Author: Brian McTavish
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Cool Tools
As the current sex symbol of cool tools, 3D printers easily attract ogling eyes by producing a virtually endless variety of objects seemingly out of thin air. It almost makes you feel sorry for the robots and other gadgets operating at the heady confluence of art and science — many of them accessible to the public, others well out of the spotlight — that also serve Kansas City’s cutting-edge tool scene.
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The Job: Joseph Brandwein
By his own estimation, Joseph Brandwein has tuned pianos for virtually every major concert pianist who’s performed in Kansas City over the last 40 years. But he refuses to name-drop. “I’m strictly low-key,” Brandwein says. “I don’t need the praise. I don’t need more business. I just do what I do.”
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Robert Stewart: Leading Man of Letters
What is the written word really worth? Only everything you can put into it. So goes the ardent ethos of probing poet and essayist Robert Stewart, veteran editor of “New Letters” magazine at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and founder of the Midwest Poets Series at Rockhurst University. Stewart’s credentials make him a high-profile player in the Kansas City literary community.
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Quixotic Scores a Hit with Dazzling Digital Projections
When is a far-out dance company far more than a far-out dance company? When it’s Kansas City’s Quixotic. The outer reaches of artistic possibility were never more palpable for Quixotic’s co-founder and creative director Anthony Magliano than in February 2016, when he and his multi-talented group of mind-blowers projected a landmark mini-movie on two sides of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.
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Tales from the Pit
For Ramona Pansegrau, music director of the Kansas City Ballet, there’s nothing like being in the orchestra pit conducting a Christmastime performance of The Nutcracker and being touched by the audience’s reaction. “One time, a little girl came down and started petting my hair in the middle of Nutcracker, Pansegrau drolly recollects.
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Nostalgia Trip
Say what you will about the interstate system, the most fabled thoroughfare in American history remains Route 66, which in 1938 became the world’s first mega-highway paved end to end. Wending from Chicago to Santa Monica, Calif., the 2,448-mile, two-lane highway carried countless travelers before being decommissioned by the federal government in 1985.
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Road Show
Most Americans are too young to remember the discouraging roads that confronted long-distance travelers before President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act, enabling the creation of the U.S. Interstate Highway System in 1956. Sixty years later, the virtually completed system’s 47,500 miles of interconnected divided highways continues to promote safety and expediency for motorists while maintaining a vital impact on the nation’s way of life.