First developers. Now trains. Most nonwhite residents of Kansas City, Missouri, live in the 3rd, 5th and 6th districts. These sections of the city do not flourish with activity. Sad fact: Developers tend to go where the white people are. Kansas City threw gasoline on this inequality by stretching the definition of blight to include bungalows near the County Club…
Dear Mexican: What’s with calling yourselves “La Raza”? Being Mexicans, Chicanos or whatever isn’t enough? Now you’re the race? Sounds pretty racist to me. The Race Is On Dear Gabacho: Few things annoy The Mexican more than the know-nothing nation’s deliberate ignorance with regard to this most nebulous of Mexican idioms. Despite the patient explanations of Chicano yaktivists who say…
Burnt Ends, “Water Hogs,” July 17 Great Idea Thanks for the great story about the five enemies of the state who are depleting our water resources and threatening the Earth. I am looking forward to a series. I suggest: Send a reporter to a local restaurant and identify the five evildoers who eat the most food, while millions are starving….
G-Love live at the Uptown
By CHRIS RASMUSSEN Why aren’t there any Chiefs jerseys on the chosen? The New York Times reported yesterday that Tyndale House Publishers, the publishers of Left Behind, are now publishing football books. Left Behind, for those unfamiliar with the series of fifteen (!) books, begins with (spoiler alert!) the Rapture, describing a massive depopulation of the world that includes pilot-less…
The countdown has begun for next week’s Pitch Music Showcase — the 34 bands, $5 affair you’ve been hearing about that is going to rock you into a coma. Schedules have been printed up and are already making their rounds ’round the city, but I wanted to announce that there have been a couple of lineup changes. First, download and…
During an especially hot and sticky night at the Westport Beach Club, ladies rolled around in the mud and four local bands — the Old Black, Waiting for Signal, Paper Cities and Thunder — rocked out, all to raise money for the Kansas City Jazz Women’s Rugby Club.
%{}% Giving good ideas a bad name: Over at Prime Buzz, Jeffrey Spivak breaks down Clay Chastain’s shifting succession of light-rail plans with a simultaneously informative and dismissive tone that you can’t just learn from the AP Stylebook. I’m not saying it’s a whirlwind tour-de-force of hilarity — we’re talking about The Kansas City Star, not Crazy magazine — but…
By CHARLES FERRUZZA Walton Marshall Bodine will turn 88 years old next month – on August 27, to be exact. Although he’s still considered the elder statesman of Kansas City television journalists for his many years reporting news on the tube, the octogenarian broadcaster says he’s had the most fun of his career as the host of his namesake weekday…
BY OWEN MORRIS Unless you’re in the beverage business or you just love trade mags, you probably don’t read Draft Magazine. It’s not meant for us lay people. It’s meant for people for whom beer is a living. This month, they have a feature on picking the perfect beer from each famous barbecue city. The beer they pick as the…
By ANDY VIHSTADT University of Kansas alumni Mates of State visited the Interface studios at AOL to perform a few songs from Re-Arrange Us, out now on Barsuk. Download the video or audio podcast here. Categories: Music
By DAVID MARTIN Philanthropist Shirley Helzberg knows how to win friends and influence people. Two critics of the lavish deployment of economic incentives came to City Hall this morning to support her plan to use tax-increment financing (TIF) to fix up a new headquarters for the Kansas City Symphony. Helzberg wants to move the symphony into the old Vitagraph Building…
By CHRIS RASMUSSEN I’m no journalist. That said, when a reporter not well-known for in-depth Royals coverage quotes an anonymous source and both principals in the story deny it, should a local talk radio host devote hours of coverage assuming that it were true? More to the point, as Sam Mellinger points out, if it were true that Jose Guillen…
Alina Simone July 29, 2008 The Record Bar By CRYSTAL K. WIEBE Here comes a bitter rant: The bummer about the rise of such awesome worldly rock acts as Gogol Bordello and Devotchka is that it’s led to some really annoying bands. Like Boom – the jokey polka, thespian group that played Record Bar last night. It’s always cool to…
By CAROLYN SZCZEPANSKI Click on the photo for a slideshow. At dawn on Tuesday, July 15, more than 200 people stared down a nearly 350-mile challenge. For the next four days, as they gritted their teeth and flexed their muscle, I played the role of river rat, scurrying after them as they paddled from Kansas City to St. Charles. For…
By DAVID MARTIN Kansas City Councilman Russ Johnson is making an attempt to correct a significant flaw in the “starter” light-rail line he’s promoting. Today’s Kansas City Star reports that Johnson wants to stretch the line to 63rd Street, making it more accessible to people who live in disadvantaged areas. The two-mile extension would increase service in the city’s 5th…
By NADIA PFLAUM I revisited these murals behind the Foxx Equipment building on Southwest Boulevard because the fleeting glimpses I got of them while driving by on Broadway just weren’t enough. Categories: News Tags: graffiti, Scribe, Southwest Boulevard
