Sometimes even a buffet has trouble making it in Kansas City’s competitive restaurant scene. During its short life span, the pleasant Kanpai (218 West 85th Street) offered not only a lunch buffet but also two dining rooms — one with traditional Chinese fare, the other a Japanese steak house with teppan-yaki grills. Kanpai owner Mike Wang has revamped the space…
Too much of anything can be dangerous. That includes money, sex, power, physical beauty, free time and food. Food may actually be the most dangerous indulgence, since most Americans tend to be gluttons; last year the surgeon general named obesity the country’s “public health enemy number one.” We find more excuses to eat rich, fatty, greasy and sugary foods…
The prodigal son is an old story. To screw things up for anyone who’s never heard the biblical parable, we’ll paraphrase: A young man asks his father for his portion of the estate and leaves home, only to squander his wealth on extravagances; after he ends up working in a pig sty, the boy returns home, begs his father’s…
The artist currently known as Drub has the same jitters any artist might have before a first exhibition. But that’s nothing compared to what the uninitiated might experience upon seeing the work he describes as “proto-porn” and “homo trash illustration for the punk-and-skateboard generation.” Drub says it would “definitely” be fair to call his work X-rated. The color drawings of…
When this column debuted at the beginning of 2000, readers and editors scoffed at its occasional subject matter, the comic book. Kids’ stuff, they growled, junk food for adults who still live in their parents’ basements. And maybe they were right back then. The industry was dying; the art form was moribund. Sales were dwindling to an all-time low,…
“We have made a decision with this show that is not a guy we will seek out for interviews because he is extremely difficult to understand. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that he will be the least-interviewed manager in baseball. I think the radio and television stations for the most part — unless something really…
Jim Rome, the most-popular sports-talk show host in America, will draw a mob of 15,000 fans to Kemper Arena on June 8. Why would Kansas City, a town whose sports teams are about as impressive as Bud Selig, rate a rare visit from the Pimp in the Box? Credit Peter Yates Enich, the father of modern sports-talk radio in Kansas…
Dog people and cat people can coexist but are often poles apart. A dog’s virtues far outshine those of a cat, say the canine inclined, while cat people see dogs as smelly and boorish. And then there are dog people and nondog people, a scenario playwright A.R. Gurney depicts in Sylvia. Gurney places a dog at the center of…
Pete Seeger was a protest singer first, notwithstanding his “pure folk” and children’s albums, and his rickety crankiness has always either lured fans or sent ’em running toward Woody. If I Had a Song, a continuation of 1998’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, pushes Seeger’s natural qualities even further, turning sweet songs into gooey puddles. Steve Earle does the…
Seated in the middle of the pseudo-Indian cover design to John Scofield’s Überjam is the jazz guitarist himself, portrayed as a smug, four-armed male variant of the Hindu goddess Saraswati, seated in the lotus asana and grasping an electric guitar with an effects pedal tucked beneath his right foot. Never mind the obvious disconnect between Hinduism and the Nietchzian slant…
Anyone who’s followed Southern rap has followed Cee-Lo, at least since the 1995 debut of his crew, Goodie Mob. On that album, which first heralded the rise of the “Dirty South” and the “crunk,” Goodie Mob gave listeners the vocabulary of a building movement, and Cee-Lo’s voice established itself as one of Southern rap’s most distinctive seasonings. During the past…
Eddie Vedder was making a point when he worked with the late Qawwali master Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a less romanticized point than George Harrison made with Ravi Shankar a generation before. Vedder and Ali Khan emphasized the ties that bind Western popular music to Eastern traditional music. Finding such a link between a secularized American descendent of gospel (rock)…
Last year’s press darlings, the Strokes, helped kick-start a resurgence of three-chord moppets that could rock without resorting to arena-sized gestures. To date, the trend’s primary beneficiaries have been such long-struggling acts as Detroit’s White Stripes and Sweden’s the Hives. When the Hives issued its sophomore effort, Veni Vindi Vicious, nearly two years ago, the release was met with almost…
For every endorser or sponsor who decides to abandon a poor-performing individual, company, product or event, there are several more free-spenders and quick-touters who write checks and hoist thumbs upward regardless of the popularity or competence of their beneficiaries. Take Chiefs quarterback Trent Green, who, perhaps as a result of one too many late hits, willingly declared the Foreigner/Bad Company/Night…
“Living legend” is an appropriate term for noted sexagenarian subjects, but there’s a distinction to be made between artists who truly deserve that title and dinosaurs who owe their misleading designation to lazy critics and overzealous fans. What makes, say, Chuck Berry and James Brown more legendary than other musicians who have spent the past decade living off their hits…
Filmmaker and Avila College professor Benjamin Meade has spent considerable time in Budapest, Hungary. During one trip he stumbled upon four reels of home movies made as early as 1948. They’d been stolen by a mover, and Meade wondered who the family was and what had happened to the kids. He later returned to Hungary to find out. His…
There has always been something infuriating, if not appalling, about killing thousands of people in the name of blockbuster entertainment, but before September 11, no one thought much about it. When life became a widescreen horror film, though, filmmakers and moviegoers contemplated what cinema might be like if it weren’t so consumed with killing for kicks. With The Sum of…
Bus a move: Alicia Scott (Letters, May 16) thinks the people of Kansas City need a deal on the cost of bus fare to go to plays and art openings. The cost of riding the bus — one dollar in KCMO, slightly higher in some communities such as Independence — is already a great deal, especially when compared to the…
With practice, former Lone Jack Police Chief Jeffery Jewell has become more creative at explaining his resignations. Last week, after the Lone Jack city council paid him to go away one year and three months before his contract would expire, Jewell hinted to the media that the eastern Jackson County town simply couldn’t afford his whopping $31,858-a-year salary anymore. “Hopefully…
Missouri bureaucrats say Donnell Minton and Marcus Leach attend an “academically deficient” high school, but that hasn’t prevented them from becoming two of the state’s best debaters. Hailing from Central High, the two routinely befuddle the competition at suburban speech meets, spewing information from fact-packed brains so fast that opponents lose track and can only lapse into whiny criticisms of…
The mortals of Blue Springs put forth a decree that their children are in peril, threatened by a black plague that calls itself goth. In the distant capital, a parliamentarian takes pity on the melancholic young people of Blue Springs. He sends forth a fortune “to identify Goth culture leaders that are preying on our kids.” The word spreads across…
The stylish MelBee’s (see review) isn’t the only Johnson County restaurant to recently give a fashion makeover to a once-dowdy location (in MelBee’s case, an old appliance store). Farther south, just off Metcalf, the strip-mall home of the failed Semolina International Pasta Restaurant (7070 West 105th) is getting a haute couture French look from interior designer Dawn Sinisgalli so that…
There’s no place like Mission, Kansas. In 1928, the quiet little borough was home to only five businesses, including a restaurant, a hardware store and a barber shop. Today dozens of shops line the stretch of Johnson Drive between the Mission Center mall and Toto’s coffee shop just east of I-35. But it feels like the original five must…
“I left Kansas City because I always had a problem with who I was and where I belonged,” says Latina artist Jessica Manco, who recently returned after spending the past few years in New York City and Mexico. “In New York, it was the first time I didn’t feel like the little brown girl,” she says. “I just felt like…
