The only thing harder than picking the perfect restaurant on Valentine’s Day is getting reservations. Three suggestions: Go with two other couples and sit at a six-top (a six-top is rarely, if ever, reserved on Valentine’s Day), pick a restaurant that doesn’t require reservations, or go out tonight instead. Yard House (1863 Village West Parkway, 913-788-4500) doesn’t require reservations, and…
Frankie Beverly has been setting the sexy mood since 1971, and his musical love potions have always proved especially potent in person. When the smooth-voiced 62-year-old croons, I can tell by the look in your eyes/That you’re falling in love with me, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for any spectators who lock gazes while the phrase lingers in the auditorium…
Some of Kansas City’s best nightspots have created anti-Valentine’s Day activities. • At The Brooksider (6330 Brookside Plaza, 816-363-4070), the Cupid’s Revenge Party begins at 10 p.m. The first 100 guests can register to win a day package at Persona Day Spa.• At Blonde (100 Ward Parkway, 816-931-2525), DJs Steve Thorell and Bill Pile will massage your heart with their…
Last December, Richard Cizik, the chief lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, acknowledged that gay kids growing up today face less isolation and stigmatization than ever before. “Fifty-two percent of young evangelicals favor same-sex marriage or civil union,” Cizik said. Sure, times are changing. But the prospect of one day marrying the person of your dreams doesn’t make being…
Two things are guaranteed to flood your winter-hardened core with a surge of blushing warmth. One is true love. The other one? Booze. You may not have the former, but the Velvet Dog (400 East 31st Street, 816-753-9990) can stoke your fires with the latter: martinis specially concocted for tonight. Love Potion No. 9 is a blend of coconut rum,…
Casablanca is arguably the most romantic movie of all time, embracing, as it does, more than one brand of romantic ideal. But let’s be real for a minute: You know Rick hit that, right? And we don’t mean in Paris, either. We mean the night Ilsa turns up after curfew to ask for the letters of transit. Seriously: Watch it…
(613 Walnut, 816-777-1107). From 4 to 7 p.m., this swanky nightclub two blocks south of the City Market has $2 domestic bottles, $3 wells, and $3 to $5 glasses of house wine. For added pleasure, try one of Seven’s specialty Sin martinis, bartender’s choice for $4.50. Wednesdays, 4-7 p.m., 2009 Tags: 548, Night & Day
(618 Ward Parkway, 816-931-7811). Get lucky on the Plaza from 2 to 7 p.m. with half off domestic bottles, wells and drafts. You can also choose from among five martinis, five red and five white wines, plus five different small plates — all for $5 each. Wednesdays, 2-7 p.m., 2009 Tags: 2817, Night & Day
(409 East 31st Street, 816-756-3767). Martini Corner called. They want their sexy back. Hook up with $5 specialty martinis and glasses of wine, $2.50 wells and domestic bottles, and half-priced appetizers from 4 to 7 p.m. Wednesdays, 4-7 p.m., 2009 Tags: 3786, Night & Day
In Boom by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, a grad student’s personal aid lures a randy journalism coed to his subterranean lab, where he studies fish sleep cycles for signs of the apocalypse. Will their intensely significant coupling lead to another big bang, or is mankind’s fate in the hands of someone watching from outside the fishbowl? This performance on the Jerome…
Artistic innovators abound in the metro, and each year The Pitch declares four of them MasterMinds. The distinction comes with $1,000, to be awarded at The Pitch’s Artopia party on April 4. The categories are visual arts, performing arts, fashion/design, and an open-competition category for all-around creative accomplishment. Make your nominations by February 27 at pitch.com/polls/masterminds09 or call 816-561-6061 for…
When cyclists aren’t busy winning races or finding space on the road, they’re usually drinking. Well, the members of the new, sponsored cycling group Team Colavita/Parisi Coffee are drinking. Team riders range from near beginners to semipro. In addition to three weekly rides, the team supports local causes, such as the 816 Bike Collective, and puts on clinics teaching children…
Carrot Atlas (Wooden Man Records) By their own accounts, the members of Rooftop Vigilantes amount to a drunken calamity every time the band takes the stage. The four-piece Lawrence band features former Girl Is a Ghost frontman Oscar Allen Guinn (also of Boo and Boo Too and Baby Birds Don’t Drink Milk) trading sloshed hooks with Zach Campbell (also of…
Gorillaz & Birds (Block Life Entertainment) Kansas City MCs Dennis “Wescrook” Westbrook and Dandrae “Cku Koo Bird” Jones are back with Gorillaz & Birds, a sure-footed step forward from their aggressive debut, Bleed the Block. These 12 cuts tend to be reflective (give or take hot-and-heavy rave-ups like “U Can Do It”), and they are well-suited by hard-hitting but streamlined…
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I wrote a love song once. Like many 17-year-old dorks with cheap, Japanese electric guitars, I was listening to a lot of Pink Floyd. On the album Meddle, there’s a goofy, jazzy number called “San Tropez.” Unlike that album’s opener, “One of These Days” (in which, after a barrage of guitars and psychotic synth noise, a distorted voice says, One…
Not all 10 entries of the Oscar-nominated live-action and animated shorts are mini-masterpieces, but there’s artistry to be found. The live-action selections largely engage in meditations on guilt, cultural differences and aging. On the Line is a twisty drama concerning a tentative friendship between a German security guard and a pretty bookstore employee. By comparison, New Boy is a small…
Outono, the latest release from evolving Kansas City, Kansas, brother band Monta at Odds, takes its title from the Portuguese word for “autumn.” And listening to the all-instrumental record might just drop you somewhere around late October. While drummer Eric Bessenbacher (of American Catastrophe) and bassist Dedric Moore lay down a soft, shifting rhythmic ground, the keys and synths of…
Marah opened 2008 with its finest album to date, Angels of Destruction — a title that proved apocryphal because shortly after its release, the band imploded. Formed near Philadelphia by Dave Bielanko in 1993, with brother Serge joining a couple of years later, Marah grew into a bastard blend of white-boy soul and shambling, folk-garage swing with enough fevered indie…
If there’s one thing director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) knows, it’s perpetual motion. So round and round goes his generic new movie, The International — from Berlin to Luxembourg to Milan to New York — as Clive Owen and Naomi Watts pursue an elusive hired gun who may be the key to exposing a European bank with a brisk…
Of special note (besides this series reboot’s boob quotient) is Arlen Escarpeta in the role of the Black Guy Who’s Toast. It falls to Escarpeta to confront hockey-masked, machete-wielding madman Jason with the most ineffectual weapon in slasher-movie history — which prompted the woman behind me to mutter, “Aw, man, don’t drop that wok.” Categories: Movies Tags: Arlen Escarpeta, Film…
“It’s nothin’ new,” Eric Sardinas sings on his fourth full-length, Eric Sardinas and Big Motor, and honestly, it’s hard to argue. Then again, some classic approaches don’t require a new formula, and Sardinas’ sometimes limited palette is less complaint than statement of fact. A shredding slide guitarist with a touch of Slash’s trashy showmanship, Sardinas’ tattooed blues frequently hammers the…
Delta Spirit recorded its debut album, Ode to Sunshine, in a cabin on the desert outskirts of San Diego. However, the sound produced there — a contemporary update of folksy protest music with strong hints of soul — is awash in humanity. With a granular voice always seeming to be on the verge of petering out, singer Matt Vasquez’s lyrics…
The movie plays like an outrageously obscene gesture as the economy continues to swallow up livelihoods. Based on Sophie Kinsella’s first two books in her Shopaholic series, Confessions the film moves the source material’s setting from London to New York. “A man will never love or treat you as well as a store,” Rebecca Bloomwood (Isla Fisher) gushes in voiceover…
