A woman kidnapped from her Kansas City apartment locked herself in Fairview Heights, Illinois, McDonald’s bathroom and escaped her captors Tuesday night. It’s a good thing her captors were apparently the worst kidnappers ever. Here’s the story: The woman, described as a non-English speaking twentysomething, was talking to her sister on the phone Tuesday afternoon when two men broke into…
%{}% A visit to Swagger finds chicken wings, hamburgers and a punching machine that stirs up conversation. Here’s a look at eggs on sandwiches, burgers and pizzas around the city. Maybe Kansas City could be a stop on a possible new reality show: Food Trucks Race Across America. Actor Tom Hanks bequeathed the White House Press Corps with a new…
Minnesota’s hottest punks (and recent Epitaph signees) Off With Their Heads are hitting the Jackpot on Friday, July 9. The band is touring in support of their upcoming Epitaph debut, In Desolation, out Tuesday, June 8. They’ve released several albums on No Idea, and singles all over the place. They’re probably the most-hyped and best-reviewed band in the punk scene…
When he ran for mayor of Kansas City, Mark Funkhouser said he was not a happy-talk kind of guy. Staying true to his word, His Heightness used an event sponsored by the Whole Person, a group that works to improve the lives of the disabled, to lay out the cold calculus of urban politics. Wednesday night’s town hall meeting took…
You know how silly it looks when you stop in traffic and in front of you there’s a car in front of you with bumper stickers from past elections? It always comes off as either the sour detritus of failure or smug gloating. Now imagine how annoying it is to live next door to someone whose bumper sticker takes up most the…
Guru, the influential MC from hip hop innovators Gang Starr, passed away from cancer earlier this week. Hot 103 Jamz DJ JT Quick found this video featuring Kansas City R&B singer Boy Big, showing how the man’s influences reached all the way here in the Midwest. Categories: Music Tags: boy big, dead celebrities, Gang Starr, Guru, JT Quick
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. The Fragrance of Beauty Author: “Joyce Landorf, radiant beauty.” Seriously, that’s straight from the about-the-author page. Date: 1973 Publisher: SP Publications Discovered at: 2nd Chance Thrift,…
%{}% Kansas City police have released the names of the woman and man dead in a murder-suicide at 3818 East 60th Terrace on Monday. They are 36-year-old Lorine Greer and 47-year-old Marvell Greer. The Star reported earlier this week that the man lured his wife to his home, killed her, told his 12-year-old daughter that he loved her and then…
View the artwork of more than 100 candidates for the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the Kansas City Art Institute. April 17-May 15, 2010 Tags: Kansas City Art Institute, Night & Day
It’s far from the first hip-hop musical, or even the first hip-hop musical at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre, so Venice might not seem like a breakthrough. But the show — another bracing, extraordinary achievement from the revitalized Rep — absolutely is. It’s the first hip-hop musical in which hip-hop is not the subject; instead, hip-hop is simply an aesthetic…
K2 synthetic marijuana has been illegal in Kansas for almost a month and will be banned any day now in Missouri. But demand is too damn high to allow legal faux reefer to die peacefully, and new products are already on the market. A few midtown locations are selling K3, which advertises itself as incense and not for human consumption….
The Sex Pistols may have given John Lydon a famous name, but Public Image Ltd. has Lydon’s heart. John Lydon calls himself a folk musician. The former Sex Pistol knows how strange that sounds, coming from a punk pioneer. “Folk is a term that seems to baffle most people,” Lydon says with his pudding-thick, working-class English accent, on the phone…
Dear Mexican: I have a friend who frequently wears a T-shirt that boldly states in big, badass, Old English letters, “Hecho en México.” Five facts follow: 1. He was born 23 years ago in the United States, in Bellflower, California. 2. His truly Mexican parents were nowhere near Mexico when he was conceived. 3. His Spanish is worse than his…
According to Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere, Mussolini was nearly as much of a bully in the bedroom as he was in office. Il Duce would eventually get busy with the Pope, but in the mid-1910s, he screwed — and screwed over — one Ida Dalser, who becomes this epic melodrama’s nobly suffering Jeanne d’Arc. Bearing Mussolini a son, Dalser was banished…
An almost miraculously photographed showcase of some of the seven seas’ least seen and most incredible specimens, Disney’s Oceans (a follow-up to last year’s Earth) lets its subjects speak for themselves. Timed to coincide with Earth Day, the film makes its preservationist agenda implicit, mostly in its wonder. The blanket octopus, mantis shrimp, and a host of protoplasmic jellyfish and…
Writer Andy Diggle dedicated his snappy DC comic books The Losers to 1980s screenwriting superstar Shane Black, creator of the Lethal Weapon series. But in adapting The Losers for film, director Sylvain White and screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Peter Berg strain to achieve the pleasurable mix of cheap laughs and expensive action that Lethal Weapon pulled off effortlessly with the…
The Flaming Lips dream big and colorful. The band’s spectrum of sounds, across its 27-year career, ranges from surging guitar chaos to off-kilter psych-rock, but the music remains united by a cinematic ethos. Wayne Coyne’s willowy tenor drifts over percolating neon arrangements in line with otherworldly album titles such as Clouds Taste Metallic, Telepathic Surgery and Yoshimi Battles the Pink…
Foxy Shazam’s cloying theatrics seem built to divide an audience. Drama-queen frontman Eric Nally erupts in vocal-cord-splintering screams that channel Blood Brothers’ shrill falsetto, giving way to pounding piano and chest-beating choruses. The result sounds like post-screamo angst, topped with the kitschy theatrics of Hedwig and the Angry Inch’s most sweaty, pantyhose-running performance. (Example: “Connect,” from Foxy’s latest release, sounds…
In an age of cheap computers and boosted software, any idiot armed with a laptop and an Ableton might be a moderately entertaining artist — someone fit only for Wednesday happy hour at your local dive but fit to scratch nonetheless. Denver producer Derek Vincent Smith’s sample-based work as Pretty Lights boasts an artful finesse that puts midweek beat scribblers…
Very few singers embody the phrase “a man of few words” like Sigur Rós’ lead etherealist Jónsi does. Throughout the Icelandic group’s 16-year history, Jónsi (full name Jón Þór Birgisson, if you feel like torturing your computer’s keyboard) has split his falsetto-driven lyrics between his native tongue and an elaborate form of gibberish that he dubs “Hopelandic.” In fact, with…
I have to hand it to the folks who took over a ridiculously large, ugly restaurant space in Mission Farms and transformed it into something exceptional. The dining area at the short-lived Boudreaux’s Louisiana Seafood & Steaks, which seemed as vast as a high school gym, has been cleverly reconfigured into a serpentine swirl of different eating areas with curvy…
