Deep into this latest ride on the High School Musical bandwagon, the death of a main character’s father is treated as less devastating than the social-clique intel it uncovers. Besides that, Todd Graff’s film is written with a desperate cleverness that clamors for attention over the brainless against-the-odds music-competition plot. Chinless new kid Will (Gaelan Connell) finds his encyclopedic audiophilia…
Wanna know how Kansas City’s music scene is doing? Look at the evidence, baby. The photos across these two pages represent fewer than half of the Kansas City and Lawrence artists who performed at this year’s Pitch Music Showcase. Across stages at the Beaumont, McCoy’s, the Foundry and the Riot Room, 28 acts plugged in and rocked out, bringing more…
I love independently owned restaurants. I loved working in them, and I certainly prefer eating in them. At big chains, the food is uniformly consistent and often less expensive than at small, chef-owned establishments — it’s just never quite as tasty or interesting. But the little restaurants can have eccentricities, good and bad, that their big rivals don’t. Take, for…
The aliens have been with us for 20 years already at the start of South African director Neill Blomkamp’s fast and furiously inventive District 9. Their huddled masses were long ago extracted from their broken-down mothership and deposited in the titular housing slum on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Unlike the space invaders of most science fiction, these 6-foot-tall E.T.s (pejoratively…
The history of men at work goes something like this: hunter, slave, serf, yeoman, line worker — and then what? Salesman? HR rep? In this post-factory, post-farmer, take-your-wife-to-work-at-the-mayor’s-office America, few jobs prize the rough-handed toil required of men throughout the millennia. When you fly to Bentonville for that Wal-Mart interview, fuck-or-kill instincts better be the last thing you brag about….
Stan Romanek is telling everyone to look at the sky. Most of the people standing around on this mid-July evening outside the Intrigue Park Place Hotel, near Interstate 435 and Front Street, don’t need to be told. The annual Mysteries of the Universe Conference — a national gathering for devotees of the paranormal and the interstellar — is again in…
Earlier this year, the city of Kansas City, Missouri, solicited bids from electrical companies. The city was looking for a business to perform regular maintenance on its electrical systems and equipment. Which do you think the city chose? a. The low bidder b. A minority-owned business c. None of the above The correct answer is “c,” Mark One Electric Co….
Dear Readers: We begin, as we do each week, with cojones, although the huevos in question deal with my column a couple of semanas ago on why gabachos prefer the former term for testicles as opposed to the latter. I gave a rough etymology of the two (cojones comes from the Spanish singular cojón, testicle, from the Latin coleo —…
Plog: KCPD keeps close eye on Chief Corwin’s girlfriend while he’s out of town,” July 28 Vacation Watch I read with amusement The Pitch’s blog post regarding KCTV Channel 5’s report on the supposed “situation” between me and Police Chief Jim Corwin’s girlfriend at his house, which resulted in around-the-clock police protection at his home. What is particularly amusing is…
Mauro Brito-Pacheco died for $20 (thanks to KMBC 9 for the detail). Kansas City police identified 38-year-old Brito-Pacheco as the victim of a homicide at Tina’s Hair Salon. View Larger Map Police say three men robbed the salon in 900 block of West 24th Street. If you have a tip, call 816-474-8477. Categories: News Tags: homicide, Mauro Brito-Pacheco
Larry Parker was the man fatally shot while sitting on a porch in the 3500 block of Wayne Tuesday night, Kansas City police say. View Larger Map Parker, 42, was struck by a stray bullet fired during a gun battle between two groups of young men. No suspects are in custody. Anyone with information about Parker’s shooting is asked to…
Placebo, who for some reason are now on Vagrant Records, come to Kansas City for a date at the Beaumont Club on September 27. I mean, I understand Thrice. I maybe understand HORSE: the band. But Placebo? The only song they ever released as a single is one of the few songs guaranteed to make me switch the station when…
If you ever lived in a college dorm, you know how stressful that first year can be, waiting to see who the computer matches you up with. Sometimes people become the best of friends and sometimes they want to murder one another within five minutes of meeting. Convicts have the same problems, worrying about who they’ll share a cell with….
%{}% On his blog today, Kansas City Police Chief Jim Corwin updated the status of the police officer who was knocked out in a scuffle in the Power & Light District Sunday night. The officer, a 14-year veteran of the force, “suffered a traumatic head injury” but “his condition was upgraded and he was taken out of intensive care” Tuesday…
A Kansas City, Kansas, man was beaten within an inch of his life early this morning. KCK police found a man in his 20s with life-threatening injuries in the 8300 block of Leavenworth Road around 4 a.m. View Larger Map If you saw the victim’s vehicle — a champagne-colored 2006 Chevy Malibu with Kansas tag PRTIBOI — after 7 p.m….
Labor Day weekend is upon us in less than a month. And, as well as signaling the end of summer, it brings us the annual Kowtown Kustom Greaserama. In addition to the car show that takes place at the Boulevard Drive-in on Saturday and Sunday, the ninth installment of the popular festival offers up what might best be described as…
Plastics have always been the future, just never the future for wine. But restaurant owners and wineries are apparently reconsidering that position. The Chicago Tribune recently reported on how restaurants are looking to save costs and avoid broken glass by purchasing wine in plastic bottles. Although wine in plastic containers has an expiration date, the lower price is making consumers…
Don’t feel bad, University of Missouri-Kansas City. At least you made it on Forbes’ list of “America’s Best Colleges,” even if it’s at No. 592 out of 600. And look at you, Rockhurst. Nice work. Here’s the list of top colleges in Missouri and where they ranked overall: No. 45 — Washington UniversityNo. 126 — Westminster CollegeNo. 163 — Rockhurst…
Celebrity blogger turned trainwreck of a celebrity himself Perez Hilton has the Perez Hilton Presents tour coming through Kansas City and hitting the Beaumont on September 23 with co-headliners Ladyhawke and Ida Maria, who rocked the Granada this past weekend and the Beaumont back in June. Now, both of these acts are pretty stellar, and it’s nice to see female-fronted…
J.E. Dunn Construction Co. will boost the participation of minority- and woman-owned businesses at its headquarters by $1.1 million in a settlement announced this morning at a meeting of the Kansas City Tax-Increment Financing Commission. Dunn was accused of using front companies to meet diversity goals during the construction of H&R Block’s world headquarters. An investigation by the city’s Human…
Chickenfoot’s logo is a lazy rectilinear reinterpretation of a peace symbol, the “track of the American chicken,” in the parlance of the Teabaggers and the Ice Road Truckers, the demographic cohort comprising the band’s core audience. “The ‘K’ is backward in the Chickenfoot logo,” Kansas City blogger Dave LaCrone pointed out when I told him about the band’s upcoming show…
You might have smelled it all the way up I-70 as volunteers at the fifth annual Tomato Fest in St. Louis put together the world’s longest bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich last weekend. The mammoth BLT stretched 179 feet and two inches. Five-hundred pounds of bacon and 1,280 pounds of tomatoes were stuffed inside pan-sized pieces of bread in an…
