You know that Mad Men episode where they go to the CLIO Awards, and Don Draper wins the award and then goes on an epic, rock-bottom bender? Well … I guess that’s not technically how it went down Sunday night at the 16th annual Pitch Music Awards at the Uptown. Nobody saw to it to give me an award, for…
August may signal summer’s end, but it’s also the start of a new season for Kansas City Actors Theatre. And I’m not alone in feeling glad at KCAT’s return. At a preview of The Mousetrap, the house was almost full. Agatha Christie’s famous whodunit kicks off the troupe’s “Summer of Mystery” and KCAT’s eighth year. This self-defined “artist-led and artist-driven”…
Two years ago, Courtney and Alex Perry purchased an abandoned Baptist church at Ninth and Harrison. Two months ago, after extensive renovations, the local couple opened the doors as the Arts Asylum. They’ve reimagined the building as a sort of full-service home base for local artists: a place where you can rent work space, teach classes and display art. In…
For most of its existence, Secret Cities has created its brightly detailed psych-pop long distance. The group started as a pen-pal tape trade between guitarist Charlie Gokey and keyboardist Marie Parker, who lived in different parts of North Dakota. Alex Abnos, a Kansas Citian, came on as drummer after meeting Gokey and Parker on an Elephant 6 fan message board…
Willie Nelson Mangy old dope-smoking Willie Nelson, with his grizzled face and creepy braids, is far from a natural fit for the Kauffman Center. (And it will definitely be interesting to see if anybody gets popped from this show for smoking weed.) But the man is a country legend, and when you reach legend status, your lowbrow qualities have a…
With his pudgy frame and eccentric manner, Ai Weiwei is hard to see as a threat — but that’s how the Chinese government has labeled him. The 55-year-old Beijing artist is best known in this country for helping design the “bird’s nest” stadium that housed the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and he co-designed a reflecting pool for this summer’s London games….
On June 21, 2008, then-Mayor Mark Funkhouser held a party at 27th Street and Prospect, one of the grungiest, most crime-ridden corners in town. Barbecue magnate Ollie Gates was there. So was a jazz quartet. There was free food, and there was a bus to carry Funk and his entourage up and down streets normally populated on a Saturday night…
A friend of mine calls the Beacon “a clubhouse for Rockhurst graduates to have a couple of beers.” Co-owner Whitten Pell prefers that people call the four-month-old restaurant at 5031 Main a tavern. Neither is completely accurate. Before opening the Beacon, Pell had limited restaurant experience. In fact, he had none. But he did have a vision for this space,…
A block west of the First Friday hot zone that is 18th Street between Baltimore and Wyandotte sits Front/Space, a discreetly compact storefront gallery. For September’s First Friday, its tiny front room is the site of Zine Dream, an exchange and work space for producers of independent publications. A generation before Tumblr, creative types used ink and paper — pamphlets,…
Can Aixois Brasserie find success at 10th and Walnut? With the exception of the Bristol Seafood Grill on 14th Street and, maybe, Maker’s Mark Bourbon House & Lounge (which has a reputation for inconsistent service and is often irritatingly noisy), there’s not much in the way of sophisticated, intimate dining in the heart of the Power & Light District. Head…
Local music types gathered at the Uptown Theater Sunday night for the 16th annual Pitch Music Awards. Click through for the party pics. Photography by Brooke Vandever.
Anybody with a TV or who has visited even slightly male-oriented websites in the past three weeks knows that action meat salad flick The Expendables 2 is opening in theaters this Friday. The film features nearly every major star of action films (and Old Spice commercials) in the last 25 years. Seriously. The film crams Chuck Norris, Dolph Lundgren, Sylvester…
University of Texas It’s paint-by-numbers in Missouri this morning. Missouri looks a bit more purple on the map this morning. The latest poll from SurveyUSA found Missouri voters essentially even in the presidential race. President Barack Obama has 44 percent of the vote, while Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has 45 percent (with a potential error of 4.1 percent). In…
UCLA In Missouri, it’s not a sandwich unless it covers half your face. Break out those extra-large sweatpants from Costco, Missouri, because you’re going to need something with an elastic waist. Missouri ranked 12th among states for adult obesity rates (people with a body mass index of 30 or higher) in a new study from the Trust for America’s Health…
Facebook: Dolce The scene at Dolce yesterday. The Dolce Baking Co. is closed Mondays, which was good news for employees of the Prairie Village bakery yesterday. As KCTV5 reported, a driver lost control of a truck and crashed into the bakery early Monday morning. “My team would have been clocking in, getting ready to start baking right at 5 a.m.,…
Marc Pannozzo Crystal Castles Be still, my electronica-loving heart. Crystal Castles brings its danceable and equally thrashable electro-noise to the Uptown October 16. Notable openers include HEALTH and Kontravoid. The door time for the all-ages show is 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $33. Also, Regina Spektor will return to Kansas City this fall. The utterly adorable singer-songwriter will perform at the…
