Chris Jeffries assumed his girlfriend had gone to pick up her dog as he let himself into her brick ranch-style house on a quiet cul-de-sac in Independence. They had been dating only a month, but he had a key. The house was stifling; the air conditioner wasn’t working. Chris cracked open a beer and went outside to mow, but the…
For some locals with fond memories of Emery Bird Thayer’s Tea Room, the 22-year-old EBT Restaurant is not their cup of tea. That goes especially for Kansas City’s best-known preservation activist, Jane Flynn, who has never set foot in the restaurant (see review). She still has a sour taste from her first preservation battle thirty years ago to save the…
Who remembers the Emery Bird Thayer department store? For 78 years this great landmark filled nearly an entire city block between 11th and 12th Streets and Walnut and Grand. I wish I could have seen it; I often stumble across vintage postcards extolling the splendors of the retail mecca: six floors of tasteful merchandise and a third-floor tea room…
She’s had more than a dozen body piercings. He’s had a car driven into Brush Creek. Typical college stuff, but for nineteen-year-old Jessica Crump and seventeen-year-old Emmanuel Boyd, these are also the subjects of a documentary of their lives through 2005. Last summer, the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s communications office debuted Four Years, Two Stories, a local take on the…
On Sunday, the Tivoli’s Jerry Harrington and Steve Shapiro discuss the 1964 Jean-Luc Godard movie Band of Outsiders and screen a fresh print. Considering that very little happens, the set is bleak and the editing is unexceptional, it’s surprising that the film is any good. The story follows two men who try to convince the naive Odile (Anna Karina)…
Before he died of congestive heart failure in March 1992, Richard Brooks, director of The Blackboard Jungle and In Cold Blood, used to tell this story. It takes place sometime in the late 1940s, when Brooks was ascending royalty in Hollywood; after all, he’d written John Huston’s Key Largo, starring Bogie and Bacall, and for his labors he had…
” has got all the showtime skills in his game, but he’s more about substance, which is more important. He’s the most gifted guard the St. Louis area has produced in many years. The Jimmy McKinney era will be right there along with the likes of Larry Hughes, Ryan Robertson, Darius Miles and Chris Carrawell.” — Earl Austin Jr., St….
Quin Snyder rides the Hearnes Center elevator to court level and walks briskly toward the bouncing basketballs and squeaking Nikes. He’s ready to watch the boys’ 4A state high-school championship basketball game between St. Louis rivals Vashon and DeSmet. More important, he wants to watch Jimmy. That’s Jimmy McKinney, Vashon’s 6-foot-3-inch senior guard. University of Missouri fans are going to…
A play about Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the most influential architects in history, could have been about fabulous set pieces — with the biography dribbled out as an afterthought. But Eric Simonson and Jeffrey Hatcher’s Work Song: Three Views of Frank Lloyd Wright takes the high road, and it’s no house of cards. For the Missouri Repertory Theatre’s production,…
Playwright Rebecca Gilman is a lightning rod. She traffics in themes that vibrate with urgency and get people talking. Boy Gets Girl, for example, follows a casual fling’s disintegration into a stalking situation, and The Glory of Living features a teen bride who procures underage girls for her husband’s sexual pleasure — before she kills them. Spinning Into Butter…
The ’80s are back! Or so say trend-watchers, as they have every other year since the actual decade. And while some Reagan-era style has resurfaced in the form of acts ranging from new-wave fetishists Causey Way to pop-metal revivalist Andrew W.K., one artifact has been steadfastly avoided: that slippery, Binaca-breath 1983 production. Cosmic Speed, the sophomore album by Go-Go’s guitarist…
D.V.S. Mindz’ 2000 debut, Million Dolla Broke Niggaz, offered a sonic timeline of the Topeka rap outfit’s storied history, with tracks dating back to its 1994 origins. DJ Kutaculous, the group’s greenest recruit, appeared on a handful of tracks, mostly augmenting the atmosphere with fluid turntablism. While Kutt’s DJ skills are well known around Top City, his reputation as a…
Isaac Freeman begins Beautiful Stars, this 73-year-old bass singer’s solo debut, by not singing at all. Rather, he talks about his mother. “This song struck me real deep, for it had been a few years since my mother passed,” he says carefully, his river-deep voice vibrating arrestingly as he recreates in his mind the first time he heard “Standing on…
Throughout Brandy’s recording career, now three albums deep, over-produced tracks have smothered her vocals. On Full Moon, the 23-year-old singer’s latest disc, she again struggles to be heard. Rodney Jerkins, who handled most of the production work, obviously doesn’t have much confidence in her ability to sing. Then again, when she’s given a chance, Brandy doesn’t justify a close-up. Full…
On paper, it’s an intriguing concept: Two of punk’s best-known bands cover each other’s material, with Rancid injecting street-smart credibility into NOFX’s snarky melodicore tunes, and NOFX adding levity to Rancid’s titanic Clash-inspired sound. On record, it’s a well-executed idea, for one song each. Reworking NOFX’s “Stickin’ in My Eye,” Rancid’s virtuosic bassist Matt Freeman adds a hyperkinetic undercurrent and…
Marsha Marr understood why her boss did not want to write off $2 million he’d spent on a computer program. That would be an admission that H&R Block Services Incorporated was not using the software, that it never would, that the money might as well have been buried beneath Henry Bloch’s beautiful fountain outside Union Station. But Marr didn’t want…
Here at the Pitch, we met Richard Tripp eleven years ago, when he was a cab driver living under the Broadway bridge. We were young and naïve then, and stunned by his story: Homeless people who tried to stay in shelters were getting stabbed, beaten up, ripped off. Shelter operators were hoarding donations for themselves. Tripp introduced us to men…
The days leading up to the April 2 Kansas City, Missouri, school board election are pushing the district further into that fifth dimension, where a 25-year-old desegregation lawsuit is “as timeless as infinity.” On March 18, board members held their regular meeting where voters could see them, at the Southeast Zoo Academy (no, really — that’s the name of the…
Scenes from a mall: I am impressed by C.J. Janovy’s candor in bringing to light the real facts of Bannister Mall and Highwoods Properties’ underhanded dealings to get tax breaks (“Blight Crawlers,” February 14, and “The Pork Authority,” March 7). The mall is a travesty and tax-increment financing is not going to help. Why wouldn’t the owner put in its…
With Panic Room, about the night Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and her teenage daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) are home-invaded by a trio of burglars seeking hidden treasure, director David Fincher reveals the derivativeness of his vision. For some, this will be enough: As mainstream, studio-financed movies shrink in significance, fervor and thought, we cheer irony and celebrate style, gullibly…
It’s readily apparent that Danny DeVito’s Death to Smoochy deals with a thoroughly debauched children’s television host (Robin Williams) who plots, amid much dark zaniness, to destroy his squeaky-clean successor (Edward Norton). It’s also easy to proclaim it the greatest movie ever made … about a singing vegan in a fuchsia rhino suit. But is Smoochy allegorical? Instructional? Culturally remonstrative?…
Somewhere near the middle of a continuum that ranges from Ultimate Fakebook’s headrushing melodicism to the Esoteric’s skull-crushing gristle lies Salt the Earth. The Lawrence quartet buries plenty of wide-eyed catchiness in its sonic sludge, but it also leaves ample room for devil-dog screams. Just listen to the nineteen seconds of guttural catharsis unleashed by singer and guitarist Martin…
As getting-discovered stories go, Ms. Jade’s is among the least probable. Granted, her methods weren’t quite as wild as Wes Scantlin’s (use fake backstage pass to meet Fred Durst, slip Puddle of Mudd demo to big Bizkit). Nor did she have to endure experiences that average people would find distasteful (attending a Limp Bizkit concert, ditching the rest of your…
Remember ska? The skankers dancing like marionettes with strings attached to their joints, the wacky choreographed horn sections, the rapid-fire reggae riffs? In 1994, groups such as No Doubt and Goldfinger introduced the venerable genre (it predates reggae) to eager young fans, who embraced its perky pace, undulating bass lines and brassy melodies. Suddenly, area punk groups were recruiting trombone…
