When Sandra Guzmán was in college, she went through an angsty phase she called a blanquita complex: She wanted to be a white girl. She even considered changing her name to Sandy Rogers. As a boricua — a Puerto Rican — who was born on the island but raised in chilly New Jersey, she grew up surrounded by Latino culture…
We were excited to hear that filmmaker and author Michael Moore was returning to give Kansas City an infusion of leftist inspiration Monday at UMKC. Sadly, though, he wasn’t free to speak with the Pitch beforehand. In fact, our efforts to secure an interview with Moore sort of resembled his classic Roger & Me, the hilarious and heart-wrenching 1989…
“It’s amazing to me that the people in this town expect more from their sports teams than they do from their elected officials. Why do they expect more from the Chiefs and the Royals than they do of their school board, of city hall, of their downtown? If the Royals had the ‘vision’ of Kay Barnes, the fans would be…
Call it arena envy. We’ve all heard that Kemper Arena is a dump, and once the Big 12 Conference tries out Dallas’ new $420 million American Airlines Center next March, organizers will want to ditch plans to bring the men’s basketball tournament back to Kansas City in 2005. The American Airlines Center’s Web site boasts that, with a 3-1 ratio…
When Winnetonka High School drama teacher Sheri Coffman sent her seniors home with the script for The Laramie Project, Moises Kaufman’s docudrama about the death of gay college student Matthew Shepard, she hoped they would reaffirm her gutsy intention to produce the play. “If at all possible, I wanted to do the play with this group of students,” Coffman…
Things we know about the Pat Metheny Group: 1. PMG, as fans call the jazz ensemble, has released eleven albums in 24 years, toured around the world and won eight Grammys. 2. Metheny is from Lee’s Summit, and his brass-man brother, Mike, also edits Jam, the Kansas City Jazz Ambassadors’ mag. 3. Metheny knows how to surround himself with very…
Unlike most neurotic boy outsiders, the members of Audio Learning Center have more to offer than paint-by-numbers angst and chip-on-shoulder bravado. Formed in 1998 as Mandarin, ALC fused the creative forces behind two aquatic early-’90s Portland acts when former Pond bassist and vocalist Christopher Brady and ex-Sprinkler guitarist Steven Birch joined forces with drummer Paul Johnson. Their labors birthed the…
It’s hard to listen to the soundtrack for the second Blade installment without being reminded of the discs that accompanied 1993’s Judgment Night and 1997’s Spawn. Those efforts paired motley crews of metallic moshers with rappers and beat farmers, respectively. That the CDs were light years better than their cinematic counterparts isn’t saying much — neither broke any real ground….
Kurt Wagner, Lambchop’s vocalist, maintains that eight or nine musicians contributed consistently to Is A Woman, the Nashville group’s sixth full-length. Good thing he cleared that up, because there’s virtually no way to discern the size of the band by listening to the disc. Perhaps never before have so many people sounded like so much less than the sum of…
Rock operas often contain neither real rock nor opera; instead, less-than-Met-ready tenors bellow pompous concept-driven lyrics while bloated guitar pop swells in the background. Such is the fate of many attempts to combine heavy music and high art — see Metallica’s disappointing symphony collaboration or any overinflated “Stairway to Heaven” rip-off. But the transfusion of blue blood into metal’s bulging…
Sometimes, when situations become too tense for a group of musicians, the best course of action is to disband and wait. Like a select few painters, rappers and saviors, Coalesce is bigger after death than it was in its previous life. Back in 1994, guitarist Jes Steineger, bassist Stacy Hilt, drummer James Redd and singer Sean Ingram began experimenting with…
Sarge didn’t have a radio single, a groundbreaking style or a fashion-forward way of appropriating an established sound. It was a female-fronted trio, but singer and guitarist Elizabeth Elmore and bassist Rachel Switzky weren’t riot girlies, Lilith fare or scantily-clad pop princesses, which would seem to exclude them from Rolling Stone’s coverage criteria. Yet in 1998, the mag picked the…
Getting a major-label record deal is no guarantee of success. In fact, a recording contract is often merely the beginning of a fresh set of struggles for burgeoning bands. Take Sinisstar, an industrial-edged nü-metal quintet that inked an enviable deal with Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst’s Flawless Records more than two years ago. In late 1999, production for the group’s…
A midlife epiphany spurred Richard Roe to plan a trip around the world with his son Chris. With his career in limbo, and struck by the realization that “two-thirds of life was over,” Roe wanted to retrace the route he and his family (a former wife and two other sons) had taken when Chris was eleven. The idea that they…
Part comedy, part tragedy and all bite, No Man’s Land (a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee) damns and mocks in equal measure, painting a picture of war’s absurdity that should — but probably won’t — make peaceniks of us all. Although set in the former Yugoslavia during the Bosnian-Serbian war, the movie transcends its geography: Bosnian-born writer and…
Plaza Blights Highwoods high jinks: As participants in the ongoing struggle to preserve the 1925 Park Lane Apartment building, we appreciated Casey Logan’s thorough and revealing coverage of the issues surrounding Highwoods’ proposed plans to demolish the building that has sat gracefully on J.C. Nichols Parkway since the early days of the Plaza (“Truce or Consequences,” March 7). The facts…
Federal Judge Dean Whipple, who presides over the Kansas City, Missouri, school district’s 25-year-old desegregation case, recently received a report on patronage and micromanagement in the district. The report cost in excess of $100,000 to prepare, and select Kansas Citians — lawyers and school officials — have seen it. But they can’t talk about it, and the public can’t see…
The only serious contest in this year’s Kansas City, Missouri, school board election is for two districtwide at-large seats, which three candidates — Michael Byrd, David Smith and Ingrid Burnett — are seeking. Only one of the three candidates will lose. But observers say the outcome of this one race may shift the board’s center of power. “What’s at…
The land between the bluffs and the river is sacred. The old town of Quindaro, at the northern edge of Kansas City, Kansas, was a stop on the underground railroad, where slaves crossed the Missouri River and found freedom in Kansas. Quindaro’s ruins rest uneasily in a forgotten neighborhood. Ten years ago, recognizing the site’s importance, activists rallied, and the…
My snooty friend John couldn’t believe it when I told him I liked the food at Lucky Brewgrille. “I mean, I’m sure it’s fine and everything,” he said, thunderstruck. “But it’s in a strip mall. In Mission, for God’s sake. And it’s really a bar, you know.” It’s fair to say that Mission isn’t exactly a restaurant mecca and that…
How I love starting the day with a phone call informing me that a previous Mouthing Off (“Here’s to You, Mr. Robinson,”) had reduced a reader to tears. I hadn’t taken two sips of coffee one March morning before Gail Lozoff — the founder of Bagel & Bagel and a $41,000-a-month executive at Houlihan’s Restaurants Inc. — called to say…
I have always been a great fan of novelty restaurants, places with oddball décor or theatrical themes and servers in costumes. The weirder the better. Back in my hometown, there was no place as extraordinary as Fritz’s Union Station, where an elevated “Skat Cat” train system delivered burgers and fries. But there was a drive-in with carhops on roller…
he news that yet another national restaurant chain, The Melting Pot (see review), had opened on the Country Club Plaza wasn’t a surprise to Steve Cole, the owner of Café Allegro (1815 West 39th Street). He’s the restaurateur who did more than anyone to make a stretch of West 39th Street the city’s restaurant row. “The Plaza,” Cole says, “is…
John Waters is slated to come to Kansas City for a ceramics convention. Yes, we mean the film director whose characters have done everything from eating shit to getting naked and licking people’s toes. And no, he’s not a ceramist. “I have my own craft, which is filth,” Waters says from his Baltimore office. “That’s what I sculpt.” He’s coming…
