Arts & Entertainment >>

• Best Street Party
  Polski Day in Strawberry Hill
  Controversy might have surrounded this year's Polski Day (regarding who held the rights to the official parade), but there was no question where the party was. On May 5, the annual parade made two KCK stops: one at the St. Joseph-St. Benedict's Church on South Eighth Street, the other under a... More >>
• Best New Holiday Tradition (1 Comment)
  Mardi Gras in the Crossroads
  Kansas City isn't New Orleans. But we do Mardi Gras right because we know what counts: dressing weird and dancing to ramshackle jazz and blues. The party that assembles every Fat Tuesday in front of Y.J.'s Snack Bar at 18th Street and Wyandotte, then forms a parade and does the... More >>
• Best Street Performer (2 Comments)
  James "J-Wizz" Hathorn
  J-Wizz understands that the most entertaining form of dancing isn't found on perfect-footwork TV competitions. It's found in places like Westport and the Plaza. It's the sort of disjointed, outlandish, pop-and-lock stuff that kids try in the privacy of their own bedrooms but never whip out in... More >>
• Best Ad Lib Poet (3 Comments)
  Bob Reeder
  Finish this limerick the dirtiest way you can think of: "There once was a woman from Venus ..." Now realize that whatever nastiness comes to mind can be topped by a few jovially spouted verses from Irish folk singer Bob Reeder. Every Friday night, Reeder dons a kilt and strums his guitar onstage... More >>
• Best Poetry Readings
  The Pit at Prospero's Books
  When they're not burning books to protest America's declining interest in reading, the lovable kooks at Prospero's Books fuel the flames of literacy by opening a makeshift stage for local poets and prosers. The store's bimonthly Pit spotlights authors from the Unholy Day Press catalog (Connie... More >>
• Best Author Readings
  Kansas City Public Library, Plaza Branch
  Public readings at the Kansas City Public Library's spiffy Plaza Branch offer a cosmopolitan night on the town for cheap. With just a little furniture rearranging, the northwest corner of the building accommodates more than 300 people for readings, lectures and "script in hand" performances by... More >>
• Best Author — Kan.
  Laura Moriarty
  It's difficult not to love novels narrated in the first person by wise kids. Evelyn, the gifted young narrator of Lawrence author Laura Moriarty's first novel, The Center of Everything, gives the book its title, saying, "If you look at a map of the world, the United States is usually right in... More >>
• Best Author — Mo.
  Matt Fraction
  When it comes to genre fiction, we like espionage, science fiction, alternate universes, Thomas Pynchon references and soap-opera intrigue. Matt Fraction layers those elements in a way that's smart, entertaining and completely cool in the graphic novel Luxuria, a collection of the first seven... More >>
• Best Fashion Export
  Jovana Mirabile
  Gone are the days when you could catch Jovana Mirabile shopping for fabric on the Plaza. The 2007 graduate of St. Thomas Aquinas High School left in August to study at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. But we don't begrudge the glitzy little lady for leaving. "I've wanted to be a... More >>
• Best Clothing Designer for Men
  Ari Fish
  The standard jeans and T-shirt are always great, but Ari Fish thinks men deserve more options. "I look at every guy and say, ÔMan, I'd love to style him,'" she says. Fish dressed several men for the summer's West 18th Street Fashion Show, saying on the event's Web site that she designs for... More >>
• Best T-Shirt Designer
  Caleb Nathaniel
  There's no such thing as a one-of-a-kind screen-printed T-shirt. That's why we prefer the Nathaniel Renewal line of hand-painted and hand-bleached tops for guys, girls and babies. Designer and company founder Caleb Nathaniel, a 23-year-old from Shawnee, began arting up his own shirts in 2005;... More >>
• Best Film Activist
  Tim Hjersted
  Tim Hjersted is a familiar face to electronic music fans in Lawrence, but, turntables aside, the 23-year-old DJ wants to mix it up on the political stage, too. Earlier this year, he and a handful of fellow Lawrencians created Films for Action, a group aimed at giving more power to the people by... More >>
• Best Movie Theater
  Tivoli Cinemas
  Of course the fucking Tivoli! This movie theater is the film junkie's home sweet home. Other art houses in town are plenty fun, but when it comes to that basic, primal, no-nonsense, foreign- or indie-movie fix, the Tivoli is as reliable as Mother Superior (the nickname of the heroin dealer... More >>
• Best Cabaret Show (2 Comments)
  Spencer Brown
  Picture David Bowie, home alone, listening to Rent. Bored, he closes his eyes, dips hand into trou, and starts to finger what he finds. Now, imagine what Bowie would be imagining. That's Spencer Brown, the glam, gorgeous marvel of late-period Late Night Theatre. He's a scene-stealing force of... More >>
• Best Drag Queen (1 Comment)
  De De Deville
  On March 25, a very special girl had her Bat Mitzvah. For 13 years, David Krom has been De De Deville, a droll and willowy glamourpuss with a knack for stealing the spotlight: at Belle Starr's weekly drag show at Sidekicks, as a cover girl for KC's Camp Magazine, with the Girly Show at Bar... More >>
• Best Actor in a Bad Play
  Ron Megee
  Here was a Christmas miracle. Flaunting his trademark mix of goofball grace and full-on abandon, Late Night Theatre leader-in-exile Ron Megee managed to take the American Heartland's lump of Christmas coal — we'd say the pandering comedy was inspired by those... More >>
• Best Funny Play
  A Scary Carrie Christmas
  In Carrie, Stephen King's richest book and Brian De Palma's best film, the blood comes from swine, murder and menses. Onstage last winter, in Phil Kinen and Ron Megee's jolly takedown of De Palma's lurid film, much of that blood flowered forth as red ribbon, most memorably in the notorious... More >>
• Best Newcomer to the Stage
  Patrick Du Laney
  Long a boon to local audiences, UMKC's graduate theater department is perhaps even more beloved by local theaters, which find in its annual yield of new students just the sort of hungry, talented, non-Equity artists who, between semesters, can achieve great things without getting all fussy about... More >>
• Best Performance in a Musical (1 Comment)
  Karen Errington
  She has enchanted the Paul Harvey set at Quality Hill Playhouse for years now, but Karen Errington's charms are too rarely paraded before the rest of us. With her ace comic timing, her broad and buoyant voice and a bottomless bag of expressive glances, Errington makes each performance like one... More >>
• Best Moments in a Theater
  Mary Bridget Davies and Kacee Clanton in Love, Janis
  The Rep's high-toned, too-polite look at Janis Joplin wasn't much interested in the big questions: how voice and drugs and deep personal and societal fucked-upness big-banged the small-town moppet into a Kozmic Blues dervish, or how and why these same factors almost immediately crushed her... More >>
• Best Theater
  The Unicorn Theatre
  After 34 years, Cynthia Levin's little-theater-that-does just keeps doing it. Even as it urges Kansas City theatergoers into the future, the Unicorn is reliable as gravity, steady as the Marching Cobras, the one theater in town dedicated to professional productions of new, challenging work. This... More >>
• Best Play
  Dinner With Friends
  The Kansas City Actors Theatre has snagged the "Best Play" honor for two years in a row by following a simple formula. First, choose a script that's great but still fresh, something like Donald Margulies' Dinner With Friends — a show that audiences are vaguely familiar with but haven't... More >>
• Best Anticipated Art Event
  The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art
  Now that the Nelson's Bloch Building has opened, we're looking ahead to the Saturday, October 27, public opening of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art at Johnson County Community College. This gorgeous new limestone-and-glass building, designed by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based architect Kyo... More >>
• Best Acquisition
  The Bloch Building
  We could gush on and on about the Nelson's new, Steven Holl-designed Bloch Building. But everything's already been written by the likes of The New York Times ("breathtaking ... a perfect synthesis of ideas"), The New Yorker ("As it turns out, the building ... is not just Holl's finest by far but... More >>
• Best Welcome Home
  Homecoming
  Kansas City was producing great artists years before the surge in Crossroads foot traffic — it's just that a lot of them moved away. Proving that you can come home again, the Johnson County Community College Gallery of Art teamed up with the Epsten Gallery to produce Homecoming, a showcase... More >>
• Best Artist
  Archie Scott Gobber
  Archie Scott Gobber gets better and better. A sculpture called "Erect," from an early summer group exhibition at the Dolphin, embodied what's so good about his work: It's funny, smart, well-crafted and thoughtful — but not self-righteous or too self-reflexive. Parsing words, making... More >>
• Best Museum Director (1 Comment)
  Saralyn Reece Hardy
  Formerly the powerhouse director of the nationally known Salina Arts Center, Saralyn Reece Hardy helped put contemporary art exhibitions on the map of central Kansas. Notably, she was tapped as the director of museums and visual arts for the National Endowment of the Arts in Washington, D.C.... More >>
• Best Random Painting in a Group Exhibition
  David Ford's "USA"
  In the Dolphin's summer exhibition, David Ford's "USA" — a 96-inch-by-72-inch behemoth that he painted this year — was an intriguing anomaly among the more formal works. A giant black panther head exploded out of the top-left corner of the canvas, snarling yet surrounded by orange,... More >>
• Best Exhibition
  America Starts Here
  Devoted to mapping the world around them, in both the physical and conceptual sense, Kansas City Art Institute alums Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler enjoyed working with material culture, from baby-food jars to old pie tins. They collaborated for a short but fruitful time before Ericson died of... More >>
• Best Photography Show
  Gloria Baker Feinstein
  Gloria Baker Feinstein's photographic disquisition of the orphans of Uganda toed a taut and righteous line between journalism and art. With a master's degree in photography and graphic design from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, this Kansas City-based artist has been in dozens of... More >>
• Best Mix Tapes
  The StreetMonstaz
  "We been doing mix tapes since they were tapes," says Rob-1-der, half of the mix-tape-producing team StreetMonstaz. He and his partner, Soul M.U.T.T., produce a dizzying array of CD compilations and hand them out — free — by the hundreds at KC clubs and parties. The two live in KC... More >>
• Best Place for the Kids to Rock Out (2 Comments)
  Main Street Café
  Denise Clark's passion for helping troubled kids led her to open Main Street Café five years ago as a sanctuary from temptations more dangerous than rock and roll. In other words, it's a drug- and alcohol-free place to rock out. "It's about building healthy relationships and helping kids... More >>
• Best Private Residence for a Rock Show
  The Pistol Social Club
  Just because it doesn't have a liquor license, an advertising budget or an air conditioner doesn't mean the Pistol Social Club isn't a great place to see a band (except in the summer, when that lack of air conditioning shuts it down). Not so much a club as a loft, the Pistol started booking acts... More >>
• Best Place to Cut a Record
  Blacklodge Recording
  Of the many, many bands that have recorded at Ed Rose's storied Blacklodge studio in Eudora, some have ruled and some have drooled. One thing's for sure — they've all come out sounding great. Bands such as the Esoteric, Ultimate Fakebook, Coalesce, Casket Lottery, Kill Creek and Appleseed... More >>
• Best Music Blog
  Little Hits
  Like vitamins hawked on late-night TV, the entries on Little Hits are easy to swallow and really do reverse the aging process. The setup is as simple as any MP3 blog: song for streaming plus quasi-literary reflection on song. Most such sites worship the new and the cool, posting buzzworthy... More >>
• Best Radio Station (1 Comment)
  KJHK 90.7
  It makes sense that a radio station run by college students would feature the freshest sounds in music. College kids are plugged into the most obscure shit — they have the time and university-provided broadband to discover it. And so the University of Kansas' student-run station, KJHK... More >>
• Best Online Radio Personality (1 Comment)
  Chronic the Hedgehog
  We honor Chronic the Hedgehog (Justin Bale) not only for his stoner sense of humor but also for his entrepreneurial spirit. Fed up with a lack of alternative options on the local radio dial, the music addict from Overland Park founded his own station on the Internet. Since late 2006,... More >>
• Best Legal Illegal Downloads
  Kansas City, Kan., Public Library
  Limewire is a great idea — until you actually use it. The downloads are slow, the risks are palpable and the sound quality faithfully approximates a cup on a string. Pop-music archivists — contemptible, thieving bastards — have a better option in public libraries, which... More >>
• Best KC Label (1 Comment)
  OxBlood Records
  When we go to other towns, countries, planets, etc., we can show the folks we encounter what's going on at home, thanks to OxBlood's First Blood, an all-exclusive compilation of the cream of the local scene. Also thanks to this label, founded boldly by music-industry victims Robert Moore (also a... More >>
• Best Lawrence Label (1 Comment)
  Range Life Records
  The same brothers who brought us the best local album also have established a sexy little imprint. Helmed by Zach Hangauer, the eldest of the Hangauer sons of Lawrence, Range Life Records has demonstrated how to assemble an arts-and-music collective and make it work — or, at least, how to... More >>
• Best Album
  Fourth of July on the Plains
  irlfriends, parties and jangly guitars — hell, yeah! But then, there are breakups and hangovers, too. It's all part of being old enough to drink but too young to know better, and no album we've heard this year better captures the anxious blues and bibulous bliss of life in one's 20s than... More >>
• Best Song
  "Sister Smoke," the Pomonas
  Global warming is on, and it's only getting hotter. That's why "Sister Smoke," by Lawrence's the Pomonas, is a perfect anthem for our times. Listening to this song is like dancing, shirtless and sweaty with smoke-filled lungs and a can of Schlitz in hand, to a stereo blasting Cornershop and the... More >>
• Best Sexy Musician
  Megan Birdsall
  Whoever invented the phrase homina homina homina had birds like Megan Birdsall in mind. When this gorgeous, 28-year-old local jazz diva parts her red lips and sends forth a volley of sweet, soulful, swinging tones into the smoky nightclub air, you'll wish you were hearing not deep, Ella... More >>
• Best Dressed Musician
  Kristen May
  Kristen May would look gorgeous no matter what she was wearing. With her searching brown eyes and petite, feminine face, the frontwoman for Vedera is a classic beauty. But the fact that she knows how to dress completes the pretty package. May can go vintage chic in high-waisted, skinny-leg... More >>
• Best Musician Facial Hair
  Christopher Crisci
  At an Appleseed Cast or an Old Canes show, your eyes will be drawn to the olive countenance of an obviously wise frontman. How will you know that Christopher Crisci is wise? Why, he's got the beard to prove it! Silver hair streaks down from both of his temples, but the dense fuzz is pure black... More >>
• Best Band Aid (1 Comment)
  Rudolph Wohlgemuth
  When it comes to designing posters, T-shirts, album covers and more for his best friends' band, Rudolph Wohlgemuth — Rudy for short — can't fail. The tall, dark and handsome 25-year-old devil of a graphic designer comes to just about every Super Black Market show. Look for the guy... More >>
• Best Sidemen
  Rob and Ryan Pope
  Making up the kind of rhythm section frontmen dream about, Pope brothers Rob (bass) and Ryan (drums) powered the Get Up Kids to indie-rock fame from 1994 to 2005. Sometimes separately, sometimes together, the Popes have brought the beats and low lines to local giants White Whale, Koufax, the New... More >>
• Best Bassist
  Jeff Harshbarger
  Jeff Harshbarger, the go-to man for bass-ism in Kansas City, is everywhere. Over here, he's playing jazz with Mark Southerland at the Record Bar. Over there, he's getting under the bop with the Mark Lowrey Trio. Across town, he's host at an open jam at the Blue Room. Out in Lawrence, he's... More >>
• Best Hip-Hop DJ
  DJ Ataxic (Bryan Fisk) djataxic.com
  "I am not a jukebox," DJ Ataxic reminds readers on his blog. He need not remind his audiences of that fact, because his lively mixes and mashups are wonderfully human. "Shout" by Tears for Fears overlaps with Biggie's "Goin' Back to Cali," for example. When not mashing classic hip-hop with rock,... More >>
• Best Club DJ
  DJ Shad
  Will Bernel is a born DJ. If you don't believe, ask the kids at the Ing Roller Rink in Rockford, Illinois, where Bernel began his spinning career at the age of 15. Now calling himself DJ Shad (say shod), Bernel has run roughshod over the scene, riding high with a fluency in things both esoteric... More >>
• Best MC
  Approach
  Approach built his local fanbase and reputation as a live exciter with music funkier than that to-go box of pork lo mein you left in the backseat of your car. His 2006 CD, The Nu, mixed live by DJ Sku — with whom Approach has enjoyed a marriage made in hip-hop heaven the past few years... More >>
• Best Band (1 Comment)
  The Republic Tigers
  Led by Kenn Jankowski, former guitarist for the Golden Republic, the Republic Tigers came onto the scene in the middle of last year with ravishingly gorgeous, electronic-dreaming anthems that held people in awe from the start. Even as the six-piece (now down to five) struggled to find its... More >>