The Pitch: January 2018 by FW Publishing

January 2018 I FrEE I PITCH.COM

Stargazing and other ways to at least not get worse in 2018.

News: THE CITy PITs KC

PET PrOJECT agaInsT dIsC gOlFErs. PAGE 10

Fat City: POwErIng

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Contents

the pitch

editor Scott Wilson staff writer David Hudnall Proofreader Brent Shepherd contributing writers Tracy Abeln, Traci Angel, Liz Cook, Karen Dillon, April Fleming, Roxie Hammill, Libby Hanssen, Deborah Hirsch, Ron Knox, Larry Kopitnik, Angela Lutz, Dan Lybarger, David Martin, Eric Melin, Annie Raab, Aaron Rhodes, Barbara Shelly, Nick Spacek, Lucas Wetzel art Director Julie Whitty contributing Photographers Zach Bauman, Chase Castor, Jennifer Wetzel graphic Designers Abbie Leali, Liz Loewenstein, Melanie Mays Publisher Amy Mularski Director of marketing and operations Jason Dockery senior classifieds & multimedia specialist Steven Suarez multimedia specialists Jada Escue, Becky Losey office administrator and marketing coordinator Andrew Miller

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chief Financial officer Bob Mahoney chief operating officer Blair Johnson executive vice President Mark Bartel vice President of Production operations Curt Pordes creative Director Heather Pierce

voice media group

National Advertising 1-888-278-9866 vmgadvertising.com

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 week’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.

The contents of The Pitch are Copyright 2018 by KC Communications, LLC. No portion may be reproduced in whole or in part by any means without the express written permission of the publisher. The Pitch main phone number: 816-561-6061 The Pitch address: 1627 Main, Suite 700, Kansas City, MO 64108 For information or to leave a story tip, e-mail: tips@pitch.com For calendar submission consideration, e-mail: calendar@pitch.com For classifieds: steven.suarez@pitch.com or 816-218-6732 For retail advertising: 816-218-6702

Questionnaire

sara copeland North Kansas City’s community development director says we need more density.

news

suburban resistance Hannes Zacharias’ exit from Johnson County signals an undeniable new shock wave. By roxie haMMill

tomahawked KC Pet Project finds itself pitted against an unlikely contingent: the disc-golf community. By DaviD huDnall

Blowed up real good Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens sold voters an action flick, but he’s giving us a real war.

into the woods Madison Flitch’s ‘tree to table’ approach gets a retail space.

energy Field Actor Jan Rogge puts her directing stamp on KCAT’s Sea Marks.

By angela luTz

By DeBorah hirsch

where the Dough is While Joe West pauses his pop-up dream, Guroux Khalifah raises his Distrikt Biskuit House.

alienation and other Delights For movie characters having a very hard time, 2017 was a very good year.

By liz cook

Politics

By BarBara shelly

making a run Keri Ingle, Lee’s Summit social worker and activist, looks to Jefferson City. By Traci angel

ProFile

commercial appeal With Primary Color Music, a crew of local musicians hits the big time — in the world of advertising. By DaviD huDnall

cover story

how to at least not get worse Twelve steps to a better 2018 — resignations, musings and resolutions for a kinder year to come. By lucas WeTzel

23 The Pitch:

i will Dare

Finding my edge Getting a handle on Blade and Timber, the area’s first ax-throwing club. By angela luTz

shoP girl

caFé

Fat city

stage

Film

By eric Melin

concerts

good taste Carlos Falcon, Vaughn Good, Theresia Ota and other chefs look back at 2017 — and ahead to the new year. By april FleMing

Bread and gone At Mario’s in Westport, powering down the last grinder as the restaurant closes. By JonaThan arlan | phoTos By chase casTor

arts

Four hands The alchemical percussion dance of Arx Duo’s Mari Yoshinaga and Garrett Arney, plus January’s classical listings By liBBy hanssen

on the cover

Look up, be quiet, listen more: a good 2018 plan. pitch.com | January 2018 | the pitch

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questionnaire

good density. More density supports better transportation choices, which leads to less land dedicated to parking, which helps create more vibrant places, which attract more people, who will help create more density. It all goes together to make a more successful community, but good density is a starting point. “As a kid, I wanted to be ...” A Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. My mom has the picture I drew in kindergarten to prove it. “In five years, I’ll be ...” The parent of a teenager, which is freaky. “I always laugh at ...” Myself. It took me a long time to learn to laugh at my mistakes, but it’s a lot better than the alternative.

Sara Copeland

zaCh baumaN

Community development director for North Kansas City Twitter handle: @skcopeland Hometown: Nevada, Missouri. For those of you who aren’t from southwest Missouri, it’s pronounced Ne-VAY-duh. Current neighborhood: Waldo What I do (in 140 characters or less): I work to position NKC for the future. Right now, my days are full of redevelopment plans, complete street projects and parking studies. What’s your addiction? Iced tea. There’s always a huge pitcher of it in our fridge, made with Constant Comment tea so it’s a little orangey and spicy. What’s your drink? Besides the iced tea? In the morning, a winter latte from Second Best Coffee. After hours, I’ll take a sidecar. Where’s dinner? I married a guy who loves to cook, so dinner is at home, eating

whatever my husband, Mark Galus, wants to dish up. He makes a fabulous carbonara. What’s on your KC postcard? It’s a North Kansas City postcard, featuring the intersection of Armour and Swift, the heart of downtown NKC. Finish these sentences: “Kansas City got it right when ...” It hired George Kessler to design the boulevard system. He gave us good bones for today’s city. “Kansas City screwed up when ...” We accepted the idea that we’re too auto-oriented to be anything else. The Kansas City of today didn’t spring out of the prairie fully formed. It was created by decisions we made, and we can make different decisions to change it to fit our dreams and desires. I think we’re realizing that. “Kansas City needs ...” More density. A lot of the issues the city is grappling with would be a little easier if we focused on creating

Who is your hero? My mom, Christine. She raised two daughters as a divorced single mom, and thanks to her, we turned out pretty well. I’m still trying my best to make her proud. Who (or what) is your nemesis? Paper. It just ends up as the clutter on top of my desk. I’m trying to cut down on paper, but it’s hard to do. What’s your greatest struggle right now? North Kansas City is a small city with a lot going on. We’re juggling a lot of projects every day and sometimes it’s a struggle to keep up with everything.

“I’ve been known to binge watch ...” Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team

My favorite toy as a child: Wooden blocks and Fisher-Price Little People. I laid out a lot of roads, and my Little People drove around my towns in their carrot car, having adventures.

“My dream concert lineup is ...” Kathleen Edwards, Jason Isbell, Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings. In my living room, so I can sing along up close.

My dating triumph/tragedy: I convinced Mark Galus that I was worth a second chance, five months after I’d broken up with him. Now we’re married and have two kids!

“I just read ...” Other than the latest City Council agenda packet? The last book I finished was The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, which was amazing. Now I’m reading Children of Earth and Sky, by Guy Gavriel Kay, who is one of my favorite authors, and reading Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets aloud to my son, which is very fun.

My soapbox: Sexual harassment doesn’t happen because a man isn’t PC enough or because a woman can’t take a joke or misunderstands your poor flirting. Women do a ton of mental work to avoid being victims of harassment — and we’d rather invest that mental energy in something we enjoy, not avoiding creepy assholes. Men, if you aren’t doing something to affirmatively support the women in your life, personally and professionally, and make it clear to other men that you won’t tolerate harassment, then you are part of the problem. Step it up.

What’s your hidden talent? I’m a pretty good handbell ringer. I started playing handbells in the fifth or sixth grade and have played in the handbell choir at Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral for 11 years. I like having regular music-making in my life. What’s your guiltiest pleasure? Fan fiction. There are some creative and talented writers out there, and when I find something good I get both the satisfaction of a well-told tale and the thrill of discovery. The best advice I ever got: Share, don’t compare. (“Boomba Hey” to all the Missouri Scholars Academy alumni out there!) Worst advice? “Declaring any major is better than being undeclared.” And that led to an incredibly miserable sophomore year in college, before I finally figured out that urban planning was the field for me. My sidekick? My kids, Henry (9) and Margo (6). They’re turning into fun people in their own right.

What was the last thing you had to apologize for? My son thought I was coming to a special event for parents in his classroom at school, but I had a morning full of meetings at work. I felt pretty bad about inadvertently letting him down. Who’s sorry now? Nobody — we hugged it out. My recent triumph: In October, we opened the first stretch of new road in NKC’s Armour Road Redevelopment Area, including the first piece of protected two-way cycle track in the metro area! I’ve been working on this project since Day One working for NKC, and others have been working on it for even longer. It is incredibly satisfying to see planning come to fruition.

the pitch | January 2018 | pitch.com

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news

Jensen (left) and Hellweg are taking CC4RG into new territory.

Suburban Resistance

hannes zacharias’ exit from Johnson county signals an undeniable new shock wave.

zach bauman

by Roxie Hammill

Jana Walker didn’t get any applause for her remarks during a recent public comment session supporting County Manager Hannes Zacharias. The people jamming the commission’s hearing room were more interested in slamming the four commissioners who had voted against renewing his contract, and warning about the consequences of what they saw as a conservative political power play. If they’d listened to Walker, though, they might have learned something about the real reasons behind his departure. “I wish all of you would have been here for the past five or six months and heard all the citizens that have come and spoken here week after week,” she told the crowd. “There’s a huge concern with transparency, and a change needs to happen.” Walker was one of those citizens. She had appeared faithfully at many commission meetings, along with other neighbors, begging the commission to rescind its approval of a cold-storage plant, one that uses anhydrous ammonia, slated to be built at New Century Air Center. Now she was part of a group, organized by adjacent landowner Mike Jensen, and its

members were conducting a master class in how to shame their county representatives. They’ve been relentless, appearing at each commission meeting, regardless of whether their item was on the agenda. They’ve conducted press interviews. And they’ve filed a lawsuit. All of which has made it hot for the commission members who voted in favor of the Lineage Logistics plant. Some of that heat had nowhere else to go but the county manager. And things are about to get hotter. The decision to send Zacharias away at the end of the year was an earthquake in the usually low-drama zone of Johnson County politics. No one expected it. And the reasons were less than clear. Zacharias’ own statement was hardly revelatory: “As expressed to me, the majority wants to take Johnson County in a more fiscally and socially conservative direction, impose more direct oversight by the commission over county operations, and adopt a more ‘laissez-faire’ attitude toward regulation. Although this governmental decision runs somewhat contrary to the County Charter, I respect it.”

The reaction was immediate. County employees and other supporters of Zacharias crowded into the hearing room the next week for a comment session that felt more like a resistance rally. Patty Logan, of Leawood, spoke on behalf of Stand Up Blue Valley, a school-support group. “We find laughable his [Commissioner Steve Klika’s] assertion that he did not allow politics to enter into his decision,” she said. “You may put your political ambitions and career for a handful of anti-tax voices ahead of your district now, but be reminded that voters are more engaged than ever before. We will not tolerate elected representatives who do not actually represent us.” A few days later, Stand Up Blue Valley withdrew its support of Klika, who had voted against renewing the contract. Klika is a former board member of the Blue Valley school district. Zacharias said he drew his conclusions about the conservative direction from recent commission action cutting money for public arts and because of a lack of support by some members on diversity efforts. But it’s hard to find anyone else on the

inside who really thinks the commission will fall in line with the no-new-taxes crowd. Of the quartet who voted out Zacharias — Jason Osterhaus, Mike Brown, Michael Ashcraft and Klika — Klika has taken the most heat. But Klika is an unlikely standard bearer for conservatives. A couple of years ago, they were promising retribution for his involvement as a key player in rehabbing the old King Louie building into a county museum and arts center. At one point, he supported the appointment of Dr. Allen Greiner as public health commissioner, even though he considers himself anti-abortion and the doctor was opposed by Kansans for Life. The citizens’ group’s outcry against Lineage Logistics wasn’t solely responsible for Zacharias’ ouster. Observers point to a cluster of reasons, including dissatisfaction with the way public art is decided upon, and new commissioner Mike Brown’s first vote. But the group is part of a trend, and the Zacharias vote laid bare the stark differences between the county’s suburbs and the rural areas beyond. Where suburban voters see good schools, parks, trails pitch.com | January 2018 | the pitch

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and a triple-A bond rating, rural residents are more likely to remember the hoops they had to jump through to divide a lot or establish a business on their property. For months, county commissioners have been watching a parade of rural residents who complain that their issues are poorly understood. There was a dispute over whether to allow a farm winery in rural Olathe. The owner of that property, Kirk Berggren, eventually got a judge to rule that state law allows the winery, but before that happened, he said that county staffers appeared exceptionally watchful of his operation, as though looking for small violations. A jump in property valuations has also created dismay, particularly in rural areas that are growing, such as Spring Hill and Gardner. Zacharias’ ouster was foreshadowed last summer, when commissioners narrowly reappointed appraiser Paul Welcome on a 4-3 vote, citing constituent complaints about the valuations. As recently as December 14, commissioners heard from several farmers who said they weren’t being listened to about road construction they said did not meet the county’s own specifications on compaction. Then there’s Lineage Logistics. Commissioners were hopeful last June about the prospect of the big new commercial resident leasing county land at the air center. After the requisite trip through a zoning board and a public hearing, commissioners approved the plan for the cold-storage facility. But Mike Jensen and some other neighbors were unhappy, saying the plan was ramrodded through. Jensen said the county ruined his land years ago because it wasn’t tough enough on drainage requirements for Kimberly-Clark, his former neighbor. Runoff from KimberlyClark silted in his pond and created a gully through his property, he said. He also said the county played games with the rules on the protest petition, using a hook-shaped strip of land that separates his property from Amazon.com to keep some neighbors from being qualified to sign. He brought friends and neighbors to the commission hearing, but their objections didn’t stop the project. The lawsuit filed later was the first mention of the anhydrous ammonia Lineage would use as coolant, but it wouldn’t be the last. County and corporate officials said an ammonia leak in the proposed closed-loop system was highly unlikely. Nevertheless, the idea that an ammonia fog could someday descend toward the Gardner Lake neighborhood and a county detention center galvanized neighbors from farther away than just the immediate area. They signed petitions asking to become plaintiffs in the suit. And they began showing up every week, along with films of ammonia spills, to ask commissioners to reverse themselves. The timing was perfect. Over in Leavenworth County a citizens’ group was earn-

ing national attention for its opposition to a proposed Tyson Foods chicken-processing plant that also would use anhydrous ammonia. That plan eventually fizzled; the company announced that it would put its Kansas plan “on hold.” Pressure from Jensen’s group began to make commissioners uncomfortable, particularly Mike Brown. Since the Lineage plant would be in his district and he had voted for it, some of the most pointed public comments were aimed at him. Because of the lawsuit, commissioners became tight-lipped when residents came calling. But behind the scenes, some were angry, calling on the company and the county manager’s office to do more to counter Jensen’s group. Brown, who would later vote against Zacharias, was particularly upset. In emails obtained by Jensen’s group, Brown had some words for the county manager’s office. “So is the [county manager’s office’s] tactic to remain completely silent??” he wrote in one email to the staff. “I’m on the front line and can hear crickets behind me. Again, my continued support of LL fades more with each minute that passes and I’ve heard from Hannes repeatedly that the CMO is here to support me as a commissioner and for me to hand off the tough stuff to them to handle but I certainly don’t see the CMO taking any roll [sic] in this issue. Loyalty matters tremendously to me … and is returned in equal measure.” Brown did not return calls for this story. Lineage Logistics eventually tabled its plan for a new cold-storage plant. Jensen has not dropped the lawsuit, though. He says he doesn’t want to risk not being able to bring it back if the company changes its mind. “We don’t trust them,” he tells The Pitch. That lack of trust is what has driven him to the next step — the nonprofit activist group, which he says will represent others who feel similarly wronged. The Concerned Citizens for Responsible Government already existed to fight the Lineage plant. But Jensen sees its potential for something more. He’s in the process of filing for CC4RG to become a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, with the purpose of helping other county residents who don’t feel they’re being heard. “Unfortunately. I’m like a lot of other people,” he says. “We don’t get too concerned about what government’s doing until it affects us. I don’t feel like I can, with a clear conscience, stick my head back in the sand now that I’ve seen the way some things are being done.” The group will have Daniel Hellweg, a political consultant from Lenexa, as its executive director. The idea isn’t to channel any one party ideology, Hellweg says, but rather to operate as a kind of consumer protection group. “The most beautiful thing about this is that Democrats and Republicans can come together to see that

“EvErything is donE bang, bang, bang, fast, fast, fast.” Jensen

development is done in a responsible way,” he says. “It’s not a partisan organization.” Jensen has more than 1,000 names on his membership roll — enough to check agendas and station observers at county meetings. He wants to use the group to speak up for people who feel like they are being run over by the government structure. “Everything is done bang, bang, bang, fast, fast,” when it comes to development in the county, he says. “What they really want is to do it without the public being informed.” The nonprofit will carry a bigger microphone than one person at a public hearing, he adds. Developers spend a lot of time selling officials on their proposals — which, Jensen says, can lead county officials to overlook pitfalls. When public input is limited to “an open public comment session where you gripe for five minutes about a decision made a year ago,” he says, “that is not a meaningful process. In fact, it’s no process at all.” For now, CC4RG’s focus is trained on county issues. But because a 501(c)(4) can raise money and lobby, Jensen’s outfit could eventually become more involved in politics and in city governments. Though designated “social welfare” groups by the Internal Revenue Service, 501(c)(4)s in recent years have been wielded to advance political interests. As CC4RG grows and raises money, it could spend its resources to bring lawsuits, canvass neighborhoods or support candidates. “That’s something the board hasn’t made a decision on but we don’t want to remove it from the table, either,” Hellweg says. The 501(c)(4) groups are special for another reason: They don’t have to disclose donors to the public. Jensen and Hellweg demur when asked if, in the interest of transparency, they would publish a donor list. Jensen says he wants to, but both say they’d have to hear counsel about the legal ramifications before making a decision. Jensen maintains that he personally likes all the commissioners and just wants to see things done right. “The county doesn’t do everything poorly,” he says. “Some things they do really well. They miss the mark in development, transparency and openness, and I feel they miss it badly.” That message hasn’t been lost on some commissioners. Asked about their votes on Zacharias, both Ashcraft and Klika say the county needs to improve how it deals with citizens. “People have that fear of government,” Ashcraft says. He describes some people’s experience of county government as a “constant drip, drip, drip” of hassles. Sewer-hookup fees, vehicle registration policy, questioning a property valuation — most processes seem made to be dreaded. Klika, too, says his dissatisfaction with the way such things as agritourism have been handled played into his feelings on the county manager’s office. “People will forgive you for a decision if they can be involved in the process,” he says. “I think we’ve lost some of that.”

the pitch | January 2018 | pitch.com

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pitch.com | January 2018 | the pitch

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The course and its players in December

Tomahawked

Kc Pet Project finds itself pitted against into an unlikely contingent: the disc-golf community.

Zach Bauman

by DaviD HuDnall

The lost and the broken have a way of ending up on Raytown Road, near the Truman Sports Complex. Along this stretch of land over the years have been a tuberculosis hospital, a state penitentiary, Kansas City’s tow lot, and the city’s animal shelter. Of those, only the animal shelter still operates today. Grim and dilapidated, it sits atop a hill overlooking a former landfill. Unlike, say, the old tuberculosis hospital, which was razed in 1971, the animal shelter was never meant to offer the illusion of comfort. It wasn’t even supposed to be an animal shelter. It had been slapped together in 1972 as a storage shed for the construction of the Truman Sports Complex. When the stadiums were finished, the city decided to turn it into a dog pound. Over the years, as demand for animal services increased, the city didn’t erect a dedicated facility; it instead hauled in trailers to house a vet clinic and administrative staff. The shelter today is so overcrowded that some employees sit at desks in the middle of hallways. The dogs, of course, have it worse. Until the city privatized operation of the shelter, in 2009, following a damning report from the Missouri Department of Agriculture, about 65 percent of all animals that arrived at the shelter were eventually euthanized. That number dropped by about half under the supervision of Wayne Steckelberg, who ran the shelter from 2009 to 2011. After (unproven) allegations of animal neglect surfaced against

Steckelberg, the city opted not to renew his contract. On January 1, 2012, KC Pet Project assumed management of the space. “We’re basically a group of animal-welfare advocates who organized together because we thought we could do better than the previous euthanization rate,” says Tori Fugate, marketing and development director at KC Pet Project. They have. In 2016, KC Pet Project’s liverelease rate — the percentage of animals that leave the shelter alive, whether through adoption or return to owner — stood at an impressive 94 percent. KC Pet Project’s oversight of the Raytown Road shelter has coincided with a larger cultural trend in pet ownership that falls in line with its mission. More and more people prefer to “rescue” dogs and cats from shelters rather than obtain them from a breeder: Paris Hilton purebreds are out; mutts and altruism are in. This has sent more prospective adopters to KC Pet Project, which has in turn increased Kansas Citians’ awareness of how decrepit the facilities that house its animal shelter really are. In April 2017, nearly 45 years after this makeshift pound took in its first stray, voters approved Question 3, a $50 million bond ask for building repairs, $14 million of which was earmarked for a new animal shelter. (Another $6 million or so will come from private donations.) KC Pet Project’s new home will not be on Raytown Road. The plan calls instead for a relocation to Swope Park — on a piece of

property occupied by the oldest and, depending on whom you’re talking to, finest disc-golf course in Kansas City.

“ ‘It’s a ParK. You Know, It’s suPPosed to Be for recreatIonal actIvItIes. and here we are, recreatIng.” Dan Cashen

Dan Cashen has accumulated so much goodwill in the Kansas City disc-golf community over the years that he can drive his truck up onto the Swope Park course in the middle of Saturday afternoon play without suffering so much as a dirty glare. It’s all smiles and waves and Hey, Dans from the few dozen players on the grounds as Cashen maneuvers his Ford F-150 across the tan December grass. “What is it, 35 degrees?” Cashen says, gesturing at a cluster of bundled-up die-hards near the fourth hole. “These people are crazy, man. They’ll play in the driving rain, they’ll play in the snow — actually, playing in the snow is pretty fun. You put little ribbons on the discs so you can find them when they slide under. And it’s real quiet and still. It’s beautiful, actually.” Cashen is 56 years old, tall, bearded, imposing, a pipefitter by trade. He’s been tossing spheres — bulky frisbees in the old days, smaller, denser discs today — on this patch of land since the early 1980s. Back then, it was on a pay course courtesy of a man named Tom Ingle, the first person to bring disc golf to Kansas City following the founding of the sport, in 1975, in Oak Grove, California. Ingle made a deal with the Kansas City, Missouri, Parks and Recreation Department whereby

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he installed nine baskets on some park acreage just off the corner of Gregory Boulevard and Elmwood Avenue. He was responsible for mowing the grass; in exchange, Ingle was permitted to charge players a buck a round. Disc golf was then still relatively unknown, though, and Ingle struggled to make a business of it. In 1990, he shut down the course, taking his baskets with him. At that point, volunteers with the newly formed Kansas City Flying Disc Club began working with the city to maintain the grounds and convert them into a free public course. Cashen liked playing the course but saw room for improvement and had some ideas. In 1994, he began to take a more proactive role. “I walked into the doors at the parks department and made my introductions and told them about the stuff I wanted to do with Swope,” Cashen recalls. “They were great. They said, ‘Knock yourself out.’ ” Cashen cruises the course and points out the improvements he has made (with help, he notes, from other disc golfers who volunteered their time) to the terrain. He installed benches so players could rest between holes. He erected pleasant signage. He brought in a bulldozer to shape some land, and he built earth bridges across the swampy hill bottoms. He constructed a small pro shop with an elevated deck looking out onto the course. Most of these things, he paid his own money to do. “My wife hated it,” Cashen says of the bills he racked up. “But in my mind, it was necessary to elevate everybody’s idea of what disc golf could be. And it worked. Play started to build. People really started coming out. We became a destination for people coming through town. We transformed this piece of ground in the middle of Kansas City into this kinda world-renowned spot.” When Cashen and the KCFDC learned,

in 2016, that the city was interested in moving KC Pet Project onto some of the Swope course’s land, they didn’t put up so much as a whimper of protest. “The way it was presented to us initially is that they only needed about 7 acres,” says Jack Lowe, secretary and spokesman for the KCFDC. “Which we were fine with. We’re on about 25 acres. We figured we’d have to relocate three holes, maybe four holes. No worries.” Then came word that a city setback ordinance for boulevards meant that KC Pet Project would have to be built farther from Gregory, meaning a different cluster of holes would have to be relocated. “Again, we had no problem with that,” Cashen says. “We’d still only be losing four holes, and we had enough space to redesign the course to accommodate KC Pet Project — which, by the way, we all think is a wonderful organization. We love what they’ve done with the pound, and we were happy to share the land with them. And, I mean, it’s a park — it’s public land. We get that.” About two months ago, though — and, notably, after the bond vote passed — KCFDC received word from the parks department that, actually, KC Pet Project needed more than the original seven acres. It now needed about 20 acres: more or less the entire Swope Park Disc Golf Course. Lowe and Cashen see their group as, essentially, a victim of its own chill. “I think because we [disc golfers] were cool about it and didn’t come out loudly as a community and say, you know, ‘We’ve been here 40 years, why can’t you put that shelter somewhere else on this 1,800-acre park?’ — I think that gave the city and the [KC] Pet Project the impression that they could just take it all,” Cashen says.

Tori Fugate, marketing and development director with KC Pet Project, says her organization was under the impression that the plan was always for a full relocation of the disc-golf course. “We were told by multiple people before the vote that the disc-golf folks were totally fine with the course being moved,” Fugate tells The Pitch. “So we were surprised a few months ago when we started to hear that they weren’t happy. It was never our intention to upset anyone. I think we were maybe told different things.” In late November, following a damning city audit of animal-control services, a proposal was floated at City Council to outsource those services to KC Pet Project. A decision is likely to be made in the coming months. Lowe suspects this may have something to do with the sudden need for more land. “My own theory is that they [KC Pet Project] now expect they will soon have animal control under their authority and so they want to be able to build a behemoth place here,” Lowe says. Fugate says that’s partly true. “We do think it would make sense to house everything under one roof, because those functions [animal control and the shelter] are related.” But, she says, the plans for the new facility — which are being finalized with architecture firm HNTB and general contractor Grand Construction — “have not dramatically expanded the size” of the building or ground. “Some extra offices but not significant growth,” Fugate says. Parks Director Mark McHenry says the KC Pet Project plan “has been refined since the spring,” requiring more outdoor space where the animals can exercise and drink in the fresh air. “We’re just providing park land to build the building,” he says. “As for programming or what KC Pet Project will do on that land, we’re not a part of those conversations.” Cashen, who speaks highly of the parks department, says it’s his perception that these decisions are “coming down from the big house — City Hall. It’s not Parks making these decisions. Parks is being told to where to put this building.” Who’s the decider, then? Who from on high decided there was nowhere else KC Pet Project could thrive other than on the grounds of this beloved disc-golf course? “Parks, the city manager, [KC] Pet Project, the group that was doing fundraising for the private portion of the Pet Project — it was a group effort,” says Councilman Scott Wagner, who’s pushing for the privatization of animal control. “When the GO bond was being discussed, there was a group that got together and said, ‘Hey, the Pet Project needs 60,000 square feet, needs some open space for animals — where does the city have land that would work for this?’ Obviously, there was interest in doing this on city property so as to avoid the costs of land acquisition. And

this was the location that was deemed to best suit those needs.” Cashen pulls off the course and drives about a mile east down Gregory, past Lakeside Nature Center and a relatively new dog park. Here, in a low, flood-prone valley bisected by Oldham Road, is where the city wants to stick the new Swope disc-golf course. “I don’t know, man,” Cashen says, sighing. “There’s no elevation changes like we have up on Elmwood. No rolling hills. Players would have to cross this busy street to get to and from holes. The planners say they can put in what they call ‘calming effects’ — speed bumps, speed tables, pedestrian-crossing signs. But I don’t know, man. We’ve [the KCFDC] got a lot of good design ideas, smart people. I mean, the Elmwood course wasn’t pretty at first, either. But I don’t know if even we can make a course out of this.” McHenry says there will be money to pay for the costs of relocating the course, wherever it ends up. “KC Pet Project is very much aware that part of the money they’re receiving from the bond will have to address that cost [of relocating the course],” he says. “Compared to the overall cost, it’s a relatively small number, and I feel confident saying we will make sure we have a nice facility for the new Swope course.” Cashen says he’s run the numbers and has it pegged somewhere around $350,000 to $400,000. “I’m a contractor myself, and I built this course, so I have a pretty good idea of what it would cost to move it,” he says. “You gotta clear land, build tee sites, build greens, put in bridges, parking lots, bathrooms. If we’re at $400,000 just to move us, at that point, why doesn’t the city just buy some land somewhere instead of running us off?” Lowe likens the city’s takeover of the course to a cycle that vaguely resembles gentrification. “We improve the luster of the land because we take ownership and pride in what we do,” Lowe says. “So, then what? They come in and boot us out. So, what happens when we create something beautiful in the new spot and some other organization comes along and wants it?” Back at the Elmwood course, Cashen calls attention to a white structure faintly visible through a ridge of trees far in the distance. “That’s Mr. Swope’s memorial up there,” Cashen says, referring to the majestic colonnade where Thomas Swope, who donated the park land in 1896, is buried. “I know it’s not our land,” he continues. “But it’s a park. It’s the public’s land. And now they’re gonna privatize it. You know, it’s supposed to be for recreational activities. And here we are, recreating.” Cashen turns and gazes out at the particular parcel of Mr. Swope’s land he’s stewarded for the past two decades. Discs fly, dogs bark, birds chirp. “It’s a great piece of ground,” he says. “I understand why they want it.”

the pitch | January 2018 | pitch.com

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12/20/17 7:28 AM

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pitch.com | January 2018 | the pitch

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12/19/17 3:23 PM

politics

Blowed Up Real Good

Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens sold voters an action flick, but he’s giving us a real war. by barbara Shelly

They already feel so long ago, those campaign ads. Remember? Eric Greitens, running to be Missouri’s governor, billing himself as a former Navy SEAL and literally shooting guns and detonating explosives? Remember how he barked at us that this was exactly how he’d blow up Show-Me politics? He won. And then he really called in the heavy artillery. In the first year of his first term, Greitens rendered any prospect for serious ethics reform in Jefferson City a smoldering ash heap. He shelled open-records laws. He took a flamethrower to the shield that usually protects Missouri schoolchildren from political interference. He treated leaders in Kansas City and St. Louis like enemy combatants. And his comments so far have suggested that he’d just as soon waterboard legislators from his own Republican party as work with them. Who needs the state GOP, after all, when so much out-of-state politicking must be done, the better to gather up more dark money, earmarked for who-knows-who’s agendas? Why answer to anybody around here when Donald Trump’s presidency every day begs national Republicans to find their next act. Voters figured they were electing an action hero. What we all got instead was a declaration of war. Last year was exhausting. And now we stagger into 2018, reeling from Greitens fatigue. Count among the shell-shocked Lauren Arthur, a Democratic legislator from Clay County, who last month

Above: a still from one of Greitens’ muscular ads

“HE MiGHt GEt ElEctEd [prEsidEnt] soMEday. pEoplE won’t know wHat a scoundrEl HE is.” Sen. rob Schaaf

told me she felt the upcoming legislative session “like a pit in your stomach.” There are many ways to recap Greitens’ freshman year. There were the colorful moments, such as the “beady little eyes” remark when he was trying to intimidate a state senator. There was the straight-faced, sub-WWE rappelling entrance into a bull-riding event at a Springfield arena. There was the sneering reference to a proposed university conservatory in downtown Kansas City as a haven for “dancers and art students.” Remember when candidate Greitens promised to take on corruption in Jefferson City? He meant for everyone but himself. As he fulminated about legislators taking gifts from lobbyists, Greitens’ operatives were busy setting up “A New Missouri,” a nonprofit created to collect anonymous contributions from in- and out-of-state donors. Greitens travels the country on private planes so as to avoid revealing his destinations. He communicates with aides via an app that deletes text messages as soon as they’re read. The functions of his office are a closely guarded secret. When Missouri journalists ask him about these things, he regards them as he would a rabid squirrel dragged in by its bleeding neck between the jaws of a loyal hunting dog. No one deserves the truth — not the media, and not legislators, people he keeps calling “corrupt career politicians” even as he shamelessly pads his political résumé. Curiously, Greitens’ standing with Missouri citizens may wind up a casualty of his smash-and-grab style. The Morning Consult, a Washington-based polling and news organization, reported in October that only 49 percent of Missourians viewed Greitens favorably. That’s not exactly Trump territory, but it’s a pretty lousy report card for a Republican governor in a red state. “He just shows no interest in governing,” said Arthur, an assessment echoed by Democrats and Republicans. Yet for Greitens to keep promoting himself effectively on the national stage, he’ll need to do something here. He’s probably figuring this out, having reportedly made a bid for the vice chairmanship of the Republican Governors Association when it met in Texas last year, only to see Pete Ricketts of Nebraska get the gig. Perhaps as a consolation prize, Greitens got to monitor a panel discussion on “disrupting the mainstream media.” The governor’s bad temper notwithstanding, he hasn’t done as much of that as you’d think. Missouri’s mainstream press is carrying on just fine, digging up stories that would embarrass most people with a political conscience. Consider what it took for Greitens to carry out his craven campaign to oust the state’s popular education commissioner. Presumably meant to give the appearance that he

is promoting a kind of “school choice” agenda — while pleasing some deep-pocketed donors — it mostly revealed the ex-soldier’s inexperience at governing. Greitens has undeniably been disruptive, though. And lawmakers now plan to turn the tables. Furious about the governor’s manipulation of the state Board of Education — he repeatedly appointed and removed members until he achieved a coalition that would fire Commissioner Margie Vandeven — senators are plotting revenge. They will almost certainly refuse to confirm Greitens’ appointees to the education board, and may hold up other appointments as well. “I don’t know where the second year is headed,” says state Sen. Rob Schaaf, a Republican from St. Joseph who clashed repeatedly with Greitens in 2017. “He is carrying the water of special interests — especially the ones that give him money or who give money to his dark-money group.” Along with power struggles with the legislature, Missourians can anticipate more national pageantry from the governor. Attacks on already weakened unions, more restrictions on abortion, and attempts to stop citizens from seeking redresses in court are almost surely in the offing, each designed to burnish Greitens’ bona fides as a capital-C conservative deserving of capital-C cash from big-money GOP donors. It’s worth wondering where we’d be right now if Greitens had been the governor he campaigned to be — a thoughtful non-politician, capable of forming new alliances and working with both urban and rural leaders to push Missouri free from its worst habits of governance. But Greitens is not that leader. He is a pretender playing a part, starring as the master of a small universe where everyone stays on script, where he is always the hero — and where there are live rounds in the chamber, ready to do real damage. “He’s a great campaigner,” Jason Holsman, a Democratic senator from Kansas City, says of Greitens. “He is incredibly disciplined with his messaging. He’ll get a phrase and stay with it no matter what you ask him.” Everyone assumes Greitens’ goal is the White House, or at least the vice presidency, and even his detractors concede he has a shot. “He could probably lose Missouri, and, if he raised enough money, he might get elected [president] someday,” Schaaf says. “People won’t know what a scoundrel he is.” Or maybe they just won’t care. America’s current scoundrel-in-chief got to the White House by demolishing everything in his path. In the wake of that destruction is a path for Greitens, who doesn’t need achievements or friends. He just needs to keep blowing things up.

the pitch | January 2018 | pitch.com

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12/19/17 3:24 PM

NEWS ZaCh Bauman

and the cutting of funds for nursing homes, we are seeing a direct effect of that. We are going to see more effects of that. These are the populations that need the most support, and we are seeing them on the chopping block. You helped campaign for Hillary Shields, also from Lee’s Summit, who lost a race in the state senate in November. Did you know her before the campaign? I knew her through some community organizations, through Indivisible KC, and we had developed a friendship. And then, when she decided to run, I encouraged her. I believe in her and believe in her passion and feel that she does have the ability to effect change.

Making a Run

Keri Ingle, Lee’s Summit social worker and activist, looks to Jefferson City. by Traci angel

Keri Ingle, of Lee’s Summit, shares with other recent political newcomers a galvanizing force: the election of Donald Trump to the White House. But when she decided to seek a Missouri House seat, she had given birth to her second child just weeks before. For someone who had spent her career to that point advocating for children, women and marginalized families, the combination of the two events signaled that it was time to try making a difference from a higher level. The District 35 house seat primary election is in August, and the general election isn’t until November 2018, but Ingle is getting an early start. We caught up with her recently at a coffee shop near Longview Lake to ask about her campaign. The Pitch: You’re new to the political scene, right? Why are you running for the Missouri State House of Representatives? I am completely new to the scene. I have never really been politically involved, except for being a constant voter and a Facebook activist, more or less, over the years. Last year’s election was a huge wake-up call for me. I’m a social worker, so a huge part of my career is advocating for vulnerable populations, for people who might not have that voice for themselves. I felt that I was called to do this. I had never been interested in politics or running for office. I think for a long time I had an idea, and other people had an idea, of what politicians maybe looked like and their background, and I think that might be part of the problem in that we don’t have diverse representation and

all the populations aren’t being adequately represented and their needs aren’t addressed. Was there a moment when you said, “OK, that’s it — I am running for office”? It was definitely post-election, and afterward I had just had my daughter. She was two months at the time. I was on maternity leave and had enough time to think. I felt like I needed to do something. As a social worker, I constantly come across laws and regulations that negatively affect my ability to help people and help the clients that I am working with. And sometimes I feel that there is a misguided attempt at helping people through legislation because they [lawmakers] have a lack of understanding. That’s not to say that I’m an expert on all populations, but I have a vast experience in Jackson County over the last 10 years. I’ve worked in child welfare, in foster care, and with children and families in poverty, domestic abuse and neglect. Your work in the children’s division influenced you, and you spoke about how elected officials were drafting policies and decisions might have hindered some of what you were trying to do. I now work in a hospital system, and part of my job is to help people access prescription medications — which can be pricy, especially on a fixed income. I see the regulations that negatively affect my ability to help them, the stopping of the MORx [state funding that helped Medicare patients with prescription drug costs]. I also help patients who need different help, like nursing facilities, and if you look at the cutting of money for in-home care

What is going on in Lee’s Summit with the grassroots campaigns, like Shields’ and now yours, that are challenging strongholds and long-held or unopposed Republican seats? Lee’s Summit is becoming more diverse, and I think that is great — the diversity is only going to enrich the community. For a long time, politicians had to look a certain way and have a certain background and be a certain age. I think, once that reality changes, it opens the door for a lot of people to step up and say, I want to do this. If you were elected, where would you focus your time? Health care? Child welfare? I did a practicum for my master’s at Truman Behavioral and at their in-patient psychiatric hospital. It is often a triage for people who were intoxicated, who were homeless, and although the Kansas City area is rich with resources for mental illness and addiction, that’s not what our rural communities are experiencing. We have a lot of comprehensive resources that they don’t have in rural communities. So when we talk about the opioid epidemic, it is pivotal that those people have access to mental health care and recognize that we are dealing with a dual diagnosis and we need both. We need to have access to services there [across the state]. Your biographical background says that you grew up in a military family. Both of my grandfathers fought in World War II, and I grew up against the background of that legacy of that. One of my grandfathers was a POW, and the other fought in the Battle of the Bulge. It was a huge source of pride in my family. My dad was in the Army National Guard and later joined the Air Force and was later stationed in Germany during the Gulf War. We lived in Germany for three years, and I went to a military elementary school. My mom worked as a nurse at an army hospital. Growing up on an Air Force base and stopping to salute the flag when the national anthem played, and growing up with children

from all over the world, definitely gave me a sense of history there. We lived in a village outside the Air Force base, and there were ruins from World War II in our neighborhood and we would go on field trips to castles, some of which had been bombed during World War II. I visited the Anne Frank house as a child and went to the concentration camps, so my knowledge was shaped early about the value of public service and service to others. I don’t think I ever had a choice. I think I was destined to be a social worker. Do you know when you actually wanted to be a social worker? I actually wanted to go to law school. My thought going into law school was I was trying to find a way to help others and I knew that was a position of power where I could help. When I started working at the children’s division, I saw that this is another way to help people and perhaps more directly. So I switched from law school to graduate work in social work. Let’s talk about gender in Missouri. The state doesn’t have many female lawmakers or representatives. With all these sexual harassment scandals coming to light, including in the Missouri legislature, how can you change the environment? What needs to be done? It is pervasive in our culture, in every part of our culture, and we are definitely in a reckoning where women are starting to feel open enough to come forward and tell their stories. I think we need to change the dynamics and the number of women [in the legislature], but I don’t think that is enough. It is just so basic to treat people with respect and dignity and it doesn’t seem like it should have to be explained but obviously it does. I think there should be consequences for people who make other people feel unsafe regardless of what they do that but especially when other people are using their power over others. Education is key and education is power and there are people who didn’t know it was inappropriate. So sexual harassment training is a very good idea. It is a jumping-off point, but that isn’t the only thing that should be done to solve everything. But at least then we can say, “Yes, you do know that that is inappropriate because you have been trained.” What are your friends and family saying about you running for office? Were they surprised? I have a very full life and have supportive friends and family. They were not surprised. I remember my mom saying, “Yes, finally.” She actually moved from Oklahoma to here after I decided to run. She is really excited. I was sixth-grade class president and I always wanted to hold offices in clubs and organizations. I remember wanting to be president [of the United States] and writing papers on it.

the pitch | January 2018 | pitch.com

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12/20/17 8:24 AM 12/20/17 12:33 PM

profile

The brains behind a Wendy’s commercial coming soon to your TV screen

Commercial Appeal

With Primary color music, a crew of local musicians hits the big time — in the world of advertising.

Zach Bauman

by DaviD HuDnall

When Sam Billen started out in commercial music production, almost a decade ago, brands and ad agencies sought the expansive, cinematic grandeur of Coldplay and Sigur Rós. Later, the Black Keys’ neo-blues style fell into favor. Then the object was to replicate the M83 sound: big drums, big synths. Twee had taken its turn for a few years: glockenspiels, whistling, ukuleles. Billen can recall trap music’s moment, too, and he’ll tell you that “like Vampire Weekend” remains a common ask. Lately, he’s fielding lots of requests for frenzied dance-hall tracks — a phenomenon resulting from a successful Spike Jonze–directed perfume ad employing music in that style. “Our job is basically to act like musical chameleons,” Billen says. “To come up with music that has the sensibility of what our clients are looking for, but that at the same time feels fresh and unique.” “Which can be hard,” adds Billen’s brother, Dan, “because those ideas are kind of in opposition to each other.”

It’s late November, and Sam Billens’ company — Primary Color Music — has just wrapped its Monday-morning meeting, a weekly routine that now entails two employees Skyping from Japan into its Kansas headquarters. Primary Color keeps a small office here in east Lawrence, inside a former chicken hatchery that’s been given an industrial-chic renovation for the purposes of leasing space to just this flavor of startup. In the corner, Dan’s wife, Rosa, works in front of an iMac, and Sam, Dan and composer Josh Atkinson sit in comfy chairs, surrounded by musical equipment, tasteful rustic decor and, for reasons never fully explained, a life-size sculpture of a pizza slice dangling from the ceiling. Most of the work produced by Primary Color Music occurs outside these walls. The five composers on staff at the company, which Sam founded in 2013, tend to work from home. The Billens and Atkinson are based in Lawrence. Ryan Pinkston works from Kansas City. Kosuke Anamizu, the latest addition to

“Our jOB is Basically tO act like musical chameleOns.” Sam billen

the team, contributes from Tokyo. Among them, they’ve written and recorded music you’ve almost certainly heard on a TV commercial, in a digital ad, blaring from a greeting card or a film or a video game. High-profile brands — Wendy’s, Garmin, Boulevard, Dairy Queen — have relied on Primary Color Music to score their American advertisements. Increasingly, this is also true in Asia, where the company recently opened a Tokyo office and is already scoring BMW and Toyota commercials and ads featuring famous Japanese actresses. “We’ve all been in bands over the years, and we’ve all written music for our various bands, solo projects, whatever,” Sam Billen says. “And in those situations, the music is your baby, and nobody is allowed to touch it or critique it, because it’s your art. What we do now, it’s 100 percent the other way. We make stuff, and people just rip it to pieces. They come in and just tear it apart. But, weirdly, I have sort of learned to like that.” pitch.com | January 2018 | the pitch

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profile

Billen: mogul in the making?

When people ask Sam Billen what he does for a living and he tells them he makes commercial music, they usually assume he means jingles. Alas, that’s rarely the case. “Jingles have kind of fallen out of favor in the industry, really,” he says. “I think I’ve only written maybe four jingles in all the time I’ve been doing this.” But it is true that jingles run in the Billen blood. Sam and Dan’s father used to write jingles for local businesses in Oklahoma City, when they were growing up there in the late 1970s and early 1980s. (Country star Blake Shelton, who hails from Ada, Oklahoma, has cited one of Billen Sr.’s guitar-and-banjo songs — delivered in the commercial by an insurance-selling cowboy named Tall Paul — as youthful inspiration.) The Billen family eventually moved to Topeka, where Sam and Dan took up music themselves and eventually formed the Billions, a Lawrence indie-rock quartet that knocked around the Midwest from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s. The dream of the musician’s life gradually gave way to more practical considerations, and the Billions hung it up around 2007. Sam, now 35, earned a master’s in English as a second language and started a family in Lawrence. Dan, now 39, found a job in advertising and settled with his wife and their children in Topeka. Sam continued to make and release music here and there, though: Christmas-themed albums with friends from Lawrence and KC, a 2012 solo record called Places. “I always just wanted to be in my bedroom, recording songs,” he says. “To me, that’s the fun part. We toured with the Billions three or

four times, and it really sucked. We’d come back completely broke, like, What are we doing with our lives?” Given his father’s occupation, writing commercial music had always seemed like a potential career, or at least a source of occasional money. “It was always kind of in the back of my mind,” Sam says. “Dan and I would talk about it sometimes.” Around 2009, Sam started talking with people — advertising folks, video-game companies, filmmakers — and offering his services. He drummed up some business scoring local films, writing snippets of music for websites and training videos. For about a year, he merged his services into a production company, where he became a partner and worked on projects for local corporations such as Hallmark, Capitol Federal and AMC Theatres. Then, in 2013, he again struck out on his own, with Primary Color Music. As new projects rolled in, he brought in Dan and Pinkston (whose band, the Republic Tigers, opened for the Billions at the 8th Street Taproom prior to appearing as a musical guest on David Letterman’s show in 2008) as fulltime employees in 2015. After a seven-year stint in Japan, Atkinson, formerly of the local band Kelpie, moved back to Kansas in 2016 and soon came aboard as a composer. And in December, Primary Color added another former Republic Tiger, Justin Tricomi. “I felt like, these guys are great musicians. Why is Dan cleaning parking lots — which is a job he had for a few years — and why is Ryan running tables at a restaurant?” Sam says. “If I can make a living at this, they should be able to, too.”

A through-line of the musical pasts of Primary Color Music composers is that they’ve all been involved in bands for which melody was an important component of the songs. Sam cites this as one of the company’s core strengths. “Just like lots of songwriters, we’re constantly making voice memos on our iPhones of melodies that pop into our heads,” he says. “We’re always working to nail down unique, appealing melodies.” “But sometimes strong melodies are a distraction,” Dan Billen says. “A local cardealership jingle — that’s kind of the epitome of what we don’t ever want to have to do. So, often, we go for more subliminal melodies, something more emotional and more in the subconscious.” “Ultimately, it’s a collaboration with the client: You take the notes, you take the direction they give you,” Sam says. “The nice thing is, clients don’t tend to talk in musictalk. Which is good, because we don’t talk in music-talk, either. We’re not classically trained musicians. It’s more like advertising talk: a movie reference, or ‘I like the pensive nature of this,’ or whatever.” “The process definitely pushes you in directions you wouldn’t normally go,” Atkinson adds. “Which again, is cool to me,” Sam says. “I hate blues music. I think we all kind of do. But we have made blues songs through this company that we love.” Japan looms large in Sam Billen’s personal and professional life. His wife, Yuka — also an employee of Primary Color Music — is Japa-

nese, and they travel to the country regularly to visit her family. A couple of years ago, as the business was starting to take off, he recalls wishing he lived closer to New York, the nerve center of the advertising industry, so that he could rub shoulders with the people doing big projects. “Then I realized that a version of that exists in Tokyo, and that I should just start reaching out to people about work while I’m over there,” Sam says. “Plus, it’d be a good excuse to come back more.” The plan is working. The Japanese side of the business has expanded rapidly, and Sam hired Anamizu to be the company’s Tokyobased composer in January 2017. He also added Mina Kabeya-Moss, who worked in finance and accounting for Japanese advertising firms but who now lives in Lawrence and works from the office there. “All our initial projects over there were the result of me forging genuine friendships with people over the years,” Sam says. “I mean, my wife’s Japanese, Josh’s wife is Japanese. People can look at us and see that we have a sincere appreciation for Japanese culture. As opposed to, you know, I’m coming over here to Japan to get me some of that Japanese money. ” The flip side to this is that certain Japanese companies will hire Primary Color Music because it’s an American company that can produce what’s perceived to be an American sound. “People sometimes ask me if the music we do in Japan is played in pentatonic scale or obscure keys or whatever, but that’s not it at all,” Sam says. “The music they [Japanese clients] are looking for is totally Western.” To keep pace with new overseas business coming in, Sam and his family will travel to Japan this month and stay through June. “Every time I go [to Japan], I feel like there’s this huge momentum, and I’m meeting more people every single time, but then it gets cut off, and I have to go back home,” he says. “So the plan this time is to give us enough time to make some deeper connections and train a couple people over there with the goal of establishing a mirror operation to what we do here in Lawrence.” Back in the States, the crew will continue chipping away at various projects — there are about 20 in the pipeline at any given time, Sam says — and enjoying the small and often strange rewards of writing music heard by millions of people who have no idea who you are. “It’s so weird, hearing your song while you’re standing in line at Dairy Queen or whatever,” Dan says. “You know that scene in That Thing You Do, where their song comes on the radio and they run through the streets? It’s like the opposite of that. You just have to kind of stare down and order your burger.”

the pitch | January 2018 | pitch.com

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cover story

How to At Least Not Get Worse Twelve steps to a better 2018 — resignations, musings and resolutions for a kinder year to come by Lucas WetzeL ©iSTockphoTo.com/nepSTock

It doesn’t get much more arbitrary than the concept of January 1 as a clean slate. As the holidays roar close each year, people start saying it again: “Next year will be better.” I usually nod along in easygoing agreement. Yeah, sure, why not? And when the year you’re leaving behind is 2017, you can’t help hoping that some kind of actual improvement really is close at hand. People call mine Generation X (or, depending on how you count, Gen Y), but if one must categorize, I prefer Generation D.O. — as in “do over.” Anyone who ever begged for a kickball mulligan on a recess playground knows what I mean. It’s not about big redemption. It’s about small second chances. The kind that might be scaled to the turn of a calendar year. It would be historic and maybe planetsaving if everybody set about achieving their personal D.O.s with renewed focus and steely purpose. But let us turn away from global concerns and indulge in the private self. Let everybody else worry about themselves; all I can do is prepare my own day-to-day attack (and tell you about it, in case you find it useful). Here, then, is a 12-step interrogation of my personal habits, in which you might see a bit of yourself. You don’t have to change a thing, but I sure hope I can.

Learn how to cook

Last week, while standing around a Weber grill cooking meat and getting faded with

my friends, I lamented the fact that I was 36 years old and still totally clueless about cooking. Don’t be too hard on yourself, they both said. “Cooking is 65 to 70 percent fucking things up, figuring out where you went wrong so that you can learn from your mistakes,” one friend told me. “The important thing is to try again.” When it comes to meat, my competitionbarbecue judge friend said, the key is to get a good thermometer. “That takes the guesswork out of it,” he said. “It keeps you from undercooking things or overcooking and drying it out.” Fortunately, at this age my kids don’t really know or care that their father’s idea of cooking is limited to sandwiches. But it sure would be nice to improve my kitchen game before they wise up or my wife leaves me for a James Beard nominee.

Find a new social network

Facebook is frustrating. I’ve spent untold hours on that site with nothing to show for it but the shame of having wasted time. I know my friends and family are on there somewhere, but I can barely see them through the kudzu of manipulated news feeds and timesucking memes. As for my own account, I hardly trust my instincts on what to share and when. In fact, my FB is for the moment deactivated (for probably the 17th time). I would never tell

anyone else to quit. But I’ve been trying to email or text people instead of using social media. I’ve heard that the iPhone 8 can even make phone calls, but you probably don’t want to risk weirding anyone out. Also, you don’t have to be in touch with everyone all the time. Allow me to suggest a new device for helping to cull your DMs: dreams. No Silicon Valley algorithms involved, but some pretty significant avatars. People show up in my dreams sometimes, and I realize upon waking that I should get in touch with them. And then I do. And it’s usually pretty satisfying. And no, I am not touching a crystal right now.

Send actual mail

It’s fun to send and receive mail. And it costs 49 cents. Considering the distance an envelope may travel and the potential value of the exchange, it’s the best bargain in America. So much so that it’s clearly unsustainable. Do it while you can.

Practice moderation

Right, we all say this about our habits, indulgences and pastimes. Let’s change it up, then, and, instead of going cold turkey and then whole hog and starting over again, aim for “balance.” Do you want to tell people how moderate you are? You do not. Would you feel pretty good about telling folks you are balanced? Probably.

Stargaze

Speaking of balancing things out, let’s talk about night life. Yes, it’s good to seek the pleasures of the usual after-dark entertainments. But night life can also mean embracing the warmth and darkness of the natural night — camping, stargazing, generally being absorbed in the nocturnal. Every once in a while, I’ll see a story about how the night sky is disappearing, about how much artificial light has obscured our view of the Milky Way. It’s hard not to wonder about the psychological effects of such a phenomenon. Fortunately for us, vast expanses of semi-unpolluted light are still within driving distance. Visiting more of them soon is a resolution that’s both sort of tangible and entirely achievable. Also:

Enjoy your natural surroundings before they disappear

While I absolutely believe we should do everything we can to physically preserve our natural surroundings, perhaps the best thing to do is make the most of them while they are still here. Whether it’s a simple stroll along Cliff Drive on a weekend or a trip to a faraway, not-yet-flooded beach, I hope to appreciate the natural world as much as possible in 2018.

Find a workable read-sleep strategy

I often complain about not reading as much as I want to. I complain at least as much about not sleeping as much as I need to. The two pitch.com | January 2018 | the pitch

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activities are forever pitted each other. When you really want to avoid falling asleep while reading, try standing up. That’s how I got through Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. It’s easy to be bold when starting a new book, but some literary challenges are too steep to face sitting (or lying) down.

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After my wife and I bought a new bed to replace our worn-out mattress and box spring, my 3-year-old son started crying. “I liked the old bed!” he said. Relax, we told him. It’s not your bed, and it hasn’t even been replaced yet. This was a kind way of saying that his protests were illogical and childish. But I could still relate; I’m not one for change. I could have told him: “Yes, much of the time we are reluctant to mix things up. We go to the places we always have, have the same conversations, listen to or read the same stuff. But each of us is always changing, occasionally questioning the foundations, habits and tastes we’ve thus far built our identities on.” But maybe then we both would have been inconsolable. So I hereby resolve to try basing my exchanges with old friends in the present, to find the new within the familiar. As Rilke puts it, “The transformed speaks only to relinquishers. All holders-on are stranglers.” I probably won’t share that particular poem with my son until he’s 4.

Support good journalism

Last year, when coming up with slogans for a protest rally I ultimately did not attend, I settled on “DON’T BELIEVE ANYONE WHO TELLS YOU REALITY ISN’T REAL.” That’s a bit long for one sheet of poster board, but I stand by the sentiment. I’ve read more good journalism in the past year than the previous several years combined, some of it in this very publication. Ponying up for a newspaper paywall or otherwise helping to subsidize reporting isn’t something we’re necessarily used to, but in a post–net neutrality era of lies and disinformation, it’s more important now than ever.

Act when you can, but don’t worry (too much) about what you can’t control

After I posted an angry political screed on Facebook earlier this year, a friend wrote, “Thanks for sharing! Let us know if you make any progress on figuring out how to best take action on these issues.” This wasn’t a put-down, but it also wasn’t without a strong and deserved current of “Hey, maybe figure some shit out before you post next time instead of just wringing your hands and saying you don’t know what to do.”

Six months later, I still don’t know exactly what to do. But I got a clue the other day while listening to — OK, I’ll say it: Jack Johnson. My son listens to Johnson’s Curious George soundtrack CD all the time. The track he plays the most is “With My Own Two Hands,” a duet with Ben Harper. The lyrics are: I can change the world with my own two hands/Make it a better place, with my own two hands/Make it a kinder place with my own two hands. Simple stuff — innocent and hopeful in just the way you mean to impart to small, uncynical beings (just before you smack them with Rilke). And, listening to it with my son as he crouched on his knees and rocked back and forth, I heard a message of grown-up hope, adult-strength common sense and maybe even something of a solution. We can control only so much. I can’t singlehandedly stop the tax bill, replace a corrupt senator or chase away global warming. But I mustn’t forget the small things within reach, the causes and organizations I can join today. In 2018, I’m going to try to tune out the big, awful things and focus on the small, immediate and positive. Who knows what those things might add up to?

Meditate

I know, I know — no one wants to read another article about the benefits of meditation. I was skeptical as well, if not of the practice itself, then of those who espouse it. But after giving it a try — after truly sitting still and upright, focusing on my breath for 12 to 20 minutes — I felt an improved ability to focus, think clearly and not fidget too much in meetings. Is my mind totally blank? No, no, no. But as the minutes go by, I find myself mentally X-ing out of all the tabs I didn’t realize were open. I don’t know if that’s Zen, but it’s valuable.

Listen

As a straight, white male, I can tell you that 2017 was awesome for holding forth on all matters as soon as they came to my attention, regardless of my expertise. Just kidding. But other dudes did just that, and made a lot of bad stuff even worse. Why not learn from their idiocy? So now I’m trying to read as much as I can about other people’s experiences, perspectives and challenges. I’m seeking to learn about the hardships they face while recognizing that the same systems and structures that keep them down were designed to give people like me advantages at their expense. In other words, I’m teaching myself to listen differently and better than I have before. That means I’m going to talk less. Just as soon as I finish telling you all about my big plans for 2018. Which should be right ... about ...

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i will dare

Finding My Edge Getting a handle on Blade and Timber, the area’s first ax-throwing club. by AngelA lutz

You don’t have to be a Game of Thrones obsessive or a red-state Democrat to grasp an elemental truth: There’s no mood elevator more immediate than picking up an ax with both hands, raising it above your head, taking aim and hurling it with all your might. This is what I discover on the dreary autumn day I drop by Blade and Timber (1101 Mulberry, bladeandtimber.com), Kansas City’s first and only urban ax-throwing club. I’m greeted at the door — which has shiny, metal axes as handles — by Ryan Henrich, who co-owns the business with Matt Baysinger. Young and almost comically entrepreneurial, Henrich and Baysinger are excellent at spotting entertainment trends that are both novel and enduring. Their excellent escape room, Breakout KC, stands as evidence of their ingenuity. Bearded and stocky, Henrich presents as someone born to wield an ax. So he looks right at home in the converted West Bottoms warehouse where he and Baysinger have set up shop. Inside the space are six lanes available by reservation, and two that are open to the public. Since the club opened in November, Henrich says, the response has been convincing: More than 1,800 people have so far tested their barbarian skills, and most weekend nights have been completely booked. He says some people have arrived a bit nervous about trying it — a three-anda-half-pound ax making for, as he puts it, a “decently heavy projectile” — but most soon find their inner Conan. “My mom is 57 and 5-foot-nothing, and on her first throw, she stuck a bull’s-eye,” he tells me, holding a shiny, silver ax etched with the Blade and Timber logo. “She loved it so much that she kind of hogged the lane for a while.” Henrich says that anyone who is tall enough to throw an ax 12 feet can hit the

target — including their youngest guest so far, who was only 7 years old. Still, for anyone who doubts her abilities, working with a coach is included with first-time admission. Aside from having a really cool job title, the ax experts guide almost every first-timer to stick a throw within a couple of minutes, Henrich tells me. “Imagine it slicing through the air,” he instructs me, and I imagine the silver blade he’s holding spinning across the room in slow motion, as though under water. Then he asks me if I’m ready to throw. I try not to seem overeager, but I’m sure he can tell I’ve been dying to get my hands on an ax since I got here. Still, I summon as much concentration as I can, not wanting to seem haphazard at first throw. I let Henrich show me how to position my hands on the handle, how to take aim. I watch him release his ax, and see it spin smoothly in a single rotation before thudding decisively into the wooden target. (They have to replace targets at least every six hours, he tells me, depending on how spirited the competition in each lane becomes.) Now it’s my turn. I line my fingers up the way I’ve been taught, and I lift the ax over my head. Yup, this warrior stance is enormously empowering. But even better is the momentum as I bring my arms forward and direct the ax toward the target. It hits handle first and bounces onto the floor. Henrich offers a few pointers: Turn my shoulders this way, step back just a little farther. I ready for the next shot, still myself, get into position ... and again watch the ax tumble to the floor. Step back even farther, Henrich says. I do. Then I aim a third time, and the metal flies, and I nearly nail a bull’s-eye. I stare at it for a second, not quite believing. Then I feel the

Matthew Beaver and Al Rose (top), Chad Britt and Lauren Kuklenski were among the hurlers at Blade and Timber last month.

Chase Castor

delight, feel the stress of the morning and my perpetually heavy self-doubt splitting apart like the wood I’ve just cut from 15 feet away. I retrieve the ax, return to my place and begin nailing throw after throw. Now I get why someone might want to rent one of these lanes for three hours. Henrich says that sounds like a long time only until you get started. “You’re a natural,” he says, as we throw side-by-side in neighboring lanes. When I ask Henrich what inspired him and Baysinger to open Blade and Timber, he says they wanted to create a place where people could gather — but not a bar or a restaurant. He loves to walk through the space on a busy night and see people talking and laughing, their phones still in their pockets. Food and beer will be available soon. Ultimately he envisions the club providing “high-impact shared experiences with friends and family.” Yes, Blade and Timber obviously allows just that, and the social appeal is obvious. But here by myself, I feel like a badass — which is at least as satisfying. pitch.com | January 2018 | the pitch

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Into the Woods

Madison Flitch’s ‘tree to table’ approach gets a retail space. by AngelA lutz

John Pryor is aware that to describe his furniture as tree-to-table is to court a certain irony, or else a certain hipster preciousness. That’s OK — the phrase has started plenty of conversations since he founded his furniture company, Madison Flitch, last year, and the curious people who have come to his Crossroads workshop have often left with pieces they’re excited to own. “It’s like farm-to-table, but with furniture,” he tells me when I ask about the clever tagline, and about his approach to craft. I’ve stopped by his 1,400-square-foot space, down the hall from Maya Yoga. I attend weekly ashtanga classes at the yoga studio, but I can’t recall ever hearing the buzz of a saw or the pounding of a hammer, even during silent savasana. It’s as though Pryor has gently willed his furniture into existence. Named for his great-grandfather Madison Bear, and the old English word for a wooden slab, Pryor’s one-man furniture company shares little in common with behemoths such as Ikea or Pottery Barn. To illustrate this, he shows me the tables in his Lily Collection. Named for his niece, the whimsical, asymmetrical tables are made exclusively from trees taken from suburban backyards in the Kansas City area. “We dispose of our trees too easily,” he says;

his removal of a tree is something else, not a disposal but a harvesting. From the time the hand-selected trees come down, Pryor’s process is, he says, “involved.” First the trees are cut into slabs and dried for one to three years in a turkey brooder house on the Eldon, Missouri, farm where Pryor’s grandmother has lived for more than 70 years. Pryor then hauls the large pieces back to KC and up the stairs to his secondstory workshop. “Sometimes the yoga people help,” he says, when I ask whether he has personally carried each “flitch” from the half-dozen trees he has so far harvested into his workshop by himself. “But it’s usually just me.” Pryor crafts the trees into tables using techniques he learned at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking, which means he never uses screws or bolts. (This explains some of the quiet.) He began building furniture for his own home to unwind while working what he recalls as a high-stress tech job, in Boston. When he and his wife moved back to Kansas City last year, he seized the opportunity to do something “a little less soul-sucking,” he says, dropping out of corporate life to make and sell furniture full time. So far, so good. In February, he’s opening a showroom at 221 Southwest Boulevard, in a

Pryor in his workspace, and some of his creations

AngelA lutz

space shared with Flying Pig Local Mercantile. He also plans to put on regular activities and events, including make-your-own chopsticks workshops. He lets me try making a set of chopsticks using two thin sticks of maple, showing me how to hand-plane the wood into the smooth, tapered utensils. I end with a shiny, elegant pair of pinchers that will turn heads at Bob Wasabi. As his operation grows, Pryor says, one of his biggest challenges involves defining himself in a crowded market. This is where that “tree to table” concept comes into play. He and his wife, Megan, love eating at restaurants such as the Rieger, where, they say, unique, flavorful meals draw upon locally sourced meat and produce. He envisions Madison Flitch doing the same thing for KC’s trees — that is, giving them a second life and keeping them in the community. Like the ingredients at the restaurants he favors, most of the trees Pryor selects are unique in some way. He grows animated telling me about the fiery streaks in pale box elder and ash wood that occur when the trees are invaded by a certain kind of beetle, or the way fungus is responsible for the elegant grayish streaks in a custom end table he recently completed.

Then there’s his 909 Collection, which has been built largely from urban walnut and maple trees harvested from 27th Street and Prospect, where the Kansas City Police Crime Lab now resides. Most of the trees from that lot would have been junked without the intervention of Pryor and the Urban Lumber Company. Pryor’s designs also take months to complete and often resemble architectural designs Pryor sees on buildings around town, which observant Kansas City residents might recognize. “This one is based on the buildings here on Film Row,” he says, pointing to a coffee table with a flared, art deco design. I realize why the table looks familiar — I’ve been walking past a similarly shaped sign on my way to yoga for the past three years. It’s fascinating to see this design repurposed in a table that has my hometown in its very DNA. And just like that, tree-to-table furniture makes perfect sense.

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the pitch | January 2018 | pitch.com

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Where the Dough Is While Joe West pauses his pop-up dream, Guroux Khalifah raises his Distrikt Biskuit house. by Liz Cook

Guroux Khalifah, flanked by brother Kiraameen Khalifah and cousin Ahmad Simmons (left), who work with him

Zach Bauman

In 2016, chef Joe West’s well-publicized partnership with then-restaurateur Erik Borger fizzled out. West had planned to open Kusshi, his dream restaurant (a kind of permanent pop-up), within the cavernous Komatsu Ramen space. Following the dissolution with Borger, West trawled for investors but staked himself on a safer bet: an executive chef position at Stock Hill, Bread and Butter Concepts’ version of an expense account–courting Plaza steakhouse. The restaurant opened in December 2016. Ten months later, West found himself trimmed from the payroll. “It was kind of a surprise but kind of not,” he says. “I tried really hard to make things work, but it’s the whole saying of a ‘square peg in a round hole.’ ” West has worked in kitchens since he was 15 — including stints at celebrated restaurants

such as 40 Sardines, Alinea and Bluestem. Cooking is what he knows. So at least now, he felt free to dive back into Kusshi. His last day at Stock Hill was September 17. On September 18, he announced the return of Kusshi’s pop-up dinners. On November 28, he announced he was ending Kusshi’s pop-up dinners. Now, he’s thinking about leaving the restaurant business altogether. “I have to put away the artistic mentality and that whole ‘I’m the chef and this is what I do’ kind of thing,” West tells me. “I just have to put that aside.” Perhaps noting my expression, he laughs and adds, “I know, it’s kind of sad.” West is soft-spoken and straight-edged — a square peg that doesn’t fit just any square hole, either. I ask if he’d open Kusshi as a real, brick-and-mortar restaurant if the right investors came calling, and he gives me a “well,

“It’s not all aBout the money WIth me.” Guroux “Roux” khalifah

duh” kind of look. Still, he says his immediate goal is something more stable, more mature, less steeped in the mercurial tempers and self-destructive behaviors popularly associated with the white coat. Yes, Kansas City’s restaurant scene is booming. But West can tell you: What’s great for diners isn’t always great for chefs. On paper, the local restaurant industry has rarely looked healthier. According to County Business Patterns data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Kansas City metro added 79 fullservice restaurants from 2012 through 2015. That trend has continued. As of December 8, Kansas City, Missouri’s Regulated Industries list of pending new licenses included more than 30 new full-service restaurants in varying stages of licensure and approval. “There’s so much going on in Kansas City right now,” West says. “So many restaurants, pitch.com | January 2018 | the pitch

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café

so many options. And not enough people are going out to eat.” National figures push back a little at West’s contention. Household spending on restaurants went up by 3 percent from September 2016 through September 2017, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. Households are spending a greater share of their food budgets at restaurants, too. In 1970, we spent about 26 percent of our food budget on food away from home. By 2014, that share was nearly 44 percent. But chefs and restaurant groups and investors all want a piece of that pie. And as more and more restaurants compete for the same diners each year, those pieces are getting smaller. Today, restaurants need more than just a solid menu to break through the competition. They need novelty. When West first launched Kusshi, in 2015, his sales were strong. There was competition then, too — pop-ups such as the national company Dinner Lab (now defunct) and Überdine were hot-ticket events — but West had no trouble filling seats. He put on dinners once a month, drawing, he says, about 40 diners to each. But the latest goround drew a starker picture; he struggled to bring 14 guests to his December pop-up, then canceled a planned New Year’s Eve dinner when no one had made a reservation three weeks out. “I think it’s kind of lost its swagger,” West says of the pop-up model. “You go to a popup and you’re like, ‘OK, cool, I can say that I went to that. I don’t have a need to go back.’” As the economy has recovered following the recession, diners’ expectations have changed. West says it’s not just about the food anymore. We want ambience, he says. We want an Instagram-worthy tablescape. Pop-ups are at a disadvantage there. Nomadic outfits have to travel light, and people with their pick of brick-and-mortar favorites often balk at paying top dollar for a meal served on paper plates with plastic flatware. Maintaining consistent, high-quality service can be a challenge, too. Traditional restaurants are already feeling a staffing crunch — and they’re able to offer servers much more consistent hours than an intermittent pop-up. So what’s a local chef-entrepreneur gotta do to get butts in booths? For Guroux “Roux” Khalifah, chef-owner of the new Distrikt Biskuit House, the answer seems clear: Keep your menu streamlined and consistent, and give your pop-up a permanent address. Khalifah’s road to entrepreneurship was a long one, testing his patience. After attending Atlanta’s Le Cordon Bleu culinary school, Khalifah worked in kitchens at Lidia’s and the Bristol, among others. But it was a stint at a Hy-Vee Market Grille that finally motivated him to venture out on his own. He walked away from that job last January, burned out after long hours cooking food he wasn’t passionate about.

“so many restaurants, so many optIons. anD not enouGh people are GoInG out to eat.” Joe West

“It’s not all about the money with me,” Khalifah says. “But I saw what I was able to produce for other individuals, and I told myself: If I can do these types of numbers for someone else’s business — someone else’s dream — I can potentially do the same thing for myself.” He picked up a few private chef and catering gigs under his own brand, No Genre Dining Services. But he felt rudderless. “I was kind of bouncing all over the place,” he says. “I was trying to show people I could do this and that, and I wasn’t sticking to anything. I wasn’t consistent.” A trip to the Dominican Republic with his wife gave him a new spark, he tells me. In culinary school, he had devoted long hours to perfecting his biscuit recipe. The inedible “hockey pucks” his mother made when he was a child — “bless her heart,” he says — inspired the fascination. But he hadn’t done much with the old recipe. Enter Distrikt Biskuit House, a pop-up restaurant Khalifah launched inside the Lutfi’s Fried Fish on 63rd Street. Although Khalifah is now slowly expanding his menu, he started with the basics: buttery, flaky biscuits bookending a perfectly fried chicken thigh sleazed with cheese. Jam on the side, if you must. The simplicity was strategic. He calls the biscuit sandwich the “hook,” a way to build a regular customer base and generate some name recognition by demonstrating his knack for consistency. “That way, when I do decide to give them a little something different, they’re already locked in.” It’s paying off. On his first day, Khalifah estimates, he made six to eight sandwiches. In his second week, he was turning out 25 a day. A month in, and he was selling 100 to 200 sandwiches most days. “It took on a life of its own,” he says. Social media has been a main ingredient in that exponential growth. That hunger for novelty? Right now, the Biskuit House is feeding it. The pop-up has a hyperactive Facebook presence, and loyal fans have been Instagramming biscuit glamor shots practically since the oven was preheated. There have been setbacks — just before Thanksgiving, Khalifah had to go dark. The city has rigid guidelines for operating businesses within businesses, and his pop-up kitchen had been deemed less than strictly kosher. But when he reopened, the customers returned — and continued to multiply. And that growth made him confident enough to sign a lease for a space on 3959 Troost, just down the street from the popular Urban Café, which opened last year. Khalifah is unsure when he’ll open the popped-out Biskuit, but he hopes to make the move sometime this spring. Like West, Khalifah initially figured he’d need investors. He put together a business proposal and prepared himself to make cold

calls. But in the end, he decided to go it alone. His dad and his uncle — both seasoned restaurateurs — told him investors would come to him once they’d seen what he’d created. Khalifah is reluctant to talk about his family connections, but he had good reason to take the advice to heart. His uncle is Lutfi Khalifah — that Lutfi. And his father, Abdul Khalifah, is helping him finance his new restaurant on Troost. But it’s still business: Khalifah pays fair market rent on the Lutfi’s space, he says, and he’s been hustling for weeks — expanding his morning hours, adding weekend service — to channel as much of his own capital as possible into the restaurant. He’ll need it. He’s entering the restaurant business at an unusually saturated time — and early signs for 2018 suggest local competition will remain robust. In 2016, the Kansas City, Missouri, Health Department conducted 413 pre-opening inspections for new food-service operations (a comprehensive statistic that includes food trucks, a few farmers markets and fast-casual outposts such as Chipotle). In 2017, it conducted 543 (not counting inspections conducted after December 11). Khalifah and West aren’t the only ones facing hard choices. A boom in the restaurant biz brings other concerns — say, a shifting composition of jobs toward the low-wage, high-turnover food-service sector. Growth in restaurant jobs is outpacing job gains in education and health care. If recent trends hold, there will be more jobs in restaurants and bars than in manufacturing by 2020. That’s bad news for anyone invested in slowing this country’s runaway wealth inequality. Meanwhile, is Kansas City’s restaurant boom sustainable? “There’s this image of opportunity,” West says, and his emphasis carries a strongly implied but. Growth in some segments of the restaurant industry — especially the franchise segment — is starting to slow. Cautious industry watchers have been warning for months that we may be in a bubble, and there’s been plenty of breathless coverage about whether and how soon that bubble will burst. But a total industry crash seems unlikely. Our collective taste for dining out feels like a durable habit (barring — knock on butcher block — recession or nuclear war). And economists such as George Mason’s Tyler Cowen, who writes for the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution, say the industry’s growth actually is sustainable. The challenge facing local restaurants has less to do with motivating diners to get out than it does with convincing them to come back over and over. Every competition has winners and losers, and every local restaurant is at risk. Time will tell whether West was right to cut his losses. But for now, Khalifah is determined to stay in the game.

the pitch | January 2018 | pitch.com

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fat city

Joe West

Zach Bauman

head Meats, Paradise Locker and specialized pork farmers, this incredible meat is available in KC. Personally we’re looking forward to incredible growth in the Crossroads with the completion of multiple hotel and condo and apartment buildings, along with the addition of more restaurants. Novel will be moving in closer to us, and there are other cool restaurants on the horizon. Kansas City needs this area of concentrated living spaces, businesses and chef-owned restaurants. A rising tide lifts all boats.

Carlos Falcon, owner and executive chef, Jarocho Pescados y Mariscos

Good Taste

better, and I look forward to being an ally or a catalyst for that change.

carlos Falcon, Vaughn Good, Theresia Ota and other chefs look back at 2017 — and ahead to the new year. by April Fleming

So 2017 was nobody’s idea of a good time politically. But at least the food was good. In fact, there seems to be an inverse relationship between whatever’s going on in Washington (and in Jefferson City, and in Topeka) and what goes on among KC’s chefs and mixologists. The past year gave us Lawrence Beer Company, Messenger Coffee downtown, Swordfish Tom’s, the new Rye, Corvino Supper Club and Tasting Room, the Mockingbird Lounge, the Monarch, Sully and Hank’s, Urban Café and Freshwater (here, then gone, but soon to come back again). All feel essential now. The good news keeps coming. Set to open in the new year: the resurrected Golden Ox, Jonathan Justus’ Black Dirt, the Myers Hotel, and the soon-to-come Crossroads location of Novel. I asked some of KC and Lawrence’s brightest culinary minds what they loved about 2017, and what they’re hungry for in 2018.

Theresia Ota, executive chef, the Monarch

The year really flew! I’m grateful for the continued excellence of restaurants like the Rieger and Novel, and new kid on the block the Antler Room — congrats and love to all for their continued success and maintaining a level of actual cuisine in KC! I’m also excited that Sam Hefter and Clark Grant are back on

the Plaza. I can’t wait to see what else they do, and to eat more of their food. I absolutely loved Ça Va’s Sunday dinner series over the summer. Anakaren Ibarra of Happy Gillis did a phenomenal dinner there on July 9. She did a regional Mexican braised pork in a yeast dough, steamed in a corn husk that was basically the equivalent of Mexican bao buns — maybe the best and most memorable thing I ate in KC in 2017. There was also the bittersweet farewell to Julian (how I celebrated the Fourth of July). Then of course the Monarch Bar opened. Hands down the highlight of my year was participating in the Les Dames & Jazz event that chef Debbie Gold and the American Restaurant hosted. What an honor to be included, and to have the time of my life cooking alongside some of the best lady chefs in KC: Katee McLean, Remy Ayesh, Celina Tio, Renee Kelly, Debbie Gold, Allison Reed, with special guest appearances from Abbey-Jo Eans and Anakaren Ibarra. I am really looking forward to seeing how the political and social climates affect the restaurant industry in KC. From a livable minimum wage, to realistic hours for salaried employees, to not tolerating sexism or sexual harassment or sexual assault in the workplace — really every workplace, not just within the restaurant industry. It feels like we are on the brink of real change for the

Vaughn Good, owner, Hank Charcuterie

I have really enjoyed Brewery Emperial. I really like the vibe of the place — it’s somewhere I want to hang out. They have good beer and a solid menu. The food is interesting, and I love that it comes from a wood-burning hearth, which adds character to the food and makes the space smell awesome and inviting. I’m looking forward to the Myers Hotel Bar reopening in Tonganoxie. It only just closed last summer, but Kate Frick was able to purchase it and will be restoring the old hotel. She hopes to turn it into a music venue, coffee shop and bar. It was a great bar, and the building has so much potential. I am very excited to see what Kate will do.

Christina Corvino, co-owner (with Michael Corvino), Corvino Supper Club and Tasting Room

To be honest, since we opened in April we don’t go out too much! When we do, we stick to our favorites — the Rieger, Ça Va, Novel, Bluestem. We definitely see a growth in local family-owned farms — what they’re offering and the standards they set with how they grow or raise their products. New farms that Michael is working with include Stirring Soil and Woodland City. Working with the farmers to plan out what they will grow, based on what the chefs want to cook with, is a really satisfying partnership to have. Additionally, our local heritage pigs were formerly being shipped to the best restaurants in New York. Now, through a partnership between Arrow-

It was shocking for me to learn that the American was closing — such a great institution. Obviously the opening of Corvino soothed that feeling. He’s a great chef, and it’s a great restaurant. The Antler Room — I’m a big, big fan. With the Rieger, we are seeing recognition on a national level. It’s good for all of us. Colby and Megan [Garrelts, of Bluestem and Rye] continuing their great tradition by expanding their new [Rye] location. I’m nothing but thankful for the year that we had. I’m so grateful to know all of these wonderful people that work in this industry. In 2018, I really want to complete this whole dream of mine of opening another location, completely unrelated to seafood. I want to continue the Mexican tradition and do more elevated Mexican cuisine. Hopefully we can move into the Crossroads to make this dream happen.

Joe West, owner, Kusshi

The Antler Room was my favorite restaurant of 2017 because the food is so good, the service is always friendly and it’s like they have their own little world tucked away on Hospital Hill. I also love Corvino Supper Club & Tasting Room — Michael does an amazing job with Asian flavors. It’s always super fresh, bright and delicious. Columbus Park Ramen Shop and Shio are both doing great ramen, and I really want to see the city embrace it more. I really enjoyed going to either one during the summer nights in KC. When I had out-of-town guest chefs, they were so impressed with our city when I took them out for drinks and snacks at places like Manifesto, SoT, Julep and Ça Va. With drinks on my mind, I have to say I had some of the best cocktails I’ve ever had at Swordfish Tom’s. It’s incredible and such a chill place to hang out. I’m thankful we have Broadway Butcher Shop. Stuart does a great job over there. Those hanger burgers are insane. In 2018, I look forward to taking more small road trips to Springfield, Columbia, Lawrence, Weston and Omaha. Going a little out of the way makes it feel like you’re on vacation, and there’s some great food and drink out there.

the pitch | January 2018 | pitch.com

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fat city

The sense of history at Mario’s was always matter-of-fact. Below, owner John Waid works the counter.

Bread and Gone

Chase Castor

at Mario’s in Westport, powering down the last grinder as the restaurant closes by Jonathan arlan

Sometimes, advance warning of bad news doesn’t fully prepare you for its reality. So it is for the regulars of Mario’s, Westport’s beloved red-sauce nook. The restaurant announced last January that the clock was ticking: December 30, 2017, would be its last day, after close to 50 years. Writing on the restaurant’s website, owner John Waid explained that the “final year is our notice to our fantastic customers that the end is near.” In a city where a favorite spot might disappear overnight, where good places sometimes fail fast and mediocre joints stick around as though to laugh at you, the long runup to no more Mario’s was soft prosciutto over the cruel hammer. There would be time — time to take a valedictory passeggiata through the place’s easy menu. The spaghetti. The pasta salad. And

oh, the grinders. Business picked up as word went around. As December started, it wasn’t unusual for Mario’s to sell out of food well before closing time. And a little despair began to sink in. “It is sad,” says Sheila Shields, who has worked at Mario’s for the past 33 years and is one of only two people known to keep the secrets of the grinder’s sauce recipe. “I’ve known some of these people forever.” “In the last 20 years, I’ve come here probably every week, if not twice a week,” says Tom Halk, another regular. “I knew that he [John] was going to retire. But now I’m going to have to figure out another place to go.” “Good luck!” another customer yells at Halk from across the room. “I’m trying to talk Sheila into keeping it going,” says David Madden, a once-a-weeker for

the pitch | January 2018 | pitch.com

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fat city

Sheila Shields has prepared countless grinders over the years here: “I know I’ve made a million.”

David Madden, a regular for 26 years

Regular Tom Halk: “I always thought the lasagna was the best in town.” The menu could hardly have been simpler.

the past 26 years. “I’m gonna miss it. Bad.” “I’m working on something,” Shields says, teasing a possible next chapter in the Mario’s story. She’s not joking. But for now, things are still business as usual: first-timers dropping in before it’s too late, long-lost customers are finding their way back for one more taste, regulars quietly accelerating their habits. In the kitchen, she’s stuffing homemade meatballs into warm pockets of hollowed-out rolls, slathering on the secret sauce, adding cheese, sealing up the grinder with a disc of bread, toasting it, handing it over. Until the routine ceases and she passes the final grinder over the counter to one last, lucky customer. And the rest of us — well, we’re gonna miss it. Bad. pitch.com | January 2018 | the pitch

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stage

Energy Field

Actor Jan Rogge puts her directing stamp on KCAT’s Sea Marks. by Deborah hirsch

“I strongly feel the energy of the audience at every performance,” says Jan Rogge, a wellknown presence on stages around Kansas City. Not that all energy is good energy. “Stop this shit,” a balcony dweller once yelled during a play in which Rogge appeared. Such is the unexpected nature of a live show. And Rogge, who also teaches acting and who sits on the board and on the artistic committee of Kansas City Actors Theatre, wouldn’t have it any other way. And now she’s “thrilled,” she says, to direct her first fulllength play for KCAT. Sea Marks — a play by Gardner McKay at Kansas City Actors Theatre, January 10-28 — explores a relationship between a city native and an Irish island fisherman that grows through letters. “I have always been romanced by stories of the sea,” Rogge says, in KCAT press materials, “so I jumped at the opportunity to direct.” Rogge also agreed to jump in and answer The Pitch’s questions by email. The Pitch: What originally lit the theater spark? Rogge: In my childhood, my best friends and I would write plays and perform for our neighbors. I’m not sure what our neighbors thought of it, but we thought we were stars. Later, in high school, I discovered theater in my senior year. Where did you train? I am from Milwaukee, where I received my BFA in theater studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. And then I received my MFA at the University of Missouri– Kansas City in the professional actor–training program. What drew you into acting? Hearing the audience laugh. My big influence when I was young was SNL. I wanted to be a sketch performer. I joined an improv group in Milwaukee and had a blast. I moved into serious acting classes at Milwaukee Rep, which introduced me to theater classics in drama. What brought you to KC, and what’s kept you here? I came here in 1985 for the graduate acting program. I graduated and worked professionally in KC till 2000. I left town to pursue theater and happily moved back in 2009. What drew you into directing? I enjoyed coaching and teaching students at Cornell University, where I worked for three years as an RPTA (resident professional teaching associate). I taught acting and performed in their productions. (My husband was living

in Philadelphia, while I was in Ithaca, New York.) It was exciting to help shape the students’ monologues and scene work to deepen their understanding of their characters. And I also appreciate collaborating with the designers. What’s the best part about what you do? I enjoy working with a community of likeminded people. My passion is telling stories and hopefully influencing an audience in some small way into seeing and feeling life in a different way from their own. What’s the hardest part? It is a balancing act, as a director, to know when to help the actor with your words or when to keep your mouth shut. The wisest job a director can do is allow the actor to do their job without your verbal input. What’s the worst thing that has happened during a performance? I was performing in a politically charged production of Coriolanus at The Old Globe theater, in San Diego, where I worked for a summer immediately after grad school. At the top of the show, an audience member in the balcony kept screaming “stop this shit.” We ignored him and continued with the play, and he finally sat down and remained quiet. What’s the best thing? The absolute thrill and exhilaration of knowing that you have hit that sweet spot with your character, audience and fellow actors. It doesn’t happen very often. But when it does, it’s the best feeling in the world. How are you affected by the audience? I strongly feel the energy of the audience at every performance. I have always believed that the audience is the added character in the play, starting with previews, that cannot be ignored. It is a real energy force that can help shape the energy of the performances. What’s one of your favorite roles? I actually have two favorite roles, and they both happen to be KCAT productions. My most challenging role would have to be Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? My other favorite role is Margie in Good People. I loved Margie’s heart and spirit in the face of adversity. What’s one of your favorite shows? One of my favorite shows is Moon for the Misbegotten, written by my favorite playwright, Eugene O’Neill. I am thrilled that it happens to be in KCAT’s next season.

MATT SAMeCK

Sea Marks

January 10-28 at Kansas City Actors Theatre, H&R Block City Stage at Union Station, 30 West Pershing Road, 816-235-6222, kcactors.org

Who’s your inspiration? My acting inspiration of contemporary actresses are Colleen Dewhurst, Frances McDormand, Catherine O’Hara, Laurie Metcalf. My inspired classic film actress is the great Bette Davis. pitch.com | January 2018 | the pitch

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arts

Other January classical and concert-music highlights: Friday, January 12 Ying String Quartet, pianist Alon Goldstein and bassist Rachel Calin play Franz Schubert’s iconic “Trout” Quintet, among other works. Friends of Chamber Music | Folly Theater Friday, January 12, Saturday, January 13, and Sunday January 14 Concertmaster Noah Geller and principal violist Christine Grossman lead the Kansas City Symphony as soloists in Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante. The concert includes Jean Sibelius’ defiantly brassy Symphony No. 5. Helzberg Hall, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts Saturday, January 13 The American Spiritual Ensemble celebrates AfricanAmerican tradition with jubilant voices and artistry. Harriman-Jewell Series | Folly Theater

Four Hands The alchemical percussion dance of Arx Duo’s Mari Yoshinaga and Garrett Arney by Libby Hanssen

Percussion, at its most elemental, involves striking an object with another object. As refined by Arx Duo, however, the art of hitting things becomes an intimate, poetic dance of tones and colors. The Arx Duo is newly local to Kansas City. Mari Yoshinaga, originally from Japan, moved here following her wedding to Kansas City Symphony concertmaster Noah Geller, and this past September Garrett Arney left the East Coast to join her, committing to the duo full time. They’ve been a professional ensemble for three years but started playing together as graduate students at Yale University. In the sheltered confines of New Haven, Connecticut, they honed their virtuoso skills and, while playing duets during the rages of Hurricane Sandy, realized their sympathies of style. I met with Yoshinaga (Arney was out of town) at Brookside’s Unbakery & Juicery. Over some green tea and alkaline water, she told me about creating the duo, their artistic vision and plans for the future. “We liked the concept of the word arc because we want to be the bridge between composer and audience, or audience and performer,” Yoshinaga said. She was back in KC after Arx Duo’s November trip to the United Kingdom, where they performed Dominic Murcott’s “The Harmonic Canon,” a piece written for the duo and a half-ton, quarter-tone double bell designed by bell maker and artist Marcus Vergette. They helped develop the piece, experimenting with the bells to create the sound world, and then recorded their 45-minute performance for digital and vinyl release with Nonclassical, a music label in East London. Though they often work within the auspices of universities (where it’s easier to access or borrow instruments, instead of taking their marimbas on the road), they want to explore outside the academic circle, too, playing in art museums, churches, barns and, as is the case at the 1900 Building, even refurbished office buildings. This is the pair’s third performance at the Karbank space, but its first concert in KC as a local group. The January 18 program will showcase the breadth of Arx’s abilities, with commissioned works and old and new repertoire standards. “We want to share a bit of our sound with the Kansas City community and let them experience some of our world,” Arney writes in an email.

At the center of Arx’s sound is the marimba, but the duo present an array of percussion works, including “Seeds,” by Leonardo Gorosito and Rafael Alberto, a marvelous work of ingenuity involving a variety of shakers. The latter are more convenient than a pair of five-octave marimbas; the instruments fit in a backpack. Arx has played the work on four continents. Likewise, Alyssa Weinberg’s “Table Talk” is for “vibraphone with junk on it,” as Yoshinaga laughingly described it, the bars layered with paper, cans, cymbals and bells, drawing from the practice of prepared piano. Many people, seeing a vibraphone, would expect something jazzy, but what comes out of the instrument is very different. And on marimbas, they’ve arranged neoclassical piano works by Igor Stravinsky. Now that they are in the same city, Yoshinaga and Arney rehearse every day, at their studio space in the Quixotic Building, across the street from the Kauffman Center. While many of their current projects began with East Coast connections, they’ve started collaborating with fellow Kansas City–based artists and organizations as they develop work for audiences here. “I would love to have that feel of community and I think there’s room in Kansas City, new music–wise,” Yoshinaga said. Watching Arx Duo perform can be a hypnotic experience: There’s a sense of harmony to Yoshinaga and Arney’s movements, an obvious awareness of each other’s presence in a way that seems choreographed but stems from a natural synchronicity. You see the evolution of that sympathy of styles, a cohesion as the two musicians go, as Arney describes it, “moving from note to note or drum to drum with a similar ‘arc.’ ” “It’s a very physical instrument, and if you move completely different you probably wouldn’t be playing very tight,” Yoshinaga said of the marimba. “I feel like we are just one percussionist with four hands.” Arx Duo 7:30 p.m. Thursday, January 18, at 1900 Building, Mission Woods

Wednesday, January 17, and Thursday, January 18 Final Fantasy is 30 years old, and the Kansas City Symphony plays selections with projected scenes and composer Nobuo Uematsu in attendance. Helzberg Hall, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts Friday, January 19 Boston Camerata’s Play of Daniel resonates in a tumultuous political and social environment with a restaging of this medieval play that speaks truth to power. Friends of Chamber Music | Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral Saturday, January 20 Violinist Maxim Vengerov returns to Kansas City after two decades away, with a program of shatteringly virtuosic works. With pianist Roustem Saitkoulov. Harriman-Jewell Series | Folly Theater Sunday, January 21 Unity Temple’s chamber music series goes on with singer Jennifer Weiman and pianist Jordan Voth this month. Unity Temple on the Plaza Sunday, January 21 2Cellos, a Croatian-Slovenian cello duo, got its break on YouTube playing pop and rock covers and now sells out concert halls and arenas worldwide. Sprint Center Friday, January 26 Pianist Llŷr Williams plays titans of the repertoire. Friends of Chamber Music | Folly Theater Friday, January 26 Park University’s International Center for Music presents faculty members Ben Sayevich (violin) and Lolita Lisovskaya-Sayavich (piano). 1900 Building Friday, January 26, Saturday, January 27, and Sunday, January 28 Kansas City Symphony plays Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 for the first time, adding this monumental undertaking to its repertoire. Helzberg Hall, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts Saturday, January 27, and Sunday, January 28 Lyric Opera of Kansas City’s Exploration Series presents Laura Kaminsky’s As One, a chamber opera exploring the transgendered protagonist’s self-actualization. Michael and Ginger Frost Production Arts Building

the pitch | January 2018 | pitch.com

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film

dunkirk

Alienations and Other Delights for movie characters having a very hard time, 2017 was a very good year. by Eric MElin

“The world is built on a wall. It separates kind. Tell either side there’s no wall, you bought a war.” — Lt. Joshi (Robin Wright), Blade Runner 2049 The best movies of 2017 were those that in some way acknowledged the societal walls that either materialized or became more fortified after President Donald Trump was elected. We’ve lived with walls a long time, of course, but one of the elements that makes the medium of film so special is its uncanny ability to put an audience in the shoes of a person on the other side of a given barrier. That insight has rarely felt more crucial than it does right now. We’ve just lived through a year of monumental disillusionment. From Charlottesville to Las Vegas, we’ve felt fear, anger, bafflement. We’ve questioned our collective perception of reality, seemingly no longer able to agree how to define truth. It would be easy to look to Steven Spielberg’s The Post — a movie rushed into production only months ago, riding timely political themes (a president bent on limiting freedom of the press, powerful men bullying a woman) — for reassurance. Too easy, it turns out. With its self-congratulatory tone, The Post comes across as a relic, a prestige package produced by Hollywood liberals and designed to safely reaffirm what half its audience already believes, while condescending to the half it’s trying to persuade. Watching it gave me no relief from this year’s exhausting cacophony. Not that succor is the point of moviegoing. But when our realest shared experience becomes one of alienation, the dearth of purely escapist picturemaking feels lazy, if not grotesque. My 12 favorite movies of the year

were bold, even extreme in their storytelling. They were stories about people who don’t fit in but are searching for meaning anywhere they might find it. For characters having a very hard time, 2017 was actually a very good year.

of believability. Yet Three Billboards finds unexpected shades to go with its broad strokes, becoming an incisive exploration of guilt and grief, and building to one of the most dramatically satisfying endings of the year.

10. The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro’s lush, 1960s-set romantic fantasy cleverly turns inside out the notions of what Americans of the era considered “normal.” Yes, there’s a married dad with an off-the-shelf nuclear family, but he’s also a sinister government agent (Michael Shannon) with some unchecked kinks. Meanwhile, our protagonists are marginalized and living on the fringe of society but remain capable of joy. The Shape of Water uses an easy-to-mock premise — a mute woman falling in love with a mysterious fish-man creature — in witty, unexpected ways, and it doesn’t condescend to any of its figures. Gorgeous production design and lived-in performances from Sally Hawkins and Richard Jenkins elevate this adult fairy tale, which swells with empathy and passion.

8. A Ghost Story Grief also hovers throughout David Lowery’s fourth film as writer and director, as the ghost of a dead man (Casey Affleck) haunts the house he lived in with his wife (Rooney Mara). Less a genre film than a remarkable piece of high-concept experiential cinema, A Ghost Story creates and sustains a mood of mystery and stillness that encourages reflection. (It shares this in common with 2017’s best film.) That’s saying a lot, considering that the main visual image of the movie is an inherently silly one — an enormous white sheet draped over a person. Lowery gives it gravity, and the conceit itself becomes everything, taking us on a journey that reminds us what a small part we play in the grand design of the world.

9. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri What seems to be plucky tenacity reveals itself to be seething, blind rage from Frances McDormand’s grieving mother of a murdered teenager, in this tragicomic rural morality play. Writer-director Martin McDonagh crosses the line of acceptable behavior more than once, taking McDormand’s antihero into some truly dark places and risking the audience’s patience. Likewise, Sam Rockwell’s simple-minded cop with a hair-trigger temper walks his own tightrope

Loaded with uncomfortabLe truths about race in america, Get Out is aLso wiLdLy entertaining.

7. Call Me By Your Name Phantom Thread These two beautifully wrought movies may seem light years away from the big themes examined so far on this list, but when the vagaries of the human heart are detailed with such precision, there’s plenty of anger and pain involved. Luca Guadagnino’s comingof-age gay drama, Call Me By Your Name, is set in the Italian countryside of the 1980s and features no small amount of relatable detail for anyone who can recall the pangs of first love. Paul Thomas Anderson’s lovely Phantom Thread is a muted romance for con-

the pitch | January 2018 | pitch.com

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film

trol freaks, filled with quiet desperation and 1950s couture. It’s no surprise that Thread’s Daniel Day-Lewis turns in a towering performance (reportedly his last), but the real discoveries here are Vicky Krieps, who plays Day-Lewis’ not-so-fragile muse, and Call Me By Your Name’s Timothee Chalamet, whose character’s aggressive behavior is a cover for his inexperience. 6. The Killing of a Sacred Deer Mother! With the deeply disturbing follow-up to 2016’s most audacious film, The Lobster, writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos has firmly established himself as the leading voice in absurdist nightmare scenarios. In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a fatherless boy (Barry Keoghan) insinuates himself into the life of a cardiovascular surgeon (Colin Farrell) and threatens to upend his family’s future. Like Three Billboards, there is a demand for justice. Taking its inspiration from numerous Greek tragedies and playing out its central dilemma in the most pragmatic fashion, Deer is a chilling indictment of modern life. Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! is a similarly coldhearted slice of metaphorical terror, starring Jennifer Lawrence, but the execution is decidedly more frenzied. Both films offer biblical allegories designed to assault and challenge, but Lanthimos is more focused than Aronofsky, who favors the kitchen-sink approach. 5. Get Out Without spoiling the hilarious, brutal twist lurking at the end of Jordan Peele’s audacious directorial debut, it’s worth noting that it’s just the final surprise in a film full of them. Loaded with uncomfortable truths about race in America, Get Out is also wildly entertaining. Peele begins by exposing the “noble white people” premise of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? for the horrific situation it is by simply telling the story from the black man’s point of view. Daniel Kaluuya puts on a brave face as his new girlfriend’s parents pat themselves on the back for being so progressive, but the interloper begins to believe there’s something more sinister at play at the white family’s estate. The brilliance of Get Out is partly due to Peele’s unrelenting commitment to showing us the emotional truth of a lifetime of discrimination, but he also turns the familiar conventions of modern horror films against his audience, illuminating a final observation that rings so true, it’s hard to even call the movie a satire. 4. Good Time The street smarts displayed by small-time Queens criminal Connie Nikas (a never-better Robert Pattinson) in this gripping, stressful cinematic experience are formidable. And his seat-of-his-pants choices also say a lot about the shitty stereotypes that persist in today’s “woke” culture. The New York–based

Good Time

GhosT sTory

indie filmmaking team the Safdie brothers follow Connie’s desperate flailing with a kinetic energy that rarely lets up. Although Good Time works 100 percent as a genre film, Pattinson’s misplaced sense of righteousness and the film’s refusal to back down from ugliness make the whole bigger than the sum of its expertly staged parts. 3. Colossal With the #MeToo movement exposing decades of sexual assault and discrimination against women by powerful men, there’s no better time to revisit the most misunderstood and mismarketed movie of 2017. Colossal is ostensibly a Being John Malkovich–like take on kaiju monster movies — except that it’s not. It’s really about an alcoholic party girl (Anne Hathaway) who finds herself under the thumb of yet another abusive creep. Jason Sudeikis embodies the kind of entitled white-male resentment that’s boiled so prominently to the surface since Trump’s candidacy stoked its long-simmering fires. The fact that many who saw the film never saw his bullying tendencies coming show just how big a blind spot we have for this kind of behavior. Spanish writer-director Nacho Vigalondo has created a genre mash-up like no other, but there’s a lot more on Colossal’s mind than giant monsters destroying South Korea. Like many of 2017’s best, though, it’s a tough go for literalists. Getting hung up on the mechanics of how the monster-mirror works is a mistake, and would mean denying yourself one of the most insightful character studies of the year. 2. Dunkirk A visceral World War II epic, Christopher Nolan’s 65mm, IMAX-projected Dunkirk utilized the large-scale format of a movie screen as no other film this year managed. Sure, there were explosions, but they weren’t there just because big-budget filmmaking these days seems to require explosions in order to get people off the couch and into a theater. Every bullet and shell instead served

an expertly calibrated piece of subjective filmmaking that emphasized personal experience over cookie-cutter “inspiration.” In telling the story of the evacuation of trapped Allied troops from a beach in France, Nolan jettisoned the typical histrionics that mark most Hollywood war movies. No, it’s not easy to get a solid grasp on all the 20-some characters trapped in this pressure cooker. Yes, some of the dialogue is tough to understand. I’ll bet it was during those six days, too. Nolan’s unique, three-part narrative structure gives the story deeper dramatic irony, while ace cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema conjures a bevy of poetic images to represent so many of the terrified shared experiences — cowardly, tragic, heroic — during this defining moment in history. 1. Blade Runner 2049 The most monumental cinematic achievement of 2017 was one nobody seemed to have asked for: Denis Villeneuve’s stunning, and stunningly relevant, sequel to 35-year-old sci-finoir classic Blade Runner. The movies, and the real world, had spent more than a generation growing beyond the self-contained “future” of Ridley Scott’s original — a drama first and an action movie a distant second — in which artificially intelligent replicants are virtually indistinguishable from humans. Yet Ville-

neuve’s follow-up bravely resuscitates the methodical, art-house pacing of the first film and asks the audience to consider tough questions about the nature of humanity, the delusions of desire and what constitutes a soul. Ryan Gosling’s replicant, K, is programmed to hunt other replicants and to obey his commander (Wright), but he wants to be special, just as any human does. He is constantly reminded, however, that he’s not even human. He lives in isolation, save for a hologram girlfriend (Ana de Armas) who exhibits humanlike traits herself. A revelation causes the invisible wall that separates human from replicant to come tumbling down — and comes with a mystery about K’s own existence. Harrison Ford’s supporting turn is among his strongest performances, and no expense was spared for the striking production design work that undergirds every detail in cinematographer Roger Deakins’ breathtaking compositions. If you look only at the box office numbers, this huge gamble — a $180 million sequel to a bygone theatrical failure — was a major loss. Yet every frame of this gorgeous epic justifies the endeavor and argues for its inclusion in cinema’s top rank. If our longing for meaning goes hand in hand with our fear that the truth is worse than we know, Blade Runner 2049 is a movie not just for this fragmented moment but for all time. pitch.com | January 2018 | the pitch

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BEER IS BETTER WITH FRIENDS

the pitch | January 2018 | pitch.com

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ReD DeATH

Monday, January 1 Red Death, Division of Mind, Altered Beast, Contrast, Devil’s Den Hardcore has a long history of both ignoring mainstream media and being ignored by it. Red Death and some of its friends have recently begun to change that. The Washington, D.C., crossover thrash band, alongside hardcore-punk peers such as Pure Disgust, has made its presence felt on NPR’s website and at an impressive handful of mainstream rock publications such as Revolver. Red Death returns to Kansas City armed with the album that spawned this latest wave of coverage, the relentless and acclaimed Formidable Darkness. Joining the bill are Richmond’s Division of Mind and three local heavy hitters, Altered Beast, Contrast and Devil’s Den. (Aaron Rhodes)

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pitch.com | January 2018 | the pitch

PITCH_41-42,44_Events January.indd 41 Pitch_01-18_48.indd 41

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the pitch | January 2018 | pitch.com

PITCH_41-42,44_Events Pitch_01-18_48.indd 42 January.indd 42

12/20/17 2:48 9:04 PM AM

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the pitch | January 2018 | pitch.com

PITCH_41-42,44_Events Pitch_01-18_48.indd 44 January.indd 44

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WANTED OLD JAPANESE MOTORCYCLES KAWASAKI Z1-900 (1972-75), KZ900, KZ1000 (1976-1982), Z1R, KZ 1000MK2 (1979,80), W1-650, H1500 (1969-72), H2-750 (1972-1975), S1-250, S2-350, S3-400, KH250, KH400, SUZUKI GS400, GT380, HONDA-CB750K (1969-1976), CBX1000 (1979,80) CASH!! 1-800-772-1142 1-310-721-0726 usa@ classicrunners.com

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CALL (888) 833-8875 VISIT ELDERSTORE.COM pitch.com | January 2018 | the pitch

Pitch_01-18_48.indd 45

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LOCAL 910 912

LEGALS Legals

$99 DIVORCE Simple, Uncontested + Filing Fee. Don Davis. 816-531-1330

1100

HOUSING/RENTALS

1102 Apartments for Rent

2000

EMPLOYMENT

9000

AUCTION DATE: 1/31/18

2022 Computer/Technical

9016 Licensed Massage & Spas

Software Developer (Kansas City, MO): Create and maintain educational software programs. Bachelors in Comp. Sci. or Comp. Engineer.+2 yrs exp as software dev. or comp. sys. admin. in edu. org. Mail res.: Frontier Schools, Inc, 30 W Pershing Rd Ste 402 Kansas City, MO 64108, Attn: HR, Refer to Ad#AA.

Alexis Massage

4000

WEATHER PERMITTING

HEALTH/

The following vehicles will be sold at public auction on Wednesday, January 31, 2018 unless claimed by owner and all tow and storage charges are paid in full. For information, please contact Insurance Auto Auction at 913-422-9303.

10am-6pm 7 days a week $60 Complimentary Water 913-387-4818

BUY, SELL, TRADE,

KS-KCKS | $515-$615 913-299-9748

4028

HEAT & WATER PAID... NO GAS BILL! KCK25 ACRE SETTING. 63rd & ANN, 5 minutes West of I-635 & I-70 One bedroom $505; Two bedroom $620. No pets please. You CANNOT BEAT this value! Don’t miss out on this limited-time offer! Call NOW! MUCH NICER THAN THE PRICE!

Miscellaneous

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

7000

$400-$850 Rent 1 & 2 Bedroom Apartments & 3 Bedroom HOMES.

816-753-5576

Colliers International, EHO

CALL TODAY!

Classifieds

500

MUSIC/MUSIC ROW

7004 Musical Instruction/ Classes

VALENTINE NEIGHBORHOOD

BUY|SELL|RENT

Piano, Voice, and Guitar lessons

available from Professional musician and Instructor. Instructor teaches in a fun and meaningful context from ages 4 to the young at heart. Sessions are a half-hour and an hour. Students who sign up before February will receive $5 off. For more info. please call/text Kathleen (913)206-2151 or email:Klmamuric@yahoo.com

502

ADULT

Adult Employment

BACCALA’ STRIP CLUB NOW HIRING DANCERS Contact Frank 7pm-3am Mon-Sat 816-231-3150

1/2 month off special 1 bed. | 1314 SQ. FT. $1375 available Jan. 5th 2 bed. 2 bath | 1477 SQ. FT. $1515

816-741-5040 | 2109broadwaylofts.com

NEWto see& what RESALE ALL AREAS | ALL PRICES Want your Short Sales-Foreclosures-Condos Townhomes-Single Family Homes.

CALL NOW

home is worth?

Sharon Sigman, rE/maX STaTELinE 913-488-8300 or 913-338-8444 www.FormLS.com

Family Owned for Over 20 Years

Hydroponic, Aquaponic, & Aeroponic Systems

STUDIOS, 1&2 BEDROOMS

• All utilities included • Off Street Parking • Laundry Facilities 816-531-3111 • Huge Windows 1111 W. 39th St. • High Ceilings KCMO

Something for everyone!

Gifts & Decor Swords & More

Best Kratom Prices in Kc! Loyalty program for Kratom cBD products • Smoking accessories • Metaphysical Essential Oils • Swords • Knives, Figurines

mOn-Sat 10am-8pm

913.782.4244 Sun 12pm-6pm

123 S. mur-Len, OLathe, KS 66062

Mon-Sat 10aM-6pM Year-roundgarden.com

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

YR MAKE/MODEL

VIN#

1998 AcurA 3.0cL 2008 VoLVo Xc70 2010 ToYoTA cAmrY 2005 VoLKsWAgEn TouArEg 2010 HonDA ciVic 2013 HYunDAi sonATA 2004 VoLKsWAgEn TouArEg 2007 ForD EXPLorEr sPorT TrAcK 2008 HonDA ciVic 2016 KiA souL 1995 BuicK PArK AVEnuE 2009 PonTiAc g8 1998 BuicK rEgAL 2006 cHEVroLET AVEo 2005 KiA rio 1998 ForD croWn VicToriA 2006 VoLVo Xc90 2002 LEXus Es300 2013 nissAn murAno 2009 cHEVroLET imPALA 2011 cHEVroLET mALiBu 2002 nissAn ALTimA 2003 AcurA mDX 1999 ToYoTA 4runnEr 2009 ToYoTA cAmrY 2007 miTsuBisHi gALAnT 2008 HYunDAi sonATA 2010 DoDgE cHArgEr 2005 sATurn VuE 2001 nissAn FronTiEr 2017 TAo TAo 150cc 2008 inFiniTi g37 1991 ToYoTA cAmrY 2000 isuZu roDEo 1985 oLDsmoBiLE ToronADo 2005 cHEVroLET coBALT 2001 DoDgE grAnD cArAVAn 2004 HonDA PiLoT 1995 HonDA AccorD 2004 cHEVroLET mALiBu 2004 DoDgE sTrATus 2014 nissAn sEnTrA 2004 ForD rAngEr 2008 cHEVroLET uPLAnDEr 2003 nissAn XTErrA 2005 KiA sorEnTo 2005 DoDgE DAKoTA 2007 cHrYsLEr 300 2010 cHEVroLET EQuinoX 2010 mErcurY mArinEr 2007 gmc YuKon 2008 ToYoTA scion Tc 1995 ForD EconoLinE 2008 mErcurY miLAn 2007 cHEVroLET TAHoE 2011 ForD Fusion 2015 ForD Fusion 2016 KiA ForTE 2013 HYunDAi AccEnT 2000 cADiLLAc DEViLLE 2003 PonTiAc grAnD Am 2000 ForD F150 2014 nissAn ALTimA 2004 VoLVo s60 2003 AcurA mDX 2002 ForD EXPLorEr 2001 cHrYsLEr PT cruisEr 2004 mini cooPEr 2017 PoLAris rZr 1984 TrAiLEr TrAiLEr 2010 KiA ForTE 2001 nissAn FronTiEr 1996 mAZDA B2300 2005 KiA rio 2001 BuicK LEsABrE 2001 ForD EscorT 2000 oLDsmoBiLE ALEro 1997 sATurn sL2 1999 HonDA cr-V

19uYA2258WL007601 YV4BZ982681035525 4T4BF3EK5Ar070348 WVgBg77L65D009827 19XFA1F51AE051113 5nPEB4Ac4DH757203 WVgcm67L04D029626 1FmEu31KX7uA14790 2HgFA16518H334031 KnDJn2A29g7829975 1g4cW52K3sH641361 6g2Er57779L181984 2g4WB52K9W1490351 KL1TD56646B529904 KnADc125756359001 2FAFP71W8WX127600 YV4cZ592961288380 JTHBF30g625036205 Jn8AZ1mu7DW200412 2g1WT57K291116168 1g1ZD5E73BF399820 1n4AL11D52c114408 2HnYD18673H518381 JT3Hn87rXX0224625 4T1BE46K39u313152 4A3AB56F07E056909 5nPET46F68H320969 2B3cA4cD9AH177886 5gZcZ53435s808528 1n6ED26YX1c303738 L9nTELKD1H1052566 JnKcV64E88m120851 4T1sV21E3mu326546 4s2cK58W0Y4357572 1g3EZ57Y9FE339310 1g1AL12FX57589133 2B4gP44r41r229795 2HKYF18504H500241 1HgcD5630sA107788 1g1Zs52F74F165541 1B3EL36X54n379624 1n4AB7AP3En854421 1FTYr15E84PA96363 1gnDV33198D177098 5n1ED28T83c699137 KnDJc733655432354 1D7HW48n25s224414 2c3KA43r37H829081 2cnALFEW2A6400108 4m2cn8H79AKJ11757 1gKFK63827J184956 JTKDE167880225851 1FTHE24Y7sHc25469 3mEHm07Z78r663944 1gnFc13c77r279344 3FAHP0HA8Br192434 3FA6P0g72Fr293407 KnAFK4A66g5617251 KmHcT4AE2Du420164 1g6KD54Y5Yu259262 1g2nV12E53c316460 1FTPX17L2YKB33309 1n4AL3AP3En217681 YV1rs61T342363538 2HnYD18673H518381 1FmZu73K02uD09637 3c8FY4BB41T636254 WmWrE33454TD82555 3nsVFE927HF802563 uF1624rB000115 KnAFW4A33A5065435 1n6ED26YX1c303738 4F4cr12A1TTm48417 KnADc125256365885 1g4HP54K21u265015 3FAFP13P31r169117 1g3nF52E5Yc329409 1g8ZK527XVZ114643 JHLrD1868Xc008675

Many of these vehicles run and drive. If you are looking for cheap transportation, don’t miss this auction/sale. We welcome all buyers. Terms of auction: All sales are “as is” “where is”. No guarantees or warranties. Paper work to obtain new title will be $75.00 Per vehicle. No guarantee that paperwork will produce title.Bidding will be number only. Terms are cash or certified check. Vehicles must be paid for in full at end of auction. No exceptions. All sales are final. No returns.

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

the pitch | January 2018 | pitch.com

pitch.com | MONTH 2017 | THE PITCH

Pitch_01-18_48.indd 46

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David M. Lurie

816-221-5900 www.The-Law.com

pitch.com | January 2018 | the pitch

Pitch_01-18_48.indd 47

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TRIBAL SEEDS

“ROOTS PARTY”

WITH THE ORIGINAL WAILERS AND THE EXPANDERS

STOKLEY

HIGH VALLEY

OF MINT CONDITION

FEBRUARY 15

FEBRUARY 10

JANUARY 19

IN THIS MOMENT

THE WITCHING HOUR TOUR WITH P.O.D., NEW YEAR’S DAY & DED

FEBRUARY 17

AARON LEWIS

SONGS AND STORIES TOUR FEBRUARY 28 & MARCH 1

WALK OFF THE EARTH

ERIC JOHNSON

MARCH 14

MARCH 23

TICKETS ON SALE NOW

Tickets available at VooDooKC.com or Ticketmaster.com/voodookc or by phone at 1-800-745-3000. Located minutes from Downtown Kansas City. Unlimited Free Parking. All shows are 18 & up.

Know When To Stop Before You Start.® Gambling Problem? Call 1-888-BETSOFF. Subject to change or cancellation. Phone and online orders are subject to service fees. Must be 21 years or older to gamble, obtain a Total Rewards® card or enter VooDoo®. ©2017, Caesars License Company, LLC.

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