Kansas City News Blog

Tonight is the Pitch Music Showcase, a Westport-sized festival of the best music that Kansas City has to offer. Wristbands cost five bucks and are available at the crowd-control perimeter that surrounds the neighborhood. Please queue in an orderly fashion and ensure that your official,state-issued identification is in order. Citizens under the age of 21 will not be admitted and are encouraged to go see Transformers for the third time. The city of Kansas City, Missouri, in conjunction with the Pitch and the Westport Community Improvement District ,would like to remind underage citizens to mind their little fontanelles. That is all.

The bill features such acts as It’s Over (at the Beaumont, 4050 Pennsylvania), American Catastrophe (at McCoy’s, 4057 Pennsylvania) and the Architects (also at the Beaumont, 4050 Pennsylvania).

Also in Westport, local actress Kaycee Moore introduces tonight's 7:00 screening of the lost classic Killer of Sheep, in which she appears, at Tivoli Cinemas. Moore will stick around and answer questions after the show before sending you into the Showcase night to get, uh, wooly. The movie sticks around through the week.

But it’s also First Friday, which is like a kind of Art Hanukkah, only it comes every single month, making it much less special and easier to ignore. As giant fans of things that are fun, we encourage you to visit the following local art openings.

The Dot Gallery (1517 Oak) -- Open House Featuring work by Doug Bates, oil and pastel paintings by Christopher Jackson, music and refreshments

Pi Gallery (419 East 18th Street) Flexion Friezes -- Paintings by Wichita artist Kathleen Shanahan

Scott Fitness 3 (2020 Washington) Art opening featuring music, food and work by Jon Bidwell and Ben Brown

The Slap & Tickle (504 East 18th Street) First-Annual Group Show with

Lori Raye Erickson
Chris LaValley
Kristin Anderson
Alan Winkler
Eddy Bailey
Erick Bachmann
Cara Humphries
Cynthia Thompson
Richard Day
Pawl Tisdale
Krista Simurdak
Travis Cook
Kriss De Jong
Amanda Thweatt
T. Neil Brown
Raven
Susanna Sitterding
George Rousis
Dana Swedo-Bernal
Apryl

Leedy-Voulkos Art Center (2012 Baltimore) Seasons

Dennis Morgan Gallery (2011 Tracy) Opening featuring "selected artists"

Locust Factory (504 East 18th Street) Recent works by Paul Mallory

Red Star Studio (821 West 17th Street) Red Star Artists in Residence, with works by Rachel Euting, Andrew Gilliatt, Ginny Simms

Hilliard Gallery (404 East 18th Street) Secrets and Misinformation by the Broken Brick Group.

If you watch movies or television, sooner or later, you see somebody drown or have a heart attack or flatline on an emergency-room gurney. Then you see the hero pumping wildly on the dead person's chest, followed by a continued flatline, followed by the hero shouting, “LIVE, DAMN IT, LIVE! YOU’VE NEVER GIVEN UP ON ANYTHING IN YOUR LIFE!” Which is how CPR works on TV.

However, in real life, this does not work at all. Guaranteed, at Sunday’s CPR course at UMKC’s Haag Hall (5120 Rockhill Road), you will not once be asked to shout at Resusci-Annie (pictured). Instead, paramedics and EMTs from the Metropolitan Ambulance Services Trust will give you very real instruction on the proper administration of CPR. These folks presumably know exactly what they are talking about. The workshop starts at 1 p.m. and will make you kind of a badass.

After which, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (4525 Oak) is offering a French film of the very best kind: the “free” kind, or as they say in Babelfish French, “un film vous ne devez pas payer.” L'Atalante follows the adventures and misadventures of a barge captain and two companions. The 1934 film is considered a lost classic (there's a lot of that going around lately), and it had to be reconstructed from multiple sources in the early 1990s. The screening is in the Atkins Auditorium at 2:30 p.m.

Have a great weekend, unless you are an employee with any of the right-wing think tanks engaged with the suppression of minority votes, in which case, have a totally crappy weekend. Bitch. -- Chris Packham