With Halloween lurking, we’d been in slight panic mode because we had no ideas for a costume. Remember The Onion’s list of “Top costumes for women, 18-34” (sexy witch, sexy nurse, sexy Mutant Ninja Turtle)? Yeah, well, that’s us. So when we heard about a party called Ellora’s Cave Fantasy, we knew we needed to mine it for costume ideas….
Kansas City doesn’t have enough celebrity restaurateurs — the kind of restaurant owners who are as well known for their personalities and opinions as for the dining rooms they operate. I can think of a handful who really know how to work the media: the Mirabile brothers at Jasper’s, Lidia Bastianich of Lidia’s and gravel-voiced Mike Garozzo of the Garozzo’s…
Few restaurants have opened with more promise and less substance than Union Café, the “outdoor” bistro situated right in the center of Union Station’s beautifully restored Grand Hall. In the space once occupied by Union Station’s original ticket counter, suddenly there was a restaurant with a great look and an oddball menu — fondue! crepes! fried catfish! — that…
WED 11/5 Quasi is one of the few bands that could play a song all about a chocolate rabbit and not only make it work but also make it seriously rock. Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss perform angsty songs that switch, on a well-timed dime, from fast rock to slow, melodramatic refrains. Listening to Quasi is most fun when you’re…
FRI 10/31 Halloween night is the perfect setting for tribute bands and rock side projects. Everybody else is in costume — why shouldn’t bands take on new identities, too? Members of sweet home Independence’s Cretin 66 slather on some black-and-white skull makeup and grease their hair into freakish pompadours for their tribute to the most terrifying band ever to come…
10/30-10/31 Pet owners are often treated as second-class parents. Halloween is one of the few holidays when those who are “only parents of four-legged children,” as Becky McCray puts it, get to join in the fun.McCray owns the Black Dog Coffeehouse (12815 West 87th Street Parkway in Lenexa), where a weeklong Howl-o-Ween Dog Costume Contest continues through Friday. It works…
The City Market (Fifth Street and Walnut) will still sell fall produce when it changes over to winter hours this weekend. If you want a pumpkin, this is still the place to get it. The pumpkin supply is more varied than what you’ll find at a supermarket — vendors offer scary white pumpkins, which are ghastly when transformed into jack-o’-lanterns….
FRI 10/31 Pipe organs produce two kinds of music: joyous sounds after church services while preachers are shooing everybody out, and that spooky stuff the Phantom of the Opera plays when he’s lonely. You know, Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.” (You’d recognize it if you heard it.) Is it the sound of all those big pipes that scares…
Amy Goodman is a busy woman. If you call her on the phone, you will be lucky to make it five minutes before she hurriedly but politely informs you that she’d really better take that other call now. And that’s a good thing. As the urgent-sounding title of her increasingly popular radio show Democracy Now! clearly indicates, she’s not…
Thursday, October 30, 2003 We know what happened when you moved into that co-op back in college. It was supposed to be an idyllic picture of sharing and kindness. But the dude who thought chocolate was the work of the devil refused to pay for his share of the chocolate-chip-cookie fund, and the straight-edge contingency wouldn’t contribute to the…
The Muehlebach Tower is haunted — at least that’s what security guards, housekeepers and engineers at the downtown hotel claimed during the two years I worked with them. So, in hopes of regaling Pitch readers with ghost stories, I dropped in on the downtown Marriott complex for an unannounced reunion. My first stop was the old Muehlebach lobby. The original…
Quality Hill Playhouse’s Oh, Coward! is like a good martini — refreshing and dry, with a twist. The show’s a fast-paced and comprehensive salute to composer, playwright and consummate bon vivant Noel Coward (1899-1973). Equally adept writing plays or musicals with sophisticated themes, Coward cut a figure no less fascinating than the decadent lives he created from thin air….
From ominous organ overtures to macabre piano melodies, keyboard instruments are an essential element in any spooky symphony. But foreboding as they might be, Ad Astra per Aspera’s sinister synthesized sounds aren’t quite as scary as the group’s violent, dual-guitar eruptions or its Exorcist-style vocals. The group usually builds its chaotic crescendos without malice, but at its Halloween show, it…
Often optimistically mislabeled the Erotica Trio by instantly enamored fans who have seen its strikingly stylish album covers, the all-female, piano-violin-cello, three-piece Eroica Trio only enhances its spell once the music starts. Its sixth CD teams the Trio with the Prague Chamber Orchestra, which will also join it onstage at this performance. Beethoven’s “Triple Concerto” ranks among the album’s highlights;…
At the height of her Geraldine Fibbers-fronting pseudo-fame, Carla Bozulich rated a Spin feature. She took full advantage of the opportunity, with a full-page photo that became the best hairy-armpits-baring punk pinup since Patti Smith’s Easter album cover. Riot-grrl chasers will never forget the sight of Bozulich, in black-lace bra and white tank top, donning yellow rubber gloves and wielding…
Marilyn Manson can’t shock us anymore, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need him. With the music charts divided among trendy garage rock, predictable gangsta rap and insultingly banal pop, the world could use some good old-fashioned rock-star provocation. Obviously it worked for the folks behind MansonSucks.com, an entire Web portal devoted to bringing down the self-proclaimed God of Fuck….
When Thad Cockrell declares in his press kit that “there’s no alt in country,” don’t you believe him. His lilting tenor comes a good deal closer to that of alt-country heartthrob and fellow North Carolinian Ryan Adams than it does to, say, fellow Tar Heel Randy Travis. You can say the same about Cockrell’s songs, too, which often value mood…
Britain, we have a problem. After years of lording considerable gravitational pull over fans of psychedelic guitar noise, “Spaceman” Jason Pierce and his musical-chairs ensemble in Spiritualized are in danger of becoming lost in their own galaxy of distortion. Spiritualized lined up for free blow jobs from fans and critics alike after 1997’s Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in…
Everyone knows about Hollywood relationships. Some doe-eyed, D-cup darling gets hot, sweaty and covered with K-Y in the company of a strapping beefcake. Predictably, the tryst crashes horribly, publicly, into the celebrity breakup bin. Then there’s Phantom Planet. The Los Angeles fivesome is best known for having the dude from Rushmore (Jason Schwartzman) as its drummer. But PP is an…
All right, Chester. Reggae is not about ratty dreads, tye-dyed T-shirts, smelly Birkenstocks and smoking spliffs the size of baguettes. It’s, like, love man. Reggae is love. Because, you know, it’s like the rhythm and the beat and the spirit of coming up in the swelter and squalor of Jamaica and still loving, really loving life. And loving the music….
Did you ever have anything like Halloween growing up in South Africa? People had Halloween parties, but we never really did the trick-or-treating and all that. What was your best costume? I always used to dress up as a woman for some odd reason. That can be scary. My fiancée grew up in Parktown North , if that means anything…
The news hit me hard. I was hysterical. Inconsolable. I searched frantically for whiskey and straight razors. Not really. I’d been here two weeks. The closure of Niener’s Bar and Grill meant fuck-all to me. I didn’t lose my virginity on the pool table. I never danced on the bar. I could barely find the place after L.I.E. singer Tim…
It’s that time of year when snot-nosed little shits come begging for free candy. Get a job, ya fourth-grade freeloaders! But whether you spend your Halloween dispensing Hershey bars, playing “Stairway to Heaven” backward or hacking up perky-breasted coeds, the following selection of Murder Is Fun! music will have you in stitches. No, really — it’s scary. Like when we…
Once upon a time, there were three cellos that needed three women to play them. Three girls were up to the task, toiling through childhood with their fingers against the strings and their bows sweeping just so. After nearly two decades, the prodigal talents decided they couldn’t tread where other cellos had gone before, down into the orchestra pit with…
