For a guy who has committed more than his share of atrocities onscreen, Shawnee Mission South High School alum David Dastmalchian seems cheery and amiable over the phone. While he has made life difficult for the Flash and the good guys in Gotham and The Dark Knight, Dastmalchian is now playing characters he read about as a child, working with…
Felicia Day hasn’t reached 40 yet, but she has already conquered several types of media.The actress teamed with Joss Whedon, the brain behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Marvel’s The Avengers, for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. In that 2008 web event, she played a woman pursued by both an aspiring supervillain (Neil Patrick Harris) and a pompous bully of a…
Few producers can match the success of DJ Shadow (Josh Davis). From the release of Endtroducing, more than 20 years ago, to last year’s The Mountain Will Fall, he has proven that he can stay at the vanguard of electronic music and production. This summer, KC gets a taste of his more current work (including his recent collaboration with Nas…
More today from the Department of Payday Lending Karma: Scott Tucker has to auction off all his dumb sports cars.Tucker, who we have covered for a very long time now, owes the Federal Trade Commission about $1.3 billion dollars for running a massive payday lending scheme. He also faces criminal charges in the Southern District of New York for fraud…
Today the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — Trump wants to gut this agency — filed a lawsuit against, you guessed it, another Kansas City area payday lending operation. This time it’s an outfit nominally based on tribal land in California but that has been operating in Kansas. This ought to sound familiar by now. The lawsuit alleges four different lending operations…
In the dance studio at the Charlotte Street studio residency space, in downtown’s Town Pavilion building, Monica Dixon looked down at a row of colorful, handmade masks that spanned the length of the stage. There were 26, each sewn from a variety of clothing scraps and synthetic materials resembling feathers, scales or flower petals.“Now that I think about it, these…
It’s not hard to feel a little sorry for Joe Robertson today. The Kansas City Star reporter drew a shortish straw with his assignment to write about the National White Privilege Conference, the mushy-sounding, academic-courting, closed-to-the-media event set to draw a couple of thousand people here later this week. On the spectrum of conventions the paper of record must acknowledge,…
Monday, April 24Step onto the patio at Ça Va (4149 Pennsylvania Avenue) this evening and forget that it’s a Monday with a champagne dinner featuring natural sparkling wines from Jenny & François Selections. A representative from Jenny & François will be on hand to discuss the wines, and the food is three courses by chef Howard Hanna. The dinner is…
Republicans in Jefferson City on Friday absorbed a hit from rival Democrats — and a body blow from the governor, who, last anyone checked, was a member of their own party.Gov. Eric Greitens’ dark-money nonprofit, A New Missouri Inc., attacked Sen. Rob Schaaf on Twitter and on the group’s website, accusing him of (gasp) “siding with liberals” and trying to…
Approximately 2,000 Kansas Citians marched (gathered) in Washington Square Park between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. today, commemorating Earth Day by participating in the March for Science, a worldwide show of support for evidence-based science (because yes, in 2017, we are seriously debating the merits of science). Speakers included Roy Jensen, Director of the University of Kansas Medical Center Cancer…
Superintendent Jim Hinson’s resignation isn’t the only problematic letter the Shawnee Mission School Board has received this week.The other communication comes from the ACLU of Kansas, and its content should disturb board members and district families.The ACLU reports that, on February 7, a student at Briarwood Elementary School was taken into custody by Prairie Village police at the end of…
Temperature’s rising in Ron Richard’s kitchen. The Missouri Senate leader has been dogged by accusations of pay-for-play politics for months now. As we reported in February, Richard cashed a $100,000 check from the CEO of TAMKO Building Products six days after introducing legislation that would effectively derail a class-action lawsuit against TAMKO. Missouri Rep. Mark Ellebracht (D-Liberty) later wrote in…
Thursday With Touché Amoré, Basement and Cities Aviv, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 18, at RecordBar, all ages, $30Post-hardcore powerhouse Thursday went on an indefinite hiatus in 2011. By the time the group announced a reunion in 2016, fans were champing at the bit to see the band live. Thursday is now on its first full U.S. tour since a string…
Monday April 17Indulge in a four-course wine dinner tonight at J. Gilbert’s (8901 Metcalf, Overland Park) featuring selections from Sonoma County’s Simi Wines. The meal includes a sea-scallops-and-shrimp ceviche, roasted pork belly with burrata salad, braised wagyu short ribs and a panna cotta, plus wine pairings. The dinner’s host is winemaker Susan Lueker. The dinner is $70 per person, not…
With an album dropping later this month (Humanz, out April 28), the Damon Albarn-fronted, quasi-animated band Gorillaz is heading out on its first tour in seven years. In a big get for Kansas City, the Humanz tour includes a stop at the Sprint Center on Friday, September 22. Tickets go on sale this Friday, April 21 at 10 a.m. via AXS,…
As honorifics go, “Lord of the Whiskey Wars” is pretty badass. So it’s no surprise that Sean Sobel isn’t ready to cede — or even share — that title anytime soon. For the second time in the event’s two-year history, the MO Brew manager and bartender took first prize at Bacon & Bourbon’s cocktail competition, this time with an elaborate…
Editor’s note: This post has been updated.Singer Lalah Hathaway and keyboardist Chick Corea are taking the headline slots for the inaugural Kansas City Jazz and Heritage Festival over Memorial Day weekend,Corea, first with Miles Davis and later with bands such as Return to Forever and the Chick Corea Elektric Band, defined fusion music, melding jazz and rock. He has been…
Ever since 2011’s next-level sequel Fast Five, each movie in the Fast and the Furious action franchise has tried to top the last in terms of jaw-dropping stunts that defy not only logical expectations but also the laws of physics. The Fate of the Furious, the series’ eighth installment, falls just short of doing that — which is really saying…
Gainesville punk trio UV-TV just released its debut LP, Glass, via Canada’s Deranged Records. It’s a post-punk meets pop dream, loaded with fuzz — or, as the group’s bio puts it, “shoegaze which has been stripped of its fat and fluff.” It’s the kind of record that demands spin after spin, with guitar hooks just as likely as the vocals…
Hometown: Olathe Current neighborhood: Proudly living in LFK What I do (in 140 characters or less): I take playing pretend really seriously. What’s your addiction? Writing “xo” at the end of long messages to people. It started ironically, but now I’m a monster and can’t stop. What’s your game? I play a game where I look at strangers and figure…
The Green Lady Lounge is expanding … into the Tank Room.Green Lady Lounge owner John Scott is buying the next door Tank Room and converting it into an extension of his popular jazz club. It will be renamed the Black Dolphin. Scott says, “We are so busy on Friday and Saturday nights that we started looking about a year ago…
Where to begin?With the gold-toned radiata pine — such pine! — creeping under you in square-jawed stools, towering over you in slope-shouldered huts, eclipsing the sun from a wall of ersatz windows. With the canyon of a restaurant, 8,000 square feet of cool concrete and black paint and dead tree. With the vibe, simultaneously primal and alien. Forget color, forget…
Stephen Webber is, from just about any angle, a rising star in the Missouri Democratic Party. Fresh off two tours of duty in Iraq, Webber was first elected to the Missouri House of Representatives in 2008, when he was 25. He went on to serve four terms as a state representative in the Columbia area, earning a degree from the…
Ryan Silvey made news over the weekend simply by conceding a fact that every other Republican in the Missouri Legislature weirdly refuses to acknowledge: that the behavior of Senate leader Ron Richard appears to be deeply corrupt and worthy of investigation.As The Pitch reported back in February, Richard accepted preposterously huge campaign donations from David Humphreys, a millionaire businessman based…
