An elephant as white as the Siberian tundra, Joe Wright’s lavish new filming of Anna Karenina would be the movie of the year if cleverness and visual legerdemain trumped all. Whisking aside the curtains, Wright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard frame the Tolstoy source material with a theatrical flourish. As if to underscore the artifice and withering scrutiny of social life…
You’re getting 20 years and a bath, says a cop to a dirty, bedraggled smack addict he’s busting in the 1974 novel Cogan’s Trade. It’s a more generous prediction than most George V. Higgins characters get, and it’s one of the only memorable lines from the author’s third book that hasn’t made it into Andrew Dominik’s flinty, funny, furious adaptation….
When The Pitch checked in with Quiet Corral last year, the Lawrence-bred folk-pop group was fresh off the release of its self-titled debut EP. Since then, Quiet Corral has been touring the country — half of its six members have put college at the University of Kansas on hold — and capitalizing on the surprising new American appetite for bombastic,…
Nine years between recordings is a long stretch for any group. Even one that remains visible in the meantime risks falling not just out of favor but also permanently off the dial. For Stacy “Reach” Smith, though, the near-decade silence between his Soul Providers releases has run alongside his ascendance from hip-hop artist to something like elder statesman. The imposing…
Chris Isaak A California kind of Renaissance man — musician, actor, surfer, talk-show host — Chris Isaak has maintained a steady, if slightly below-radar, presence for 25 years now. (“Wicked Game” was on the charts in 1991.) You’d think a handsome guy with a pompadour and a retro-hip aesthetic wouldn’t be built to last, but Isaak has an effortless, almost…
Nobody wakes up and thinks, Today is the day I’m gonna cheat on my girlfriend,” Davy Rothbart writes at the outset of “Tarantula,” an essay in his recently published debut collection, My Heart Is an Idiot. “The shit just kinda happens — a series of small, bad decisions that leads to one larger, pivotal collapse.” Some people commit the act,…
Flickr/Maureen Lunn For the first time in eight years, a new company is operating the City Market. Finding restaurant tenants for three potential dining venues in the City Market is one of the priorities for the Prairie Village-based KC Commercial Realty Group, which will take over the management contract for the historic shopping district on December 1. KCCRG replaces longtime…
Stars of the US women’s national team are coming to Kansas City. Kansas City is fast growing a reputation as a soccer-mad city, and it’s going to get another boost next year when a women’s professional soccer club takes the field. The team will be called FC Kansas City and owned by the same owners of the Missouri Comets of…
He has worked on albums by Ghostface, T.I. and Ludacris, but to the extent that Young Guru is known at all, it’s for being Jay-Z’s right-hand man behind the boards. In addition to engineering just about every record that Hova has released, Guru now also serves as Jay’s tour DJ. He does his own thing, too, though, and this Czar…
KCTV 5 “It’s Peyton Manning. Who wouldn’t want a picture?” That’s what Kansas City Chiefs receiver Dwayne Bowe told KCTV Channel 5 after Sunday’s 17-9 loss to the Denver Broncos at Arrowhead. Bowe and running back Jamaal Charles waited for the Denver QB for postgame autographs. (Charles told the TV station that the autograph was for his mom.) We hope…
Former Pitch scribe Matt Pearce is set to talk about loneliness in Kansas City on today’s Central Standard. The KCUR program is tackling the issue of being lonely in KC with Pearce, psychologist Dr. Bruce Liese and sociologist Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson from Washington State University at 10 a.m. Pearce penned a first-person piece earlier this month for The Pitch about…
Frannie Franks’ pocket-size cakes pack big taste. The words “coffee cake” are too elastic. They’re as likely to end up on the side of a cellophane-wrapped, desiccated crumb cake as they are to be used. We’d be in good hands – albeit, slightly cinnamon-dusted hands – if all coffee cakes were to follow the lead of Frannie Franks. The 16-month-old…
What happens when a biblical scholar and a wine lover get together to literally walk through the vineyards of the Holy Land? The result is Divine Vintage, a new book that looks at how wine has helped guide and inform religion and civilization from the days of the Old Testament through modern times. Authors Joel Butler, president of the Institute…
Ghostbusters II may have had the ghost train. But Kansas City has its very own ghost train station, at least according to the intrepid crew of Ghost Adventures. Tales of ghosts and the presence of decades-old bullet holes brought the Travel Channel show to investigate in September. The hourlong program features interviews with Union Station employees, a history lesson about…
Angela C. Bond Now you’re thinking about tacos, aren’t you? If you want to remember the old Poco’s on the Boulevard (3063 Southwest Boulevard) and find out how the new look came to pass, turn your television to the Food Network Wednesday. That’s when the Restaurant Impossible episode filmed earlier this year at the Kansas City restaurant re-airs. Charles Ferruzza…
Flickr: vxia Sit. Eat. Repeat. Happy Thanksgiving to you. May your next few days be filled with good food and family. And a turkey that is perfectly cooked. And stuffing that is fluffy and plentiful. And creamy mashed potatoes that can hold a spoon upright. And tart cranberry sauce that wakes your mouth up for another round of leftovers. With…
Credit: Family that oddly posted a picture of its Thanksgiving to Wikipedia. Your Thanksgiving will be better than many people’s. Local charity Care of Poor People says it’s in a bind. People are donating cash and supplies to help the millions of people in the Northeast that were harmed and displaced by freak storm Sandy. That’s great! Unfortunately for the…
KU faculty say homophobia is common on campus. A survey released November 16 regarding faculties at Kansas’ seven state universities reveals that University of Kansas professors believe homophobia is commonplace on campus. As one KU respondent put it, “Anti-GLBT discrimination is the norm in the unit and school levels quite often.” The Kansas Conference of the American Association of University…
NovoGradac is the ‘Charlie’ in Chestnut Charlie’s. You know what we eat here on the Plains: sauce-slathered barbecued ribs, mounds of mashed potatoes, breads of our golden wheat. Also: fire-roasted chestnuts. The Midwest turns out to be a darn good place to cultivate chestnut trees. And there’s a surprise oasis for the food that’s close to home: north Lawrence. That’s…
Photo by Brooke Vandever Name: Maria Vasquez Boyd Occupation: Producer and host, Artspeak Radio; founding member, Latino Writers Collective; member, the Ukulele Fight Club Hometown: Kansas City Current neighborhood: Independence Who or what is your sidekick? My iPod What career would you choose in an alternate reality? Study gorillas in their natural habitat. What was the last local restaurant you…
There’s a certain red-state pleasure in watching a historical drama set in a country you don’t really care about. For instance: the lush but too leisurely A Royal Affair. Under its skirts and wigs and candle wax, the multinational production offers a lesson in the high-court skulduggery of Age of Enlightenment Denmark. Not necessarily a 100-percent accurate lesson — as…
