It’s Rex Manning Day! We don’t have enough occasions to celebrate the opening of a new record store in Kansas City, so let’s relish it for a moment. … Ah, new records. So plasticky. Mills Record Co. opens today at 314 Westport Road. You can check out its blog here, and then pop by the new store, which will be…
intev The Pitch’s First Friday app will guide you through the Crossroads art party. Unfortunately, the weather isn’t cooperating with this month’s First Friday. But there’s a lot of great stuff to see, snow be damned. Need a guide through the Crossroads Arts District? We’ve partnered with intev LLC, which has created an app to help you find the galleries,…
File Sam Brownback is Eric Holder’s pen pal. Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder have become grudging pen pals in the last week. Brownback lately has been championing a new Kansas law that attempts to shield firearms in the state from federal regulation. It also makes it a felony for federal employees to come to the…
Facebook: Tavern at Mission Farms This bar is a good bet this weekend. Kentucky Derby week is a special time. It’s a chance to don a goofy hat or a seersucker suit and enjoy a mint julep or six. Tavern in the Village (3901 Prairie Lane, Prairie Village) and Tavern at Mission Farms (10681 Mission, Leawood) are hosting derby parties…
Click here for this month’s First Friday gallery openings.
Celina Tio’s Collection will offer a special $5 First Friday menu at Collection tomorrow. Ignore the bright-yellow Kansas City Cafe sign still hanging on the side of the red-brick building at 1532 Grand. “That was supposed to come down yesterday,” says restaurateur Celina Tio with a sigh. “I may get on the ladder and take it down myself.” Kansas City…
Reggie B makes some noise. Yesterday, Brooklyn-via-Toronto hip-hop producer Marco Polo dropped a new mixtape, Newport Authority 2. On it, there’s a track called “Cur$ed (What’s Wrong Remix)” that features legendary NYC rapper Rakim (of Eric B. and Rakim). That same song also features a melodic chorus from Reggie B, whose name you might recognize if you pay attention to…
File J.E. Dunn gets to build this retail attraction soon. Swedish furniture- and meatball-maker IKEA picked J.E. Dunn – who else? – to build its store atop the Great Wall of Merriam. The prolific Kansas City contractor gets to work with civil engineer Shafer Kline & Warren on the tricky task of building a massive store to replace a barely…
File Good things didn’t come in the mail for Brownback on April 26. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will have none of Kansas’ new gun-law hijinks, telling Sam Brownback that a recently passed bill purporting to protect Second Amendment rights is actually unconstitutional. Holder sent Brownback a letter on April 26, one day after Senate Bill 102 became effective, warning…
Wandering Mayor. In print this week, we checked in with Sephiroth, who hosts the Sucka Free Producer’s Showcase. It’s a night devoted to the city’s beat makers and producers, and it goes down this evening at RecordBar. On the bill: Wandering Mayor, Dan Matic, Topp Boom and Leonard Dstroy. Seven bucks gets you in. Categories: Music Tags: sucka free producer’s…
Facebook: Potbelly Potbelly is getting ready to fill more bellies. Potbelly Sandwich Shop has picked a second Kansas City area location. The franchise, which is like Google Fiber for Chicagoans, has received approval from the city of Overland Park to build a 2,134-square-foot restaurant at 6751 College Boulevard (near the southwest corner of College and Glenwood). A drive-through was not…
This will sound like faint praise, but it’s something of a wonder that we aren’t sick of seeing Robert Downey Jr. suit up as Iron Man. Unlike Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow, whose appearance in even the first, delightful Pirates of the Caribbean film diminishes in the memory with each lame successive installment, Downey’s Tony Stark has managed to stay in…
It’s probably best to see Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder or any Terrence Malick movie — or any movie, really — with diminished expectations. Two years ago when Malick released The Tree of Life, only the fifth feature film in a career going on four decades, the rapturous reviews produced a critical lock step that kept a lot of viewers…
Once a pitmaster has won the American Royal, there’s really only one last mountain to climb in Kansas City: opening a barbecue restaurant in a town that demands smoking excellence. So four years after he hoisted an oversized check as the American Royal Invitational Grand Champion, Todd Johns is firing up Plowboys BBQ in Blue Springs. “We want to make…
The 39th Street West neighborhood is home to a number of city-famous establishments — Jazz, Donna’s Dress Shop, d’Bronx, Room 39 — but is not exactly an entertainment district. At least, not in the way Westport, the Plaza and the Power & Light are. It’s a great area for happy hour, dinner and maybe a drink after dinner, but by…
Bill Callahan Part of me thinks that Bill Callahan is a ghost. Few in the RecordBar crowd, last time he was in town, seemed to even notice that he had taken the stage; the set started both abruptly and unassumingly. After the last song, he thanked the crowd, put down his guitar and walked right out the front door and…
When David Bennett started playing music, he gravitated toward conventional folk songs: “These kinds of ballads where it’d be just me and an acoustic guitar, maybe a girl singing harmonies or something,” he says. “I got a little bored of that.” For the past few years, the 26-year-old Kansas Citian has been recording homemade demos as Akkilles. On these recordings…
I don’t want to rap. I don’t want to be a DJ. I just want to make some dope fucking beats.” So says local hip-hop musician Sephiroth. And he’s not alone. Particularly since the death of legendary producer J Dilla, in 2006, interest in producing has grown, and the art form continues to evolve. This is true both at the…
Art is Asher Lev’s passion, his language, his way of interacting with everything around him. He can’t remember a time when he didn’t paint or draw. But this need clashes with his ultra–Orthodox Jewish faith and upbringing. It’s narishkeit (foolishness), time stolen from studying and serving God. And Asher’s subject matter goes against his religious teachings — surely driven, he’s…
Pat Humston moved to Swope Ridge in 1968. Back then, she and her husband, Jim, liked that the neighborhood felt almost rural, though it was well within Kansas City’s borders. Nestled near Swope Park, south of where 63rd Street meets Interstate 435, Swope Ridge is a working-class enclave that even today seems bucolic thanks to its narrow, winding, hilly streets,…
Oh, it was a shit show,” Alexa Nguyen will say later. Nguyen, a 22-year-old entrepreneur with a 3-D home-printing startup called Handprint, is recalling a recent tense meeting of Kansas City Startup Village. The village has been under way only a short time. It started in October 2012, when the startups Local Ruckus and FormZapper moved into a building at…
There was a time when it was unheard of for an Italian restaurant not to serve spumoni, that slab of Neapolitan with attitude. The confection — two layers of ice cream folded around a center of sweetened whipped cream flavored with rum and toasted nuts, and doused with a rummy sauce — was often the only dessert you could order…
Frenchy needs to learn some boundaries. The Royals thumped the Rays 8-2 at home Tuesday night. It was just the win that fans needed to get the bad taste of the two games – 9-0 and 10-3 losses – out of their mouths. But it wasn’t an entirely painless night. Royals outfielder Jeff Francoeur clubbed a triple in the seventh…
Anthony Accurso has remade his family’s restaurant in his image. Take a look at some of his dishes, courtesy of photographer Angela C. Bond.
