The Pitch: January 2020

January 2020 I FREE I THEPITCHKC.COM

The Kansas City climbing community is scaling up.

BY EMILY COX

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Discover Queen Nefertari’s tomb, one of Egypt’s greatest archaeological treasures, and the richness of everyday life from 3,000 years ago.

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CONTENTS

32 ARTS

THE PITCH

Publisher Stephanie Carey Editor in Chief David Hudnall Digital Editor Kelcie McKenney Staff Writer Emily Park Contributing Writers Traci Angel, Liz Cook, Riley Cowing, Karen Dillon, April Fleming, Roxie Hammill, Libby Hanssen, Deborah Hirsch, Dan Lybarger, Aaron Rhodes, Barbara Shelly, Nick Spacek Little Village Creative Services Jordan Sellergren Jav Ducker Contributing Photographers Zach Bauman, Chase Castor, Joe Carey Graphic Designers Austin Crockett, Jake Edmisten, Lacey Hawkins, Jennifer Larson, Katie McNeil, Danielle Moore, Gianfranco Ocampo, Kirsten Overby, Alex Peak, Fran Sherman Director of Marketing & Promotions Jason Dockery Senior Multimedia Specialist Steven Suarez Multimedia Specialist Becky Losey Account Manager Rebecca Watson Director of Operations Andrew Miller Multimedia Intern Hannah Strader Design Intern Jon Tinoco

CAREY MEDIA

Chief Executive Officer Stephanie Carey Chief Operating Officer Adam Carey

VOICE MEDIA GROUP

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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.

COPYRIGHT

The contents of The Pitch are Copyright 2019 by Carey Media. No portion may be reproduced in whole or in part by any means without the express written permission of the publisher.

The Pitch 1627 Main St., #600, Kansas City, MO 64108 For information or to share a story tip, email tips@thepitchkc.com For advertising: stephanie@thepitchkc.com or 816-218-6702 For classifieds: steven@thepitchkc.com or 816-218-6732

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THE PITCH | January 2020 | thepitchkc.com

Wall Art Andy Goldsworthy’s Walking Wall approaches its final resting place at the Nelson.

BY KELCIE MCKENNEY

34 High/Low

Chamber music and video games collide in “A New World: Intimate Music from Final Fantasy”

BY LIBBY HANSSEN

36 MUSIC

20 ZACH BAUMAN

6 LETTER

A Note from the Editor

BY DAVID HUDNALL

7 NEWS

Streetside What’s coming and what’s going in KC retail, food, drink, and real estate.

BY DAVID HUDNALL

8 #MarchesSoWhite

The Reale Womxn’s Rally aims to host a more inclusive Women’s March.

BY KELCIE MCKENNEY

10 Home Free

With the passage of its Tenants Bill of Rights, the activist group KC Tenants has scored a historic win for renters in the city.

BY EMILY PARK

12 FEATURE

At Scale All strapped in for the great Kansas City climbing renaissance.

BY EMILY COX

20 CAFE

Heavy and Light Come for Fox and Pearl’s airy and Instagrammable interior design, stay for the masterful meats. Or vice versa.

BY LIZ COOK

26 FOOD

New Year, New Food New options for dinner (and lunch) (and drinks) abound in 2020.

BY APRIL FLEMING

28 EAT

Eat This Now Bolognese Fries at Ravenous

BY APRIL FLEMING

Welcome Home A whirlwind year for The Greeting Committee wraps up with a hometown January show at the Uptown.

BY NICK SPACEK

38 Huge in KC

Local Nineties cult fave Giants Chair returns with its first new music in over two decades.

BY NICK SPACEK

40 SAVAGE LOVE

Open Ended Power dynamics (and imbalances) in non-monogamous relationships.

BY DAN SAVAGE

42 EVENTS

January Calendar Where to go and what to see this winter.

29 DRINK

Drink This Now The Winter Latte at Second Best Coffee

BY APRIL FLEMING

30 PAGES

Good Westport People An offshoot of Mills Record Company, Wise Blood Booksellers is open and slinging new and used books.

BY DAVID HUDNALL

“CLIMB EVERY MOUNTAIN”

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LETTER

JOIN US IN THE NEW YEAR

EDITOR’S NOTE The first thing I ever wrote for The Pitch was a 150-word blurb about the B-movie actor and director Bruce Campbell. He was coming to town to screen a new film.

This was in 2005. I had recently graduated from college and spent the following six months unemployed. The future was not looking particularly bright. A staffing agency eventually placed me at a large corporate law firm known for representing tobacco companies, pharmaceutical firms, and defense contractors. The firm’s office, then as now, was in a tall building on Grand near Crown Center. You know the one. I did not do much at this job. Some days, they would hand me a black Sharpie and a folder filled with documents, and I would be instructed to redact specific words. Other days, I’d perform light data entry. But most of the time, I would report to work and nobody would ask me to do a single thing. Entire days would pass without anyone uttering so much as a word in my direction. It was nice, in a way. But it didn’t seem sustainable. Sooner or later, somebody was going to wonder aloud what that guy with the bad haircut was doing there. And then where would I be? I was a half-employed English major with no marketable skills.

So I started writing.

Over the next year, I contributed several more blurbs to The Pitch’s calendar section—we called them “shorties” then—and some small music pieces, too. I recall interviewing Bob Saget at one point. I was starting to get the hang of whatever this thing was, maybe. But I wanted to live in a bigger city. So I moved away for five years. When I came back to Kansas City, in 2010, The Pitch hired me to be a music blogger. Then I became the music editor. Then I started writing about business and crime and politics and all the rest of the things that happen inside a city. Two years ago, when Stephanie and Adam Carey bought The Pitch, they asked me to be the new editor. I’ll always be grateful to them for that, and for believing in the continued importance of the long-running magazine you hold in your hands—40 years old this year.

This is my last issue as editor of The Pitch. I’m moving to Arizona at the start of 2020 to become the editor in chief of Phoenix New Times, a muckraking city paper I’ve admired for years. (As of press time, the Careys haven’t yet hired my replacement, but look for news on that soon.) It is bittersweet leaving both Kansas City and The Pitch, a publication that’s so entangled with

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THE PITCH | January 2020 | thepitchkc.com

my own view of myself that I sometimes struggle to differentiate between the two.

(Perhaps that’s a sign this is a good time to leave.) Most of the best people I know I have met through The Pitch: coworkers, fellow journalists, sources, subjects, freaks. Thanks to you all for making my life in Kansas City so much richer. (Not financially, of course.)

Stay in touch; I’m on Twitter.

I remember the day that dinky little Bruce Campbell piece ran. It was a Wednesday in August. The Pitch hit the streets every Wednesday back then, and there was a Pitch box around the corner from the law firm’s office, near one of the parking garages we temps were forbidden from using. Around lunchtime, I took the elevator down and checked the box, but the glass was clear—the new issue hadn’t yet arrived. I slunk back upstairs and pretended to work for a bit. Around three in the afternoon, I tried again, and this time as I approached I could see fresh paper in the window of the box.

The cover story was a David Martin piece about Missouri legislators outlawing fully topless dancing in the state, a ban that remains in place to this day. Of course, I did not read David’s piece until much later.

Instead, I flipped furiously to the calendar section, in search of my shortie about a guy who had just made a movie called Man With The Screaming Brain. And there it was. And there was my name underneath it. I read it, and then I re-read it, and then I read it again, grinning like a dope out in the scorching summer sun.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to accept that most achievements aren’t as satisfying as you expect them to be while you’re working toward them. You go for a nice dinner and move onto the next thing. But seeing my name in print, in The Pitch, was different. I was high for weeks. I think it’s because, for the first time in my life, I felt connected to the city. Being in The Pitch— whether you were the one writing or the one being written about—meant you were part of the larger conversation happening in Kansas City. It meant that somehow, in some small way, your ideas mattered.

What a thrill that is. What a caper this life in journalism is. What a profound joy to share it with you all.

Thanks for reading, David Hudnall Editor in Chief

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WHAT’S COMING AND WHAT’S GOING IN KC RETAIL, FOOD, DRINK, AND REAL ESTATE.

BY DAVID HUDNALL

Kansas City, Missouri is on its way to becoming the first major U.S. city with zero-fare bus service. In early December, Mayor Quinton Lucas and the city council unanimously passed a resolution directing the city manager to fund fare-free public transportation in the next fiscal year budget. The city has about two months to figure out where to find the estimated $8 million required to pay for the lost revenues.

Meanwhile, the new Prospect Avenue MAX bus line is already free. The route— which goes from 75th Street to downtown and offers free wi-fi—began running in December and won’t charge fares for at least its first three months. City officials hope the transit line will increase economic activity at businesses along the East Side corridor.

The Kansas City Chiefs have a new radio home. After 30 years at 101.1 The Fox, Chiefs games next season will be broadcast at 106.5 The Wolf. So much wildlife on the local airwaves.

The Arthur Bryant’s Barbecue at the Legends in Wyandotte County has closed.

That leaves only the 18th and Brooklyn location still open (though it seems to be doing just fine).

Rockstar Burgers owner Brian Smith was finally arrested in early December, following months of rumors and stories of assault, gun violence, and other unseemly behavior

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Smith was charged with assault and armed criminal action, but notably is being held without bond. The restaurant, opened in 2016, has also closed.

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#MARCHESSOWHITE THE REALE WOMXN’S RALLY AIMS TO HOST A MORE INCLUSIVE WOMEN’S MARCH. BY KELCIE MCKENNEY

In January 2018, Randy Fikki’s daughter asked him why other cities in the U.S. were holding Women’s Marches but not Kansas City. It had been a year since the original Women’s March brought over 10,000 people to Washington Square Park, near Crown Center, to protest Donald Trump’s inauguration. So Fikki, a reverend at Unity Southeast, a church on KC’s East Side, decided to plan a last-minute march from Brookside to his church.

The following year, he did so again, this time with help from Paula Neopte, a member of Fikki’s church, who stepped up as the official planner. But by then people

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THE PITCH | January 2020 | thepitchkc.com

had begun talking about why a man was organizing women’s marches—and, furthermore, why these marches seemed so white.

The events were empowering. But to some, they also felt exclusionary, leaving out (or at best tokenizing) the transgender community, non-binary community, and women of color.

Neopte says that, in planning the 2019 march (which was held at Unity Temple on the Plaza), she reached out to multiple women of color in the community, including Justice Gatson, a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Reale Justice Network. Gatson declined to

participate, saying that if Fikki and organizers would work with them over the next year and demonstrate that they actually wanted to support women of color outside the context of the march, then she would consider helping in 2020.

“I didn’t see the inclusion of trans people and their voices, I didn’t see the inclusion of black people, and I didn’t see the inclusion of brown people,” Gatson says. One Struggle KC, a black-led coalition of KC activists, also declined to participate in 2019, for similar reasons.

The 2019 Women’s March forged ahead, and as an attendee it appeared diverse. Fran

Marion, of Stand Up KC, and Sheri Purpose Hall, a spoken word artist, were speakers at the event, along with then-Mayor Sly James.

“We felt like we had a good representation in terms of the folks that we had [speaking],” says Nepote. “It was an election year, so that was really cool that we had Alissia Canady there, Jolie Justus, Sharice Davids— that was amazing.”

Gatson points out that all but one member of the 2019 organizing team were white. Maite Salazar, a nonbinary community activist who is running for the 5th District seat in the Missouri House of Representatives in 2020, says people of color are often approached late in the planning process for events like these—long after their input could shape them.

“Every time there’s a big event in Kansas City, I get that last minute message of, ‘Hey, we really want your support,’” Salazar says. “‘We really want you to do this, and we want you to come speak at this.’ And it’s like, ‘Are you looking at my body of work as a human being, or are you looking at my skin color?’” Salazar says.

Fed up with feeling like an afterthought, Gatson this year decided to organize her own march, the Reale Womxn’s Rally. She assembled a diverse group of planners that includes Salazar; Jen Harris, a queer activist and performing artist; Planned Parenthood organizer Leslie Butsch; Beccah Rendall, of Showing Up for Racial Justice and Kansas/Missouri Dream Alliance; and Maddie Womak, the founder of Barrier Babes, an organization that brings “unapologetic education” about sexual health to the Midwest.

“We’re tired of hearing from white women,” Womak says. “We don’t need that.

Like, we know we get paid less than men do. That’s a known fact amongst all women identifying people.”

Until November, it was looking like Kansas City would be home to two competing women’s marches. But after learning of the Reale Womxn’s Rally, Neopte and Fikki opted to cancel their event. It’s not entirely amicable.

“I do believe our planning committee was diverse and inclusive, and we wanted to build on that this year,” Neopte says, adding that “some who are criticizing us for not being inclusive chose not to participate on the planning committee, even though they were invited to be a part of the leadership.”

Regardless, the Reale Womxn’s Rally will be held on January 18, though at press time the location was still yet to be determined. (Check the Reale Justice Network Facebook page closer to the event.)

“I believe it is truly being created from the heart and soul of the community,” Salazar says. “It’s something that the community needs instead of it being handed down to us. We’re creating it ourselves. And I always think that’s really beautiful.”

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9

NEWS

New Mayor Quinton Lucas was an early ally of KC Tenants.

HOME FREE WITH THE PASSAGE OF ITS TENANTS BILL OF RIGHTS, THE ACTIVIST GROUP KC TENANTS HAS SCORED A HISTORIC WIN FOR RENTERS IN THE CITY. BY EMILY PARK

Tiana Caldwell had never been involved in civil activism of any kind until a little over a year ago.

The 42-year-old had more pressing concerns. In the spring of 2018, Caldwell was diagnosed for the second time with ovarian cancer. Soon, she was unable to work. She fell behind on rent. In late 2018, Caldwell, her husband, and her son were evicted from their home. In addition to losing their residence, having an eviction on their record made it difficult for the Caldwells to find a new place to rent. When they finally did find housing, sewage poured from the pipes in the shower the very first night they moved in. The health department eventually deemed the home uninhabitable. The Caldwells spent the next six months living in hotels until finding a permanent place to live in the summer of 2019.

Early on in this process, when they had not yet been evicted, the Caldwells came across some information online that had been compiled by Tara Raghuveer, an activist and researcher then living in Chicago. Raghuveer’s research found that an average of

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THE PITCH | January 2020 | thepitchkc.com

42 Kansas City residents were evicted from their homes every day. The Caldwells reached out to Raghuveer and discovered that she was planning a move back to Kansas City, her hometown, where she hoped to organize a movement focused on housing issues in the city.

Hardly a year later, the group Raghuveer founded and directs, KC Tenants, is an inescapable force in local politics. In December, with the help of new Mayor Quinton Lucas (whom they supported in the 2019 mayoral election), KC Tenants pushed through a Tenants Bill of Rights, a historic piece of housing policy that would have been unthinkable in Kansas City just a few years ago. Tiana Caldwell was not only among the first of a group that now counts roughly 250 Kansas Citians as members and claims to have connected with over 18,000 renters in the city. To Caldwell’s surprise, she’s also become one of its leaders.

“I’ve realized strengths I didn’t know that I had,” Caldwell says. “Before [KC Tenants] I probably would have cowered at the

thought of speaking in front of a group of people. Now it’s become a normal thing for me. It’s taught me how much I care about other people. It’s taught me how policies work, about the hidden doors that aren’t public. I see things for what they are, but it also makes me feel empowered. Because there is a way to change things, and I had not realized that.”

•

•

•

Raghuveer moved back to Kansas City at the beginning of 2019, and the first KC Tenants meeting was held in February. Only 12 people showed up. But slowly the ranks grew.

New members began contacting people about their rental experiences through social media, by contacting people associated with eviction court cases, and by walking door-todoor. When the group’s first public rally was held, in March, KC Tenants had grown to 50 members. Not content to simply hold marches and protests, Raghuveer and her team began plotting how to change actual housing policy at the local level.

The answer seemed obvious: a municipal election was coming up in the summer.

KC Tenants launched an aggressive public campaign, demanding answers from candidates about their positions on various housing issues. The group then put together a voter’s guide based on those responses. It was

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viewed online over 5,000 times, KC Tenants says. On election day, Lucas, the group’s preferred candidate for mayor, emerged victorious, as did several other council candidates who had committed to the KC Tenants housing platform.

“Nobody that was running for office was even talking about housing, or housing rights, or tenant rights, or anything,” says James Owens, a leader in KC Tenants and— like Caldwell—a first-time community activist. “By the end of the election they were all talking about housing rights or tenant rights to the point where our current mayor—by the time he was elected—was talking about how he wanted housing to be his legacy in Kansas City.”

With the election behind them and a seeming commitment to their cause from Kansas City’s elected officials, KC Tenants launched a specific campaign for a tenants bill of rights in the city.

To develop it, members formed a strategy team of close to 20. They spent hundreds of hours drafting the plan—gathering input primarily from the very people who would be most affected by changes in housing policy in the city. Several members of the group shared problems with housing units infected with mold, roaches, bedbugs, rats, and other horrendous health hazards. One tenant leader had explicitly asked her landlord if the unit

NEWS

she was moving into had any prior issues; she was told no, but found out after she moved in that the place had a history of bedbug infestations. Others spoke of the weight of having previous arrest, conviction, or eviction records that made it challenging to find safe and accessible housing in Kansas City. One tenant leader, Quadafi, served 22 years in prison. Since his release in August of 2019, he hasn’t been able to find housing.

“I live in my car even now,” Quadafi says.

“It’s cold. It’s scary sometimes. I was released and told to go do something productive. I came out the door getting involved with organizations, trying to help, trying to aid, trying to assist, and every time it came down to personally being alright, I was turned down, kicked to the curb because of a prior conviction. Each time this happens it takes a little piece of my dignity away.”

It took KC Tenants leader Robert Richardson two years to find a place that would rent to him in Kansas City after he was released from a nine-year sentence. Richardson points out that he has the privilege of being a “well-educated, clean-cut, white male.”

“When I met Tara,” he says, “she said, ‘We need to change the way we treat people of all backgrounds in this city, because if it happens to you, it happens to everybody.’”

After the group identified the problems it wanted to address, Raghuveer and several leaders took those concerns to lawyers—even several landlords—and began the process of putting together a piece of legislation to take to the council.

“The tenants actually wrote this bill of rights,” says Janis Deveny, who owns and manages two rental properties with her husband. “They would ask me, ‘What do you think of this?’ And I’d say, ‘This one’s not gonna fly,’ or ‘Yeah, this one will.’”

They ended up with 12 separate pieces of legislation, which they then narrowed down to one resolution and two ordinances (only one of the ordinances ultimately made it before the council). Then they took it to the mayor and council to see which parts would hold up, and what might need to be amended. “[Their approach] is a throwback to how democracy is supposed to work,” says Third District Councilman Brandon Ellington, one of KC Tenants’ champions on the council.

“If you look at all of the movements when it comes to so-called ‘minority issues’ or ‘issues of the oppressed people,’ they always start at the grassroots organizing level. And then they use that organizing to effectuate law.

And I think that’s what we’ve seen here.”

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Not everybody was on board. Many property owners in the city took issue with the tenant’s bill of rights package and the way the process unfolded.

At the December 2 housing committee

meeting where the package was discussed, both sides of the issue were given 30 minutes to voice their thoughts, with one minute allowed per person. Kim Tucker, executive director of the Mid-America Association of Real Estate Investors, says it was too rushed.

“It was fair on both sides, but no one really got the chance to share their thoughts in depth,” says Tucker. “Why are we rushing it?

Can we step back, bring both sides to the table, and come up with something that would actually address the problems of evictions and affordable housing?”

The opposition took issue with several parts of the package. Stacey Johnson-Cosby, a neighborhood leader and realtor who owns and manages 20 rental properties with her husband, found redundancy in most of the legislation. She says the role of the new

because of 16 different protected traits that include race, gender expression, and victims of violence. (Every single protected class in the ordinance represents a member of KC Tenants.)

Property owners say the laundry list of protected traits makes it risky to own property in Kansas City, because they can now easily be accused of discrimination that could result in loss of their license.

“If we have, say, a pedophile who’s served their time,” Johnson-Cosby says, “and they come to me and say, ‘Stacey, I want to rent your property,’ and everything else about them is OK, but because I know there’s a family next to them with children, if I say ‘No, it’s not going to work here,’ they could then accuse me of discriminating against them because of their criminal history.”

“Their approach is a throwback to how democracy is supposed to work,” says Third District Councilman Brandon Ellington.

CHASE CASTOR

division duplicates processes other departments—codes enforcement, health, neighborhood preservation—are already in place to do. “The way some of the housing providers or landlords are looking at it, it’s just one more place that tenants can go to complain about us,” Johnson-Cosby says, “and we think that’s unnecessary.”

Raghuveer counters that placing everything under one department enhances the enforcement mechanism, because the division will have the power to suspend or revoke a property owner’s license to do business in Kansas City. She says this will have a targeted impact on out-of-state corporate landlords who largely don’t seem to mind the $500 violation fine previously in place.

KC Tenants’ bill of rights requires landlords to disclose any past issues with their rental unit; to help tenants estimate the cost of utilities; and requires increased notice to a tenant before entering their unit. It also bars landlords from discriminating against tenants based solely upon record of prior arrests, convictions, or evictions, type of income, or

Raghuveer points out that the new Division of Housing and Community Development will consist of an appeals board for landlords to go to in cases like that.

“I hope that we are able to sit down and amend it where it has errors,” Tucker says.

Property owners weren’t the only ones who made compromises. The original package included an ordinance that would have established a right to counsel for low-income tenants, with the city paying the cost of representation. That piece never made it to committee.

Tenants also suffered a loss when Lucas added a line to the ordinance during the committee hearing in early December: “In no event shall an owner be compelled to participate in an otherwise voluntary benefit or subsidy program.” Without that line, landlords would have been banned from discriminating against tenants who use federal vouchers like Section 8 as a source of their income to pay for rent. But under the amended ordinance, landlords retain the right to refuse tenants because they hold a voucher.

“The addition of that one sentence changed thousands of lives,” Raghuveer says.

“On something like source of income discrimination, 13,000 people get some form of housing assistance in Kansas City. That’s 13,000 people who would have been impacted by this.”

The smell of mold permeates through the home of D. Gillespie, a KC Tenants leader who was directly impacted when the mayor wrote that line into the ordinance. The roof of her home leaks frequently and soaks the insulation in the attic. There are holes in the walls and cabinets where the rats that infest the home have chewed their way through the cherry wood. She’s thrown away countless pieces of furniture and appliances the rats have ruined, and her kitchen is piled high with stacks of plastic containers that protect her food from the rodents.

Gillespie says her landlord is well aware of the problems with the house, but he does nothing to fix them. Because she lives on Section 8 vouchers, she’s limited in the places she can go to rent housing. Gillespie feels like she has no choice but to stay where she’s at. Her mold and rat-infested home is better than no home at all. She was homeless for six months before she found the home she lives in now.

“With them not accepting source of income, I don’t know what I would even do if I had to move,” says Gillespie, who’s on Section 8 vouchers because of health issues that prevent her from working. “I’ve already been rejected by people who don’t accept Section 8.”

The tenants debated introducing an amendment before the full council to add the source of income discrimination protections for voucher holders back to the ordinance. In the end, the group decided it was too risky.

Source of income discrimination will be one of the next battles KC Tenants goes on to fight for with city council.

“We’re going to come back for it,” Raghuveer says, citing that 15 states and 60 cities across the country already ban source of income discrimination.

The concessions did little to dampen the enthusiasm in the KCMO Council Chambers on December 12. The tenants bill of rights passed with only a few dissented votes.

Whoops, hollers, and chants of “This is what democracy looks like!” rang out in the room.

The following day, U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders tweeted his support. “Congratulations to the advocacy work done by @KCTenants to help pass a Tenants Bill of Rights in Kansas City,” Sanders wrote to his 10 million followers. “Safe, decent, and affordable housing is a human right, not a privilege.”

“This is such a huge, huge thing,” said Caldwell, bursting with joy after the vote.

“We have revolutionized the way that policy is made.”

“This is our first bite at the apple,” Gillespie added. “We’re just getting started.” thepitchkc.com | January 2020 | THE PITCH

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FEATURE

Up the walls at ROKC North.

AT SCALE ALL STRAPPED IN FOR THE GREAT KANSAS CITY CLIMBING RENAISSANCE. BY EMILY COX

If, a year ago, you drove past the low-slung, red-brick building that today houses Sequence, you’d never have guessed that, soon, all day long, people would be learning how to scale boulders inside it. But to Graham and Dara Hess, co-owners of the climbing gym, this Crossroads structure was worth moving all the way from Utah for.

“We sifted the country for this building,” Graham says.

The couple—avid climbers—had been living in Salt Lake City for over a decade, working grown-up jobs in marketing and law. But they longed to open their own climbing gym. The only question was where. So they started touring potential cities—a process that took two years in all.

They looked in Omaha, Orlando, Memphis, Indianapolis. They wanted a downtown location, a place where people could walk and bike, and where real estate was still af-

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THE PITCH | January 2020 | thepitchkc.com

fordable enough to run a viable business.

Eventually, Graham made his way to KC for a visit and spotted a promising building at 1710 Washington, just a block west of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.

For Dara, who is from L.A., Kansas City seemed about as off the radar as she could imagine. “I was like, ‘Kansas City?

Where is that exactly?’” she says. But when she came out the next weekend and saw the space, she immediately understood. The brick, the light, a barrel roof providing just enough space to build climbing walls. It was the one.

“As soon as I drove onto the street,” Dara says, “I was like: Holy shit, this is it.”

The Hesses convinced the building’s owner, who was planning to turn it into offices for leasing, to sell them the building.

Then Graham called up Nick Orange, whom he’d randomly met two years before in Black

Velvet Canyon, in the climbing mecca of Red Rocks, Nevada, and asked Orange to be his head setter—essentially, the person who designs the routes at a climbing gym.

Orange was working in Boston at the time.

But he packed up and moved to KC. “I knew that Graham was going to design the best bouldering gym that I’d ever see,” Orange says, “and that’s completely the case.”

Sequence, the gym Graham has dreamed of building for nearly two decades, opened in February of this year.

Natural light pours in through the glass-paneled garage doors; despite being full of several continuous, angular climbing walls that rise to the ceiling, the atmosphere is airy. Plants are abundant. There are separate rooms for fitness and yoga. On a recent afternoon, a cluster of twenty-somethings stood around in soft, rubber-soled climbing shoes, looking up at a wall covered in brightly colored holds. “Left hand on that crimp,” one climber said to another, in a bit of collaborative brainstorming. “Bump up your right.”

Interest in climbing is swelling all

CHASE CASTOR

across the country, owing to documentaries like the Oscar-winning Free Solo and the highly Instagrammable qualities of climbing gyms (they tend to be colorful) and the great outdoors (self-explanatory). According to the Climbing Wall Association (CWA), the indoor climbing gym industry, currently estimated at $618 million, will be worth a billion dollars by 2021. This summer, climbing will be an Olympic sport for the first time.

There are now seven climbing gyms in the Kansas City area. Four of them, including Sequence, have opened in just the last four years. Comparable cities like St. Louis and Columbus have only four such gyms apiece. In December, the sport’s up-andcomers and future champions competed at Sequence, as they hosted USA Climbing’s youth regionals, the first time it’s been in Kansas City.

“Kansas City was in a climbing deficit,” says Andrew Potter, owner of RoKC, a local chain of climbing gyms. But, in recent years, “People saw a market opportunity and jumped on it. That’s what I’ve done.”

This month, Potter will open his third (and largest) gym in Olathe. Still, Potter

FEATURE

The Hesses moved from Utah to KC to open Sequence.

says, he regularly encounters Kansas Citians who are surprised to hear that running a climbing gym is a sustainable business enterprise.

“They look at me like I’m crazy,” Potter says. People tend to “think that I own, like, a plywood wall that I put up in my barn, and we throw a bunch of mattresses from an alleyway on the floor. But this is a legit operation. I’m going to have almost 100 employees this year. This isn’t a small company.”

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The confusion is not totally unwarranted. Kansas City isn’t known for being near things people historically climb—such as a mountain.

And, in fact, apart from Cliff Drive and some boulders scattered throughout Swope Park, options are limited in Kansas City.

One must drive at least a couple hours to find substantial rock climbing opportunities.

Still, there’s been a small but active community of climbers here for decades.

The Kansas City Climbing Community

CHASE CASTOR

THERE ARE NOW SEVEN CLIMBING GYMS IN THE KC AREA.

(formerly the Kansas City Climbing Club) formed in 1983 and gathered at places like the Westport outdoors shop Backwoods and a Salvation Army in Independence. (The group was permitted to build a climbing wall on the side of the latter, but the building has since been torn down.) Jim Grace, who moved to KC after a stint as a park service ranger out west, was an early member.

This was before the internet; climbers found knowledge and camaraderie through clubs like KCCC. There were no climbing gyms in Kansas City at the time, because climbing gyms were not a thing anywhere.

“We’d climb roadcuts,” Grace recalls.

“We climbed on the sides of people’s houses.

Anything we could find to climb to train. A guy built an ice wall on the side of his house, he put up hay bales and flooded it and we climbed out there. I built a water-gripping system in a big tree and it would form a 20 foot ice column, and we would climb on that.”

Many members of the KCCC were also instrumental in creating local rock climbing routes. Route development might include looking at maps (these days, satellite imag-

es) to identify the location of new potential crags (climber-speak for an area of outdoor climbing), clearing trails, brushing dirt and moss away from rock, identifying climbable routes, and putting in permanent bolts and anchors for sport climbing.

In the 1970s and 80s, climbers were doing what’s now called traditional climbing, or trad. As they climb, climbers place gear to which they clip their rope intended to catch them if they fall. The 90s brought the spread of sport climbing, for which bolts are permanently affixed to the rock for climbers to attach their rope to. In the late 90s and early 2000s, Grace says there was an “organic blast-off ” of new climbing as local climbers developed routes across Missouri.

Two prolific route developers were Jesse Gross and Jeremy Collins. (Collins was profiled by The Pitch in 2003, as he climbed on buildings downtown and underneath highway overpasses, trying not to get caught.)

Gross first climbed when he was a student at Mizzou in 1997. “I instantly was completely addicted,” he says. Back then, the traditional way of climbing was to scale rocks with a mentor who shows you the ropes (as it thepitchkc.com | January 2020 | THE PITCH

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FEATURE

Sarah Kraly (left) and Andy Rhoades of the Kansas City Climbing Community. “It’s hard to climb in Kansas City,” Kraly says, “so we have to band together.”

CHASE CASTOR Opposite: Potter, of ROKC, now has three climbing gyms in the area.

were). “And he’d learned from his mentor,” Gross says. “It was almost like an oral history, or knowledge that was passed down.”

Gross and Collins teamed up in the early 2000s in Kansas City, exploring the area, mapping crags, and sharing all they learned via word of mouth, often at KCCC meetings. (Collins later produced the rock climbing guide book Mo Beta, the current go-to for climbers in Missouri.) Over time, they began to see more and more people at crags they’d pioneered.

“It felt good to have provided a place for people to go and climb,” Gross says. “All of a sudden, this outdoor climbing community started developing.”

Route development is still happening across Missouri, and even in Kansas, with adventurous climbers seeking out cliffs with new physical puzzles to solve. But while there’s a lot of rock in Missouri, it isn’t always of great quality. As Jim Karpowicz writes in the introduction to Mo Beta, “Judged by most commonly held standards in the rock climbing community—rock quality, access, climbing style, quality of the moves—Missouri falls way short.” For

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THE PITCH | January 2020 | thepitchkc.com

WHERE TO CLIMB INDOORS IN KC Ibex Climbing Gym 801 NW S Outer Rd Blue Springs, MO 64015 climbibex.com

RoKC North 1501 Howell St North Kansas City, MO 64116 climbkc.com/nkc

Monster Mountain 9063 Bond St, Overland Park, KS 66214 emeraldcitygym.com/monstermountain-wall

RoKC Underground 3150 Mercier St. Suite 641A Kansas City, MO 64111 climbkc.com/underground

Apex Climbing Gym 7200 W 106th St Overland Park, KS 66212 apexclimbinggym.com

Sequence Climb 1710 Washington St Kansas City, MO 64108 sequenceclimb.com

RoKC Olathe 654 N Central St Olathe, KS 66061 climbkc.com/olathe

many, a big part of the draw around these parts is adjacency to Arkansas.

“There’s phenomenal, world class climbing in Arkansas,” says Graham. “For Nick [Orange] and me, that’s part of the excitement for us being here—that there’s this rad area that we get to help develop, and put up climbs and be a part of.”

Gross agrees. “You go to any crag in Colorado, and there’s just hundreds of people,” he says. But, “You can go to Arkansas and go to a world class climbing crag and have it all to yourself. And most of it’s really hard, really featured, steep, fun, gymnastic powerful climbing.”

Still, Collins—an old pro who estimates he’s created around 500 routes in his life (including 100 in Missouri)—is still at it in the Show-Me State.

“I thought I was done exploring scrappy Missouri cliffs, then I visited Monegaw Springs”—it’s about halfway between KC and Springfield—“on a tip for the book,” Collins says. “I put a season of energy in there ... It’s so much manual labor to develop crags [in Missouri], and it’s great to find something that really felt worth the effort.”

FEATURE

thepitchkc.com | January 2020 | THE PITCH

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FEATURE

Will Nagengast tries out moves on a recently cleaned and bolted climb in Missouri.

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Topographically, Kansas City may be less than ideal for rock climbing. It does, however, have plenty of buildings inside which a person might construct a gym. The current climbing craze that has taken root in the city might, in fact, be credited to the fact that we don’t have mountains. A 2015 article in Climbing Business Journal (it’s a thing, launched in 2013) observed what it called the Midwest Paradox: People want to climb, but there isn’t much in the way of mountains nearby. Thus, gyms grow in popularity.

Or, as Andy Rhoades, currently the secretary of the KCCC, says: “Our gym-to-crag ratio is out of control!”

Kansas City’s first commercial climbing gyms, Ibex and Monster Mountain, both opened in 1995. Those were the city’s only two climbing gym options for 18 years, until 2013, when The Cave opened in midtown KC (it was taken over by RoKC in 2018). In the early days of commercial climbing gyms— the first ever opened in 1987, in Seattle—they were a place for climbers to train in the off-

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ANDREW CONROY

season. These people largely got into climbing because they were already spending time outdoors. “The way we came to climbing,” Grace says, “is we started as backpackers and hikers, and then eventually got around to climbing.

So we were comfortable being outdoors and taking care of ourselves.”

These days, though, many people’s entire climbing life is indoors. With the majority of new climbers getting their introduction at a climbing gym, Grace says, “A lot of these people—and this is not a criticism—they will come out of the gym, and they’ve never camped.”

While there are no solid numbers on how many indoor climbers are also going outdoors, Graham and Potter estimate that perhaps 30 percent of climbers make it from gym to crag.

And most experienced climbers will tell you that indoor and outdoor climbing are almost different sports, with different challenges, requiring different skills and mindsets.

Despite all the changes in the climbing landscape, KCCC remains a vital resource for new climbers. The organization hosts biannual climbing trips that welcome newcomers.

Its fall trip in November 2019 drew around 30

climbers, about half of whom were climbing outdoors for the first time.

“The once niche that we fill that no other outlet fills,” says Sarah Kraly, treasurer of KCCC, “is getting people from the gym to the crag, because it can be really intimidating when you don’t know what you’re doing, or you don’t know anybody.”

“We are serving the people who are new and need that foot in the door,” adds Rhoades.

Both Kraly and Rhoades are examples of a new generation whose love of climbing introduced them to the outdoors, not vice versa. Rhoades had never been camping before her first KCCC trip. Kraly says, “Now I go camping like 30 days a year. Climbing has this byproduct of taking me to the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.”

But beauty has emerged inside gyms as well—particularly in terms of human relationships. Bouldering is especially social, as you’re not tethered to one partner. “You get to hang out and talk, talk through moves,” says Graham. “It’s not competitive. It’s a fun, collaborative environment.”

The climbing gym, says Kraly, “is the last outlet where you can go up to strangers, and

it’s expected and encouraged. People don’t feel this anywhere else.”

“It’s hard to climb in Kansas City,” Kraly adds, “so we have to band together.”

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It’s the Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving, and RoKC North is filled with families. Preteens swarm over the bouldering area. Kids eagerly use the autobelays (contraptions built to lower you safely when you fall) in the tall wall area. A handful of what might be called serious climbers work advanced routes with practiced technique, but today is mostly for the beginners.

Making gyms accessible to novices has been an intentional effort on the part of gyms and industry manufacturers. Easier routesetting, well-padded bouldering areas, and autobelays have dramatically lowered the barriers to entry. If you can climb a ladder, you can scale the beginner routes at a climbing gym.

RoKC is particularly emphatic about being a family-friendly gym.

“Birthday parties are a huge focus for us,” says David Van Volkenburgh, GM for

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RoKC Olathe. “All youth programming is, because that’s what’s building the climbing community: kids who are getting into it at an early age and sticking with it, and it becomes their life sport.”

While RoKC North can get a little chaotic with all those children, its new Olathe facility is better designed to accommodate them.

It offers child care so that parents have the option to climb unencumbered, and its two birthday party rooms have their own dedicated climbing walls—a decision also designed to help alleviate traffic on the main walls.

The Olathe RoKC is supersized for adults, too. (And seniors—some local climbers are in their sixties and seventies.) The North RoKC location has 10 autobelays; Olathe has 24. North’s climbing walls are nearly 40 feet tall; Olathe’s are 50. In addition to the climbing areas, Olathe also boasts 8,000 square feet of fitness activity—competitive, Potter says, with the offerings of any standard gym.

At the same time, he sees climbing as far more engaging than your typical workout.

Going into a regular gym, Potter says, “Most people are like, ‘I have one hour, I’ma set my phone up, I’ma turn my show on, I’ma get on the treadmill, and count down every second.’

They never get away from this—” he mimes staring at a phone screen. “Go look through the facility right now and see how many people are hanging out on their phones. They’re not. They’re climbing, they’re engaging.

Might be the first time in the day they’re not staring at a screen. The reason people fall in love with [climbing] is because you actually get focus pulled away from all the other garbage. This is a form of meditation.”

Graham at Sequence largely shares that view.

“If you’re not having fun, you’re not going to stick with it,” he says. “For the people that climb and stick with it, they love the movement—it’s infectious, they can’t wait to do it. They can’t wait to solve the puzzle. Maybe people don’t get that as much with counting to 20 with a weight.”

The physical breakthroughs experienced during climbing also often correlate to mental breakthroughs. After ten years of climbing, Dara Hess says, “I look at something and I say to myself, ‘There is absolutely no goddamn way I’m going to be able to do it— like, it’s physically impossible for me to do it.’ And then I do it. And that’s a breakthrough. Why did I limit myself mentally when physically I could do it? I just think that’s so cool.”

“For some, climbing will never be enjoyable,” says Potter. “But for those that don’t even realize it’s an option, climbing can dynamically change your life. You should climb just to know whether or not you should climb.”

New heights at Sequence.

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CHASE CASTOR

THE PITCH | January 2020 | thepitchkc.com

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CAFE

HEAVY AND LIGHT COME FOR FOX AND PEARL’S AIRY AND INSTAGRAMMABLE INTERIOR DESIGN, STAY FOR ITS MASTERFUL MEATS. OR VICE VERSA. BY LIZ COOK

In 2019, Kansas City’s restaurant scene felt like a Dickens novel. I couldn’t keep up with all the openings—until I couldn’t keep up with all the closings. The best of times, the worst of times.

Restaurant margins are always tight; this business has few safe bets. But if I were a betting woman, I’d bet on the success of Fox and Pearl, the new(ish) Westside restaurant helmed by Kristine Hull and chef Vaughn Good. Sure, the restaurant has great marketing and photo-friendly design and lots of influential fans. But its cozy-luxe style of cuisine also feels ideally calibrated for KC diners right now.

Good’s menu is highly meat- and smoke-centric (most dishes are cooked on a wood-fired hearth), and while most everything’s local and seasonal, few dishes feel offbeat or ostentatiously “chef-y.”

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THE PITCH | January 2020 | thepitchkc.com

In some restaurants, the pan-seared bologna ($15) would be a high-low wink drowning in self-conscious flourishes. Here, it’s an affectionate menu staple. There’s a housemade “yella mustard” with an astringent, primal burn. There’s a candied jalapeno cream cheese that leans into both sweet and heat with hedonistic joy. There’s the bologna itself—thick-sliced and rust-browned, twinkling with fat like confetti in a snowglobe.

That’s a vibe Good began to perfect at Lawrence’s Hank Charcuterie, a butcher shop and restaurant he operated from 2014 to 2018. I loved Hank and had high hopes for Good’s next act in KC. But he and Hull didn’t rush the transition. They opened provisionally in the quaint-crowded old Novel space on 17th Street while the buildout of their final Summit Street destination was underway.

The new space debuted in July, and that patience—and Hull’s enviable eye for design—paid off. Fox and Pearl is easily the most beautiful restaurant to open in Kansas City in the last year. At night, it’s sleek and romantic—shocks of neon glint off the old grid windows while man-sized plants flank banquettes like bodyguards. During brunch, daylight pours in with a cold, stately elegance, energizing the dark wood tables and cozy brick hearth. In the secluded basement lounge, white Christmas lights zag around bar shelves and low candles flicker with each bark of laughter or hiss of a record player spinning The Clash.

Service here is prompt and easygoing. I’ve noticed a growing trend of servers pouncing on you with questions—“HOW IS THAT FIRST BITE TASTING?”—as soon as you pick up a fork. But Fox and Pearl’s sharp servers have, for the most part, mastered the art of popping up when you need them and vanishing like Homer Simpson into the hedge when you don’t.

The menu is divided into small and large plates, and both sections are stacked with housemade terrines, pâtés, and sausages. For a light meal, snack on the smoked chorizo ($9), a plump and soft-textured link with a snappy skin and an assertive back-up

The open brick hearth showcases Fox and Pearl’s wood-fired cooking.

ZACH BAUMAN

dancer: spicy pickled cauliflower.

The potted cheese ($11), one of a few meatless plates, was a sleeper hit with the veiny sharpness of blue cheese and the pimento hue of a holiday cheese ball. The buttery, roasted garlic crackers reminded me vaguely of Chicken in a Biscuit. This is not a diss.

Those small plates feel designed for happy-hour grazing alongside one of bar manager Katy Wade’s cocktails. On my visits, the cocktail menu had something for every taste, from the easy-drinking Autumn Sweater ($11), which tasted like the sweet, cider-spiced victory of French-tucking a cable knit into your skinny jeans (fashion people: how?) to the Not That Kind of Witch ($12), which blended Linie aquavit, Strega, and Campari. The latter was challenging, abrasive, bitter, syrupy. It bossed me around and made fun of my shoes. I loved it.

Still, my favorite cocktail was the Give Me The Beet Boys ($11), a drink that deserves the “food-friendly” label typically reserved for wine. Beet-infused mezcal and aromatic byrrh complemented Good’s smoky, earthy cooking, while grapefruit and

CAFE

FOX AND PEARL

2143 Summit, (816) 437-7001 foxandpearlkc.com

Hours: Tuesday–Saturday: 5–10 p.m.

Sunday: 10 a.m.–3 p.m.

Prices: Small plates: $5–18. Large plates: $15–42. Brunch plates: $6–14, Cocktails: $9–12

Best bet: Sip a Give Me the Beet Boys and pick over some potted cheese and pan-seared bologna. Still hungry?

Order the rabbit pot pie.

Left: Ricotta-filled tortilla con la coda are swaddled in a sage and butternut squash sauce. Right: Bartenders build food-friendly cocktails behind Fox and Pearl’s white marble bar.

ZACH BAUMAN

Cinderblock French cider crisped up the drink.

At dinner, there’s reason to look beyond the meats and order one of the pastas.

I liked the tortelli con la coda ($16)—ricotta-filled noodles shaped like turkey necks.

The pasta was perfectly chewy, swathed in a dreamy butternut squash sauce with sage and smoked hen-of-the-woods mushrooms.

This dish was Thanksgiving in a bowl.

The beef and heritage pork Bolognese comes in two sizes ($15 and $25), but even the small was a generous enough portion (and rich with pork fat and parmesan). The penne in my bowl was a little soft, but the dish was otherwise Fox and Pearl concentrate: simple flavors, top-notch ingredients.

Sunday brunch offers a less expensive way to sample Good’s food and a good excuse to order the excellent Creole BBQ Bloody Mary ($9), which has a thin and garden-fresh mix. Brunch is also your only chance to sample the excellent, pillowy-soft ricotta fritters ($6; cinnamon-sugar donut holes that went to college) or the smoked beef belly pastrami ($14), which balances fatty-crisp morsels of meat with acid sparks

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If you’re fighting a hangover (or training for a marathon), order the braised pork burrito ($12), which packs an enormous chewy, toasted tortilla with pig and potato and white beans, then crowns it with a sunny egg. Pickled onions lighten this otherwise heavy dish; hunks of potato are crisp-fried so they never get sogged and sad. The arbol salsa that comes standard is good, but you’ll want a side of the house-fermented hot sauce ($1). Though the sauce changes semi-frequently, both of the varieties I tried on my visits were bright and complex.

Sometimes the menu’s simplicity backfires. The cornmeal pancakes ($12) on the brunch menu tasted flat by comparison, the grilled ham and apple compote too mild to seem exciting. And the burger ($14) on the dinner menu was grilled to order but bluntly salty, the Hemme Brothers Creamery cheddar pasted too thick for the other flavors (caramelized onion, stone-ground mustard) to come through.

At other times, attempts to complicate the dishes feel underdetermined. I adored the smoked pork terrine ($9) on its own but

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Top: Roasted parsley root and a blackberry onion jam energize the seared foie gras small plate. Right: The pan-seared bologna shares a plate with pickled egg and thick slices of buttermilk-dill bread.

ZACH BAUMAN

was confused by its presentation. The lightly crusted slice was draped over a buttermilk biscuit like a torch singer on a piano, another biscuit half-propped on one elbow nearby. I didn’t know what to do with all that biscuit. Was I supposed to eat it like a sandwich? You can add an egg for an upcharge if you want to smother the terrine’s subtler flavors—but why?

I was foiled again by my old enemy, Unnecessary Egg, with a small plate of seared foie gras ($18). The surprisingly loose foie arrived crowned with a runny quail egg.

The result was unctuous-on-unctuous, but all I tasted was the egg.

Most of the menu items feel more confident—like the great porchetta ($27, sadly now cribbed from the menu) which married alternately crisp-edged and butter-soft pork belly with lean and juicy loin. This is Aspirational Pork. Pork chops have posters of this porchetta in their dorm rooms.

Another menu celebrity: the rabbit pot pie ($25).

I was lukewarm about this dish when I tried an earlier version at Hank, but there’s nothing lukewarm about it now: the pie’s thick, savory filling is beautiful and smoky and hearty and Jesus Christ, volcanically hot. Saw into the shiny, honey-butter crust early to let the steam escape.

Your patience will be rewarded with glossy rabbit and mouthwateringly smoky cubes of ham.

For Kansas City’s upscale restaurant scene to thrive, it’s going to need standard bearers for both the out-there, Technicolor tasting menu and the nose-to-tail, Cowtown cuisine. Fox and Pearl is a strong contender for the latter.

Good does what he does with masterful technique, and he’s surrounded himself with people—in the kitchen, behind the bar—who do the same.

Vegetarians and thrill-seekers might not find much to tempt them at Fox and Pearl. But I can’t think of a restaurant more likely to convince food-fuss skeptics of the merits of fine dining.

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FOOD

NEW YEAR, NEW FOOD NEW OPTIONS FOR DINNER (AND LUNCH) (AND DRINKS) ABOUND IN 2020.

BY APRIL FLEMING

It’s not just a new year but a new decade. Will the local food and drink trends of today— food halls, arcade bars, combination gameand-nosh spaces (pickleball, volleyball), breweries, distilleries—still be en vogue in 2030? Will the planet be inhabitable? Nobody knows! But here’s what we’re keeping our eye on in the short term for 2020.

Westside, River Market, and Crossroads: KC’s newest tortilleria and mini-market Yoli Tortilleria will open its doors in the Westside sometime in early 2020, the first local eatery to offer Sonoran-style flour tortillas. Just a few blocks away, Fox & Pearl owners Vaughn Good and Kristine Hull, along with general manager and sommelier Richard Garcia, plan to open a dive bar called Low-Fi Lounge. Located next door to Fox & Pearl, it will offer natural wine boxes, wine magnums, and lots of mezcal.

Garcia is also planning to open a Westside wine shop dedicated to 100 percent low-intervention wines and natural wines. He says he aims to give it the feel of a record store, with a comfortable living room-like space for tastings and unique events.

In the Crossroads, Michael and Christina Corvino will fully open Ravenous, their new fast-casual burger-fries-shake joint, which will also boast ample outdoor seating, canned beer, wines, and batch cocktails. (It’s currently only available for takeout and delivery.) Star Bar + Rec, a massive outdoor rec center and bar complete with sand volleyball courts, is slated to open in the former Cherven Desauguste (right) and Mehret Tesfamariam are moving Mesob across the street.

ZACH BAUMAN

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THE PITCH | January 2020 | thepitchkc.com

FOOD

Kansas City Star offices at 18th and Grand.

(Construction here has been slow-moving though; this seems unlikely to open until fall.) In the River Market, Baramee Thai Bistro owners Nutnisa and Doug Hoffman plan to open a new Thai restaurant in the former Cascone’s location on 5th Street. It’ll be called Phikul Thai and feature a similar menu to Baramee. Expect it to be serving by summer. Finally, West Bottoms Whiskey, a distillery and cocktail bar at 13th and Hickory, hopes to be serving customers by the time you read this.

Midtown, Plaza, and South KC: In Westport, a significant wave of bar and restaurant development is underway, with several regional chains moving in. By spring, the Colorado-based company Atomic Provisions will open a 6,000-square-foot food hall of sorts at 42nd and Pennsylvania (across the street from Ça Va) that will include Denver Biscuit Company, a bar called Atomic Cowboy (which opens every morning at 8 a.m., serving breakfast cocktails), a pizza place called Fat Sully’s, and Frozen Gold, which

serves premium soft serve ice cream. Half a block away, in the former Doughnut Lounge space, Sweet Combforts will soon be selling Belgian “waffle pops” with savory and candy coatings; Wing Kitchen, selling yes, wings, will also operate in the same building. Tin Roof, a Nashville-based honky-tonk with Southern food and live music, is opening in the former home of the Foundry and Sailor Jack’s Snack Shack.

Finally, Snooze A.M. Eatery, another Denver transplant serving breakfast and booze, will open at 42nd and Broadway sometime this spring.

Chef Cherven Desauguste of Mesob has announced that he is moving his popular French-inspired Ethiopian-Caribbean restaurant to a more prominent location at 36th Street and Broadway (the former home of Krokstrom), and it should be open before spring. On the Plaza, Punch Bowl Social, a large arcade, restaurant, and bar concept, will open as the anchor tenant in the newly remodeled Jack Henry Building. Look for that in fall or winter of 2020. Robert Joseph and Erika Vikor of Banksia Bakehouse plan to open a second location of their Australian

bakery in the spring, as well as a Cantonese restaurant named Duck and Roll, at 48th and Main (across from the Plaza Library).

And the beloved Austin taco chain Torchy’s Tacos will be opening a location by summer in The Pavilion at Ward Parkway Center.

Johnson County In downtown Overland Park, DOP Donuts, a kid-friendly (and pet-friendly) outdoor coffee and donut shop is slated to open at 80th Street and Conser (no estimated opening date is available), while further south down 135th Street, Chicken and Pickle will open its second Kansas City location at Prairiefire (likely in the fall). Papa Keno’s will also be opening a new store at 148th and Metcalf that should be ready to go by March or so. In Mission, beer drinkers can look forward to the opening of Rock Creek Brewing Company, at Beverly and Johnson Drive. Nearby, early work on the long-suffering Mission Gateway project has begun, with celebrity chef Tom Collichio’s food hall in early stages of construction. For that, though, you’ll have to wait until at least 2021.

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EAT

Eat ThisNow Bolognese Fries at Ravenous

We wouldn’t necessarily expect a take on chili cheese fries from James Beard Award-nominated chef Michael Corvino. His Crossroads restaurant Corvino Supper Club and Tasting Room is known for progressive fare prepared with exacting standards. Recently, though, Corvino and his wife and business partner, Christina, opened Ravenous, a fast-casual joint connected to their marquee establishment. (It’s only open for take-out and delivery during weekday lunches until the spring.) And it turns out that Corvino can dream up craveable, snacky treats just as well as he can craft a precise tasting menu. In the case of his Bolognese fries, it’s all about that sauce—a meaty, umami-rich, super flavorful tomato gravy that Corvino also serves on fresh pasta in the supper club. It’s an involved process to make. He starts with a braised onion and garlic sofrito, adds bacon, beef short ribs and brisket, along with a savory beef and chicken reduction, red wine reduction, and house-stewed tomatoes. Then he gives it some heat with Calabrian and Thai chili oil, and a Vietnamese fish sauce and fermented rice koji. The sauce is then cooked for hours, imparting deep flavor and oh-my-god richness. For his Ravenous menu, Corvino slathers the Bolognese on to crispy, salty french fries, then dusts the whole thing with a layer of parmesan. You can try to just have a few bites, but the far more likely scenario is you staring at the bottom of an empty fry boat, wishing for more.

--April Fleming Ravenous. 1830 Walnut. orderravenouskc.com APRIL FLEMING

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DRINK

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Utilizing exceptional proprietary Costa Rican roasts and the city’s only Slayer espresso machine (it’s very nice), Second Best Coffee in Waldo has been a hit among KC coffee heads since it opened in 2014. Espresso shots and pour-overs are always a solid choice here, but the current winter menu includes several standouts. One is the 511, which features crushed ice, eggnog, Prototype espresso, and a white chocolate snow (there is also an eggnog version of this drink). But we keep returning to the Winter Latte, a shot of espresso, eight ounces of steamed milk, cloves, allspice, and a light dusting of nutmeg. The spices make for a deeply aromatic experience—one whiff (and maybe a sip), and you feel transported to the side of a fireplace in a very cozy home, even though you’ve just shuffled in from a parking lot at 85th Street and Wornall. --April Fleming

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GOOD WESTPORT PEOPLE AN OFFSHOOT OF MILLS RECORD COMPANY, WISE BLOOD BOOKSELLERS IS OPEN AND SLINGING NEW AND USED BOOKS. BY DAVID HUDNALL

They’ve been selling books at Mills Record Company for a few years now—a small, highly curated section of mostly music-related works, small press poetry, and progressive political stuff. Judy Mills, who owns the Westport record shop, and Dylan Pyles, who’s been working there since 2015, are big readers (they both have Master’s degrees in English from Kansas State University, though they received them a few decades apart), and in early 2018 they began talking about carving out a larger section for books in the store. Then, one day, Mills experienced what might be described as a divine moment of customer service.

“I sold an Anne Sexton and an Alan Watts at the same time,” Mills says, referencing the confessional poet and the Eastern scholar, “and I had an emotional, visceral feeling that I hadn’t had in a long, long time.”

She took it as a sign: What if we just opened a whole new bookstore?

As luck would have it, a cozy space at 300 Westport Road—just around the corner from the record shop—was coming up for lease. It seemed perfect. They jumped on it. The buildout took a little while, but as of

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THE PITCH | January 2020 | thepitchkc.com

Thanksgiving weekend, Wise Blood (a nod to the Flannery O’Connor novel of the same name) has been open and selling books to the public, with Mills owning the shop and Pyles managing it.

Inside, there’s a healthy indie bookstore mix—contemporary fiction and nonfiction, poetry, art books, graphic novels, a shelf for local authors. (They take special orders as well.) Wise Blood sells both new and used books, which notably aren’t divided into separate sections and instead sit alongside each other on the shelves.

“I’ve always wanted to see that in a bookstore,” Pyles says. “Inventory-wise, it’s a little tricky to navigate, but I think it’s worth it. When I lived in Lawrence, on my days off, I’d go to the [used shop] Dusty Bookshelf and then to the Raven [for new books]. I thought it would be cool if Kansas City had a shop with both of those in one place.”

Like Mills Record Company, Wise Blood aims to be a community space almost as much as it is a business. Pyles has as-yet-unfinalized plans for a nonprofit that would offer community education classes in specific areas of creative writing in a room

in the back of the shop, and an entire wall of Wise Blood is devoted to showcasing local and regional art (the current featured artist is Hubbard Savage). Readings and discussions will also be emphasized; Hadara Bar-Nadav, Jose Faus, and Jermaine Thompson held poetry readings over Wise Blood’s opening weekend, and authors Whitney Terrell, Robert Stewart, and Angela Elam were scheduled for a panel discussion about the literary tradition in Kansas City (though it was postponed due to a snowstorm).

As for the business model itself, Mills says her philosophy is informed by her experience running Mills Record Company since 2013.

“Something I think we do well at the record store is that we present the best variety we can, and then let customers help shape what the rest of it looks like,” she says. “I started out saying I was only going to sell new records. That changed pretty fast. So, I think the community will shape it, the audience will shape it, and the times will shape it.”

She continues: “We’re still learning.

Neither of us are expert booksellers. But I

Mills (left) and Pyles are at your literary service.

ZACH BAUMAN

READ UP Wise Blood.

300 Westport Road. feel like if you are passionate about something, and smart about it, and you engage with the community and let it become their location, then fill in the blank. Books, records, whatever. Your desire to please is what will come through.”

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ARTS

WALL ART ANDY GOLDSWORTHY’S WALKING WALL APPROACHES ITS FINAL RESTING PLACE AT THE NELSON. BY KELCIE MCKENNEY

In 2004, the Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy traveled to the Flint Hills of Kansas. Goldsworthy, who’s 63, builds site-specific installations—his work is particularly interested in natural landscapes and the passage of time—and he was erecting a 22 x 14 foot arch on the campus of Wichita State University. The arch was built from cuts of Flint Hills limestone, and during his time working on the “Wichita Arch,” as it was called, he began to notice commonalities between his native Scotland and this part of Kansas. Goldsworthy had grown up around stone workers and lamb farmers, and now he was meeting people on a different continent who practiced similar trades. Even the landscape was similar—the way people built stone walls that carved up the land.

More than a decade later, stone harvested from Flint Hills quarries has reentered Goldsworthy’s life. For the better part of the past year, Goldsworthy has been working at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art on a project called the Walking Wall. (Goldsworthy has a thing for walls; in 1998, he completed a 3,000 foot wall at Storm King

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THE PITCH | January 2020 | thepitchkc.com

Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley.)

Over the course of the installation, Goldsworthy has built, then torn down, then rebuilt a stone wall at multiple locations on the grounds of the museum: across Rockhill Road, in front of the Bloch Building entrance, over the roof, down a flight of stairs, through the sculpture garden, and into the museum itself, as a permanent sculpture.

“It was an idea that I’d had in some sort of form for a long time,” says Goldsworthy.

On a brisk day in November, the final phase of the installation was in process. A crew of workers was dissembling the wall in the northern part of the sculpture garden and pushing small wheelbarrows carrying up to 150 pounds of stone across the property toward a window outside of the Bloch Building. There was a subtle choreography to the proceedings: rhythmic and labored, but comfortable.

“The subtle genius of Andy is taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary,” says Steve Waterman. “It doesn’t hit you over the head—you have to engage a little bit.”

GABE HOPKINS

Waterman is deputy director of design and experience at the Nelson-Atkins, and he oversaw much of the logistics involved with the Walking Wall project—a particularly tricky bit of art to manage. In May, the wall stretched directly across Rockhill Road, from the sculpture park to the entrance of the museum, interrupting traffic for nearly three weeks. During the third stage of the wall, in July, workers covered in mud were a regular presence in the museum itself, pushing wheelbarrows full of rock across a little paper path on the museum floor. (The stone had to be transported in-

side the museum because it was the fastest and safest way to transport it to the staircase on the east of the museum, where the wall was built down the full flight of steps during the fourth stage of the project.)

Throughout the installation, the public was free to interact with Goldsworthy.

A huddle of neighbors would stand around the work, watching the crew carry stone.

Regulars started to stop by. At one point, Goldsworthy told Waterman that he didn’t know what to do with all the baked goods he was receiving.

Goldsworthy was surprised by how ac-

ARTS

GABE HOPKINS

commodating the museum was to his wild and difficult ideas.

“I think it is so indicative of the will and energy and open-mindedness and imagination of this institution,” Goldworthy says of the Nelson. “In any other place, there would be guards and people from the museum telling the public what to do and where to go, where not to go. There is none of that here.”

Goldsworthy has a team of trained British wallers who travel with him on projects like the Walking Wall, but he also insisted that artists and local craftsmen—

not big contractors—be involved in building and dismantling the Walking Wall. He wanted people moving stone with their hands, one at a time, using no more than wheelbarrows, shovels, and buckets. One of the locals chosen was Matthew Hayden, a metal sculptor who also has a landscaping and hardscaping business that occasionally repairs walls in Brookside.

“A lot of people would come up and wonder, ‘Why this is going on? Why are you doing this?” Hayden says. “It’s a dance. It’s also a performance. The song being performed is us moving this stone wall.”

“IN ANY OTHER PLACE, THERE WOULD BE GUARDS AND PEOPLE FROM THE MUSEUM TELLING THE PUBLIC WHAT TO DO AND WHERE TO GO, WHERE NOT TO GO,” GOLDSWORTHY SAYS. “THERE IS NONE OF THAT HERE.”

In the fall, a local pastor held a sermon on the wall. A meditation class met at the wall during each of its stages; they’d walk along the path from where the wall had last been, following the dead grass the heavy stone left on the museum’s lawn.

“It’s just had all these different kinds of responses, which I think have been amazing,” Goldsworthy says. “Certainly, it has taken me to territory that I never expected. And I can ask no more of a work of art than that.”

In two to three years time, Goldsworthy and the Nelson-Atkins are in talks of revisiting the project for an exhibit. Goldsworthy isn’t sure yet what the exhibit will look like, but he says he’s eager to return.

Today, the wall sits on the hill leading south toward the Bloch Building. A portion of it enters into the museum through a window, stopping in the atrium. In its final resting place, the journey of the wall is invisible, but the history isn’t.

“It has rested for several weeks between the stages, giving a chance to become even more timed into people’s minds, which makes the movement of it that much more poignant,” Goldsworthy says. “It is now ingrained in the memory of the people who live here will pass the story of it being here.”

ARTS

HIGH/LOW CHAMBER MUSIC AND VIDEO GAMES COLLIDE IN “A NEW WORLD: INTIMATE MUSIC FROM FINAL FANTASY.” BY LIBBY HANSSEN

You enter the Theater of Folly. Gatekeepers guard the portal. But you carry a tribute.

You present it to the guards. They let you pass, lead you to your throne. Now the real mission begins. You’re here to see a chamber music concert called “A New World: Intimate Music from Final Fantasy.”

Orchestras performing scores from well-known video games like the Final Fantasy series have been blowing through town about once a year of late, drawing sellout crowds and expanding the audience for chamber music in KC. “The audiences are some of the most appreciative and attentive audiences around,” says Mark Lowry, a local percussionist who often works with the national production companies that organize performances like “A New World,” helping them contract with local musicians. “They are totally into the games, and music is such an elemental part of that. They know every tune, know which characters are represented by every tune—

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THE PITCH | January 2020 | thepitchkc.com

it’s almost like playing for a very knowledgeable opera audience.”

“A New World: Music From Final Fantasy Volume II” is the latest installment of Final Fantasy concert music. Several of the touring video game music productions bring along flashing laser shows, 40-piece choirs, and huge screens showing clips from the games.

Not “A New World,” which arrives in KC at the Folly on January 17. (Coincidentally, “A New World” isn’t the only concert with video game affiliations happening in town this particular weekend. Lyric Opera of Kansas City commissioned a work from the versatile composer Laura Karpman, who scored the games Everquest II and Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom, for its Explorations Series production “…When There Are Nine” on January 18, which honors women’s suffrage and the ratification of the 19th Amendment.) In this show, the music itself is the primary focus. The album takes

LEANNE ARAYA

beloved themes from different games and presents them via an 11-piece ensemble with arrangements that range from symphonic to rock-driven to lounge-y jazz, mixing in duos, trios, and piano solos. Performing the music live requires a combination of classical skills—elegant sound, ear for balance, long and flexible phrasing—and “a sense of drive and rhythmic edge,” Lowry says. “It keeps you on your toes to know just what each phrase needs most.”

The original “A New World” concert came to Overland Park’s Naka-kon in 2016 and was performed by members of the Kansas City Symphony. For this performance, as last time, Eric Roth conducts the group, which includes ten local musicians and pianist Benyamin Nuss. (Roth is part of the father-son powerhouse AWR Music, spearheaded by Grammy Award winner Arnie Roth. AWR arranges, produces, records, and conducts these shows; Eric was last in town in August conducting the 40-piece orchestra for “Weird Al” Yankovich’s “Strings Attached” concert at Starlight Theatre.) Nuss, who’s just 30, has made a name for himself at the international level through his associations with video game music; he’s done solo albums featuring the work of Final Fantasy composers Nobuo

GET OUT “A New World: Intimate Music from Final Fantasy” Friday, January 17 The Folly Theater 300 West 12th Street Uematsu and Masashi Hamauzu.

For many, these game music concerts are their first symphonic experiences. But to think of the genre as a sort of stepping stone to more serious repertoire (as is often the case with “popular” versus “classical” marketing) is a disservice to the value game music has for folks. Neither does the genre require academic attention to legitimize it, even though the field of ludomusicology is steadily gaining traction in scholarship.

This is music that millions of people experience in their daily lives—unlike, say, a Hadyn symphony or Schubert art song. These works inspire people, enliven them. The music takes them to a new world.

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EXPERT SPEAKERS PANEL DISCUSSIONS VENDORS EXHIBITORS CERTIFICATIONS AFTER PARTY FOOD & REFRESHMENTS

BRING YO

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thepitchkc.com | January 2020 | THE PITCH

35

MUSIC

ELIZABETH MIRANDA

WELCOME HOME A WHIRLWIND YEAR FOR THE GREETING COMMITTEE WRAPS UP WITH A HOMETOWN JANUARY SHOW AT THE UPTOWN. BY NICK SPACEK

In 2014, Addie Sartino, Brandon Yangmi, Pierce Turcotte, and Austin Fraser were students at Blue Valley High School who had just started a promising indie-pop group called The Greeting Committee. Flash forward five years, and those young pups have grown from a local band into a national act that tours with heavy hitters like Rainbow Kitten Surprise, Bombay Bicycle Club, and, earlier this year, a monthlong stint opening for Hippo Campus. We spoke to Sartino by phone recently during a tour stop in Idaho about the Greeting Committee’s rise, its new EP, I’m Afraid I’m Not Angry, and the process of anchoring catchy, dancey tunes with such emotionally centered songwriting.

Just going through the song titles on the new EP—“Cry Baby” and “Simply Surviving” and “What If Tomorrow Never Comes?”—seems to suggest that recording the vocal takes might have been an emotionally draining experience. [laughs] Yeeeeaaah, I would say

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THE PITCH | January 2020 | thepitchkc.com

that it was. It also caught me at a time in life where—2019 has been a year of transition for me, and a lot of that caught up to me the week we were in the studio, so a lot of that week was filled with me being in tears. So that set it up nicely for those lyrics and those songs. It was somehow simultaneously horrible timing for my personal life, but also great, because it did, in some way, focus it on those vocal takes and the music, and really allow me to live in those emotions in the studio, which I think is something that can be hard to do. You know, the studio is this really forced emotional time, I guess, where you’re trying so hard to get perfection and to really catch lightning in a bottle, and that’s just not really how things work. I think, with the help of Jake [Luppen, producer and Hippo Campus member] and Caleb [Hinz, a Twin Cities musician, from the band The Happy Children], we got there more so than we ever have before.

Radio has been very good to the Greet-

MUSIC

GET OUT

The Greeting Committee Saturday, January 11 Uptown Theater

ing Committee. Both the Buzz and KJHK have spun the songs a lot—KJHK had you in for some in-studios, and the Buzz has brought you on for some live shows. It seems you were able to develop your live chops, as opposed to coming straight out of a Spotify or Soundcloud audience. I think we were really, really fortunate, right off the bat, to step into radio, and now, Spotify and Soundcloud. The new thing is to get onto Spotify playlists, and it’s nearly just as difficult as getting onto radio. I think Spotify playlists benefit you, because it boosts your monthly listeners, which can help create this facade of, ‘Oh, we’re big,’ when, really, something that the boys and I have learned, just from our previous touring history with other bands, is that’s not always entirely accurate. You can have a lot of Spotify streams but not be able to pull in a crowd.

And then, you can have not very many Spotify streams and be selling out venues. It’s this very weird balance where the numbers aren’t very accurate these days.

Where that support is really helpful is radio holiday shows or summer festivals or whatever it may be. We’ve been very fortunate to have the Buzz behind us, and even the Bridge and KJHK. In Minnesota, Go 96.3 has really championed our music. In Columbus, we have CD 102.5, and they’ve been awesome. It does help bring people into a show. If you get put into rotation on radio, it can make a difference, and we saw that with [TGC radio hit] “Hands Down,” as opposed to our second EP, which we put out and did not have a single that did very well. There was a difference there. And so, what I think the Greeting Committee has figured out is that we’re not a super radio-friendly band, actually. “Hands Down” was just a rarity, I guess, because “Hands Down” doesn’t fit with really anything else in our catalog. Which is fine—I love it for what it is, and we wrote it, and we’re proud of it, and it got us to where we’re going. I would say that one of best strengths is probably our live show, and so getting out and playing just as much as we can is how we’ve learned to get our following up, whereas other bands may have mega-suc-

cess on the radio, and that brings them in fans and whatnot. It’s a different path for everybody, but it’s definitely worth having every tool you can.

You all have been touring for a really long time. Did you start touring early on in high school, or did you hold off a bit until graduation? We started touring somewhat in high school. Our touring career has actually really picked up this year.

We started out with an Arkells tour, then we had our headline run, which was our first-ever national headline run, and that went really well. We were really grateful for that. Rainbow Kitten Surprise, Bombay, and Hippo Campus are three of my favorite bands in the whole world. I remember very vividly getting the call about Rainbow Kitten Surprise and just losing my mind that we were going to tour with these people— and, they’re just as phenomenal human beings. And Bombay Bicycle Club, we’ve had a song about them since the Meeting People Is Easy era, so that was a dream come true, as well. I would say this has been a game-changer of a year, in a way.

Your last big solo hometown show was a sold-out performance at The Truman in December 2018. You’ll be at the Uptown in January. Is it exciting to start out 2020 playing a hometown show? It’s very exciting, and I think it’s more of a great closing to this chapter than it is an opening. In 2020, we’ll go into writing the second record, so that’s going to be interesting. I don’t know if any of us have any idea what we want to do. I know what we did with the EP was that we set out to ignore everybody besides the four of us. I think [TGC debut album] This Is It came from a point of a lot of pressure to have a record that sounded a certain way or accomplished a certain thing. That wasn’t us consciously making that decision, by any means. I think that was something we realized in reflection, and so when we wrote I’m Afraid I’m Not Angry, we said, “Hey, let’s just do this [as] the four of us, in Austin’s basement, like everything else.” None of us wanted anybody else involved. We don’t want management’s opinion, we don’t want the label’s opinion, we don’t want anyone’s opinion except for what we feel and what we think, and I think that has allowed us to create a product that we are extremely proud of. I’m hoping the second record is just an extension of that, and that listeners get another growth spurt from us, and that we feel another growth spurt, as well. We’ll see where that takes us, I guess. I’m excited—2020 is going to be an exciting year of creating, and then hopefully, the back half is filled with another headline run. That would be my goal.

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MUSIC

PAUL ANDREWS

HUGE IN KC LOCAL NINETIES CULT FAVE GIANTS CHAIR RETURNS WITH ITS FIRST NEW MUSIC IN OVER TWO DECADES. BY NICK SPACEK

The original plan, says Scott Hobart, was to re-record Giants Chair’s second record.

This was Duane Trower’s idea. Trower, a longtime local sound engineer, had recorded Purity and Control the first time around, back in 1996. But it was the first album he’d ever done. He’d learned some things in the 20 years since. He thought he could do it better.

So Trower got in touch with his old pals in the post-hardcore trio—Hobart the frontman, Byron Collum on bass, Paul Ackerman behind the kit—and told them if they wanted to relearn those old songs, he’d be keen to take another crack at it.

“I was game,” Hobart says, seated in front of Parisi Cafe at Union Station on a break from his job designing sets at the Coterie Theatre. “I thought it might be fun.”

Then Ackerman suggested maybe Giants Chair should just write some new material. So in 2016, the band started working on some new songs for the first time in two decades.

Giants Chair’s ‘90s heyday was a brief

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THE PITCH | January 2020 | thepitchkc.com

but fruitful one, featuring two full-length records on Nebraska’s Caulfield Records, a fistful of seven-inch singles and splits, and tours with fellow Kansas Citians Boys Life.

Along with that band, Giants Chair was also contemporaries of local acts like Molly McGuire, Shiner, and Season to Risk—the socalled “Kansas City sound” that for a fleeting moment in time looked like it might be one of the many next big things after Seattle.

Though Giants Chair never made it up the majors, the band has retained something of a cult following, up to and including the members of Cave In, who covered “The Callus” on their Tides of Tomorrow EP. Giants Chair disbanded in 1997, after the tour for Purity and Control. “New stuff wasn’t really coming, and we didn’t want to force it into something less than vital to us,” Hobart recently wrote in a piece for the Talkhouse.

Ackerman moved to Washington D.C., where he joined former Boys Life members Brandon Butler and John Rejba to play in the Farewell Bend for a couple years. Collum re-

mained in Kansas City and played in the indie-rock act Doris Henson from 2002-2007.

Hobart also stayed in Kansas City, starting up the beloved honky-tonk act Rex Hobart and the Misery Boys—although he moved to Buffalo in 2005, while his wife went to grad school. By the time Hobart returned from Buffalo, three years later, Ackerman had also returned. Over the last decade, Giants Chair has played the occasional show, once every year or two, often some special occasion or benefit. But largely the band has been dormant.

Now, though, we have Prefabylon, a new Giants Chair album, which arrived in December, a full 30 years after Hobart, Collum, and Ackerman met one another as students at the Kansas City Art Institute in the fall of 1989. It’ll be familiar to fans of the group: post-punk emo tones, a touch of Midwestern twang.

“The music came pretty easy,” Hobart says. How about the words?

“The lyrics were a little bit more of a challenge,” he says. Hobart has been busy writing country songs for the last 20 years—a different animal. “That kind of stuff [country music] was just, gush in a journal forever, and then you kind of piece it together. Or, you practice enough, sometimes things were even more organic, in that you would be playing through the song for

the tenth time, and just some words would come out.”

Whereas with Giants Chair, he was aiming for songs with more of an anchor to them. And if there were any doubts as to whether or not Hobart still has something to say, the refrain in the song “Russian Racehorse,” leaves little doubt about it. Confusion is power! Hobart shouts repeatedly over instrumentation working hard and fast enough to give Helmet’s “Unsung” a run for its money.

“They’re not really narrative, but I think they have a little more cohesion in and of themselves, lyrically,” Hobart says of the ten songs on Prefabylon. “At first, I thought it was going to go down the easy path of obtuse, abstract lyrics. But I wasn’t feeling really passionate about that. I wanted to have something to say. I looked inside and said, ‘These are the things that are frustrating to me right now, and these are the things that music seems to vibe with.’ So, yeah: Some of it is due to frustration with politics, culture, [and] life in general as a 48 year-old.”

“But I was also just trying to rely back on the 30 year-old Scott who was just throwing stuff out there and seeing what sticks sometimes,” Hobart continues. “I feel that I, as a 48 year-old father of two, married for however long, have earned the right to be frustrated and express it.”

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THE PITCH | January 2020 | thepitchkc.com

Dear Dan: I’m a mid-20s cis straight man.

After my girlfriend and I finished college, she moved overseas to start her job. We’ve broken up twice and gotten back together twice. We are interested in opening up our relationship, but I have reservations. She wants the freedom to throw herself into her new world without the constraint of having to shut down non-platonic sparks. My girlfriend has brought up marriage several times. While she admits she doesn’t have a good track record with monogamy, she insists marriage will change that. Another concern: The last time she was in an open relationship, she cheated on her then-boyfriend with me. “No exes” was one of their rules, and I was her ex at the time. (I didn’t know she was with someone else.) Another wrinkle: When I confided in her recently that I had developed romantic feelings for another person, she asked me to choose between her and them, and so I aborted this burgeoning connection. That felt unfair, seeing as she wants her freedom. She is also bisexual and wants to have experiences with women. I would be fine with her hooking up with women, but it makes me sick to my stomach to think about her with other men. She would be willing to put her desire for experiences with other women to the side in order to be with me, she says, once we are married. I would love to hear your thoughts on these things: (1) Whether we should open our relationship. (2) My male/female hookup distinction. (3) How to move forward if your partner is unsure whether they are built for monogamy but nonetheless wants to settle down in a married, monogamous relationship.

Onto Processing Entirely New Situation Dear OPENS: 1. Don’t open it. End it. It’s time to put this dumb, messy, past-its-expiration-date shitshow of a relationship behind you. Would knowing your girlfriend is already fucking other people help you do that? Because your girlfriend is almost certainly fucking other people. Already. Because when someone with a shitty track record where monogamy and nonmonogamy are concerned asks their partner for an open relationship while at the same time demanding their partner “abort” any potential “non-platonic” friendships they might have … yeah, that motherfucker is already fucking other people. They just don’t want to give their partner the same freedom they’ve already seized for themselves.

2. It seems like a silly distinction to me, OPENS, one that comes from a place of insecurity. (And a “no other dick” rule would make most gay open relationships impossible.) But sometimes, working with your partner’s insecurities—accepting them, not fighting them—is the key to a successful open relationship. And since many bisexuals in monogamous opposite-sex relationships often ask to

open the relationship because they want to act on their same-sex attractions (or, indeed, have their first same-sex encounter), keeping outside sex same-sex—at least at first—isn’t an entirely unreasonable request. But this is irrelevant in your case, since your girlfriend is already fucking anyone she wants.

3. Your soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend is hilarious. People who are bad at monogamy don’t get better at it once they’re married. If anything, people who were good at monogamy tend to get worse at it the longer they’re married. If your soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend isn’t bullshitting, if she isn’t bringing up marriage and monogamy to complicate and extend your conversations about opening up this doomed relationship, then she’s deluded. And if your girlfriend cheats because she gets off on risk, danger, or deception, getting married—which would obviously make cheating riskier and more dangerous—could make cheating more appealing to her, not less.

Dear Dan: I’m a bisexual man married to the most beautiful trans woman. I can’t keep my hands off her. But why can’t I fuck her anally like we both want? I can’t seem to push past the gates, which sends a signal to my brain that I’m doing something wrong, which make me Mr. Softee. Every other thing we do in bed is smooth as silk. Help!

Limp Isn’t My Preference Dear LIMP: I’d have to see video to guess at what might be wrong—not an ask, don’t send video—but it never hurts to use more lube, engage in more anal foreplay, and sometimes do butt stuff without even attempting anal intercourse. And when you do go for it, maybe instead of you trying to fuck her/push past the gates, LIMP, you could lie still and let her take charge. In other words: Don’t fuck her with your dick, let her fuck herself with your dick.

Dear Dan: I’m a twentysomething bi man in a loving relationship of three years with a straight woman. Last year, we opened up our relationship. At the beginning, we set some ground rules.

One of her rules was that I could get together only with women, no men. It bothered me at the time, but it was the only way she would be okay opening up, so I didn’t press her on it. Fast-forward to a couple days ago, when I brought it up again. She eventually admitted she’s afraid I will leave her for a man, and that’s why the idea of me being with other men makes her uncomfortable. She knows these are stereotypes, but she says she can’t get over it. I ended that night angry and hurt. Now I don’t know what to do. To be honest, if we weren’t in an open relationship, I wouldn’t be bothered by the fact that I can’t be sexual with men. But now that I know she is not okay with me doing so because of these bi ste-

reotypes, it drives me nuts. I’m not going to end our relationship over this, but how can I get her to understand my bisexuality is not a threat?

Bye-Bye Bisexuality?

Dear BBB: “BBB obviously isn’t going to leave his girlfriend for the first man he sleeps with,” said Zachary Zane, a “bisexual influencer” and a sex writer for Men’s Health. “All bisexual men are not secretly gay. But this is a lie—a vicious stereotype—that BBB’s girlfriend has heard countless times. So even though she knows this logically, she still can’t shake that concern. Fear often isn’t rational and it can override logic. She’s simply insecure.”

And while accommodating a partner’s irrational insecurity is sometimes the price we have to pay to make an open relationship work, accommodating your partner’s insecurity—one so clearly rooted in biphobia— isn’t going to be sustainable over time. You’re already angry and hurt, BBB, and you’re going to get more upset with every dick you have to pass up. So what do you do?

“The key to helping BBB’s girlfriend understand that his bisexuality isn’t a threat is for him to reassure her often that he’s not going to leave her for a man,” said Zane, “and to tell her and show her how much he loves her. He might also ask if there’s a way she’d feel more comfortable allowing him to be sexual with a man. Maybe they have a threesome. Maybe she prefers that it be someone she knows, or someone she doesn’t know.

There’s a lot to discuss.”

But eventually, for your own sanity, you’re going to have to insist that your girlfriend get over her biphobia. She can’t just throw up her hands and say, “I can’t help it!”

“Perhaps I’m giving BBB’s girlfriend too much credit, but it sounds to me like she’ll come around in time,” said Zane. “And while BBB is angry—and validly so—the anger shouldn’t be placed on his girlfriend.

It should be placed on a society that has ingrained in her the belief that bisexuality isn’t valid and that bi men will always leave their wives/girlfriends for another man if given the opportunity.”

And if she never comes around, BBB, then you can show her how silly and irrational her fears were by leaving her for another woman. (Follow Zachary Zane on Twitter @ ZacharyZane_.)

Question for Dan? Email him at mail@savagelove.net. On Twitter at @fakedansavage.

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The Hangover Half-Marathon, State Line Road in Leawood

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New Years Day Chili Cook Off, Old Town Lenexa

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2020 Winter Wedding Show, Kansas City Convention Center

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Thighmaster Album Release, The Brick THE ZEROS, recordBar

JANUARY 10-12 The Curse of the Black Pearl Live Orchestra, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts

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Jim Florentine, The Comedy Club of Kansas City Kathleen Madigan, Arvest Bank Theatre at the Midland Retirement Party, The Rino YACHT, recordBar

JANUARY 12

JANUARY 7

Jantsen, Encore at Uptown Theater

Miss Virginia Screening, Tapcade

Sheri Hall, The Speakeasy

Terror Tuesday: House on Haunted Hill, Alamo Drafthouse

Sleeping With Sirens, The Granada

JANUARY 8 Fortunes Fool and Give Way, The Vinyl Underground at 7th Heaven

JANUARY 9 Claudia Oshry: The Dirty Jeans Tour, Arvest Bank Theatre at The Midland

JANUARY 13 Leanne Morgan, Kansas City Improv Comedy Club

JANUARY 14 Black Magic Flower Power, The Riot Room Motionless In White, The Granada

thepitchkc.com | January 2020 | THE PITCH

43

EVENTS

JANUARY 15 Film Club: Oldboy, Alamo Drafthouse

Deux Twins, Mosaic Lounge

Freekbass, The Riot Room

Hoosier Arenacross Nationals, Hale Arena

Jason Ricci, Knuckleheads Yoga Nights at the Zoo, Kansas City Zoo

The Hillbenders Present “WhoGrass”, Knuckleheads

JANUARY 17 A New World, The Folly Theater The Cult of the Soprano, The 1900 Building

Monster Jam, Sprint Center

JANUARY 18 Bomsori Kim, Carlsen Center at Johnson County Community College

Tedeschi Trucks Band, Music Hall

I Am Craft Beer, Rochester Brewing and Roasting Co. COURTESY OF MONSTER JAM

Cory Wong, Madrid Theatre

Enuff Z Nuff, Aftershocklive

The Gatlin Brothers, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts

JANUARY 17-19

JANUARY 16

Support Local Music Showcase Vol. II, The Riot Room

Exploration Series: When There Are Nine, Michael and Ginger Frost Production Arts Center

JANUARY 19

JANUARY 21-26 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts

Colter Wall, Liberty Hall

JANUARY 22

Lyfe Jennings, VooDoo Lounge

Wale, Uptown Theater

JANUARY 20

JANUARY 23

All Get Out, The Rino

Begin The Begin, Knuckleheads

JANUARY 21

Brody Buster Band, The Riot Room

Anne-Sophie Mutter, The Folly Theater Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio, recordBar

Schedule Your Treatment today!

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44

THE PITCH | January 2020 | thepitchkc.com

EVENTS

JANUARY 24

JANUARY 28

The Band That Fell To Earth, recordBar

Stanislav Ioudentich and Miriam Fried, The 1900 Building

Just What I Needed, Ameristar Casino

SVDDEN DEATH, The Truman

Nathan Lund, The Rino

JANUARY 26

Ray Scott, The Riot Room Winter Jam 2020, Sprint Center

Danny Worsnop, The Riot Room

North by Night, The Folly Theater

JANUARY 31

Slap Frost Revue, The Riot Room

JANUARY 30 JOE CAREY

Chicago The Musical in Concert, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts

JANUARY 25 Royals Fan Fest 2020, Kansas City Convention Center

Cirque du Soleil AXEL, Sprint Center

Sean McConnell, Encore at Uptown Theater

JANUARY 24-26

George Strait, Sprint Center

Magic City Hippies, recordBar

JANUARY 29

2020 Chinese New Year Celebration, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

UnBridaled, Uptown Theater

JANUARY 30 FEBRUARY 2

Ambrosia with Peter Beckett, Ameristar Casino Hairball, VooDoo Lounge The Nicole Springer Band, Mills Record Company Randall King, The Granada

Chamber Music with Emanuel Ax, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts

The Standby, The Rino

Surf Curse, recordBar

Todd Barry, recordBar

Subtronics, Uptown Theater

JANUARY 27 Midge Ure, recordBar

thepitchkc.com | January 2020 | THE PITCH

45

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THE PITCH | January 2020 | thepitchkc.com

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thepitchkc.com | January 2020 | THE PITCH

47