If the venerable Accurso’s Italian Food & Drink (see review) is a throwback to the Eisenhower era, the Plaza’s brand-new re:Verse (618 Ward Parkway) celebrates a style that was born during the same time. The brainchild of 35-year-old restaurateur James Taylor (who also owns La Bodega), the sophisticated bar and eatery opened last week in the space once occupied by…
A few years ago, the city re-routed Brookside Boulevard, cutting off the stretch of Main Street just south of the Plaza. Even before that, however, the commercial neighborhood of shops, bars and restaurants was the un-Plaza. It may be only a short limo ride from the city’s hoity-toity shopping-and-eating district, but in terms of character, Main Street between 49th…
9 Thursday Local author Jean Ford brings Fish Tails and Scales, her book of anecdotes about her boisterous father and his life in the Ozarks, to the North Independence branch of the Mid-Continent Public Library tonight at 7. Ford’s voice is that of someone sitting around with a bunch of friends, laughing about shared experiences and lovable characters in…
After he moved away from home, author Whitney Terrell always thought his background in Kansas City was “very boring and white-bread.” So he never used to write about it. But on one trip back he noticed that the only time he ventured east of Kansas City’s color line was on his way to I-70 to shoot game with a society…
“See girls forced into gilded Geisha palaces!” promised the ads accompanying the 1943 RKO release Behind the Rising Sun. And if that wasn’t enough to satiate anti-Asian sentiment: “See captive women treated with unspeakable barbarity! See cruelties of war committed against even babes in arms!” The picture came a year after RKO’s anti-Germany propaganda film during the height of…
It’s rumored that the greater Kansas City area is home to a hundred theater companies. If that were true, with any given night offering Kansas City audiences a choice of dozens of dramas, comedies or musicals, and if all of those shows were filled to capacity, it would be a front page Arts & Leisure piece in the Sunday…
The hip-hop trio once known as Tha Alkoholiks is now called Tha Liks, but its first disc under the new name proves the change was made solely for brevity’s sake. Whether requesting “Another Round” or co-opting Freak Nasty’s “Da Dip” to craft an ode to taking sips, Tha Liks are still tipsy off the whiskey. The group even incorporates its…
Long after John Singleton’s Baby Boy ends its theatrical run, people will still be bobbin’ their heads to the soundtrack. That’s nothing new — soundtracks have long been the official extension of a film’s marketing plan — but at least the songs on this disc are tied to the plot, not obtusely “inspired by” the film. In addition, audio excerpts…
This is going to hurt a lot, so let’s get it out of the way: Shangri-La Dee Da is really fucking catchy. Compelling in the same way a sore tooth demands that you vigilantly light up your pain receptors with your tongue every couple of minutes, the new Stone Temple Pilots disc is an awesome cavity of an album. As…
Rarely have songs so down in the dumps sounded so blindingly sunny as those on the Pernice Brothers’ The World Won’t End. Like famous pop depressives such as Brian Wilson and Ian Curtis, frontman Joe Pernice appears to transform all the things that bring him down into pure bah-bah-BUH-bah sing-along beauty. Come to think of it, “Beach Boys meets Joy…
On December 9, 1981, in the midst of a decade-long war between the Philadelphia police department and radicalized elements in the city’s African-American community (a struggle that claimed the lives of eleven members of the black revolutionary group Move, including five children, and left sixty families homeless), a police officer was shot dead. Journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal was also shot in…
T.S.O.L. is releasing its comeback album Disappear at the same time as its label reissues the band’s 1982 disc Beneath The Shadows. One record is a classic slice of California hardcore filled with sharp riffs, snotty vocals and brutally honest social commentary; the other is a mature album that steps far away from punk’s formula with fey piano bits, slowed…
When Puddle of Mudd made its first major impact on Kansas City in 1994, grunge was still hot — hot enough that KQRC FM made room in its rotation for a track from that quartet’s self-released EP. “They were a hot draw,” recalls Banzai publisher Jim Kilroy, who placed Puddle of Mudd on the 1994 Freaker’s Ball bill that also…
Take two punk bands (one streetwise and rugged, the other more melody inclined), a straight-up power pop quartet and a dark-edged metal band that claims residence in the depths of hell. Put them together on one bill and it might seem to be a recipe for conflict, but so far there’s a complete lack of grandiose predictions about who’s…
The downside of using the latest in high-tech to craft albums is the expectation that those skills will carry over to other areas of electronic endeavor. But fans checking out the official Plaid Web site (www.plaid.co.uk) will likely be disappointed; beyond a clever basic page that mimics a Mac desktop, with pull-down menus linked to basic content (and to a…
In the genus Alternative Rock, the feverish hunt for fresh species classifications (emo, slowcore, et. al.) has cooled. Every category now has a leader and dozens of imitators who, in turn, are ineptly copied. But may we submit a new label for Joe Pernice, the gifted songwriter behind the defunct Scud Mountain Boys and recent critical darlings Pernice Brothers? Call…
If there’s any justice in moviedom, this summer’s feel-good hit will be an unassuming Dutch comedy called Everybody’s Famous! Defying long odds, writer-director Dominique Deruddere has taken a couple of shopworn subjects — the public’s obsession with celebrity and the ineptitude of amateur criminals — and parlayed them into an original and inventive farce. It was nominated for an…
During this cinematic Summer of Dumb, it would be all too easy to celebrate half-assed cleverness as a virtue, especially when proffered by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who elevated the gross-out to an art form (or, more likely, fart form) in Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary. Osmosis Jones, one of two films the Booger Brothers are offering this…
“I have some questions about Greg Robinson. Not about him personally, but his defense. His defense pretty much at the end of last year laid down.” — Tim Grunhard, on the Chiefs’ new defensive coordinator, WHB 810 GH: Grunhard, Bill Maas and Frank Boal started their new show on WHB at the end of July and gave us a hint…
Over the past decade, Carl Peterson has probably spawned more commerce in this city than any other local businessman. Peterson revived the Chiefs franchise, and the resale of season- and single-game tickets alone has caused hundreds of thousands of dollars to pass from pocket to pocket. It appears, though, that the fringe fan who drove after-market ticket profits as high…
Trailer Trashed The kids aren’t all right: Regarding C.J. Janovy’s “crazy/pitiful” (July 26): I hope the AMC theaters feel ashamed and useless for not responding to the cries of our younger generations! May the guilt and fear lie on their shoulders, along with all the other adults turning their backs on our children. Instead, we should all be asking, “Where…
Beer brawl: As The Theatre in the Park’s 32nd season came to a close last week in Shawnee Mission Park, the power struggle onstage in Evita gave way to a political spat. The issue is cold beer. The sale of malt beverages at future performances “is in the preliminary, information-gathering period,” says Executive Producer Mike Musick. That has certain Johnson…
Ten years ago, Robert Harris picked up the phone to find on the other end a relative stranger bearing extraordinary news. This man was at a film exchange in Toronto, where movies are housed and rented out to exhibitors, and he was holding in his hands canisters of film containing what Harris considered something akin to the Holy Grail:…
Louise Barry is ready to host a party. Nothing too fancy, just her friends from the coffee shop and their spouses or dates in her apartment twenty stories above the Plaza in the Sulgrave building. Her thick glass dining room table rests on its concrete-column base. Her bronze sculptures and ornate wood cabinets are dust-free. Her blood-red Chihuly glass sculpture…
