After a week of dining out in New York City and Boston, I’m starting to wonder if separate checks is a quaint Midwestern custom, right alongside the dollar dance at weddings and making eye contact with strangers on public transportation. At most restaurants in Kansas City, the server will ask if my party wants separate checks regardless of the number…
Pretty big show announcement: 96.5 the Buzz has revealed the lineup for its annual “The Night the Buzz Stole Christmas” concert of popular music performances. This year, the Buzz’s Christmas thievin’ will take place at the Midland over the course of two nights: Monday, December 6, and Wednesday, December 8. The bands range from good to kind of stinky to…
Nothing helps a hangover like a little hair of the dog, so as you shake off the cobwebs of this Halloween weekend here’s one last jolt. Kevin Smith has finished up his Westboro Baptist Church-inspired horror film, Red State, and has announced he’ll be submitting for the film for entry into the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. The film, which stars…
Humanity is lost when a video game — Madden football — leads to a homicide. If you missed it last week, an accusation of cheating may have led to a homicide in Wichita. Four men started fighting during a game of Madden football, ending with the death of 22-year-old Luke German, whose body was found in a front yard. An…
%{}% UPDATE: Kansas City police say the victim of the homicide is 67-year-old Fannie Delia Young. Police are still seeking tips. A maintenance worker noticed that a resident’s mail had been stacking up for several days and decided to check on the woman. The woman, described as a black female in her mid-sixties, lived alone at 12th and Michigan. Her…
Whitney Houston has bite. Hidden Pictures’ newest EP, named after the frequently sweat-drenched singer, is chock-full of ear-worming melodies like its last EP, Choosing Sides. Houston’s got something more than Choosing Sides’ sweet, incredibly catchy tunes, though: slightly acidic electric guitar. Paired with Richard Gintowt’s signature melodies, it’s one triplet of songs that will withstand six months’ worth of repeated…
Dear Mexican: I’m totally serious about my e-mail, so please forgive me if my question sounds ridiculous. I also mean no insult to anyone about my question or questions in this e-mail. There are a lot of antsy/jittery people along the southern border of the United States. Lots of those antsy people seem to want to grab anyone who looks like a Mexican,…
Four minutes into a late-October Missouri Mavericks game against the Wichita Thunder, Wichita defenseman Jason Goulet mashes Mavericks winger Karl Sellan hard into the boards with a hit near his face. Sellan crumples to the ice for several seconds. The fans, at least the ones who aren’t still filing into the Independence Events Center at that moment, howl. It won’t…
Title: Graded Lessons in Physiology & Hygiene Authors: William O. Krohn and S.J. Crumbine Date: 1923 Publisher: The state of Kansas Representative quotes: “Bathing is necessary, then, because three million tiny sewers or sweat ducts are pouring out filth and dead matter on the surface of the skin” (page 73). “I have before me now on my table as I…
English art star Sam Taylor-Wood’s oddly straightforward biopic about the juvenile John Lennon concludes with the singer’s haunting, incantatory primal scream, “Mother.” But instead of tying a bow on the film’s portrait of familial abandonment, Lennon’s guttural, air-cleaving quaver puts everything that precedes it to shame. Lacking the song’s raw emotive power, Taylor-Wood’s debut feature is a rote coming-of-age tableau…
On matters animated and 3-D, I take my cues from the 7-year-old sitting at my right, who got fidgety about 10 minutes into Megamind, a 3-D superhero story about the villain who — shocking — turns into the good guy. (“Same story as Despicable Me,” said the wee one.) To recap: Will Ferrell, as the titular blue meanie with the…
Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Lixin Fan’s prize-winning documentary focuses on a single family caught up in the world’s largest mass migration. Opening overhead shots show a huge mob waiting in the rain to push their way into China’s Guangzhou railroad station for the annual New Year’s journey, which is made by 130 million workers to their homes in the nation’s rural outback….
In different circumstances, young Harriet Jacobs, bookish and dreamy, might have spent her days wandering meadows with book in hand, lost in musings. But Jacobs was born into slavery in the Deep South, exactly 50 years before the Emancipation Proclamation. Language was her pleasure and consolation, but it was also her peril: Literacy was illegal for slaves in the antebellum…
It’s a long, long way from the women’s bar outside Berkeley, California — where Ntozake Shange first presented For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, in December 1974 — to Atlanta’s Tyler Perry Studios, where the impresario filmed much of this calamitous adaptation. Though striving for artistic legitimacy in bringing Shange’s incomparable play to the…
A docu-fiction hybrid, Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio’s Alamar records and partakes of a 5-year-old boy’s dream vacation. Natan, born of a brief romantic liaison between Italian tourist Roberta and Yucatan tour guide Jorge, leaves Rome to stay with his father in a visit so timeless that it might be an entire summer or a single day. Jorge takes his son to to…
Erin McGrane knows one eternal truth about life in our city: “It’s an incestuous little pool we’re swimming in,” the local actress says, laughing. Across 318 square miles of Kansas City, six degrees of separation are three more than you need to make a connection. Three will get you the growing Oil Boiler collective, the latest example of what happens…
In Due Date, a skinny, scowly and dryly self-referential Robert Downey Jr. meets a chubby, beardy, quasi-autistic Zach Galifianakis boarding a flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles. Downey Jr. plays Peter, an architect with a very pregnant wife (Michelle Monaghan) waiting at home for him; Galifianakis’ Ethan is a would-be movie star headed to Hollywood, with a pocket dog under…
The tagline of Yo Gabba Gabba’s U.S. tour is “There’s a Party in My City.” Any musically conscious parent familiar with the hit TV series knows that young and old are guaranteed a visual and aural throw-down when the cast hits Kansas City with veteran rapper Biz Markie. Created by Aquabats’ lead singer Christian Jacobs, the show has garnered buzz…
No Better Than This, John Mellencamp’s 21st studio record, is a sparse roots album on the independent label Rounder, and it’s nothing like the arena rock that marked his ascension to stardom. (Fans of the Coug’s “Jack and Diane” are shit out of luck.) Producer T Bone Burnett recorded the songs in mono, on midcentury equipment, at three locations: Sun…
It’s a strange truth: Acoustic versions of rap songs are like catnip to the masses. Jenny Owen Youngs’ deadpan take on Nelly’s scummy, misogynistic “Hot in Herre” scored irresistible novelty points and ushered her debut album, Batten the Hatches, into the spotlight in 2007. Her potty-mouthed waltz “Fuck Was I” — in which she tossed around f-bombs in a sweet,…
If you believe, as I do, that dining out is as much a theatrical experience as a culinary one, then you’ll agree that the nine-month-old Latin Bistro and Culinary Center is a one-man show. The star? Tito Le Chef. No, that’s not his real name, but who cares about real names in show business? In Hollywood’s golden age, movie stars…
One theory about the universe posits that space-time is holographic. A holographic universe is scientifically interesting because it suggests answers to a bunch of annoying unresolved mysteries regarding the physics of black holes and the laws of thermodynamics. The research outfit Fermilab intends to test the theory by building a holographic interferometer to see if the universe becomes blurry at…
“Golden October declines into somber November,” wrote Missouri native T.S. Eliot, although for the local restaurant community, golden October had both somber declines and uplifting moments this year. There were welcome openings of new restaurants, old restaurants transformed into new ones, and the closing of a few once-popular venues. Oh, and the temporary closing of a little hot dog shop…
