America’s first black president gets sworn in on Tuesday. Today, celebrate the black leader whose civil rights crusade helped make that possible. Events for Martin Luther King Jr. Day are happening throughout the city. From 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Rockhurst University (54th Street and Troost), the Harmony’s Youth Day Celebration promotes interactive learning for kids. Admission is free….
Author Joe R. Lansdale may be a legendary figure among readers of genre fiction and fans of Bruce Campbell movies, but Brookside artist Nathan Fox hadn’t heard of him before being asked to illustrate Lansdale’s Pigeons From Hell, adapted from the short horror story by Robert E. Howard. “Actually, I’d only known of Howard’s stuff from the Conan stories,” Fox…
No writer ever gazed deeper or more despairingly into the prison of middle-class American conformity than Richard Yates, which may explain why none of his books sold more than 12,000 copies in his lifetime and why it’s taken more than 40 years for one of them to reach the big screen. It is said that we go to the movies…
Lawrence’s Rooftop Vigilantes may well be our satellite shire’s breakout band of 2009. The kinetic four-piece has been earning mad music-blog love without so much as a proper album, a situation they’re about to remedy with the release of an LP titled Carrot Atlas and a 40-day tour across the whole motherflippin’ country. Recalling indefatigable acts like the Thermals and…
Somewhere beneath its mediocre comedic trappings, there’s a decent action movie trying to fight its way free, and it stars Kevin James as an overweight regular joe who can use only the items in the mall where he works to fight obnoxious extreme-sports athletes with guns. It takes forever for the plot to kick in; meanwhile, there are endless fat…
Can this heartwarming, unambitious and overtly sentimental film be simply too nice to get beat up on by anyone other than the coldest of bastards? Perhaps it helps if you’re in the third act of your life, just as neurotic White Plains schlub Harvey (Dustin Hoffman) is: long-divorced, facing forced retirement by a younger generation of commercial jingle writers, and…
Cedric Burnside grew up in a small shack that belonged to his grandfather, pioneering Mississippi bluesman R.L. Burnside. Picking up his drumsticks at a young age, he eventually toured the world with his gramps and was schooled in everything from music to manners. Nowadays Cedric plays in a duo with Springfield, Missouri, native Lightnin’ Malcolm, a master guitarist who also…
Like Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath before, Hammerlord proudly announces its name during a track on its debut album. The Lawrence group, which features former members of the Esoteric and Evermourn, proves equally forthcoming about its chosen genre, inserting the phrase “heavy metal” into several songs. Having established its identity and calling, Hammerlord starts branching out from its power-thrash formula,…
Will there be a special Academy Award for Best Aryan Costume Design this year? Everywhere you turn in the movies, it’s swastika flags and SS uniforms. But where are all the Jewish victims? The nearest thing to a traditional Holocaust movie is Edward Zwick’s Defiance, about three Jewish brothers who put together a Jewish kibbutz in a Belarus forest, the…
For being so under-the-radar, KC act Seume sure went pro when putting together his debut album, It Is What It Is. Seume is David Seume, whose last name — pronounced “sue me” — is different enough to stand on its own once people get used to hearing it. Alexandra Wolkowicz (the same photographer who shot the image of the man…
It takes a brave band to hop into a Dodge Durango in the middle of winter and navigate the Midwest tour circuit with a one-ton trailer attached to its rear. But Chicago’s Brave Ulysses exhibits that kind of reverence for the old-school D.I.Y. approach: demoing albums before actually recording them and earning fans one handshake at a time. The group…
Corinne Sweeney is a lion. Unfortunately, the wild, soulful, incantatory singer for Kansas City’s Mythical Beast is often surrounded by housecats on her group’s debut LP, Scales. The offending felines are distorted guitar and bass that should plunge and surge like ocean trawlers but instead crackle and buzz like two-stroke weed eaters. “Eyes Into Space” starts with a descending Sabbath…
Angus Young, the 53-year-old spastic schoolboy sprite, built his rock-god status with ear-splitting, blues-infused, high-voltage rock and roll. His guitar heroics aren’t color-coded or virtual. Neither is his arse, which he’ll proudly display should he strip off his knickers when AC/DC stops by Kansas City. Thirty-five years, 16 albums and the death of lewd yet legendary singer Bon Scott couldn’t…
At the outset of this, the first collaboration between local MCs Negro Scoe and InfO Gates, a young boy tells listeners: Man, y’all don’t want it, partna. He’s right. Only a sadist would enjoy this thorough bludgeoning of hip-hop music. A convoluted cross between rude-boy swagger and hipster rap, On the Green is schwag, leaving users with a dull headache,…
Hours before the clink of champagne flutes ring in another new year, Julia Haile testifies to a seated and sober crowd. “It’s your thing,” the petite, chestnut-skinned soul singer calls to the urban-outfitted midtowners in the audience. It’s New Year’s Eve at the Czar Bar, a rock-and-roll joint situated near the dark underbelly of the Power & Light District. Do…
Stretch, who is Kansas City’s most entrepreneurial artist, didn’t ask my opinion on the name of his new restaurant in the Crossroads. But what the hell: I think calling it Grinders West is all wrong. It makes the new place — in a storefront to the immediate west of the more raucous, testosterone-heavy Grinders — sound like a holding tank…
The Wrestler may be plenty visceral, but it’s no more a sports movie than professional wrestling is a competitive sport. Darren Aronofsky’s relatively unpretentious follow-up to the ridiculous debacle that was The Fountain is all about showbiz. It’s also a canny example: If you want to make a comeback saga, you get a washed-up star — in this case, Mickey…
When Connie Francis sang “Where the Boys Are,” she wasn’t referring to museums and galleries but she could have been — the art displayed in public institutions is still male-dominated. Following suit, the 2008 Charlotte Street Foundation Fellows are fellas. Jorge García Almodóvar, Mike Hill, Beniah Leuschke and Adolfo Martinez make up this year’s winner’s circle. Despite the artists’ dissimilar…
As is now a tradition, an evening with Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre is a bit of a soirée. In the drapes-and-concrete METspace (the building that the company has gutted on Main), audience members get treated to desserts and cheeses, music and chatter, charming pre-show speeches from director and party hostess Karen Paisley, and that happy tickle that comes from watching good…
A knight rides a flying ostrich. His lance is sharp and true. But he’s outnumbered. A half-dozen men swoop after him astride their own devouring buzzards. The knight feints left, then spurs his ostrich to flap its wings and fly him to safety on a lean island of rock suspended in the air. A buzzard dives after him. At the…
It’s a time of joyous goodbyes. Next week, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney; last week, Carl Peterson and Phill Kline. Kline’s official last day in the Johnson County District Attorney’s office was Monday, January 12 — by that time, according to news reports, he was already teaching a law class at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, the college founded…
Dear Mexican: What is it with Cesar Chavez? Recently in Dallas, we’ve gone through three attempts to name streets after Mr. Chavez. In one instance, the plan was to remove the names of two brothers, who were city founders, from a street named after them and rename the street Cesar Chavez Ave. This is being touted under the banner of…
The Pitch Best of 2008: October 2 Dressed Down I’m always excited to read your Best Of Kansas City issue, but I was disappointed in what I read this year. It wasn’t that I disagreed with the choices made; I was astonished at The Pitch’s continuing ignorance about who it is congratulating in certain circumstances. The award for Best Costumes…
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