Pack up the kids and rent some blades. The Independence Events Center is hosting an open skate for families this Christmas Eve. Wed., Dec. 23, 8 a.m.-8 p.m.; Thu., Dec. 24, 8 a.m.-8 p.m., 2009 Tags: christmas, independence events center, Night & Day
Who can keep the colors and the causes straight for all those post-Livestrong bracelets? Apparently, the 6 million people wearing Will Bowen’s purple Complaint Free gear can. Bowen, lead minister of One Community Spiritual Center, started the movement in 2006 by giving members of his Kansas City congregation purple bracelets meant to remind them not to complain — about the…
In the 1983 film A Christmas Story, the holiday dinner is ruined by a pack of dogs, and the family winds up eating a lonely Christmas dinner in a Chinese restaurant. Traditionally, however, Chinese restaurants have been the staple for lively Christmas Eve meals — the sweet, spicy and sexy cuisine offers a culinary counterpoint to the less exotic roast-turkey-and-dressing…
Why lie in bed all night, pretending to sleep, when Santa knows you’re actually listening intently for hooves on the rooftop? He’ll come only after you get passed-out drunk on eggnog and no sooner. Begin that process at RecordBar (1020 Westport Road, 816-753-5207), which opens at 10:30 p.m. for its annual Yuletide Log and Egg Nog Holiday Party. As a…
When the holiday experience has sucked away the final piece of your soul, find a safe ride and get back to reality at a casino. You’ll be surprised to see how many people have the same idea. • Depot #9 at Ameristar Casino (3200 North Ameristar Drive, 816-414-7000): This bar in a railroad car has $3.50 16-ounce house microbrew draws,…
It’s the day after Christmas, but holiday events keep rolling with free films and music at the National World War I Museum (100 West 26th Street) at Liberty Memorial. At 10:30 a.m., catch silent star — and World War I veteran — Buster Keaton in a 1930 talkie called Doughboys. The film includes a character named Ukulele Ike, which is…
My, how time flies. And how fast our young wizards and witches grow up right before our eyes. Wasn’t it only yesterday that we banished young orphan Harry to the cubby beneath the stairs? And just look at him now — off at Hogwarts earning a first-rate education to defend against the dark arts, dealing with faculty and Slytherins, navigating…
Between today’s inevitable gift-return trips (Aunt Susie must have been shopping for you in the children’s department), drink a little bubbly in Brookside. From 1 to 4 p.m., the shop called Wine, at 112 West 63rd Street, pours free tastings of various sparkling wines from around the world, including champagne. Remember, it isn’t really champagne if the grapes weren’t grown…
Positive psychology argues that hope and happiness are good for you — at which we cynics roll our eyes. But the positive psychologists present their theory through sound empirical research — for which we skeptics cream our jeans. According to the University of Pennsylvania ‘s Positive Psychology Center, people who lead fulfilling lives perform better at work and in school,…
Weston’s Snow Creek (located on Highway 45, north of Kansas City), where winter recreationists ski or snowboard 12 different trails, offers special holiday hours this week. More seasoned winter athletes can hit Rattlesnake Terrain Park, with jumps, bumps, rails and pipes for “experts only,” according to the Web site — including a 300-foot vertical drop. For the uncoordinated (or the…
Trivia question: Who was America’s first “public enemy No. 1”? No, not John Dillinger. It was actually an affable bootlegger, bank robber and kidnapper from South Dakota named Verne Sankey — “a nice guy who just wanted to make it big,” according to his biographers. Sankey wasn’t the most creative crook, though. One of his gang’s legendary fill-in-the-blank ransom notes…
British heritage cinema can be dull and boring when packaged for the export market. Laboring under lampshade millinery, hair that looks like cake, and more sumptuous banqueting than we should ever have to sit through, Emily Blunt is cute, sassy and wildly improbable as the titular majesty-in-waiting, who, in life, was a short, dumpy policy wonk and energetic social reformer….
Guy Ritchie’s resurrection of the world’s most famous detective is a dank, noisy affair that unfolds in a gloomy London that seems a bootleg copy of A Christmas Carol’s CGI set. Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective was, in essence, a master of the 19th-century scientific method who used empirical observation and logical deduction to make sense of a chaotic universe; it’s…
As with its predecessor, Paris je t’aime, there are hits and misses. Producer Emmanuel Benbihy decreed that each of the 11 segments of this “collective feature film” be set in a specific neighborhood, but only a few manage to capture the spirit of their surroundings. The duds, like Jiang Wen’s pickpocket three-way with Hayden Christensen, Andy Garcia and Rachel Bilson…
Closing out a pretty great year for children’s movies — Up, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and Coraline among them — Betty Thomas’ dutiful animated and live-action sequel to 2007’s Alvin and the Chipmunks brings up the rear with capable mediocrity. It’s not entirely Thomas’ fault: What are you going to do with those fat-cheeked, helium-voiced singing critters but…
There’s no city-clogging traffic jam in Nine, the musicalized version of Federico Fellini’s movie-about-moviemaking 8 1/2, but the result feels like the celluloid equivalent of a 12-car pileup. An assault on the senses from every conceivable direction — smash zooms, the ear-splitting eruption of something like music — Nine thrashes about in search of “cinema” the way a child thrown…
Does Nancy Meyers hate women? The thought ran through my head not very long into It’s Complicated, Meyers’ stocking stuffer about the romantic trials and tribulations of obscenely privileged and narcissistic Southern Californians. Once more into the breach goes Meyers to show us what women really want, this time with Meryl Streep as a Santa Barbara restaurateur “of a certain…
No band in Lawrence takes its shit quite as seriously as Mammoth Life. The cultish eight-piece collective releases its songs on transparent blue vinyl and divides its members into teams that create “aural,” “visual” and “lingual” art. Want more? The group dresses in its own line of frilly apparel and sends out verbose press releases extolling the virtues of “emotional…
Kansas City-bred singer-songwriter Joel Kraft hightailed it up to Portland, Oregon, last year, taking his nylon-string guitar and childlike pop sense with him. As one of the few local artists who could make glockenspiels and binary-code lyrics sound delightful, Kraft was a fixture on the alt-folk bookstore circuit and also performed a tour of duty with the Popsicles. His humble,…
Alluvial soil, like that of the Mississippi River Delta, is an amalgam of silts, ores, gravel and gemstones. The dirt that comes from there is loose, fertile and rich — a birthing ground for a specific brand of blues that combines soulful vocals, emphatic rhythms and lush harmonica sounds. Kansas City’s latest gift from the Delta gods is Cadillac Flambé,…
A friend of mine observed: “You’ve been writing about a lot of diners lately. Is there a connection between the economy and comfort food?” Of course there is. Not just comfort food but inexpensive comfort food. The Great Depression was the heyday of the diner, the luncheonette, the cafeteria, and the blue plate special. In 1933, one of the Depression’s…
Thomas Wolfe was wrong. It’s certainly possible to go home again. Ask any of the college grads riding out the recession on their parents’ rec-room couches. It’s just that going back is a lot like time travel in the Terminator franchise — you can’t bring anything with you but the knowledge you’ve gleaned from the intervening years. That’s the discovery…
Rehearsing with your new band for the first time? Bring cookies. This is Camry Ivory’s tactic when she arrives at her first practice (and, incidentally, first Pitch interview) with the Sexy Accident. On a recent Tuesday evening, she shyly carries a keyboard and a container of crumbly chocolate-chip bites into the warm Westport house where she auditioned for band leader…
In our review of You Will All Fade Away, the 2007 debut album from doggedly dramatic Kansas City indie-rock band the Belated, we suggested that singer Michael Richardson take it down a notch or two. Amid the band’s roaring, minor-key crescendos and epic piano-rock fantasias, Richardson’s voice often came off like bad karaoke. During the two-year process of making album…
