Here at The Pitch, we’re as big of fans of contrarian thinking as the next guy, if not more so. But Kansas Republican Congressman Tim Huelskamp has been making the media rounds throughout the government shutdown saying things that just seem batty. Huelskamp, as we’ve reported before, has been kind of a Ted Cruz lite in the House (more on…
Surfer Blood Riot Room, Kansas City Tuesday, October 15, 2013 By Travis Stull The four members of Surfer Blood took the stage at the Riot Room last night to play Kansas City for the first time. From the looks of the well-packed crowd, this had been a long-awaited show. The four-year-old band from West Palm Beach, Florida, has come a…
Jill Sixx Gevargizian knows you like to watch. In fact, the first-time filmmaker is banking on that compulsion. Her featurette, Call Girl, is about a man who sets out to broadcast his date night but ends up sharing something far more disturbing. How disturbing? You’ll have to wait until Gevargizian releases the film to find out. (She’s aiming for a…
The West Bottoms’ arteries are clogged with traffic around 4:30 p.m. on this first October Friday. The roads around spaceship-shaped Kemper Arena are blocked and alive for the world’s largest barbecue contest, the American Royal. I’m here with Kansas City Chiefs offensive linemen Donald Stephenson and Jeff Allen. We’ve come for a sauce-tasting contest. The Chiefs picked Allen and Stephenson…
Name: Dustin Schirer Occupation: Senior creative producer at Barkley, partner at Tight Salad Enterprises Hometown: Manhattan, Kansas Current neighborhood: Live in Prairie Village but spend most of my time in the Crossroads. What I do (in 140 characters): The simplest explanation: I make video content. Whether it’s for brands or for fun, I’m just a video girl living in a…
Few funk bands are as old as Here Come the Mummies. No, really. They’ve been around for, like, 5,000 years. That’s their story, at least. It’s all highly suspicious. Here Come the Mummies is a funk band shrouded in secrecy. No one knows who’s in the band – the players dress up like mummies for every show. This is to…
One of the last burning legal embers of Karen Pletz’s reign over the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences got stamped out a couple of weeks ago – at least for now. Former KCUMB vice president of admissions Stephen Phipps dismissed his own lawsuit against the osteopathic university on September 26. He had sued the school, claiming that KCUMB…
Mike Bechtel has a concept for a neighborhood restaurant. He’ll open Kansas Town next month…he hopes. Mike Bechtel knows West 39th Street pretty well. He’s lived in the neighborhood for 14 years, owns a couple of houses, hangs out at Prospero’s Books, drinks in the saloons, shops in the stores. What he doesn’t know so well is the restaurant industry….
District Pour House + Kitchen is open in the former Gaf and Romanelli Grill space. Here’s a look at the food, courtesy of Angela C. Bond.
It’s been awhile since we heard anything from Irv Da Phenom. That may be because he quietly relocated recently to Los Angeles. Sad news for the scene here, but Phenom still visits us in ol’ KC frequently. Now, one of local hip-hop’s favorite sons has a new mixtape out called Power Level, and it’s packed with so many tightfisted rhymes,…
If I had a dollar for every time an artist sent me a Facebook message with a plea for my attendance at (and published stamp of approval for) such-and-such event, I wouldn’t have to be a writer anymore. The hardest part of being an artist in the music industry is often not the creative aspect – it’s getting your art…
Late last week, word started emerging that Senate Republicans were talking with Democrats and the White House in order to craft a spending bill that would end the ongoing government shutdown. Those rumors sent Tim Huelskamp, a Kansas GOP congressman hellbent on sideswiping Obamacare, to his computer to write a passage for his website titled, “Will the GOP stand firm?”…
A strange Kansas City Museum Advisory Board meeting on Monday ended with the board casting a narrow vote in favor of a business plan that recommends the separation of the Kansas City Museum from Union Station Kansas City Inc. A 5-4 vote puts the business plan into the Kansas City Council’s hands. (The KCMAB is an advisory board with little…
You like alt-folk? Americana? Roots-rock? Other hyphenated genres vaguely derivative of country? Awesome. Todd Snider delivers a sound that appeals to all those food groups, and he has been at it for nearly 20 years. Snider’s songs often include a bit of political commentary, and his lyrics unfurl like the words of a wizened storyteller drawing in a skeptical child….
Surfer Blood waited three years to follow up its excellent breakthrough album, Astro Coast, with the recent Pythons. The major-label bow glosses over a lot of the raw emotion that made Surfer Blood sound so promising back in 2010. Add a domestic-battery charge filed against frontman John Paul Pitts – a charge later dropped – and the band has had…
Facebook: Bluestem Deb Dickinson, the manager of volunteers for Shepherd Center Central, has one of the most difficult jobs in the city. “There are days I have to say ‘no’ all day. And when you have to say that to people who need Meals on Wheels, it’s extremely disheartening,” says Dickinson. The Westport-based Shepherd Center Central merged, earlier this year,…
KMBC Channel 9 came out with an editorial over the weekend that urged Jackson County voters to approve a half-cent sales-tax increase to fund translational research on November 5. The television station’s general manager, Sarah Smith, took to the top of a parking lot at Children’s Mercy Hospital, suggesting that the structure could become the place where viewers’ loved ones could…
Lookout, Maryville. Yesterday, the Star published a harrowing story about Maryville officials dropping a case involving the 2012 rape of 14-year-old Daisy Coleman by high-school senior Matthew Barnett. Coleman’s family was essentially run out of Maryville, while Barnett – whose grandfather is Missouri state Rep. Rex Barnett – is off partying at the University of Central Missouri. The Coleman’s house…
