While pondering the upcoming holidays, we had this epiphany: New Year’s Eve is like Marty Schottenheimer’s Chiefs. Every year, we have high expectations for the end of the season, but we’re always let down. How much do we hate New Year’s Eve? Let us count the ways. First, the weather is freezing. Second, our friends are out of town. Third,…
It’s one thing to change the name of a short-lived restaurant, as when Loula’s Bistro and Wine Bar became Hannah Bistro Café (see review). But for the popular Pyramids Café (3613 Broadway), a new owner meant a new name, a revamped menu and a complete interior makeover. When Jaffar Shukair turned an old storefront Subway sandwich shop into the Pyramids…
Kansas City restaurateurs haven’t always been lucky naming restaurants after famous locals. True, Annie’s Santa Fe (named for this town’s best-known hooker) had a long run before the Mexican food chain fell — metaphorically anyway — on its ass. And even though “Walt Bodine’s Steakhouse” might have been an improvement over the more suggestive “Sir Loin Room,” the new…
Heather Hands, who owns and operates the City Market’s Local Harvest, thinks putting on a little weight this time of year is healthy. “It’s really best to eat what’s in season,” she explains. Local Harvest may be small, but it’s got the basics — milk, cheese, bread, corn, jam and locally raised pork (the other other white meat) —…
When the prizes are awarded at next month’s Sundance Film Festival, there’s a chance Kansas City could walk into the winner’s circle. Among the competitors in the Sundance Online Film Festival is the two-minute short Ultralove Ninja, created by the six-person, eighteen-month-old motion graphic and design studio MK12. Ben Radatz is a designer with MK12. His business card calls…
The biggest event to happen to television this year took place at the multiplex this summer: My Big Fat Greek Wedding, a one-woman show that has blossomed into a one-woman franchise. This spring, CBS-TV will debut My Big Fat Greek Life as a midseason replacement, featuring the entire cast of the movie save John Corbett—and good luck distinguishing it…
“It’s been hanging over my head to the point where I haven’t been able to enjoy the off-season.” — Paul Byrd, on the burden of weighing multimillion-dollar contract offers from a handful of MLB teams, The Kansas City Star GH: What an absolutely awful way to have to spend the four months you have away from your $2 million job…
Jason Whitlock, The Kansas City Star’s African-American sports columnist, says Roy Williams’ Jayhawks are too black for their own good. For the first time in more than a decade, the University of Kansas had lost three games before Christmas, and pundits were grasping for reasons why. “If you look at Roy’s typical eight- or nine-man rotation, it’s not his typical…
The golden road to mainstream acceptance brings a steady flow of female vocalists through the jazz side of town. Yet most of these young singers jump ship as soon as they find an audience for their work, abandoning what is often perceived as the narrow confines of jazz for the endlessly amendable realm of pop. Vocalist Carol Duboc obviously understands…
When the clock strikes midnight on Tuesday evening, wise local music fans will be at the Bottleneck celebrating their Anniversary. Having just returned home for the holidays from a lengthy tour, the Lawrence quintet should be ready to cut loose and throw some confetti. Sharing the bill are Leawood’s Gadjits, who inked a major-label deal with RCA in September. Having…
Yeah, sure, Christmas is grand, go Jesus, blah blah blah. That doesn’t change the fact that Andy Bob gets screwed out of birthday presents every December 27. As a youngster, he really got the shaft, missing out on those parties with the hats and store-bought cupcakes because his annual celebration fell during winter vacation. Certainly the oversights of the…
At a concert last month in Lawrence, one young woman sported a white T-shirt decorated with the black-marker message “I Goatwhore.” Unfortunately for the New Orleans-based black-metal quartet, its name had been crossed out and replaced with Beck, that evening’s headliner. Hell hath no fury like a satanic band scorned, so the fair-weather fan would do well to repent. Otherwise,…
There have been some personnel changes in BR549 recently, but the band’s frontman, Lawrence native Chuck Mead, has weathered a lot in his musical life. After all, if he hadn’t left the Homestead Grays, there might never have been a BR549. And if Poverty Wanks, the reggae/ska outfit he worked with in the mid-’80s (really — ask him) hadn’t…
Born before punky power-pop was major-label marketable and remaining true to itself during the alt-buzz days, Iowa’s House of Large Sizes still refuses to alter its path. Much like former tourmates Poster Children, HOLS revels in riffage and comes across as subtly as a car crash. Live, the band sets up, plugs in and goes from zero to rock in…
Growly, snarling, sweaty hardcore metal has traditionally been made by growly, snarly, sweaty guys. But the genre should clear some room for the new breed of chainsaw kittens that are currently knockin’ on Satan’s door. One such act is Wage of Sin, an all-female quartet determined to put the grrr back in girl. With fast and frightening guitars that grind…
Given Back Porch Mary’s knack for blurring the lines between blues, rock, country and metal, the band’s current home of Austin, Texas, is a perfect fit. However, this high-energy outfit actually got its start in Manhattan, Kansas, in 1995. Although the band’s lineup has changed slightly since then, it remains a perennial area favorite thanks to a heavy touring schedule…
In an effort to bestow landmark status on 2002, pundits have dubbed it “year of the producer” or lauded the “return of rock.” Never mind that dominance is nothing new for producers such as Timbaland, who conjured 2001’s three best singles. Or, for that matter, that the most recent albums by the White Stripes and Strokes came out more than…
Based on the true story of three young Aboriginal girls who walked across the perilous Australian Outback to be reunited with their mothers, Rabbit-Proof Fence might well be subtitled True Grit. When it comes to issues of racism and how a nation treats its indigenous people, the former English colony of Australia is on a shameful par with the United…
Everything about Catch Me If You Can, the loosely fact-based tale of a teen who swindled millions while posing as, among other things, a Pan Am pilot, a doctor and a lawyer, is breezy and easy to swallow. Its maker, Steven Spielberg, hasn’t had so much fun in two decades, since he was schlepping Indiana Jones around the globe….
Where the wild things are: How funny it was to remember Joe Miller’s article criticizing KCTV Channel 5 (“Anchors Away!” April 4). I couldn’t help but laugh when he belittled their reporting expertise. Why? Because of the shabby reporting your paper did on WildCare Inc. (Allie Johnson’s “Predatory Practices,” October 10). I have volunteered at WildCare for the last ten…
It’s been a hard year for charities. So why have two national foundations snubbed a hometown company eager to give away its money? GayCoffees, a Kansas City-based enterprise that sells a variety of blends for $10 a pound and gives $4 from each sale to charity, appears among the A-list gift ideas in the December issue of Out, a national…
Last January, vandals broke into the apartment of two black Northland residents and painted it with racial slurs. That same month, two swastikas were spray-painted on a shed and a car owned by two black families in Kansas City, Kansas. In April, someone set fire to a car owned by two Park University students from Liberia, who then were held…
The Burly-Q Girly Crew is backstage getting ready. On a makeshift stage on the cavernous first floor of the Hobbs Building, a stockyard-era brick warehouse in the West Bottoms, Michael Morales smashes cans of food on his “finger of doom.” But the cigarette-smoking twenty-somethings in leather jackets and sexy-librarian glasses won’t have much more patience for Bob the Amazing Juggler…
In word-association games, rarely is “a strip mall in Johnson County” the first thing that comes to mind after “meat market.” Unless we’re talking about Raoul’s Velvet Room, where a swank interior and alleged sassiness shine a beacon for trendoids everywhere. Located at 119th and Metcalf — in the same strip as Mardel, a Christian-merchandising emporium — its high hookup…
