Archives: August 2008
Daily Briefs: Gosh, maybe I’ll write about stuff everyone else is writing about for a change.
%{}% By CHRIS PACKHAM From the Comments: wumble says: You know when you dream all your childhood about becoming a princess, and then you just happen to be rich, white, blonde, and beautiful, and then you become adept throughout junior high and high school at various sexual tecnhiques, often in cars parked behind Oak Park Mall, and then you pledge…
The Czar Bar VIP Opening Party
Wednesday night, a few lucky souls got to enjoy some refreshments at the brand new Czar Bar at 1531 Grand. It’ll be open for real this Friday, August 29. We like it.
The Download Extra: New Del the Funky Homosapien MP3
By ANDY VIHSTADT Expect a few freebies from Del in the upcoming months. The Hieroglyphics MC had this to say in an interview with HipHopDx. “We make so much music that sometimes waiting for album to be released for folks to peep is too long. We may be on to something completely different by then and those tracks may not…
Trippin’ on Miracle Fruit: A Testing Party
BY OWEN MORRIS On a recent Friday night, in a house on the edge of suburbia, a group of young professionals gathered in a cavernous kitchen, eying suspiciously the mixture of fruits, vegetables, spices and alcohol laid out before them. Some were nervous, others skeptical and a couple openly questioned the legality of what they were about to do. It…
Breakfast Buffet: Thursday, 8/28
BY OWEN MORRIS What is it about this town that makes it so hard to leave? Maybe it’s the fact that there’s so many reasons not to. (Venus in the Kitchen) A long profile on the family and people behind the Liberty Fruit Company. Like so many good local businesses, there’s several generations involved in running it. (KC Biz Journal)…
Have the Royals Gone Conservative with ‘Hug Cam’?
By ERIC BARTON I got a text message last night at 8:58 from a friend with some pretty big breaking news. The Royals, he reported, have dropped the Kiss Cam for a more Disney-style version called the Hug Cam. “Dunno for sure but if so that is too creepy conservative,” he wrote. Admittedly, I haven’t been to the ‘K in…
A Very Special “Studies in Crap”: Wacky Summer Mad Libs
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. Wacky Summer Mad Libs Author: Roger Price, Leonard Stern and deeply bored, anonymous children Publisher: Scholastic Date: 1988 Discovered at: Second Chance Thrift, 1229 E. 63rd…
Thelma Tribute
Corrie Van Ausdal watched a VHS tape of Thelma and Louise every day for a year, starting in seventh grade. She wrote a college thesis about the film. She borrowed the movie’s bit-by-refrigerated-bit candy-bar consumption during the play Killer Joe and drew inspiration from Thelma when depicting a rolling-pin-wielding wife in Pig Farm. “She’s a total slob, but she’s also…
Wild Fruits
The wild pawpaw is a feast of a berry. Indigenous to eastern and southeastern North America, the pawpaw is green until it matures to a seeded spectacle of yellowish-brown, signaling that it’s ready to eat. Many trace the name to the more well-known papaya. Historical rumor has it that President George Washington frequently chomped on the pawpaw as a favorite…
Life Is Pleasure DVD screening, the Life and Times, System & Station
The decade mark is a meaningful one for a band like System & Station, a group that has plugged away in relative obscurity despite owning a polished sound that deserves at least as much props as similar, more-lauded acts such as Foo Fighters or Sunny Day Real Estate. Steering its mighty ship through three home states — Idaho, Wisconsin and…
THE CHIEFS ARE NO. 1
The Kansas City Chiefs enter today’s game in a four-way tie for first place. They’ve avoided injuries, Brodie Croyle hasn’t lost us a game and Larry Johnson hasn’t been accused of any inappropriate touching. Yeah, OK, some might say these things are true because the Chiefs haven’t played a regular-season game yet. But go to tonight’s game at Arrowhead Stadium,…
Salsa in the Streets
Lambada may have been the “forbidden” dance, but salsa, a Caribbean dance form corresponding with a musical style of the same name, is the sassy dance. Although generally performed as a partner dance, there are solo forms for dancers who prefer to lone-wolf it on the dance floor (LOSERS). Frankly, no incidence of solo salsa dancing has been documented in…
Life is Pleasure Screening
The Life and Times hasn’t set a release date for Tragic Boogie, its next album, but fans have ample evidence that the group remains on task. The Boogie sessions have yielded “Fall of the Angry Clowns,” a new MySpace-posted track. Also, the film Life Is Pleasure, which documents the Life and Times’ 2006 Japanese tour, uses large chunks of the…
Wednesday Trivia Night
We know there’s a ton of useless knowledge rolling around in your head like grapes in an empty briefcase, so why not disgorge it in a competitive atmosphere while drinking beer? Every Wednesday at 9 p.m. at Lew’s Grill and Bar, you can struggle with questions such as, “In what film did Kevin Bacon star with Jeannine Taylor and Harry…
Guitars + Bruises = Cool
For teenagers in need of some self-confidence, it’s hard to imagine two better avenues than rock and roll and roller derby. The two disciplines collide tonight, along with a bunch of flailing bodies on skates, as the Kansas City Roller Warriors invite Paul Green’s School of Rock to perform a pregame concert at the School of Hard Knocks roller-derby bout….
Blues on Film
John Belushi cultivated his appreciation for the blues while filming Animal House. Inspired, he teamed with future House of Blues co-owner Dan Aykroyd to create the Saturday Night Live characters Jake and Elwood Blues. Released in 1980, The Blues Brothers still ranks as SNL’s best cinematic spinoff. Jake and Elwood, “on a mission from God,” reconvene their R&B revue (stocked…
Teachers’ Finest
Some cities may look down their noses at Kansas City’s less-than-cosmopolitan veneer, but one thing outsiders can’t say is that we have no art scene. Along with dozens of thriving galleries, we have the Kansas City Art Institute, one of the top 10 art schools in the country. Tonight, see what makes the KCAI a great school at a show…
Slide for Health
In 1992, MTV introduced The Grind, a wildly popular dance show hosted by the perpetually shirtless Eric Nies and featuring anyone who could shake his or her ass without breaking a sweat to the latest in hip-hop and rap hits. Eventually spawning its own series of VHS tapes for teens everywhere, The Grind turned dancing into exercise. Sixteen years later,…
Out of Left Field
By acquiring Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox in the ’20s, the Yankees began what has become a time-honored tradition of buying their way to success. Back then, the survival of a ball club depended on the one-dimensional business of putting butts in seats. Fans turned out in droves to watch the player who could change games in the…
Until the Balloons Drop
The Chiefs have never won at Invesco Field at Mile High in Denver. Area Democrats hope the venue proves luckier for Barack Obama, who accepts his party’s nomination for president there tonight. Catch Obama’s speech and other festivities from the final night of the Democratic National Convention at a DNC viewing party tonight at the Screenland Theater in the Crossroads…
Inhale, Exhale
September is National Yoga Month. And lest you think you’d have to be some kind of yogi to get through the next 30 days, rest assured that yoga welcomes all levels of physicality and experience — no matter if you can’t twist your body into a pretzel or touch your toes.Take Ashtanga, for example. It’s a practice typically learned in…
EATSTRONG
Habitual Tour de France winner and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong will tell his inspiring story into a microphone at 10:30 a.m. from the dais at the American Royal Business Luncheon at Hale Arena (1800 Genessee, 816-513-4000). The event includes barbecue from Oklahoma Joe’s. Grandstand tickets cost $37.50; individual table seats are $75. If you want to get close enough to…
Flip sides
Some say the best art and literature is that in which one can recognize the best and worst parts of the self. Part of the attraction of a book like Moby-Dick, then, is that we find Ahab’s semiheroic quest endlessly appealing but also find his quixotic obsession repugnant. In this vision, art becomes a way to recognize the duality that…
Find The Pitch
