The Pitch: April 2017

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The Blues: What happened

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The PiTch QUeStiONNAiRe

Savannah Rodgers, film director

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Contents

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MAjOR LeAGUe

Major Baisden sold his tech company for $134 million and started a pro wrestling league — and he means business.

By David Hudnall

15

the NeW ReSiStANce

Justice Gaston-Bowers and Hillary Shields talk about their different approaches to political awareness in the age of Trump.

By Traci Angel

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the bLUeS

What happened to the Missouri Democratic Party?

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23

ALL iN

Michael and Christina Corvino put everything (and nearly everyone) they know into their new Corvino Supper Club and Tasting Room.

By David Hudnall

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By April Fleming

34

pUt A LiD ON it

Amina Marie Hood says there’s a hat for everybody — and she’ll make you one to prove it.

By Angela Lutz

Books ......................................................21 Drink ........................................................32 Fashion ...................................................36 Art.............................................................39 Film ..........................................................43 Screen Stealers ....................................44 Café ..........................................................47 Music .......................................................50

Cover: Michael and Christina Corvino in their new restaurant. Photo by Zach Bauman

the pitch editor Scott Wilson Managing editor David Martin Staff Writer 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, Eric Melin, Annie Raab, Aaron Rhodes, Barbara Shelly, Nick Spacek, Lucas Wetzel Art Direction: J.C. Franco contributing photographers Zach Bauman, Jennifer Wetzel Graphic Designers Katy Barrett-Alley, Amy Gomoljak, Abbie Leali, Liz Loewenstein, Melanie Mays Senior classified Multimedia Specialist Steven Suarez Multimedia Specialists Becky Losey, Ryan Wolkey Advertising and Digital coordinator Casey Osburn

Director of Marketing and Operations Jason Dockery Office Administrator and Marketing coordinator Andrew Miller publisher Amy Mularski southcomm 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

n at i o n a l a dv e r t i s i n g

VMG Advertising 888-278-9866, vmgadvertising.com Senior Vice president of Sales Susan Belair Senior Vice president of Sales Operations Joe Larkin

distribution

The Pitch distributes 35,000 copies a month and is available free throughout Greater Kansas City, limited to one copy per reader. Additional copies may be purchased for $5 each, payable at The Pitch’s office in advance. The Pitch may be distributed only by The Pitch’s authorized independent contractors or authorized distributors. No person may, without prior written permission of The Pitch, take more than one copy of each month’s issue. Mail subscriptions: $22.50 for six months or $45 per year, payable in advance. Application to mail at second-class postage rates is pending at Kansas City, MO 64108.

copyright

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questionnaire

lAkeside live Live MUSic at tHe winery and brewery

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7 - Bitter Disappointments 6pm 8 - KnockKneed Sally 6pm 9 - Frank Rardon 2pm 14 - Coyote Bill 6pm 15 - Finnegon’s Crossing 6pm 21 - The Bucket Band 6pm 22 - Kyle Sexton Band 6pm 28 - Crosseyed Cat 6pm 29 - Junebug and The Porchlights 6pm 30 - Clay Hughes 2pm

MAy

Savannah Rodgers Film director

Hometown: Olathe

they look like.

Current neighborhood: Proudly living in LFK

What’s your drink? White sangria. It used to be tequila, but I ruined that for myself.

What I do (in 140 characters or less): I take playing pretend really seriously.

Where’s dinner? In LFK, I can’t get enough Burger Stand. When I’m in KC, it’s almost always a burger from the Buffalo Room at the Westport Flea Market.

What’s your addiction? Writing “xo” at the end of long messages to people. It started ironically, but now I’m a monster and can’t stop.

What’s your game? I play a game where I look at strangers and figure out which actor

“As a kid, I wanted to be ... ” The general manager for the Washington Wizards. Don’t ask.

“In five years, I’ll be ... ” 27, hopefully.

5 - Big Louie & the Wrecking Crew 6pm 6 - Wildwood Boys 6pm 7 - Scotch Hollow 2pm 13 - Mike Vande Band 6pm 14 - Karen Brown & Tom Tipton 2pm “I always laugh at ... ” Brooklyn 99. Everything about that show is wonderful and hilarious.

“I’ve been known to binge-watch ... ” All irreverent comedies. It’s a form of self-care.

“I can’t stop listening to ... ” The Streets of Fire soundtrack. It’s impossible to not get stoked while listening to it.

“My dream concert lineup is ...” Bleachers and every artist who covered one of the band’s songs on Terrible Thrills, Vol. 2. I’m obsessed with Jack Antonoff ’s songwriting.

Taylor Swift and all of the other artists he collaborates with are welcome, too.

“I just read ... ” Anna Kendrick’s book

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questionnaire

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What’s your hidden talent? Hiding all talent What’s your guiltiest pleasure? I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. I feel no shame for my love of Fuller House, okay?

The best advice I ever got: “Help yourself.”

Worst advice? Someone of influence in the film industry once told me that if I wasn’t shooting my movies on film stock, I was only making artless “videos.” Super elitist, classist and pretentious.

My sidekick? My pug, Teddy Who is your hero? My mom. She’s overcome a lot of adversity in her life. She was a single parent for a long time and I really admire her. Anyone who knows her should feel lucky.

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Who (or what) is your nemesis?

Fascism What’s your greatest struggle right now? Dealing with the current political climate. I grew up during the Obama years; it was a privilege in its own right. This is a terrifying time, but there is hope seeing the consistent direct action from activists. I wish more citizens had engaged in activism earlier; maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess.

People who participate in direct action for the Women’s March also need to show up for Black Lives Matter events. It’s important to be intersectional in our fight against oppression.

My favorite toy as a child: I had a Po doll from Teletubbies that would say homophobic epithets and sing, “Bite my butt.”

The ’90s were wild, apparently.

My dating triumph/tragedy: I’ve been in love with my partner since I was 17. We became best friends almost instantly. We’ve been together for two and a half years now, still going strong. I’m very lucky to have such a supportive, wonderful person in my life.

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My brush with fame: After one of my screenings at Kansas City FilmFest last year, someone told me there might be a get-together at a hotel bar. I left and looked for the hotel for 20 minutes before asking a couple for directions. The couple turned out to be Don Cheadle and his partner. He was receiving a big award that day from the festival and apparently everyone was trying to meet him. I wasn’t starstruck; I really just wanted to hang out with my friends after the festival. He seemed very reluctant to

Two short films Rodgers directed, For Sale and Girls Night, are included in the Heartland Student Shorts block at 8:35 p.m. Thursday, April 6, at Kansas City FilmFest. give me directions, but his partner was gracious and told me they were headed there.

So, for the next few minutes we made some small talk about Chi-Raq and if he was enjoying the festival. Conversation was polite but terse. We ended up in the elevator together and made some more small talk. He pointed to my festival badge and asked if I was a volunteer. His face looked so relieved when I told him I was a director; I’m guessing it made him feel more confident I wasn’t some stalker. The conversation was much more upbeat for the rest of the elevator ride, then we all parted ways and said goodnight.

I walked in the opposite direction to the bar. Naturally, the bar was empty and there was no get together after all. Really sorry about following you back to your hotel for no reason, Don Cheadle.

My soapbox: Everyone needs to watch Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains.

The story of the movie’s production is endlessly fascinating, but it’s also a great film.

It stars Diane Lane and Laura Dern when they were maybe 15. Diane Lane plays this little badass named Corinne Burns who starts a terrible (yet amazing) punk band called the Stains and a feminist revolution.

Sarah Jacobson did a great documentary piece about the production of the film and how it wasn’t given a home-video release until about 20 years after the fact. Ten out of 10: highly recommend all of it.

What was the last thing you had to apologize for? This question implies I’ve made a mistake before.

Who’s sorry now? Homophobes I went to junior high and high school with. Admittedly, their homophobic epithets were less cute than that Po doll. Also, they’re probably not sorry.

My recent triumph: Sometimes waking up and dealing with the weight of a fascist autocracy is a triumph in and of itself. •

Twitter Handle: @snacpack Instagram: @savannahrodgers

april 2017 the pitch pitch || april 2017 || pitch.com the pitch.com

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SportS Not enough room in this ring for Lakota Red Cloud and Dak Draper

Major League

Major Baisden sold his tech company for $134 million and started a pro wrestling league — and he means business.

By DaviD HuDnall

It’s Saturday night, an hour ahead of showtime for the National Wrasslin’ League, and inside the Kansas City Scottish Rite Temple’s courtly green room — modestly perched podium on one end, a massive etching of a Masonic double-headed eagle on the other, blood-red carpet and white walls in the hundred or so feet between — the vibe is cheerful but focused. Being here is like being backstage at a play that happens to star an all-jocks cast. Two dozen well-built men in colorful tights are chatting, laughing, taping up, rehearsing moves, sitting on folding chairs, drinking from gallon jugs of water.

Half-open suitcases overflowing with wrestler-friendly beauty products (hair gel, baby oil, Gold Bond, cocoa butter) litter the floor.

In a corner, a 25-year-old wrestler known in the ring as Jax Royal — he’s in a tag team with his identical twin brother, Jet Royal; they’re called Royal Blood — sits blank-faced as his blond mane is straightened and refashioned into braided cornrows. Up by the podium,

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a villainous wine connoisseur called Niles Plonk paces back and forth, mouthing lines, clutching a chalice.

One of the more noticeable specimens in the room is a tall and exceptionally athletic 31-year-old African-American man who goes by the name Blaine Meeks. Six months ago, Meeks was bouncing and bartending in Austin, Texas, and touring low-level wrestling circuits in what spare time he could muster. He usually performed as Bolt Brady, a hyperactive comic-book enthusiast.

“Most wrestlers at that level, you’ve got a full-time job during the week, you try to drive to work the indie shows on the weekend, and then you gotta hurry up to get off the road and back to town again to show up at your job,” Meeks says. “It’s a real grind.”

Meeks would occasionally make the trip up to Kansas City for monthly events staged

by Metro Pro Wrestling, a local indie outfit that started in 2010. He got to know Metro Pro’s founder, Chris Gough, a little bit.

Then one day last year, Gough called Meeks and told him he was recruiting wrestlers for a new league, based in Kansas City, to be launched at the beginning of 2017. The league, Gough said, would treat wrestlers as salaried employees, with benefits and 401(k) s — an unprecedented approach in the world of professional wrestling.

“He said, “How’d you like to wrestle fulltime?’” Meeks recalls. “I mean, that’s been my dream since I was 13. I said, ‘Sure, of course.’ I moved up to Kansas City pretty soon after that.”

Originally, Major Baisden wanted to buy a baseball team.

This was in 2015, after he’d sold his company, Iris Data Services, for $134 million.

Baisden has always been something of an overachiever. Born in Sacramento, California, he graduated from the University of

California-Davis at age 19. He worked as a manager in the legal tech support unit of the California Department of Justice, then found his way into a company that specialized in organizing and photocopying legal documents. Baisden helped shepherd that company into the digital age and ended up with some equity in the business. Then, in 2007, he started his own, Kansas City-based company, Iris, which provided electronic discovery services for law firms and corporate legal departments.

“Basically, we had technology that could comb through massive quantities of data — billions of documents — and pare all that down to just the documents likely to be relevant for a lawsuit,” Baisden told me in March, in a glass-walled conference room at the NWL offices in the Town Pavilion building downtown. “The thing we did different than our competitors is that we packaged the product in a way where the law firm didn’t have to rely on a service provider to continued on page 10

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SportS

use the tech — the firm could use it themselves.”

By the time Epiq Systems, a legal-tech heavyweight, bought Iris, Baisden had built it into a $50 million company that had contracts with 50 of the 200 largest law firms on the planet. As co-founder and president, Baisden walked away with, he said, “a good chunk” of the $134 million sale. He was 34 years old and a multimillionaire. What to do?

Baisden had always been a baseball fan.

Now that he had big-league dough, he wondered if it might be possible to put together an ownership group to buy a Major League Baseball team.

“I explored it pretty seriously,” Baisden said. “But what I found is that it’s very hard to cobble together enough money to have a significant say in the operations of a professional baseball team.”

He considered a Major League Soccer team. “But I have no passion for soccer,” Baisden admitted.

Wrestling was not on his radar. Baisden had enjoyed what was then called the World Wrestling Federation on television when he was a kid, but as a business venture, professional wrestling seemed like a loser.

“The WWE totally has the market cornered, right?” he said, referring to what the WWF eventually became. “And everybody I’ve seen try to challenge the WWE has failed miserably. But then I heard about this thing called indie wrestling.”

A few brief words here on the history of professional wrestling: In the old days — the 1960s and 1970s — pro wrestling was a decentralized and largely regional phenomenon. As Vince McMahon, the chairman and CEO of WWE, told Sports Illustrated in 1991: “There were wrestling fiefdoms all

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over the country, each with its own little lord in charge. Each little lord respected the rights of his neighboring little lord ... There were maybe 30 of these tiny kingdoms in the U.S.” That all changed in the early 1980s, when McMahon bought the WWF from his father and set about consolidating the industry under its aegis. The regional leagues died off.

Bolstered by cable-TV contracts and payper-view specials such as Wrestlemania, McMahon’s enterprise emerged as the preeminent talent showcase for pro wrestling in America. These days, there are arguably three serious national wrestling leagues — WWE, TNA Impact and Ring of Honor — but WWE remains the industry juggernaut.

What is generally referred to as the indie wrestling circuit is a sort of minor-league patchwork of wrestling events that sprouted up across the United States following the decline of the regional leagues. Have you seen Darren Aronofsky’s unrelentingly grim 2008 film, The Wrestler? That depicts one corner of the world we are talking about (though it’s not necessarily representative of the lives of indie-circuit wrestlers).

“There’s a whole spectrum of indie wrestling,” Baisden said. “Literally, there’s thousands of these events a year that draw anywhere between 15 and 500 people to a show. So I started researching it and learned that there’s basically three types of guys in indie wrestling. At the top is a guy who is good enough to be in the WWE but they’ve already got a guy like him. That’d be like trying to get on a baseball roster and you play first base and they’ve already got Eric Hosmer signed to a 10-year deal. There’s no room for you.”

Baisden went on: “The second type of guy is a weekend warrior — a guy with a job

Baisden, the Vince McMahon of the NWL

What if intercity rivalries could Be resuscitated in the context of Wrestling, in the saMe Way they help fuel the nfl and the nBa?

and maybe a wife and kids, and he’s good, but maybe he just doesn’t have the time to chase the dream anymore. Third type is a guy who has no business wrestling — he’s out of shape or old, maybe — but for whatever reason is extremely entertaining. He’s a character.”

Character-driven storytelling is something of a lost art in pro wrestling these days, in Baisden’s view. His favorite wrestlers were big personalities such as “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, and he is fond of oldschool characters who tapped into the cultural zeitgeist; he cites anti-American heels the Iron Sheik and Nikolai Volkoff and Colonel DeBeers. Baisden also believed that there was untapped value in the idea behind the regional wrestling leagues that had been snuffed out in the 1980s. What if intercity rivalries could be resuscitated in the context of wrestling, in the same way they help fuel the NFL and the NBA? The more research he did, the more Baisden saw a business opportunity in a middle zone between the WWE and the indie circuit. But he was still a novice. So he tracked down the most experienced pro wrestling expert in Kansas City: Chris Gough.

Prior to founding Metro Pro Wrestling, in 2010, Gough worked for the WWE. He interned for the organization during summers in college, and then moved to work in its Connecticut offices following graduation. He stayed from 1999 to 2003, serving as a video editor and a writer on Raw, the league’s Monday-night cable staple.

When Baisden called, Gough was at a crossroads with Metro Pro Wrestling. He was putting on the events by himself — booking talent, setting matches, organizing pre- and post-production, editing for TV broadcasts — and just barely breaking even.

continued on page 12

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SportS

It was a love-of the-game type of hobby. But Gough has a family. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep it all up.

“Major had a lot of enthusiasm, and he had a lot of good questions about how promotions and marketing work in independent wrestling,” Gough says. “And the way it works is that indies don’t generally have money for promotions and marketing. But Major does. So that was intriguing.”

They hammered out a deal, the upshot of which was that Gough shuttered Metro Pro and came on as director of operations for the wrestling startup Baisden had begun assembling. Baisden subsequently acquired a similar indie organization, St. Louis Anarchy, on the other side of the state, paving the way for the kind of city-versus-city warfare that Baisden envisioned as the backbone of the NWL.

The peculiar American phenomenon of professional wrestling requires — of its leading practitioners, at least — a combination of skills rare in most humans. Agility and a high threshold for pain are essential.

A six-pack and tennis-ball biceps will get you further. Handsomeness helps. But you must also be a charismatic performer. Can you command a crowd’s attention while on the mic? Are you funny? Can you improvise?

Those blessed with this freakish mixture are usually scouted and signed quickly by the WWE. But the WWE doesn’t always maximize its wrestlers’ strengths, or promote the best ones.

“It can be weird and political with them,” Gough says. “Plus, for the last decade or so, Vince [McMahon] has been copying the

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UFC playbook, in my opinion. It’s a lot of tough, athletic, padded-up guys, and not much in the way of personalities.”

In other words, the kind of wrestlers Baisden wanted for his league — fun, original characters — were out there. From his experience booking Metro Pro, Gough even knew who some of them were. The question was how to attract them to the NWL. The answer was easy: money. Most wrestlers don’t have much of it. Baisden had a lot of it.

And he was willing to spend it. Over the next several months — this all happened in the second half of 2016 — the NWL offered deals to eight wrestlers from across the country. Under the agreements, the wrestlers get a salary (“comparable to average household income,” Baisden told me), a corporate apartment in Briarcliff, and access to the half-million-dollar, 10,000-square-foot training facility that Baisden has built in North Kansas City specifically for the NWL. (The majority of the wrestlers who appear on NWL cards are still part-time, though they, too, are reportedly well-compensated compared with athletes in other leagues.)

In exchange, these eight wrestlers moved to Kansas City and work like full-time wrestlers: strength and conditioning several times a week, regular lessons in mic skills, maintaining social media accounts, shooting promos, a live show every weekend.

“The WWE doesn’t even pay health benefits,” Gough says. “Major is the first guy ever to do that. And nobody besides the WWE has a training facility as nice as the one north of the river. Those are huge incentives.”

That’s why Meeks came up from Austin, and it’s why Dak Draper — a former

Character-driven storytelling is something of a lost art in pro wrestling these days, Baisden says.

“the WWe doesn’t even pay health Benefits.

Major is the first guy ever to do that.”

college wrestler, once signed to the WWE, who ended up working as a personal trainer and hitting the indie circuit on weekends — drove east from Denver. Jax and Jet, the Royal Blood tag team, were already living in Lee’s Summit; they used to work at Mosaic, in the Power & Light District, but no need for that gig anymore. The other four full-time wrestlers signed by the NWL came from St. Louis.

NWL events alternate weekends between Kansas City and St. Louis, and one of the fights on each card has bragging-rights implications. For now, the NWL is just those two cities. But Baisden told me he sees the current arrangement as a model the NWL will replicate elsewhere.

“The long-term goal is to have 15 of these city pairs,” Baisden said. “We’re still figuring out what we want the next one to be. I think it will either be Austin and San Antonio, or Seattle and Portland. We’ve talked, in California, about L.A. County and the Inland Empire, or a ‘Battle of the Boroughs’ type of thing in New York.”

Ultimately, Baisden’s plan is to be in 30 markets over the course of the next decade.

He believes the NWL has the potential to grow into a $250 million company. The league will hit profitability, Baisden said, when it’s drawing 900 people per show, something he expects to take two years. Two months in, both NWL cities are drawing between 200 and 250 people a show. That number may increase after April 1, when the NWL’s Saturday matches begin airing on Channel 38 the Spot in Kansas City, at 11 p.m.

“Really, Kansas City is not an ideal town for what we’re trying to do,” Baisden said.

“It’s an oversaturated sports town. If you look at St. Louis, though, they just lost the

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SportS Jax Royal: Mosaic bouncer turned fulltime wrestler

Rams. People in St. Louis have expendable income for sports. So in terms of a business model, St. Louis is really more of a test market for us than Kansas City is.”

Baisden added that the fans in St. Louis are different from Kansas City’s — more dialed in to the humorous and ironic qualities that underpin the culture.

“In Kansas City, the crowds are a little more family-oriented,” Baisden said. “So, like, in Kansas City, the crowds tend to cheer or boo based on whether it’s a good guy or a bad guy. In St. Louis, it’s more like they’re evaluating the show based on their wrestling knowledge. They cheer or boo based on the level of creativity of what the wrestlers are saying and doing. It feels kinda like you’re at a house party where a wrestling show broke out.”

Like Vince McMahon, Baisden plays a version of himself in the NWL. After the first match at the Scottish Rite Temple, he makes his entrance: pinstripe suit, big, Obama-like smile, a round of bro hugs for the front row. Baisden ducks into the ring and grabs the microphone and bangs out the necessary housekeeping: merch for sale in the lobby, NWL membership packages, a special NWL appearance at Planet Comicon (April 28, $10). He’s even working on a catchphrase — “Next slide, Rupert!” — a nod to his Powerpoint prowess.

A jolt of loud, symphonic violin music interrupts Baisden’s sales pitch for a new wine available at concessions. Plonk, the wine-snob wrestler, is on the scene. (Usu-

ally, he is trailed by his personal porter, Belvedere, but Belvedere apparently has the night off.) Outfitted in a skimpy robe and shiny, shin-high red boots, Plonk grabs hold of the mic and scolds Baisden for promoting such unsophisticated swill. (As it happens, both men really do know a fair amount about wine: Baisden is one of the owners of Tannin, the Crossroads wine bar, and Plonk owns the Windy Wine Winery, in Osborn.)

Before long, Meeks (nerdy glasses, comic-book-style “BM” on his mustard-gold tights) and Draper (aviators, brown-suede fringe jacket, no shirt, bright-white tights), and Lakota Red Cloud — a portly, bearded, vaguely Native American character with a red mohawk and Southwestern attire — have joined the ruckus.

Draper calls Meeks “a loser, a geek, a nerd,” and dismisses Plonk’s lofty airs: “I didn’t like class when I was in school, Plonk, and I don’t like it now,” he booms.

The crowd boos Draper. He points at some children in the front row and yells at them to shut up. More boos.

Later, Baisden re-emerges to call security on the NWL’s most menacing villains, a greasy tag team called the Howletts, after they’ve put Red Cloud through a table and shaved off his beard while he was unconscious. Ten security guards in bright-orange NWL shirt storm the ring and escort the Howletts out.

“Get them out of here,” Baisden says.

“I want them out of this building. It’s not funny.”

But most everyone in the crowd is smiling. pitch.com | april 2017 | the pitch pitch.com | month 2017 | the pitch

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3/22/17 4:31 PM

politics

The New Resistance

Conversations with Justice Gaston-Bowers and Hillary Shields about their different approaches to political awareness in the age of Trump.

ZaCH Bauman

This page: Gaston-Bowers; following: Shields, Trump and scenes from this winter’s local demonstrations.

By traci angel

“Get with people who really want to make change,” Justice Gaston-Bowers says as we talk about activism at the dawn of the Donald Trump presidential administration. It’s a simple idea, but Gaston-Bowers — education chairwoman of One Struggle KC — isn’t suggesting it as an easy formula.

Yes, dissatisfaction, anxiety and unrest have increased, manifesting in protests and demonstrations that have been well covered in the mainstream media. But Gaston-Bowers, who works as a doula at Uzazi Village, is wary of short-term anger’s ability to fuel long-haul social or political improvement. A few marches Trump’s first 100 days in office aren’t going to be enough.

I’ve come to see Gaston-Bowers at Uzazi, which was founded to boost infant and maternal health in KC’s African-American community, to ask her about the issues she says complicate this moment’s animating forces — about, among other things, white privilege and the Black Lives Matter movement’s roots in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s work.

The Pitch: How long has One Struggle KC been around? Why was it formed?

Gaston-Bowers: One Struggle KC was formed about two years ago, when some local organizers went to Ferguson during the Mike Brown uprising. And we saw that a lot of the problems they were facing there were some of the things going on here. So the plan was to come back to Kansas City and to organize and to see how people were feeling and to see how far they wanted to take things.

There was a group of local organizers, and those organizers coming together to form one group to focus primarily on police brutality and injustice. We have several groups in the city working on various issues, but we didn’t have any that focus on the issue of police brutality.

Have we made progress in what Black Lives Matter is identifying?

Speaking on Black Lives Matter, let me first say this because I don’t people to be confused. Black Lives Matter, now a global

organization, was started by three women after Trayvon Martin. That was Black Lives Matter. Then we have this thing called the Movement for Black Lives. And that is where people get confused. Because under that umbrella, there are several organizations where people work on issues regarding black lives. Typically it gets pushed under the same umbrella. There is different leadership, different goals. Black Lives Matter does have a whole platform.

We’re not an official Black Lives Matter chapter — we just do that same type of work. We are One Struggle KC. We are our own entity.

The confusion is that we say “Black Lives Matter” as a slogan, and it gets put on posters and everyone is saying it. And we agree with it, but fundamentally there is a difference. We are not part of any chapter. There are lots of organizations that do Black Lives Matter work but are not a part of their national organization. And there were organizations that did Black Lives Matter work before the organization was formed. One

Struggle is a local organization pretty much doing the same kind of work as the Black Lives Matter movement.

We do not have one leader. That is what I like about Black Lives Matter. We don’t want somebody to die and then the movement is over. The things that Black Lives Matter did, like take over highways, people would say, “[Martin Luther] King would never do that.”

Actually, King wrote the book on doing that.

The plans that King had after he was leaving the sanitation strike was that he was going to the Capitol and going to camp there and not leave until the demands were met. But he was killed the next day, so that did not happen. But young activists went back and read this and said, “You know what, we are going to do this.” So the taking over the highways and all that, that was Dr. King.

Are more people starting to understand white privilege — the idea that people of white ethnicities are treated and afforded different opportunities than people of color? Is this idea becoming more mainstream?

No. No. Some people are. But are they pitch.com | april 2017 | the pitch pitch.com | april 2017 | the pitch

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politics

really getting it? No yet. It takes more time to get.

So Jane Elliott [an anti-racist activist known for her Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes exercise] was here, and I saw her. And I found something problematic in what she said. She said that white folks can probably cure their racism in about 12 months if they download her informational packet and if they start applying those things to their life. It’s not as simple as downloading an information packet and applying those things to your life.

And that’s one thing that we need to correct and address. And I think, because she has been doing this work for 50 years, sometimes people just give her a pass. And I don’t give anyone a pass. She didn’t open up for questions. Had she, I would have asked her about that. She also doesn’t believe in the concept of white privilege. I am a black woman, and I am telling you as a black woman that I know there is privilege. It gets to be: Why is this woman speaking to me or for me in this ally position when she really doesn’t quite get there? Jane Elliott, 50 years out there doing this work, and she still doesn’t get it.

At an intersectional panel that Planned Parenthood hosted the day after the the Women’s March in January, you said that

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“THere are So many people wHo are noT aCTiviSTS BuT wHo wanT To make a differenCe and are GeTTinG involved wiTH poliTiCS for THe firST Time.”

black women faced systemic racism and systemic sexism? Now there are many activists, many of whom are women. Have these resistance movements had any influence on One Struggle? Is there any interest in coming together?

When the women from the Women’s March began to organize, back in November, I saw them organizing and they were posting online, and I was suggesting to them that the movement needed to be inclusive of POC [people of color] leadership and that it really wasn’t going to be a movement if it didn’t. I brought up the issue of the co-opting of the name [African-American women had a Million Woman March in 1997], and that was an issue for my community. They tried to ignore that, and came back with a statement, but the statement didn’t match what we saw.

They did eventually call in women of color in leadership.

At the local level, the ones organizing, they spit out what the national organization was saying. I told them it had to include marginalized people, and they weren’t doing it. They didn’t know me. They didn’t know the work I did. And I don’t think that mattered. I was tagging the people they should have been talking to. I tagged SURJ [Stand-

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politics

SATURDAY, MAY 20th | 3-10PM

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FeATUReD MUSic: Lonnie McFadden • Amanda Fish ing Up For Racial Justice]. I tagged One Struggle. I tagged certain members from SURJ, and I knew they could talk to these women and how they could make it inclusive. One white woman challenged them and said these are all white women and she told them that not all the right women at the table and they basically said, “What are you talking about?”

In order for us as an organization to participate, we need to have a seat at the table, and we thought we were just being trotted out as token. There was no groundwork laid. Any person of my skin tone, I don’t care if they have a position, if they say something, then you should pay attention.

Gloria Steinem, in her book Life on the Road, writes of how she preferred touring with Florynce Kennedy [who grew up in Kansas City] and preferred her to join her when she was touring. Is this what needs to happen — to make sure women of color are represented at a talk or protest?

What I’m saying is that there has to be some real work going on. We’ve been organizing for over two years. We think: Why won’t those women coming out to our rallies with us? Now that a certain group feels threatened, they think, “Let’s, everyone unite.” And I’m thinking, “Hold up, hold up.”

Get with people who really want to make change. The best group for white folks is SURJ. If you skip the education part, everything else means nothing. There are certain things that you have to work on and get a grip on before you merge people together.

For example, a white guy coming to a diverse meeting might have certain feelings that are rooted in racism. And he might have certain feelings to voice those and he

will because I’ve seen it over and over again.

At the end of the panel discussion, before you knew why I wanted to talk to you, you directed me to SURJ. Is that what you normally do — direct people to SURJ, to become educated about white privilege?

And not just white privilege but how we operate in the world. When One Struggle was forming, we had a lot of white people showing up to our meeting, and SURJ was not [yet] created. And our allies would tell us, because of what we are talking about, that we would have to explain time and time again. We could never get to the meat of what we were doing because of micro-aggression and racism. It just took away from what we were trying to do. So we asked our friends to organize themselves. That’s how SURJ began.

SURJ does do a lot of education. We do organize together, and we do show up for each other, but we are not going to skip this very important part of what we now we need, this part that we skipped during the civil rights movement — and other movements, quite frankly. We recognize there is a high level of ignorance regarding race issues, and until education comes into it, it will keep coming up in our meetings and people will leave angry and they won’t understand. But when a white person can go to SURJ meeting and be told, “Do you know that is racist?” and it comes from a different person. And when I as a black person can say something, and it pisses me off, because no one can tell me about my experiences, even Jane Elliott. We need to get to a place where it is not abnormal to take direction from black leadership.

So if a person starts to understand what white privilege is, to understand Black Lives

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politics

Matter, and participates in SURJ, then do they start to protest with One Struggle?

Yes. We support each other. You have to pay attention to the wording [of the event].

We may do a request for a specific campaign and need specific people to show up. When we are doing something regarding marginalized people, we don’t need white people coming crowding out the people we intend to focus on. We need the face of the issue.

We know that the presence of white people has a powerful statement in itself. So depending on the action that we are going to do, we are going to show up and show that the people we are showing to uplift will be lifted up.

You told me at the panel discussion that a white person can’t become an ally until a black person says they are an ally.

Some people go and read a book and say, “I’m woke. I’m woke. I’m an ally. Let me put my safety pin on. Let me get my little rainbow beads.” But there is more to it than that. And it is people like me, who are the most marginalized, the black women, the black men, the disabled, the LGBTQ community. If the lesbians say you are an ally, you are an ally. It’s not that you get to say that. You can’t designate that. We give that to people we know, who we trust, who we have seen show up. Who have organized with us late into the night and earlier in the morning.

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What would you say to someone who tells a white person, “You don’t have defend people of color. They can take up for themselves?”

Yes, we can defend ourselves, however, it is a powerful position for a white person to take in recognizing it. When I see that, that is who I call an ally. When you can question or challenge them on a comment that they make, or a racist view that they may have, that is absolutely acceptable, and that is what we need to happen.

That isn’t being a white savior?

That is not being a white savor. I see the bystander effect: They see someone being abused, but no one around them will care.

That’s how I see those folks, standing there, saying, “They can take care of themselves, and we can take care of ourselves.” But we need to get the foot off our neck. This country has the wealth it has because of us [African-Americans]. People who don’t realize they have this privilege are still benefitting. So it really takes education for people to really see it. They don’t really realize institutional racism. ______________________________ Hillary Shields is behind the Resist Trump Tuesdays at local lawmakers’ offices and is an organizer for Indivisible KC, the group that’s pushing back against the new presidential agenda.

At a coffee shop near where she works as a paralegal, I talked with her about those efforts. The night before our conversation, for instance, she had helped organize a town-hall meeting for representatives, none of whom showed up. Their constituents told their health-care stories to cardboard placards in the chairs where the politicians should have been sitting — every word of which was taped and sent to those lawmakers’ offices.

The Pitch: What is Indivisible KC and how did you get involved?

Shields: Indivisible KC is a grassroots organization formed after the election. Basically, the day after the election, Pantsuit Nation was formed and the leaders of that group said, “Now what do we do? We have all these people who want to make change.”

And then they came out with the Indivisible guide, which is a Google doc floating around that you can link to. And they read that, and a lightbulb went off. I personally read it and I had that thought: “Yes, yes, this is what I’m going to do.” So I went on the Progressive Social Network and found people who were trying to organize, and I went on Twitter and I realized there wasn’t a KC one [Indivisible], so I tweeted out using the handle that we were getting organized. So I hooked up with people ... and we started a group and started talking about what kind of actions to take.

The first action that we did was January 10, going to Roy Blunt’s local office. We made Facebook events, and people showed up. It seemed to be obvious that the staff members there were not expecting anyone.

They usually get one or two people [a day], and there were 30 of us and one Republican.

In the Indivisible guide that we’d all read, we learned that you have three people in Washington who work for you: your two senators and your representative. Nobody else there works for you, and they don’t really care what you have to say. So what you need to do is talk to your own representatives and put pressure on them to do the right thing. And that’s what we’ve been doing. After that first event we’ve been going every Tuesdays for Resist Trump Tuesday, where we have groups go to all of our four senators’ offices.

Are you finding that the energy is picking up? Is it the same people coming out every week?

It depends. I think different people come out for different things. There are definitely some regulars, but I can’t tell you how often I hear “This is the first time I’ve ever done this.” There are so many people who are not activists but who want to make a difference and are getting involved with politics for the first time.

Are you hearing from the representatives?

I am on a first-name basis with every-

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politics

one at Sen. Blunt’s office. I’m getting to know them very well. We have not heard directly from our members of Congress.

That is very disappointing. We’d like to.

What is really sad is that Sen. [Pat] Roberts was at an event a week or two ago, and he heard about us and called us paid protesters and agitators. So I guess he had heard about us. Personally I have not received a paycheck. If I could do this fulltime, I would, but there is a reason why we are meeting on my lunch hour.

Is there something standard that you say to someone who says you’re being paid to protest?

It is ridiculous. We’ve been discussing among ourselves what to say to people because it is ridiculous. None of us are getting paid. At the town hall, we asked everyone to give us a round of applause if you were not paid to be here, and the room was very loud. So we address it but is certainly is not a focus. It is concerning that representatives should be so excited that so many people are becoming politically engaged and they want to discredit their own constituents, who are trying to share their stories.

Were you an activist before this?

I volunteered in President Obama’s campaign in 2008. I made a few phone calls for Hillary Clinton.

What is your advice for someone who wants to get involved?

The first thing is that people want help in focusing their energy. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter or sign up for our action e-mail you can hear about it. You can take the Indivisible playbook and put

13 Politics.indd 5 Pitch_3-23-17_60.indd 19

it into action. The first thing is calling ahead. Take pictures and video with your phone before or after and share on social media.

You’ve talked a little about that Midwesterners being nice. Is this one of our flaws when it comes to this?

I don’t think there is any benefit in making enemies. For example, Sen. Blunt, while I disagree with him on a lot of issues, he still came out and said that we needed an investigation into Russian ties to the Trump administration.

Just because we disagree on one thing doesn’t mean we can’t work together on something else. Keeping a positive relationship means that they will keep listening. We will keep showing up over and over again. I’m not an angry person, and I don’t think getting angry gets it across any better.

Are you the resistance?

I see us as working with the laws we have. I am involved because I love our democracy. People can call it what they want, but to me, calling your member of Congress, going to a town hall and engaging in a peaceful protest — that is just being a good citizen.

It’s already working. I want people to see how successful we have already been in such a short time. Betsy DeVos came this close to not getting in, and the gutting of the ethics rules was stopped. This public pressure has worked. If we keep showing up and applying pressure, we will win. There are more of us and we are passionate and it will work.

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Books

Wake-up Call

Thomas Frank warned that Democrats had abandoned working people. The result: Trump.

By DaviD Martin

If there’s a villain in Thomas Frank’s most recent book, it’s Bill Clinton.

Released last March, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? describes Clinton’s presidency as a “disastrous success.” The low unemployment numbers and soaring stock markets of the “New Economy” masked a rise in inequality. “Disagreements over how an economy worked or in which direction social policy was being steered were being brushed aside” Frank writes. “From entitlement reform to free trade, it was an age of harmony and understanding.”

The triumph of Clinton, Frank argues, marked the end of the Democrats’ commitment to working people and egalitarianism.

Instead, it became the party of professionalclass liberalism. He predicted that Hillary Clinton, who had been her husband’s chief political adviser, would be susceptible to a more populist candidate. In one passage in the book, Frank presciently warned that Democrats need to stand for more than being an alternative to the those awful Republicans. “People do find other places to go, of course — they stay home, they join the Tea Party.”

They vote for Donald Trump.

Frank, who grew up in Mission Hills, is also the author of What’s the Matter With Kansas?, the 2004 book that described how Republicans used social issues to trick people into voting against their economic inter-

ests. Frank wrote about the backlash against the professional class in What’s the Matter With Kansas?, an idea he develops more fully in Listen, Liberal. Frank tells The Pitch that he decided to write that latest book after the 2012 election. He was skeptical of the Democrats who talked confidently demographic changes and “coalition of the ascendant” cinching future presidential elections.

“I heard this and I’m like, this is the dumbest theory ever. And look — look where we are,” he says. “A lot of Democrats in Washington really, sincerely believed that, and now their party is in a condition of historic defeat.”

Frank spoke by phone from Cleveland, where he was promoting Listen, Liberal, which is now available in paperback. This interview has been edited and condensed.

The Pitch: At the time you were writing Listen, Liberal, you foresaw that Hillary Clinton might struggle against a more populist candidate.

Thomas Frank: Yes, but I still thought she would win. I still thought she would win, because all the polls said she was going to.

One thing I have learned in my adult years is to believe the polls. I was completely taken in by the sort of pseudo-science of polling.

And pseudo it turned out to be.

Was it difficult for you to watch Donald Trump so successfully position himself as the friend of the worker, when you worried about something like that on the horizon?

“The sysTem is riggeD — ThaT was elizabeTh warren’s line.

Trump sTole iT From her.”

It was surreal. It was like a dream, like something you see in dreams. It’s like, this guy is doing exactly what I wrote about it not only in What’s the Matter With Kansas? but also in Listen, Liberal, which I wrote, remember, before [the campaign]. Trump is only mentioned in passing, at the very end of the book. It was written well before any of this happened. It was uncanny. It was a strange experience, because I doubt strongly that he’s actually read those books. I don’t know if he even reads books. But it was weird. It was as though he was reading my books as a strategy guide to do something really evil.

I was reminded of the themes in Listen, Liberal reading a story in The New York Times after the election. A reporter spoke to African-American voters in Milwaukee who talked about feeling like they had no good choices.

That’s right. It is important to recognize this now: The failure of the Democrats among working-class voters is across the board. A lot of the white working-class voters have gone over to the Republicans. A lot of the black working class and Latino working class just stayed home this time, which is just as deadly for the Democrats.

You supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party, but your first choice was Elizabeth Warren. Knowing what we know now, it’s easy to imagine her beating Trump in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

They appeal to to the same group. There’s continued on page 22

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a reason Trump stole his signature line from her: The system is rigged — that was Elizabeth Warren’s line. Trump stole it from her.

Trump’s campaign was this massive rhetorical theft from the Democratic Party. Just the other day, he went and laid a wreath on the grave of Andrew Jackson, founder of the Democratic Party. It is crazy what’s going on. But, yeah, Elizabeth Warren would have done quite well, I think.

I think Sanders would have beaten him.

It would have been slightly complicated. It would have been a different race, of course.

Look at a guy like Bernie Sanders. He’s a beloved elder figure. No scandals to mention. People really like this guy. Nobody hates Bernie Sanders, except for your sort of Washington Beltway centrist types — they can’t stand him. But average people, he’s like a Harry Truman type or a Franklin Roosevelt. It’s this very reassuring politics from long ago. Yeah, he would have beaten Trump. Those disaffected working people would not have jumped ship and gone to the Republicans if he was the Democratic nominee. That’s the group that turned it.

In What’s the Matter With Kansas? you suggested that race was not triggering much of the indignation that led white working people to vote for hard-right Republicans.

In Kansas. It’s different in the South.

When I wrote about Kansas, I deliberately wrote about Kansas because it wasn’t a Southern state. That was the whole idea.

There have been many, many books about race and its role in the backlash in the South and in other places, like New York City. But Kansas intrigued me because that wasn’t the obvious answer there.

What do you think about the theory that a significant number of Republican voters hold latent authoritarian tendencies?

Oh, hell. It’s possible. Trump has certainly been an authoritarian kind of guy. There was a famous study by [critical theorist Theodor] Adorno, after World War II, about the authoritarian personality in politics. Trump seems like a figure right out of that. I think

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authoritarian is a good word to describe him. His manner, anyway — I don’t know that it describes his politics. It certainly describes his idea of the world: You need a strong leader, and all this crap. But I would caution people who call him a fascist. I think that’s going too far.

In that he hasn’t thought it through that far? It’s more of a performative authoritarianism?

Authoritarian, I think, is an accurate description of him. But a fascist involves all these other things. Fascists are really into totalitarianism. This guy is — I mean, just look at his hair. This guy is an individualist to the nth. He’s on wife No. 3. in Listen, Liberal, you fault President Obama for being gentle with Wall Street after the financial crisis. But it’s interesting that the tea party began to coalesce around a CNBC personality’s rant against a program aimed at helping homeowners in danger of losing their homes to foreclosure. Have you underestimated the extent to which some voters resent safety-net programs?

No, I often write about how people resent safety-net programs. They don’t resent Social Security. For God’s sake, it’s the most popular government program there is. What really got me about the tea party movement — this is in my last book, Pity the Billionaire — is what I call the muddle. They would rail against banks, against Wall Street banks.

They would sound just like left-wringers.

And then they would flip the script, and the target of their rage would be individual homebuyers. There are many, many examples of this. It sounds like populism. It sounds like a movement that you want to sign up with. And then you look at the fine print, and it’s completely upside down.

An example is this Steve Bannon documentary Generation Zero. When I was writing about the tea party movement, back in the day, I actually bought a copy of it somewhere on DVD and never watched it.

I finally put in the DVD player when Steve Bannon became the right-hand man to the

president, and I watched it. The first 20 minutes or so look like a standard documentary about the financial crisis, with all this footage of skyscrapers in New York, and talking about how foolish the bankers are, and their bonuses and how greedy they are. And then it takes this weird turn. Who are they going to blame it on? Hippies! He actually shows footage from Woodstock. He tries to blame the financial crisis on hippies! This is the man advising the president of the United States now. That is that tea party movement in a nutshell.

One prescription I saw in Listen, Liberal is that Democrats should pursue policy initiatives that are easy to understand and universal. Is that the right takeaway?

Yeah, I suppose so. In a general sense, they should understand by now that this is a populist age. People are furious about the crumbling of the middle-class dream.

Furious. They are lashing out in all sorts of different directions. Donald Trump spoke to that outrage really, really effectively, and Democrats need to understand that. The thing to remember about populism is that it is originally a movement of the left. It was a movement of the left in the 19th century, and it can very easily be a movement of the left again. But it requires a Democratic Party that is actually willing to try.

You’ve written a lot about how prosperity in America isn’t shared as much as it is sold to us. It wasn’t as easy to see in the 1990s, when you started writing about it.

So, the late 1990s were this highly prosperous time. But it was also very easy to see at the time, if you were paying attention, that a lot of people weren’t participating in it. And it was also based on a dream, on a falsehood. It was bound to collapse. It was not a real prosperity. I’ve always been kind of a cynical person who expects the worst. The worst keeps happening.

One part of Listen Liberal that’s stayed with me is the passage where you talk about how companies like Uber aren’t innovative as much as they are workarounds of traditional

middle-class economic arrangements. After I read it, I started seeing it other places. Charter schools, for instance, it’s easy to see how they kind of fit in the circumvention strategy, in that their innovation seems to be that they don’t have to deal with teachers’ unions.

That’s exactly right. When Democrats and other politicians talk about innovation — and by the way, they do this all over the world now; this is what parties of the left think they are: We’re parties that support innovation and the creative class. There was this golden age of innovation in America, from about the 1930 up to about the 1970s.

Just think about all the things that were invented and came online in that period. There were amazing productivity increases. That doesn’t happen anymore. And yet we have this cult of innovation. We talk about it all the time. And the only innovation out there is these smartphone apps that are designed to do what you just mentioned: circumvention. They’re all about circumventing existing social protections for people or laws, even. Once you understand that, you see it in all these different places. It’s not something to celebrate. These are not innovations that are good for humanity in the way that, like, air conditioning was, or rural electrification.

I think Listen, Liberal was the first book I reached for after the election. It was startling to see how you had seen this is coming.

It’s a little bittersweet, because on the one hand, it’s a very nice compliment. I knew on Election Night — it’s like, Oh, my god, look at what’s happened. On the other hand, I have kids, and they have to grow up under this man, Trump. He flies over our house in his helicopter. This a terrible time politically.

This is a terrible time. It’s sort of nice that I saw it coming to a certain degree. But that doesn’t really make up for it. thomas Frank discusses Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? at the kansas City Central Library (14 West 10th street) at 6:30 p.m. thursday, april 6.

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Politics

The Blues

What happened to the Missouri Democratic Party?

by DaviD HuDnall

Stephen Webber is, from just about any angle, a rising star in the Missouri Democratic Party.

Fresh off two tours of duty in Iraq, Webber was first elected to the Missouri House of Representatives in 2008, when he was 25.

He went on to serve four terms as a state representative in the Columbia area, earning a degree from the University of Missouri’s law school along the way. As a legislator, he pushed bills aimed at increasing funding for higher education, restricting payday loans, and prohibiting discrimination of LGBT individuals. Webber is sincere, serious, strong-jawed and a capable public speaker — qualities that were on display as he addressed the crowd gathered in early February for the launch of Northland Progress, a new political action group in the Kansas City Northland.

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The room that evening was hungry for a full-throated progressive message, and Webber had brought one. He urged the audience to resist President Donald Trump’s agenda “every day, morning, noon and night until he’s out of office — whether that’s 2017 or 2018 or whenever.” Webber then challenged the crowd to become more engaged in local politics, even to consider running for office.

“If you’re waiting for somebody to come up and hand you a $20,000 check to run for the Legislature or run for school board, I can tell you from experience: Stop waiting,” Webber said. “It ain’t gonna happen. Get out, organize and do it for yourself.”

Webber himself could have used a couple extra $20,000 checks from Missouri Democrats in 2016. Termed out of the House, he ran for an open Senate seat in

his home district last November — and lost to Caleb Rowden, a former Christian-rock musician without a college degree.

That Senate district — the 19th — includes Boone County and Cooper County.

Boone is home to the University of Missouri, which has historically made it one of the more reliably liberal areas in the state.

Webber won only narrowly in Boone — 50 to 49. In more rural Cooper, to the west of Columbia, Webber got clobbered; Rowden took a full 70 percent of the vote there. The trend is evident across the state: Democrats are not just losing in rural counties. They are losing very, very badly, doing worse with every election.

A young, polished liberal with a military background is a precious gem, particularly in Missouri, and Democrats here are wise enough not to let one drift into the ether.

Hence Webber’s post-election appointment as chairman of the Missouri Democratic Party. In his new role, Webber is on a sort of listening tour, driving around the state and gathering information from Democrats at events such as the one held by Northland Progress.

“We [Democrats] need to get back to winning in areas that we used to win until 2010,” Webber told me. “When I first got to Jeff City, in 2008, there were Democrats representing places like Cass County, the Bootheel, north-central Missouri. Now those reps are all gone. So I think one of the first steps for Democrats is to start showing up again in rural Missouri and let rural voters know we care about those areas.”

Making inroads among rural voters is far from the only daunting task that lies ahead for Webber and the Missouri Demoon page23 24 | the pitch pitch.com | april 2017continued pitch.com | april 2017 | the pitch 23

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Politics cratic Party. Districts that touch exurbs and suburbs and even the state’s largest cities now regularly vote red. As a result, Republicans in the state now enjoy supermajorities in both bodies of the Legislature and control of the governor’s mansion. Democrats can claim only two officials in statewide posts — U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, who is staring down a scary re-election campaign in 2018, and auditor Nicole Galloway, who was appointed to the job by former Gov. Jay Nixon following the suicide of her elected predecessor, the Republican Tom Schweich.

Not even boy wonder Jason Kander could wash enough of the blue stink off him in 2016 to claim a victory in Missouri.

He’s been cited by President Obama as one of the future leaders of the party, and his national profile is accordingly being fasttracked before our very eyes — catch him on CNN or Real Time With Bill Maher or on your feed making highly retweetable anti-Trump quips — but the highest office Kander has held so far is Missouri Secretary of State. Kander ran a smart, disciplined, progressive campaign last year and came close-ish to unseating U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt in a bad year for Democrats. But he still lost.

The impotent state of the Missouri Democratic Party is the result of a vacuum of leadership, vision and money that has darkened over the past decade, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former state legislators, county committee chairs, recent candidates and other party insiders. There is agreement that external forces — the grip of conservative media in isolated parts of the state, campaign finance laws that allow unlimited outside money to pour into races, the Trump phenomenon — have exacerbated Democrats’ woes in Missouri. But most acknowledge that the state party has been neglected to the point of near-obsolescence.

Several candidates with whom I spoke literally laughed out loud when I asked how helpful the state party had been in their recent races.

“We’re very hopeful about him [Webber] here,” says Cindy Schroer, chairwoman of the Lafayette County Democratic Central Committee, in Lexington. “I think everybody out across the state is rooting for him to turn things around. But he’s got his work cut out for him. You’ve got to understand: This was basically a blue county 10 years ago. Last year no Democrat even challenged the Republican running for state rep. We’ve had no real contacts, or connections with, or directions from, the state party for years and years.”

The old Hemingway quote about how you go bankrupt — two ways: gradually,

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and then suddenly — applies. The Missouri Democratic Party stopped showing up for work. It wasn’t paying the utilities. All that happened in November is that Missouri voters made it official and foreclosed on the home and put it out on the street.

Here are some sobering numbers: In 2006, Missouri Democrats fielded candidates in all but 15 of the state’s 163 House districts. In terms of putting warm bodies in races, they did much better than Republicans, who left 35 House districts lacking a candidate in that year’s election.

Fast-for ward to 2016: Democrats left 55 House seats uncontested, whereas Republicans failed to put up a candidate in only 23 House races.

Another way of saying this is that Republicans ran unopposed by Democrats in fully a third of all Missouri House races in 2016.

Not surprisingly, over these 10 years Missouri Republicans have catapulted to power. They have increased their presence in the House from 92 seats to 117. Democrats — who held a competitive 71 seats in 2006 — are now down to 45 seats. It’s not much better in the Senate, where Democrats have dropped from 13 to 8 members

in a decade. With Eric Greitens now installed as governor, Republicans are free to legislate as they please. The best Missouri Democrats can do these days is shout about the worst of the bills that Republicans are putting forward.

It would be difficult to overstate how powerless the Democratic party is today in Jefferson City. Incredibly, Democrats now hold only one House seat south of Interstate 70 in outstate Missouri — a vast expanse that covers nearly two-thirds of the land in the state. That seat is in Springfield, the third-largest city in Missouri.

Angela Dowler Pryor, a 49-yearold seventh-generation Southwest Missourian, ran for one of Springfield’s Republicanheld House seats in 2016. She’s a perfectly plausible candidate: mother, wife, left a job in the private sector for the world of nonprofits. In recent years, she has worked at Planned Parenthood and as a state-licensed navigator for the Affordable Care Act to help people access health care.

The district in which Pryor ran, the 134th, is not some preposterously red rural backwater. It includes Missouri State University, a Democrat-friendly zone with a

“I haD no guIDance, no traInIng. they DID zero for Me. lIterally DID nothIng.”

Jay Nixon rarely leveraged his popularity as governor to benefit Demomcratic candidates.

history of high voter turnout. Bernie Sanders held a rally in her district during the primaries, and 4,000 people showed up on 24 hours’ notice.

But Pryor couldn’t get the Missouri Democratic Party to pick up the phone.

“I had worked on someone else’s campaign in 2014, so my expectations for them [the state party] were already low,” Pryor says. “But on my race, I had no guidance, no training. I had to fundraise completely on my own. They did zero for me. Anything at all would have helped. They literally did nothing.”

She lost by 20 points.

At least there was a Democrat on the ticket in the 134th District — hardly a certainty, even in relatively urban Springfield.

In 2016, Republicans ran unopposed in one of the area’s seven House districts; in 2014, Republicans had two House races to themselves, and three were uncontested by Democrats in 2012. As recently as the late 1990s, Democrats held five House seats in the Springfield area. No more.

“The state party has basically imploded, at least as far as I can tell,” Pryor says. “It’s a foregone conclusion these days that you pretty much can’t win in Springfield unless you’re a Republican.”

In even more conservative parts of the state, such as central Missouri and the Bootheel, Democratic county committees have either closed up shop or are viewed with such derision by locals that information about meetings is conveyed in a near whisper. Candidate recruitment is almost nonexistent.

Matt Michel, a 27-year-old first-time House candidate in southeast Missouri who ran mostly because nobody else stepped up, says that, in his district, the 153rd, Fox News plays on an endless loop “literally anyplace in public where there is a TV: bars, fast-food restaurants, Chinese restaurants.” He adds: “We don’t tend to hold our events in public because we have to contend with that.”

Michel, a lawyer in Doniphan, garnered only a quarter of the vote in his race but says he plans to run again in two years, when the incumbent he lost to in 2016 terms out. He’s hopeful that the party infrastructure will have jelled a bit more in the meantime.

“I feel like the county committees and the state party have really dropped the ball in recent years by not reaching out to new voters,” Michel says. “They relied heavily on those they already knew were in the party. They just call those same people over and over instead of communicating to new people that there are still Democrats here.”

Kyle Garner, 32, challenged a House incumbent in a rural district that includes Sedalia. Garner has some bona fides that might play well in mid-Missouri: He’s a former volunteer firefighter, he did some time

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Politics in the Air Force, and he’s putting himself through law school at Mizzou. A first-time candidate, Garner was hoping for guidance from the state party: “Like, ‘This is how you fundraise, this is a sample script for a doorknocker’ — things like that,” Garner says.

Garner had one contact at the state party — Kristen Self, director of campaigns. But she quit halfway through the 2016 cycle, and, Garner says, “We were on our own after that.” He eventually paid out of his own pocket to attend a weekend seminar for progressive candidates held in Columbia

by Wellstone, a national organization that provides resources for Democratic politicians. He lost his race by 40 points.

Would you believe that the Missouri Democratic Party charges its candidates for access to information about voters in their districts? And that, for some some candidates — particularly those in rural districts on shoestring budgets — the fee is prohibitively high?

Believe it.

Across the country, the Democratic Party uses a software system called the Voter Activation Network to track potential voters. VAN is a sort of living document that compiles voter names, phone numbers, addresses — even issues that are important to specific voters — in a database that is updated after every phone call and every door-knock. It allows campaigns to microtarget specific demographics, and supplies canvassers and candidates with information about the political mindset of the people whose doorbells they’re ringing.

It can be a powerful tool in campaigns.

In Missouri, county committees get access to VAN for free, but candidates must pay the state Democratic party $500 if they wish to use it. That may not sound like a lot of money. But consider John Cozort, who ran for a House seat in the 51st District (which includes Marshall and parts of Warrensburg).

“I didn’t spend more than $500 on my entire campaign,” says Cozort, who is 28 years old and works at a convenience store in Marshall. “So $500 for VAN was not something I could afford.”

Even with great data, Cozort — or others who didn’t have room in their budgets for VAN, including Michel and D.J. Rash, who ran for state rep in Cass County — were Washington Generals–style long-shot candidates. Still, it’s an obvious strategic failure for the state party not to set aside the VAN fee for its candidates. Even someone with no chance of winning can update the voter file, generating information that would be useful in future statewide elections.

Perhaps due to such negligence, many candidates I spoke to who did pony up the $500 for VAN found it outdated and not especially useful.

“Ninety percent of the phone numbers

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Waggoner is part of the state party’s new guard.

were inaccurate,” says Pryor, the state rep candidate from Springfield. “I attribute that partially to people gravitating away from land lines and toward cell phones. But I also believe it’s because we haven’t had anybody down here campaigning to update the system.”

Cydney Mayfield, of Boonville, who is fresh off a loss in a race for Cooper County Assessor, used VAN. But she did so, she says, only because Webber, who was campaigning in her district, showed her how. “It wasn’t clear to me how to use it or access it — there were no communications about training or anything like that,” Mayfield says. “Stephen’s campaign came to the rescue and educated me.”

Mayfield has since been named chairwoman of the Missouri Democratic Rural Caucus. She’s been thinking about ways the party can reform itself in rural races, and she believes that training candidates in VAN, and eliminating VAN fees, are obvious first steps.

“They [the state party] have basically been using it [VAN] as a fundraising tool to pay for party operations,” Mayfield says. “I

don’t think that’s the right policy for rural districts like ours.”

Webber and the executive director of the Missouri Democratic Party, Emily Waggoner, are new to their jobs; both say they’re interested in rethinking the VAN policy. “I anticipate there will be a healthy discussion about it at our upcoming state committee meeting,” Waggoner says.

A good person to ask about party policy is Roy Temple, who ceded to Webber his position as chairman of the Missouri Democratic Party following the 2016 election.

Temple, who also runs GPS Impact, a digital media firm for progressive campaigns, had held the position since 2013.

“It’s not the state party trying to hustle candidates out of cash,” Temple says of the decision to charge for VAN during his tenure.

“It costs money to maintain these voter files. There are multiple layers to the data, and some of it is purchased from commercial vendors. There are a lot of administrative costs to that the state party incurs from all this.”

Temple continues: “Obviously, in a

“When, DurIng the last electIon, DID you ever really hear What the heck a DeMocrat stooD for?”

world of infinite resources, everybody would have millions to spend on direct mail and marketing and these things. But the party has to make decisions about how to pay for an effective voter file, and different eras of party leadership have made different decisions over the years about how to do that.”

When Temple was chairman, his was an unpaid, part-time position. The same was true of his predecessors Mike Sanders, who chaired from 2012 through 2013 while simultaneously serving as Jackson County Executive; Susan Montee, in 2011; and Craig Hosmer, from 2008 to 2010.

With Webber in the seat, it’s now a full-time, paid position, a change that several people with whom I spoke suggested should have been made following the sandshifting elections of 2010, which swept 20 Democratic-held seats out of the Legislature.

In Platte County — parts of which are within the KC metro — no Democrat has won since 2010; today, the county has zero Democratic representatives in the state Legislature, and Republicans hold every elected position at the county level.

“The problem is that, once you lose these seats, it’s hard to get them back,” says David Christian, chairman of Platte County Democratic Committee. “There are a lot of independents in our districts, and we could have used resources and attention from the party to find them and turn them out. But we haven’t really been getting that.”

Many recent Missouri legislators assign blame for the decline of Missouri Dems to the very man who, with his veto, spent the past eight years preventing the worst Republican ideas from becoming law: Jay Nixon.

Several Democrats expressed disappointment, even bewilderment, that Nixon — a well-liked two-term governor — rarely leveraged his popularity to benefit other candidates. Even Webber, who is otherwise uninterested in pointing fingers, casts subtle shade Nixon’s way.

“I think it’s a fair critique to say that Nixon was never someone who made the infrastructure of the party a priority,” Webber says.

Jolie Justus, who served in the Missouri Senate from 2006 to 2014 and is now a Kansas City Councilwoman, is more pointed.

“I didn’t see any evidence of Jay Nixon fundraising for our Senate candidates while I was in office,” Justus tells me. “It would have been nice to see more leadership from him and his team when it came to both raising money and recruiting candidates.”

Nixon’s aloof attitude toward his own party is not unprecedented — President Barack Obama was accused, not without reason, of similar party neglect from his national perch — but a little love from Uncle Jay might have helped stem the rapid

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Politics

rise of Missouri’s red tide.

When Kathleen Sebelius was governor in Kansas, from 2003 to 2009, she was constantly on the phone raising money for candidates, according to Mike Gaughan, a former executive director of the Kansas Democratic Party.

“She [Sebelius] was certainly active in helping to raise funds for the KDP, and for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot in Kansas,” Gaughan says. “She also mentored young candidates and activists, she built strong relationships with county party leaders, and she helped bring resources into Kansas that helped to improve our campaigns.”

When Mel Carnahan was Missouri’s governor, from 1993 to 2000, he built a candidate-recruitment apparatus called Camp Carnahan, which groomed aspiring Democratic politicians and showed them the ropes — walking lists, voter-identification techniques, fundraising approaches — of running for office. No such operation existed under Nixon.

“When you have a sitting governor, that’s a powerful thing for the party,” says Joe Carmichael, the Missouri Democratic Party chairman from 1993 to 2004. “It gave somebody like me the luxury of focusing on recruiting and training good candidates, which ultimately is the best way to improve your party’s probability of success.

We had a coordinated effort where the governor would raise money for the party and people like me, working with the legislative causes, would disburse the cash to candidates.”

Carmichael, now a lawyer in the Spring-

feature

Webber (right) has his work cut out for him in rural Missouri.

field area, continues: “Looking back, I was there at a good time. My sense is that Republicans are now the ones who have a really good grip on that kind of infrastructure and candidate recruitment in the state. So what we had on our side when I was there is what they’re [Democrats] up against today.”

A political party is, of course, a private entity. Like a corporation, it owes basically nothing to the public. You don’t like it? Start your own party.

But the United States won’t stop being a two-party nation anytime soon, and one of those factions wants to cut taxes for wealthy people and corporations, dramatically trim social programs that benefit the poor and the middle class, and strip away women’s reproductive rights. The Republicans who openly espouse racist or xenophobic views do so with the implicit approval of their leader, an impulsive authoritarian named Donald Trump, who now happens to sit in the White House.

For liberals, centrists and even those whom we once called moderate Republicans, the Democratic Party is supposed to be a bulwark against the most repulsive parts of the Trump GOP’s agenda. But in Missouri, the party is ill-prepared to push back.

And the real implications of Republican rule are already being felt here. Republicans have been sharpening their axes for years on laws perceived to be unfriendly to corporations, and, less than three months

into Greitens’ governorship, the trees are falling: labor unions, via the passage of the right-to-work law; consumer and employee protections, via tort reform. Decisions to raise the minimum wage in Kansas City and St. Louis have been nullified by laws quickly enacted by the Republicanled Legislature. Higher-education funding is slashed in the new budget. A proposed expansion of charter schools in the state will tighten the already cramped budgets of public schools. Greitens, who campaigned on ethics reform and transparency, has formed a secretive nonprofit shadow operation that permits him to solicit unlimited contributions from undisclosed donors.

That Democrats have failed to defeat these plainly unpopulist policies suggests, among other things, slack-spined messaging on the part of the party.

“When, during the last election, or even before, did you ever really hear what the heck a Democrat stood for?” wonders Mayfield, the rural caucus chairwoman from Cooper County.

Mayfield says that, while out knocking on doors, she frequently heard from voters who associated Democrats with transgender bathrooms and the Black Lives Matter movement. They complained that Democrats were focused on identity issues instead of meat-and-potatoes concerns vital to rural voters — “access to good-paying jobs, access to cheaper health care, and community safety,” Mayfield says.

“If we focus on values instead of issues, that allows us to have a consistent message that works across rural and urban areas,” Mayfield says. “Black Lives Matter or

transgender bathrooms as specific issues are very divisive in rural areas. But the values behind why Democrats support those things — equality for all, justice applied regardless of race — are, I believe, values that most Missourians hold.”

When I spoke to Webber, he was driving to an event in Rolla, hosted by the Phelps County Democratic Committee. He’d been hitting up as many as four Democratic club and committee meetings a week since January, he told me, often in rural areas the state party had ignored for years. He said he’d been heartened by the turnout.

“Almost every single meeting is having record attendance,” Webber said. “There’s a ton of momentum right now. We just have to make sure we channel that frustration into action by recruiting strong candidates and showing up big in 2018.”

He said reelecting McCaskill to the U.S. Senate is the No. 1 priority in 2018. Second is making progress in reclaiming legislative seats. But he was quick to manage expectations.

“I think success in 2018 means picking up some seats and putting ourselves in position to make more substantial gains in 2020 and future years,” Webber said.

“Democrats losing in rural Missouri didn’t happen overnight, and it won’t change overnight. But at least now we are focused on building our presence back up in these communities and letting people know Democrats are still here.”

Then Webber cut out. The road to Rolla isn’t lined with cellphone towers. But he hoped his message would ring clear when he arrived. pitch.com | april 2017 | the pitch pitch.com | april 2017 | the pitch

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All In

ZaCh BauMan

Michael and Christina Corvino put everything (and nearly everyone) they know into their new Corvino Supper Club and Tasting Room.

By April Fleming

A few weeks ahead of the opening of Corvino Supper Club and Tasting Room, the most eagerly awaited new restaurant to open in Kansas City in 2017, chef Michael Corvino jokes that it all could have been very different.

“Over the past couple of years, there’s a little piece of me that has wondered: Should I just go do something fast-casual where everything’s in a tortilla?”

Corvino is kidding — mostly. The Washington state native has racked up an impressive résumé centered mostly on luxury dining: executive chef at the American in Kansas City and at Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas; time at the RitzCarlton in Naples, Florida; stint at the panAsian Departure in Portland, Oregon, and the Peninsula Hotel in Chicago. Maybe the man really does want to roll burritos for a few hours a day and get to bed early.

Not anytime soon, though.

For the past two years, Corvino and his wife and business partner, Christina Corvino, have been designing the Corvino Supper Club and Tasting Room, a union of luxury and casual anchoring the new Corrigan Station development at 18th Street

and Walnut in the Crossroads. On its north end, the restaurant features a private, 18seat tasting room; its main dining room is home to a 90-seat “supper club,” which will focus on shareable and family-style plates, against a backdrop of live music. It’s an altogether ambitious setup, especially for first-time restaurant owners. Ambitious but — crucially — less formal than the departed (and famously starchy) American.

“I’m so excited,” the chef tells me when I ask him about his venture’s less buttoneddown climate. “I’ve done a lot of fine dining. We are doing the tasting room because I want to have this extremely focused aspect that emphasizes quality and touches people. But I also just want to have fun, and have a place where my friends and peers can just come in and sink their teeth into something.”

Building a large local restaurant from scratch, in the heart of the one of the city’s most desirable locations, is no small endeavor. Early in their planning process, the Corvinos enlisted Hufft Projects, which was involved in designing and building Corvino Supper Club and Tasting Room.

The couple naturally stayed involved at

every stage of the project — meaning that Michael Corvino, unnaturally, has gone long stretches without cooking.

“He needs to get back into the kitchen,” Christina Corvino says, laughing. Her husband agrees, noting that this is the longest break from duty he’s taken since he began his culinary life at age 17. But the layoff was a function of ownership, something new for the now-35-year-old. Speaking with him, you don’t get a sense that he (or Christina) feels bowed by the pressures of new responsibilities and ramped-up expectations.

“At a serious level of cooking, most chefs take ownership of a restaurant as if it were theirs,” Michael Corvino says. “There [at the American], my name was on the menu.

But when you’re an owner, and when the financial piece is 100 percent yours and people have invested in you, there is a big difference. I just care that much more.”

Christina Corvino agrees. “The parts that are new are the legal aspects,” she says.

“We have investors. There is a lot of learning with that. It’s all on-the-job learning, and you just hope that you’re not making a mistake.”

Her role will primarily be front-ofhouse; she will manage guest relations as well as plan and coordinate events. She’s also arranging the flowers in the restaurant every day, bringing color into a place designed with a muted, black- and gray-leaning palate in order to cede the spotlight to the food.

That leaves the back of the house to Michael Corvino, who for the first time is working in a kitchen he designed himself.

“I wanted to go big the first time and get it right” he says of the space, which includes plenty of windows to let in natural light, and no fluorescent illumination.

The kitchen will be visible from the tasting room, and diners in the supper club will be able to glimpse the action, too, through windows placed behind the supper club’s long bar.

Michael Corvino calls his kitchen a “European-style pass” — meaning that the cooks and chefs plate together at a big table, with nary a heat lamp in sight. The servers and the chefs will set the pace for diners, chef Corvino says, but the style in the kitchen will be order-fire: Once a dish is plated, it goes right out. continued on page 30

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Cover Story

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As for staff to go in that kitchen and dining room, the Corvinos were able to build a team of talent by calling upon the chef ’s former colleagues and staff. He recruited chef de cuisine Dina Butterfield from Dallas, where she worked with Michael at Rosewood Mansion (and opened Japanese restaurant Uchi there). And familiar faces are coming over from the American, including sous chef Andy McCormick, general manager Keith Goldman, sommelier Ross Jackson and pastry chef Amanda Schroeder, former assistant to Nick Wesemann. The Corvinos have hired bar staff but say they’re looking for a “perfect fit” to manage the bar.

The menus will reflect chef Corvino’s diverse experience: Expect significant Asian influences, classic European cooking techniques, interpretations of American staples, and specialty ingredients from all over the world. His vendor orders so far include heritage pork from Paradise Locker, wagyu beef from Texas, fish from both coasts as well as from Europe, fresh wasabi stem from British Columbia and mushrooms from the Pacific Northwest. There will be a dry-aged ribeye with huitlacoche.

There will be fried chicken with gochujang cream and white kimchi (gochujang being a red chile–based Korean condiment).

A shrimp-and-mussels plate, Corvino says, encompasses his overall approach to menu creation. “This dish is playing off of a French-style mussels dish with broth and bread, and we’re also playing off of Thai and Asian curries that you serve with crunchy, sour pickles to cut through all of

the spices of the curry. We cook the mussels in a broth, then cool them down to room temperature and pull out all of the shells and strain our broth. Then we cook rock shrimp and add the broth with green-curry butter, and then add the mussels back in.

So then you’re just able to eat shrimp and mussels in this delicious, luscious curry broth, and dip your bread in it without all the shells getting in the way.”

The chef ’s excitement mounts as he goes on: “It’s very much what we do in French cooking, right? Cook with a bunch of vegetables, get all the flavor, strain it all into this liquid, and then pour it over perfectly cooked vegetables. It’s really mishmashing ingredients and techniques from French and different East Asian cultures. That’s very much to me what American food is, and what I as an American chef — classically trained by European, French and Swiss-German chefs, and having opened a Japanese and Korean restaurant and worked in a Chinese restaurant — [see as] what a melting pot is. It’s really full-circle to me what American cooking is.”

What was that about everything maybe being in a tortilla?

The supper club is now open, with the tasting room set to follow by May 1. The idea is to ease into the new environment.

“We’ve always just enjoyed making people happy and giving people good experiences,” Christina Corvino says. “We’re looking forward to doing the actual job that we’ve been working toward.”

Her husband nods. “Yes,” he says.

“Cooking.”

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cover story

Rye

Hank Charcuterie

Dismiss this address as suburban and you’ll miss out on a fine view: tree-shaded grass and a large pond. Rye’s patio view is, in fact, more scenic than what you’ll find at most outdoor spots around town. Enlist a friend for a sunny afternoon and relax in one of the space’s comfortable loungers or under a large umbrella, then ask for a pitcher of bar manager Van Zerr’s rosé sangria, which rejoins Rye’s drink menu this month.

The deceptively strong porch-pounder is a blend of rosé wine, Union Horse white whiskey, Lillet Rose (a wine-based aperitif) and Dolin Blanc vermouth, with the bartender’s selection of fresh fruit. You might need a ride home after, but it’s worth it.

In the three years since Vaughn Good, the owner and chef of Hank Charcuterie, opened his consistently impressive restaurant, he hasn’t stopped refining his approach. Last year, he took down his butcher counter, in favor of more dining space indoors; he also has built out a lovely, torch- and string light–lit patio nestled between his restaurant and the shop next door. Head bartender Adam Chase creates the restaurant’s seasonal custom cocktails, which this spring include Chase’s Herbal Press: Rieger gin, a house-made lemonlime shrub, soda water and fresh herbs.

The drink is ideal for spring and goes well with Good’s rich, meaty dishes.

10551 Mission road, LeaWood ryekc.com

Laura Wagner, Aep’s new bar manager, is getting her menu ready for warmer weather.

Zach Bauman

A Patio Six-Pack

Let the outdoor cocktails commence — starting with a half-dozen favorite patios.

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Aep

Boru Ramen

SoT

Westside Local

Among the subtle changes that Aep owner and executive chef Jakob Polaco has made to his new restaurant is an update to a neighborhood hidden gem: the rooftop patio that once belonged to Thomas and still offers a hypnotic view of 39th Street and the surrounding Volker neighborhood. New furniture and fencing perk up the space, which starts table service this month for the first time since Polaco opened Aep last fall.

Also fresh here: bar manager Laura Wagner, who has been busy crafting her first cocktail menu for Aep. Among her creations is the Thai Tea Milk Punch, a blend of strongly brewed Thai tea (black tea flavored with star anise, tamarind and cardamom), Right gin, turmeric, lime and clarified milk. According to Wagner, the clarification process removes the solids from the milk and, when blended with the tea, reduces the astringency to lend the drink a silken texture. Sounds just right for drinking outside, up high.

The frenetic intersection of 75th Street and Wornall Road has gained a dining complement with this restaurant, which busily turns out ramen, bao buns and cocktails as ’80s and ’90s music videos blaze from its many video monitors. And in good weather, Boru’s sliding glass garage doors — which connect wraparound patio seating to the indoor space along the restaurant’s entire south wall — give you another kind of bustling entertainment, allowing you to revel in Waldo’s street scenes. A great time to feel the breeze and the bustle is happy hour (3-6 p.m.), when signature cocktails are $5. Selections include a crisp take on the French 75, renamed the Samurai 75, which features gin, sparkling wine, jasmine syrup and lemon; and the Big Trouble in Little Waldo, a blend of vodka, Calpico lychee soda and matcha green tea syrup.

The 30-seat patio behind SoT is sort of an urban dream, an oasis between tall brick buildings adorned with string lights and vertical greenery. It’s a sophisticated and charming space, and owner Ron Berg knows it: He has invested in some stylish new outdoor furniture, just in time for warmer weather. The real stars at SoT are still the cocktails, though, and for spring, bartenders Rebecca Freeman (formerly of the American) and Margot Thompson (formerly of the Farmhouse) are working up new drinks. So far, the menu includes a bright and tart Paloma, made with white tequila, rose-and-cardamom syrup and lime juice, topped with Aperol foam.

Also featured is an almost-too-beautifulto-drink cocktail named Botanic Ritual, which centers on Uncle Val’s Botanical Gin and lychee puree and co-stars a frozen sphere of Rothman and Winter crème de violette, Kuebler absinthe, orange bitters and edible flowers. As the sphere melts, the drink’s flavors subtly change and deepen.

Bar manager Zac Snyder has spent the past two years building a cocktail program at Westside Local, one he’ll tell you “thrives on fun, delicious, approachable drinks.” For spring, he asked his bartenders to collaborate on a menu of reimagined classics, and among the new offerings is the Westside martini, which riffs on the South Side by replacing the gin with tequila and the mint with cilantro. (A lime here is still a lime.)

Snyder has also cleverly interpreted the ’70s drink known as the Slow Comfortable Screw Against the Wall. The original utilizes vodka, sloe gin, Southern Comfort, orange juice and Galliano; Snyder’s combines Rieger whiskey, apricot liqueur, absinthe and a house-made orange-lime cordial. It is mildly sweet and citrusy, and it is dangerously easy to drink — ideal for an afternoon in Westside Local’s cozy, welcoming beer garden.

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event of the month

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Roasted and Toasted

The Pitch’s Bacon & Bourbon Festival is just what it sounds like: hog heaven.

Graphic tees, bumper stickers and Arby’s commercials agree: Everyone likes bacon. Sure, there are a few exceptions — vegetarians, people who don’t eat pork for religious reasons, most pigs). And the savory American favorite finds its perfect complement in a certain brown liquor. In fact, bacon and bourbon would already be as synonymous as coffee and doughnuts, if only more people drank bourbon with breakfast or acknowledged the awesomeness of night bacon.

Instead, it’s once again up to us to put the two together at The Pitch’s Bacon & Bourbon Festival, on Thursday, April 13, at the Guild (1621 Locust).

This is the place to sample bacon strips and bourbon sips (and creative variations on both) from A Little BBQ Joint, Crazy Good Eats, Ollie’s Local, Morning Day Café, District Pour House, Pickens Sweet Treats, Urban Café, Tom’s Town, Pinckney Bend Distillery, Holladay Distillery, Homesteader Café, Wicket & Peg, Wild Turkey and Crown Royal.

Bacon and bourbon pair well with another classic combination — drinking and voting. The second annual Whiskey Wars cocktail competition pits defending champion Sean Sobol (MO Brew) against bartenders from Grunaüer, Julep, Dempsey’s, Slick Willy’s Saloon, Mustang Sally’s and Brick House.

Here is a closer look at a few of the evening’s attractions: Urban Café (4101 Troost) Chef Justin Clark’s daytime eatery, which opened in January, exclusively features locally sourced, organic ingredients, so feel assured that his Asian-inspired smoked pork-belly sandwich (with pickled carrots, cilantro, cabbage and sambal mayo) will be

as good for you as it is ridiculously delicious.

Morning Day Café (6 East Franklin Street, Liberty) Another before-noon restaurant gets to let loose with a little bacon after dark: Morning Day Café is bringing bacon-and-egg rolls with bacon-gravy dipping sauce.

Holladay Distillery (1 McCormick Lane, Weston) Holladay’s White Dog isn’t bourbon — it’ll be a couple of years before the resurgent distillery’s barrels are ready — but what this clear spirit lacks in age, it more than makes up for in 118-proof punch. Normally, White Dog is available only on site in Weston, so this is a rare opportunity to taste it without making a day trip.

Tom’s Town Distilling Co. (1701 Main) Also waiting for its on-site bourbon to age is Tom’s Town, which is filling the gap with small batches of the 10-year-old bourbon it purchased and branded as Pendergast’s Royal Gold. Try it straight or in a Bittersweet Caroline cocktail (with lemon juice and grapefruit-peel-infused honey syrup).

Pickens Sweet Treats (etsy.com/shop/ PickensSweetTreats) Founded in October 2015 by sisters Nanette and Natalie Pickens, this Independence confectionary spends most weekends sweetening up regional events and festivals.

It’s serving maple-bacon fudge and bacontopped toffee.

All this, plus wine: Cooper’s Hawk is featuring samples of several varietals, including Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir and Rhubarb.

So there’s something for absolutely everyone at Bacon & Bourbon. Even you, teetotaling vegan: We’ll see you at the Blip Coffee Roasters table.

Bacon & Bourbon is sponsored by Topgolf. Tickets are $35 (GA) and $45 (VIP); doors open at 6:30 p.m. for VIP guests and 7 p.m. for GA.

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shop girl Hood, left, in her shop. Below, some of her creations, worn by models.

courtesy of AMinA MArie Millinery

Put a Lid on It

Amina Marie Hood says there’s a hat for everybody — and she’ll make you one to prove it.

by AngelA lutz

With baseball season kicking off this month, Amina Marie Hood has a message for any lady borrowing her significant other’s favorite Royals cap: “We can do better.”

She’s in a position to feel confident about that. As the owner of Amina Marie Millinery, Hood offers sleek, no-nonsense “baller caps” that are fun, flirty, feminine — and way better than spending a three-hour baseball game with your hair tucked inside your boyfriend’s sweat-stained Monarchs cap.

The hats are part of Hood’s new ready-towear collection, which is displayed appealingly at her east Brookside shop, where she’s been since last May. The lineup also includes fedoras, different styles of berets, and a couple of wide-brim options, all in classic colors that go well with any outfit. Hood models a tan baller cap for me when I stop by her shop, and it looks right at home with her cream-colored dress and knee-high leather boots. I suspect it would look just as chic with a plain white T-shirt and jeans.

The ready-to-wear collection is Hood’s first, though she’s been making custom hats for the past three and a half years. She got started when a friend asked her to make a mini top hat for her to wear to Burning Man.

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After that, she started taking millinery classes and found that she loved the form.

“It took me 37 years to find what I loved, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” she says. “The universe opened up and said, ‘Maybe you should make some hats,’ and I was open to it. It [millinery] is complex — it involves sculpture, balance and proportion.”

Each of Hood’s custom hats is handsewn and designed specifically for the client; she calls them “true labors of love.” As a mother of three, she often works at home.

“It’s a messy process,” she says. The hats that result from her hours of work, however, are anything but messy. She shows me a custom, wide-brimmed, lilac-colored hat she’s been working on, its darker accents contrasting smartly with the sheer, crosshatch-patterned fabric around the brim. This hat is so much more than just a way to keep the sun off your face. It’s a wearable work of art, classy without being flashy.

When she gets an order, she starts by asking the buyer where and when she’s planning to wear her hat. The Kentucky Derby? An Easter social? She asks about the outfit that will likely be worn with the hat and asks the client how she wants to look and feel while

wearing the hat. “The hat should complete the outfit, not compete,” Hood says. “You don’t have to be bold to wear a hat.”

She knows many people don’t feel that way, though, having been put off by some of the more ridiculous hats they’ve seen celebrities wear on red carpets. She also hears a lot of people say they simply don’t look good in hats. Hood counters that this is never the case — there is a hat for everybody. Yes, you’d expect a milliner to take this position, but Hood makes a strong case.

“People say they don’t look good in hats, but they’ve only tried one or two styles,” she says. “If you tried jeans that didn’t fit, would you never wear jeans again?” She says it’s all about proportions: finding a hat that isn’t too big or too small for your face, for instance, or a brim that isn’t too wide or too narrow for your frame.

In addition to generalized hat anxiety, Hood has encountered many younger people who are unfamiliar with millinery. She wants to help change that, and she has the chops to make it happen: In 2015, she was the only American finalist in the prestigious Lock and Company millinery competition in London.

“A lot of people think of millinery as something their grandma would wear,” Hood says. “I want to introduce it to the younger generation in a fresh way.”

One way she’s appealing to a broader audience is by collaborating with other local designers, including Heidi Hermann and Asiatica. She also loves to remind people that they don’t have to be dressed up to wear a nice hat. That should be an easy sell once those baller caps find their way off the racks and into the stands.

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fashion

House of Cochon’s “statement jewelry” is big and bold.

Fresh, Pressed

Your post–Kansas City Fashion Week preview of Kansas City Fashion Week By angela lutz

Whether you’re looking for a statementmaking necklace to complement your favorite black dress, a one-of-a-kind piece of wearable art, or a playful T-shirt made nearby, Kansas City Fashion Week has become the year’s premier event for finding something that will drill straight to the center of your amygdala and take root, leaving you simultaneously curious and confused — as only fashion can.

Because the couture clock is always ahead, 35 local, regional and national designers were readying to roll out their fall and winter collections March 29 through April 1 at the Grand Hall at Power & Light. And because that couture clock waits for no one, this year’s show would have fallen into the gap between The Pitch’s end date as a weekly and this first monthly issue.

But I wasn’t about to miss the chance to interview four of this spring’s most intriguing designers. As you read this, their collections have already rocked the runway, but it’s not too late to seek them out.

Meanwhile, I asked them what inspires them and what about Fashion Week most excited them.

COCO & ILIA

cocoandiliadesigns.wixsite.com/cocoandilia When it comes to clothes, Cortney “Coco” Sims and Ilia Siegwald have always been on the same wavelength. As fashion students at Stephens College, in Columbia, they often created complementary designs without even realizing it. And once they figured it out, it was difficult to keep them apart.

“We got in trouble a few times because we would walk over to each other’s tables and help each other design,” Siegwald says.

“Because of that, we ended up realizing we were designing a lot of the same things.

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From there, we were like, Why don’t we continue to do this?”

Three years later, as Coco and Ilia, the young designers maintain a playful, upbeat dynamic in their relationship, laughing easily and often during our phone conversation.

In addition to their effortless connection, each one brings a vital individual component to their collaboration.

“I love to figure out how you can change the lines of something to make a completely new shape, where Coco’s more focused on the hardware and how you can create something using different outside pieces,” Siegwald says. “We match those two things together.”

The resulting designs mix leather, denim and fringe with other interesting textures — think fishnet and fur — to create a video game– and comic book–inspired look that Sims calls “hard, high-end street wear.” And the women share a clear picture of who’s wearing their clothing.

“We want to speak to the girl or woman who knows who she is and wants to relay that message to whoever needs to know,” Sims says. “You can look at her and know who she is without even speaking to her once.”

“She’s kind of a bitch about her business,” Siegwald adds.

These days, Siegwald and Sims are on top of their business as well, viewing their first Kansas City Fashion Week as a chance to get an immediate reaction to their work, empower other aspiring designers — and show off a little bit, too.

“We have that star factor — that ‘it’ factor — and I’m not even trying to be cocky about it,” Sims says. “We have that shock value that is missing a lot of the time. It’s that one little edge that should’ve been took a little farther that we go ahead and push off the mountain.”

HOUSE OF COCHON houseofcochon.com

Courtney Cave-Perry’s first attempt at jewelry design was the result of a candid and relatable moment: She wanted something to wear to an event but couldn’t find anything she liked. Instead of giving up and settling for her second choice, as so many of us typically do, she decided to make her own.

That didn’t quite go according to plan. “It was horrible,” she says.

But she didn’t give up. “I decided I should learn how to do it, so I took some classes and did some research, and I’ve been making jewelry for 13 years now,” she says. “A lot of it is self-taught — with a lot of trial and error.”

Her experience has led her to develop her own style and create what she calls “statement jewelry”: big, bold, colorful pieces that

transcend mere necklaces to become wearable art. These aren’t petite charms that you can tuck under a tee; they’re closer to ornate, beaded breastplates, and they’re guaranteed to get a second look from anyone you pass on the street.

“They’re not for the faint of heart,” CavePerry says. “I am capable of making anything that someone commissions me to do, but when it’s my own design, they definitely make a statement and they’re normally pretty full of color and life. My pieces are certainly not for everybody to wear on a regular day, although I hope everybody doesn’t want to fit into the basic mold.”

Cave-Perry also draws inspiration from the people around her. She’s named necklaces, earrings and pins after friends and family members, and she says she’s newly inspired by the young artists she meets through the Kids with Crayons program, which teaches art to children in area homeless shelters. continued on page 38

3/23/17 11:19 11:03 AM

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fashion

Judy Bales’ designs, such as this full-body piece, show how she pushes nonfiber materials to extremes.

During the day, she works as executive director of the Arts Asylum, which runs the program.

“A lot of people are unaware that in the Kansas City metro area, the average age of a homeless person is 7,” she says. “Those kids are part of what still makes me able to create, so a lot of pieces were inspired by them and their stories and their resilience.”

This marks Cave-Perry’s ninth Fashion Week. She says she keeps coming back because of the welcoming atmosphere that encourages creativity and growth.

“I also have a background in theater, so this is a nice blend of putting on what I believe to be a theatrical production,” she says.

“It’s a safe and supportive environment — like a family atmosphere.”

QUEEN’S ROCKET jonfultonadams.com

Menswear designer John Fulton Adams draws inspiration from a variety of unexpected sources. After apologizing for what he admits is a scatterbrained pre-coffee state — he was up late sewing and preparing for Fashion Week — he rattles off an intriguing list.

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House of Cochon has become a Fashion Week staple.

blaCKsheep photographY oF omaha

“The thing that most inspires me is old Hollywood glamour and the dandies of the 19th century,” he says. “I love film noir. I’m interested in origami. I’m really inspired by fur and feather. And we collect skulls at the house. We’re very nature oriented.”

This disparate range of influences results in some unique and striking designs. There are fitted pants, paired with vests made from the curtains at a mortuary. There’s a skirt fabricated from a scuba suit that’s been rubbed with gold. There are T-shirts depicting mischievous silhouettes — a squirrel with a machine gun battling a mouse with a hand grenade, for instance, or a woman sharing an intimate conversation with an alligator.

Adams also isn’t afraid to use fur — even better if he has a personal history with the animal, as he does with the coyote pelt that was about to make its first appearance at Fashion Week.

“The coyote pelt came from Lebo, Kansas, and the coyote was attacking my mentor’s chickens,” he says. “She had to get rid of the coyote, so she had it made into a pelt.”

And to think Adams almost pursued another career path entirely. As a student at the Savannah College of Art Design, he switched majors from architecture to fashion after realizing he wasn’t terribly good at math.

“I was afraid I was going to kill someone with my designs if I did architecture,” Adams says. “But no one would get hurt if I did fashion.”

Give or take the occasional deviant coyote.

JUDY BALES judybales.com

With more than four decades of experience as an artist, Judy Bales can easily claim a far-reaching résumé. Her academic background is in fine art and fabric design, but she has done everything from large-scale gallery installations to public art, which involved collaborating with engineers on trail and highway bridges.

About seven years ago, she detoured into fashion — though she still doesn’t consider herself a fashion designer.

“I broke off into ways of working that don’t clearly fit into any category,” she tells me. “I consider myself a fiber artist, but I’ve always worked with wires and plastics and nonfiber materials but used them as fiber. My materials are more likely to be purchased from a hardware store than an art-supply store.”

Many of her runway-ready looks involve

unusual materials, often recycled or salvaged, that she harnesses to create what she calls “extreme, full-body jewelry.” Wire becomes thread. Window screening becomes fabric. While not intended for daily wear, the resulting garments look simultaneously feminine and fierce — a model draped in a cloud of mesh wire, for instance, or a floorlength drapery that looks as though it’s made of porcupine quills.

Each time Bales works with a model, she views it as a collaborative effort. For her, it’s not only about the garment — it’s also the person who wears it.

“Combining my work with the human form is very exciting to me,” she says. “I’m collaborating with the body. Rather than using a model as a mannequin for my work, I try to match up my work with that particular model. It’s never going to look the same on another model, and it will be different each time I present that work.”

Based in Iowa, Bales had never participated in Kansas City Fashion Week before.

“I love Kansas City, but I don’t get there very often,” she says. “A lot is going on with the arts there, and I’ve always been very impressed by that. I’m very excited to be introduced to it and introduce myself to the whole fashion community and meet exciting new designers.”

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art art

Monica Dixon and a friend try on a pair of recently completed masks, each made from dozens of scraps of fabric.

Jennifer weTzel

The D Word

Monica Dixon’s Temenos puts a movement — lots of movement — in motion. Just don’t call it dance.

by Lucas WetzeL

In the dance studio at the Charlotte Street studio residency space, in downtown’s Town Pavilion building, Monica Dixon looked down at a row of colorful, handmade masks that spanned the length of the stage. There were 26, each sewn from a variety of clothing scraps and synthetic materials resembling feathers, scales or flower petals.

“Now that I think about it, these have really ruled my life,” she said of the masks, which she started making toward the end of 2016.

Two hours later, the room had filled with people, each of them wearing one of the masks while leaping, slithering or danc-

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ing around the stage. Dixon, also in a mask, moved among the dozen or so participants, calling out instructions and encouragement over a playlist of dance, electronic and international music.

The evening took on the form of a yoga class, with a quiet introduction, guided instructions for movement and a shavasanalike repose, during which attention was called to individual parts of the body. Visually, however, it resembled a hybrid of pantomime, dance party and clandestine mascot-training session — equal parts ceremony and silliness. As the sky darkened outside and the city lights snapped to life, some-

one hovering outside the studio’s sixth-floor windows would have enjoyed an arresting scene: silhouettes unabashedly hopping, twisting and crawling around the room.

This was Temenos, a monthly event that Dixon began earlier this year as an extension of her artistic, yoga and dance practices.

The 28-year-old West Plains, Missouri, native — a 2011 graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute — regularly leads meditation and healing dance workshops at art spaces, youth centers and women’s shelters. She sensed, she says, a need for an environment free of the cultural baggage associated with the D word.

“Dance is often thought of as something you do when you get drunk, something almost vulgar,” Dixon says. “Or else it’s thought of as a performative thing. When you say the word ‘dance,’ people start asking about choreography or audience, things that really don’t have a place in Temenos.”

Instead, Dixon prefers the term “creative movement,” a description meant to encourage exploration, expression and experimentation. “I’m hoping that people can enter a mental space with other people where they are able to move in a way that might not look as cool as it feels.”

Temenos — adapted from an ancient Greek term for sacred space in a profane environment — arose from Dixon’s interest in ritual, a curiosity she says flowered while she studied in Europe and traveled alone through India. “I realized how ritual played a much more integral role in the structure, pitch.com | april 2017 | the pitch

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At the Big Brothers Big Sisters building in the Crossroads, Dixon leads a group of children and their adult mentors through a series of movements.

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time and practices of other cultures, and I became more aware of the need for ritual in my own life, how that can have either a positive or a negative effect,” she says. “America is, relatively, such a young and diverse country that we don’t have as many rituals, aside from the 24-hour clock.”

Integral to the Temenos ritual are the masks, which evolved from Dixon’s studio practice of working with found materials, thrift-store fabrics and clothing from friends — “all things that have a past related to the human body,” she points out.

The masks use color and fabric to alter a person’s perception of themselves, their environment and how they interact with it, she says.

While some friends and fellow artists have told Dixon that they view the masks as references to, say, the hijabs worn by Muslim women or the festival attire of other cultures, she says they’re actually based on ski or ninja masks. The idea is to allow fluid movement without risking injury.

Not everybody is ready to be a dance ninja, though. At a recent event Dixon led at Big Brothers Big Sisters of Kansas City, the young participants showed little interest in the masks, regarding them as unnecessary, uncomfortable or simply “too hot.” Still, the young people and their adult mentors instantly took to the movement part of the program, using it as an opportunity to explore the variety of ways they could remain in motion while laughing and bonding with one another.

Though she hadn’t exactly anticipated the kids’ aversion to masks, Dixon wasn’t surprised to see everyone’s eagerness to be unstill, to reconnect with childlike unselfconsciousness.

“Temenos is a time and space set aside for people to come together and act in ways they don’t normally get to,” she says. “When you’re a child, everything is new, and it feels like everything is there for you to explore, figure out and make your own. We lose that as we get older, so my hope is that these events create a space where people can reconnect with their bodies in a way that they forgot.”

The next opportunity to take part in Temenos will be April 22 at the Drugstore, as part of Olivia Clanton’s “Creative Toolbox,” a monthlong series of classes and workshops. Other events will be announced as they are scheduled on Dixon’s website (monicajdixon.com).

In May, Dixon’s idea of creating sacred spaces in the middle of civic life will find a more visible expression as part of the city’s Art in the Loop Foundation, which recently awarded her a grant to transform a park in the City Market. The park’s trees will be spanned with canvases made from recycled materials, creating a colorful, tentlike environment. (Her tentative title: “Cloud Canopy.”) Over the summer, Dixon plans to host a series of public events and meditation sessions in the space, just a stone’s throw from the streetcar line.

What all of these undertakings have in common is Dixon’s emphasis on accessibility — access to materials and to environments as well as to occasions for people to escape their everyday mindsets and bring their attention inward. At the center of that practice, Temenos remains a moveable feast, likely to pop up wherever conditions are favorable, continuing Dixon’s aim to introduce new rituals — one creative movement at a time.

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film

Fest Kiss

Writer-director Morgan Dameron came home to grow her Different Flowers.

Dameron, on the set with actor Sean Gunn

By Dan lyBarger

Morgan Dameron — a writer-producerdirector triple threat whose Different Flowers screens at this year’s KC Film Fest (April 5-9) — has already made a name for herself. Or, more precisely, lent her name to an intergalactic blockbuster.

J.J. Abrams named heroic resistance pilot Po Dameron (played by Oscar Isaac) after her in his Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Abrams, among the most well-known filmmakers in Hollywood, used to be her boss. Now she has factored her experiences working as his executive assistant into her own feature film, about a bride (Emma Bell) who bails on her wedding and joins her sister (Hope Lauren) on an impromptu road trip to see their grandmother (Shelley Long) at her farm.

Stops include a certain big, big ball of twine in Cawker City, Kansas, and the “World’s Largest Goose” in Sumner, Missouri.

Like her characters, Dameron got some help from relatives for her crowd-funded movie. The filmmaker, who is in her late 20s, hired her brother, Dylan, to be her digitalimaging technician, and their sister, Natalie, was the on-set photographer. Some of her cousins play flower girls at the wedding.

Dameron presents her movie at two screenings at the Cinemark Palace. (Times and tickets: kcfilmfest.org.) I called her in Los Angeles to talk about bringing it all back home.

The Pitch: What have you done in Different Flowers that we don’t usually see in road movies?

Morgan Dameron: I’ve always been a big fan of road movies and obviously was influenced by Thelma and Louise and all these great stories that take place really in the heart of America.

What I really wanted to do was twofold: One, was to tell a female-driven story, an authentic sister relationship. I really set out to portray a relationship that I don’t see on screen that often. You know, you see a lot of buddy comedies. You see a lot of two guys or brothers onscreen but seeing a complex rela-

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tionship with two sisters is something that I don’t see very often, and so I set out to write something that was true to what I knew. I’ve got two sisters, so I put that into a road movie.

I also wanted to portray the Midwest, which was convenient for me because it’s what I know. But it’s also so beautiful. A lot of people think it’s a flyover state, but I think there’s something gorgeous and unique about this part of the country, so I set out to try to capture both elements of those in Different Flowers.

What should people know about the scenery here in Flyover Country?

(Laughs) I think they should know that obviously there is farmland and beautiful farmland, but that it’s breathtaking. We [the crew] were sort of staying at Kansas City, but the first time we drove out to the country, specifically in Baldwin City, Kansas, where we were filming at the farmhouse that’s in the film, they said, “Wow. The sky is so big.”

I think that’s something that’s really special, especially in cinema. We’re in the widescreen format, and you get these beautiful landscapes.

Shelley Long, who produced and who’s coming to the festival, won an Emmy for playing an East Coast patrician in Cheers, but she’s actually from the Midwest.

Absolutely. She’s from Indiana, so I think there was a connection to the Midwestern story for her as well. We had some great conversations about growing up in the Midwest and how that grounds you in a way that’s really unique and special. It’s also about how the people of the Midwest have their quirks but ultimately there’s a kindness there that is often not found in harsh Hollywood.

What I was drawn to with her is that she plays a bit of an alternative Midwestern grandmother. She’s wisecracking. She always knows what to say. She does yoga. I thought that she would be able to bring her big personality to this character and really fill it out.

We were able to build someone really special, a blend of grandmothers we have. Everyone

stands up a little bit straighter when Shelley Long walks in a room because you know you have to be the best for her.

At the moment, you are currently best known for having been an executive assistant for J.J. Abrams. What does that title mean?

Being an executive assistant can really run the gamut. I was very lucky to be at the right hand of a really talented filmmaker and to see firsthand how a lot of these projects are developing. I got to be on set for Star Trek: Into Darkness as well as Star Wars: The Force Awakens. To get to witness from the inception of the idea all the way up through the release and the publicity surrounding the film is invaluable experience for me as a filmmaker. He’s great at surrounding himself with talented people, and that’s the best advice you could ever get: Surround yourself with people who are as good as, if not better than, you are.

You had a successful Kickstarter campaign, but many filmmakers don’t. How were you able to get fans to donate for a movie that studios would reject because it doesn’t have enough superheroes?

That is the great thing about crowdfunding, is that you are able to find your audience so early. For us, we had over 500 people come and join us on this journey. That was what really set out to do was not just ask for donations or for money in return for rewards but to really ask people to be a part of the process, to get a behind-the-scenes look, to join this filmmaking team from the very beginning.

So we’ve tried to give people a real insider’s look at what it’s like to make an independent film. A lot of people who donate to Kickstarter are interested in filmmaking and maybe they want to do some of that of their own. That’s a goal we set out to do from the very beginning.

What did you encounter with making a film here instead of L.A. or Vancouver?

Working on a film in Kansas City was really special because people were so excited

natalie DaMeron

about making movies in Kansas and Missouri. With Los Angeles, even though it’s a great filmmaking hub and you access to a diverse and talented pool of people and crew members and cast, a lot of times people are a little jaded. They might be a little cynical about the filmmaking process because they see it all the time.

But in Kansas City, I’ll tell you a great story that’s an example of this: We were having a big problem finding a Jeep for our film.

We were going to try to borrow one, but we needed it for pretty much the entire month we were in Kansas City. My dad set about following people down the highway.

I was thinking: You can’t do that — you’re going to get in trouble. You can’t just follow people home. But lo and behold, someone pulled up in a Jeep Wrangler at Jerry’s ARC Auto Store in the Northland. And we asked Jerry [Brockhaus] if we could borrow the Jeep for our film, and he said, “Sure. No problem.”

We were able to get a key character. The Jeep plays a character named Albert — the lead character Emma’s Jeep. You really wound never run into something like that anywhere else working in one of those big cities.

You’re not a stranger to KC Film Fest. What have you presented here before?

It is so special to have our homecoming back at the Kansas City Film Festival. That was a festival I used to go to as a kid growing up, when it was the Jubilee and Fred Andrews ran it. And then to be there with my college film (It Was Like That) when it was KC Film Fest and now at the new home in the Cinemark Palace on the Plaza.

I had my first kiss at the Cinemark Palace on the Plaza. It’s a really special venue for me, and I can’t believe that I’m going to screen my film there. It was a really amazing experience making my film there because of the support and talent of the community and also because it’s my home. To be able to share the film with the people of Kansas City is indescribable. I can’t wait. pitch.com | april 2017 | the pitch

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screen stealers

Field and Stream

Above: Burning Sands; next page: I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore

Netflix and Amazon’s original-content war already has a winner: you. It’s just a matter of finding the time. by eric Melin

When Netflix’s The White Helmets won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short Film in February, it was a victory long in the making for the streaming giant. For more than five years (and seven Academy Award nominations), Netflix had sunk considerable money into buying and distributing documentaries, with its eye on the traditional movie industry’s highest prize.

Almost every headline about this historic win also included the news that Netflix’s chief streaming rival, Amazon, had picked up three Oscar wins, and in higher-profile categories. Amazon Studios’ Manchester by the Sea and The Salesman won Best Actor and Best Screenplay, and Best Foreign Language Film, respectively.

That helps explain why Netflix’s PR department — which has long been notoriously secretive about viewership numbers — reported a dramatic surge of searches in-platform for the 40-minute Helmets.

And the company continues to invest unprecedented resources in original programming.

On May 26, Netflix releases War Machine, a feature film starring Brad Pitt as a character based on U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal in David Michôd’s $60 million adaptation of the nonfiction Afghanistan war book The Operators. In December, Will Smith’s sci-fi movie Bright — directed by Suicide Squad’s David Ayer — premieres on Netflix, free for subscribers.

Netflix has also beefed up its financing and buying arm in the name of independent film, securing distribution or streaming rights to 10 titles that premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, including a record-setting $12.5 million paid for Dee Rees’ Mudbound, starring Jason Mitchell and Garrett Hedlund.

Four movies that premiered at Sundance in January are already streaming. The sci-fi drama The Discovery wasn’t available at press time but has a promising pedigree. Written and directed by Charlie McDowell — who helmed the 2014 head-trip sleeper The One I Love — it stars Jason Segel, Rooney Mara and Robert Redford and begins with the provocative premise that the afterlife has been scientifically proven.

The best of the remaining three Sundance premieres available now on Netflix is I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, a clever and darkly funny revenge tale that subverts expectation at every turn. Melanie Lynskey (Hello I Must Be Going, HBO’s Togetherness) plays a depressed medical assistant, and Elijah Wood is a socially awkward metalhead who helps her try to find the drug-addled burglars who raided her house. The home invasion has awakened a righteous fury in her: She’s sick of feeling helpless in a world populated by assholes.

Actor Macon Blair is the writer-director of I Don’t Feel at Home, and he’s recognizable in a cameo here as the protagonist in Blue Ruin and the emotional center of

Green Room, the latest genre-juiced drama from his childhood friend Jeremy Saulnier.

Like those movies, Blair’s directorial debut makes its narrative home among miscreants and outsiders. (It even co-stars David Yow as the main villain, a guy better known to underground-rock fans as the singer for sublime noise rockers the Jesus Lizard.) Also like Saulnier, Blair has a knack for investing more deeply in characters than is typical for genre films, even as he upends the plot conventions of traditional thrillers.

I Don’t Feel at Home is rougher around the edges than Saulnier’s work, but where Blair’s film separates itself is in its humor.

Blair’s version of rural America is part cutto-the-core authentic and part exaggerated screwball comedy, with the laughs coming from the margins. In service to that tactic, Wood sometimes wobbles on the line between believability and caricature, but Lynskey is present in every moment.

Lynskey has a long history in indie film of lending richness and complication to thinly written characters, and she does it again here. The actress wrings out just the right amount of empathy while making you believe that this timid woman, who has been driven to the edge, is finally making things happen for herself — even when she’s in way over her head.

I Don’t Feel at Home won the Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. Dramatic competition at Sundance, and it feels like a win for the vitality of independent film (and for Netflix subscribers).

Another 2017 Sundance picture available to stream now is Burning Sands, a timely, well-rounded drama about the pressure to succeed at all costs. The ritual of fraternity hazing is too often played out in a one-dimensional way in movies. Gerald McMurray’s directorial debut, however — which follows five young pledges at a traditionally black college — gives a fair shake to supporting characters on all sides. Trevor Jackson does fine work in the lead, but many filmgoers will be paying special attention to a frat brother played by Trevante Rhodes, who was the third incarnation of Chiron in 2017 Best Picture winner Moonlight.

We know going in that hazing is dangerous and that it has led to tragic deaths.

Burning Sands concerns itself more with the cultural attitudes that enable, reinforce and raise the stakes of this dangerous tradition. It’s not a perfect film — it often feels too plot-packed — but it gets how hyper-real everything feels during that time of impending adulthood. And it has a lot to say about how a fear of failure plays into the modern view of masculinity.

Finally, Deidra & Laney Rob a Train is a teen comedy that’s unusual in many ways but ultimately can’t find the right tone.

Newcomers Ashleigh Murray and Rachel Crow are the title characters, two teenage sisters who become the primary caregivers for their family when their mother is jailed for stealing a TV. This already sounds like a typical indie drama, but what makes Deidre

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& Laney unique is that it depicts all of its hardships and bad decisions with the same upbeat, sunny attitude.

The screenplay, from first-timer Shelby Farrell, sympathizes with its kids; they’re in a shitty situation, but they’ve kept their plucky spirit. But that sympathy contributes to a jarring unevenness. So do performances by Tim Blake Nelson and Sasheer Zamata (Saturday Night Live) that are one small step from cartoonishness. There’s no doubting director Sydney Freeland’s good intentions — he has cast actresses of color and given his film a positive, girl-power vibe — but energetic delivery alone can’t support its entire running time, and Deidra & Laney slowly runs out of steam.

Also in April

There are subversive themes, and then there are films that seem to exist solely as subversions unto themselves. As in: the cinema of John Waters.

The filmmaker’s scrappy early works fall squarely into that latter category, and although his second feature, 1970’s Multiple Maniacs, hasn’t achieved the same level of notoriety as its 1972 follow-up, Pink Flamingos, it’s easily as demented. It rides a similar anarchic spirit that thumbs its nose at every tenet of tasteful (or even competent) filmmaking.

The Criterion Collection has issued a new, 4K restoration of this 16mm provocation, which features drag queen Divine (the director’s muse) as she takes her Cavalcade

of Perversion road show to the squares of regular society as a front to rob and murder them. The Blu-ray is accompanied by a new Waters commentary and cast and crew interviews. These features are also available on the new joint TCM-Criterion streaming service, Filmstruck.

Amazon Prime has two reliable series returning this month, and one new docuseries. You have to wonder if American Playboy: The Hugh Hefner Story, available to stream on April 7, is merely an excuse to license a ton of naked photos and videos and pass them off as a serious effort. Will this 13-part series actually delve into the complexities of a man who spent six decades redefining the way modern society looks at sex? If it’s the latter, I’m intrigued. The series mixes doc footage with actors playing the main roles.

Amazon also launches third seasons of its reliable crime drama Bosch (April 21) and its superlative relationship comedy Catastrophe (April 28), which features the last TV role of the late Carrie Fisher.

Not that you’d expect it, but there isn’t a lot of traditional storytelling in the new, feature-length documentary David Lynch: The Art Life, which has been stitched together from 20 interviews Lynch did over three years and explores both the well-known and lesser-studied works of Hollywood’s last true surrealist. Screenland at Tapcade opens it on April 21, alongside 4K restorations of Eraserhead (celebrating the 40th anniversary of Lynch’s debut) and Mulholland Dr (which may just be his masterpiece).

screen stealers

The Alamo Drafthouse’s Film Club series features two new independent films each month. Buster’s Mal Heart, showing on April 26, is its sophomore outing, and features Mr. Robot’s Rami Malek as another internalized loner. It’s a difficult movie, but fans of his groundbreaking TV series are already used to working a bit. Malek plays a bilingual

hotel concierge and frustrated family man who’s suffering from some severe Y2K paranoia. Or is he a mysterious mountain man, on the run from the cops? The film’s nonlinear structure and its use of dual perspectives (we get both versions of Malek’s character) obscure what’s really going on. Most of the drama comes from this schism.

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Café

Splintered Ambition Komatsu Ramen goes big but needs to get better.

By Liz Cook

Where to begin?

With the gold-toned radiata pine — such pine! — creeping under you in square-jawed stools, towering over you in slope-shouldered huts, eclipsing the sun from a wall of ersatz windows. With the canyon of a restaurant, 8,000 square feet of cool concrete and black paint and dead tree. With the vibe, simultaneously primal and alien.

Forget color, forget plant life, forget daylight. This is a place where ultramodernity circumnavigates itself in search of a creation myth: In the beginning, there was nothing.

Nothing but a fuck ton of pine.

This is Komatsu Ramen, a vast desert planet with a pretty good concession stand.

Komatsu opened in midtown this past December on the crest of a ramen wave: Local shops Columbus Park Ramen and Shio Ramen have seduced slurpers for some time, and Bōru Ramen Shop launched in February, hot on Komatsu’s heels.

But Komatsu chef-owner Erik Borger had promised something different in the months before he opened his paean to timber: His place would be cheaper (with the bowls a flat $10, whereas KC’s market rate hovers between $12 and $14). It would be open later (until 1:30 a.m.) to cater to the last-call crowd. And it would be large enough to comfortably seat an ocean liner’s midnight-buffet line.

So Borger’s is less ramen shop, more ramen warehouse — which must have been the plan, given that 3951 Broadway is notoriously over-

sized. More than one previous tenant (most recently, Open Fire Wood Burning Pizza) disappeared into its yawning maw, never to be heard from again. Any endeavor scaled to a floorplan of this size requires volume of a kind that has stubbornly failed to materialize along this stretch. Still, Borger is banking on just that kind of traffic to make Komatsu stick. He estimates the space can fit 365 diners. “I think it’s the biggest ramen restaurant in the world,” he told me.

If that sounds like a nightmare for servers — high volume, low density — it is. On all three of my visits, the waitstaff wore the grim, resigned faces of people who’d been apologizing for hours.

“I’m so sorry,” our server said during one visit, leaving an appetizer (steamed brisket buns) on the table when we were halfway through our ramen. “I’m not sure what happened. We’re slammed tonight.”

I slid to the edge of our enormous pinewood pod and squinted at the horizon. I spotted only a half-dozen other faces in the dining room, but this far from land I couldn’t be certain.

Our server needn’t have bothered with the brisket. By the time the steamed buns arrived, their bottoms had seized into a jawpopping, jerky-tough chew. “It’s kind of like a communion wafer,” a tablemate remarked, not unkindly. A daub of black-garlic crème fraiche provided a sharper flavor than your altar-issue host, but the brisket pieces were too stingy to add much else.

The buns erred more in execution than in design. In fact, the crispy tofu buns I ordered on a second visit were dewy and pliable, with the right balance of fillings (generous tabs of crisp-edged tofu; a smear of tangy, togarashi mayo; a crisp layer of spice-crusted cucumber slices). And while the other starters are simple — edamame, cucumber and seaweed salads — the portions are hearty and the flavors bright. A plate of edamame tossed with a seven-spice powder proved an ideal bar snack, with salt and spice to balance Komatsu’s sweet cocktails and fragrant sakes.

The extensive drink menu suits the space.

There’s a sprawling list of sakes and wines, and a slate of cocktails and blended shots includes three flavors of chūhai — a mix of sparkling water and shōchū liquor that’s mild, refreshing and almost imperceptibly sweet. (Nondrinkers have multiple teas and Japanese sodas to choose from.)

Justus Drugstore rock star Arturo VeraFelicie consulted on the cocktails, which skew sweet and citrusy. The White Lady is among the stiffest, though when I ordered it, the harsh blend of gin, Cointreau and lemon hadn’t been shaken long enough to blunt the booze. I preferred the Milky Way, a whiskeybased drink in clear-liquor clothing. Concentrated Calpico, a yogurt-y Japanese soft drink, brightened up the spirit, while simple syrup and lemon lent it a clean finish. A wisp of blue curacao spiraled cosmically through the glass, adding an air-kiss of cotton-candy sweetness.

Komatsu’s ramen menu is almost as large, with 26 bowls that vary mostly in their toppings. Excepting a vegetarian bowl and a vegan bowl, they’re divided into three sections, based on their tare, or flavor base: tonkotsu (pork broth, served with a thin hakata noodle), shoyu (soy sauce, served with a curly tokyo noodle), and miso (fermented soybean paste, served with a chewy hokkaido noodle).

Within each section, diners choose from one of eight combinations of meat, vegetables and seasonings.

Borger won’t divulge the source of the meat, other than to say that it comes from a local smokehouse. Worth noting: Neither the meat nor the noodles nor any of the broths is cooked in-house. Borger will tell you that this is to make his dishes more authentic, not less. Though he initially planned to make his own noodles, an article by renowned ramen chef Ivan Orkin changed his mind. “It’s not possible to get the correct wheat in the United States,” Borger told me. The solution? Sun Noodle, a Japanese purveyor that supplies noodles to Orkin’s restaurants as well as to Momofuku, David Chang’s New York ramen mecca.

The tares for the broths are imported from Japan as well, though this seems a matter of sheer practicality. “We’ve done almost 50,000 bowls of ramen since we opened,” Borger told me in early March. At peak times, the restaurant may fill 100 bowls in an hour. That’s a lot of broth to prepare from scratch. continued on page 48

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Café

I couldn’t help but measure Komatsu’s bowls against those of hyper-local competitors — I’m team Shio for noodles, team Columbus Park for protein — but Borger’s passion for authenticity has borne fair fruit.

Ramen initiates, for instance, may find comfort in the Hakata, a tonkotsu bowl with Midwestern roots. Tabs of fatty smoked brisket swim with sweet corn, bean sprouts and bamboo shoots in a cloudy pork broth. The hakata noodles seemed the least forgiving: In both the Hakata and Yokohama bowls I tried, they were overly soft, with a spaghettiish texture. And the tonkotsu wasn’t as sticky as I’m accustomed to, despite its high-tech origins; Borger told me that his source uses a refractometer to verify the broth’s density.

But I had no qualms about the flavor, which was rich and intensely meaty. The soft-boiled egg was another standout. In the Hakata and in every other bowl I ate, the yolk was cooked to a thick, honeylike consistency, the white tender and salty thanks to a soy-andmirin marinade.

The miso broth was even richer. Borger chalks it up to Japan’s long-fermenting red miso; the top-shelf stuff can be tricky to come by in the United States. Here, the opaque white broth is full-bodied and complex, with a gentle funk from the fermented bean paste. The accompanying hokkaido noodles were my favorite of Komatsu’s three styles. The strands were thick and chewy, as comforting as a hug and resilient enough to withstand minutes in the hot broth (though ramen etiquette dictates a race to the bottom of the bowl).

Skip the Kama, a miso bowl with tiny poached shrimp and thin-sliced wheels of narutomaki, cured fish cakes with a groovy pink spiral. The fish cakes were pleasant and mild (if a bit gristly), but the shrimp were mealy and left a dirty aftertaste. The Oga, which swaps the seafood for broad slices of pork belly, is better.

Each day, Komatsu offers one lunch special for $8. On my daytime visit, that was the

48 48

Susaki, a shoyu bowl trimmed with generous hunks of roasted chicken, hearty bean sprouts and wilting spinach leaves. My favorite accompaniments (besides that softboiled egg) were the raw enoki mushrooms, spindly little soldiers that slowly softened in the broth’s fragrant steam.

The curly Tokyo noodles were firmer than the Hakata, with a pleasing bite, and the dark broth — built on a tare of multiple soy sauces for extra umami — was suitably savory, with dueling notes of acid and caramel. Of the three broths on offer, the shoyu has the most curb appeal: On my visits, the broth was a bold mahogany, its surface flecked with confetti shimmers of emulsified fats.

At dinner, all bowls cost $10, though diners can “make it spicy” for a dollar extra. The house-made condiment is worth the investment: Komatsu blends chili paste, a proprietary 12-spice powder and a pungent leek oil into a silky, vibrant relish that adds harmonizing heat and tang to each bowl.

Less successful: the house-made atmosphere.

Design is both Komatsu’s calling card and its Achilles heel. Borger had a singular vision for the space, and that vision involved 23,000 pounds of pine. (The restaurant’s name means “small pine,” which seems inadequate. I suggest: “colossal pine,” “bigleague pine” or “pine to mock the gods.”

Send translations.)

Oh, but that main dining room. File under “good intentions gone wrong.” Every aspect of the build, from the blond booths with asymmetrical roofs to the cubbies cut at odd intervals into their walls, mirrors award-winning architect Ietsugu Ohara’s design for a branch of Shyo Ryu Ken, a famous Japanese ramen chain. That design makes sense for the Japanese shop, a modest room crouched under an Osakan overpass where diners can enjoy a semiprivate experience while still feeling connected to the bustling bar feet away. But it’s an odd fit for 3951 Broadway. Far from cultivating coherence,

zach bauman

Komatsu Ramen 3951 Broadway 816-469-5336

komatsuramen.co

Hours

11 a.m.–1:30 a.m.

Monday–Saturday 11 a.m.–midnight Sunday

Cocktails: $9 Appetizers: $4–$7 Ramen: $10

Best bet: Nibble some togarashi edamame with a Milky Way and save room for the oga miso bowl.

Skip dessert — unless a sake bomb speaks to your soul.

the wooden huts maroon diners on little islands miles from the nearest friendly face.

Better to eat in the bar area. Unlike the main dining room, the bar doesn’t block its wall of windows with a blanket of pine. The wood is still a strong presence — the bar, the shelves, the high-top tables, the square stools — but exposed walls and blessed daylight offer needed contrast. The space feels airy, sophisticated and social — enough so that you might be persuaded to stay for one more drink.

But don’t overtax your bladder. I am duty-bound to warn you about the bathrooms at Komatsu, which resemble the scene of a truck-stop murder. Icy-toned overhead fluorescents bathe you in queasy, institutional light, and the space mirrors the restaurant as a whole: oversized and underused. The functional portion of the ladies’ washroom is relegated to a backroom with two stalls and, on my second visit, two broken sinks. To reach it, I traversed an enormous, unfurnished square room with nothing on its mirrored walls but a missing-persons flier. The bathroom itself was the physical manifestation of horror-film infrasound. I checked corners for Saw-grade booby traps. I gazed into the streaked mirror and saw the abyss gaze back.

I gave wide berth to a bucket that warned: “DO NOT MOVE.” I returned to my seat in need of diazepam. I settled on dessert. The only desserts on Komatsu’s menu in March were a sake bomb and a selection of kakigori: shaved ice flavored with imported Japanese syrups in flavors such as lychee or wasabi and pear.

For $6, a bowl of ice and syrup may be tough to swallow (though the yuzu flavor was refreshing and crisp). Still, if you don’t have work in the morning, you may as well go for the sake bomb — I can think of worse ways to end a meal than with a Schlitz tallboy.

Plus, you’re eating in the bar, right? Those window-facing bar seats are the best in the house. Even a desert planet needs a good cantina.

the pitch | april 2017 | pitch.com the pitch | april 2017 | pitch.com

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3/22/17 4:42 PM

jazz music beat

That Old Feeling

After a botch, the KC Jazz and Heritage Festival still has a chance to do right by our music.

by Larry KopitniK

It wasn’t Janelle Monáe’s fault.

The first rule of planning any concert bill dictates that the sponsor never — never! — announces the headliner until that headliner has signed a contract.

If the sponsor breaks this rule and prematurely discloses the big-ticket draw, among the better possible outcomes is the artist’s agent saying, “You must really like us!

Our new, higher price properly reflects our mutual admiration.”

Among the worst potential outcomes: the headliner tweeting, “Unfortunately this is untrue information. An alternative fact.”

The latter is what happened when the new Kansas City Jazz and Heritage Festival, set for Memorial Day weekend, broke that cardinal rule in its very first official announcement — prompting Monáe to respond publicly in just that way.

And so it was that the jazz museum was forced to release a statement, on the evening of what should have been a good day, saying: “Unfortunately, we must retract the statement of Janelle Monáe performing at the jazz festival. Janelle was not confirmed for the event and was incorrectly advertised. The American Jazz Museum sincerely apologizes to Ms. Monáe, her fans, and our media partners.”

This was embarrassing. (And here I must say that The Pitch is the event’s print-media partner, an arrangement made with this

50 50

magazine’s publishing team rather than with its editorial staff. Which doesn’t really lessen the disappointment.)

And, of course, it was far from the first time that Kansas City’s jazz community had aimed a gun at its own foot and pulled the trigger.

April is Jazz Appreciation Month, first declared by the Smithsonian Museum of American History in 2001 to celebrate jazz as a living and historic music. Kansas City lays a tight claim on both counts.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Local 627, the African-American musicians’ union founded in a then–rigidly segregated city. That union’s headquarters stands today, at 1823 Highland Street, as the Mutual Musicians Foundation, a National Historic Landmark still hosting jazz jams each Friday and Saturday night until 5 a.m. Most weekends, participating musicians include a sampling of the remarkable young talent perpetuating and reinventing this area’s signature music. Many of them came through the University of Missouri– Kansas City jazz program, where Bobby Watson and Dan Thomas have repeatedly recruited classes of the nation’s premier jazz talent. Others move here for opportunities unavailable elsewhere in the Midwest. They perform at the Blue Room, the Green Lady Lounge, the Majestic, or at the Tank Room (with rappers — it’s still jazz — on the fourth Friday of each month).

Listening options are not exclusively tied to dark clubs or old union halls. Subscription series this year have booked legends of the music, including drummer Jack DeJohnette, who is headed to the Gem Theater, and pianist Robert Glasper, a celebrated young star who has recorded with Kendrick Lamar, who recently played the Folly. The Kansas City Jazz Orchestra regularly offers a smartly refined sound in the Kauffman Center’s Helzberg Hall.

Despite these assets, though, Kansas City jazz repeatedly wounds itself. Last year, the oldest, largest, most financially successful and most racially diverse jazz festival in the area, Johnson County’s 27-year-old Jazz in the Woods, reimagined itself — bafflingly — as SoJo Summerfest. The idiotic name wasn’t the worst part; to contextualize the event’s country rock and its Elton John cover band, the program proclaimed: “As you can see from our talented group of homegrown bands from Kansas City, SoJo Summerfest is definitely not a jazz concert.” Friday night attendance plummeted from more than 15,000, in 2015, to a few thousand last year.

This year, Jazz in the Woods will return. Yet to be seen is how much of the audience that organizers cultivated over two decades will also return.

Jazz is integral to our community’s international identity. It grew up here in the 1930s as the soundtrack to sin, accompanying Prohibition-era drinking, gambling and prosti-

tution. It’s a delicious romanticism that our music has never shed — or much wanted to shed. Even today, Green Lady Lounge owner John Scott pegs half his audience as visitors pining for a Kansas City jazz experience. Yet for locals, the experience of this music teeters between the not-inaccurate impression that something great is happening here, and the foggy dread that the form is doddering and due for collapse. The latter is owed to the incomplete redevelopment of a historic district; 18th and Vine remains sprinkled with dilapidated buildings that occasionally burn. Some understand it as nothing more than a place where tiny audiences listen to old songs.

Anyone who has struggled to find an open table at Green Lady on a weekend night knows there’s a substantial jazz audience here. Step into one of those Tank Room gigs next door, or drop by RecordBar a couple of Sundays of each month, and you’ll hear jazz that refracts modern influences through wicked talent.

The Jazz District’s history is unquestionable. Behind the braced facade at 1822 Vine Street stood a club where tales of 1930s jam sessions cemented Kansas City’s renown for extraordinary music.

The building next door housed America’s first African-American-owned auto dealership. A block over, at the Paseo YMCA, the charter establishing the Negro Baseball Leagues was signed. Yet, a 1979 study funded by the Ford Foundation for the Black Economic Union found that even nearly 40 years ago, people feared coming to the area. For many, decades-old perceptions are ingrained.

The Major League Baseball Urban Youth Academy, now rising behind the jazz and Negro League museums, to be operated by the Kansas City Royals, promises to draw fresh eyes and a new attitude. The city’s $7 million commitment to clear lost buildings, brace historic structures and freshen the district can only help.

A magnificent festival over Memorial Day weekend could also attract fans open to new perceptions, even if its announcement was botched.

The museum is working on a replacement for Monáe, an artist who will appeal to the same younger audience. But let’s be honest: Between ties to Kansas City and the current peak of her career, few acts a sponsor could justify in a jazz festival here would be as big a draw as Monáe. Knowing she was so close to headlining shades the festival with fantasies of what might have been.

Jazz in Kansas City needs a major success. It cannot keep shooting itself in the tootsies.

the pitch | april 2017 | pitch.com the pitch | april 2017 | pitch.com

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music

New Beats

KC’s hip-hop scene boasts four up-and-coming producers.

By AAron rhodes

Rory Fresco is Kansas City’s most recent hip-hop success story. In a city known for its independent titans — namely Tech N9ne and his Strange Music label — Fresco is the first rapper in recent memory to achieve major-label status for the first time in recent memory. The teenager signed to Epic Records in 2016, after years of writing raps and making beats in his father’s basement.

Because most rappers aren’t skilled producers, the next Fresco might need some help. That’s where four other emerging local talents come in: Bam Keith, J-Tone, Alexander Preston and 1Bounce are ready to make the beats for the next headline-making KC rapper. Fresco already knows their work, so we should, too.

Bam Keith

Born Brandon Keith Thomas, Bam Keith has been making noise of one kind or another for a majority of his 23 years. The nickname comes from a grandmother who noted — as grandparents will — the child’s tendency to percussively slam anything in his immediate vicinity. Predictably, then, Thomas learned drums as a kid and created his first beats at age 10.

Less predictably: He picked up another dozen-plus instruments.

“My granddad played 10 instruments before he died,” Thomas says. “I always hear about how great he is all the time … so I made sure I played 10 instruments by the time I graduated.”

The arts coordinator at the Paseo Acad-

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emy of Fine and Performing Arts shot videos of Thomas performing during his senior year and got him accepted to a program with the Grammy Museum — all while Thomas was homeless and couch surfing. The skills he learned in the museum’s workshops, and the connections he made there, have helped to ignite his career.

Today, Thomas works at 825 Studios in Westport, fields production and engineering work from clients around the country and is in the process of writing music for a collaborative album with Kansas City rapper Kuttybear.

J-Tone

Jacob Walton, at just 19 years old, is one of Kansas City’s finest beatmakers. Early in 2016, he proved himself as rapper-producer capable of making trap-style party tracks on [Explicit Content] — an EP made with A’Sean and WontoN. Two days before the year ended, he showed that he wasn’t a onetrick pony by releasing another EP, Take The Ride, on which he and A’Sean revisited their lyrical roots over some of Walton’s most dynamic instrumentals yet.

“I wanna be somebody’s Kanye West,” Walton says. “Somebody that people can study and look up to and emulate and really sit there for hours and hours on end playing all of his songs and watching him in the studio and dying trying to get in the studio with him.”

Even though some of his MC work has outshined many of his peers, Walton has recently been placing most of his focus on

1Bounce

production. He’s had a hand in the music for Gee Watts’ highly anticipated Caviart, due out this spring. But even if Walton’s work on that album doesn’t land him a national gig, his solo work seems destined to draw a big spotlight.

Alexander Preston

Hemar Randall’s alias is a brand in the making, with music to match. The 24-yearold’s sleek yet chaotic modern hip-hop is informed by punk rock as much as it is by electronic music, making for a potent calling card.

“I wanna be worldwide,” Randall says.

“With Zarin [Micheal], I want the both of us to just create this ill sound that transcends anything anybody else has done before.”

Zarin Micheal is an 18-year-old rapper from Kansas City whom Randall has been working with for more than a year. Randall played a large role in the production of Michael’s Fuck You EP and will do the same on his upcoming Sinner of Attention.

“It’s been a fun process,” Randall says.

“We’ve started and restarted the project, I wanna say, four or five times, simply because we both know we can do more — we can do better. Direction is always changing, but it’s a good thing.”

One of Randall’s most high-profile pieces so far is a co-production with pal Ryan Jacob on a song for Indica and Lil West, “Don’t Even Know.” The track has accumulated some 132,000 listens since its release last December — a number and a pace that could be the start of worldwide.

1Bounce

Malcolm Asberry was born to compete.

Now known among Kansas City hip-hop heads as 1Bounce, he spent many of his high school and college years running track. And the drive that once pushed his athletic career forward now propels him to create hit records.

“I won state in high school in long jump, broke my school record,” he says.

“I really thought track was gonna be that thing, and it was a real eye-opener that I didn’t have it anymore. I just lost the passion for it. That’s when the music just swept me off my feet. And I’ve been doing it ever since.”

Since his college days, Asberry, 24, has produced tracks for several KC artists. In 2015 he released “Thoughts Hinder Every1” — an album made up of his beats that featured appearances from DEV3N, Aaron Alexander and other local talents.

Asberry has also made a name for himself as a DJ, working numerous shows at local bars and clubs, backing up Gee Watts and SuperShaqGonzoe at concerts, and landing a slot on a national tour with Atlanta’s OG Maco.

So he’s already winning. But Asberry isn’t one to stay still for very long.

“I took a break from producing for a while, when I got back from tour,” he says. “I was quiet, just peeping game and regaining that love for the music and really revamping the brand. Now I’m back on cue. I’m really ready to make a push for it and do it the right way.”

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music

MaTT NeeDhaM

Unlocking the Black Site The promise of Red Kate’s new DIY label

By Ron Knox

It was St. Patrick’s Day, and Kansas City punk quartet Red Kate was dressed to celebrate: black shirts, black jeans, black boots.

To be fair: A green T-shirt did peek from beneath the black button-up worn by L. Ron Drunkard, the band’s singer and owner of maybe the most preposterous stage name in the city. But that hint of green was incidental. There’s a lot of Irish in the band, but Red Kate appeared uninterested in what corporate America has rendered a kind of Valentine’s Day for beer.

The band was at Vinyl Renaissance in Overland Park for a one-band, early evening gig. The crowd was sparse, the fluorescent lights seemingly too bright for a rock show, but no matter. Red Kate’s greaser-tinged prog punk blasted through the shop’s open door and rattled the green-beer-infused pedestrians who strolled the sidewalk outside.

Red Kate did have cause to celebrate. The Vinyl Renaissance gig served as the unofficial kickoff for what will be a few weeks of shows in support of the band’s latest album, a split EP with Lawrence’s Stiff Middle Fingers. Aside from representing the first new music from the band in nearly two years, the record is also the product of what the band hopes will be a repeatable process for more low-profile Midwestern punk acts.

The release is the second on the band’s own label, Black Site. In a scene where longevity is rare, Red Kate has been jolting listeners for a decade, and in that time the band’s founding members have acquired things young underground bands typically lack — full time jobs, families, homes. So, having outgrown the youthful DIY scene from which the band’s members emerged, Red Kate’s members have conjured Black Site to give back.

“All the indie hipster people are going to ignore you, because you’re too hard or too something,” Drunkard said, describing the bands he envisions on Black Site’s roster.

“Someone about you doesn’t fit the model they want for indie music.”

54 54

We were talking a week before the Vinyl Renaissance gig, Drunkard at a stool inside a nearly empty at Fric & Frac, on West 39th Street, his head in his hands. It was late afternoon during a break from a day full of errands, and he was flustered because a member of some local band — does it really matter who? — had been complaining about Hopcat, the paint-by-numbers chain beer pub that just opened on the corner of Westport and Broadway. As it turns out, Drunkard explained, the band had one of its songs used in one of the bar’s promotional videos.

Drunkard was incredulous.

“It’s the kind of shit that just drives me nuts about the music business and integrity and whether anybody has any anymore, and whether it matters, whether it fucking matters,” Drunkard said. The bartender came around, and Drunkard ordered some tater tots.

The economics of the industry: That’s what gets to Drunkard. He understands selling out, he told me — most everyone has “sold out,” in the antiquated sense of the phrase. But Red Kate is by its very nature an anti-corporate band. Drunkard comes from a union family; his parents, his aunt and his sister were all teachers’-union members at one time. Two of his uncles were Teamsters.

And his grandparents were Kansas farmers — the kind of good, solid progressives made in the mold of the pioneers who first claimed this hunk of prairie. So there’s an ethical code embedded in Drunkard’s music and in his life, and to him that code is unassailable. That means eschewing corporate influence in favor of industry built locally, by those who actually craft the art. As the old saying goes: It’s DIY or die.

This is where Black Site comes in. The vision for the fledgling label is less a music venture than it is a virtual punk commune, allowing bands from Kansas City and farther afield to collect their labor in the pursuit of an independent but organized ecosystem.

The idea for the label arose, as record la-

bels often do, because of the band’s own need to put out an album. After Replay Records put out Red Kate’s first full-length, 2013’s When the Trouble Comes, the band was left searching for a way to put out its follow-up two years later. “We were in a situation when we were trying to put a physical product out, not just online,” Andy Whelan, Red Kate’s drummer and founding member, said.

Sitting at Fric & Frac, Drunkard waxed on about the importance of the physical product, particularly in a world that strands thousands of songs unheard on Spotify.

Finding truly new music online without an algorithm has grown increasingly difficult.

So a band that produces a physical recording of its music, especially on vinyl, has, Red Kate believes, the potential to transcend any one fan’s music collection. The disc can move from one shelf to the next, indefinitely.

Following the split with Stiff Middle Fingers, Drunkard and Whelan plan to release a new EP from Kansas City punks Wick & the Tricks. There’s talk of reissuing music from long-gone Kansas City-area bands. After that, they’ll see, Drunkard said. The minimum run of records is 500, but, unless the name on the spine is Madisen Ward, most local bands strain to sell that many albums in Kansas City alone. For acts whose underground bona fides are in keeping with Black Site’s ethos, the number is smaller still.

But the idea for the label stretches beyond pressing records. There’s talk of a kind of podcast proto-network, beginning in Kansas City and growing to include other local-music hubs, for which contributors could assemble playlists of local and touring bands to help promote records, get kids to the gigs and so on. Whelan said he also wants the label to solidify the area’s informal network for touring bands trying to book shows around the Midwest.

Whelan, who played in bands around the east side of Missouri for years before moving to Kansas City, said he sees the relationships between bands in different cities as

uniquely Midwestern. “I’ve always been into this kind of regional thing,” he said. “We’re all on these islands, and the ocean is a little farther away.”

Where East Coast bands can easily travel from New York to Philadelphia to D.C. over a weekend to play gigs, in the Midwest a full day’s drive is often necessary just to get to the next gig. Around here, the network of bands stretches hundreds of miles, down the Interstate 35 corridor from Minneapolis to Kansas City to Dallas, and east and west from Denver to St. Louis. Black Site, Whelan said, could serve as a hub for organizing bands in those cities to book gigs, arrange tours and generally navigate the music world from their isolated islands.

Anyway, the bandmates told me, that’s the right thing to do. So, too, is the band’s other mission: Convincing their local comrades in the underground music scene to use local makers and print shops as much as possible. At the moment, the band uses Callender Printing, a union print shop on the Kansas side, for their 7-inch covers, and had its second LP pressed at QRP, in Salina. LFK Press in Lawrence prints Red Kate’s laborsoaked artwork on union-made shirts. Now, Ven Smith, Wick and the Tricks and Stiff Middle Fingers use Unite Here shirts as well.

When Drunkard moved back to the Midwest from California, in 2006, he entrenched himself in labor issues and helped found the Kansas City chapter of Jobs With Justice, the labor-rights organization. Red Kate has become a vehicle for Drunkard’s interest in those issues. Black Site will be no different.

“We have to figure out a way to start realizing that the only way that we’ve got what we have is because people have put aside their personal needs and they’ve worked together for the common good,” Drunkard told me. He was talking about unions, but labor is labor. Corporate control is that old world — that green beer, that soundtrack for a restaurant commercial. And that old world is good only for its ashes.

the pitch | april 2017 | pitch.com the pitch | april 2017 | pitch.com

54 MusicB.indd 2 Pitch_3-23-17_60.indd 54

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