On school days, Sabra Kline gets in her car and cruises past the homes in her Overland Park neighborhood. She and her 16-year-old son, Stephen, pick up Alex Kolar, who should have been a freshman at Shawnee Mission South this year. Later that afternoon, Stephen and two other boys load into Stella Doering’s car with her son Zachary for the…
Individual citizens and neighborhood groups try to influence the city’s development process through their testimony at public hearings, but development interests have a different strategy. Of the four councilmembers on the Planning, Zoning, and Economic Development Committee, which makes final recommendations on development to the whole council, all have enjoyed significant campaign contributions from developers, their lawyers, utilities, real estate…
Alex Cruz is a Kansas City, Missouri, police officer. Cruz, his wife, Kathy, and their two children live in a stretch of woods west of U.S. 169 in Kansas City North. Their neighbors, Cindy Dickerson and Darren Ivey, also are cops. And as cops, they’re required to live in the city they patrol. “We are no different from others looking…
A month ago, R.J. Cutler thought he found a home for his child, one that would coddle and nurture his baby until it was ready to stand on its own two legs without wobbling or falling. A month ago, it all seemed so simple to the Oscar-nominated producer-director, who was used to making his films by maxing out his credit…
China feast: It’s no secret that Kansas Citians love Chinese food — the local yellow pages list more than 160 Chinese restaurants. And that doesn’t include supermarket carry-out departments or casino buffets, which always seem to have at least an egg roll or a crab rangoon lurking around. It’s easy, but unfair, to gripe that most Chinese restaurants don’t serve…
There hasn’t been an Andy at Andy’s Wok restaurant in Overland Park for many years. But the real question is, where is Andy’s Wok? Not the round-bottom cooking utensil but the cozy restaurant with a seafoam-colored dining room once tucked into an unassuming strip mall. For nine years, the popular but rather ordinary Chinese eatery held its own in the…
7 Thursday Occasionally, touring life necessitates traveling with a band with which one shares little more than a label and a creative spirit. For example, the Black Heart Procession, a group known for its bleak, moody compositions, will share The Bottleneck’s stage in Lawrence Thursday night with Man or Astroman?, noted space-rock goofballs. But for emotional cleansing, it’s hard to…
Not since Richard Pryor flamed out in the ’80s has it been so good to be funny, gifted, and black in America. Eddie Murphy, whose career might be on the elevator ride going down, still knows how to bang it at the box office as the Nutty Professor. Chris Rock, Murphy’s Saturday Night Live spawn, continues breaking comedic ground on…
Prior to the sweeping Latinization of pop culture — back when Menudo was a punchline and Freddie Prinze Jr. was learning his times tables — the idea of a Latin film festival in Kansas City was a pipe dream. According to writer and actress Evelina Fernandez, whose film Luminarias appears at the 2000 Latin American Cinema Festival, any Latin…
The buzz about the Unicorn Theatre’s season premiere, Paula Vogel’s Hot ‘n’ Throbbing, has focused almost exclusively on the John Waters-like premise: a suburban soccer mom sidelights as a pornographic-film writer. While it may get people in the door, that setup is merely that — a prelude to kisses so twisted that some may be revulsed. “Remember when they…
The Get Up Kids have packed clubs across the country and, most recently, entertained adoring fans overseas, but it’s always different to look into the cramped crowd and see familiar faces. For some, playing hometown shows is a way to exhale before returning to the usual grind of proving yourself in front of strangers, while others feel the stakes…
In the mid- to late-’80s, when Tone Loc and Sir Mix-A-Lot first attracted attention, an event that brought three platinum-selling rappers together would have caused any promoter plenty of sleepless nights. These were the days before hip-hop became mainstream-friendly, when even cuddly teddy bears who rapped over rock riffs about dogs humping their legs and smooth-flowing jesters who described…
Don Henley some credit; he could reconvene the Eagles every summer and make a fortune instead of letting his former bandmates take wing only on special occasions for high-dollar tickets. But this year, the reordained Texan is touring behind a solo album already on the skids. He’s done the VH-1 thing and the Rolling Stone interview, and he’s shed some…
Remember those Tearjerker candies: sour as hell on the outside yet sweet enough to make you puke on the inside? Consider Modest Mouse somewhere along the same lines, packing a huge wallop in either direction. After its moody compositions made Modest Mouse an indie-rock darling, the group moved on to Epic, on which it released The Moon and Antarctica, which…
Although coverage of CD-release celebrations and other fatigue-defying feats has pre-empted our reviews of local releases during the past few weeks, all area artists who submit their work can rest assured that a write-up will eventually appear. But given that the stack of local releases grows larger on a daily basis, patience is a relevant virtue. This week’s column, devoted…
The main thing that sets (Hed) P.E. apart from the rest of the current crop of rap-metallers is that lead vocalist M.C.U.D is a talented enough rapper to conceivably earn a slot on a label such as No Limit or Aftermath if he had no band to front. Unfortunately, being a better rapper than Fred Durst is like being the…
Raphael Saadiq and Dawn Robinson don’t boast the best pipes in the music biz, but when paired with the melodic compositions concocted by Ali Shaheed Muhammad, their singing sounds undeniably sweet. This unique union carries the debut effort from Lucy Pearl, a group that can’t quite meet the expectations that resulted from its impressive pedigree but nonetheless provides welcome respite…
On the post-riot-grrrl landscape, female-fronted punk bands range from the Sleater-Kinney camp, which merges perky cheerleader chants with adventurous art-rock, to the Donnas and their daughters, who churn out straightforward rockers that attempt to make up for in spunk what they lack in substance. In the middle of this spectrum are Sleater-Kinney’s Olympia, Washington, neighbors The Bangs, who blend their…
Taking into account Jimmy Page’s track record after the crash of the mighty Led Zeppelin, it’s easy to dismiss this double live album as another Coverdale/Page-style attempt to do away with Robert Plant. However, to make such an assumption would be to ignore the participation of the Black Crowes, a group never known as the do-anything-for-a-quick-buck type. Vocalist Chris and…
Weezer has not released any new material in five years, yet its September 7 show at The Blue Note in Columbia sold out before most of the MU students returned to school, and its September 8 date at The Granada has people freaking out as if John Lennon had risen from the grave to reunite The Beatles. The discussion forum…
A few years ago, alternative radio reached for the next big thing and grasped onto anything brass, resulting in both the ska craze and the swing revival. Strangely, both fads faded soon after the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies made the unfortunate (for radio listeners) mistake of combining the two genres and releasing 1997’s most ingratiating single, “Zoot Suit Riot.” Since then,…
At this writing, parts of Texas have gone without rain for 60 days. During the drought, Denton, Texas, rockers Slobberbone released their third album — the churning, cowpunky Everything You Thought Was Right Was Wrong Today. Like a raindance, the disc’s 12 songs are solemn, optimistic, a little desperate; in the hard-touring aftermath of this release, the eight-year-old quartet has…
This is the beginning of The Way of the Gun you will not see, because it was written but never filmed: Two men, Parker and Longbaugh, urinate in an open grave in front of mourners, beat up a priest, steal organs meant for transplant, and shoot a dog. The introduction, 10 script pages long, was to be shot in…
Insensitive Guy’s As if the poor girl in the Guy’s story wasn’t emotionally damaged enough by the unfortunate events that happened to her (“Let the Chips Fall,” August 24), then for PitchWeekly to publish an article detailing the extremely explicit acts she was coerced into by an old man is disgusting. She thought it was bad enough that she had…
