let the sparse crowd (and Lo-Hi frontwoman Hollis Queens in particular) in on their... More >>
• Best Encore
  Elvis Costello
  For Elvis Costello, encores are more like coming back after intermission: He tends to play nine or more selections after the first curtain drops. He saved the best for last, closing with an awe-inspiring rendition of his angst-ridden epic "I Want You." Punctuating depressing, defeated... More >>
• Best Local Record Label
  Datura
  Datura Records created a splash late last year with the release of Approach's stellar Ultra Proteus, an EP that juxtaposed a funky live band with the Lawrence MC's enlightened prose. Proteus also sported professional packaging that demanded -- and received -- serious attention. Within months of... More >>
• Best Local Artist
  Steve Tulipana
  As a founding member of Season to Risk, the group that redefined intensity for local audiences for more than a decade before going on indefinite hiatus this year, Steve Tulipana already deserves permanent hall-of-fame status. But this award recognizes the stunning tear he's been on just in the... More >>
• Best Local Release
  "So Heavy"
  Perhaps it took a dreary spell in mainstream hip-hop to clear the airwaves for local talent. With Jay-Z's lukewarm cameo on Beyonce's omnipresent "Crazy In Love" making that tune rap's closest thing to a summer anthem, heads were fiending for a hot, multilayered beat and a smooth, chant-along... More >>
• Best Illustration Show
  N.C. Wyeth
  It's rare that work by an illustrator makes it from the pages of books and magazines to the walls of a fine-art museum. However, last winter, KU's Spencer Museum of Art exhibited N.C. Wyeth's original illustrations for the literary classics The Last of the Mohicans and Kidnapped, among others.... More >>