Love it or loathe it, the Shamrock Shake is back at McDonald’s. Now that the annual day-glo homage to St. Patrick’s Day isn’t going anywhere, Fat City decided that it might be time to suggest a few food pairings for the Bernie Mac favorite. While some on The Pitch staff jokingly suggested that syrup of ipecac should be the top…
The general manager at KCTV Channel 5 wanted to blame CBS for the station’s inability to recover the lost signal from the Kansas-Missouri basketball game on Saturday. “The network simply made a mistake,” G.M. Bobby Totsch said in a message posted on the station’s website. Totsch’s story is undercut by the fact that engineers at other CBS affiliates in Jayhawk/Tiger…
Free food makes people crazy. We act irrationally when given the promise of a free sample bag of flavored popcorn or presented with orange chicken on a toothpick. We eat what we would never be willing to pay to eat, precisely because it is free. So, while you might be tempted by a free meal, are you ever concerned about…
Ebony Tusks is a hip-hop project from Cowboy Indian Bear’s Marty Hillard. A new release is coming, called Midas — Hillard refers to it as a “mini concept album” — and it will be released on March 21. If you haven’t caught Hillard rapping live yet, Ebony Tusks will open for Das Racist on March 30 along with Stik Figa,…
Lobbyists take note: If legislation you oppose makes its way to the House floor, the best tactic for fighting it is not leading a rowdy protest in the Capitol gallery. House members might take issue with that and bounce you from the building. Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal decided on Friday to do just that to AFL-CIO lobbyist Bruce Tunnell,…
There’s a small, devoted faction of Kansas Citians that take this whole Mardi Gras business pretty damn seriously. (Don’t believe us? Check this slideshow.) We’re guessing that they’re going to take Crosstown Station’s 2nd annual Fat Tuesday crawfish boil pretty damn seriously, too — at least, seriously enough to fly in the little lobsters straight from N’Awlins. Categories: Music Tags:…
Medical marijuana bills get put on the Missouri House’s agenda all the time, but they never get very far, as should be obvious by the fact that I’m typing this sober and clear-eyed. God bless people for trying, though. It eluded us before, but that’s no matter. Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … and one…
Talk about curbing the birth rate, eh? In a partnership with LifeStyle condoms, the notoriously trashy party girl Ke$ha has recently emblazoned a bunch of condoms with her face, and she blasts them out of the infamous glitter cannon onstage during her shows. For an all-ages show that hosts an 8-foot-tall penis, blasting a bunch of rubbers at the crowd…
Alana Barragán-Scott, director of Missouri’s Department of Revenue, is all aglow with pride whenever she gets a chance to talk about Missouri’s new “enhanced security” vehicle-registration tabs. The new stickers have your license-plate number printed right on them to thwart “scrapers,” thieves looking to peel off the old tabs and sell them on the street for $20-$40 bucks a pop….
If the title of Seth Rozin’s play, Two Jews Walk Into a War, at the Unicorn Theatre, sounds like the opening of a joke, that’s because it is. The setup: Two men are the last Jews in Kabul. The punch line: They hate each other’s guts. Ishaq, a fastidious, widowed accountant (Jim Korinke), and Zeblyan, a carefree, earthy carpet salesman…
Austin, Texas, has been home to a carnival of aural trends for 23 years, thanks to South by Southwest’s annual music, film and interactive festival. For one hectic week in mid-March, musicians and label representatives and music journalists crowd Austin’s streets. Part of the sprawl is a slew of unofficial showcases where most Kansas City bands jam when they make…
The day that Maurice Engelen — better known as Lords of Acid’s Praga Khan — answers the phone in his home country of Belgium, the Low Country kingdom has marked more than eight months without a centralized government. “We seem to be very proud of it. It’s working, and nobody is complaining,” he says, his accent thick and guttural. Unorthodox…
Dear Mexican: When the Second World War ended, the Germans and Japanese had to return all territories they had acquired by force. The United States acquired most of the West from Mexico by force — the United States won the war with Mexico, but did that make it right? Why does Mexico not go to the World Court and sue?…
Claire Denis’ tense, convulsive White Material is a portrait of change and a thing of terrible beauty. The time is unspecified. The subject is the collapse of an unnamed West African state. And the protagonist is French settler Maria (unflinchingly played by Isabelle Huppert), the proprietress of a family-run coffee plantation. A composition in continuous crisis and continual dread, White…
In Julie Taymor’s hands, Shakespeare’s The Tempest becomes a listless feminist parable. The duchess Prospera (Helen Mirren) has been forced into exile, stripped of wealth and position by her scheming brother, Antonio (Chris Cooper), who branded her a witch by using her prodigious smarts against her. But her maligned gifts roar back with a vengeance. From the isolated island where…
Those who delight in stereotypes (Jews like money)may be attracted to The Concert. Andrei Filipov (Aleksei Guskov) pushes a broom at the Bolshoi. Thirty years before, under Brezhnev, he lost his status there as star conductor for refusing to fire his Jewish musicians. Intercepting a fax from the Théâtre du Châtelet inviting the legendary orchestra to perform in Paris, Andrei…
On a bone-chilling February morning, two Kansas City police officers, Tim Griddine and Albert Villafane, cruise through the low-income housing complexes near 12th Street and the Paseo with the car’s heater blasting. They peer out the side windows, looking for cars to be towed from the squatty batch of apartment buildings they patrol called Charlie Parker Square. Without periodic cleanups,…
Boiling a band down to its essential elements is a difficult task. (Examples: Ke$ha would be glitter and slime, the Cramps would be leather and sperm, and the Black Lips would definitely be vomit and silly string. But those are easy.) Naming your band after its essential elements, though, isn’t just ballsy; it’s brilliant. Sugar & Gold plays — what…
Middle Brother must have sneaked into older brother Monsters of Folk’s bedroom and ripped a page out of its diary. The supergroup of sorts is another alt-country dream team with a little less cheek in its title: John McCauley of Deer Tick, Matt Vasquez of Delta Spirit and Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes. Magazines with folk boners are already pleading with…
Most references to Ty Segall are inevitably followed by comparisons with the late Jay Reatard. Stylistic similarities are generally exaggerated, but they have an eerie amount in common. First, their backgrounds: Both men fronted lively punk acts before going solo. Then there’s the recording ethos. (In June, Segall releases his third solo album in three years, Goodbye Bread.) Lastly, there’s…
Merle Haggard has been playing shows in Kansas City for nearly 50 years. Last summer, Knuckleheads owner Frank Hicks told me a story, in which he mentioned the grizzled country star’s early appearances in our town. “You know where the Shady Lady’s at? That used to be a pretty good club here in Kansas City. It was called Genova’s Chestnut…
If you happen to have a couple of million bucks stashed away, you can purchase the old Rieger Hotel building, just south of 19th Street and Main. For considerably less, you can eat a damn good meal on the first floor, in a smart-looking sage-green dining room that was once the lobby of a three-story hotel. Was there ever a…
