While most baby boomers associate the name “Corner Restaurant” with the place Stephen Friedman opened in 1980, that location at Westport Road and Broadway has had the name before. In the years after World War II, it was a soda fountain and snack shop called The Corner Grill, run by the Meltis family. The place continued as a lunch spot…
A few Kansas City restaurants have been sitting on their laurels for so long that they’ve crushed them beyond recognition. Nostalgia is all well and good when it comes to culinary landmarks like, say, Winstead’s. But does that neon-lit temple of greasy flattened hamburgers and joyless service really still warrant such devotion from its apostles? I say no, but…
Black-and-white photographs of homeless people holding cardboard signs or sleeping on benches have become a cliché that photography professors dread. Such photographs, intended to tug at the viewer’s conscience, often have the unintended effect of objectifying their subjects, distilling complex human lives down to stereotypical images. But Kansas City Art Institute seniors Dylan Mortimer and Hayes Ford — whose…
Bill Clause, a member of the local performance organization CrossCurrents, didn’t settle on his players for River City Review by holding tense, competitive auditions. Instead, he taught a Communiversity acting class that brought together the cast of these five unrelated sketches. “These people aren’t part of the normal theater crowd,” Clause says. “The neat thing about Communiversity is, you…
“If Entercom fucks Petro for no good reason, Johnny Dare will be a problem. I really feel bad for Soren because Entercom is screwing him to the wall. The problem that Whitlock is going to have is that Entercom has a very heavy commercial load that he’s not used to. The first time he blows off a break and skips…
With the Chiefs embarrassing us week after week and regional college sports stuck in strange winter doldrums, the hottest topic in Kansas City sports talk radio is Kansas City sports talk radio. But you haven’t heard it discussed much on the air, and you won’t read about it in The Kansas City Star. That’s because all the mainstream sports media…
Where the sky is a wide vault of shifting color and the land stretches for miles to every horizon, the ego shrinks to its appropriate insignificance: a gnat upon the skin of the earth, vanquished with the flick of a finger. Humility is a good thing. We are only transients in infinity. The sky, the land, the water will…
The Coterie’s loyalty to Laura Ingalls Wilder has, for six years running, kept the theater’s December garden lush and fertile. But with the newest installment in the Little House on the Prairie series — an adaptation of Little House by the Shores of Silver Lake by Philip blue owl Hooser — the bloom is beginning to leave the rose….
On its sixth full-length, Godflesh forsakes machines to become them. Though a surfeit of loops and throbbing gadgetry still pulses beneath Hymns, electronics play a much more limited role in the whole affair than they have on the Brit industrial-metal forebears’ recent efforts, such as 1999’s superb jungle-tinged Us and Them. Remarkably, though, the motorized rigidity that made the band’s…
There’s really nothing too special about Staind. Lacking an experimental nature, a good-times spirit or breadth of vision, the group merely pairs solid riffs with lyrics that come in two flavors: gloomy and gloomier. So why are so many people still buying Break the Cycle, which has spawned several inescapable power ballads on its way to becoming the most popular…
On the cover of her new album, Shelby Lynne kneels braless in a skimpy, skin-tight tank top. From the front, her belly button peeks out above unbuttoned shorts. From the rear, thanks to some especially cut off cutoffs and a strategically placed mirror, we get a shot of her ass cheeks. Presumably this is all meant to be sexy, but…
Among their own kind, pop musicians have never enjoyed the patronage of a more enthusiastic fan — or suffered the withering barbs of a more honest critic — than Elton John. The 54-year-old icon’s career-long expressions of admiration and disdain trace a history of the past three decades’ chart heroes and goats. So it was refreshing, if not unexpected, to…
In this season of greater-than-usual need, attending benefit shows remains a plausible way to enjoy great music while helping a charitable cause. (In particular, The Get Up Kids’ Red Cross-supporting gig with The Anniversary and The Appleseed Cast on December 7 should be satisfying on many levels.) But as our fearless leaders would no doubt have you know, concert attendance…
Ever have one of those secrets that you have to tell someone, and in turn, that person tells five people, those five people tell five more people, and before you know it, the whole town knows about it? The Dismemberment Plan might still be a secret to most music fans, but it’s the type that can’t be concealed for long….
If you were to write a song about Jimmy Eat World, it might break down like this: Boy watches Twisted Sister video on MTV and decides he wants to rock. Later, boy meets other boys and forms a band named after a childhood drawing meant to make fun of a portly, overbearing sibling. Boy develops a local following in Mesa,…
This is the true story of seven people (Tommy! Annie! Ashley! Maria! Griffin! Carpo! Benjamin!) picked to live in a city and have their lives changed. Find out what happens when people stop being polite and start being real. The Real World: Sidewalks of New York. If you came across Edward Burns’ new film on cable and didn’t recognize…
Songs of Solomon A room with a pew: Regarding Casey Logan’s “Love Thy Neighbor” (November 15), about Troy Covey: It is disgusting. He left out a few facts. He left out interviewing the assistant pastor, the dance instructor and the building manager. He neglected to mention the free dinners given to the homeless on Sunday nights and the outreaches, the…
This year, Thanksgiving spills into an extra week now that the corps of stooped, elderly baggage screeners at Kansas City’s airport has seen all of the metro’s air travelers through the holiday safe and sound. We also give thanks for the flip-flopping of Missouri Republicans Sam Graves, Kenny Hulshof, Todd Akin and Roy Blunt, and Kansans Jim Ryun, Todd Tiahrt…
A case set for trial in Wyandotte County next week asks two $75,000 questions: How can a black woman be mistaken for a white woman, and how can mouthwash be mistaken for pain medication? One night in March 2000, 51-year-old Oretha Roark, who is black, went with her husband to their local pharmacy inside the Bonner Springs Wal-Mart. Roark, who…
Marshall Gardiner’s breath was a horse’s snuffle. The 86-year-old man’s eyelids fluttered as his irises rolled toward the ceiling of the plane. “Are you okay?” J’Noel Gardiner asked a stupid question. Clearly, her husband was not. “Are you okay?” Marshall seemed to hear the repeated question and recovered long enough to smile and nod. Then another seizure convulsed him. J’Noel…
Kansas City, former home to the smelly, noisy stockyards and still the namesake for a cut of strip steak, loves its beef. And these days, name-brand beef is even more alluring. For example, at the new Nick and Jake’s (see review), the kitchen serves up four cuts of premium gold angus, aged for more than 21 days. And at two…
Where the hell are we going? Kabul?” asked my friend Jeff as my car raced ever further south. We had long since passed the bustling strip at 119th Street and Metcalf and were heading into a dimly lit neighborhood that, in the not-so-distant past, had been farmland. We had been on the road more than twenty minutes, far too…
Childhood memories can be conjured with the smallest of prompts — a certain aroma or taste, for example. For Dorinda Nicholson, who at age six witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor unfolding outside her kitchen window, the trauma was renewed this past summer with the release of the movie Pearl Harbor and ceremonies marking the sixtieth anniversary of the attack….
DJs Superwolf and Memphis Black, who spin rare funk and soul 45s at low-key, hole-in-the-wall hangouts in the most urban parts of the city, sometimes refer to themselves as “soul varmints.” The name makes sense: Rather than seeking out the well-known tracks that help DJs prepare for predictable requests, Superwolf and Memphis Black are vinyl scavengers, rummaging through records at…
