Facebook: Green Dirt Farm Cheese, please. Get out your calender. I’ll wait. Got it? Good. Look at the weekends you’ve got available and your current cheese budget. Now, double your cheese budget and clear your weekends. Green Dirt Farm has posted its schedule for cheese tastings and cheese appreciation events, and there’s a lot of good eating to be had….
Eans is in at the American. While the American (200 East 25th Street) searches for the next head of its kitchen, Josh Eans will be serving as the interim executive chef. Eans took over the reins this weekend from chef Debbie Gold, who left the Crown Center eatery for another opportunity with a locally based restaurant group that hasn’t yet…
It’s your parents’ fault that you’re lazy. If you’re, how should we say this, motivationally challenged, you might be able to blame your parents, a new University of Missouri study suggests. Frank Booth, a professor in the MU veterinary school, and post-doctoral fellow Michael Roberts, published a report showing that they could selectively breed rats that were very lazy or…
Dan Lybarger Dreifuss onstage at this year’s True/False The Chilean movie No, which opens today in Kansas City, has taken festival prizes at Cannes and São Paulo, was an Oscar nominee this year for Best Foreign Language Film, and is well worth seeing. It depicts Chile’s 1988 plebiscite, when a majority of the country’s citizens voted to end the dictatorship…
The Fox bar in Overland Park turns off the neon later this month. The Fox, one of the oldest gay bars in the Kansas City metro (and the only one in Johnson County), at 7520 Shawnee Mission Parkway, will unplug the pinball machine, cover up the pool tables, and lock the doors for the last time on Sunday, April 21….
The Well This should keep it hopping. Until Fat City scrapes together the cash to put a giant Bat-like signal in the sky with a pine-cone shaped symbol, you’ll have to settle for an online announcement. Hopfest tickets are now on sale. The annual ode to hops at the Well (7421 Broadway) and Lew’s Grill and Bar (7539 Wornall) is…
Wikipedia Raise a toast to Benton at Kelly’s tonight. The only way to truly honor Thomas Hart Benton is with free beer and cake. Celebrate what would have been the painter’s 124th birthday tonight with the Benton Bash at Kelly’s Westport Inn (500 Westport Road). The party runs from 5 to 7 p.m. and includes one free drink and cake….
Facebook Isreal Hawkins faces a juror of his peers on April 17. Tuesday was another tough day in court for Isreal Owen Hawkins leading up to his April 17 trial for running the alleged Petro America racket. On that day, a federal judge denied without explanation Hawkins’ attempt to get another lawyer on his case. Hawkins, who is accused of…
Charlie Wheeler has until July to move. Former Mayor Charles Wheeler will get to stay in his foreclosed house. For a little while longer, anyway. Earlier this week, The Kansas City Star’s Steve Kraske reported that the beloved Wheeler was being forced out of the house on West 53rd Street because he owed $40,000 in back taxes and insurance payments….
There’s polar bear love at the zoo. The Kansas City Zoo might have a new addition toward the end of the year. Zookeepers said on Wednesday that its polar bears, Nikita and Berlin, have been getting frisky with each other lately. The zoo won’t know until fall if Berlin has a bun in the oven. There’s a kind of a…
Facebook: Boulevard It’s officially grilling season. There’s beer in those brats. Farmland Foods (a Kansas City-based subsidiary of Smithfield Foods) and the Boulevard Brewing Co. have partnered on a pair of sausage products: Pale Ale Bratwurst and Unfiltered Wheat Bratwurst. The new pork brats are now on grocery-store shelves (Hy-Vee, Price Chopper and Hen House) and are available at the…
Rawxies will win over vegans and non-vegans alike. Just as bacon is the gateway drug for carnivores, Rawxies may become part of the germination for the vegan movement in Kansas City. The heart-shaped cookies that exist in the space between food bar and dessert are a KC product created by Callie England. In a nice counterpoint, the raw, vegan, gluten-…
Tracy Torres was inspired by Napoleon for her bakery, but she doesn’t serve napoleons…yet. Not being a student of apiology, I didn’t know there was a difference between a French bee and a honeybee that buzzes around Lenexa (and maybe there isn’t). But Tracy Torres, the proprietor of the three-week-old French Bee Bakery, at 404 East Street in downtown Parkville,…
Director Derek Cianfrance, working from a script co-written with Ben Coccio and Darius Marder, recasts his Blue Valentine star Ryan Gosling (still waiting for one great part) in a daddy-issues version of Crash. The torsion here involves the fated working class, the morally compromised privileged, various legacies of failure and violence … and some exceptionally odd voice coaching. Cianfrance again…
By the time director Danny Boyle sends Rosario Dawson off-camera to shave her hoohah, the only suspense left in his Mad magazine version of Inception is whether he’ll show the results. (He does. And the fact that Boyle and Dawson are reportedly a couple is a Hitchcock joke that’s more amusing than anything in this movie.) Trance starts as a…
Complaining about a movie’s score is like carping about how a game is refereed. Neither music nor officiating ends up mattering all that much if the talent is working. But: A solemn orchestral motif to heroize the occasion of Jackie Robinson showering for the first time alongside his teammates is a blown call. You can picture 42 writer-director Brian Helgeland…
Can media change the world? From the radical montage films of post-revolutionary Soviet Russia through Italian neorealism and the Popular Front and the youthful street grammar of 1960s new-wave cinemas in France and Brazil and Czechoslovakia, up to today’s guerrilla-video movement in China, there has been no shortage of effort. Results are harder to prove, but the true events dramatized…
The music industry continues to collapse, but booze sales are holding steady. In the last decade, there has been a marked increase in the number of musicians peddling their own alcoholic products. Sammy Hagar blazed the trail with Cabo Wabo tequila. Diddy has Ciroc vodka. Train offers a line of wines. (I’m “calling all angels,” praying that the new 2011…
An artist begins with nothing more than an idea or a vision, then creates “order, design, tension, balance, harmony.” And should that artist experiment with a new form, the public — and the critics — may not get the point or appreciate its difficult fulfillment. Such is the canvas of Sunday in the Park With George, Stephen Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize-winning…
The last time Bill Maher was in this part of the Midwest, the cretins at the Westboro Baptist Church drove down to Springfield to protest his stand-up show. Saturday, Maher is making it even easier on those trolls: He’s performing in their hometown, at the Topeka Performing Arts Center. The Pitch chatted with the liberal comedian and host of HBO’s…
Allan Markley is the latest to throw sand in the gears that power local tax-increment financing. And the Raytown Quality Schools superintendent says he has good reason to do it. TIF, that often-used instrument, is meant to spur development in blighted places that wouldn’t otherwise attract it. The principle is simple: Local governments redirect new property and economic-activity taxes within…
The Blackbird Revue Glow (Self-released) Churchy McLachlanisms abound on Glow, the new four-song EP from husband-and-wife duo the Blackbird Revue. They establish the mood straightaway, on opener “When You Are Mine.” Where you go, I will go/Where you lay your head, I’ll be/Where you go, I will go/I am yours eternally, Jacob Prestidge sings, accompanied by some flavorless folk strums….
