%{}% Earlier this month, McDonald’s began serving a limited all-day breakfast menu at most of its fast-food restaurants in the United States. It was the most-requested customer change for the corporation and was met, by most reports, with high enthusiasm. It wasn’t long before local restaurateurs got into the act. Everyone loves breakfast — anytime — right? A few days…
%{}% Name: Dorado Quick Occupation: Writer, at Barkley Hometown: Inglewood, California Current neighborhood: Downtown Kansas City What I do: I turn chicken scratch into ideas, ideas into concepts, and concepts into stories that breathe life into brands and their communities. What’s your addiction? Graphic novels and comic books. They’re the best forms of storytelling I’ve ever encountered. What’s your game?…
%{}% Like a dry run a year ahead of what’s either going to be the most furious modern U.S. presidential election or the most boring, Our Brand Is Crisis arrives to teach us about democracy and its primary currency: highly weaponized campaigning. Tonally, it’s a mess — part M*A*S*H (the movie, not the TV show), with American practical jokers at…
%{}% %{}% I have a friend whose father’s daunting intellect is fundamental to the older man’s decidedly ascetic approach to certain of life’s comforts. Take him to dinner somewhere with an even modestly ambitious menu, and he’s likely to remark later, if you ask him how he liked the food, that it was good, sure, “but it was no Whopper.”…
%{}% %{}% Inside a Northland strip-mall storefront called the Vape Room, wearing a hat that says “Khali Vapors,” Robert Mathis — “Big Rob,” as he is known by some in the local vape community, which, yes, there is such a thing — brings a complex-looking electronic box to his lips, takes a giant pull off its mouthpiece, and expels turbocharged…
%{}% %{}% In the center of a misty prairie stands a primate wrapped in a gilded shroud, a monolith, a talisman. A much smaller, unclothed primate climbs the larger beast — not a child reaching the shoulders of a parent but a lone animal attempting to transcend a hierarchy. This, an image titled “Magic Jack,” reminds us where our human…
%{}% %{}% Prof Last week, lauded Minneapolis rapper (and notorious wild child) Prof released his Rhymesayers debut record, Liability. It’s a beefy, 16-song monolith that announces Prof’s talents to anyone who’s willing to listen — and probably a few people who would rather not. On Liability, he snarls and spits out his lyrics with enviable speed and dexterity. The undeniable…
%{}% %{}% Halloween, fast approaching, is that time of year when the American master of the macabre Edgar Allan Poe is most fondly recalled. Getting in on the season this year is Lawrence playwright Ric Averill, whose newest piece — an opera called Midnight Visit to the Grave of Poe: A Grotesque Arabesque — bows this weekend. Midnight Visit takes…
%{}% As RecordBar’s days at its current location wind down (the venue loses its lease at the end of the year), few chances remain to celebrate with the People’s Liberation Big Band of Greater Kansas City, which has made the Westport club its home the first Sunday of each month for the past seven years. The band’s original compositions ride…
%{}% %{}% Robin Campbell had always dreamed of being in a band like the Cave Girls. She was the lead singer for the Last Call Girls, a job she’d done for three years and had enjoyed. But what she really had in mind was something different. “I always wanted to be in an all-girl band,” she says, sitting at the…
%{}% %{}% Sensitive performances and fraternal sparring stamp the Unicorn Theatre’s The Brothers Size, a drama that masters heavy themes with a light hand. The play, the first in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Brother/Sister trilogy, follows three young men — each named for a different Yoruban orisha, or divinity — in the Louisiana bayou as they confront the binds of family…
%{}% %{}% Back in 1937, the novelist Sinclair Lewis, traveling through the Midwest on a lecture tour, wrote to a friend in New York that Kansas City was a town “entirely composed of chop suey joints.” Good luck finding chop suey here today. And you can take back your egg foo yong and your sweet-and-sour pork, for that matter. The…
%{}% Investigators believe the owner of a nail salon that burned along with the rest of a building on Independence Avenue on October 12 intentionally started the fire. Thu Hong Nguyen, 43, faces charges of arson and murder; she is being held on $2 million bond. Around 7:30 the evening of October 12, the Kansas City Fire Department responded to…
%{}% James Pittman, a gay man, says he was called a “cocksucker” by Joe Jurden, the president of Cook Paper Recycling Corporation, the local company he worked for from 2004 to 2011. He also alleged, in a 2013 lawsuit filed in Jackson County, that Jurden “made other comments of a sexual nature, discriminatory to a male homosexual, including asking him if he…
%{}% Ashleigh Luna had an epiphany after graduating from the University of Central Missouri three years ago. She remembered that her first love — dating back to her childhood Easy-Bake Oven as a child — had been to have her hands in the dough. So, after college, the broadcast-media major followed a different track, attending culinary school — the Denver…
%{}% You might know Russell Davis from Spike TV’s Bar Rescue, or perhaps you’ll recall that 2012 Bartender of the Year award from Nightclub & Bar. Either way, Davis — who got his start over a decade ago in the Austin bar scene — has managed a wildly successful career in the booze industry. As the CEO of Cosmic Lifestyle Corporation,…
%{}% Major news in Wyandotte County surfaced late on Monday when the Justice Department announced that it sued the Kansas City, Kansas, Housing Authority, along with a former employee, on grounds of sexual harassment. The lawsuit claims that Victor L. Hernandez, a hearing officer and administrative coordinator for the KCKHA until January 2014, subjected two women who were applying for…
%{}% Hometown Congressman Emanuel Cleaver recently sent a letter to the Food and Drug Administration, urging the agency to work with credit-card companies and online retailers to cut off sales of something called “flakka.” Here, from the letter: “In 2015 alone more than two dozen people have died from Flakka-related incidents, with that number expected to rise. Addiction is a…
%{}% Greg Bland has found the first brewmaster for his Stockyards Brewing Co. The brewery — slated to open later this year in the iconic former Golden Ox restaurant space in the West Bottoms — has tapped Micah Weichert, of Gordon Biersch, to help launch Stockyards. A mutual friend put the two men together. “I’ve been talking to Micah for…
%{}% Back in 1982, Branson, Missouri, struck an agreement with a developer to build a hotel at the site of that town’s old airport. As an inducement, the city gave the developer a break on paying for access to the municipal sewer system. So when Branson later turned around and asked the developer to pay more than $100,000 in fees…
%{}% If you’re going to play retro arcade games, you’ve gotta have pizza. As of this weekend at Up-Down (101 Southwest Boulevard), pizza is on the menu. Actually, it’s the only food on the menu. After a soft rollout this weekend, today is the first full day of pizza by the slice. Each day, at least four different kinds of…
The Kansas City Royals will enter the World Series for the second straight season. Last year the Royals were defeated by the San Francisco Giants in seven games, but the Royals will again look to win their first World Series since 1985 when they host the New York Mets, starting with Game 1 on Tuesday night. According to TiqIQ, the…
%{}% Boulevard is freshening up its image. Last week, Kansas City’s biggest brewery released a first look of its new logo and some updated packaging that we’ll be seeing in March 2016. Why the change? Boulevard explained in a press release: “The goal for the Kansas City brewery’s evolution is to provide better visibility for the Boulevard brand at retail,…
%{}% If you had planned on seeing the indomitable Janet Jackson on Tuesday at the Sprint Center, bad news: That show, along with several others, has been postponed. Over the weekend, Ms. Jackson postponed shows in Salt Lake City, Denver, Kansas City and St. Louis; in a tweet, she explained that it is “doctor’s orders” for her to go on…
