Blogs

Harry's Country Club and the Brooksider Bar & Grill will close for two days because of violations of Kansas City, Missouri's liquor laws.

The suspensions begin at 7 a.m. on Sunday.

Violations included the selling of alcohol to minors, according to the city's Regulated Industries Division.

Celebrate America. Duh -- it's Fourth of July weekend. But seriously, Worlds of Fun is having a Celebrate America Festival every Friday and Saturday in July. Since you're probably not working today, you should just go now. As a reward for surviving the Orient Express, there will be fireworks in the evening.

If you want to wait until Saturday to get your Independence Day on, head to the Crossroads. Due to the holiday, some galleries are waiting until next weekend to hold their monthly openings. But some, like the Pi Gallery, are doing the regular First Friday thing.

Watch the skies for bursts of color! Click for info on a bunch of fireworks happenings across the metro.

Before it gets dark, though, you should totally head to the National World War I Museum and let Rin Tin Tin's great great great great (maybe some more greats) grandpuppy lick your face. His appearance is part of a bunch of patriotic activities planned at the museum on Saturday.


Image courtesy Flickr: delgaudm

Petite jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg elicited this week's "Comment of the Week" on the Plog.

On Tuesday, Peter Rugg reported that the U.S. Supreme Court had declined to take a case about the constitutionality of Missouri laws directed at the troglodytes who preach a hateful brand of Christian fundamentalism at funerals.

"Shepcat," whom we know to be Brent Shepherd, a proofreader who helps minimize the atrocities of The Pitch's writing staff, considered the photo that appeared with Rugg's entry and wrote:

Who's the Olan Mills photographer whose bright idea it was to stand tiny (but formidable) Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the back row with the frontcourt of Bird, Pa[r]rish and McHale?

Well played, sir.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nodame88/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

St. Louis Grand Hotel & Suites

If Kansas City, Missouri, leaders decide to subsidize a new, 1,000-room convention hotel, and the hotel falls short of expectations, no one can claim to be surprised.

Demand for hotel rooms in Kansas City is expected to fall 6.4 percent this year, according to new study. PKF Hospitality Research indicates that hoteliers' revenues will fall 15.7 percent this year as lower demand drives down prices, the Kansas City Business Journal reported Wednesday.

To be sure, a scary economy will keep more travelers at home in 2009 than in prior years. But it's not as if the hotel business was all cupcakes and candy canes before the stock market got its arm caught in a mulcher. St. Louis provides a bracing example.

In the 1990s, St. Louis expanded its convention center and built a new domed stadium. Hotel visits remained flat. A 1,000-room convention hotel opened in downtown St. Louis in 2003; in its first year, the hotel checked in fewer visitors who paid less money for their rooms than had been anticipated. In February, it was sold on the steps of a courthouse.

Despite more than a thousand letters and e-mails begging Gov. Jay Nixon to sign a bill that would strike down Missouri's helmet law, Nixon vetoed it today. The bill would have allowed motorcycle riders 21 and over to ride helmetless on all roads except interstate highways.

Missouri Department of Transportation director Pete Rahn issued this statement: "I want to thank Governor Jay Nixon for showing courageous and compassionate leadership by vetoing the repeal of the motorcycle helmet law. He has saved lives today."

Rahn caught some flak from Sen. Kurt Schaefer, sponsor of House Bill 202, for butting into legislative matters. Rahn spent $30,000 to conduct a telephone survey, the results of which showed that 84 percent of Missourians are in favor of keeping the helmet law.

Nixon had a busy day today -- he also approved Westport's festival license so that folks can booze in the streets, like at the downtown entertainment district (but with some restrictions; for instance, there can be no more than two such "festivals" per month.) If the heads of Cordish Co. still feel the way they did back when David Martin filed this story, we're guessing they're not thrilled by the news.  

July's First Friday is proximal to the patriotic distraction of Independence Day, and maybe you're not so much thinking about art. While it's clearly important to drink American beer while listening to Toby Keith and reading the Constitution by the light of exploding fireworks this weekend, there are some art exhibits open in the Crossroads Art District on Friday night, among which you'll find an informal non-reception at the Late Show (1600 Cherry) for artists Steven Frink and David Gant.

Gallery owner Tom Deatherage will mount a full reception for the artists next Friday, but if you're in the neighborhood this week, he'll have the doors open and Gant's exhibit, American Family, is a knockout. Reinterpreting a collection of old family photographs in an anxious, gestural style, Gant's impressionist figures are mundanity heightened to a painterly beatitude. His tactile brushwork both veils and exaggerates his subjects, and creates an urge to touch the canvas which I'll just stipulate here that I was able to suppress because I am totally a professional.

Likewise, Steven Frink's impressive abstractions are objects of careful craftsmanship, but we don't have any digital images to post. Just getting images of Gant's work from the beloved and crazy Deatherage was like pulling teeth; we figured a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush and you shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. "Why rock the boat?" we might have been heard to say.

Anyway, Frink's carefully layered paintings are a result of deliberately distressed canvas and successive passes of earthy colors and geometric patterns which are really kind of hard to describe, but which are very impressive in person. Thanks to Deatherage's eye for great work, his relationships with area artists and his constant search for emerging talent, the Late Show Gallery remains a mandatory First Friday destination for art collectors and enthusiasts.

The Kansas City Kansan reports that Board of Public Utilities General Manager Don Gray gets to keep his $170,000-a-year job for at least the next 18 months.

BPU

Don Gray

Pitch staff writer Justin Kendall has written extensively about the BPU, which provides water and electricity services. His stories -- and the eventual indictments against BPU officials -- depict a place where functionaries live like kings and accountability is virtually nonexistent. Sort of like the athletic department at Kansas State University.

Gray promoted Marc Conklin to chief administrative officer a few months before Conklin and another lawyer, Rodney Turner, were indicted on charges that they had looted $400,000. Conklin killed himself in March.

Click here for Kendall's orignal story about Conklin's fine dining habits, and here for Gray's cavalier attitude about same. This story described the nature of Conklin's allegedly criminal enterprise, and this story told of Gray's tolerance for no-bid contracts. 
 

Father Emil Kapaun

Father Emil Kapaun of Pilsen, Kansas, is one step closer to canonization since a Vatican investigator's visit June 26th. Andrea Ambrosi, the investigator for the Roman Catholic Church, visited family members of Chase Kear, who miraculously recovered from a traumatic brain injury. The family told Ambrosi that they prayed to Father Kapaun during Kear's hospitalization and recovery.

Kapaun has a pretty cool history, if his Wikipedia page can be trusted. He was born in Pilsen on April 20, 1916, attended Conception Abbey seminary in Conception, Missouri, and Kendrick Theological Seminary in St. Louis. In 1944, at the height of World War II, he joined the Army. He was stationed in India, and after the war, in Japan near Mount Fuji. In 1950, his unit was sent to South Korea, where he was captured by Chinese Communists.

Unable to sleep during his capture, Kapaun said prayers and comforted the dead and dying, performed baptisms, heard confessions, and held Mass, offering the Eucharist from an alter set up on the front of an Army Jeep. He died in a POW camp in 1951 and was buried in a mass grave.

Original story on Ambrosi's visit here.

U.S. Attorney's Office

Lindsey D. Craword, the Kansas City woman who hired a man to assault her in a ridiculous attempt to advance a sexual-harassment suit, pleaded guilty today in federal court to wire fraud.

Crawford admits that she and a friend hired man to assault them in the detached garage of her Waldo residence. Crawford and Julie R. Bernet claimed initially that two men clubbed them on the head with bottles as they exited the vehicle. Initial reports said one of the woman was sodomized by the assailants, who fled.

In fact, Crawford and Benet hired their attacker, Gordon F. Reabe Jr. of Lee's Summit, after meeting him at a restaurant at Harrah's Casino on November 24, 2008. According to charges that were filed, Crawford agreed to be sexually assaulted but only if knocked unconscious.

Authorities said the women wanted the attack to look like retaliation for lawsuits they had filed against a former employer, Mercedes Benz of Kansas City.

KC River Fest 2009 begins officially tomorrow with a 3 p.m. set by June Bug and the Porch Lights. At 10:30 a.m., the Port Authority of Kansas City is offering 200 free tickets to the event at a ribbon-cutting for the new Riverfront Wetlands Ecosystem Restoration.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers managed the restoration. The project is accessible from the Town of Kansas Pedestrian Bridge. It's located just to the west of the Grand Avenue viaduct.

The wetland isn't much to look at now. (I took a picture yesterday.) But with each new shrub and mile of path, the riverfront becomes something more than a place for hobos to drink themselves blind. This is progress.