It was cold and wet the day last January when I took a bus from downtown to Anti-Crew headquarters in a house near Armour and the Paseo. In those days, I didn’t have a car, so I was often the only white person my age on the Metro — especially those east-side routes. So I identified with the song “Route…
The members of Pixel Panda just can’t seem to sit still. That’s not some trite observation of the band’s career aspirations. On this Thursday night at McCoy’s in Westport, the four bandmates — singer Do-Yun Kim, keyboardist Alicia Solombrino, bassist Luis Arana and his brother, guitarist Jorge Arana — won’t stop squirming in the seats of their oversized booth. Some…
Dear Mexican: How did the patron saint of Mexico get a name derived from Arabic? El Moro Judío Dear Jewish Moor: You’re referring to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the brown-skinned apparition of the Virgin Mary who tradition says appeared before the Aztec peasant Juan Diego in December 1531 just outside what is now Mexico City. As you correctly noted, Guadalupe’s…
Backwash, December 21 Hernia Relief Your send-up of Skip Sleyster’s “column” in The Kansas City Star was great. Why they don’t give him a column and make that ass-wipe Hearne Christopher Jr. pay to get his ink in the paper will always be a mystery. Ernie Henderson, Lenexa Janovy, November 23 and December 21 Copy Right I have previously complained…
Hey, hit-and-run driver, remember me? I was driving the southbound Grand-Am GT that you rear-ended one Monday morning. I was exiting the Broadway Bridge when you decided to clip the ass end of my car. You probably couldn’t see me when you ignored the “no right turn” sign and gunned it west on Fifth Street toward KCK. But I saw…
For months, Kansas City Star cartoonist Lee Judge has been asking the paper’s online readers to tell him what to draw. If he still needs ideas, we’ve come up with a cartoon we’d like to see him pen. Feel free to fill in your own dialogue. Send or drop off your ideas: Tell Lee Judge What to Draw, the Pitch,…
Bobby Smith, the 38-year-old owner of Xtreme Fitness in Lee’s Summit, is a walking ad for his company. In November, he placed 13th in a field of 230 at the National Physique Committee Bodybuilding & Fitness Championships in Miami Beach, Florida. We caught up with Smith, a 20-year veteran bodybuilder who competes in the heavyweight class, to find out what…
After two big-time politicians were accused last week of crimes related to mortgage fraud, everyone in town seemed to be asking the same question: How can I get in on this action? Kansas City Councilwoman Saundra McFadden-Weaver and mayoral candidate Katheryn Shields both face federal indictments in unrelated mortgage-fraud investigations. They follow former Kansas congressional candidate Adam Taff, who went…
Hey, Katheryn Shields, here’s something to really be proud of. After a long career in local politics, you triumphantly filed paperwork to run for mayor of Kansas City, Missouri. And in your January 5 announcement — in which you proclaimed yourself “the only candidate for Mayor who has the experience, the desire and the vision” to pursue an important…
By now, the Strip hopes all of its readers are safely back from their holiday travels. Hunkered down at home, this meat patty was disturbed to read reports of starving cattle, up to their bellies in snow out in western Kansas, and was worried about some of its co-workers getting stranded at the Denver airport. Airports were on the Strip’s…
I was standing outside a downtown wine bar when it became clear that something had to be done. And by something, I mean a bar tour. More specifically, a tour de smoke that would suss out the stankiest-smelling place in town. It was First Friday, and a young woman next to me in a pinkish tweed coat was puffing away…
Finally, after about a year of waiting, we can all see, in finished form, the video that Toyota/Scion made for Reach. Click on “Watch Now” in the “Featured Show” box on the left. My crappy PC monitor is too dark for me to see much of what’s going on. Hope you fare better with your office machine. Hey, dude, wake…
I was picking up some groceries last night around 9 when I got a call from Zach Phillips about a rippin’ party at his band’s practice space at this building on the corner of 36th and Main. A bunch of bands, including his own, were playing and there was beer. I was gonna take it easy, but what the hell…
This week’s issue of Jazz Notes — a local, weekly e-mail newsletter sent out by an older white dude with the inexplicable e-mail address “steelbuns@sbcglobal.net” — contained a link to a Bobby Watson concert recorded by an NPR affiliate in New Jersey (I think). Oh look, and there’s one by Karrin Allyson, a “Kansas City daughter.” Meanwhile, in my home…
I was really tired this week and chose napping over blogging for the most part. I promise to come back next week with renewed vigor. I might even write a few words on the bands I’ve seen live lately and have merely watched drunk wondering what the hell I would say about it later in writing and then saying nothing…
Robert Wilonsky and Jordan Harper recap their top DVDs of 2006: Eraserhead (Absurda/Subversive) — Finally available on DVD, David Lynch’s debut film remains as captivating and frustrating as it ever was. The print looks great in its own weird way, and the feature-length doc shows Lynch speaking more clearly about his art than his normally cryptic style allows. A History…
Terror on the Toyland Express Since its inception, the Mystery Train has staged clever, interactive mysteries set on dining cars headed to or from Union Station in various eras of Kansas City’s past. This time, things get weirder: The train is a Lionel electric, chuffing around the mayor’s Christmas tree in front of Union Station, and the murderer, the victim…
American Dream: In Question The second installment of the Belger’s American Dream series requires an open mind and an adventurous spirit. National artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Roche, Renee Stout, Robert Stackhouse and William T. Wiley, among many others, share space with local artists Archie Scott Gobber and May Tveit, offering a variety of media with intriguing results. Rather…
Full Frontal Comedy sounds like it’s going to be filthy. Instead, it’s sweet-natured, sometimes ribald, occasionally angry — but in a sensible, evenhanded way. The company’s shows, which generally pair improv with scripted sketches, might tickle the taboo, and the performers are unafraid to work blue, but they never do so cynically or without a comic point or in the…
Director Todd Field’s second excursion into middle-class unease, Little Children (following his intelligent but overrated In the Bedroom), opens with a slow pan around a living room crowded with cheap china figurines of … little children. Twisted into insidious grins, their blood-red lips ooze a comic horror that will seep into the lives of the film’s real kids and their…
Eleven winters ago, Universal had the season’s strongest movie — a downbeat sci-fi flick freely adapted from a well-known source by a name director. With a bare minimum of advance screenings and a pointed absence of hype, the studio dumped it. This year, Universal has done it again. The 1995 castoff was 12 Monkeys, Terry Gilliam’s remake of Chris…
Most of the people I know in the restaurant business believe that most, if not all, of the new dining venues planned for the Cordish Company’s downtown entertainment neighborhood, the Power & Light District, will be national chain operations. The restaurant operations most frequently mentioned on the Baltimore-based development company’s Web site include the Hard Rock Café, the Red Star…
Yeah, I know that the new film version of Dreamgirls — based on the 1981 stage musical — is supposedly a roman à clef inspired by the rise of Diana Ross and the Supremes. What gets lost in the movie’s focus on the chubby vocalist with the powerful voice getting shoved out of the spotlight by the skinny, pretty and…
Late on a Wednesday night in North Kansas City, three women stood atop the bar at Moxie, vying for a chance to be Miss Kans-Ass City. As the DJ cued T.I.’s “Bring ‘Em Out,” a hot blonde pulled up the cuffs of her slender jeans to her knees and raised her shirt up to expose her taut midriff. The second…
