Archives: January 2013

The Stanley Cup will be in Kansas City on Saturday

The NHL lockout is still hanging around. There have been no games played, and only a fool would get their hopes up about recent negotiations between the players and the league. And even if a partial season is salvaged, a 48-game season is weak sauce. But, hockey fans can get 2013 off to a fantastic start on Saturday by posing…

Kansas City’s independent presses

Kansas City’s independent presses are finding commercial and critical success by paying attention to detail and carefully crafting their own aesthetic. Photos by Chris Mullins.

Andy Reid is interviewing with the Kansas City Chiefs, per ESPN

Photo via SRA Moses Ross Andy Reid is interviewing with the Chiefs. Andy Reid has a job interview today in Philadelphia with officials from the Kansas City Chiefs, ESPN is reporting. Reid is also expected to interview with the Arizona Cardinals today, but it looks like KC is trying to make an early play for the recently fired coach of…

Merriam’s Ikea euphoria paves over the failure of Merriam Village

The planned Ikea in Merriam is replacing bad memories of Merriam Village. “It’s kind of an interesting story,” Merriam City Administrator Phillip Lammers says of the events that led an Ikea to this suburb. Lammers is right. Merriam probably owes its Ikea – slated for a 2014 opening – to the nation’s economic downturn and the failure of a big-box…

The Pitch‘s Questionnaire with AAF-KC director Katie Daily

Photo by Sabrina Staires Name: Katie Daily Occupation: Director of American Advertising Federation of Kansas City (AAF-KC), a membership organization furthering the education of advertising professionals and promoting the art of advertising. We specialize in professional development programs, speaker and networking events and recognition shows. We represent the second-largest AAF chapter in the nation and one of the top creative…

102.5 the Fan, the third sports talk radio station in KC, launches this morning

Flickr: brankomaster 102.5 FM will no longer be intentionally funny. Sports misery loves company. At midnight, Funny 102.5 became Sports Radio 102.5 FM the Fan. The local station, owned by Cumulus, is now broadcasting the CBS Sports Radio network as a replacement to the channel that featured small segments of stand-up comedians’ acts. Traces of Funny 102.5 still remain with…

The Beaumont Club is closing?

The Beaumont’s Interior We still haven’t yet rubbed the Christmas/New Year’s break sleep out of our eyes, and we’re seeing reports of some bummer news. Info surfaced this morning here and here that the Beaumont Club is closing its doors. No word yet on when or why, but we’ll post news or a statement from the club as it appears….

Oddly Correct’s new space on Main is now open

Facebook: Oddly Correct Oddly Correct now serves espresso. You no longer have an excuse to drink 5-Hour Energy. Oddly Correct’s new space at 3940 Main (formerly B-Bop Comics and just three doors down from their old location) is now open and serving coffee until midafternoon. Back in December, Fat City talked to owner Gregory Kolsto about his plans for the…

Music Forecast January 3-9

Elvis Birthday Bash Had he not died on a toilet eating a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich 35 years ago, Elvis Presley would have turned 78 on January 8 this year. He has been dead so long that 78 actually sounds kind of young to me; I doubt that I would have blinked if I was told he would have turned 100 this…

Nine to Fiver: Mike Stover

Mike Stover knows the value of some good old-fashioned peace and quiet. When he’s not at practice with his five active bands (the Grisly Hand, Mr. Marco’s V7, the People’s Liberation Big Band, Ernest James Zydeco, Dead Voices), he spends his days working at the audiovisual desk at the Kansas City, Kansas, Public Library, expanding the music selection and loaning…

The Kansas City Techno crew comes to terms with the dance-music explosion

Nobody listens to techno, Eminem blurted on his wildly broad 2002 diss track “Without Me.” Globally speaking, he was dead wrong; electronic music had been huge in Europe and Asia for decades. But from Slim Shady’s perch in middle America, he had a decent point: At the time, the number of people in the United States interested in hearing Eminem…

Not Fade Away

Not Fade Away is writer-director David Chase’s rock-and-roll-changed-my-life movie. Chase, who created The Sopranos, takes us back to New Jersey, this time to the garage-band Garden State of the early 1960s. His stand-in for this semi-autobiographical story is Douglas (spunk-filled newcomer John Magaro), a decent kid and aspiring drummer who gets bitten by the rock bug when the British Invasion…

Promised Land

Promised Land starts with a fine scene, a vaguely menacing corporate one-on-one in the Michael Clayton mode. Steve Butler (Matt Damon) is up for a big promotion within the energy company for which he has been an extremely successful traveling salesman. Director Gus Van Sant keeps the camera on Damon as the actor lays out Butler’s homegrown motivation for making…

Hyde Park on Hudson

It can be confusing to see so much talent and good intention poured into an enterprise as wrongheaded as Hyde Park on Hudson. You see Bill Murray giving a studious but unmannered performance as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and you wonder why he makes you wince. You watch Laura Linney — who can do anything because she’s Laura Linney —…

Skill, artistry, process, entrepreneurship: KC’s indie printers

If you were reading these words on newsprint, you’d be looking at a page that had been machine-produced for a large audience — something manufactured, as most everything is, with efficiency and cost-effectiveness in mind. But not everybody who puts ink to paper operates that way. A vibrant community of commercial printers in Kansas City has purposely adopted labor-intensive methods,…

Anton’s Taproom meats Main Street

Every restaurant needs a personality. Anton’s Taproom and Restaurant, at 16th Street and Main, hasn’t stopped at just one. It’s not just a restaurant. It’s also a saloon, with 72 beers on tap. And a butcher shop. And an art gallery. Oh, and there’s the sustainability center in the basement, where baby-lettuce plants grow under artificial light and, in a…