An Evening with the Company Featuring Hyborian, Young Bull, Druids, Snowchild, Orphans of Doom, Merlin, and Stone Grower The Granada Saturday, July 14 Riff after riff after riff: With a heavy emphasis on stoner and doom acts, Kansas City metal label The Company presented seven of the area’s finest metal bands to Saturday night’s crowd at the Granada. Lots of…
Dear Dan: Longtime Savage Love fanboy with a bit of a conundrum — and it’s your fault! I’m a bi man in my 30s. To use Charles M. Blow’s word, my bisexuality is “lopsided.” This means that I fall in love with women exclusively, but I love to have sex with men occasionally. My current girlfriend not only approves, she…
Four men who want to be the next governor of Kansas got together on a stage Thursday night. And they pretty much forgot to talk about Kansas. Given the state’s sputtering economy and mounting financial woes, the debate at Johnson County Community College brought to mind a crowd of people sitting around an intensive care unit and blustering about everything except…
In Kansas City, we proudly tout our beer, our music, our t-shirts, our sports teams (sometimes) and our … dance?Maybe it’s high time to start. Befitting its arts-hub aspirations, Kansas City boasts a surprisingly robust dance scene, especially compared to other cities its size. The region’s largest dance company, Kansas City Ballet, earned national attention when KC hosted the Dance…
M.C. Taylor’s soulful, North Carolina-based folk-rock act has been on a tear the last few years, touring relentlessly and releasing new music at a frenzied pace. Most of it is quite good — earnest but rollicking, it strives for the mystical purity of giants like John Prine, the Grateful Dead, Van Morrison, even the Meters. Thursday evening at Crossroads KC,…
Awful House, one of the Kansas City DIY scene’s most beloved venues, is preparing to meet its premature demise this summer. The warehouse space, located in the West Bottoms, has been hosting LGBTQ- and POC-focused punk and electronic shows since September of last year — a steady schedule of spirited gigs from forward-thinking musicians. Due primarily to costs associated with rent…
When Tina Gallego, a Missouri prison guard, complained to her superintendent about the disgusting names her male counterparts were calling her and other female corrections officers — “cunt,” “bitch,” “whore” — she was told if she didn’t like it, she could get a job at Walmart. A few months later, Gallego, who was employed at the state prison in Kansas City’s…
The Open Spaces festival announced today that pop force of nature (and KC native) Janelle Monáe and the Roots will be headlining “The Weekend” portion of the arts festival, which takes place October 12-14 at Starlight Theatre. The Roots will be playing Friday, October 12 and Monáe on Saturday the 13th, along with the Soul Rebels, the Vijay Iyay Sextet,…
A tough-to-watch viral video, released a couple years ago, recently resurfaced. In it, a plastic straw is carefully extracted from the nose of a sea turtle. Despite its unpleasantness, the video has been viewed 27 million times as of this writing, bringing vital awareness to a banal but important issue: plastic straws — the kind that come in just about…
Since sometime in the early 2000s — we’re not exactly certain when — The Pitch has been publishing online at pitch.com. That is going to change soon. Actually, it has already changed. You are currently at www.thepitchkc.com, which is our new domain address. We’ve sold pitch.com. Soon, pitch.com will take you to a place that has nothing at all to do with…
Tuesday, July 10Celebrate Bastille Day all week with Ça Va (4149 Pennsylvania Avenue), which is offering French food and specials starting tonight through Saturday. Each day offers a little something extra as well. On Tuesday, be among the first to try the Champagne Jacquesson 741. Wednesday’s special will be flights of champagne and crémants (a type of sparkling wine), and Thursday brings…
Dear Dan: In a recent column, you said you never hear from married couples whose sex life got better and more frequent over the years. Well, now you have. My wife and I were married 24 years ago, and we are currently having more sex and better sex than we did in the first years of our marriage. There are…
Back in 2014, when Paul Davis was the Democratic nominee in the race for Kansas governor, he made a campaign video. One of the actors in it was Jeff Montague, a stage performer in Topeka. As it turned out, Montague had a troubled past. Shortly after the video was released, the Kansas Republican Party released to the media a variety…
This article was sponsored by the Kansas City Nerdlesque FestivalCall it next-level cosplay: at Nerdlesque, you can see your favorite fandom characters strip on stage.“It’s like Comic Con and a Burlesque festival had a sexy, little baby,” says Annie-Mae Allure, the founder of local variety show the Rude Review and executive producer of Kansas City’s first Nerdlesque Festival, which runs…
Can Kansas City continue to be a place where young artists live cheaply, have room (and time) to experiment, even own a space? The correlations between art and real estate have become more intertwined here in recent years, and it’s mostly not good news. As the Crossroads grows and becomes less habitable for artists and galleries that aren’t profit-driven, experimental and…
Rubbish Co. is a young organization, as is the duo — Phoebe Rain and Tiffani Starr — behind it. Since the beginning of the year, the environmentally minded pair has been finding fresh ways to merge art and conservation — a practice they call “artivism.” They’ve made clothes — in June, five of their trash-turned-outfit pieces walked in the West 18th Street Fashion…
It’s fucking hot. And humid. And everything’s sweaty and gross. Don’t go outside. You’ll melt. Watch these videos because they’re chill as hell, and you can do that while hiding in your basement, trying to avoid the sun until sometime in mid-September. The tracks from Toughies, Berwanger, and Mikal Shapiro are sunny enough to give you a tan, anyhow. C…
I’ve thought a lot about the “uncanny valley” — the threshold at which robots and puppets become eerie in their imitation of human life. Until recently, I never bothered to think about what might be on the other side. A few weeks ago, I received a press release inviting me to a sneak peek of “the region’s first and only doob…
Occasionally, trying to do something the easy way ends up being a goddamn nightmare. So it was with my recent interview with the four members of long-running KC punk outfit Sister Mary Rotten Crotch. They’re all busy with their own stuff, so we try having a voice chat together over Facebook Messenger. Logistically, it doesn’t go so hot — lots of…
Monday, July 2Cinder Block Brewery (110 East 18th Avenue) is helping fans prep for this week’s holiday with its first-ever seasonal can release, which begins at 4 p.m. today. For the first time ever, the brewery will be selling 16-ounce cans of Hop Cuddle (NE IPA), Cerveza De Verano (Mexican lager with lime), Hop Maven 11, and Tropical IPA (made…
Up until about a year ago, Kendall Blakeney was a cable guy. He’d spent his early twenties doing the starving-artist thing — visual art, mostly — with little success. Then his girlfriend announced she was pregnant. “I felt like I had to put the big-boy pants on and get a big-boy job,” Blakeney, who’s now 27, says. He knuckled down for a…
