Fired Up! Missouri offered up this nearly line-by-line analysis recently of a story in The Kansas City Star. The blog claims that the Star watered down the McClatchy Company’s original newspaper piece because the paper’s “editorial staff feels the need to protect ‘the Republican-controlled Missouri General Assembly’ from exposure to facts reported on and published by its parent company.” Categories:…
It’s always heartening when a down-home, Midwestern girl makes it big out there in the big city. Case in point: Kate Brosnahan, the St. Teresa’s Academy graduate who went to work for Mademoiselle in New York City, married Andy Spade and launched a line of handbags, shoes, stationery and clothing under the charmingly lowercase brand name kate spade. Categories:…
I ran into Wes Gartner, drummer for the now-defunct Doris Henson (woops, try their MySpace, the other night, and he said that completions are being made for a new, and presumably final, DH album. A few months ago, DH frontman Matt Dunehoo sent out an email directing people to a Web site where he’d posted some solo songs — rather…
Concert Review by Nadia Pflaum Last night at the Granada in Lawrence, El-P took the stage beneath white sheets imprinted with the disturbing icon from his album, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead: a skeletal bird in flight, head twisted to look heavenward, crowned with a halo. His bassist, DJ and keyboardist arrived dressed in woolen facemasks with holes for…
MOVIES: We thought Saturday’s 5 p.m. Gore-B-Que at the Brick (1727 McGee, 816-421-1634) might be an environmental awareness event connecting vice presidential slide-showman Al Gore’s greenhouse outreach with a delicious pit-roasted pig. But the truth, as is often the case with the environmental implications of human industry, is far more terrifying. Gore-B-Que is The Brick’s rechristening of “Dinner and…
A reader named John wrote us on May 9 to ask for some help getting news he ought to have read in his daily paper. “Some of us would like to see the complete list of contributors to the Funkhouser inauguration festivities, but The Star only published the list in its $400-a-year blog. Could you please publish the list…
I didn’t know Leslie Noble Ballew. But she was a huge fan of the weekly Trivia Nights at the Westport Flea Market (held on Wednesdays and Thursdays), and anyone who delights in knowing the battles of the Crimean War or identifying TV theme song snippets is just cool, period. Leslie, who tragically lost her life in the Ward Parkway…
In this week’s Pitchcast, Pitch Music Editor Jason Harper spins songs by Morrissey, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Clutch, El-P, Cloud Cult, the Fourth of July and incidental music by Mike Flowers Pops, White Flight, and others. Get it through iTunes here. or … Categories: News
Thirty years ago today – May 10, 1977 – the big story on most of the morning TV shows was the announcement that one of Hollywood’s most legendary movie stars, Joan Crawford, had died at age 72. Although Crawford was technically a native of San Antonio, Texas (she was born there as Lucille Fay LeSueur in 1905), Kansas City claimed…
Sunday morning classics. Sundays, 2007 Tags: Night & Day
Saturday movies at the Brick (1727 McGee) are a long-standing tradition, but owner Sheri Parr now offers a theme that you can really sink your teeth into. “Dinner and a Movie Night” is now Gore-B-Que, which includes a $6.95 barbecue dinner, beer specials and some walking corpses with an insatiable lust for guts. Tonight, the Brick serves up ribs and…
Of all the bar genres in Kansas City, the wine bar is woefully underrepresented. Fortunately for us, the newly opened JP Wine Bar Coffee House has stepped up to fill that void. JP’s décor is sleek and modern; chartreuse walls contrast nicely with dark cherry furniture, and silver chandeliers shaped in abstract swirls hang overhead. A row of booths…
Before you pee on this page of the Pitch, read up. You know how your human always ditches you for happy hour? Here’s one you can drag her to. Every third Tuesday of the month, Lill’s on 17th (815 West 17th Street) teams up with the urban-pooch walkers at Citydog to throw a happy hour for dog lovers. They…
Two koalas visit the Kansas City Zoo through the summer. May 10-Sept. 10 Tags: kansas city zoo, Night & Day
Because I Said So! (Universal) Breaking and Entering (Weinstein) The Bridge on the River Kwai: Collector’s Edition (Sony) Cagney & Lacey: The True Beginning (MGM) The Caine Mutiny: Collector’s Edition (Sony) Catch & Release (Sony) Deliver Us From Evil (Lionsgate) Dirty Dancing: Twentieth Anniversary (Lionsgate) Donnie Brasco: Extended Cut (Sony) Everybody Loves Raymond: The Complete Eighth Season (HBO) The 4400:…
There was a time in my life when I might have actually enjoyed Pocket Pool a little bit. Back when I was 12, giving myself migraines from staring at scrambled cable porn, the notion of a game where I could “win” pictures of girls in their underwear would’ve seemed pretty cool. Heck, even the game’s name might’ve sounded funny….
To Catch a Thief: Special Collector’s Edition (Paramount) Starring Cary Grant as a cat burglar and Grace Kelly as a hot-to-trot heiress, this is easily one of Alfred Hitchcock’s slightest films, especially coming on the heels of Rear Window; indeed, its idyllic setting on the French Riviera suggests it was a vacation getaway for the director and his cast, who…
Iron Kisses On one level, Iron Kisses is another dash through two of the most common — and self-involved — ideas that you’d see in a young playwrights’ workshop: a coming-out tale, with a detour into how a character got the hell out of a small town. Playwright (and native Kansan) James Still’s innovation is to give us this story…
The Chicano Experience This is the third-annual group exhibition organized by the Mattie Rhodes center celebrating the Chicano (Mexican-American) experience. Israel Garcia’s mixed-media installation includes two large photographs — a white-haired woman working in the kitchen, and a male worker in a cowboy hat and a denim jacket — placed next to an abstract sculpture of a disembodied face, with…
Before it hit Kansas City, Pamela Gien’s popular one-woman The Syringa Tree was feted by critics, decorated with awards and generally toasted for being all the noble things it is: a visceral, sentimental play about growing up white and wealthy in apartheid-era Johannesburg, South Africa. Most of this praise applies to its incarnation at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s new…
Lots of people have been paying attention to Uganda lately. Forest Whitaker won an Oscar playing Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, which depicts the atrocities Amin committed there. A 20-year-old civil war in the north has left the country shattered. Rebels have displaced nearly 2 million people, leaving the country with parentless children; AIDS has done similar…
The young men move about the muddied hillside engaging in a friendly afternoon game of hurling. On their way home, they are accosted by a platoon of “Black and Tans,” the occupying soldiers sent from England to stamp out the crackling embers of Irish independence. The place is County Cork, circa 1920, six years after the Defence of the Realm…
Four years after the rough coincidence of 28 Days Later in theaters and “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq, 28 Weeks Later reminds us that both missions are now officially fucked. The story thus far: Seven months have gone by since the rage virus of the 2003 movie passed from chimp fang to British bloodstream in an animal-rights intervention gone awry, unleashing…
I had mixed feelings when I saw a “for lease” sign in front of the space that, for decades, was home to the Berliner Bear (7815 Wornall). Seeing that sign was almost like reading the obituary of an old friend, though I was never a regular patron and, in fact, had never returned after I last reviewed the place (“Kraut…
