Early Drinkin’
Fitz’s Blarney Stone (3801 Broadway, 816-753-4949). Drown sorrows in midtown starting at 9 a.m., when wells are $1 off. All beer is 50 cents off until 6 p.m. Mon., March 16, 9 a.m., 2009 Tags: Night & Day
Archives: March 2009
Domestic/Domesticated
A new exhibition by local artist Emily Eakes, curated by Molly Murphy. Sun., March 15, 2009 Tags: Emily Eakes, Molly Murphy, Night & Day
Archie Scott Gobber Is Better Off Now
Archie Scott Gobber Is Better Off Now is an exhibit by artist Archie Scott Gobber, a native of Warrensburg, Mo. Tuesdays-Fridays, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturdays, 12-4 p.m. Starts: March 13. Continues through April 17, 2009 Tags: Night & Day, Warrensburg
Group Creative
“Part of the magic of Create Your Own Reality is that you don’t have to be an artist or even artistic. You just have to have the intention to create,” says Darcy Bloss, the mind behind tonight’s free event at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (4420 Warwick, 816-753-5784). Bloss sees tonight as an opportunity to bring creative people together…
Green Day
After mass on this day 136 years ago, so the story goes, native Irish priest James A. Dunn led parishioners from Eighth Street and Cherry into downtown. They had to wait nearly 80 years for public sentiment to catch up with their revelry, but in the decades since KC embraced St. Patrick’s Day, it has become the city’s largest single-day…
CINEMATIC SENSEI
In the realm of Japanese cinema, Yasujiro Ozu was the anti-Kurosawa. Not that that’s a bad thing. Kurosawa tended toward the epic and feudalistic. Ozu was inclined toward quieter, gentler, more personal stories, often mining the emotional depths of Japanese families. In his final masterwork, 1962’s Autumn Afternoon, an aging widower, reflecting on his life, arranges a marriage for his…
KCK Art walk
Kansas City, Kansas, kicks off its 2009 Follow the Dotte Art Walk series this evening with a bit of a twist. Usually, the galleries around Minnesota Avenue between Fifth and Seventh streets open their doors on the second Friday of each month, but in March they’re open the second Thursday night, too, in honor of the Kansas City, Kansas, Public…
Rite of spring: The fifth-annual Pitch Ultra Music DJ Contest raged on despite the down economy
Even if one does not drink, take drugs or succumb to a seizure, it’s tricky to retain the particulars of an event such as The Pitch Ultra Music DJ Contest at NV. The intense strobe lights, the thunderous and rapid beats, the smoke and glitter pouring out of the ceiling, and the general overstimulation of all senses — all of…
Wendy and Lucy
Modest but cosmic, Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy is a movie whose sad pixie heroine, Wendy (Michelle Williams), already skating on thin ice, stumbles and, without a single support to brace herself, slides into America’s lower depths. Introduced while calling for her dog, Lucy, Wendy loses first her liberty (briefly), then Lucy (again), and finally her car in the course…
Thomas Function
Few bands are named so that that you can tell in an unconscious minute that you’ll love what they do, that you’ll immediately feel a perfect kinship on their first chord. Thomas Function is no exception. But don’t fry your wires making it mean something. Instead jump right into the troubadour sound of these Alabama boys’ basement-truth anthems. On the…
SXSW KC ’09 – It’s Official
Republic Tigers frontman Kenn Jankowski accurately describes South by Southwest as “Mardi Gras for hipsters.” But more than that, the huge music, film and interactive festival that is held in Austin every year has become an international, popular (as opposed to just “indie”) music convention, carnival, explosion. Most years, more often than not, bands from Kansas City and hereabouts don’t…
Secret Chiefs 3
Best known as one of the main creative forces in Mr. Bungle, guitarist Trey Spruance has long shown interest in a broad range of styles, including modern classical, obscure film scores, avant-garde jazz and death metal. With his outfit Secret Chiefs 3, Spruance dives into traditional Persian music but displays none of the postmodern irreverence that was so central to…
Cotton Jones and Human Highway
What these acts share in common is a realization of artistic detours. Maryland’s Cotton Jones is a duo consisting of Michael Nau and Whitney McGraw; previously, the pair fronted Christian indie-pop-folk group Page France, issuing an underrated trio of twee albums. Cotton Jones finds them mining organ-based blues and Zombies-esque dark wave to spooky, if not especially ecclesiastical, effect. For…
Black Lips
Sneaking below the radar of college radio, NPR and, until recently, the mainstream press, Atlanta’s Black Lips has built a significant national following by playing its guts out at any and every club that would have it. Between tours, the group has released numerous vinyl singles and five LPs, including this year’s 200 Million Thousand. The foursome’s sound is deceptively…
Andrew Bird
Along with eccentric one-of-a-kinds like Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom, Andrew Bird would make a fine professor at some school for indie overachievers. Flying around in a genre obsessed with punk’s unlearned cool, Bird is a classical violinist, a virtuoso whistler, and a songwriter whose über-literate lyrics wouldn’t dumb down a grad-school writing class. Cutting his teeth with ’90s neo-swing…
Two Lovers
Though Two Lovers is based on a Dostoyevsky story, director James Gray’s lack of interpretive distance from his subject, coupled with extreme overacting from lead actor Joaquin Phoenix, results in melodrama that sits up and begs to be farce. As Leonard, a jilted thirtysomething who has moved back in with his Brighton Beach Jewish parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Moshonov),…
Sliccs Gotcha
If you run across Sliccs Gotcha while driving, don’t tailgate. On “Used to Shootouts,” the last track of his new release, Prince of Whales, Sliccs casually warns: I’m used to shootouts/Shoot my own back window out/You get behind me, I be shootin’ your front window out. The rest of the album expands on that theme: violence, the daily grind, an…
With amps up loud, the Dactyls come screaming out of the Lawrence scene
The block in the east Lawrence neighborhood where the Dactyls practice might just be the nexus of the town’s music scene. Across the street, the Get Up Kids are prepping for an upcoming reunion tour. The Dead Girls and the Spook Lights also are within earshot. All of these bands are capable of rattling the fixtures, but the Dactyls especially…
You don’t have to wait for the last day of the Mayan calendar to make a trip to Fiesta Azteca
We don’t need any more bad news. But a friend of mine, who obsesses over things such as the Mayan calendar, called one day to tell me to start living it up because the world is supposedly coming to an end on Sunday, December 23, 2012. If I didn’t believe him, he said, I could look at any number of…
What Who’s Lerner & Loewe? really makes us wonder: Who’s Nathan Granner?
Recent productions at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre have brought this town a pair of shows that demonstrated the power of cohesion: In The Arabian Nights and The Glass Menagerie, every element of stagecraft came together like notes making up perfect chords. Other shows, by comparison, now seem a little more scattered, reduced to their individual elements instead of made…
Strategos — Christian former cops fight a battle of wit, skill and strategy with imaginary school shooters
The classroom’s desks are empty now. It’s the end of the day, and the final bell has rung. The last person in the room is Lisa Butts, 43, the assistant principal at South Valley Middle School. Butts started out as a math teacher in Pennsylvania in 1993, then moved to Missouri in 2003 to take this job with the Liberty…
Want the fun of a public meeting without having to be there? Twitter is the only way to fly.
Twitter — the social-networking Web site that allows real-time status updates in 140-character bursts — isn’t going to make your life easier. Unless, that is, you’d rather be somewhere other than City Hall on a weekday afternoon while keeping up with the blow-by-blow of an insane public hearing there. If you’re sensible that way, Pitch staff writer Nadia Pflaum had…
Bad Heart
Title: A Heart Speaks: A Promise to Cherish Author: LaVyrle Spencer Publisher: Jove Books, New York Date: 1986 Discovered: Donated by Jen Chen The cover promises: Women are like flowers, ready to spread and bloom around a rigid pistil. Representative quote: “It seemed as if the beguiling fountains of Kansas City itself danced within Lee’s heart as she waited for…
Here’s why the Mexican loves the asshole Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio
Dear Mexican: Not sure if this has been asked before, but how do you feel about Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio? I think the guy’s a fucking racist, who’s just out to get Mexicans to fulfill his racist agenda. He’s been relevant lately due to the protests in Arizona against Section 287(g) of some immigration act, which basically grants the sheriff’s…
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