Meal planning is so 2009. Instead, grab a few reusable shopping bags and find ingredients for breakfast, lunch and dinner from the more than 100 vendors at the Farmers’ Market in downtown Lawrence. Now in its 34th year, the market has expanded to three days a week — the Saturday Market (7-11 a.m., between Eighth and Ninth streets and between…
In an interview with The Pitch last year about local fashion designer Ari Fish’s appearance on Project Runway, Peregrine Honig said, “Most of the time, when you read about young actors or designers emerging from Kansas City, it’s treated as a novelty. ‘Kansas City?’ As if we’re living in cornfields with a piece of wheat hanging from everyone’s teeth.” Watch…
The J’Adore Burlesque series continues at Crosstown Station. Expect sultry and comedic performances by various local burlesque entertainers. Fri., June 25, 7 p.m., 2010 Tags: Night & Day
Jeff Harshbarger’s Alternative Jazz Series at RecordBar (1020 Westport Road, 816-753-5207) is a church service for jazz freaks. This installment brings Indian-American woodwind artist Aakash Mittal. Based in Boulder, Colorado, Mittal is poised to break into the national jazz scene with top-notch saxophone, flute and clarinet chops and a progressive approach to modern jazz composition. His new album, Videsh, is…
Plog: “KC parks department pisses on advocates then wonders where advocates went,” May 28 Releash the Hounds I have new neighbors. They own a large dog. They illegally walk their dog with no leash. The male owner does so while carrying a coffee cup in his hand. He does so on the public sidewalk. Many infants are pushed along this…
It’s been about five years since Katie Euliss and Mike West — the husband-and-wife team better known as Truckstop Honeymoon — relocated from post-Katrina New Orleans to Lawrence. Judging by the down-home witticisms on their sixth full-length, Homemade Haircut, it’s clear that they’re really not big fans of wind. It’s another beautiful day in May/I love Kansas in the spring,…
Directors Brian Koppelman and David Levien, frequent writing partners who scripted Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, have created the Michael Douglas Experience; whether you respond to the material depends largely on how much you enjoy the actor lazily riffing on the oily creatures of his past. After a prologue that’s set six and a half years before, showing thriving car-dealership…
Sometimes, music made in a rural place grows to fill the empty space around it. It’s an idea that’s manifested in the music of North Dakota’s Secret Cities. The band’s crystalline, lightly psychedelic music recalls the folksy whimsy of Sufjan Stevens filtered through the sunny, lo-fi romanticism of Real Estate. It’s a rich mix that’s both melancholic and uplifting, and…
A bad drunk dried out into a luckless loner fisherman, Syracuse (Colin Farrell) lives for visits with Annie (Alison Barry), his wise-beyond-her-years disabled kid stuck in the custody of her still-boozing mom. One morning, Syracuse pulls up his net and finds a shivering woman — or is she a mermaid? — and soon his fishing fortunes change. While Annie hits…
Mother and Child is a compassionate, multi-threaded tale about the lives of everyday women. Rodrigo Garcia’s film takes potentially banal subjects — what defines “family,” biological parents versus those who adopt — and transforms them into something powerful. The film focuses on three women: defensive physical therapist Karen (Annette Bening), who lives with her ailing mother and writes letters to…
Scott Lucas and Joe Daniels — better known as Local H — approach rock like it’s a matter of life and death. Rough-hewn and rugged enough to leave bruises, Local H’s sound is burnished by grunge and inspired by classic rock. The band cut its teeth as a quartet, but Local H forged on after the bassist and the other…
One might wonder when self-described “aging alternative icon” Henry Rollins finds time to sleep. Since joining the legendary punk band Black Flag in 1981, Rollins has made a habit of being on the road nearly 300 days a year. When he’s not touring with the Rollins Band, hosting TV and radio programs, and playing bit parts in movies, Rollins books…
Grown Ups begins with a flashback to a 1978 boys’ basketball championship, where the starting five look like 12-year-old versions of Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, David Spade, Rob Schneider and Kevin James. We catch up with the teammates 30 years later, reunited for Coach’s funeral and entrusted with Coach’s ashes. With their families, they head for their old summer-getaway lodge….
Kentucky quintet Cage the Elephant puts out a flash-welded blast of classic-rock verve. Its funky, shuffling blues rhythms echo G. Love and Special Sauce with a garage-bred vibrancy reminiscent of the Hives, and singer Matt Shultz’s drawling rap-sing twang recalls the sneering delivery of Alex Turner (of Arctic Monkeys). The sheltered, Southern religious upbringing of siblings Matt and Brad Shultz…
Cadillac Flambe’s debut release, Live at Knuckleheads, comes on like a train — one you miss. Opener “Long Black Train” churns and builds, all sweaty palms and short breaths, like someone racing through a station. Then the second track, “Death of Me,” starts, and the cars pull away — and confusion, given voice by an excess of harmonica, reigns. What…
Kansas City’s Strange Music is a hardworking label. Rarely does a calendar page flip without someone on the Strange roster dropping a new joint into hip-hop’s shadowy underground. Kutt Calhoun’s Raw and Un-Kutt is the rapper’s third studio album, and it’s an evolutionary step in Calhoun’s career. (So far, he’s best known to many fans as Tech N9ne’s sidekick.) Raw…
Forest of Luxury sounds like a name for high-end, prefabricated homes. (In fact, that’s exactly what a Google search of the Lawrence band’s name yields, after the band’s MySpace page.) In the local music scene, Forest of Luxury is a furiously funky musical mash-up of two like-minded individuals. Founded in the summer of 2009, the band is composed of Ryan…
If the economy had been better, Gary and Cristina Worden would have been perfectly happy running one restaurant: their Argentinian dining spot, Piropos, in Briarcliff Village. But in 2007, when the Wordens moved Piropos to the Briarcliff space from its original location — on a bluff overlooking downtown Parkville and the Missouri River — they kept the original building open…
You know and love Jason Bourne as an implacable killing machine. But what if he were a mouthy asshole instead? That’s the provocative question posed by James Mangold’s Knight and Day, which casts Tom Cruise as a Bourne wannabe who seriously can’t shut up. As Roy Miller, an agent gone rogue from the FBI or the NSA or the CIA…
You get a sticker when you pony up at the gate of the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival. That makes sense. The annual to-do in Southmoreland Park is more like voting or giving blood than spending a night at the theater. It’s one of those civic responsibilities that people feel good about doing. And if the show is a washout,…
Kansas City, Missouri, leaders recently wrestled with an interesting question: How will our run-down neighborhoods face the future? The debate was not framed this way, of course. No one stood up and used the word shitbox. But the topic under discussion — urban agriculture — has more to do with answering that question than the City Council seems to realize….
Dear Mexican: Why do the Mexicans HATE American soccer and “hate” (bolded, underlined and italicized) Landon Donovan? Uncle Sam’s Army Brat Dear Gabacho: Because Mexicans hate Americans — duh! Geez, this is the literary equivalent of taking a penalty kick at this year’s FIFA World Cup with no goaltender, but I also want to plug Gringos at the Gate, an…
It’s just shy of midnight, and more women are sitting at the bar than dancing at one of Kansas City’s older strip clubs. Sally is behind the bar, joking with the few regulars who are here, pouring shots when they’re called for. There are only a few customers now, and this is as quiet as a Friday is likely to…
