Archives: August 2008
Daily Briefs: Touch-a touch-a touch-a my butt, losers.
%{}% By CHRIS PACKHAM I’m bragging. You’d brag, too, if you were the Plog Employee of the Month. But some of us are winners, and you know what they say about the cream always rising? They say it always rises. They were supposed to pick somebody at the beginning of the month, but Faysal got busy with payroll and forgot….
The Download Extra: Cure Tribute, New Bat for Lashes MP3
By ANDY VIHSTADT After one has had a 30-year career of making music, one is bound to be immortalized with a few covers. Then again, if the selections on Perfect as Cats: a Tribute to the Cure are any indication, Robert Smith should have thought about packing it in around 1990. Chock full of early Cure (the newest song on…
Save this Restaurant (Whorehouse)!
By CHARLES FERRUZZA I’ve lost track of how many ill-fated restaurants have come and gone at 2801 Southwest Boulevard. The best-known was probably El Patio Restaurant, operated by the legendary restaurateur Jose “Don Pepe” Hernandez for two years until 2002. The two-story building has a rich history: In the early 20th Century it was a saloon operated by a Kansas…
Designer Alert: Jeanee Wallace and Dirty Laundry
by Nadia Pflaum Last Thursday was the first Thursday of the month, which means I was checking out the WearHaus trunk show and happy hour at the Velvet Dog from 5 to 9 p.m. There, I was introduced to the designs of Jeanee Wallace, a Hallmark employee who sews aprons under her own label, Dirty Laundry. Wallace is originally from…
Breakfast Buffet: Thursday, 8/14
BY OWEN MORRIS A rambling post about beer, badgers and blown bar hook-ups. Really, that’s a weekend in and of itself. (KC Beer Blog) If you’re going to the KC Irish Fest and plan on drinking (I know that last phrase is redundant) then pay attention because the format for drink-buying is a lot different this year. It involves tokens…
Studies in Crap: The Eagle Christian
Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power. The Eagle Christian Author: Kenneth Price Date: 1984 Publisher: Old Faithful Press, Montgomery, Alabama Discovered at: Goodwill, 89th & Wornall The Cover Promises: Eagles and Christianity….
The Gunhands with True North
Tonight at Crosstown Station, the Gunhands and their pards in True North bring chicken-fried, wind-burned down-home country hipsterism to the Crossroads. Look, the music is great, and what better excuse do you need to wear your awesome giant belt buckle? But that crinkled-up straw cowboy hat in the back of your closet? Leave it home; it makes you look like…
Tomfooleries Happy Hour
$2.25 Call Liquors. With juice add 1.00 $1.75 Domestic Draws $3.25 Cuervo Margaritas (rocks only) Happy Hour Food . . . $2.95 Southwest Chicken Eggrolls Mini Cheeseburger with Caramelized Onions & Instead Sauce Ballpark Cheese Nachos Spring rolls with Thai Peanut Dipping Sauce Jalapeno & Cheese Stuffed Pretzel Fish & Chips with Tartar Sauce Pepperoni Pizza Fried Mozzarella with Marinara…
U like 2 Watch Prince
Vanity had an insatiable freebase habit, Carmen Electra gave good midriff and Sheena Easton had the look, but our favorite Prince protégé by far is Morris Day. Famous for portraying the Kid’s villainous rival in 1984’s Purple Rain and for fronting pop-funksters the Time, Day eschewed the typical protégé persona of dripping-wet sex appeal in favor of smugness, which made…
Yo, Tony!
When skater extraordinaire Tony Hawk does something, he does it his way. He pioneered his own skating moves, built his own HuckJam brand from the ground up and named his annual skating tour something so goofy that it’s inspiring. Fans can easily forgive him for the ridiculously named Boom Boom HuckJam. He is, after all, a legend.Get hip to Hawk’s…
big bones promo
Sure, the Northern League has its former major leaguers, such as former Royals Ken Harvey (now a T-Bone) and Tony Cogan (now a Gary Railcat). But isn’t the fact that the league employs players released by the Royals an implicit concession that it is an inferior league? And anyway, the league’s promotions — not its quality of play — provide…
Reeping the Benefits
Sure, Last Comic Standing has brought mainstream recognition to the underappreciated art form, but between the melodrama and the shady editing, precious little creative insight is gained about those who lay it all out onstage. Fortunately, NBC’s reality contest has done at least one thing right in its five-plus seasons: crowning Jon Reep as last year’s winner. He’s redneck as…
Moral Gray Areas
Two shows into a remarkable summer season, the Actors Theatre of Kansas City is more than living up to its mandate: mounting classics both traditional and modern with an emphasis on craft. Last month’s Desdemona and Translations were engaging, challenging productions distinguished by well-developed dramatic ideas and top-flight acting. Tonight at Union Station’s City Stage (18 West Pershing), the company…
Flatpicker’s fundraiser
On the Mo-Kan opry scene, there’s hardly a more fabled figure than Mike O’ Roark, a singer and virtuoso flatpicker who has devoted his life to entertaining folks in the good-natured spirit of the Grand Ole Opry. “When he gets going, I refer to him as the Smothers Brothers on crack,” says Terry O’Brien, his agent of 26 years. O’Roark,…
Taste the World
Here’s some local trivia: KC is home to a Welsh Folk Dancing Society and the Chanda-Bangladesh Association. Also true: Bangladesh and Wales are two of the 42 countries represented at this weekend’s 29th-annual Ethnic Enrichment Festival at Swope Park (Meyer Boulevard and Swope Parkway). During the event, the park’s bandstand will be the site of cultural performances every half-hour. And…
Respecting the French
Five years since so-called patriots renamed them, Freedom Fries are no longer spoken of. Liquor-store owners quit pouring out French wine in an ill-advised and ineffective boycott. Tensions have faded to the point that Union Station’s Science City (30 West Pershing Road) will teach children today to build trebuchets, war weapons with a moniker of French origin. Kids can also…
Mrs. Bildungsromanson
The Johnson County Museum (6305 Lackman in Shawnee) has picked out a few classic movies to go with its exhibit Coming of Age in Johnson County: 1960-1976. Sure, none of the series’ titles is set in the Midwest, and a couple (Psycho, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) are less about the dawn of adulthood than about the twilight of…
Well-Rounded
New-age types like to point out the four basic elements of life — earth, air, fire and water. Other types like to do something similar by pointing out the four elements of hip-hop culture. If MC-ing, graffiti, break-dancing and DJ-ing are the building blocks of hip-hop culture, then today’s Hollapalooza ’08 at the Kansas City Repertory Theater’s Copaken Stage could…
Waldo Pizza
(7433 Broadway, 816-363-5242). Get a 14-inch pie with two toppings — say, shrimp and kalamata olives or roasted chicken and spinach — for just $8.95. Add the salad bar for $4.99. Mondays, 2008 Tags: Night & Day
Sci-fidelity
No matter when or where people go to see movies, there will always be snarky audience members calling attention to themselves with loud, annoying comments. From 1988 to 1999, the television show Mystery Science Theater 3000 took this concept and asked: What if these people were actually funny? The results proved hilarious, leading to a feature film in 1996 that…
Atlanta Flow
There’s a pretty good argument that spoken-word performance poetry is one of the few underground art forms still largely untainted by commercial interests. Take, for instance, the Smashmouthification of rock music, whereby a once iconoclastic form has become merely a vehicle for injecting new soda flavors and financial instruments into the marketplace. But Madison Avenue hasn’t yet leveraged poems to…
The Brooksider
(6330 Brookside Plaza, 816-363-4070). From 5 to 7 p.m., domestic draws are $1.75 and domestic bottles and wells are $2.50. Stick around after for $1 domestic draws. Mondays-Thursdays, 2008 Tags: Night & Day
Sharp’s 63rd Street Grill
(128 West 63rd Street, 816-333-4355). Drink minipitchers all day for $3.95. Yes, even Guinness. Mondays-Fridays, 2008 Tags: Night & Day
Find The Pitch
