Archives: October 2009
Tonight’s Stephen Lynch Show at the Midland Postponed
Due to a family emergency, tonight’s Stephen Lynch show at the Midland is postponed. The show’s been rescheduled for December 12. All tickets for the show tonight will be honored at the December 12 show. For refunds, please visit the point-of-purchase location. If this bums you out too terribly much, pull out the Live at the El Rey DVD and…
More from 63rd Street: 2nd Chance Thrift Store
The employees behind the scenes of 2nd Chance Thrift Store have an impossible task. Boxes the size of refrigerators are stacked 15 feet high, brimming with clothing and shoes. Smaller containers are crammed with random housewares, from books to bath towels. The entire length of the massive warehouse looks like its been slammed by a cardboard avalanche — an avalanche…
Jason Miller’s latest stunt leaves him covered in blood
With the rain starting to drench his shirt and bead in his hair, Jason Miller looked to his small gathering of animal rights followers last night. “Are you guys cold?” he asked, shivering slightly from the nighttime chill or adrenaline of possible arrest. “No, I’m hot,” a woman in a pink ski outfit spit angrily, casting her eyes at the…
Zeppelins, The Titanic, and the future of education: Studies in Crap celebrates progress with a 1913 Scientific American
Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power. Scientific American Date: August 23, 1913 Discovered at: Westport Antiques Representative Quotes: “Probably the first whole-hearted aerial attack in modern warfare will be delivered from a…
Artist Studios
Artists all over the metro area will open their doors for the public to view, visit, and buy. See http://www.kansascityartistscoalition.org for more details. Sat., Oct. 17, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun., Oct. 18, 1-4 p.m.; Sat., Oct. 24, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun., Oct. 25, 1-4 p.m., 2009 Tags: Night & Day
Out Out
Last October, the Lesbian and Gay Community Center of Kansas City’s annual Out in Westport celebration moved out of Westport and into Hyde Park (38th Street and Gillham Road). The result: a more picnic-ready, dog-friendly event with a new name, OutFest Kansas City. OutFest returns to Hyde Park today from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free picnic grub will be…
Kind of Kind of Blue
Miles Davis was known for assembling musicians, giving them a stripped-down framework and just letting them create. This worked to jazz perfection 50 years ago when Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Jimmy Cobb and Paul Chambers made Kind of Blue. The understated masterpiece is seen by many as the definitive jazz recording and the Big Bang of modal…
The Edge of Hell
The Edge of Hell (1200 West 13th Street), a spooky Kansas City institution for 30 years, confronts visitors with their most primal fears. The house’s disorienting interior and artfully discomforting atmosphere prime its occupants for the sheer adrenaline terror of groping through darkness and the appearance of monstrous chainsaw-wielding apparitions. Live rats and a live reticulated python lend breathing, tactile…
Macabre Cinema
The Macabre Cinema (1222 West 12th Street) adapts famously terrifying film characters and situations into one of the West Bottoms’ newer Halloween attractions. Guests are ushered through a vintage movie theater whose screen, illuminated despite an ostentatiously broken projector; becomes the threshold across which lurk the most terrifying and recognizable figures Full Moon Productions can conjure without violating copyright laws….
The Beast
The Beast (1401 West 13th Street) claims to be America’s largest haunted house, boasting a huge cast, a quarter-acre, fog-shrouded werewolf forest, a recreation of the Victorian London streets where Jack the Ripper stalked his victims, a huge maze and an alligator-choked swamp. Open seasonally, this frankly Disney-grade attraction is enhanced and improved year-round to provide new thrills for returning…
Liv Strong
In a classic Peanuts strip, Lucy Van Pelt reveals that her baseball bat is autographed not by Mickey Mantle but by Liv Ullmann. With that shout-out to the Norwegian actress and her most frequent director, Ingmar Bergman, children everywhere began the journey down foreign cinema’s thorny path to existential crisis. In a lecture titled “Morality, Art and Confession: Big Questions…
Visual Delicacy
Tonight, Kansas City artist and curator Jennifer Boe presents a solo exhibition of her embroidered works, a sly take on meat and potatoes called How to Cook a Wolf, at Rockhurst University’s Greenlease Gallery (1100 Rockhurst Road, 816-501-4407). The show takes its title from M.F.K. Fisher’s 1943 book of the same name, a series of essays exploring hunger and the…
Classically Contemporary
The combination of contemporary dance and classical music is unusual enough that the challenge inspired choreographer Michelle Diane Brown of Kacico Dance to set her new ballet, Innerlying Landscapes, to Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings.” The world premiere of the piece — at 8 tonight at the Folly Theater (300 West 12th Street) — marks the first theatrical collaboration between Kacico…
Mouth-Watering
The Big Easy may never again be what it once was, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try to re-create it in your kitchen. New Orleans chef and restaurateur John Besh visits Jasper’s (1201 West 103rd Street) from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. to talk about the city where he grew up and sign copies of his new book My New…
52 Kick-up
The stage, though, remains its greatest medium, and the ballet’s 52nd season opener takes place tonight at 7:30 at the Lyric Theatre (1029 Central). This weekend’s selections are Jessica Lang’s “Splendid Isolation III,” Arthur Saint-Léon’s “Frescoes,” Lev Ivanov’s “Le Corsaire de Deux” and Artistic Director William Whitener’s “Carmen.” The Kansas City Symphony accompanies. Performances are scheduled through Sunday; call 816-931-2232…
Missouri Wins
The debate over whether it’s better to live on the Missouri or the Kansas side of these cities may never be resolved. But for zoo lovers, anyway, a KCMO address is currently more beneficial. All month, the Kansas City Zoo (6800 Zoo Drive) is letting in residents of its side of the state line for free. The offer extends through…
The Heaviest Flower
The Heaviest Flower is a two-person exhibition of recent photographic work by longtime friends and peers Elijah Gowin and Colby Caldwell. Tied together through their innovative inquiry of the materiality of photography—both artists use painstaking and elaborate processes for reaching their final images – the exhibition circles around themes of anxiety, loss, and the tenuous beauty of living. An 80-page,…
Teenspeak
For all the tongues clucked and beards stroked over the Kansas City, Missouri, School District, we rarely hear from the students themselves. Luckily, there’s a way to learn firsthand what it’s like to grow up in this city, and it also happens to be entertaining as hell. The artists and poets performing tonight at the Paseo Coffee House have been…
Led + Dead
In many ways, Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead couldn’t be further apart on the musical spectrum. But delve deeper into the roots of each legendary act, and you’ll find common ground with such artists as Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry, Sonny Boy Williamson and the Beatles. The two bands occasionally crossed paths on the festival circuit, peacefully coexisting among fans…
Zombie Mall
Director Ron Megee has his fingers on the pulse of pop culture, and he isn’t feeling anything … because the stars of his new production, Maul of the Dead, are zombies. Mitch Brian drew his inspiration for this tale of zombies taking over a mall in the year 1978 from the classic zombie flick Dawn of the Dead. Coterie at…
What Brown Did For You
One hundred fifty years ago today, firebrand guerrilla John Brown led his ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry, in what was then Virginia. The man had stones like basketballs. But before all that, Brown captained a small militia in the name of making Kansas a free state. To honor this man of action in 1911, Kansas City, Kansas, erected the country’s…
Stage to Screen
If you’ve ever experienced an Alacartoona show, you’ve probably thought it would make a fine film. The Kansas City musical-cabaret ensemble delights in drawing audiences back to 1930s Berlin with suggestive and occasionally absurd performances. An Inspiration Grant from the ArtsKC Fund has allowed Alacartoona to translate its stage show to the silver screen, a process that began last November…
Reflecting to Live
Chemotherapy forced Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg into early menopause, and surviving the cancer dictated the removal of her breasts. As the poet laureate of Kansas faced these harsh realities, she thought a lot about what it means to be alive. Her new book, The Sky Begins at Your Feet, follows her painful journey. “It’s a memoir about cancer, community and coming home…
Find The Pitch
