After Carlotta Campbell died of head and neck cancer on November 27, 2009 (the day that she and her husband, Mike, would have celebrated their 44th wedding anniversary), Mike and the couple’s daughter, Olivia Booher, met with Ronald Marts, proprietor of Marts Memorial Services, a storefront funeral home in Westport. They arranged for Carlotta’s remains to be cremated. The family,…
Dear Mexican: The perception of Mexico having a defective culture has come up in your column several times. It’s most important to point out the historical differences between Mexico and the United States. The United States was invaded by settlers who came to live here permanently. Mexico was conquered by gold-seeking thugs who wanted to return to Spain rich. The…
Being Chrissie Hynde is no easy task. The enigmatic Pretenders frontwoman is equal parts bitch and muse, with professional and personal histories to make even the most established rocker cower: a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, one of the best debuts ever to grace the vinyl stand, a child with Kinks founder Ray Davies. These days,…
A fascinating look at the complex intersections of art and charity, Waste Land follows celebrated New York artist Vik Muniz back to his native Brazil, where he’ll work with outer Rio garbage pickers on an ambitious art project. Ostensibly called to “give back” to the impoverished region from whence he came, Muniz finds that the individual lives he encounters are…
This minor 2009 Toronto Film Festival entry — an adaptation of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, Ayelet Waldman’s novel of Upper Manhattan entitlement and sanctimony — has been dusted off to capitalize on insatiable, inexplicable Natalie Portmania. Portman, also an executive producer, stars as Emilia Greenleaf, the home wrecker of the title who becomes the second wife of Jack (Scott…
Rick and Fred (Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis) are two domesticated husbands whose long marriages (to Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate, respectively) have achieved somnolent routine in suburban Providence, Rhode Island. Yet the wives worry. Rick is a girl watcher; Fred masturbates in the privacy of their parked Honda Odyssey. (His predicament is, throughout, the less dignified.) Under the guidance…
Samantha Fish, Kansas City’s own blue-eyed, blond-haired blues prodigy, is returning from Europe, where she recently signed with RUF Records in Lindewerra, Germany. (It’s the same label that handles Walter Trout, Robin Trower and Ana Popovic.) Fish has been overseas recording her first album and touring with British soul musician Dani Wilde and Otis Taylor’s daughter, Cassie Taylor. (Did we…
Jamey Johnson’s The Guitar Song isn’t just the best country record of last year. It’s a double album split into two halves — The Black Album and The White Album — so it’s the best two albums. Not to be confused with the works of Jay-Z or the Beatles, the first half of The Guitar Song picks up with Johnson…
Brooklyn duo the Forms, like a mythical beast, appears once every four years to deliver new material before spiriting away to its mystical den somewhere south of Queens. Debuting in 2003 with the critically acclaimed Icarus, the group centered its sound on off-kilter rhythms and parallel guitar and piano lines. The band followed with an equally strong self-titled effort in…
You can’t have too many concepts. Just ask Forbes Cross, who has opened so many different restaurant concepts over the past two decades that I can’t even remember all of them. The best known of those was probably Michael Forbes Grill, the clubby Waldo pub that was his first great success, in 1985. Between the opening of that restaurant —…
Huge, bearded rapper Rick Ross has had so many shots taken at him, it’s surprising that the self-appointed Teflon Don is still standing. The man, who was born William Leonard Roberts II (and took his stage name from gangster “Freeway” Ricky Ross), had his credibility as a rock-slanging drug dealer shot to hell when his past as a corrections officer…
Mardi Gras always seems a bit out of place in Kansas City. To many local peeps, Fat Tuesday is just another day for people to ditch work at lunch and get shitfaced. However, some local heads take the tradition pretty seriously. One of them is Bob Asher, the face of KC’s oldest and largest “super krewe”: the Top of the…
So you’ve survived a near-fatal heart attack and you give up all your vices: smoking, boozing, rich desserts and fast food, right? Wrong. At least as far as fast food goes. A new study published in the American Journal of Cardiology reports that after six months, more than half of heart attack patients who frequently ate fast food before their…
Maybe you have eaten bugs and not even known it. A friend of mine in college worked for a now-defunct fast-food, fried-fish chain and insisted that as part of her job, she cut out some kind of round worm — a phocanema decipiensx — from the cod before it was battered and deep-fried. “And if we don’t get all the…
Judge Joseph Ellis of the Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District, this morning denied an appeal by 3rd District City Council candidate Michael Fletcher, who is fighting to remain on tomorrow’s primary election ballot. Last Thursday, Jackson County Circuit Court Judge Ann Mesle ruled in favor of the 3rd District incumbent, Councilwoman Sharon Sanders Brooks, who argued that Fletcher can’t…
Firefighter Jeff Smith was driving a pumper truck to an emergency last week when he made a split-second decision. The decision that the 21-year veteran made was self-sacrifice. A car was coming at him Tuesday afternoon in what would have undoubtedly resulted in a head-on collision. Smith cranked the steering wheel sharply, according to KMBC, causing the pumper to crash…
Free song downloads are sweet, but 140 of them is a hell of a lot sweeter. Thanks to Spinner, you can grab yourself a free three-part MP3 download of more than 140 tracks from bands that will be at this year’s South by Southwest music festival. And because the deadline has passed to register for the event, it will have…
Five people are claiming that bouncers at the Foundry roughed them up Friday night, according to KCTV5. Brad Torrence told KCTV5 that he was celebrating his 30th birthday when a bouncer dragged him out of the bar by his head. “The bartender asked us to move a couple times, we did. We moved over a couple times,” Torrence told the…
Here’s the blueprint to ruining your kid’s birthday party: Get into a brawl at Check E. Cheese’s. Two families celebrating separate birthday parties started throwing down Saturday night, the Topeka Capital-Journal reported. Must have been quite a brawl because police busted up fights inside the Topeka restaurant as well as in the parking lot. Categories: News Tags: Chuck E. Cheese’s
Children are the future and all, but sometimes — well, most times — they are annoying, clever little shits. Pop-music artists are well aware of this precocious nature of children and often will place their voices in more adult contexts. Having children rap cover songs or sing behind rock songs makes the song in question seem more like novelty than…
Kansas basketball coach Bill Self has suspended junior guard Tyshawn Taylor indefinitely for violating team rules. “Although we are disappointed in Tyshawn, he will remain a member of our team and practice with our team until he is reinstated for competition,” Self said in a statement released to the press. No word on what rules Taylor violated. This is a…
%{}% The effort by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the Republican-led state legislature to deprive the state’s teachers of collective bargaining rights was catnip to rightbloggers last week. This is because it involves two of their traditional objects of hatred: Unions and public education. You know things are serious when the intensely rightwing Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government and the Washington…
Making Movies has scored some serious accolades lately, like the band’s feature on AOL’s homepage. Now, AMC Theaters is using the band’s new song, ‘”Sirena,” as the soundtrack to its trailer for its Oscar Best Picture Showcase in theaters nationwide. Categories: A&E Tags: AMC, making movies
It’s not easy to attempt to define Kansas City in a single restaurant, but that’s behind the idea behind a current poll on the Kansas City Business Journal’s site. The journal asked, “What is Kansas City’s ultimate iconic restaurant?” And so far, the answer, by an overwhelming margin, is Arthur Bryant’s, with 46 percent of the more than 1,000 votes…
