The Pitch: December 2017

December 2017 I Free I PITcH.cOm

The Wish Issue

You are here — so here’s what to eat, drink and give (and who needs giving) this season.

pitch.com | december 2017 | the pitch

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the pitch | december 2017 | pitch.com

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Contents

the pitch

Editor Scott Wilson Associate Editor David Hudnall Proofreader Brent Shepherd Contributing Writers Tracy Abeln, Traci Angel, Liz Cook, Karen Dillon, April Fleming, Natalie Gallagher, Deborah Hirsch, Ron Knox, Larry Kopitnik, Angela Lutz, Dan Lybarger, David Martin, Eric Melin, Annie Raab, Aaron Rhodes, Barbara Shelly, Nick Spacek, Lucas Wetzel Art Director Julie Whitty Contributing Photographers Zach Bauman, Chase Castor, Jennifer Wetzel Graphic Designers Amy Gomoljak, Abbie Leali, Liz Loewenstein, Melanie Mays Publisher Amy Mularski Director of Marketing and Operations Jason Dockery Senior Classifieds & Multimedia Specialist Steven Suarez Multimedia Specialists Jada Escue, Becky Losey Office Administrator and Marketing Coordinator Andrew Miller

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Chief Executive Officer Chris Ferrell Chief Financial Officer Bob Mahoney Chief Operating Officer Blair Johnson Director of Human Resources Becky Turner Executive Vice President Mark Bartel Vice President of Content/Communication Patrick Rains Vice President of Production Operations Curt Pordes Creative Director Heather Pierce

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copyright

The contents of The Pitch are Copyright 2017 by KC Communications, LLC. No portion may be reproduced in whole or in part by any means without the express written permission of the publisher.

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QuEStiOnnAiRE

Jeff Durbin Blooom’s software-engineering director is “a little obsessed” with trying to automate his home.

By DAviD MARtin

6

nEWS

Brick by Brick Historic Kansas City’s roll of endangered buildings is a preservationist’s wish list.

By tRAci Angel

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POlitiCS

Over the Clifford Frank White’s chief of staff is helping his boss — but what about Jackson County?

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StREEtSiDE

Whine Flight Uncorking your inner musician at Drunkin Fiddles

Facing the Future The Kemper’s thrilling show of Outwin portraits holds up a timely mirror.

Riding High What can a double-decker bus tour tell us about Kansas City?

By AngelA lutz

By Annie RAAB

By DAviD huDnAll

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By BARBARA Shelly

i Will DARE

SHOP GiRl

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PROFilE

All i Want for Christmas is a tamale Unexpectedly wrapped up in the Lenexa Public Market

Breaking through James “SugEasy” Singleton teaches a new generation of hip-hop dancers.

By AngelA lutz

By JennifeR Wetzel

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18

FEAtuRE

A Prairie Home Resistance In Kansas, the oil and gas industry has long operated with impunity. Now, as it marches through the Flint Hills into Douglas County, fights lay ahead.

By DAviD huDnAll

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COVER StORy

Wishes: Eat, gift and bee merry Feeding holiday appetites, KC style, and filling worthy stockings

ARt

COnCERt CAlEnDAR

CAFé

Amendment needed Repeal 18th pours style and ambition into the Northland but could use a little something more.

By liz cook

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On tAP

On, Blitzen Building a foolproof KC sixer leaves me drunk on the possibilities.

By liz cook

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islands in the Stream This is no time to unplug your Blu-ray player.

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On tHE COVER

Artist Mario Zucca’s map is available as a print at Raygun and from kcmomap.com pitch.com | december 2017 | the pitch

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questionnaire

Jeff Durbin

Director of engineering at Blooom Twitter handle: @Blooominc (my best work is there) Hometown: Olathe Current neighborhood: Weatherby Lake

drink downtown, and it would be great if it was easier to get downtown and the streetcar continued on to other districts.

“As a kid, I wanted to be ...” An Olympic gymnast. Bart Conner was my idol.

What I do (in 140 characters or less): I lead Blooom’s software and technology team. We build software that will (hopefully) help millions of people retire sooner.

“In five years, I’ll be ...” Hopefully a dad.

What’s your addiction? I’m a little obsessed with trying to automate my house.

My wife says I’ve gone a little overboard, but it’s fun. We recently moved, so I’m looking forward to starting from scratch and playing with some of the new stuff that has come out.

“I’ve been known to binge watch ...”

HBO. I’m a definitely a sucker for Silicon Valley and Game of Thrones.

What’s your game? Life. Intertwining work and play. I absolutely love what I do, so I’ve always got work on the brain. But I make it a point to travel with family and friends and maybe enjoy a beverage along the way.

What’s your drink? I’m not too picky on my beverage as long the company and/ or scenery is good. Bourbon is high on my list lately. Got to visit some distilleries in Louisville, Kentucky, and there is such great history, tradition and creativity in the process. Beer: Deschutes Brewery’s Mirror Pond Pale Ale. (Sorry, Boulevard.) Wine: Not terribly picky, but probably a red, and preferably at a winery.

Where’s dinner? The Majestic Restaurant.

Hard to beat steaks and live jazz in Kansas City.

What’s on your KC postcard? I love Mission. It’s where I bought my first house, and it was the perfect location. Great neighbors in a safe environment and close to everything in KC. More often than not, we’d just hop to the shops, restaurants and bars on Johnson Drive. Great small-town feel in a bigger city.

Finish these sentences. “Kansas City got it right when ...” They pulled in Google Fiber, creating national recognition for the local startup scene and spawning great communities for entrepreneurship, like Kansas City Startup Village and the Kansas City Startup Foundation.

“Kansas City needs ...” A better publictransportation option. We love to eat and

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“I always laugh at ...” The Office and Scrubs.

“I can’t stop listening to ...” Radio: Dana & Parks on 98.1 KMBZ. Podcast: TED Radio Hour.

“My dream concert lineup is ...” I’m thinking Bush, Live, OAR and Dave Matthews. That’d be pretty fun.

“I just read ...” Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth,

by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. I really enjoyed it.

days playing multiplayer computer games like Counterstrike and WarCraft.

My dating triumph/tragedy: The first time my wife brought me to her hometown, I sat through her parents’ glass coffee table and ended up in the emergency room.

What’s your hidden talent? Backflips.

Love to bust them out.

What’s your guiltiest pleasure?

Bourbon. I love to try new ones, especially if there is a story behind it.

The best advice I ever got: Get shit done.

Measure it.

Worst advice? Clean your plate.

My sidekick? My wife, Johnna.

What is your spirit animal? A monkey.

I’ve always loved to climb on things. That’s why Mom put me in gymnastics.

Who (or what) is your nemesis?

Chinese food or the gym What’s your greatest struggle right now? Growing Blooom. I love the potential impact Blooom can make in the financial world, but we still have lots of work to do to get there.

“I’m a lIttle oBsesseD wIth tryIng to automate my house.”

My brush with fame: I was a Kansas City Star Scholar-Athlete of the Year. I was on the front page of the paper and threw out the first pitch at a Royals game. In 2012, I got to meet and have dinner with future American League MVP Mike Trout. That was awesome.

My soapbox: Sometimes you have to get out of the way and let people do awesome things.

What was the last thing you had to apologize for? Switching my wife to Android phones Who’s sorry now? Still me My recent triumph: Making the leap to Blooom. I had been at Netchemia/ PeopleAdmin for 11 years. It was a big jump, but loving what we are doing here.

My favorite toy as a child: Nerf toys: Loved to build forts and duke it out with my friends. Computers: My friends and I would pack up our computers and monitors and set up in each other’s basements for

the pitch | december 2017 | pitch.com

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feature

Brick by Brick

UMKC’s Epperson might yet find a way back to good use.

Photo by Jennifer Wetzel

historic Kansas City’s roll of endangered buildings is a preservationist’s wish list.

by Traci angel

Kansas City’s past — as cowtown and cattle hub, as commercial force, as recession survivor — is readily visible in its buildings. But what about KC’s future? Cranes dot the horizon as luxury rentals rise, but viable empty properties, some of them storied, await their next chapters, or else obliteration.

Preventing the destruction of unique or otherwise worthwhile structures is central to Historic Kansas City’s mission. The preservation advocacy group each year compiles an endangered list, naming the buildings that should be considered for renewal but instead risk the wrecking ball.

“Every community has its own identity and architecture,” says Lisa Briscoe, Historic Kansas City’s executive director. “The purpose of the endangered list is to draw attention to the plight [of buildings at risk] and attract new interest by new owners, the neighborhood and others to assist us and galvanize local community support.”

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The organization doesn’t have deep pockets or an especially strident voice, but Briscoe can claim some recent success stories, including the sparing of “Nelsonhood,” where historic homes may have been sacrificed to transform the area around the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art into a larger arts district. A plan is now in place to preserve those homes, she says.

Preservation victories also came to repurpose Kemper Arena and add life to the ACME Cleansing Company building, and other projects are waiting for a plan to be announced or finalized.

Lauren Manning, a local historic preservation planner who is part of Young Preservationists KC, suggests using the phrase “the greenest building is the one already built” when thinking about wishes for development.

She can list several properties in the midtown area just needing some care.

“The buildings along and east of Troost have enormous potential,” she says. “There’s

a multistory apartment building at 39th and Main that has sat deteriorating.”

But there are no guarantees, so consider this list, drawn from HKC’s priorities, a kind of civic wish list for those of us who hope some of the area’s most interesting structures will see revival.

Sauer Castle

935 Shawnee Road Kansas City, Kansas

Epperson Hall Photo by traCi angel

Once you see Sauer Castle, on a high hill overlooking the Kaw River Valley, you don’t forget it. Built in 1872 by businessman Anton Sauer, the castle is legendary to the area teenagers who have driven by it, hoping to glimpse the ghosts that local lore insists haunt the place. It’s empty these days, scarred by generations of trespassers and vandals and unassisted by out-of-town owner Carl Lopp, a descendent of the Sauer family. Lopp started

the pitch | december 2017 | pitch.com

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feature

St. John has seen better days.

Photo by Jennifer Wetzel

No ghosts at Sauer Castle — in the daylight, anyway.

Photo by Jennifer Wetzel

restoring it 30 years ago but has seemingly abandoned those efforts.

Two years ago, Jason Simmons started a social media group to share memories of Sauer Castle. The idea was to raise awareness of the place; maybe a swell of attention would spark serious restoration. Now 6,800 people are members, and the site includes historic facts, photos and comments about possible futures for the building.

“The effort to save, restore Sauer Castle is mainly in the hands of the owner, along with the city and historical societies’ hands, if they can even do anything,” Simmons says.

“Nobody is able to force the property owner to restore the castle except for himself, the city and historical societies. I feel my hands are tied. All I can do with the help of the group is to bring attention to its neglect and the city as well as other societies for not enforcing their codes, by sharing videos and pictures for comparisons.”

St. John the Divine

2511 Metropolitan Avenue Kansas City, Kansas This brick church was built in the late 1880s and sold to the Catholic diocese 50 years later, having established its place in the

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town’s historic Mexican-American neighborhood of Argentine. But as church attendance dwindled in the 1990s, the structure fell to neglect. Wyandotte County officials threatened demolition, and the owner, St. John the Divine Community Art & Education Center Inc., faces a challenge in moving forward.

“We are currently exploring funding and development options but unfortunately have a high hill to climb, as our efforts were effectively thwarted for over five years by the demolition order,” says Daniel Serda, board secretary for the center.

Serda goes on: “That threat conveniently ignores the fact that, as a condition of the federal Historic Preservation Fund grant that underwrote the stabilization work — which was authorized by unanimous vote of the Unified Government Commission — a 10-year preservation easement was filed by the Kansas State Historic Preservation Office that requires our organization to take affirmative steps to both preserve and protect the building against further threats of demolition.”

Because of this struggle, the building is on the endangered list, Briscoe, of Historic Kansas City, says. “And that really is the purpose of the list — to find champions who also bring attention to just how much hard work they are up against,” she says.

MGM Building

“the greenest building is the one already built.”

Lauren Manning

220 West 18th Street Built in 1930, the MGM served as a distribution point for Hollywood to send its features across the country. The building is part of what once was known as Film Row, a filmindustry hub in what’s now the Crossroads District. All the big studios — United Artists, MGM, 20th Century Fox, Paramount — had spots there, at a time when they also owned movie theaters. Today, the area lacks historic markers.

Like other buildings on this list, the MGM suffers from neglect. But neighbors and developers have expressed interest in the property. “We will be re-evaluating to see to what degree it is threatened,” Briscoe says, noting that the Crossroads has undergone much restoration and that the area’s boom might make the building somewhat safer.

the pitch | december 2017 | pitch.com

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Knickerbocker apartments

If you wander by Epperson House, on the University of Missouri–Kansas City campus, and see the boarded windows and the tightly shuttered doors, you wonder: Wouldn’t this make a good alumni center or a community events venue?

Well, you’re not alone. And there is a plan, but Briscoe can’t discuss it yet.

The Tudor-Gothic structure was completed in 1923 and has secret passageways and an organ loft, among other architectural touches.

It was the private residence of Uriah Epperson and his wife, along with an adult “adopted” daughter. Over the years, it became known for mysterious appearances and what some claim are paranormal experiences. It was donated to UMKC and served most recently as offices for the architecture department.

“There are efforts, but I can’t talk about it,” Briscoe says. The property has been a community concern and attracted enough attention that a plan may be announced soon, she says.

Officials from UMKC did not return messages requesting comment.

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Wheatley Providence is historic for Kansas City’s black community. It was dedicated in 1918 and was the first hospital here to train black doctors and nurses. The property eventually was abandoned and is now geographically challenged in restoration efforts, according to Briscoe, because it lies halfway between the growing Crossroads and 18th and Vine districts.

The Country Club Plaza

“This still remains on the list because of the continued development in and around it,” Briscoe says. Preservationist groups have fought development attempts in recent years, but the real estate is so broadly valuable that such calls for change will always be a factor.

the pitch | december 2017 | pitch.com

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politics

Over the Clifford

BarBara Shelly

Frank White’s chief of staff is helping his boss — but what about Jackson County? by barbara Shelly

Always a gritty spectacle, Jackson County government has descended into exhausting ugliness.

The legislature is feuding with the county executive. Employees report tanking morale.

The county-run jail is a house of horrors.

Property assessments are screwed up. And nervous insiders speculate that the FBI’s yearslong fascination with county contracts may be building toward indictment.

A scapegoat is in order here. But who?

Many of the problems, as well as the ongoing FBI probe, took root while Mike Sanders was county executive. But Sanders has taken shelter as a well-paid lawyer in a politically connected firm. And though he still occasionally works his old county contacts for deals that would benefit his friends and further pet projects, he is out of the line of fire for the moment.

Sanders’ replacement, Frank White Jr., is technically in charge. White was clearly more adroit at fielding ground balls as the legendary Kansas City Royals second baseman in the 1970s and ’80s than he is at making executive decisions. Under pressure to do something about the appalling jail, for example, he recently announced the formation of an unwieldy task force to take another look at a well-examined problem.

Still, White remains popular with the public, and legislators and others know enough not to make him their punching bag. But he has conveniently provided his critics with someone to blame for the spiraling dysfunction in Jackson County.

That would be his 35-year-old chief of staff, Caleb Clifford. Since stepping up as White’s right-hand man in the spring of 2016, Clifford

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has managed to strike fear in the hearts of some county employees, alienate nearly every legislator and establish himself — at least in theory — as a stumbling block to progress.

“You know I can’t work with your chief of staff. I’ve said that numerous times,” legislator Crystal Williams told White during a public meeting in mid-November, when lawmakers and the county executive lobbed frustrations back and forth.

Williams and others told White he was listening to the wrong person and receiving bad advice. Legislator Garry Baker said employees were “walking on eggshells.” White disagreed, but legislator Denny Waits backed up Baker. “I can tell you they are,” he said.

“I know people have been threatened with being fired.”

When I phoned current and former county employees, people described Clifford as a manipulator who has walled off channels of communication to ensure that information to and from the county executive travels through him. Whereas previous chiefs of staff had worked down the hall, Clifford turned a conference room next to White’s office into his work space, allowing him to sit sentry over any comings and goings. He has canceled some regular staff meetings and discourages chitchat among staffers. He thrives on closed-door meetings with no record of what took place.

“I tried to take notes, in case he would say, ‘I never said that,’ ” said a staffer who left county government in the past year. Like others I talked to, the former staffer asked for anonymity, calling Clifford “a mean, vindictive guy.”

“Caleb would definitely come after me,” a current employee said. “He’s very Trump-like.

He is trying to build an organization based on loyalty. You can by no means disagree with his viewpoint.”

So I admit feeling some surprise when Clifford agreed to meet with me in midNovember. He told me yes, he knows he’s a lightning rod, but a chief of staff sometimes has to take on that role.

“I think I get much too much credit for the decisions and positions of the county executive,” he said. “He is a very principled person.

He is a very passionate person. He selects his positions and he advocates very strongly for them. He’s been kind enough to allow me to have input.”

Clifford was working as an assistant Jackson County prosecutor, he told me, when he first encountered White. Clifford monitored governmental affairs for the office. He and Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker met with White as the ex-Royal was considering a run for county legislator.

After they chatted, Clifford told me, he handed White his business card and figured that would be it. But White called him that same day. “He had questions about everything,” Clifford said. “His curiosity and passion for not just wanting to be a name surprised me, and made me want to help him.

He was in it for absolutely the right reasons.”

White easily won election as county legislator in November 2014. About a year later, Sanders unexpectedly resigned as county executive, and legislators chose White to fill the post through 2016. In November of that year, he won a nearly uncontested election to serve the remaining two years in Sanders’ term.

It’s been pretty much downhill ever since.

I told Clifford about some of the gripes about his management style, including charges that he is isolating the county executive.

“It’s untrue, is the basic answer,” he answered, though he acknowledged an element of accuracy. “Depending on the issue and depending on the wishes of the county executive, it is my responsibility to assist him in reviewing information, meeting with those who have opinions and ideas, and relaying them. This is an organization of 1,000 employees. And quite frankly, the county executive is a celebrity. There has to be some structure.”

A former employee told me that Clifford discourages the use of emails for all but the most mundane business, warning the staff that emails are “discoverable” should a lawsuit materialize. That often forces staffers to deliver printouts to his office — an inefficient mode of communication if one has to take the creaky elevators in the downtown courthouse.

When I mentioned this to Clifford, he looked flummoxed, but then laughed. “I think all of us use emails all the time,” he said. Maybe so. But people who worked with Clifford in the prosecutor’s office remember that he cautioned against being too free with emails there, too. They also remember him as

somewhat devious and prone to exaggerate his importance in the office.

In the hour or so that we talked, in a courthouse conference room, Clifford mostly said all the right things. He spoke about White’s hesitation to commit to building a larger jail facility without a discussion about slowing down the incarceration of people of color.

He said a plan was in place for dealing with problems in the assessments of commercial properties. He told me that his greatest satisfaction in the job has come from helping hold down healthcare premiums for county employees, and from seeking raises for lowpaid workers.

Clifford is smart and politically savvy.

If I had talked to him in isolation, without the cacophony of complaints as a backdrop, I would have come away thinking him a good wingman for White, a political neophyte.

But that would be a minority opinion. “Although I think that Frank White cares deeply about the associates of the county, there appear to be barriers to us moving forward,” Williams, one of the few legislators who has voted in White’s favor on contentious personnel issues, told me. “It seems to me that this is an opportunity for the county executive to bring in new blood and build a team intent on serving the people of the county, and I don’t see that happening.”

Almost no one does. White is notoriously prideful — witness his years-long estrangement from the Kansas City Royals. He’s not going to admit to making a mistake with perhaps his most important hire.

And maybe, from his perspective, he hasn’t. Clifford may care about power, but he doesn’t seem to give much thought to popularity. He’ll gladly earn $140,000 a year to take the heat from legislators and an entrenched county bureaucracy while White smiles and does meet-and-greets at county functions.

A lot of people aspire to make the county executive’s job miserable enough to discourage White from running for a full, four-year term next November. Legislators such as Waits and Dan Tarwater — who play the role of career politician to the hilt — might like to clear the way for themselves to run the county.

People hooked up to Sanders’ old gravy train of contracts would love to get that pipeline flowing again. Reformers cling to the hope that someone like Peters Baker, the county prosecutor, will take the job and actually professionalize county government.

But Jackson County voters love Frank White. And though the county executive’s job has cut into his golfing time, he’s done nothing so far to suggest he’ll relinquish his $145,000 salary and the perks and prestige that come with the job.

Same with Clifford. “I am very fortunate to have the position that I have, and quite frankly I hope to stay in this position for some time to come,” he told me. “I hope I’m an asset for the county executive.”

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Riding High

Bethanie Schemel, co-owner of Kansas City Double Decker Tours

What can a double-decker bus tour tell us about Kansas city?

Zach Bauman

by DaviD HuDnall

“A word you’ll hear me say a lot today is condos,” said my tour guide, Troy, as we sailed past the Western Auto building on Grand, atop a double-decker bus.

What a coincidence: I had been talking about condos just hours before. Or maybe I am just always talking about condos these days. Luxury housing is sprouting up everywhere in this city. It bothers me. Maybe, as some smart people tell me, this influx of new housing will satisfy the market, make apartments less scarce, help stabilize rising rent prices across the city. Maybe. But when I stare at these boxy buildings and envision the 550-square-foot rooms inside them, renting for $1,700 a month, all I can think is that the best thing about Kansas City — that it’s cheap to live here — is slipping away before my eyes.

I got a short Americano in the Crossroads the other day and it was three dollars and some amount of cents. Do you know what that means? That means my coffee cost $5. I give the barista a dollar, and who knows what happens to that loose change. It’s never in the car when I need money to park. Five dollars!

Call me Andy Rooney, but you know it’s true. I was hardly alone at the brewery the

other night, where the cheapest beer was $8 and it came in a 10-ounce glass. Were some of you also wondering when you started getting less beer for more money? Do you really like this Whole Foods–ification of your city?

The fact that there are condos under construction everywhere is not unrelated to the fact that people are now apparently willing to pay $33 to ride around Kansas City on a bus and listen to a man such as Troy talk about buildings and local history. Not only do people want to live here now — they also want to visit here. Take it from Bethanie Schemel, co-owner (along with her husband, Karl) of Kansas City Double Decker Tours.

“We started out in 2012 doing these barbecue tours,” Schemel says. “We’d take a passenger bus to Bryant’s, Gates, LC’s, Danny Edwards, all that. And in between stops — what we call ‘digestion time’ — we noticed that people seemed really interested in the Plaza, UMKC, the Nelson-Atkins, Westport, the World War I museum. So we decided to expand and start offering guided sightseeing tours.”

The Schemels bought a double-decker bus from a Chicago tour company whose owner

“I thInK locals and people Who greW up here are surprIsed When they see the Bus.” bethanie Schemel

was retiring. (The vehicle had seen action in New York and, before that, in London.)

Today, KC Double Decker Tours owns two such buses and two trolleys. In addition to the barbecue tours, the company also runs at least four sightseeing tours, six days a week. And it’s not the only tour-bus company in town — there’s also Kansas City Fun Tours. But for now, it’s the only one that offers hop-on, hopoff service across its eight stops: Crown Center, Power & Light, the River Market, Boulevard Brewing Company, the National World War I Museum and Memorial, Westport, the Plaza, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. “I think locals and people who grew up here are surprised when they see the bus going around the Plaza and downtown or wherever,” Bethanie Schemel says. “But people from out of town, I think they expect to be able to do a tour. I’ve been in KC for 11 years, and my husband for 13 years. We’ve watched it grow into this destination type of place. So we’re not that surprised there’s demand for it.”

Demand was not great the day I rode the bus. My dude Troy didn’t need his microphone for the first leg of the route; I was the only person taking in the sights. (This was not pitch.com | december 2017 | the pitch

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entirely unexpected: It was a cloudy October Thursday. Later in the week, I’d see the bus, mostly full, cruising Main Street.)

Troy used to lead tours at Walt Disney World and in the Florida Keys, but he has KC roots and moved back here recently. He works part time as a stage manager for theater productions, does a bit of acting, and lately spends a couple of days a week standing atop a double-decker bus talking about Kansas City.

He’s in his late 40s, actor-fit, and favors sunglasses and a white-and-black fitted KC cap.

I could see a tattoo peeking out from under his polo shirt.

At Power & Light, six middle-aged women boarded the bus, and Troy retreated to the back, plugged in the microphone, and commenced the full treatment.

“Where are you all from?” I asked the ladies.

“Wisconsin,” one of them told me.

“Oh? Where in Wisconsin?”

“Near Milwaukee,” another said, avoiding eye contact. “Hey, Karen, you still got my Chapstick?”

They seemed reluctant to engage the man in his 30s sitting alone at the front of the tour bus. In the silence, I considered the possibility that these unfriendly Wisconsinites were among the 53 percent of white women who tipped the election for Trump.

I wondered this again when the bus stopped at the Nelson and Troy pointed out the headless statues by Magdalena Abakanowicz on the museum’s lawn. Troy identified Abakanowicz as a Polish sculptor and said the headless bodies she’d created were open to interpretation. (For his part, he added, they spoke to a lack of individualism in modern life.)

“Sounds like she’s got issues,” one of the Wisconsin ladies said of Abakanowicz.

“Daddy issues,” another of them said.

Together, they laughed a dumb, nasty laugh of a kind Abakanowicz surely had in mind when she cast her bronze. It’s here that I’ll submit my longstanding belief that Midwesterners are not nearly as nice as our reputation suggests.

As Troy said at the outset, condos were indeed an inescapable component of the tour. So much of our history is now just housing. The old federal courthouse on Grand is now the Courthouse Lofts. Many buildings in the Garment District — which Troy told us was once second only to New York in terms of clothing production — have been converted into lofts. The Western Auto Building (originally built for Coca-Cola): lofts. All these buildings that were once home to businesses that provided fair wages and pensions for workers are now condos for the upper-middle class, or cafés staffed by overeducated employees with crushing student-loan debt, unprotected by unions, with no chance for retirement. That the zombies of late capitalism have invaded Kansas City and are in the process of mak-

ing this quiet place unlivable for the average person is horrifying. We should be enacting policies aimed at making life easier for ordinary Kansas Citians. Instead, we give massive tax breaks to developers, ignore our failing schools, and build a streetcar for people lucky enough to work or live along the increasingly expensive route along which it travels. And for tourists. Don’t forget the tourists.

Maybe it is starting to sound as though I didn’t enjoy the tour. Guess what? I loved the tour! It felt great to sit up high and roll through the city and listen to someone talk without the responsibility of having to respond. Things I learned: ‌•‌ Harry‌S.‌Truman‌worked‌at‌The Kansas City Star? In the mailroom for two weeks, apparently, but I did not know this. Subsequent Googling revealed that Truman once wrote, “If the Star is at all mentioned in history, it will be because the President of the U.S. worked there for a few weeks in 1901.” Trumpian! ‌•‌ During‌the‌height‌of‌Prohibition,‌there‌ were 50 jazz clubs on 12th Street alone.

Related: The tour did not go to 18th and Vine, which seemed like a significant oversight to me. Schemel later told me that it’s hard to access the area on a tall bus due to a variety of issues with trees and overpasses.

Getting there is on her to-do list. ‌•‌ Mobsters‌bombed‌the‌hell‌out‌of‌the‌River‌ Market — then called the River Quay — back in the 1970s. Only when they all died off or went to prison did it start to become the cutesy place it is today. ‌•‌ Because‌of‌all‌the‌critters‌that‌roamed‌near‌ the banks of the Missouri River, Rabbit Run and Possum Trot were also in consideration when Kansas City was named. I knew about the latter, but had never heard the former. Some cursory web research has found no hits on Rabbit Run, but Troy said it, and I trust Troy. ‌•‌ Former‌political‌boss‌Tom‌Pendergast‌kept‌ an office above what is now the Majestic Restaurant. Today, it’s a smoky-ass cigar room. ‌•‌ As‌we‌approached‌the‌Country‌Club‌Plaza,‌ Troy referred to J.C. Nichols several times as a “visionary.” I was on good behavior, so I did not raise my hand and correct the record to reflect that Nichols’ vision included wildly racist housing covenants that prevented blacks from owning property in the many neighborhoods he developed — a disgusting policy whose aftereffects in some ways continue to define our segregated metro.

At one point, we passed Royal Liquors, on Southwest Boulevard. A bum slouched against the wall out front yelled at the bus: “Hey!” It was more like a warning than a greeting.

There was menace in it. I looked back at the ladies. They seemed unnerved. This pleased me. That’s what I’m talking about, I thought.

There’s the city I love.

the pitch | december 2017 | pitch.com

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T IC K E TS AR E S E LLI N G FAST!

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James “Sugeasy” Singleton teaches a new generation of hip-hop dancers.

by Jennifer Wetzel

“Music, rhythm and dance have been strong elements in my life since early childhood, when my family and I would listen to records all day long.” So says James Singleton when The Pitch asks him what he does and how he came to do it. He may be understating things a little, though. To watch SugEasy — this is what everybody calls Singleton, and the name suits him — move, to see him dance and lead dance students in any of the decidedly unslick but compelling videos on his YouTube channel, is to see just how strong those elements have turned out to be for him.

Singleton’s business, Translation in Movement, means to pass music, rhythm and dance along to others, especially young people, with emphasis on where those elements intersect with hip-hop culture. When SugEasy is your teacher, your ABCs start with B, for breaking and beat-boxing. Also: DJing, MCing, graffiti writing. Also, he adds, “street knowledge.”

derstand how they are moving to the music they’re hearing in their earbuds, their car, their studio or stage or wherever they may be.

My classes formulate dancers that can listen to any song or genre and tell their own story with their bodies. Learning from me will give you freedom and confidence, plus you will know the history of hip-hop culture and the reasons we do what we do. This releases you from just learning a set of routines with no meaning or musicality.

Jennifer Wetzel

Where do you dance?

The fourth Saturday of every month, at the Ship, I get to hear the legendary JocMax and DJ Max play funky soul that leads into an early house groove to keep your body rockin’ all night long.

The Pitch: What do you do?

SugEasy: I am a dancer, a dance teacher, an advocate for the positivity of authentic hiphop culture, and a choreographer.

Records or streaming?

My sources are 45s and 12-inch records — I DJ and love to spin music. But I also have a love-hate with Spotify because it’s an easy place to come across fresh artists with dope new tracks. I listen to all types of music from any genre — as long as it makes my head nod.

What are your hip-hop classes and workshops like?

My classes are not based on students coming in to learn routines or a lot of steps. I teach the foundations of dance and help people un-

Whom would you love to dance with or for?

Right now I love to dance with my daughters and with my crew, Souls of Sole. And I always have fun in the end-of-class cypher

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Singleton leading students at Crescendo Conservatory in Overland Park

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You Belong At...

with my dance students. Beyond that, I truly enjoy sharing my love of dance with specialneeds students and to see their faces light up with the joy of movement. Plus, I like to rep my city by getting busy on the floor at nationwide jams and events.

Onstage, if I had to pick someone, it would be Justin Timberlake. After performing, dancing and/or sharing the stage with JT, I could retire.

SugEasy’s Essential Tracks “It’s a New Day,” “Funky Drummer,” James Brown “Cookin on 3 Burners,” Cressy St. Breakdown “93 ’til Infinity,” Soul Mischief “Protect Ya Neck,” Wu-Tang Clan “Waitin’ for the DJ,” Talib Kweli “Alone at Last With Amerie,” Elaquent “Best You Got,” Chris McClenney “Be Quiet,” Falcons “Dancing on the Sun,” Seven Davis Jr. “Think Twice (Henrik Schwarz Remix),” the Detroit Experiment “We Are on the Move (Joey Negro Revival Mix),” Zo! featuring Erro & Phonte

Who are some hip-hop pioneers you’ve introduced to KC? Timothy “Poppin’ Pete” Solomon from the Electric Boogaloos; Steven “SugaPop” Daniels-Silva and Steffan “Mr. Wiggles” Clemente from the EBs and Rock Steady Crew; Anthony “YNot” Denaro from Rock Steady Crew; the pioneer of hip-hop Emilio “Buddha Stretch” Austin Jr. Buddha Stretch will be back in Kansas City in January 2018 with Elite Force Crew member Henry Link for a workshop.

Who is your mentor? Do you have protégés?

Buddha Stretch and Link are my hip-hop mentors. BBoy YNot for breaking, Mr. Wiggles and Poppin’ Pete for popping. And Sekou Heru is my house-dance mentor. Shout out to all the other elite dancers I have learned from and trained with. I can’t possibly list them all, but I appreciate all the knowledge and direction they have given me.

From my crew Souls of Sole, my protégés are Windy “BGirl Windarella” Farr and Brenden “DJCastILL” Castille. And I can’t forget my little youngsters Devin and Isaac — even though they are not crew yet, they’re coming up fast.

What is the future of dance?

The future of dance is actually to go back to the early origins of hip-hop culture. All these dance styles we teach now began as social dance forms, as ways to have fun on the floor and to dance for love, not for show or spectacle. We want students to simply love to move, to be able to freestyle and flow smoothly within the sounds around them.

A dancer should want to battle and be the best, yes, but a true advocate for our culture will stay at the jam to the end and rock the floor all night. The future is to return to the past and practice the original goals of the hip-hop movement: peace, love, unity and having fun.

SugEasy’s hip-hop dance classes meet at several studios in town, including an all-ages, all-levels Breaking class on Thursday nights at 360 Gym in Olathe. See translationinmovement.com or TranslationInMovement on Facebook, or email translationinmove ment@gmail.com.

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In Kansas, the oil and gas industry has long operated with impunity.

Now, as it marches through the Flint Hills into Douglas County, fights lay ahead.

by DaviD HuDnall

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“This doesn’t really have anything to do with your story,” Cindy Hoedel said, slowing her pickup truck — a 1990 red-and-white Ford XLT Lariat, outfitted with 10-ply heavyduty tires — to a halt on a gravel road near the Greenwood County line. “But, I mean, look at those wild mustangs. Aren’t they just beautiful?”

Hoedel gawked out the window to the north, where dozens of horses — white horses, tan horses, brown and spotted horses — roamed a fenced-in field. It was a chilly, cloudy afternoon in mid-November, and Hoedel took advantage of the travel break to pour hot coffee from an ancient-looking Thermos into its small steel cap. She took a sip and continued.

“They’re, like, the rock stars of horses.

They’re the Rolling Stones, you know? They’ve got these long, mangy tails and manes, and they’ll just stare you down. They’ve never been ridden, so they’re not intimidated by people.

Oh, my god, I just love them.”

Hoedel is 56, with an impressive mane of her own — dark, wavy — and blue eyes that bulge when she is stimulated by a topic, which is often. One does not strain to comprehend why she might feel kinship with a wild horse.

For 20 years, Hoedel worked as a writer and editor at The Kansas City Star. Toward the end of her tenure there, she favored assignments that took her far from the city: columns on roadside motels, stories about gravel bike races. By the time she was laid off, in September 2016, she had already moved to Matfield Green, a town of 113 people in the Flint Hills.

Out here, in central Kansas, Hoedel has not only swapped a condo view for the sight of chickens in the yard; she also has traded the passive and frequently lonely existence of a reporter for work that’s more collaborative and immediate.

“I was ready to move on to the next thing, and part of the next thing was, I wanted to participate in stuff that for years I was only able to write about,” Hoedel said. “Specifically, political and environmental activism.

And I hate that word, activism — that’s other people’s word. But, you know, just action.”

What energizes Hoedel these days is opposition to recent moves by the oil and gas industry in Kansas — specifically, the encroachment on parts of the state long unaffected by the harmful effects of drilling. In January of this year, Hoedel learned that a company called Quail Oil and Gas had applied for a permit to put a wastewater-injection well in the Flint Hills town of Diamond Springs, in Morris County.

Ten years ago, an application for a well permit in Morris County would have drawn no objections. Even three years ago, after man-made earthquakes began to hammer Oklahoma and south-central Kansas at unprecedented rates, it’s unlikely anyone in the Flint Hills would have cared too much.

Then Pawnee happened.

On September 3, 2016, a 5.8-magnitude

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earthquake rippled out from its epicenter in Pawnee, Oklahoma, and was felt as far away as San Antonio, Texas; Memphis, Tennessee; Fargo, North Dakota; and Maricopa County, Arizona. Kansas City was not spared; the quake caused a crack in the Wyandotte County Courthouse that spans from the roof down to the ground.

Despite being nearly 200 miles north of the epicenter, Flint Hills residents experienced an intense battering, according to Hoedel and others, of more than a minute.

Picture frames fell from walls, beds and chairs bounced around, and cracks were later found in home foundations. Before 2012, seismic activity was rare in this part of the country: Kansas averaged only one earthquake a year strong enough to feel. Then they started coming in droves: 115 in 2013 and 2014. Those were small rumbles, mostly, but now they seemed to be gaining strength. And there was an obvious culprit: wastewater-injection wells used by oil companies in the boomtowns of Oklahoma and the southern Kansas counties of Harper and Sumner.

Quail Oil sought a permit to inject as many as 5,000 barrels of wastewater a day deep into the ground in Diamond Springs.

Its proposed well lay atop a site where three geologic formations converge: the Bourbon Arch, the Nemaha Uplift, and the Humboldt Fault, which 150 years ago experienced the largest recorded earthquake in Kansas history.

The site is less than 100 miles from the Wolf Creek nuclear reactor, and 14 miles from the Tallgrass Prairie National Reserve. It’s also home to a spring, still in use, that has been renowned for the purity of its water since the days of the Santa Fe Trail.

“They called it Diamond Spring because the water is so clear and clean and delicious and sparkling,” Hoedel said. “And now this company wants to dump all this contaminated water into the ground nearby, using this process that we know causes earthquakes.”

In response, Hoedel and a few other likeminded souls in the community mobilized and formed a group called the Flint Hills Stewards. What was initially an effort to protect Morris County from the excesses of the oil and gas industry is gradually evolving into a larger effort across Kansas. It is a well-timed undertaking. The industry is on the move in Kansas, and, as the Flint Hills Stewards and others have quickly learned, almost nobody in the state is attempting to hold it accountable for its actions.

Kansas is less flat in real life than it is in the popular imagination. Yes, the journey from Lawrence to Colorado along Interstate 70 is so flat and monotonous as to be grueling. But Kansas is technically the seventh-flattest state in the union, behind Florida, Louisiana, Delaware and others. And nowhere in Kansas is the unexpected variance in topography more

apparent than in the Flint Hills, a verdant region (roughly 10,000 square miles, from above Manhattan down to the Oklahoma border) home to rocky hills, wildflowers and some of the last remaining tallgrass prairie in America.

After admiring the stallions, Hoedel and I passed Teterville, a 1920s oil town that’s now a ghost, notable for a Stonehenge-like monument that beckons travelers to the vistas that await at the end of the elevated, bumpy gravel road one must traverse to reach it. In November, the view was Texas-like in its vastness and dustiness. Come spring, I was assured, it would again be a prairie bouquet of green, yellow, blue and pink.

A few miles past Teterville, we arrived at a Greenwood County oil site where the Flint Hills Stewards have recently protested an injection-well permit application. I pointed at a well on the property and asked Hoedel if it was the well in question. She shook her head.

“That’s just a standard vertical-shaft oil well,” Hoedel said. “Nobody’s worried about those.”

The concern is over injection wells, which come in two varieties, grouped under the heading of Class II wells. The first are disposal wells, like the one in Diamond Springs.

These are for oil companies looking to get rid of the toxic fluids that are a byproduct of conventional drilling or hydraulic fracturing (also known as fracking). Dumping massive quantities of these fluids deep into the earth at high pressure can lubricate fault lines, causing them to slip and trigger earthquakes. The other kind of injection well — the kind that’s been proposed for the Greenwood County site — is known as an enhanced recovery well. These wells are used to dredge up hard-to-access reservoirs of oil that remain after conventional drilling has taken place at a site. This is accomplished by blasting toxic wastewater into shallow rock layers. Whereas disposal wells are linked to earthquakes, enhanced recovery wells are seen as a threat to surrounding bodies of water.

Soon, Susan and Daniel Sykes joined us at the Greenwood County site. A couple in their 60s, they moved from Topeka to Burlington about three years ago.

“We’ve had friends down in this area for 30 years, and so we knew there were wells around here,” Susan Sykes told me. “We even have friends who are in oil. But we were not aware we were moving into oil country. Two years ago, we were driving to get groceries in Iola on this gorgeous sunny day. And I noticed this rainbow bouncing off a pond.

We pulled over and had a look, and the water was absolutely full of oil. We’re seeing things like that all the time. You’re driving along next to a creek, clearly in a floodplain, and 3 feet off the creek bed is an oil well. And it’s like, really?”

Experiences like these have compelled the Sykeses to spend large chunks of their free time documenting and reporting oil spills in

Cindy Hoedel and Okie at Diamond Spring, in Morris County, Kansas

eastern and central Kansas. They register their complaints with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, the state agency tasked with responding to oil spills. But permits for new wells are granted by a more obscure body called the Kansas Corporation Commission. If you live in Kansas and you have concerns about an oil company’s disposal well or enhanced recovery well, you take them to the KCC — where, for a variety of reasons, you have almost no chance of winning.

Decisions at the KCC are made by three commissioners, all of whom are appointed by the governor. Each current commissioner — Pat Apple, Shari Feist Albrecht and Jay Scott Emler — owes his or her job to Sam Brownback. The KCC typically approves oil-well permit applications unless it receives letters of protest within 30 days of the company publishing a public notice in a local newspaper.

As Hoedel and others have learned, though, there is a pattern in Kansas of oil companies publishing notices telling the public it has only 15 days to object. The KCC also appears to have been issuing permits after only 15 days — that is, not following its own regulations — in the cases of least 21 recent wells. Fifteen of those wells have applications pending, and the KCC now says it will require the offending companies to re-notice the wells in a newspaper. But six of the wells are already operating and permitted.

“Those six wells are operating illegally, according to state law,” Hoedel says. “I think they should be shut down.”

Linda Berry, a spokeswoman for the KCC, told me that “the matter is currently under review by our agency.”

But even if an oil company gives proper notice to the public, and you happen to read the paper that day, and you mail your protest letter on time — letters can’t be sent electronically, per the KCC’s outdated requirements — the system still favors industry over individuals.

“You write a letter, and the KCC sends you back three pages of dense, intimidating language that says you must follow all these regulations and be willing to testify in 10 days,” Hoedel says. “We thought there’d be some kind of town hall meeting where we could voice our concerns. Instead, at every stage, you’re getting these scary, complex, serious-sounding legal responses from them that seem designed to intimidate you from moving forward.”

Just to get an administrative hearing before the KCC, the Flint Hills Stewards had to start a GoFundMe page to raise $10,000 to pay an attorney and an expert witness to represent them.

“It’s an absurd process where they [the KCC] are restricting participation by residents,” says Joe Spease, chairman of the fracking committee for the Kansas chapter of the Sierra Club. “It’s an enormous expense for ordinary people just to get in front of them [the KCC]. Meanwhile, there’s almost nothing requiring the oil and gas companies to demonstrate that a proposed site is safe.” (The KCC requires operators to meet certain construcpitch.com | december 2017 | the pitch

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Susan and Daniel Sykes are tracking oil spills in eastern and central Kansas.

tion requirements intended to ensure that groundwater will not be affected. Berry also says KCC staff conducts an “area of review” study looking for improperly plugged wells within a quarter-mile of the proposed well.)

Finally, there is no statutory requirement that the KCC consider induced seismicity when making decisions. In other words, despite the fact that the U.S. Geological Survey has formally declared that “wastewater disposal is the primary cause of the recent increase in earthquakes in the central United States,” and despite the testimony of James Aber — a professor emeritus of geology at Emporia State University who is familiar with the Flint Hills — that such a well constituted an “uncontrolled experiment” that would increase the risk of earthquakes due to the convergence of fault lines in the region, the KCC commissioners were under no obligation to pay attention. Nor did they heed the urging of a letter addressed to them by 30 state legislators asking them to “err on the side of caution” when considering the application. In the end, they ruled in favor of Quail Oil and Gas. “They basically pointed to their own regulations that said, unless the protesters can make the case that this well will harm water resources, or you can show that the well constitutes an immediate seismic emergency, the

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permit ought to be granted,” says Bob Eye, the attorney representing the Flint Hills Stewards in the hearing. “The problem is that the legal and regulatory framework at the KCC just hasn’t evolved to keep pace with the new problem of induced seismicity in Kansas.”

Hoedel puts it more plainly: “They completely ignored the evidence. They said, Well, there haven’t been any earthquakes in Morris County yet. Well, yeah: That’s because there haven’t been any high-pressure injection wells here yet. The past is no indication. There weren’t any earthquakes down in Harper County four years ago, either.”

The first oil well in Kansas was drilled in 1860, one year before statehood came to the territory. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, company towns dotted the landscape.

Production peaked in 1956, when the state produced 124 million barrels. It steadily dipped, down to 33 million barrels in 2005.

Then fracking and horizontal drilling came along.

The advent of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, allowed energy companies to access hard-to-reach reservoirs of oil and gas by blasting water, mixed with other chemicals, underground to break up rocks that stood in

the way. Horizontal drilling gave companies the capability to dig miles to the side rather than simply straight down. As these technological innovations came into vogue over the past decade, Kansas looked poised to benefit from it economically.

And in some ways, it has. Between 2011 and 2013, oil companies invested more than a billion dollars in Kansas, hoping for a boom.

Production rose from 35 million barrels in 2006 to 50 million in 2014.

Down in Harper County, property owners were getting huge offers from oil companies to drill on their land.

“For the longest time, it was $20 an acre the oil companies would give you to drill on your land,” says Frank Smith, who lived in Harper County. “Then the boom came, and in 2012, 2013, the offer is $1,000 an acre or even $1,500 an acre. There’s a lot of dirt-poor farmers down here that have been struggling for years raising cattle and winter wheat. They were living a precarious existence. All of a sudden, if you own even a section [640 acres], you’re on your way to being a millionaire. I don’t know anybody who’d walk away from a check like that.” (Smith’s wife, who owned their land, received $1,200 an acre for the 48 acres she owned. They’ve since moved to Oregon.)

The hope was for a North Dakota–like oil rush along Kansas’ Mississippi Lime formation. Brownback, whose signature tax cuts were on their way to being confirmed as the worst policy decision in the history of the state, prayed for the tax dollars a boom would generate. But that didn’t pan out.

Instead of a statewide financial bonanza, fracking created a lot of wastewater, which was then dumped down disposal wells in underground rock formations. In Harper County alone, wastewater injected into disposal wells rose from 10 million barrels in 2010 to 52 million in 2013. This, as we now know, begat seismic activity in the area.

The earthquakes and the damage that resulted from these disposal wells (including a million-dollar repair bill at the Harper County Courthouse) forced the KCC to finally acknowledge, in 2015, that it had a problem on its hands. It used an emergency statute to cap the amount of wastewater that could be disposed, but only in Harper and Sumner counties, where the majority of fracking, and thus wastewater disposal, was occurring.

(Brownback did even less: He convened a task force to study the connection between wastewater disposal and earthquakes; the task force found no direct connection.)

Right now, oil prices are low — about $56 a barrel, down from about $100 a barrel three years ago. But they will eventually go back up.

Oil is a nearly $3 billion industry in Kansas — which is Koch country, as good an energyindustry insurance policy as a state can have.

Judging by permits filed in the central and eastern parts of the state, activity is set to migrate north.

That’s Scott Dawson’s impression, too. A 35-year-old Chase County resident, Dawson spends his days on top of a horse, tending to cattle on a ranch that, as an employee working there, he said he’d rather not name. The ranch also hosts drilling and wastewater disposal wells.

“I’d say the last four years, there’s definitely been a noticeable uptick in this chunk of the Flint Hills,” Dawson told me. “Chase County, Butler County, Marion County. A lot more of my neighbors got a well. You see the rigs going by on Highway 50. You see them building some new road across a pasture to a pump jack or tank battery. Even with low oil prices, they’re still punching holes in the ground — more so than back when we were paying $3 a gallon for gas and oil was high.”

At the ranch where Dawson works, he has observed the cost. Cows turn up “healthy one day, dead the next,” he says, having found their way into a containment area and drunk from a wastewater pit. A month ago, a pressure gauge on a tank failed and blew wastewater 40 feet in the air, visible a mile away. Dawson says he believes it was several hours before anything was done to cap the tank.

“To me, if I owned the ranch, that would be very concerning,” Dawson says. “If you got a saltwater [wastewater] spill that soaks in deep enough, you got a dead spot there forever. And then if it leaches into the groundwater or the aquifers, I mean, hell.”

He continued: “It’s weird to me that a lot of ranchers, who work outside all day and make a living because we have land you can raise a cow on, are like, ‘Who gives a crap?’ about some of this stuff. It’s like, hell, you want to leave something for your kids and grandkids.

God’s not making any more land.”

I heard similar sentiments expressed by Sarah Uher, who owns an antiques store in downtown Cottonwood Falls and lives in a 100-year-old home with her husband and kids outside that Flint Hills town.

“A lot of people around here depend on agriculture,” Uher said. Her point was easily made; we were standing in a field, within sight of a big red barn. “If this land becomes contaminated, all that is gone. Same with the water supply. If it goes bad, you can’t haul enough water here to support livestock.”

I had crossed over the Cottonwood River to reach Uher’s house. She noted that, situated as her family is on the other side of town from the river, running water from the city will never reach her family. Her water well is almost literally a lifeline.

“We like to fish,” she said. “We like to swim in the creek. People tube in the river. A lot of people eat fish out of the river.”

There’s also, of course, an economic argument to make in favor of pumping the brakes on oil production in the Flint Hills. Cottonwood Falls, with its quaint downtown and

the pitch | december 2017 | pitch.com

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Share the gift of Christmas with your family.

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feature

Sarah Uher (left) fears that the heightened risk of earthquakes threatens the health and economic prosperity of the Flint Hills.

recently rehabbed historic courthouse, is a tourist attraction that generates revenue for the county. Outside of a small aviation company, there’s no other significant industry here.

“We’re on a roll the last five years, with one or two businesses opening every year,” Uher said. “For us, that’s huge.”

This was roughly the argument advanced in the mid-2000s by then-Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, when she established about 5,000 square miles of the Flint Hills as off-limits to wind farms. Brownback expanded that zone more than twofold, to 11,000 square miles. None of this environmental stewardship, though, seems to apply when it’s the oil and gas industry at the table.

As a result, Uher recently had to purchase earthquake insurance on her home, a cost that she and others say amounts to yet another subsidy for oil companies at the expense of ordinary people.

“The Flint Hills lucked out [historically] by having this rocky soil that prevented the land from being tilled and turned into a different ecosystem,” Uher says. “We have some of the last tallgrass prairie left in North America. And now we’re just going to choose to tear up the little bit that’s left? It doesn’t make any sense.”

As long as Kansas’ government remains so hospitable, oil and gas companies will search the state for new places to drill. Even liberal Douglas County, home to deep-blue Lawrence, has felt the tentacles.

Amy Adamson, who owns 15 acres in south Douglas County, returned to her

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home one day in 2014 and found an oil and gas company setting up shop on her land. The company argued that it had a lease for mineral rights on her property. But that paperwork was a century old — no longer valid, Adamson and her lawyer would argue in court.

John Hampton, Adamson’s attorney, says, “When Amy bought land — what the Kansas Supreme Court has said is, if there’s a lease like that from 1918 and it expires and there’s no affidavit of production on file with the deeds office, you have the right to rely on the termination provision of that lease. This one expired in 1923. And in this case there is no affidavit of production on file.” But a judge in Douglas County ruled against Adamson, citing a rationale similar to the one at KCC, putting the onus on citizens rather than on industry.

“What he’s saying is, we had to prove they didn’t have right to be on our property rather than other way around,” Hampton says. “We had to prove they didn’t have a valid lease, rather than they had to prove they did. And that’s the center of this — who has the burden of proof. We believe a landowner just has to prove they own property and haven’t given permission. And it’s incumbent on oil and gas to show their defense of a valid oil and gas lease.” (Adamson’s appeal is pending.)

Only Texas and California outpace Kansas in their use of Class II wells. There are 11,630 enhanced oil recovery injection wells and 5,000 wastewater disposal wells in Kansas, according to the KCC. Douglas County is now home to 177 of those recovery wells, and at least two disposal wells. And more are

on the way: Another oil and gas company, Midstates Energy Operating LLC, has recently filed applications to build enhanced recovery wells near Eudora. Like other companies in the state, it published an inaccurate 15-day public notice.

Gil Zemansky, a hydrogeologist in Lawrence with more than 30 years of experience in water-quality regulation, has asked the KCC to reject the Eudora wells. Zemansky says it is a “virtual certainty” that more faults exist in northeast Kansas than are yet mapped. And he points out that a U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist noted, after the Pawnee quake last year, that “many of the earthquakes we are seeing are occurring on faults we don’t know about.”

In a letter to the KCC, Zemansky writes: “To date, we are unaware of any oil or gas company in Kansas being held accountable for causing earthquakes or ignoring the rights of Kansas landowners and residents when they want to utilize other people’s property.

Midstates Energy has given no assurances that it will do anything more than operate to maximize their short-term profit by exploiting others from a distance.”

The county has no power to deny these permits; that lies with the KCC. But Douglas County administrator Craig Weinaug and Lawrence City Manager Tom Markus wrote a joint letter to the commission asking it to require the company to restart the notice process so that citizens could have adequate time to protest. The KCC agreed.

“We’re not saying all injection wells are bad,” Weinaug says. “Our lens is that the burden of proof is on the KCC to prove this injection well won’t endanger [the] water table or put residents at risk of earthquakes. And we want to know how they are going to reach that conclusion.”

The proposed Eudora wells lie in Douglas County Commissioner Nancy Thellman’s district.

“It’s been an incredibly opaque and complicated process just to even bring these concerns to the KCC,” Thellman tells me. “Even as a commissioner, I have no real power. My conclusion is that our best hope to contain this type of activity is for the legislature to improve regulations around this aggressive drilling, and then hold the KCC accountable to those new regulations.”

The legislature has this power. Other states, such as Ohio, have changed their permitting laws to reflect the growing risk of earthquakes.

Though the KCC is appointed by the governor, it must follow rules set by the legislature.

Dennis “Boog” Highberger, who represents Lawrence in the Kansas House, says he was “surprised to see injection wells this far north,” meaning Douglas County.

“I think it would be in the legislature’s purview to make it a requirement that the KCC consider it [seismicity] when making rulings,” he says.

Marci Francisco, who represents Lawrence in the Kansas Senate (and is reportedly eyeing a run for secretary of state), says she supports something like a statewide comprehensive plan for oil and gas, carving out areas deemed risky due to fault lines or important for preservation.

“I also think, as these earthquakes keep hitting, the state needs to assess fees overall to allocate for damages,” Francisco says. “The legislature should not be allowing activity that creates property damage without some way to reimburse the individuals who suffer those damages as a result. We do that for drivers. We require them to carry insurance. We have that for workman’s compensation. When we take risks like this, we need to make sure there’s insurance for those harmed.”

Outside her home in Matfield Green, Hoedel scooped her Australian shepherd, Okie, into her truck, and I followed them up Highway 177, toward Morris County. We passed horse stables and rolled-up hay bales. We passed a tire swing swaying in the wind. We passed oil wells gesturing slowly toward the earth like those vintage drinking-bird toys. A deer hopped over one fence, crossed the road, then jumped over another fence. Along the road were barns on which the paint was fading from red to brown, and iron entrance gates to places with names such as Carl Farm and Division Ranch. Then we passed through the gates of Diamond Creek Ranch and followed dirt and gravel roads to Diamond Spring. It’s on private property, but Hoedel had permission from the owner to be there.

In July — after the Flint Hills Stewards raised enough money to pay for a hearing to protest the Morris County well, but before the KCC ruled against them — Hoedel proposed a picnic out here by the spring for everyone involved in the cause.

“It was a hot day, but there was shade, and then this wonderful spring, of course,” Hoedel said. “And my friend Alexa performed a water-blessing ceremony. It was one of those deals where it was like, ‘No pressure, you don’t have to participate in this if you don’t want to.’

But everybody was totally into it: We got in a circle and everybody got blessed or smudged or whatever. It was just so great.”

The spring itself is just a little square in the ground, maybe 8 feet by 4 feet. We bent down, cupped our hands and drank from it.

Okie lapped some up, too. Maybe it was the moment or the historical context of the place, but there really did seem to be an unusual purity to this water.

“Right?” Hoedel said, nodding with satisfaction. “I truly think it’s the best water I’ve ever tasted. The irony of that, you know” — that this freshwater spring would be endangered by dirty oil wastewater — “that was just too cruel. That was just too much for us.”

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december 2017 | the pitch

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Bourbon Pretzel and Coconut Lime Caramels Salt and Flint

Feeding holiday appetites, KC style, and filling worthy stockings First, we were hungry, so we went looking for food. Not (just) for ourselves, of course. We set out to build a better gift basket, made up of KC originals — the special pantry items we covet for our own. (And we felt an extra buzz about a certain Raytown apiary.) From pickles to sauces, breads, baked goods, candy and cheeses, here are items guaranteed to cause serious debate about whether one should give or keep. (Buy two. Ho ho ho.)

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Then we thought about who should get such a basket, and we looked at one another and agreed that, if we gave in and ate all of this stuff ourselves, we should make up for our seasonal gluttony by patronizing one or more of our favorite arts groups, giving to some of our favorite reginal concerns — and urging you to do the same. You can call this happy assemblage a holiday wish list, but really, everything here is a big deal to us year-round.

Gloriously sticky and explosively flavorful, the caramels from this Lawrence candymaker come in a variety of surprising (in a why-didn’tI-think-of-that kind of way) flavor combinations. ($1.60 each at Better Cheddar, by the box at saltandflint.com)

Tanzanian Vanilla Vain Vanilla

All vanilla extract is boozy, but this one centers on a house-spiced rum that lends seasonal flavor to your baked goods or coffee. ($17, vainfoods.com)

Ibis Cranberry Almond Bread Ibis Bakery

Here’s a seasonal offering that’s basically perfect with some fresh butter. If you want to get ambitious in the family kitchen, use it to make stuffing. ($9.50, Ibis Bakery)

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Pitch_2

cover story

Heirloom Tomato Bruscetta

KC Canning Co. collaboration with Boys Grow Farms

Q39 Barbecue Sauce Q39

The speed with which Q39 became an essential KC barbecue destination is in no small part due to its tangy, sweet and slightly spicy signature sauce. ($10, q39kc.com, kansascitybbqstore.com)

Here’s your new go-to snack in a jar. Just add toast or crackers. ($10, kansascitycanningco.com)

Boys Grow Avocado Hot Sauce Boys Grow Farms

Good for pizza, tacos, Bloody Marys and just about anything else you put in your mouth: jalapeno and avocado combined in a creamy sauce that delivers polite but addictive heat. ($4.50, boysgrow. com)

Watermelon Rind Pickles

Spicy Chili, Garlic and Herb Fresh Cheeses

Watermelon rind doesn’t sound good.

But Better Cheddar makes a variety with a perfect firm texture and a slightly sweet tartness that’s ideal for cheese plates or adding to cocktails. ($13.99, thebettercheddar.com)

Green Dirt Farm has been teaching us for years that sheep’s-milk cheese can be superior to that from cows or goats. This spreadable fresh cheese is a convincing lesson in rich satisfaction. ($5, greendirtfarms.com)

Green Dirt Farms

Better Cheddar

Pineapple Cilantro Habanero Shrub

Las Californias Shrub Company

Who knew vinegar-based drinks could be this addictive? It’s sweet, tart and spicy, and a little bit of plain soda with it is all you need. ($20, saltandflint.com)

No-Sugar Apple Butter Louisburg Cider Mill

The Ploughman Spices

This inexpensive and ubiquitous apple butter is packed with flavor without any added sugar. ($4.99, louisburgcidermill. com)

Wood & Salt

Sprinkle this multipurpose seasoning on just about anything to amp up the savory flavors: chicken, steak, seafood, vegetables for roasting. The only problem: You’ll run out too quickly. ($11.99, woodandsalt.com)

Red Wine Cranberry Sauce and Vanilla Bourbon Peach Preserves KC Canning Co.

Skip the gelatinous canned log of cranberry sauce and opt for this one, made with red wine, which adds depth of flavor without cringe-y tartness.

For the preserves, see KC Canning Company’s website for a vanillapeach bread pudding recipe that will make you a holiday hero. ($10, kansascitycanningco.com)

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Fresh Corn Tortillas KCMex Tortillas

Local chefs are so fond of this new tortilleria’s products that they’re finding their way onto high-end menus around town. Good enough for them, good enough for us. ($4.50, several area locations, including Local Pig)

Ghost Pepper Cheese Marwood

This is for the cheese lover in your life who also claims to love food that makes her sweat. Call that bluff, deliciously. ($9.50, marwoodsales.com) — April Fleming

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cover story

(with and without kids)

The National Museum of Toys and Miniatures

We can attest to being grown up, if somewhat childlike, yet loving the National Museum of Toys and Miniatures with a toddler’s enthusiasm. And we can tell you that getting a couple of grown-ups into the place, anytime, over and over, is among the cheapest, most rewarding memberships anywhere: $25 and you get to be a card-carrying toy lover. Have kids? Have four kids (and a partner)? The price goes up ... to a generous $75. Our renewal is already in the mail. (toyandminiaturemuseum.org/ membership)

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Meanwhile, the metro’s 800-pound art gorilla remains free (except for special exhibitions) but remains well worth joining. With memberships starting at $55, it’s not a budget buster, either. (nelson-atkins.org)

The Kansas City Zoo

Speaking of gorillas: For $99, residents of Jackson County or Clay County get family admission all year, plus tickets for pals and visitors, and a T-shirt. (kansascityzoo.org)

Union Station

For $95 a family, there could be a lot of repeat visits to Science City in your future. (unionstation.org)

The Coterie

KC’s youth-oriented theater company has set a high standard for itself — and largely hews to it, year after year. A 10pack flex pass for $100. (thecoterie.org) — Jennifer Wetzel

Neither/Nor Zine Subscription

We’ve talked up KC’s zine resurgence in recent times, and now there’s an easy way to spread the word yourself.

Kansas City-based Neither/Nor Zine Distro, run by KC Zine Con organizer Jess Hogan (and keeping kiosks full of DIY reading material available at Holy Cow Market & Music and two Crossroads record stores year-round), gives you several shop-from-home options. Order a package every three, six, nine or 12 months, or just call up a one-time purchase, customized to whatever nerd streak you want to tickle: punk-rock, comix, photography, and on and on. Tiny, earnest, smart surprises abound. (neither-nor-zine -distro.tumblr.com/subscription)

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— Aaron Rhodes the pitch | december 2017 | pitch.com

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KTBG 90.9

There’s a lot of competition around here for your NPR dollar. But if your priority is supporting area musicians and venues, this gets the nod; $10 a month gets you a Bridge T-shirt. (bridge909 .org)

Girls Rock Lawrence

Dedicated to education and empowerment, this group puts on a weeklong summer camp for girls and trans youth, ages 12-18, where they form bands, write an original song nd play it live at the end of the week. (girlsrocklawrence.org)

Heartland Men’s Chorus

This nonprofit, volunteer chorus has made a significant cultural contribution to the community. When you support its work, you allow the group to purchase music, commission new works and help its outreach and social-justice programs. (hmckc.org)

Kansas City Chorus

This vibrant group of more than 100 women gathers each Tuesday evening to sing and learn the art of barbershop harmony. Nothing else like it. (kansascitychorus.com)

Kansas City Civic Orchestra

For more than 50 years, the community-based orchestra’s mission has been to bring high quality, free concerts to the community, played by an all-volunteer orchestra of amateur and professional musicians. Supporting the group helps it pay its bills so the music keeps flowing. (orchestra.kccivic. org)

Kansas Public Radio

Back to your NPR dollar: If you nod along to the Retro Cocktail Hour or Trail Mix, here’s where to help out; $12 a month gets you a KPR MemberCard, providing two-for-one deals at some cool places. (kansaspublicradio.org)

KCUR 89.3

Got anything left for NPR? KCUR is a juggernaut, but we don’t take it for granted. Also, Boulevard goes down nicely in a “Stand With the Facts” pint glass. (kcur.org)

KKFI 90.1

Community radio doesn’t get much less commercial — that is, old-school midtown weird, in the best way — than KKFI. We love it, and we know a few people who’d do great things with the guest-DJ slot a $250 donation earns.

Just saying. (kkfi.org)

Mid America Freedom Band

Kansas City’s LGBTA community band, jazz band and marching band is about to have a much-deserved really big 2018.

Get in on it. (growthfreedomband.com)

Midwest Music Foundation

The MMF provides grants for musicians in need of urgent care, wellness services and healthcare grants. If you value local music, pledging support to this organization is as good a demonstration of good faith as a fan can give. (midwestmusicfoundation.org) — Nick Spacek

This is not an exhaustive list, but it’s where we’re starting this December with our social-justice and civicimprovement contributions.

Kansas City Anti-Violence Project

Elizabeth Wheeler, a volunteer on the board of directors for the KC Anti-Violence Project, says: “We’re growing, and always trying to meet the community needs as they come up.” What comes up is often a bummer, though: domestic violence, hate crimes, sexual assault.

But KCAVP is succeeding in reducing the number of violent crimes in Kansas City by providing important services, education and support to those in need need — especially queer youth. “There was a vacuum of support for trans people of color here, so we established a weekly support group and are providing services to this demographic,” Wheeler says. “We are the only LGBTQ specific organization of this kind in the four state region of Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska.” A “Drag Queen Bingo” fundraiser for KCAVP happens Saturday, December 16, at the Hamburger Mary’s on Broadway. (kcavp.org) KC Pet Project KC no-kill shelters work with animals

that elsewhere would be euthanized. As you’d expect, medical and housing costs add up, with a take-in rate of about 23 animals a day. Running the place isn’t easy, and the volunteer turnover rate is also what you’d expect. So, yes, your time is needed and welcome, but so are Amazon gift cards and numerous basic items. And for a $500 donation, you can book a fleet of puppies and kittens for a “Snuggle Service” to visit you and your co-workers at the office. We’re saving up. Who doesn’t need snuggle time? (kcpetproject.org)

One Struggle KC

The group works on behalf of people of color to counter police brutality and lift up marginalized persons (including LGBTQ) within the black community. (onestrugglekc.wordpress.com)

Stand Up For Racial Justice

Educational group for white people to help learn how to fight white supremacy and support people of color. Fifty percent of donations are shared with racial-justice organizations led by people of color. (showingupforracialjustice.org)

Kansas/Missouri Dream Alliance Youth-led organization that works with high school groups to educate youth about immigration. (ksmoda.org)

Anytown Kansas City

Organization geared for educating and bringing together groups from different faiths, races and backgrounds. (nccjstl. org/donate)

Stand Up KC

Helps to raise awareness in lifting the minimum wage and creating living wages while highlighting workers’ rights. (standupkc.org)

KC for Refugees

Supports the city’s refugee community by connecting them with jobs, shelter and other necessities. (kcforrefugees. weebly.com)

Uzazi Village

This family clinic addresses maternal and baby care in the urban core. (uzazivillage.org)

Center for Excellence and Immigration legal help

The center pairs asylum seekers with lawyers and supports immigrants with other legal help. (innovationlawlab.org)

Operation Breakthrough

Provides health services and educational instruction to low-income families. (operationbreakthrough.org) — Annie Raab and Traci Angel

11/20/17 11/20/17 11:48 9:33 AM

Hogshead

Piropos

The Lucky Taco

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pitch.com | december 2017 | the pitch

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CovEr Story

Zach Bauman

Bee’s Knees

Erik Messner among his wares and tools

a couple turns a backyard passion into a business

by DaviD Martin

A few Christmases ago, Rachael and Erik Messner put a beehive on their wish list. She’d become interested in keeping bees after reading a book about homesteading. He was curious to test the notion that locally sourced honey helps allieve seasonal allergies.

A set of grandparents bought the young couple a hive, which Erik set up in their backyard. The learning curve was steep, he says.

But once he got a feel for keeping a colony healthy and productive, beekeeping became a passion. “For someone who’s curious, there’s no end to things you can learn about bees,” he says.

Rachael came up with the idea to make lip balm and other cosmetics from the beeswax.

When the items proved themselves a hit at local craft shows, Rachael decided to become a full-time apothecarian.

In October, the couple opened a shop in Raytown. There, three days a week, Messner Bee Farm sells lip balm, deodorant, candles, beard oil, solid perfume and other products derived from the wax of their bees and those of other beekeepers in the area.

The lip balm comes in several varieties.

Rachael says her favorite balm to wear is Lavender Lemonade; her favorite lip tint is Amish Rose. “It’s wonderful to make a product

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that’s such a necessity and a treat at the same time,” she says.

The couple brought formidable skills to the endeavor. Rachael, who has extensive experience working for small businesses, learned the software she uses to design the product labels as a student at the Kansas City Art Institute. Erik trained as a structural engineer and is fascinated by the complexity of the hive.

“A bee is kind of cool,” he says. “But a hive, it’s like a superorganism. It has its own mind.

It’s like a mammal. Each hive out there has a different personality, a different set of genetic traits. They’ll respond differently to stress. As humans, you can’t help but develop a little affection for anything that gets to be like that and has its own personality.”

The shop occupies a two-story clay-tile building that dates to the 1920s. It was a chicken house for an adjacent restaurant that sold all-you-can-eat meals for a dollar. More recently, Erik’s mother ran an interior-design business out of a stone house on the property that she remodeled.

Rachael and Erik now live in the house, which sits between the shop and Yellow Rock Barn, an event space the two will manage after the new year. Couples who rent the barn for

“Each hivE out thErE has a diffErEnt pErsonality.”

Erik Messner

weddings and receptions have begun asking for honey jars as favors.

Lip balm and bottles of raw honey are the Messners’ top sellers. In addition to plastic tubes, Rachael packs the lip balm into lockets. “It’s not like everybody buys one, but the people who buy one buy five,” Erik says of the lockets.

The shop reflects the Messners’ pride in Kansas City’s maker community. The couple went to high school with ceramics artist Kate Schroeder, whose custom-designed honey jars are sold in the shop. The store carries Nectar Republic soy candles, Green Bee flour-sack tea towels and other items made in Kansas and Missouri.

Beekeeping equipment is also available.

The hive-curious can start with a mason bee house. While they don’t produce beeswax or honey, mason bees are docile pollinators.

“People really love bees,” Rachael says. “They are genuinely curious about them and want to know what they can do to help them out.”

The bees appear to be helping Erik with his allergies. Before getting that first hive, Erik says, he could count on being miserable for two or three weeks a year. “Now, six years into beekeeping, I barely get a runny nose twice a year.”

the pitch | december 2017 | pitch.com

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i Will DAre

Whine Flight

Uncorking your inner musician at Drunkin Fiddles

by AngelA lutz

Just after sundown on a chilly fall day, I spot a few people crossing 43rd Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas. I’d arrived in the neighborhood to sit in for a session of Drunkin Fiddles, the strings class for adults taught by local musician Laurel Parks. The figures ahead of me in the twilight were carrying violins.

I’ve caught the scent of aspiring musician, and it will lead me to the right door.

As I walk up the stairs to the space where Parks lives and works, I’m greeted by the telltale grade-school screech of tuning fiddles.

Some of the amateurs are tapping and sawing out notes toward songs they’ve already learned, the most recent run of classes having gotten under way a couple of weeks back.

A middle-aged woman asks Parks for help achieving concert pitch. Parks works the violin, and I ask the woman how class is going so far.

“I sound better now than I did when I started,” she tells me, laughing. “Are you going to play tonight?”

Her question catches me off guard. “I’ve never touched a violin before,” I say. “It wouldn’t be pretty.”

30

“I hadn’t touched one, either, before I took this class,” she replies.

I quickly learn that most of Parks’ students share this in common: About half of them had never played an instrument before they signed up for Drunkin Fiddles, and twothirds had never held a violin. The idea is to provide a nonthreatening environment to try something new.

“I always try to make people feel as welcome as possible,” Parks tells me later, when we catch up over the phone. “If you have to start something from the very beginning as an adult — especially a stringed instrument — it’s not going to sound good. But no one can hear you by yourself, squeaking away. They are just focusing on themselves.”

With long, dirty-blond hair and a breezy demeanor, Parks seems the ideal candidate to lead a group of grown-ups down the road of self-discovery (with occasional pit stops for self-loathing) inherent to learning a new skill after the age of 25. Oh, and there’s wine — plenty of wine, along with bottles of Boulevard beer and a tray of cheese and crackers on a table at the back of the room.

“Help yourself,” Parks insists. “And don’t worry about drinking too much. There’s always more.”

I grab a snack and have a seat, listening as Parks’ 10 students talk about their weekend plans, the room illuminated warmly by a strand of lights hung from the ceiling. Then

they begin to play. This week’s song is called “Dancing Bear,” a haunting melody that Parks says is perfect for Halloween. She breaks the song down to its most basic parts and teaches it one section at a time, using a chart. The fledglings’ bows bob almost in unison, the sounds gradually weaving together to find the music.

Parks has been leading Drunkin Fiddles since 2015, when some of her friends encouraged her to field informal classes. She was initially inspired by a group violin class her

dad took when she was a 4-year-old kid in Lincoln, Nebraska.

“He had an old violin and a bow with hardly any hairs on it, and he would practice in the basement,” she tells me. “At that age, I was fascinated and I wanted to play, so they found a teacher for me, and I’ve loved it ever since.”

Parks also gives private lessons to about 40 kids a week and plays in two local bands — Of Tree, with her husband, Benjamin Parks, and the Wires, a project with cellist Sascha Gro-

the pitch | december 2017 | pitch.com

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schang. She’s also played in the Des Moines and St. Joseph symphonies, but she prefers writing her own music — and helping others discover musical ability they either forgot or never knew they had.

One man tonight, for instance, bought a violin on Amazon several years ago and

is finally learning how to play it. A married couple comes every week together, he learning violin and she cello. Another man is reigniting his love of music — he enjoys the fiddle because you can dress songs up or down as you choose — but says he’s here as much for the community as anything else.

And with a core group of students that returns for every six-week session, along with a rotating cast of newcomers, the sense of community is strong. From where I sit, at the back of the room, watching a bunch of perfectly established men and women struggle like kids toward acquiring a new skill while laughter flows in abundance, I recognize that welcoming vibe immediately. I don’t sense any awkwardness here, and not just because of the wine.

“That’s always interesting, when you get someone who has no experience and then they do it,” Parks says. “It’s cool to watch the transformation. I always tell new people the first two classes are going to be overwhelming, but if you can just stick with it for six weeks you’ll notice you can do something you never thought you’d do.”

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816-554-2284 pitch.com | december 2017 | the pitch

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Shop girl

Unexpectedly wrapped up in the Lenexa Public Market

by AngelA lutz Chase Castor

32

I never thought my love of homemade tamales would take me deep into Johnson County.

But that is where you find Red Kitchen Tamales, and the moment I heard about the place — about the cheesy goodness, about the long lines to snag one before the day’s supply sold out — I knew I had to get there.

Red Kitchen’s core product has already proved popular enough for owner Alejandra De La Fuente to quit her day job and devote herself full time to her corn husk–wrapped creations.

For someone living in Northeast KC, the drive to 87th Street and Renner Road feels like something of a journey, the kind of trip for which you maybe bring along some pemmican. On the afternoon I filled my car with gas and pointed myself south, I couldn’t recall even having been to Lenexa before. And if I was forgetting a long-ago visit, the sights failed to jog my memory as I neared my destination.

Seemingly everything was under construction, with a new branch of the Johnson County Library and a recreational center among the additions in progress at the Lenexa Civic Center, a 200-acre project that has taken decades to come to fruition. It was new enough to confound my GPS. At the center of it all is the Lenexa Public Market, which occupies the same building as City Hall. Though it’s located in the heart of an archetypal suburb, the market has a sur-

prisingly urban feel — kind of like an indoor version of downtown’s City Market, minus the fresh produce. All of the vendors are locally owned, offering a range of goods that includes T-shirts, candles, soaps and such foodstuffs as pastries, pizza and ramen. There are outposts of favorites Foo’s Frozen Custard and the Roasterie. It is an ideal venue to order a refillable coffee and spend a few hours just watching the people.

When I arrived, business looked a little sleepy, with just a few folks browsing the booths and munching on skewers from Chewology Gyoza and Kushiyaki, a Japanese restaurant that I found immediately intriguing simply for its mouthful of a name. I warmed up with a stroll through the candles by Pickwick, some of them holiday-themed and saddled with names like “Holiday Spruce” and “Dickens.” I know it has long been fashionable to complain about retail’s overeager seasonal switchovers, but for me, the day after Halloween is the latest you should begin adorning the world in garland and twinkle lights. Everyone operating at the market seemed just as enthusiastic.

Instead of gifts for others, though, I was snatching up stuff for myself. I wanted to buy each super-soft, pre-shrunk T-shirt and hoodie I touched at We Got Your Back Apparel, which puts its own spin on trendy KC pride

the pitch | december 2017 | pitch.com

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Shop Girl

gear. Its Chiefs, Royals and KU tees utilize a design that resembles a Dia de los Muertos sugar skull, with a football, a baseball or a basketball in the center of its forehead, like a third eye.

A couple of booths down I found Serene’s Bakery, co-owned by mother-daughter duo Serene and Susan Sayyed. Susan (pictured, this page) was working behind the counter, where I was drawn helplessly by what I’d spied in the case: a fat pumpkin roll stuffed with cream cheese. I purchased one to go, and she pulled it out already packaged, as though she’d been expecting me.

“Normally it’s a lot busier right now,” she told me, explaining why my pumpkin roll was ready to, well, roll before I’d even ordered it.

“Today is a slow day.”

I asked her how business had been overall, and she said things have been pretty good.

She gestured toward the construction outside the window and described everything going up around the market — an aquatic center, apartments, that library. She said that some slow days now would end up being worth getting through.

“And the tamale lady is going in next door,” she added.

“Wait — so she’s not here yet?” I asked.

Indeed, the neighboring booth sat empty, awaiting its tenant. Apparently I’d overlooked one important detail: De La Fuente had been serving her tamales just one day a week in the kitchen upstairs, where the market also hosts regular cooking classes and workshops.

Thwarted but not unhappy, I shuffled over to Chewology and ordered an ahi tuna skewer. The tender cubes of fish were satisfying enough that I didn’t feel deprived. If anything, I felt fortified for my next drive to Lenexa, now assured. pitch.com | december 2017 | the pitch

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the pitch | december 2017 | pitch.com

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PITCH_

Café

Zach Bauman

Amendment Needed

Repeal 18th pours style and ambition into the northland but could use a little something more.

By Liz Cook

Repeal 18th Bar and Bistro is the latest in a line of establishments celebrating Kansas City’s mobbed-up middle finger to Prohibition. But it may be the first of its kind in North Kansas City, bedding down in the burgeoning commercial corridor that’s already home to Chicken N Pickle and the Cinder Block and Calibration breweries.

Father-daughter team Edward Collins and Ann Cook opened the cocktail-centered gastropub six months ago, in a strip mall–issue space that once housed Johnny’s Back Yard.

Collins and Cook kept the yard — Repeal has an outdoor stage and books live music Wednesday through Saturday nights — but they hedged their bets with an industrialmodern redesign and an indoor cigar lounge.

They also hired a veteran mixologist, Darrell Loo, and a promising executive chef — Bryan Sparks, whose kitchen credentials include Jax Fish House & Oyster Bar in KC and Ostrea in St. Joe.

Sparks’ singular focus on texture and presentation thrusts Repeal 18th into the same weight class as KC’s fine-dining heavy hitters.

But to last more than a couple of rounds, the restaurant will need to reckon with an intermittent tension: At times, the drinks are overwrought and the eats are underseasoned.

The cocktail menu is biblically long, with heavy slates of pre-Prohibition classics and more modern, seasonal drinks. Though there’s a drink for every taste, whiskey lovers are clearly in Loo’s sights. Tall shelves behind the bar stack dozens of ryes and rare single malts toward the ceiling, the spirits equivalent of that library from Beauty and the Beast. The craft cocktails have craft prices, but happy hour is a good way to sample some of the classics for cheap. My pick’s the Sazerac, which Loo treats with the reverence it deserves. The drink has no unnecessary embellishments, just a solid pour of rye tamed with Peychaud’s bitters and licorice-sweet Kubler Absinthe.

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Hours The Old Fashioned sips just as smooth, with a fragrant orange edge, though the one I ordered was overstirred.

Loo’s seasonal cocktails are showier, though style occasionally eclipses substance. I wanted to love the Winter Is Coming, which looked purpose-built to tick all my boxes: cognac, madeira, Colony cold brew–infused Luxardo, Fernet Dogma — a coffee version of the herbal liqueur. The drink had a warm, appealing nose from the plum bitters, but it tasted muddy, blunter than its component parts.

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pitch.com | december 2017 | the pitch

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I preferred the Dark and Gloomy, thanks to an inspired snowcap of Angostura-andegg-white foam. That top was glossy and meringue-thick, with a bracing tartness and a slightly woody edge transported almost alchemically from the drink’s cedar-infused Rieger vodka. I am not exaggerating when I say I would drink a glass of this foam and call it a protein shake. But it was more interesting than the drink underneath, which had a flat pumpkin flavor reminiscent of Libby’s straight from the can.

The bar food is a cut above the ordinary, but two of my favorite menu items are the most dressed-down. Truffle fries are ubiquitous now, but Sparks’ meticulous take gave me a new appreciation for them. The fries arrived 10,000 to a bowl, each generously parm’d and pleasingly funky from a light touch of truffle oil. But the texture was the main draw: The fries’ crisp exteriors gave way to soft, flaky insides in a puff of starchy steam.

The funk returned in the Truffle Pig, a flatbread layered thoughtfully with sharp truffle cream, melty gouda, spicy soppressata and caramelized onions. The ingredients harmonize well, and Sparks doesn’t overtax the bread — but the star here, again, is the texture. The crust is crisp but flexible, with a delicate, airy structure that belies the grease and cheese.

Plating is another of Sparks’ strengths, and the charred bone marrow makes a hell of a glamour shot. The pale bone is striped handsomely with scorch-brown grill marks and dressed with a verdant salad of fried parsley, briny capers and edible marigolds.

Repeal’s version delivered less of an umami kick than I expected when I tried it, but the marrow was suitably rich and gelatinous — an ideal spread for the accompanying triangles of marbled rye.

Repeal 18th had two soups on the menu on my visits — a chunky chili of wild game and white beans, and a silky purée of smoked butternut squash. The chili was comforting, though it would have benefitted from a creamier bean and a heavier hand with the spice.

The butternut-squash soup was more promising, its purée impossibly smooth and almost marshmallow-sticky, with a light maple flavor and a little pulse of smoke from the squash.

But the flavors were too plain for the presentation. The dish needed more salt, more smoke, more spice — just more.

Muted flavors undersold the entrées I tasted as well. I’m thinking of an unadorned mound of cubed sweet potatoes alongside a strip of crisp-crusted salmon (like so many restaurant salmons before it: fine). Or a moist, local Berkshire bone-in pork chop that had a whiff of ginger but little else. (Ah, but the smoked eggplant spaetzle that arrived on the side was excellent and peppery, with a yielding, dumplinglike bite.)

The pork-belly BELT was a literal interpretation — so literal, in fact, that the bread was naked, with nary a swipe of mayo or any other condiment that might overtax the sandwich acronym. The ingredients were, again, high quality and well textured: crisp hunks of tender pork belly; a rich and gently fried duck egg; a dense, lightly soured and toasted bread. But the sandwich cried out for a catalyst to help each of its top-notch components cohere.

I wanted every entrée to be like the Cedar River bone-in short rib. This is the plate to order when you need to wait out your cocktail buzz. The tender meat came glazed with a subtle Amarena-cherry barbecue sauce and bright chimichurri. And the presentation was half of the pleasure. The short-rib bone stretched up proudly like a skyscraper from a moat of creamy whipped potatoes dressed with piquant mustard greens and tenderstalked asparagus. It was a résumé in a dish, a brash advertisement for what Sparks does best.

Repeal 18th has a solid foundation — strong classic cocktails, satisfying bar bites and elegant plates that showcase a promising chef’s care. With a little time (and maybe a little thyme), the team should be able to nudge the few underperforming items across the finish line.

the pitch | december 2017 | pitch.com

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38

It’s a moving target, that threshold separating “fledgling adult-olescent” from “functional grown-up who opened a Roth IRA (while drunk),” but I suppose I’ve crossed it. I know this because I’m now expected to contribute to family holiday get-togethers. But I don’t feel like balancing a casserole on my knees for a five-hour car ride, so my version of fulfilling this duty means that I bring the beer.

Don’t think this gets me off the hook. In an age of punishing variety, no two drinkers share the same taste (perhaps especially when they share a name). IPAs are as contentious as tax policy, and there’s always one Coors-orbust relative ready to loudly decry the lack of “normal beer.” There’s no pleasing everyone.

The closest you’re going to get? The mixed six-pack, suitable for family dinners and ideal for a lazy hostess gift. Whether you’re bartending Christmas dinner or picking out a present for the beer snob in your family, the best way to project style is simply to play up the hyperlocal angle. Luckily, KC’s craft-beer scene is still enjoying an extended moment.

My self-imposed rules: Each beer must be from the KC area and available in 12- or 16-ounce cans or bottles (sorry, bomber fans).

I seek a mix of styles and flavor profiles. I love a novelty beer as much as the next human garbage pail, but I don’t want to drink cloying chocolate porters and sugar plum– infused seasonal hop syrups just because it’s December, and really, neither do you. Here, then, is what my family can look forward to: Martin City Radical Candor. There’s no better cure for seasonal affective disorder than this cheery double IPA, which comes wrapped in a tie-dye label cribbed from a Grateful Dead tour poster. The finish is as bright and bold as the packaging. Though the beer clocks in at just under 9 percent alcohol by volume, it’s neither especially boozy-tasting nor offensively hoppy. Big ups to the bright citrus flavors, which add a sweet and fragrant orange note without skewing sour.

Boulevard Collaboration No. 7. Yeah, yeah, this came out in August. But the 12-ounce longnecks have made their way to Boulevard’s mixsix wall, which is the ideal way to sample this oak-aged lager. This is the beer for your uncle who puts ice cubes in his white wine. It’s light, it’s fruity, it loves Phil Collins, and it sips and tastes like Welch’s White Grape Peach. (This is a compliment.) Maybe a lemon wandered its way into the mash at some point, but it moped right back out again. Pour this into your Christmas-morning orange juice for the loveliest brass monkey you’ll ever down.

Torn Label Monk & Honey. Belgians are the stinky cheeses of beer: You either love that

funky afterglow or you’ve forever forsworn it.

But never say never. Torn Label’s local honey– infused Belgian singel delivers the expected yeasty goodness and subtle undertones at a modest 6 percent ABV, pouring cloudy but sipping sweet (behind a nose of clove, tea and star anise). Bring this for your snooty brotherin-law who pronounces gose by crank-shifting through eight different vowel sounds.

BKS Artisan Ales Holstein. If you can dream up a milk stout, I’ll try it, but the one that truly lives up to my fantasies is BKS’s Holstein.

The fledgling brewery has already mastered the style: roasty, toasty flavors commingled with a slight bitterness that deftly cuts through the creamy, silky texture. Oddly Correct coffee can be assertive, but the El Salvadoran beans in this brew add a strong aroma without too much acidity. BKS sold out of the cans quickly at the first soft opening, so plan ahead.

KC Bier Co. Dunkel. When your family’s beer tastes seem irreconcilable, shut up and play the hits. KC Bier Co.’s Munichstyle brown lager is easy and malty, with enough heft and hops to ground the sweetness. Flashy it’s not, but this is a faithful representation of the style with a smooth profile and no off (or overly bready) flavors.

It’s a well-worn baseball glove of a beer: soft, brown, comfortable.

Piney River Brewing Co. Aux Arcs. Piney River breaks my rule by not being altogether local — it’s a long drive from KC to Bucyrus, Missouri. But if you’re angling for some hipster Midbest cred, find some of this. Aux Arcs is a cracklingly dry saison with a smoky nose and a clean-lined bitterness: all of the raisin-y goodness you want, but none of the sourdough-starter smell. This is the beer for the special person in your life who appreciates the finer things but isn’t a total goddamn wang about it. It’s interesting and complex but still digestible (more Ulysses, less Finnegan’s Wake).

Back-up plan: If you can’t imagine the holidays without a sweater-patterned label on your beer (or if BKS is sold out of Holstein), grab a bottle of Boulevard Snow and Tell. It’s a thin, clean Scotch ale with an oaky finish, and it pours the color of chestnuts. It’s also the rare winter seasonal balanced enough to drink year-round.

the pitch | december 2017 | pitch.com

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film

Islands in the Stream

This is no time to unplug your Blu-ray player.

by Eric MElin

If you love movies but rely on streaming services to watch them, your life is about to get more complicated. In a little more than a year, all Disney-owned content will leave Netflix and move to a dedicated platform. If you want Disney, Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm titles — films and TV shows that make up a disproportionately large share of the mainstream public consciousness — you’ll have to pony up. (Disney also owns ESPN, which similarly plans to roll out its own à la carte sports service, but that’s a Hulk of a different color.)

Not that locking down every last princess, Skywalker and Avenger guarantees primacy. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Now, CBS All Access and an array of niche specialty streaming services (Filmstruck, Shudder, MUBI, etc.) are already vying for your automatic recurring payments — fragmenting the marketplace in the process. Cord cutters and cable subscribers alike may find themselves nostalgic for the extinct brickand-mortar video-rental store. The selection may have been finite, but whole walls of stock didn’t disappear overnight due to big bundling deals.

Meanwhile, how many subscriptions is fair burden for one media-hungry household? OK, we’re all resigned to the fact that no one or two services offer every big movie or hot series. But as studios ink new deals for catalog movies, consigning other titles to the void, the services themselves can barely keep up, let alone the customer base (us). Wanna stream an entire franchise on the same service? Forget about it.

Only three of the eight Fast & Furious movies are on any streaming service at all. Gremlins is on Netflix, Gremlins 2: The New Batch is not. Don’t make Gizmo cry; you wouldn’t like him when he’s wet.

This is my way of reminding you of a fundamental fact that takes on new resonance in the gift-giving season: For the die-hard movie junkie, physical media still rules.

With a Blu-ray, you’re likely seeing the best picture quality possible outside the cinema itself. (Have a 4K setup and/or a neighborhood theater where the bulbs are set for 3-D and make other movies look oddly dim? You’re doing better at home.) Remember that your streaming feed is necessarily compressed and subject to your internet provider’s limitations — not how Christopher Nolan does it. And let’s not forget about the extra features and the booklets and the commentaries that add up to a good Blu-ray. A decent shelf of wellproduced discs is a mini film school.

Criterion’s restoration of The Philadelphia Story is close to perfection.

Here, then, is my guide to some of the most impressive Blu-ray releases of the season. No bare-bones bargains or shitty transfers here, just high-quality picture, sound and extras.

Boxed Sets

This past summer saw the release of the final chapter in something very rare — a wholly satisfying sci-fi trilogy (and a remake at that). War for the Planet of the Apes is the third and last of the rebooted Planet of the Apes franchise, and, like Dawn of the Planet of the Apes before it, it achieves emotional and intellectual realism within a fantasy matrix. Better yet, it potently challenges political and racial ideologies. Andy Serkis returns for another motion-capture miracle as head ape Caesar, while Woody Harrelson is in fine form as a ruthless colonel who understands that the human race’s days are numbered. In addition to deleted scenes and commentary from co-writer and director Matt Reeves, the disc includes featurettes on the tech used to create photorealistic CGI apes, as well as the fascinating history of the original Apes franchise, which was radical for its time (the late 1960s to the middle of the next decade). You might as well spring for The Planet of the Apes Trilogy, which includes Rise, Dawn and a host of extras for about $10 more.

The late George Romero is forever known as the “father of the zombies,” but after inventing the genre in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead, the politically conscious low-budget auteur made three wildly different movies, collected for the first time in the limitededition Blu-ray set George A. Romero Between Night and Dawn. There’s Always Vanilla (1971) is a melodrama about a young veteran who would rather be a drifter than have any responsibility. Season of the Witch is a 1972 surrealist feminist drama about a neglected housewife who discovers her calling through witchcraft. And you’ve likely heard of The Crazies, Romero’s angry 1973 return to horror, which is steeped in paranoia and distrust of the government. The latter two are both presented in 4K restorations; there are plenty of interviews, commentaries, and documentaries on the discs, too, plus a 60page booklet featuring new writings on these rarely seen films.

Before Woodstock, there was the Monterey International Pop Festival. D.A Pennebaker’s 79-minute documentary Monterey Pop captures this historic Summer of Love weekend, immortalizing some of rock’s most defining moments: Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire, the Who’s Pete Townshend smashing his own ax. But Pennebaker and his crew (which included nonfiction legends Albert Maysles

and Richard Leacock) shot way more footage than was released. Fifty years after the show, The Complete Monterey Pop Festival box includes not only a 4K restoration of the original cut of the movie but also raucous full sets from standouts Hendrix and Otis Redding, and another two full hours of concert footage featuring the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Moby Grape, the Grateful Dead, Simon & Garfunkel, Janis Joplin, the Mamas & the Papas, and more. Pennebaker’s verité style puts you right in the middle of this cultural moment, while his commentary and interviews go deeper.

The Next Musical Revolution

Ten years later, the Sex Pistols spit on all that peace and love and created a sense of danger that had been long missing from rock and roll. When bassist Sid Vicious was arrested for the stabbing death of girlfriend Nancy Spungen, it looked as if Sid believed his band’s own hype. Alex Cox’s remarkable 1986 romantic tragedy, Sid & Nancy, recasts wanton destruction as a suicidal death trip and self-fulfilling prophecy by two co-dependent, strung-out lovers (played by Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb). The Criterion Collection’s reissue is from a new 16-bit, 4K digital transfer supervised and approved by director of photography Roger Deakins, and it looks better than I’ve ever seen it. The bopitch.com | december 2017 | the pitch

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nus features are split between solid makingof stuff and doc stuff, including plenty of infamous real-life footage of Sid, Nancy and the Pistols.

Music of a Different Breed

If you see only one Polish musical-horrorvampire-mermaid movie this year, make it Agnieszka Smoczynska’s The Lure, also out on Criterion Blu-ray now. Released last year in America, this genre-bending drama is The Little Mermaid with a dark twist, giving its two topless teenage mermaids sharp pointy teeth and a thirst for blood. An interview with Smoczynska has her defending The Lure’s exploitative impulses as girl power, while its sometimes baffling original musical numbers blend glam rock and disco pop with lyrics that don’t necessarily translate well into English. Contemporary movies don’t often make it to Criterion this fast; whether this thing is hailed later as a classic is debatable, but The Lure is worth reckoning with now.

Cinema’s Formative Years, Restored

A movie spoken about in hushed tones among film historians, F.W. Murnau’s 1924 silent expressionistic masterpiece, The Last Laugh, is finally available on Blu-ray, in a 2K restoration from Kino Classics. Any short summary of the film — which follows the travails of a hotel doorman (Emil Jannings) — ignores its true innovation, cinematographer Karl Freund’s “unchained camera,” which seems to move freely, taking on adventurous new perspectives. Although silent, The Last Laugh also famously eschewed intertitles and pioneered the use of overlapping images and montage. This disc includes a new score, a making-of doc, commentary, and the unrestored version of the film on a DVD bonus disc.

For another lesson in visionary OG auteurism, pick up Criterion’s 2K digital transfer of Carl Theodor Dryer’s 1932 Vampyr. It was the first sound film by Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc), but it was shot silently, allowing the director more camera movement. His wonderful trick shots help create a fractured, experimental narrative that make this a twisted great-uncle to David Lynch’s Eraserhead. A visual essay, a short doc and an in-depth audio commentary from a Dreyer scholar delve into his groundbreaking work here, and the movie itself holds up brilliantly. The Blu-ray also comes with a 215-page book containing the screenplay and the 1872 story it’s based on.

James Whale may have directed the Gothic horror tale Frankenstein, but his 1932 The Old Dark House (once thought lost) is more claustrophobic thriller than horror movie. Boris Karloff is again the heavy, but he’s just a raging alcoholic, not a superhuman monster. Whale

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keeps it simple while showing his talents for pacing, subtext and cheeky humor. Melvyn Douglas, Gloria Stuart (yes, the one in Titanic) and Charles Laughton are among the travelers holed up in a mysterious mansion to avoid a storm. Whale’s sharp direction gets a lot of campy mileage and genuine dread out of the house’s owners, even if The Old Dark House isn’t traditionally scary. There are two commentaries and a couple of short interviews.

Date Night

When a great romantic comedy truly clicks, it’s usually because of a sparkling script, purposeful direction and the chemistry of a wonderful cast — a rare combination now that may never have been more perfectly brewed than it was in 1940’s The Philadelphia Story. George Cukor’s classic saved Katherine Hepburn’s career, led to James Stewart’s only Best Actor Oscar and features the archetypal Cary Grant performance. The new Criterion Blu-ray sports a beautiful 4K restoration, commentary, a doc and two full episodes of The Dick Cavett Show focusing on Hepburn.

Previous Blu-rays of Billy Wilder’s 1960 Best Picture winner, The Apartment, have looked and sounded good, but on December 12, Arrow Academy is releasing a new 4K restoration from the original camera negative, in a limited Blu-ray run of 2,700 copies. This timeless film — starring Jack Lemmon as an office worker beholden to his boss and Shirley MacLaine as the “other woman” to married man (and said boss) Fred MacMurray — is an absolute treasure. Handsomely shot and well-acted, it’s a perfect bridge between the classic era of screwball comedies and the more inward-looking character studies that would become commonplace just over a decade later.

The bonus features on this edition are what you’d expect, with a good mix of academia and interviews, but it also comes with a 150page hardcover book featuring new writing about the film and plenty of behind-the-scenes stills.

Finally, A Fish Called Wanda is getting a home-video release worthy of its status as one of the best films of the 1980s. Like The Apartment, this new Arrow Blu-ray sports a new 4K restoration sourced from the original negative.

John Cleese wrote and stars in this darkly comic caper, which pits British and American stereotypes against each other to hilarious effect. Cleese’s uptight barrister is taken in by sexy con woman Jamie Lee Curtis, which makes her dim-witted lover, Otto (an unforgettable, Oscar-winning Kevin Kline), beyond jealous. A pet-loving hitman who keeps accidentally killing dogs (Michael Palin) is a sublimely absurd addition in a movie that still has the power to surprise. Lots of extras are ported over from a previous Blu-ray release, but some new appreciations and interviews are here, too.

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Facing the Future

Amy Sherald’s “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)”

The Kemper’s thrilling show of Outwin portraits holds up a timely mirror.

by Annie RAAb

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The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery awarded Amy Sherald’s “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)” first place in the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. It is the image you see on this page, and I’ll talk about it more in a minute. But time is running out for you to see it in person at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. If it’s not yet January 7 when you read this, go to the Kemper and come back. I’ll wait.

The Kemper is the only Midwest stop for the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition of 43 selected Outwin Boochever winners, and, simply put, the show is a must. My notes from walking through the space remind me to mention complex social hierarchies and contemporary challenges to the American identity and how the art of portraiture addresses those matters here — how certain themes recur, destined to be fed to the insatiable hydra of

American culture. At whatever depth these works speak to you, however, there’s an almost primal thrill to seeing a significant assemblage of recent figurative art.

The only portrait here that does not include a human face is “Janie,” by Clarity Haynes.

The subject is painted from her chin to the bottom of her stomach, her ample volume spilling to the edges of the frame and beyond with a fullness that recalls the ancient Venus of Willendorf. Haynes emphasizes the weight of the breasts, draws our eyes over the contours of a body at rest. Her nudity renders her vulnerable, until we recall that, countless human generations ago, nakedness was a symbol of strength and fertility. The portrait restores some of that power by depicting this body — the shadows under the fat and between the puckers of the stretched skin — with painterly beauty. Haynes captures time

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Come see.

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The Nelson-Atkins is only U.S. venue for this groundbreaking exhibition. #PicassoKC Anthropomorphic Mask, Ivory Coast, Dan culture, before 1966. Wood, 9 7/8 x 6 1/8 x 3 5/16 inches. Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris. Inv. 73.1966.3.10. Image © musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac. Photo: Claude Germain. | Pablo Picasso, Spanish (1881–1973).

Male Bust (study for “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”), 1907. Oil on canvas, 22 1/16 x 18 5/16 inches. Musée national Picasso Paris, MP14. © 2017 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo: René-Gabriel Ojéda.

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45th & Oak, Kansas City, Missouri | nelson-atkins.org | 816.751.1ART The exhibition was conceived by musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in partnership with Musée national Picasso-Paris and adapted by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and The Montreal Museum of Fine Art/Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal.

Major funding provided by Shirley and Barnett C. Helzberg Jr., Hall Family Foundation, Bank of America, Americo Life, Inc., Paul DeBruce and Linda Woodsmall-DeBruce, Donald J. Hall, Muriel McBrien Kauffman Foundation, Marcelo and Jordan Claure/ Sprint, Morton and Estelle Sosland/Sosland Foundation, Donald J. Hall Initiative, Bloch Fund for Special Exhibitions, G. Kenneth and Ann Baum, Bloch Family Foundation, Bill and Christy Gautreaux, Trudy and John Jacobson, Atterbury Family Foundation, Barton P. and Mary D. Cohen Charitable Trust, Dr. Mary Davidson—Trustee, Dick Belger and Evelyn Craft-Belger, Nancy and Rick Green, The Neil D. Karbank Foundation, The Karbank Family Fund, Kent Sunderland, the Committee of 100, and our Honorary Committee.

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itself in the dimension and muted colors of the painting: “Janie” shows us the softening, the stillness, the rounding of the body as it yields to the years. The 21st-century American woman might reject this sight at first, conditioned as she is to avoiding the appearance of hunger, especially for something that expands the shape or diminishes the presumed allure of a lithe body. (Let’s set aside for now the way a typical modern man might see Janie.)

Haynes challenges us to reconcile our prejudices about size and what it indicates about socioeconomic status and self-awareness.

Beauty standards have evolved along with humans; Haynes’ work is a capsule history of these changes, contained in the uncontainable force of one body.

Alison Bechdel, the illustrator, feminist author and namesake of the test so many popular movies fail, is a semi-recognizable face in the gallery. Riva Lehrer depicts the artist looking into a mirror, one arm thrust behind her sketching a portrait of her mother in blue ink in the dark spot of her own shadow.

Bechdel’s own ink-and-paper version of her mother portrays a chilly, detached figure whose power over household and children inverts the control she lacks over her marriage.

Lehrer’s piece adds an exterior, observational layer to Bechdel’s memoir, while introducing — the Bechdel portrait is the first you see — a possible thesis for the whole show. Portraiture is an art of self-reflection for the artist, regardless of who is on the canvas. Each is a map of flaws and victories, which the viewer may recognize in common.

Which leads me to Sherald’s “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)” — a figure ready to hold us indefinitely in her steady gaze.

Her pose is culturally performative, a person indulging a historical fantasy that doesn’t quite fit into any single American era. Her look is vintage — bygone hat cocked to one side of her head, white gloves snapped tight, a dress you’d kill to find in a thrift store. She could be heading off to church or returning from it. The teacup in her hand is comically distended, as big as a whole kettle. The backdrop suggests wallpaper they don’t make anymore. She is not someone you know. Yet her expression is frank and altogether modern.

If you find her appearance ironic, she’s not laughing with you. Miss Everything does not recognize her deviation from historical reality, the way she has been liberated from our history to live out her own alternate timeline, free to drink tea and look her finest, apart from anybody else’s expectations or assumptions about her status, her class.

Meanwhile, Sherald herself has earned a role in shaping the American narrative. She will paint the official portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama. Looking at “Miss Everything,” you can’t imagine any artist better suited to that task.

Rigoberto A. Gonzalez’s “La Guia (The Guide)” borrows its drama from Romanticist

paintings of the mid-1800s but its concerns from yesterday’s papers. A theatrical moment unfolds around three figures: a man, a woman and la guia, a teenage girl. But the girl is charged with smuggling this family and others safely from Juarez, Mexico, to El Paso, Texas. “La Guia” demonstrates Gonzalez’s thorough understanding of composition, color and light, and it’s not hard to imagine him working in the 19th or 18th centuries.

By emphasizing technique, Gonzalez renders his contemporary allegory in a timeless way: Each of the three characters expresses fear and doubt in ways recognizable across centuries of art. The figures are lit from the left, somewhere behind the viewer. But in the top-right corner, the last bit of a sunset can be seen behind the mountains around the Mexican city. It’s a small detail compared with the overall dimensions of the image, but it tells us something important about the moment: This is no heavenly or natural illumination but rather the searchlights of angry authority.

However you feel about the political issues running under the current in “La Guia,” the painting’s anxiety washes over you.

By the exit, a salon-style composition of frames displays Naoko Wowsugi’s “Thank You for Teaching Me English.” Fourteen photographs of friends, each in the middle of pronouncing a word he or she has taught Wowsugi, make the language itself the portrait’s subject. Colorful backgrounds match the tone and intensity of each word. A man in a suit with wide blue eyes says, “Bureaucracy.”

The “Smithereens” girl is caught midgrowl, her eyes narrowed to convey obliteration.

Jaimie Warren (yes, KC’s Warren) bullies us from a floral post above our heads, lips stuck out in a taunt: “Wussy.”

It’s a lighthearted conclusion to an almost overwhelming exhibition, one that shows us loved ones, families, friends and even heroes not objectively but with the intimate subjectivity of portraiture. Taken together, the images at the Kemper mirror the ways in which we separate people are all pressing against the same American membrane, every unique actor affecting the whole. In the faces and figures are moments of strength, compassion, humor and resiliency of a kind we hope to see in ourselves. The Outwin selections confirm that, when we make ourselves susceptible to empathy, our vulnerability is the first step toward tolerance — and we are seen, even when no one is painting us. The membrane pushes back against our efforts to alter societal boundaries, but maybe, as another of Wowsugi’s teachers puts it, it’s all gonna be “iight.”

The Outwin 2016: American Portraiture Today Through January 7 at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 4420 Warwick, kemperart.org

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events

Friday, december 1

Chris Lane, Dylan Schneider, Bailey Bryan The Truman thetrumankc.com

Whitechapel

Granada Theatre thegranada.com

Broncho, the Holy White Hounds The Riot Room theriotroom.com

Daniel A. Hoyt (This Book Is Not for You reading), La Guerre, Maria the Mexican Replay Lounge replaylounge.com

Saturday, december 2 Tech N9ne

Granada Theatre thegranada.com

Madisen Ward and the Mama Bear eKALI

Sunday, december 6 Ekali’s name might not ring a bell, but if you’re a hip-hop fan, you’ve already heard bits and pieces of his work. Portions of his 2014 single “Unfaith” are sampled on Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late.

Since then, the vancouver electronic producer has signed to Skrillex’s OWSLA label and dropped the first single from his upcoming debut. Joining ekali on tour are Dallas producer Medasin and Kansas City native Judge — who is riding high after landing his first string of festival appearances and big placements from Young Thug and Blackbear. — Aaron Rhodes Ekali With Medasin and Judge Wednesday, December 6, at RecordBar, 1520 Grand ($17) $UICIDeBOY$

Johnson County Community College jccc.edu/carlsen-center-presents

Sunday, december 3 Phoenix, Y God Y

Arvest Bank Theatre at The Midland themidlandkc.com

21 SAvAge

Saturday, december 9

The Truman thetrumankc.com

Fans were already excited for this show back in September, but Atlanta trap star 21 Savage upped the ante on Halloween with the release of a surprise collaborative album with Migos member Offset and super-producer Metro Boomin’. Without Warning hits where Savage’s solo Issa missed, delivering the murky, gruesome murder raps that his base first fell for. Before the kids can count along with Savage during “Bank Account,” they’ll have an opening set from young Louisiana rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again, who draws influence from a long line of street-smart Southern rappers, the most evident being fellow Bayou State star Boosie Badazz. — A.R.

tueSday, december 5

21 Savage With YoungBoy Never Broke Again Saturday, December 9, at the Uptown Theater, 3700 Broadway ($39)

monday, december 4 Kodak Black

Arvest Bank Theatre at The Midland themidlandkc.com

The Wood Brothers

Thrice, Circa Survive, Balance & Composure and Chon Uptown Theater uptowntheater.com

thurSday, december 7

WedneSday, december 6

Decades Rewind

Lied Center, University of Kansas lied.ku.edu

Saturday, december 9

Dustbowl Revival

Friday, december 8

Trans-Siberian Orchestra

Knuckleheads knuckleheadskc.com

Jewel

Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith Sprint Center sprintcenter.com

Sprint Center sprintcenter.com

Uptown Theater uptowntheater.com

Friday, december 15 New Orleans rappers and cousins Ruby Da Cherry and $lick $loth teamed up as $uicideboy$ in 2014, then started pumping out an absurd number of ePs and mixtapes, topping the SoundCloud charts with a fusion of 1990s Memphis flows and trap-rap instrumentation. This KC visit marks a first, but friend and frequent collaborator Pouya worked his way up from playing the Jackpot in 2015 to the granada in 2016. A packed house at the Uptown would be something of a Midwest milestone for this latest wave of lo-fi rap stars. — A.R. $uicideboy$ Friday, December 15, at the Uptown Theater, 3700 Broadway ($28)

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The Folly Jazz Series: Spanish Harlem Orchestra The Folly Theater follytheater.org

KPR Presents: Big Band Christmas Liberty Hall libertyhall.net

Freedom Sounds Collective, Go Generation, Boomtown United

Sunday, december 10 Traindodge, Bummer, Sundiver, Nouveau The Riot Room theriotroom.com

The Hip-Hop Nutcracker

Arvest Bank Theatre at The Midland themidlandkc.com

RecordBar therecordbar.com

monday, december 11

Dream Ritual, Bummer, Youth Pool, Doubledrag

Evanescence

Davey’s Uptown Ramblers Club daveysuptown.com

Gee Watts, Sauce, Heartfelt Anarchy, Shawn Majors, Clark Rooseveltte, Terence Tyrone MiniBar minibarkc.com

Music Hall Kansas City ticketmaster.com

Friday, december 15 Todd Rundgren

Voodoo Lounge, Harrah’s North Kansas City caesars.com/harrahs-kansas-city

Jackyl

Live Music

EvEnts

Wed 12/6

Jeff & Norm 7pm

Thur 12/7

JohNNy GleasoN JamGrass

Fri 12/8

Tracer heiGhTs

SaT 12/9

rex pryor soNG circle 1pm rock paper scissors 5pm

Wed 12/13

Jeff & Norm

Thur 12/14 Barclay BroThers Fri 12/15

lauGhiNG WilloW

SaT 12/16

Dry Dollar BaND 4pm

Wed 12/20

full couNT & Turkey BoNe

Wed 12/27

Jeff & Norm 7pm

Thur 12/28 Jimmy & Dave Nace 7pm

The Truman thetrumankc.com

Fri 12/29

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Sun 12/31

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Photo by Chris Leeg

Sunday, december 17 Tatsuya Nakatani played the first show at the 1900 Building, back

when the performance space was just a concrete shell with exposed pipes — a reverberant space perfectly suited to the overlaid textures of the Nakatani Gong Orchestra. This month, Nakatani performs here again, this time in the spruced up recital hall, joined by a cohort of local artists ready to apply themselves to his unique soundscape of bowed and scraped percussion. The ensemble grew out of Nakatani’s experience as an avant-garde soloist, creating a layered array of sounds that defied comprehension as the product of one player. His improvised, free-form sets — the wistful ringing of singing bowls, shimmering bowed gong, erratic bass-drum thumps — generate a visceral, uncanny aural experience. — Libby Hansen

Tatsuya Nakatani and Friends 5:30 p.m. December 17 at the 1900 Building, 1900bldg.com

Wholesale ticket prices. Never pay fees again. All for just $1.99/month.

Go to www.anytixx.com and use coupon code: "thepitchkc" and save 10% pitch.com | december 2017 | the pitch Untitled-4 1

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events

Christmas Party tuesday, deC. 19th • 4pm-2am • Over 60 Girls • Free Buffet • Prizes & Giveaways 30 seconds East of the Power & Light District

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Saturday, december 16 Shinedown

RecordBar therecordbar.com

Pokey LaFarge

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The Interrupters, SWMRS, the Regrettes

Homestead Greys, Ricky Dean Sinatra

Knuckleheads knuckleheadskc.com

The Bottleneck thebottlenecklive.com

WedneSday, december 20

Kansas City:

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Try FREE: 816-533-0048 More Local Numbers: 1-800-926-6000

Ahora español Livelinks.com 18+

Sonic Spectrum Tribute Series: New Order

The Truman thetrumankc.com

Handel’s Messiah Always FREE to listen and reply to ads!

thurSday, december 28

The Bottleneck bottlenecklive.com

Sunday, december 31 Kid Rock

Sprint Center sprintcenter.com

Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts kauffmancenter.org

Split Lip Rayfield Grassfed

thurSday, december 21

The Zeros

Illenium, Said the Sky, Dabin Arvest Bank Theatre at the Midland themidlandkc.com

The Bottleneck thebottlenecklive.com Ameristar Casino Kansas City kansascity.ameristar.com

Casi Joy

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BlACk lABEl SOCiEty

Girls!Girls!Girls!

30 minute Free trial 18+ 816-841-1577 // 913-279-9202 48

Saturday, december 30 Every act on this tour is important to heavy metal in a different way.

Black Label Society, founded in 1998, is the project of longtime Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Zakk Wylde. Despite hailing from New Jersey, Wylde injects a distinctly gruff, Southern attitude into the band’s groove-inflected songwriting. Both opening acts are pioneers of their respective subgenres: Corrosion of Conformity began as a hardcore punk band in 1982 before introducing elements of metal and becoming one of the first purveyors of crossover thrash. A handful of bands preceded Eyehategod in creating sludge metal, but few have contributed more sludge anthems. — A.R. Black Label Society With Corrosion Of Conformity and Eyehategod Saturday, December 30, at Uptown Theater, 3700 Broadway ($35)

the pitch | december 2017 | pitch.com

Pitch_46-48_Concerts/Events Calendar.indd 48

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DECEMBER2017 2017 || the pitch.com || december THE pitch PITCH pitch.com

PITCH_49-51.indd 49 49 Pitch_12-17_52.indd

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11/20/2017 11/20/17 11:40:06 12:52 AMPM

LOCAL 910

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City of Fountains School allows participation in it’s activities, services, events and programs by persons of any race, color, national or ethnic origin, religion, sexual orientation or gender.

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Foreign Language Teacher-Turkish (Kansas City, MO): Teach Turkish Lang. courses to sec. school students. Bachelor in Turkish Lang or rltd fl d + 1 yr exp as Turkish Lang teacher at mid or high sch.

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Science Teacher (Kansas City, MO): Teach Science at secondary sch. Bachelors in Science Edu, any subfi eld of Science, or Engineer.+1 yr exp as Sci Tchr at mid or high sch. Mail res.: Frontier Schools, Inc, 30 W Pershing Rd Ste 402 Kansas City, MO 64108, Attn: HR, Refer to Ad#CK.

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4000

BUY, SELL, TRADE,

4028

Miscellaneous

WANTS TO purchase minerals and other oil & gas interests. Send details to P.O. Box 13557, Denver, Co 80201

Swords & More

Best Kratom Prices in Kc!

available from Professional musician and Instructor. Instructor teaches in a fun and meaningful context from ages 4 to the young at heart. Sessions are a half-hour and an hour. Students who sign up before January will receive $5 off.

For more info. please call/text Kathleen (913)206-2151 or email:Klmamuric@yahoo.com

Loyalty program for Kratom cBD products • Smoking accessories • Metaphysical Essential Oils • Swords • Knives, Figurines

mOn-Sat 10am-8pm

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Sun 12pm-6pm

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FREE

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SAMPLES

Largest seLection of cBD ProDucts in Kansas city!

The following vehicles will be sold at public auction on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2018 unless claimed by owner and all tow and storage charges are paid in full.

For information, please contact Insurance Auto Auction at 913-422-9303.

YR MAKE/MODEL

VIN#

2006 Ford TAurus 1FAFP56u46A164034 2017 Ace WeldINg TrAIler 4YMul1013gM009167 2016 HYuNdAI soNATA 5NPe24AF3gH264787 2017 HoNdA HR-V 3CZRU6H3XHG701093 2013 CHeVRolet MAlibU 1G11C5SA8dF130215 2016 HARley-dAVidSoN XG750 1Hd4Nbb13GC503825 2008 MeRCedeS-beNZ ClK WdbtJ56H18F256403 2006 cHrYsler PAcIFIcA 2A4gM68476r764143 2007 MITsuBIsHI gAlANT 4A3AB36F37e083445 2008 CHeVRolet tRAilblAZeR 1GNdt13S082143436 2011 Ford Focus 1FAHP3HN5BW182851 2001 dodGe RAM 2500 3b7KF23671G180982 2015 NiSSAN VeRSA Note 3N1Ce2CP6Fl394220 2012 leXUS eS JtHbK1eG0C2476318 2013 dodGe AVeNGeR 1C3CdZAG2dN770246 2005 dodGe GRANd CARAVAN 2d4GP44l05R431668 2007 VolKSWAGeN JettA 3VWeF71K37M115192 2012 toyotA CAMRy 4t4bF1FKXCR249894 2017 TrIuMPH sTreeT TWIN sMTd31gN4HT827270 1995 Ford escorT 1FAsP11J5sW233430 2007 FoRd eXPloReR 1FMeU63e67Ub40444 2004 cHrYsler ToWN & couNTrY 2c4gP54l44r586029 2011 CHeVRolet SilVeRAdo 3GCPKte34bG368645 2014 KAWASAKi eX300 JKAeX8A19eA004549 2010 FoRd eSCAPe 1FMCU0d7XAKA46252 2004 HyUNdAi SoNAtA KMHWF35H84A065408 2005 FoRd F150 1FtPX14595Nb78389 2016 FoRd FoCUS 1FAdP3K29Gl325953 2006 PoNtiAC Vibe 5y2Sl65816Z450150 2006 bMW 325i WbAVb13586KX46476 2011 HoNdA CiViC 19XFA1F90be004921

YR MAKE/MODEL

VIN#

2004 CHeVRolet MAlibU 2014 NiSSAN MURANo 2006 JeeP GRANd CHeRoKee 2009 PoNtiAC Vibe 2010 KiA SoUl 2013 dodGe AVeNGeR 2017 toyotA CAMRy 2009 NIssAN rogue 2006 toyotA SCioN tC 2008 SAtURN oUtlooK 2007 dodGe CARAVAN 2010 HyUNdAi GeNeSiS CoUPe 2008 CHRySleR toWN & CoUNtRy 1989 JeeP CHeRoKee 2001 PoNtiAC GRANd PRiX 2010 Ford FusIoN 2010 CHeVRolet CobAlt 2002 MAZdA PRotéGé 2002 cHrYsler 300M 2014 Ford FusIoN 2010 dodGe AVeNGeR 2015 MitSUbiSHi MiRAGe 2006 MAZdA 3 2004 ToYoTA HIgHlANder 2002 iSUZU Rodeo 2008 CHeVRolet iMPAlA 1999 MeRCURy CoUGAR 2008 HoNdA CiViC 2007 JeeP PATrIoT 2006 Ford F350 2009 GMC SieRRA

1G1ZS52F74F165541.

JN8AZ1MW4eW503165 1J4GR48K56C213965 5y2SP670X9Z422881 KNdJt2A26A7160934 1C3CdZAb1dN590101 4t1bF1FK1HU385784 JN8As58T79W051178 JtKde177260079670 5GZeV23798J123988 1d4GP25b37b119971 KMHHU6KH9AU035252 2A8HR64X38R745807 1J4FJ57l1Kl404389 1G2WR52171F199697 3FAHP0cg2Ar278476 1G1Ad5F51A7222105 JM1bJ225220572281 2c3He66g52H266676 3FA6P0Hd4er137369 1b3CC4FbXAN209398 Ml32A3HJXFH056478 JM1bK343761496118 JTegd21A240094728 4S2CK58W424310990 2G1Wt55N981233497 1ZWFt61l5X5616912 2HGFA16518H355364 1J8FF48W67d393863 1FTWW31P76eB06592 3GteK13C29G199654

Many of these vehicles run and drive. If you are looking for cheap transportation, don’t miss this auction/sale.

We welcome all buyers. Terms of auction: All sales are “as is” “where is”. No guarantees or warranties. Paper work to obtain new title will be $75.00 Per vehicle. No guarantee that paperwork will produce title.Bidding will be number only. Terms are cash or certified check. Vehicles must be paid for in full at end of auction. No exceptions. All sales are final. No returns.

50 50

INsURANCE AUTO AUCTION 2663 sOUTH 88TH sT. KCKs, 66111 913-422-9303

117 S Mur-Len oLathe, KS 66062 913-397-0594

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| DECEMBER | pitch.com 2017 THE PITCH | december | pitch.com 2017 the pitch

Pitch_12-17_52.indd PITCH_49-51.indd 5050

11/20/2017 11/20/17 11:35:47 1:13 AM PM

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19301 East Eastland Center Court | Independence, MO 64055 eastlandcourt@clovergroupinc.com pitch.com | december 2017 | the pitch

Pitch_12-17_52.indd 51

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11/20/17 10:26 AM

98.9 THE ROCK PRESENTS

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WITH SPECIAL GUESTS ALL THAT REMAINS

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52

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the pitch | december 2017 | pitch.com

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