Bloc Party. Monday, June 11, at the Uptown Review by Richard Gintowt I probably wouldn’t have heard the new Bloc Party album Weekend in the City if it weren’t for the KCK Public Library at 625 Minnesota Ave. I discovered this treasure trove of hip and obscure free music (and it’s legal!) after learning that local musician Michael Stover…
“Rape is terrible. Rape is awful.” That’s from Kansas Senator and presidential hopeful Sam Brownback. He made that comment, according to this article in The Kansas City Star, while speaking at the National Catholic Men’s Conference in South Carolina. So now we know where he stands on that whole rape thing. You can almost picture one solitary tear rolling…
On television, reruns allow you to live on, ageless, in perpetuity. Sadly, life affords no such reprieves. We here at the Pitch just received word that reality-TV icon Frankie Abernathy, the infamous star of MTV’s Real World: San Diego, has died after a prolonged battle with cystic fibrosis. Categories: News
It’s this chilling video of Kelsey Smith’s abduction that first captured the public’s attention. There are hundreds of videos on the Web about Smith and her accused killer, Edwin R. Hall. Smith’s final moments were documented on this surveillance video from Target: Categories: News
Boneyard Birthday Bash So far, 2007 has been a very good year for goths everywhere. Not only did spooky heavyweight champion the Undertaker defeat the Animal at this year’s World Heavyweight Championship, thereby extending his WrestleMania record to 15-0, but it’s also the 150th anniversary of Union Cemetery at 227 East 28th Terrace. This weekend, the Union Cemetery Historical…
We’ve saved the now-removed MySpace page of Edwin R. Hall. You can find it here. Categories: News
We here at the Plog couldn’t believe our good fortune when we received word that the Kansas City Brigade and The Kansas City Star are sponsoring a Name the Mascot Contest. Apparently, the Brigade’s old stealth bomber is so 2006. In the boldly transparent effort to be more kid-friendly, the new KC personification of arena football awesomeness will be ……
Tomorrow, the friends, acquaintances and admirers of the late, beloved artist Mott-Ly are sending the golden fellow off in Crossroads KC style. A jazz funeral march is scheduled for this Friday around 5:30 p.m., beginning in front of YJs Snack Bar at 18th and Wyandotte and moving east to the Late Show Gallery at 1600 Cherry. Here’s the official dispatch,…
%{}% The blogger …Just Cara claims to have dug up the MySpace page of Edwin R. Hall, who’s accused of kidnapping and murdering 18-year-old Kelsey Smith. Among the personal details on this page is a poem: Never the coldest, in this place of mine, Sorounded bu those ive loved. never the coldest, in this head of mine, with the thoughts…
The latest Sprint Center tenant rumor is that the NHL will swell to 32 teams and award Kansas City and Las Vegas franchises, according to a report today in the Pittsburgh Business Times. Monday night at Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals rumors circulated that the expansion announcement was imminent, according to SportsBusiness Daily, an affiliate of the…
Earlier this week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a ruling that made me think about uptight Kansan Sam Brownback, one of the Senate’s main crusaders against dirty words. This week, the appeals court basically ruled that the Federal Communications Commission had been a douchebag in imposing decency standards on networks since Janet Jackson’s boob…
A lot has been written about how MySpace pages turn into memorial sites when their owners meet an untimely death, but that doesn’t make them any less sad. This is the MySpace page of ACE, aka Andre Taylor, Kansas City’s 39th homicide victim this year. He was found shot to death on the front lawn of 8600 Drury Avenue last…
Local chapter of Parents Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays holds first a board meeting, then a general meeting. Second Sunday of every month, 1:30 & 3 p.m., 2005 Tags: Night & Day, Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays
Debauchery mecca Whiskey Tango (401 Southeast Outer Belt Road in Grain Valley) has moved its Bike Night from Wednesday to Thursday, making the event into one long vortex of live music and rowdy patrons. From 3 p.m. until 3 a.m., bikers can rev their hogs, enjoy the Harley babe contest and survey other bikes in the ample asphalt parking lot….
Broomball has humble origins: kids, ice, broom, ball. But the game has been predictably reconfigured by grown-ups as an organized sport with leagues, a championship game and a governing body called the International Federation of Broomball Associations. The once-spontaneous ice game of faux hockey played with Chuck Taylors and kitchen brooms now sports specially designed rubberheaded brooms. Inviting spontaneity back…
When Kansas City Art Institute graduates Mel Ziegler and Kate Ericson began working together in the mid-’80s, the art world wanted either the brutally provocative or the shamelessly solipsistic. Ziegler and Ericson, meanwhile, developed restraint and an almost polite resistance that went underappreciated. Ziegler and Ericson routinely chose insinuation over indictment, more interested in asking what something didn’t mean…
In this week’s Pitchcast, Mayor Mark Funkhouser takes us for a ride in his now-infamous Corolla. The new Kansas City mayor talks about the slow progress of politics, his wife’s 5:30 deadline for him to be home at night and how to help the East Side. Get it through iTunes by clicking here, download it on the Web by clicking…
The Abyss: Special Edition (Fox) The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: Extra Frills Edition (MGM) Bruce Springsteen With the Sessions Band: Live in Dublin (Sony) The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: A Re-Imagining of the 1919 Masterpiece of Horror (Image) CHiPs: The Complete First Season (Turner) Coming to America: Special Collector’s Edition (Paramount) Fail Safe (2000) (Warner Bros.) The…
Bold proclamation time: There wouldn’t even be an Xbox 360 without Halo. Microsoft lost billions on the original Xbox even with its mega-successful sci-fi games, so it’s hard to imagine the red ink that would have spilled without them; even suggesting a second go at the console business would’ve had shareholders burning effigies of Bill Gates in the Microsoft parking…
The Sergio Leone Anthology (MGM) Sergio Leone made westerns like Wagner made ditties. This essential boxed set — four films with four discs of supplemental material, much of it scholarly and insightful — shows the Italian director supplanting the elegiac Monument Valley iconography of John Ford with a darker, ruder, more bleak-humored brand of mythmaking. It’s all here: the rhythmic…
Kim Casebeer: 10 Miles From Home There are no boring places, only boring people. The regionalist Kim Casebeer stakes her work on this claim, and she’s interesting enough to pull it off. All of the subject matter here lies within a 10-mile radius surrounding the artist’s childhood home in the Flint Hills of Kansas. Most clever is the tongue-in-cheek pastel…
In the last few weeks, as I’ve stuck my head into Kansas City’s burgeoning stand-up comedy scene, I’ve found myself pondering motherfucker. How did this word — this taboo of such universal power that it would make Caveman A clock Caveman B right in the caveman junk — replace the word um? Linguists tell us that its recorded usage came…
In Handymen and Girly Boys: Masculinity, Craft, and Culture, six men work in a variety of media — including knitted yarn — that’s traditionally associated with “women’s work.” Kansas City Art Institute instructor Maria Elena Buszek organized Handymen in an attempt to expand the visual conversations of the annual Surface Design Association Conference, a national event hosted this year…
JUNE 8 HOSTEL: PART II Cast: Lauren German, Bijou Phillips, Heather Matarazzo, Roger Bart Director: Eli Roth In a decidedly unkempt Slovakian dungeon, three vacationing Americans are flayed, decapitated and generally mistreated by insane rich men with knives. Summer movie fun for the whole family. OCEAN’S THIRTEEN Cast: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Al Pacino, Ellen Barkin Director: Steven…
