If chefs are like rock stars, then Taste of KC is kind of like a local culinary Lollapalooza. Each year, The Pitch pits some of the city’s best chefs against one another in a cooking competition. While they vie for glory, everyone else eats. Dish up at booths set up by 21 local restaurants, including Dos Reales, Range Steakhouse, Waldo…
The Royals hope to miss starting pitcher Cliff Lee when the Cleveland Indians arrive tonight at Kauffman Stadium (Interstate 70 and the Blue Ridge Cutoff) for the beginning of a three-game series. The 2008 Cy Young winner tormented the Royals last year, compiling a 5-0 record. Of course, the 2008 Royals were a pretty feeble offensive bunch; for Pete’ sake,…
Author Michael Pollan doesn’t want to be one of those possibly well-meaning experts or self-serving corporate flacks who tells you what to eat. But Pollan — who investigated the evolution of our collective eating habits and peeled away the often unpleasant layers of an industrial system that turns rows of homogenous crops into aisles of brightly colored boxes full of…
If you’ve been kicking around the Kansas City music scene since the 1970s, then you know about Cowtown Ballroom. Those more recently out of diapers may know the ornate structure near 31st Street and Gillham as El Torreon, a skating rink and on-again, off-again site of ragtag all-ages shindigs. Not much musically has been happening at the 82-year-old building lately,…
During Live Woolies to Woolens, an 11th annual event, fiber artists and area guild members will demonstrate their crafts at Shawnee Indian Mission State Historic Site. Sheep shearing demonstrations will be presented on the hour, and, plus materials and handmade items will be available to buy. Sat., May 16, 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m., 2009 Tags: Night & Day, Woolworths Group plc
Today at 4 p.m., a weekend-long scooter festival begins. Tornado R’Alley V includes events, rides, gymkhana, food and a raffle. Some rides may have minimum speed requirements, but this event is open to all street legal, makes, models and cc’s of scooters. See http://i727.photobucket.com/albums/ww278/monza2t/tr5_tee.jpg for complete details. Fri., May 15, 4 p.m.; Sat., May 16; Sun., May 17, 2009 Tags:…
Local author Joel Goldman has reached the USA Today bestseller list by writing gripping, engaging crime novels set against a backdrop of familiar Kansas City locales. His latest novel, The Dead Man, follows former FBI agent Jack Davis as he investigates the (supposedly unconnected) deaths of a former Rockhurst High School football star and a local architect. The action takes…
When I called Andrew Morgan one afternoon last week, he was hanging out in a studio working on logic problems — you know, those puzzles in which four friends go out to dinner and one has to figure out which one wore the yellow tie and which one had the duck confit. Morgan, you see, is a Musician of Very…
If there’s anything for Jack White in Wichita, then it’s the bargain-bin 45s of that town’s 1960s and ’70s soul scene. However, there’s no need; Numero Group has gathered them on Eccentric Soul: Smart’s Palace. Smart’s Palace was the joint run by Dick Smart, bassist, club owner, DJ, record-store owner, promoter and proprietor of the ill-fated Solo label. It’s the…
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have transformed some of the most clichéd genres with smarts, non-screechy politics, superb acting, and visual beauty. Sugar tackles the sports movie and the immigrant story. While certainly diamond-specific, Sugar is less about America’s pastime than the fallacies of the American dream. Miguel “Sugar” Santos (the remarkable nonprofessional actor Algenis Perez Soto), a 19-year-old star…
Established artists who’ve made midcareer leaps from gallery to movie house have not easily found their footing. But British video artist Steve McQueen is the exception. Hunger, which won the prize for best first feature at Cannes last May, is a superbly balanced piece of work, addressing the passion of Irish Republican martyr Bobby Sands, who starved himself to death…
Benny Boom built his reputation directing music videos and commercials, and his first feature, Next Day Air, falls somewhere between the blunt-force visuals of the former and the focus-group formulas of the latter. What’s being sold in this skeletally plotted story of a drug shipment gone awry is not a hip-hop star (though a couple of them appear) or an…
When Iron and Wine’s Sam Beam abandoned the rustic, breathy minimalism of his early albums for new songs caked in head-spinning reverb, he left the door open for Horse Feathers to steal your indie-folk-loving heart. Horse Feathers is guided by Portland, Oregon-based songwriter Justin Ringle, who surrounds his patient meditations on gray skies and hard lives with compelling cinematic instrumentation,…
After recording 16 studio tracks and a bunch of acoustic-oriented home tracks, Lawrence’s the Dead Girls (formerly Dead Girls Ruin Everything) decided to hold off on a full-length and hype up their eventual album with three EPs. Te Quiero is the second installment of the EP series, and it does exactly what it’s supposed to do: Build excitement. The title…
St. Louis music fans have the privilege of seeing Bunnygrunt (or its alter ego, a Blondie cover band called Blondiegrunt) perform on a regular basis. But the rest of the country rarely gets a chance to experience the sloppy-pop innovators up close. That’s a shame because the act’s shambling indie-guitar rock and anime-eyes-cute lyrics (think punk rock for the socially…
Tails, pocket squares and patent-leather shoes are not exactly club attire — particularly when the evening’s music is pulse-accelerating, brain-rewiring dubstep and drum ‘n bass. Dancing to that in a tux will make you look like James Bond having a stroke. And that may be exactly why Kansas City’s Lotus Camp DJ collective is calling for ladies and gents to…
Lisa Kekaula is garage punk’s secret weapon. The BellRays frontwoman is what soul mama Sharon Jones would sound like macking on the New York Dolls. Kekaula has more white-hot passion and fury than a stack of Black Flag LPs, with a smoky strut to liberate garage punk from its four-chord home. The BellRays began almost 20 years ago with an…
Over the years, B-52’s personnel have recorded with members of the Talking Heads, Iggy Pop and R.E.M., cementing the band’s stature in a sort of pre-Internet era of pop evolution, when conduits for new music were restricted to the radio, MTV and the circulation of mix-tape audiocassettes. The B-52’s fall on the “affable” end of the spectrum of good-time party…
Brodie Rush can come off like a madman or a genius, depending on the night. He’s probably a bit of both, but one thing is certain: The dude takes care of business. From fronting a Led Zeppelin tribute band to hosting karaoke nights to freaking out kids at the Coterie Theatre, the brain behind Be/Non has never been short on…
I’ve always said that the aural quality — the music and the noise level — are important components in the dining experience. God knows, I don’t want to eat in a monastic setting, but sometimes silence is preferable to deafening (the music at the Italian bistro North, in Leawood, comes to mind) or to my recent experience at a suburban…
At the tail end of The Da Vinci Code, having traipsed around scenic Paris and London for over two hours to find out whether the Holy Grail was just an old cup or the womanly seed of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Tom Hanks’ Robert Langdon, ace symbologist, sloped off back to Harvard, though not before wishing the womanly seed (a…
Westport seemed slow on a Saturday night. As I scarfed a slice between comedy shows, the guy at Joe’s Pizza confirmed it. “Yesterday was slow, too,” he said to paramedics on a break. “Ever since all those shootings.” Earlier, at the Westport Coffee House, I had watched high-end improv troupes Loaded Dice and the Trip Fives delay their show a…
At 49 years old, Dennis Skillicorn no longer looks like the picture on the ID clipped to his starchy, prison-issued shirt. His mustache and hair have gone from brown to gray. Blurry tattoos set into his arms have faded to the same slate blue as the eyes magnified behind his glasses. Skillicorn lives on death row at Potosi Correctional Center,…
You know a shopping center is in distress when the Big Lots moves out. Big Lots is a closeout store. It left Brywood Centre last year. Hollywood Video is gone, too. But the strip mall, at East 63rd Street and Blue Ridge Cutoff, is poised to make a comeback. Last year, the City Council in Kansas City approved a plan…
