If Kansas City’s Dave Merola has his way, the traditional Thai noodle dish pad Thai — a stir-fry of cellophane noodles, chopped peanuts, egg, bean sprouts, cabbage and scallions — will become as familiar to local diners as, say, a double cheeseburger and fries. Merola, who owns six Wendy’s Old-Fashioned Hamburgers franchises, has signed an agreement with Colorado-based Noodles &…
All right, we might as well confess: We’ve been plotting at Night Ranger Headquarters. Late at night, in a windowless room with just a single 60-watt light bulb illuminating the red and caramely highlights in our hair (which reminds us — roots are probably showing; must make hair appointment) …wait, what? Oh, yeah, we digress. Anyway, we’ve been planning our…
Ann Liberda is a terrific cook, a great waitress and, so far, a pretty clever gambler. The Thai native took her first big risk back when she was a server at a Thai restaurant in Overland Park and decided she could do it better herself. She got a loan and opened her first Thai Place in an unattractive, wood-paneled…
THU 1/29 You’ve heard of Sike Style — graphic designer, DJ and hip-hop promoter all in one. But have you heard of his kid brother? If not, it’s probably because Style the younger is too young to hit the bars most nights. But not this Thursday, when the Hurricane (4048 Broadway) hosts an all-ages hip-hop show from 6-8 p.m….
FRI 1/30 Despite the so-called newness of so-called reality TV, the dichotomy between the real and the suspect has always been a filmmaker’s prerogative. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s (4525 Oak) winter Electromediascope program toys with that concept in a three-week Friday-night film series called Real to Reel. Of the films available for preview, it’s Quirine Racke and Helena…
1/29-2/13 Given the current state of the sport, it must be difficult to appreciate that Major League Baseball teams were segregated by race within the past seventy years. The Theatre for Young America (5909 Johnson Drive in Mission) and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum want to educate younger audiences about baseball, race relations and 18th and Vine during the…
WED 2/4 If the Kansas City Chiefs’ defensive line could tap into the combustive energy of the stressed-out businesswoman who rushes home to feed three ungrateful children and one drunk husband, maybe they could force a punt. That’s the thinking behind today’s Women’s Sports Festival, where perfectly upstanding women harboring secret desires to kick, pummel and destroy can check…
SAT 1/31 The name of Saturday’s Chili for Choice event is intriguing. Even the best bowl of chili we could ever imagine would be unlikely to convince Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to vote in favor of a woman’s right to choose. You can only expect so much from a comfort food. But the chili dished up by activists…
Reading a casting call specifying that actors should be between 3 feet and 5 feet tall and possess a wolflike nose and coarse body hair, we wondered if someone was looking for more Average Joe contestants. But it turns out that the performers in demand are made of cloth, papier-mâché and found objects — and belong to Paul Mesner,…
Thursday, January 29, 2004 If we had anything to do with it, Kansas Day celebrations would be anything but tame. Imagine if the anniversary of Kansas’ statehood were celebrated with an enormous party on a par with the debauchery of Atlanta’s dearly departed Freaknic, the citywide bash of epic proportions that fell victim in recent years to overeager partygoers…
Russ Johnson has seen a lot of changes in the fifty years since he began assembling model cars. Back in the ’40s and ’50s, the small car kits were simply blocks of balsa wood that required serious hands-on attention and patience. Plastics came along and made the job a little easier, but not much. The first kit that Johnson…
With the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum here, it’s surprising that The Monarchs of KC is the first theatrical salute to the team that Jackie Robinson left in 1945 to go to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Written by Gene Mackey and directed by Jacqee Gafford, with a Danny Cox score, Theatre for Young America’s musical fable supposes that the ghosts of various…
Plays set in the Middle East are as rare in these parts as falafel and mosques used to be — something too exotic for Midwestern sensibilities. But the world evolves and tastes broaden, and the new play How His Bride Came to Abraham by former Kansas City resident Karen Sunde is having its first fully staged production at the…
The 22 songs from Love’s fertile peak (1966-69) that make up The Best of Love make the case that this L.A. band belongs in rock’s pantheon. The first racially integrated rock group, Love was led by Arthur Lee, an African-American from Memphis who synthesized the era’s folk, pop (the group vigorously pumped up Burt Bacharach’s “My Little Red Book”), garage…
One person’s trash is another’s Tchaikovsky. For Mark Gergis, aka Porest, the world is a dumpster: Talk suey rots on radio airwaves, children’s tapes and audio diaries clutter thrift-store bins, public-television documentaries drone on like Ben Stein. Imagine Prude Juice as a sort of Fresh Kills symphony. “Flip for Tomorrow” mimics the rhythms of the future as envisioned by the…
San Francisco label Orthlorng Musork has unleashed lots of bizarre experimental electronica into the world over the past few years. Its latest specimen, Babies That Hunt, takes to even more ridiculous realms the electro babbling of labelmates Blectum From Blechdom and the ADD digital pop of French trio DAT Politics. Secret Mommy (Vancouver producer Andy Dixon) imbues his music with…
Music for laying your woman/man/transgendered individual down by the fire usually isn’t known for its subtlety. When Marvin Gaye wanted to get it on, he wrote “Let’s Get It On.” Trent Reznor tossed aside foreplay to scream something about wanting to fuck you like an animal. Even Barry White, the king of Music to Pimp By, didn’t exactly beat around…
It’s a testament to the power of marketing that Ja Rule has managed to sustain a showbiz career as long as he has. Neither particularly talented nor especially charismatic, Rule has surfed the mainstream wave on a marginal ability to imitate forefathers such as Tupac and DMX. He’s also had lots of old-fashioned good luck. His star-making appearance alongside J….
Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books? Yeah, neither do we. But we believe in the free-enterprise system, which is why we are giving you two options for your Son Venezuela Critic’s Choice reading pleasure. OK, so the chimpanzee running this section double-booked. It just means you get to double your pleasure, double your fun. Option 1: When faced…
%{}% You have to think that the moment when the son of a bluesman finally slinks up to his mother and whispers, “Momma, I’ve decided to live the blues life, just like my daddy did” isn’t a joyful one for a mother. Still, Ronnie Baker Brooks, son of Lonnie Brooks, the most smiling blues guitarist ever, has joined Luther Allison’s…
Talk about blossoming indie cred. The Lawrence boys in Ghosty have opened for critical darlings such as Spoon and Beulah. They’ve played the prestigious CMJ showcase in New York City. They’ve recorded material with producer Mike Mogis, known for his work with cult-favorite Nebraska bands such as Bright Eyes. And they’ve even helped out on a song by indie pioneers…
Who gives a fuck about a goddamned Grammy? I’d bet the members of Skeleton Key might know the answer. After all, their 1997 debut, Fantastic Spikes Through Balloon, was nominated in the Best Recording Package category. The fact that a group of art-funkateers from the Lower East Side even got that close to a Grammy with an album recorded…
As stunning in its genre as Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/Love Below was in hip-hop, Opeth’s recent releases Deliverance and Damnation (sold separately) depict radically different facets of the Swedish metal outfit’s personality. Deliverance delves out savage riffs and robust rhythmic backdrops, tempering the fury with eerily calm eye-of-the-storm instrumental passages. Damnation, an impressive acoustic departure, bares Mikael Akerfeldt’s tunefully damaged voice and…
People are running out of gimmicks. The whole underage-sex-kitten thing is played out. Ditto the ambiguous man-dressed-as-a-woman and woman-dressed-as-a-man things. Wearing masks, painting faces, worshipping Satan. Tossing raw meat and live chickens into the audience. Self-mutilation. Biting heads off bats. Throwing feces. Ho-hum. Ah, but there aren’t nearly enough people fucking with the Pennsylvania Dutch. Enter the Amish Armada….
