Archives: March 2009

Psychic Sylvia Browne

Did you know that psychic Sylvia Browne, frequently seen on the Montel Williams show, is actually a Kansas City native? That’s right. And she’s coming home to amaze us with her ability to see the future, interpret the past and communicate with ghosts. Tue., March 31, 7-10 p.m., 2009 Tags: Kansas City, Montel Williams, Night & Day, Sylvia Browne

South by Northwest

Need a south-of-the-border vacation but don’t have time or money to get very far? Spend a couple of hours with the Philharmonia of Greater Kansas City. For its “Spring Break in Latin America” concert, the community orchestra taps the music of Peru, Brazil and Mexico. Conductor Andrés Franco will strike up tangos, sambas and other alluring sounds, including Santos Cifuentes’ “Scherzo…

The Original Bonnie and Clyde

Author Jeff Guinn gives a presentation on America’s favorite crime couple — Bonnie and Clyde. Thu., March 26, 7 p.m., 2009 Tags: Bonnie and Clyde, Jeff Guinn, Night & Day

Call It, Friend-O

Find a penny, pick it up, and all day long you’ll have good luck. Find $2 million at the scene of a desert bloodbath, and you’ve got nothin’ but trouble. For Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), trouble comes dressed as Anton Chigurh (Oscar winner Javier Bardem), one badass motherscratcher with a Prince Valiant haircut, who is singularly committed to finishing the…

Cool Experiment

Paul D. Miller — aka DJ Spooky — was never much for the traditional DJ routines of spinning, remixing and party-rocking. His interests have always been more obtuse, from collaborations with avant-jazz artists to a conceptual remix of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. But nothing thus far in Miller’s career has been as ambitious as his current obsession:…

Tres

Now a Californian, poet Gloria Vando Hickok prefers returning to Kansas City when the weather is warm. But the outdoor climate won’t matter when the poetry is as passionate as it will be at 7 tonight, when she joins members of the Latino Writers Collective at the Writers Place (3607 Pennsylvania, 816-753-1090) for Tercera Página. “That translates as the third…

Famous KC

Tonight, local personalities and civic leaders vie for the glory of being a dance champion at the third-annual fundraiser Kansas City Dancing With the Stars. Just like the TV show, competitors practice their routines with a local dance studio for several weeks. See the results (as well as some sparkly costumes and spirit fingers) at the Downtown Marriott–Muehlebach Tower (200…

LIGHTS! CAMERA! L’CHAIM!

In The Big Lebowski, the Dude’s bowling buddy, Walter Sobchak, sums up Judaism as “3,000 years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax,” and in a roundabout way, this sums up Kansas City’s 11th-Annual Jewish Film Festival — a diverse array of features and documentaries exploring faith, family and Jewish tradition through subjects as ancient as Jerusalem’s Western Wall…

Packed with Alpacas

We don’t believe that certain animals really exist. Ligers are one example. Alpacas are another — tiny, little llamas with stoner haircuts. The idea that hundreds of alpacas are gathering in one place so close to us is as thrilling and terrifying as a fever dream. In this case, we refer to the Midwest Alpaca Owners and Breeders Association’s sixth-annual…

Funnybook Fraternizing

It’s convention season, that special time of year when comic fans hop off their laptops for some real-life social networking. Join in the fun this weekend at Planet Comicon at the Overland Park International Trade Center (6800 West 115th Street). Guests include local favorites Jason Aaron (Ghost Rider), Matt Fraction (Uncanny X-Men), Nathan Fox (DMZ), B. Clay Moore (Hawaiian Dick),…

Poetry Aloud

Marie Asner’s poems traffic in soaring imagery and terse invocations of emotion, and she manages to make contradictions and incongruities seem commonplace — maybe even expected — in the lines of her verse (“hiss of fang sneers through broken promises”). Drop by today’s installment of the Johnson County Public Library’s Meet the Writer series to hear Asner read Kansas-themed poems…

Psych!

You’re gonna be on TV! Not! For comedian Dobie Maxwell, April Fools’ Day came a little early this year. On March 16, two days after his 46th birthday, the funnyman from Chicago was supposed to make his national television debut on The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson. Maxwell had made the trip to Los Angeles a few days earlier…

Precociously Prodigious

She bills herself as a saxophonist, a singer, a songwriter, a composer and an arranger. Yes, she’s 16. And, yes, she has been hailed by the likes of Wynton Marsalis, Lee Konitz, Phil Woods, and countless other jazz giants as more than just a rising star. It would almost seem that the very future of jazz rests upon the delicate…

The Bulldog

(1715 Main, 816-421-4799). On Saturdays, the Bulldog is the land of half-price bottles of wine from 5 to 10 p.m. And the selection isn’t chintzy; options include pinot noir, merlot and a host of others. Saturdays, 5-10 p.m., 2009 Tags: 318, Night & Day

Grand Street Café

(4740 Grand, 816-561-8000). Starting at 11 a.m., Grand Street’s Saturday happy hour offers $2 draws of domestic beer, $3 well drinks, and $3 glasses of wine. Available until 3 p.m., the specials then resume during reverse happy hour from 9 to 10:30 p.m. Saturdays, 2009 Tags: 2817, Night & Day

Harry’s Country Club

(112 East Missouri Avenue, 816-421-3505). This honky-tonk club is a great place to jump-start the evening. The drink specials are too numerous to list, but rest assured that wine, bottled beer, draught beer, fancy cocktails, martinis and even hot drinks are just a few of the options between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. Saturdays, 11 a.m.-4 p.m., 2009 Tags: 548,…

World Wine Tasting

If you attend the World Wine Tour at 801 Chop House, you have no excuse to leave sober. Some 300 wines from more than 40 winemakers will be available for tasting. Plus, you get scrumptious appetizers to soak up all that alcohol. Reservations were $50/person or $90/couple in advance. Admission at the door is $60/person. Call 816-994-8800. Mon., March 30,…

Kansas City’s blue-eyed reggae legends regroup

The stories associated with Kansas City’s Blue Riddim Band have been told and retold for the last three decades. Yarns have been spun — sometimes even true ones — about the band’s many accomplishments: playing Jamaica’s Reggae Sunsplash Festival, opening for Bob Marley at the Hoch Auditorium in Lawrence, earning a Grammy nomination, and carrying the torch of Midwest reggae…

Gomorrah

Matteo Garrone’s corrosive, slapdash exposé of organized crime in and around Naples comes on like Mean Streets cubed. Many of Gomorrah’s characters and situations are drawn from Roberto Saviano’s impressive 2006 best-seller, but Garrone’s movie is less an adaptation of the book than the successful decanting of its toxic fumes. Crime bosses and crooked pols are offscreen. Instead, we have…

Aquiver Before the Past

Title: The Arrowette Author: Warrensburg High School newspaper staff Date: November 14, 1928 Discovered: at Waldo Antiques Representative quotes: “At the Freshman class meeting, we elected a new sergeant-at-arms, as Henry Shaw, our old one, had dropped school. William Settles was elected. If he can keep the Freshmen quiet he surely deserves an award.” (page 2). “It has been remarked…

Timecrimes

Less a mind-fuck on the level of 2004’s ingenious Primer than a sort of mental canoodle, this modestly diverting slice of shoestring Spanish sci-fi, from writer-director and co-star Nacho Vigalondo, proves yet again that time travel is an ambitious but low-budget filmmaker’s jumbo Erector Set. Lured by a woman who mysteriously removes her top in his backyard woods, homeowner Héctor…

Sunshine Cleaning

More than a year after its first twirl at Sundance, this Amy Adams and Emily Blunt dramedy finally shrugs its way into theaters, and it almost seems like an afterthought. A film about sisters who go into the crime-scene cleanup business, it’s a muddled mess: terrific performances (from Adams, especially, as the former high-school cheerleader now at the bottom of…

The Prids

The Prids are all about it — love, that is, and the pain that comes with it. Built around core duo David Frederickson and Mistina Keith (who started out as friends, got married and then got divorced while keeping the band together), the Prids are firmly rooted in early Cure and Joy Division with an ear toward the future. As…