The kids get a really bad rap in the KCMO School District. You hardly hear a peep about them unless the TV news is covering their bad test scores or the times when a fight draws police to their campuses. So I was glad to see KMBC Channel 9’s cameras, among others, filming as young people ages 15-22 came streaming through…
Our brother in arms Miles Bonny is hard at work updating his roster of beatlicious music at InnateSounds, and the latest to come out of that corner is a song by Kansas City MC and producer D/Will and a video of Michigan duo Daru and Rena. Look for D/Will’s upcoming album, Battery Effect, soon. This is the first we’ve heard…
Categories: Music Tags: bruce springsteen, comics, mammals, rock cliches, sketchbook
%{}% The mood at The Kansas City Star is sour and grim. The future is both certain and uncertain for the unlucky ones whose numbers were called. The names of the laid-off reporters continue to trickle out — telling friends or posting status updates on Facebook. Gone are City Hall reporter DeAnn Smith, books editor John Mark Eberhart and the…
Jumping aboard the bandwagon of offering it up for cheap and using the word “stimulus” somewhere in the verbiage (see also: Barack Obama, REO Styxwagon) is the American Jazz Museum, which sent our a release today announcing the Rhythm & Ribs Festival Stimulus Plan. If you wait until the day of the festival, June 20, you’ll pay the full price…
Flickr: Popartdks One of the busiest days in the restaurant industry is Mother’s Day, that fabulous holiday devoted to the loving Moms of the world. It’s not exactly around the corner — May 10 is 54 days away — but at least one local restaurant is already tooting its own horn to get those reservations flowing in. Starker’s Restaurant, 201…
Living up to its title, the Fat Bruiseday bout was a marathon of hard-knocks Saturday night, sending Roller Warriors careening into the crowd, crashing spread-eagle onto the rink and falling with such force that it popped the plastic right off one player’s knee pads. The third battle of the season for Kansas City’s four-team, all-female roller-derby league wasn’t a nail-biter. The Knockouts had…
Flickr: Puamelia It’s a shame that people think they only have two beer choices on St. Patrick’s Day — light beer with green food coloring or a Guinness. While Guinness is the de facto Irish beer, two others are also good and just as authentic. I get defensive on the subject because I consider Murphy’s Stout to be one of…
%{}% The layoffs at The Kansas City Star are going on as I write this. I find no joy in typing this — only sadness for the people let go. This morning, I came across Roxie the Cockeyed Optimist, a blog written by the wife of Star columnist Mike Hendricks. Yes, he’s still employed. But as she writes, her husband’s…
This afternoon in Topeka, lawmakers will talk about cleaning up “corrupt political advertising.” The House Elections Committee has a 3:30 p.m. hearing scheduled to talk about holding 527 organizations accountable for their sometimes smelly campaigns. An amendment to Senate Bill 117 would force anyone who buys political ads to identify themselves on TV and radio commercials and in mailings, robocalls,…
Flickr: Sashertootie History is filled with stories of kings and queens who had demanding culinary tastes — the legendary chef Antonin Careme worked for King George IV and Czar Alexander — but today’s news that Kim Jong Il, the leader of North Korea, ordering the opening of the country’s first Italian restaurant and “sending North Korean cooks to Naples and…
Flickr:Pnoeric More restaurant chains are under fire for misrepresenting the calorie counts on their menus. This time it’s Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts who are in hot water after a news station in New York found “caloric inaccuracies.” New York City was the first city to require calorie information on the chain menus, and similar bills have been proposed all over…
Ollie Gates’ plan to make Kansas City’s east side a duty-free zone has run into a stout opponent: the Missouri Constitution. Gates belongs to the Intra Urban Economic Council, a group pushing for the elimination of sales taxes in a 20-block area between Prospect and Troost. Gates likes to call the proposal “an inverted TIF.” Instead of letting developers feast…
Bonnie Winston and Zaina Saad bring out the feast. I’m too lazy to be an activist, but food is always a great motivator for me. That’s why my friends Mike Murphy and Sharon Lockhart were able to convince me to attend last Saturday’s “Breaking Bread Together: A Dinner with KC Area Iraqi Refugees and Iraqi War Veterans,” hosted by the…
Here’s another reminder that if you have a restaurant you love, you better start patronizing it more often, because in this economy, there’s no promise the joint will be around next week. Or tomorrow! Yesterday was the last day that Lorenza “Poco” Guiterrez served breakfast and lunch at her namesake restaurant at 3063 Southwest Boulevard. The petite Guitterez had established an…
%{}% SHUT UP, JOURNALISM: After eight years of what the French, the crazy Libertarians and George F. Will call “laissez-faire” governance in which the executive branch of the United States government pretty much withdraws from public life, emerging occasionally to declare war, the Washington press corps is totally confused and stumbling around trying to cover an administration that actually, y’know,…
%{}% Tea time is not complete without scones. Here’s how to make them so you don’t end up with a dry rock in your mouth. Economists could be missing the easiest way to tell when the recession is over: champagne sales stop going down and start going up. Drinking a bottle of bourbon six nights in a row and then…
I must now take a hot moment to thank whatever sucker sold Tindersticks’ album Curtains to the Hastings in my hometown, shortly after the album came out in 1997. I came across it browsing the racks some bored weekend evening and snatched it up because I’d read a review in Mojo. I had no idea what I was in for….
The next NBA team to use the Sprint Center as leverage to get a better deal back home might be the Indiana Pacers. Despite low attendance and nine out of 10 seasons in the red, Pacers owner Herb Simon says he wants to keep the team in Indianapolis, but the cost of operating Conseco Fieldhouse — a whopping $15 million…
Raysa Williams is a Paseo grad who studied theater and dance. She’s been the victim of two layoffs in two years. She was laid off from her work as a closer for Nations Lending, a title loan company, in October 2007 but was out of work for only a month when the company suddenly offered her old job back. She…
Neil Halstead’s dramatic ascent into the hearts of sleepy-music aficionados far and wide began with Slowdive, a shoegazey English band that channeled choice chunks of the Cocteau Twins and the Jesus and Mary Chain. The group left a couple of critically acclaimed albums in its wake when it disbanded in 1995, but Halstead quickly regrouped as Mojave 3 and become…
After the Roller Warriors’ third showdown of 2009, only one team survived 40 minutes of hard knocks to remain undefeated.
