Not long ago, I was dining at a little Platte City café that served home-style food. The kind of restaurant that you might guess served homemade apple pie or bread pudding. But the waitress was much more excited about that night’s special dessert: a pretty square of chocolate mousse deliciousness called Tuxedo Cake. “Do you make this here?” I asked…
Lucero and Murder by Death with the Delta Saints Crossroads KC at Grinders, Kansas City Tuesday, July 15, 2014 Murder by Death and Lucero were reunited on the same bill at Crossroads KC last night, after years of not playing together. Murder by Death jumped right into things, starting with “Kentucky Bourbon.” Band members barely said a word between songs,…
This year, the 2014 Pitch Music Awards Showcase is split over two nights: This Saturday, July 19, at the Riot Room and Friday, July 25, at Knuckleheads Saloon (lineup details and tickets here.) The PMA Awards Show is at the Uptown Theater, held this year on Sunday, August 3, and hosted by World Air Guitar Champion Eric “Mean” Melin and Mills Record Co.’s Judy…
Bread and pastry look like art, but they’re science. Scary, scary science. And because everything we know about science comes from Breaking Bad, let’s put it in Walter White terms: The grocery-store croissant you ate this morning — which, for $1.50, left buttery little shadows on your pants when you got out of the car and brushed off the flakes…
Young & Sick with Bent Denim The Riot Room, Kansas City Tuesday, July 15, 2014 Saying that Nick Van Hofwegen suffers from a slight language barrier might be giving the Dutch artist too much credit. A talented cartoonist in his own right (Van Hofwegen has designed cover art for the likes of Robin Thicke and Foster the People), the lead…
Name: Michael Gelphman Occupation: Founder of Kansas City IT Professionals Hometown: Overland Park Current neighborhood: Brookside/Waldo What I do (in 140 characters): I’ve built a tech community in Kansas City of 12,000-plus over the past six years, and we do tech events like the Compute Midwest conference and Hack Midwest hackathon, as well as educate software developers via the Disruption…
The Westport Art Ensemble captures your attention, welcoming you for a listen to the complex and dynamic interplay among master musicians. These days, the ensemble usually reunites when drummer Todd Strait – who moved to Portland and often tours with Karrin Allyson – returns to town. With bassist Gerald Spaits, keyboardist Roger Wilder and saxophonist Dave Chael, WAE performs original…
Late in Steve James’ documentary Life Itself, the director e-mails his subject — dying writer Roger Ebert — to ask why he chose that two-word phrase as the title of his autobiography. For the first time in their correspondence, Ebert demurs. “I can’t,” he answers. This turned out to be hours before Ebert died. For a decade, he’d been hospitalized…
%{}% Summertime is Fringetime, and as in past years, KC Fringe Festival kicks off with a big preview night — this year, Thursday, July 17 — when you can sample brief snippets of half of the festival’s offerings of theater, music, dance, comedy, burlesque, film and spoken word. It’s a hodgepodge of professional and amateur productions, works in progress, works…
Man or Astro-Man? For a moment in the early aughts, it seemed that Man or Astro-Man was calling it quits. At least, that’s what fans of the beloved surf-rock band concluded in the decade-plus after 2000’s A Spectrum of Infinite Scale, with no new material and few live shows. But last May, Man or Astro-Man released Defcon 5…4…3…2…1, which takes…
For Joy Biggs, the memories of January 22 in the Sherman County jail (“the Bastille,” locals call it) are still as vivid as the day they happened. “I can’t stop thinking about my sister dying there,” Biggs tells The Pitch. “It’s all too much.” Biggs remembers the dirty, western Kansas jail cell where her sister, Brenda Sewell, was lying, her…
About a year ago, I made my first trip to Kansas City for The Pitch Music Showcase. I remember sweating inside the Riot Room as Not a Planet, Antennas Up, Sons of Great Dane, and Hammerlord delivered blistering sets. As the streets of Westport swelled with enthusiastic local-music supporters, I felt a sense of appreciation for this diamond-in-the-rough patch of…
It has been at least 24 years since local chef Joe Shirley — the founder of the Uberdine series of pop-up restaurant events — last ate a school lunch at Horace Mann Elementary School in his hometown of Springfield, Missouri. But he has never quite forgotten the experience — or his favorite things on the heavy plastic lunch tray. “My favorite days were…
Lawrence Democrat Paul Davis last month told The Pitch to look out for a wave of what he called unprecedented Republican support for his bid to replace Sam Brownback as Kansas governor. That prediction came true on Tuesday when more than 100 Republican officeholders, past and present, were part of a press conference in Topeka to announce their support for Davis…
There’s no longer a chef in the kitchen at the two-year-old Remedy Food + Drink (500 West 75th Street, 816-361-9788) in Waldo, but the innovations of past chefs, including the venue’s debut chef Max Watson, continue to be offered on the abbreviated but solid menu. “We’ve decided to put less emphasis on chefs,” says general manager Brian Tagg, “and we…
Rick Springfield has written a New York Times bestseller. He’s on a co-headlining tour with Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo. Additionally, Springfield’s getting ready to star work on a new album. So, those of you who refer to him as “teen actor turned musician” for his work on General Hospital in the 1970s or make “one hit wonder” comments regarding…
This year, the 2014 Pitch Music Awards Showcase is split over two nights: This Saturday, July 19, at the Riot Room and Friday, July 25, at Knuckleheads Saloon (lineup details and tickets here.) The PMA Awards Show is at the Uptown Theater, held this year on Sunday, August 3, and hosted by World Air Guitar Champion Eric “Mean” Melin and Mills Record Co.’s Judy…
Journey with the Steve Miller Band and Tower of Power Starlight Theatre, Kansas City, MO Monday, July 14, 2014 Arnel Pineda is the best thing to happen to Journey since Steve Perry’s hip-replacement surgery. He’s a rail-thin, mic-tossing 46-year-old Filipino guy who jumps all over the place, sounds just like Steve Perry and can almost pull off head-to-toe denim. (Fact:…
LOL. Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin — sorry about the nickname, Todd; some skidmarks just won’t wash out of the underpants — has a new book out today. Well, that’s what you do when you’re no longer electable because you said crazy things about the female body. The book is called Firing Back: Taking on the Party Bosses and the Media…
Basically everyone has a Beatles story, even that one guy who insists that he has never really cared for the band. And for many on Wednesday, seeing one-fourth of the Fab Four at the Sprint Center is the fulfillment of a dream — one that was almost cruelly snatched away from local concertgoers. The 72-year-old Paul McCartney is recently back…
If you didn’t get to see Cloud Nothings at the Riot Room back in April, the sun may be shining in your corner of the lot this week. The Cleveland band is back in town, riding waves of raves for its recent live shows. This is unsurprising, given Cloud Nothings’ latest full-length, the excellent Here and Nowhere Else. Throughout the…
It was 1983 when Pat Benatar proclaimed that we stand together, heartache to heartache. There is no part of “Love Is a Battlefield,” from the heavy electronic drumbeats to Benatar’s defiant singing, that is not pop gold. The same can be said for much of the original heartbreaker’s catalog, which you’ll be able to hear reproduced live on Wednesday at…
