Recent Stories
Have Yourself A Miserly Little Christmas
A Gift Guide for the Financially Ruined
Economists say that to get the market running again we need to spend a lot of money this holiday season. But what money? We’ve all been laid off. Luckily, there’s a gift guide tailored to the financially ruined consumer.
Birth of The Beats is Born, 64 years later
Thanks to Lawrence's James Grauerholz, the crime novel that launched the careers of Burroughs and Kerouac finally sees print
In August of 1944, a 19-year-old Columbia student named Lucien Carr killed 33-year-old David Kammerer, the man who had mentored him since he was a young, fatherless boy and had come to fawn over him to the point of obsession. Carr stabbed him with a Boy Scout knife during a fight and threw his body in the Hudson River. The first people he ran to were his friends Bill Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.
Spy Candy
Local guys design 007 title sequence, save the world
Naked women and lazers... "that's how we pitch every title design that our studio's ever done." -Timmy Fisher, MK12's Title Design Director for the new Bond film "Quantum of Solace."
Back in the Day
Billy Spears Band-legendary local act of the '70s-reunites for one more show
There was a time when Billy Spears was king. A food service worker at the Kansas Union with curly hair and, judging by the old pictures, an inscrutable and wild look to his eyes and all about him-when Billy Spears was playing his fiddle, people would not miss it. "He was a legend around town," says Chuck Mead of BR549.
Don't Trust Anyone Over 30 18
Probing the mind of the youngest voters
Everyone said the world would change and it did. And the events that followed the tragedy-no need to list them here-were put into motion before she was a teenager. She turned 18 last week and now, in the midst of the economic crisis, she prepares to vote in her first election. As things fall apart, she can safely say that the mess of a country she inherits is one she did not help create through the electoral process.
Back in the Day
Legendary Lawrence rebel George Kimball returns
George Kimball has been many things: rebel, novelist, journalist, boxing aficionado. He blew into Lawrence like a harbinger of change at the beginning of the 1960s on an ROTC scholarship to KU and stuck around off and on throughout the turbulent decade. He ran for sheriff of Douglas County in 1970, the year the Kansas Union was firebombed and riots swept through the city, and was seen as a spokesman for the counterculture.
Lost & Found Art
Lawrence's found object artists
A normal schmuck might see these things and think, "Huh, that's interesting," and move on with the day. The curious-minded packrat might even take 'em to the garage for safekeeping. An artist, on the other hand...
The Chain Gallery
Prison Poster Project showcases art from the inside
In the summer of 2004, the We Are Resisting conference was coming to Lawrence and it was expected to draw hundreds of anarchists from across the country. Chantel Guidry, who ran the local chapter of the Anarchist Black Cross, a prison abolition network, was helping organize a prisoner art show to coincide with the conference.
Low Brew
An ode to cheap beer
As the sun of summer nears its final horizon, a free tip for those among us who are not yet privy to the trend sweeping fast through the gullets of the beer drinkers of this town: Hamm's with lemon.
Cloud Factory
Local artists funnel magic from the sky
In 2004, a man from London named Gavin Pretor-Pinney started a group called The Cloud Appreciation Society, a project that was kind of silly and life-affirming in its exaltation of something so commonplace.
