The Pitch: July 2019

JULY 2019 I FREE I THEPITCHKC.COM

Cheap rent and studio spaces are rapidly vanishing from Kansas City’s arts landscape.

What now?

By Emily Cox

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CONTENTS

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4 STREETSIDE

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

BY DAVID HUDNALL

8 FEATURE

Shop Beautiful A KCAI collab brightens up Independence Center Mall.

BY EMILY PARK

10 PROFILES

The Boy from the Bootheel A gay Democrat repping Kansas City, Greg Razer understands rural Missouri much better than it understands him.

BY BARBARA SHELLY

12 NEWS

Brushed Aside What happens to KC’s art scene when the cheap rent and studio spaces that keep artists here start to fade away?

BY EMILY COX

22 GET AWAY

Paved Paradise At the Lake of the Ozarks, they’ve put up a Margaritaville where Tan-Tar-A used to be.

BY DAVID HUDNALL

28 CAFE

Down to Earth Black Sheep + Market on West 39th Street has the makings of a neighborhood favorite.

BY LIZ COOK

32 31 DRINK

40 SAVAGE LOVE

Drink This Now The Jalapeño-Carrot Martini at Freshwater

BY APRIL FLEMING

Grown Ups A decision point in a sexless marriage; adult baby diaper lovers.

BY DAN SAVAGE

32

40

FOOD

(E)LFK Is East Lawrence the best culinary neighborhood in the state of Kansas?

BY APRIL FLEMING

EVENTS

July Calendar Where to go and what to do this month.

34 ARTS

Up Close and Personal Cellist Eman Chalshotori is eager to spread the love.

BY LIBBY HANSSEN

36 MUSIC

Long Way Home For the Creepy Jingles’ Jocelyn Nixon, moving back to KC was just the beginning.

BY NICK SPACEK

31

38

EAT

Act Two Matt Hill of Umberto leaves the horror show behind on his Thrill Jockey debut.

BY NICK SPACEK

Eat This Now Cheese Slippers at Messenger Cafe

BY APRIL FLEMING

APRIL FLEMING

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, Eric Melin, 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, Jennifer Larson, Katie McNeil, Danielle Moore, Gianfranco Ocampo, Kirsten Overby, Alex Peak, Vu Radley, Zachary Trover Director of Marketing & Promotions Jason Dockery Senior Multimedia Specialist Steven Suarez Multimedia Specialist Becky Losey Director of Operations Andrew Miller Editorial Interns Rebekah Lodos Gina Pepitone Multimedia Intern Madeline Turner Design Intern Lacey Hawkins

Cheap rent and studio spaces are rapidly vanishing from Kansas City’s arts landscape.

What now?

By Emily Cox

BRUSHED ASIDE

Photo by Chase Castor, illustration by Emma Olson, art space by Kate Horvat.

thepitchkc.com | JULY 2019 | THE PITCH

3

STREETSIDE

McCoy’s in Westport will reopen as Mickey’s Hideaway later this summer. The new restaurant and bar will feature some of the old McCoy’s menu items — no brewery, though.

The historic Nelle Peters building at 3216 Gillham Plaza will soon be home to a variety of female-owned businesses, including a spa concept called Hand & Land (from Nicole Lobdell and Jessica Moler), a full-service restaurant called Billie’s Grocery (from Robin Krause, who opened the Filling Station coffee shops and owns Unbakery), and Apothé (an apothecary, also from Krause). The building’s owner and developer, Butch Rigby, is currently in talks with a variety of other tenants for the space.

The coworking company Industrious plans to rent 30,000 square feet of space on the Country Club Plaza, further saturating a KC coworking market that already includes four Plexpods, three iWerx, and the big WeWork building in the Crossroads.

STREETSIDE

KELCIE MCKENNEY

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

BY DAVID HUDNALL

A Westport building at the corner of 41st Street and Pennsylvania Avenue has been purchased by a Denver restaurant group that plans to open four different concepts in the 6,600-square-foot space. Those concepts are: Atomic Cowboy (fancy cocktails and craft beer), Denver Biscuit Company (uh, biscuit-based foods), Fat Sully’s (New York-style pizza), and Frozen Gold (soft-serve specialty ice cream). They’re aiming for an October opening at 4141 Mill Street.

J. Rieger & Co.’s Electric Park project in the East Bottoms will open July 12. The distillery has expanded to include two bars (the Monogram Lounge, the Hey Hey! Hey! Club), a private dining area, a historical exhibit telling the story of J. Rieger (founded in 1887), and a 40-foot slide between the second and first floors.

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THE PITCH | JULY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

The Truman Library and Museum will close for a year while undergoing a $25 million expansion and renovation. The last day to visit is July 22.

Californos in Westport has closed after 30 years in business. RIP, but hopefully this will free up some of those parking spaces in the circle drive out front that always looked like open spots but were reserved for Californos valet.

A Hard Rock Hotel is coming to the KC area, and it’ll be in … Edwardsville? Village South, a proposed development south of the Kansas Speedway, will feature a Hard Rock Hotel, plus a 32,000-square-foot conference center, two restaurants, a coffee shop, nightclub, fitness center and retail. Construction is set to start sometime this summer.

ZACH BAUMAN

Michael and Christina Corvino will open a fast-casual restaurant called Ravenous at 19th and Main in the Crossroads later this summer. On the menu at Ravenous: cheeseburgers, fries, malts, chicken sandwiches, pies, beer, wine, and bottled cocktails — a Danny Meyer/Shake Shack type of thing, sounds like.

A combination liquor store, wine bar, and grocery store is coming soon to the Crossroads. Owners Mat “Slim” Adkins and Jeff Jones hope to open The Pairing Wine & Grocer at 1615 Oak in August.

STREETSIDE

3 2 N D

A N N U A L

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THE PITCH | JULY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

BLIND BOX BBQ FACEBOOK

South of Summit Taqueria & Tequila plans to open this fall in a Waldo event space at 512 W. 75th St., between the Summit Grill and Boru Ramen.

Nebraska Furniture Mart at the Legends will soon be home to a Blind Box BBQ. The second location of the Shawnee restaurant and

bar — home to the Notorious P.I.G. sandwich (smoked sausage and pulled pork topped with mac and cheese and onion straws) — will take over 7,000 square feet at NFM, more than half of which will be an outdoor patio with fire pits.

Yes, you can buy drinks at Blind Box and carry them around while you shop. Construction will begin soon, with a targeted opening before the holiday season.

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FEATURE

SHOP BEAUTIFUL A KCAI COLLAB BRIGHTENS UP INDEPENDENCE CENTER MALL.

BY EMILY PARK

Blank space abounds at Independence Center. It’s all white walls, white floors, white ceilings, and — until recently — white, 40foot pillars that shoot up like towers from the floor to the tippy top of the shopping mall.

About a year ago, Cheryl Meyer, the marketing director at Independence Center, was thinking it’d be nice to add some color to the place.

“We were looking to get more involved with the community and bring other organizations into the center,” Meyer says, “but then we were also wanting to do this art project.”

She soon stumbled upon Sponsored Studio, a program at the Kansas City Art Institute that matches students with local businesses looking to solve creative problems. The businesses get artistic insight; the students gain hands-on experience in the often-tricky practice of making a living from one’s art. Meyer took a look at the projects Sponsored Studio has completed since its launch at KCAI five years ago — a mural at the Kansas City Zoo’s Stingray Bay exhibit, a chandelier comprised of 1,000 butterflies designed for the Plaza cocktail lounge Monarch Bar — and concluded that KCAI’s program would be a natural fit.

“We look for partnerships with both the business and nonprofit community to help them bring their creative projects to life when they don’t have the talent internally to do that,” explains Randy Williams, senior director of corporate programs at KCAI. “It gives our students an opportunity to work directly with a client possibly for the first time, but to do it in the safe environment of a classroom space.”

Each project generates revenue for KCAI. Fifty percent of the proceeds go to the school’s scholarship funds, while the other fifty percent covers costs of the project and provides a stipend for the students commissioned for the project.

Williams says the goal of Sponsored Studio — and Micro, an elective class open to students of all majors that functions as a sort of design agency within KCAI; most Sponsored Studio projects are facilitated through it — is to give students the confidence to pursue business opportunities independently.

That’s precisely what happened with

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THE PITCH | JULY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

FEATURE

Arlan Elgin, who graduated in May with a degree in illustration. During Elgin’s semester in Micro, the class tackled projects like play poster designs for the Coterie Theater and veterans portraits. The class also designed the storefronts and cityscape sets for UMB’s School of Economics, a field trip experience where elementary school aged-students learn the business and financial skills in a mock city-business setting.

Elgin’s designs were selected for two of the storefronts — an encouraging outcome as she prepares to pursue her craft after graduation. And because the nature of the project meant she had to constantly communicate with other designers to ensure the work was cohesive, she says she’s now more comfortable working with (and networking with) other artists.

“It helped a lot in terms of confidence — being able to approach a professional job and feel capable to give them what they want and deliver the end product,” Elgin says. “[Micro] was kind of invaluable for preparing me for

the professional world.”

For the Independence Center project, Meyer invited Williams to the mall, and they landed on the idea that the students could design column wraps for the colossal pillars visible to shoppers as they walk across the east and west wings of the shopping center. Meyer then met with the students enrolled in the fall 2018 semester of Micro. She told the students what Independence Center was looking for, they asked some questions, and then the students set about designing some potential pillars. Each member of the class would present their design as they would to any other client they might encounter outside of the classroom in a professional setting.

A few weeks later, Meyer returned to see what the students had come up with.

KCAI junior Nehemiah Cisneros presented his design painted in black and white. When his design was chosen (along with recent KCAI graduate Lacey Vonderschmidt), he digitized the illustration and added color,

The pillars designed by Vonderschmidt (left) and Cisneros are a permanent installation at the mall.

OTHER SPONSORED STUDIO PROJECTS INCLUDE CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE STINGRAY BAY EXHIBIT AT THE KC ZOO AND A CHANDELIER WITH 1,000 BUTTERFLY DESIGNS AT MONARCH BAR.

ultimately presenting Meyer with several different color scheme choices. Those were then narrowed to the two designs that, as of May, wrap the pillars outside the mall’s interior Macy’s entrance. The colorful pillars are a permanent installation at the shopping mall, and Meyer says she hopes to pursue more creative projects at Independence Center in the future.

For Cisneros, a painting major who transferred to KCAI in the fall of 2018, it was a special way to connect with his new home.

“I was blessed to have the opportunity to actually make something happen in a city like Kansas City,” he says. “It was very humbling to have been here for under a year and have been able to give something to the community.”

Meyer’s pleased as well.

“We’re just really excited about the way it came out,” she says. “It adds an experience more than just shopping. I like to watch as the shopper’s walk by and take it all in, looking up and wondering what’s going on.”

COURTESY OF INDEPENDENCE CENTER

thepitchkc.com | JULY 2019 | THE PITCH

9

NEWS

PROFILES

Razer was raised in Cooter, MO, population 450.

“Not a great place for a closeted gay kid to grow up,” he says.

KELCIE MCKENNEY

THE BOY FROM THE BOOTHEEL A GAY DEMOCRAT REPRESENTING KANSAS CITY, GREG RAZER UNDERSTANDS RURAL MISSOURI MUCH BETTER THAN IT UNDERSTANDS HIM. BY BARBARA SHELLY

The Missouri legislature recently wrapped up a session that was awful for — among others — women, LGBTQ Missourians, and Democrats. Greg Razer is two of those three.

On a recent Saturday morning, he’s holding a town hall to tell his constituents all about it.

About 70 people of various ages have interrupted their weekend activities to hear from their state representative in an anteroom at a Brookside church. One woman carries a yoga mat. Another brings two dogs in a basket. A kid in a Scout’s uniform scribbles copious notes.

Later this evening, Razer will appear on stage at Kansas City PrideFest wearing

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THE PITCH | JULY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

jeans and a T-shirt with a queen’s insignia.

But this morning, he’s sporting a suit with an open-collared oxford shirt. People greet him as they would a well-liked neighbor.

“This was my third year in the legislature, and most of the time I thank you for sending me there,” Razer says.

He runs through a summary of the good, the bad, and the ugly in the 2019 Missouri legislative session. The list of upsides is so short that Razer draws approving applause when he mentions that members of the Westboro Baptist Church showed up one day at the Capitol to hassle him for his unsuccessful attempts to get protections for

LGBTQ Missourians written into the state’s human rights statutes.

Though Razer represents a progressive, urban district in Kansas City (roughly: the Country Club Plaza to Interstate 435, State Line to Troost Avenue), the Westboro experience was hardly his first exposure to discrimination. As a gay Democrat who grew up on the fringes of a Bootheel town called Cooter (!), Razer understands rural Missouri much better than it understands him. His family was cotton farmers, and he attended an evangelical church in a town with a population of 450.

“Not a great place for a closeted gay kid

to grow up,” Razer says. “At 17 years old, my senior year in high school, I was suicidal.”

College saved him, he says. Specifically the University of Missouri, where he majored in history at the Columbia campus.

“I got to Mizzou, and it’s just like my whole world opened up. I met all these people from different parts of the state and country and the world, with all these different thoughts and ideas. It changed my life.”

By his junior year, Razer was done with concealing his sexual identity. Coming out was so difficult, he says, that he remembers the exact dates he did so. The second person he told was his roommate. Razer’s declaration was followed by a long silence. “If you’re gay,” the bemused roommate finally said, “why isn’t our apartment decorated better?”

Somewhat ironically, around the time Razer was coming out, he was also going into hiding — as Truman the Tiger.

“I kept talking about it and my friends were like, damn it, Greg, try out or shut up,” he says of his desire to be the school’s mascot. “So I tried out. And I got it.” Razer ended up representing the school as Truman for two years, another reason his affiliation with Mizzou remains a central part of Razer’s identity to this day.

Razer moved to Kansas City after college and got his start in politics as an aide to Jackson County legislator Scott Burnett. Before getting elected to represent Missouri’s 25th legislative district in 2016, he spent eight years working as a staffer for former U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill. Razer took office at the same time as Eric Greitens. His first two legislative sessions were dominated by dramas surrounding the scandal-ridden GOP governor.

But at the start of this year he felt cautiously optimistic. Greitens was gone, replaced by the affable Mike Parson. Razer had hopes for a new, more progressive House leadership.

Those hopes didn’t survive the first week. As the House was conducting opening business, Razer proposed barring lawmakers from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity when hiring staff. Republicans objected, citing religious freedom. “That kind of set the tone of the session for me,” Razer says.

Although four openly LGBTQ lawmakers serve in the legislature, Razer has become the banner carrier for issues affecting those communities.

“And look, I’m happy to do it,” he says.

“I know today, in every single House district in the state, there is some teenager thinking about ending their life because they don’t see a way that they can ever come out and be happy. I will fight for them as hard as I can.”

He said that very thing on the House

PROFILES

floor, in the one chance he got this year to urge lawmakers to add sexual orientation and gender identity to the Missouri Non Discrimination Act. It was to no avail. For the 21st year, the Republican-led House protected a status quo that allows employers, landlords, and others to deny opportunity to persons on those grounds.

Razer for the most part remains collegial with Republican legislators. “I think I’m pretty well liked in the legislature,” he says. “But then they go back to their offices and write these anti-LGBT bills.”

Support sometimes comes from unexpected quarters. “There is this handful of older white rural Republican males who stand up for us,” Razer says “Kind of the exact opposite of what you would think. But they all have a son, a daughter, a nephew, a niece who has come out.”

Although he doesn’t mind being known for LGBTQ advocacy, Razer is passionate about a range of issues. Unfortunately, most of them seemed to go the wrong way in Missouri this year.

He was excited to be named to the influential House budget committee — until it became clear his GOP colleagues were intent on voting down every amendment offered by a Democrat.

He served on the transportation committee — but hated the legislature’s ultimate decision to fund bridge and road repairs out of the state’s general fund.

And Razer was repeatedly appalled by the Republican majority’s attacks on higher education under the guise of promoting religious freedom and/or free speech.

A bill brazenly called the “Campus Free Speech Act” would have allowed students to sue colleges and individual professors who dared to express opinions outside of the designated topic in the classroom. “It’s really the no-critical-thinking bill,” Razer says.

Another proposal would have protected student groups that wanted to restrict membership based on “sincerely held religious beliefs.” Advocates tried to justify the discrimination with a far-fetched example: What if the Southern Baptists tried to infiltrate the campus Catholic club?

“Nobody’s concerned that the Southern Baptist group is going to have a coup against the Catholics,” Razer informed a committee. “This bill is designed to keep people like me out of a club.”

Neither of those bills passed. But Razer remains convinced the legislature is out to damage his beloved University of Missouri system.

It didn’t help when conservative state lawmakers went batshit over an incident at UMKC this spring. A student was arrested for squirting a visiting anti-transgender rights speaker with a water gun. UMKC Chancellor C. Mauli Agrawal apologized to the speaker, but said the speaker’s opinions “do not align with our commitment to diversity and inclusion…”

That set off conservatives, who accused Agrawal of not protecting the speaker or his right to free speech.

“They did everything they could to protect the speaker,” Razer says. “[Conservatives] are mad because the chancellor said, ‘We respect LGBT people.’”

For the 2019 Missouri legislative session’s grande finale, Republicans legislated a ban on all abortions after the eighth week of pregnancy, the lone exception being to save the life of the mother.

Back at the Brookside town hall, Razer tells the audience that the debate on the House floor was “passionate and personal.

There were lots of tears on both sides of the aisle. It was horrible.”

He continues: “I’m hoping an extremist bill like this abortion bill may the wakeup call. At some point the people of Missouri have to take the state back.”

He is preaching to the choir. One man raises his hand to announce he fled Kansas three years ago to escape former Gov. Sam Brownback and GOP craziness there.

“Now I’m thinking Missouri is even worse,” he says.

At the moment, it’s difficult to argue otherwise. “You all did not pay me enough,” Razer jokes to his constituents.

The truth is, though, Razer thrives on politics and public service. He is currently mounting a campaign for a state Senate seat that will open up in 2020. That will take him into south Kansas City, Grandview, and the fringes of Lee’s Summit. The district is traditionally Democratic turf but a bit more conservative than the friendly environs of Razer’s House district.

Razer wraps up his town hall by inviting constituents to visit the PrideFest going on downtown. It’s coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion in New York City, a pivotal moment in the fight for gay rights.

“In 1969 I could be arrested,” Razer says. “Today, I can be married, serve in the military, and I get to stand in front of you as your state representative.”

Even — or perhaps especially — if that means serving in the Missouri legislature.

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Visit kcsymphony.org for details. thepitchkc.com | JULY 2019 | THE PITCH

11

NEWS

The Drugstore’s closing has sent 26 artists scrambling for studio space.

CHASE CASTOR

BRUSHED ASIDE WHAT HAPPENS TO KANSAS CITY’S ART SCENE WHEN ITS MOST ATTRACTIVE QUALITIES — CHEAP RENT AND STUDIO SPACES — FADE AWAY? BY EMILY COX

Not so very long ago, Davin Watne and his bandmates in the garage-soul act Thee Devotion rented the entire upstairs floor of a Crossroads building for $100 a month. The year was 2008. Downstairs was Posterworx, a digital printing company at 1523 Oak. Posterworx’s owners, John and Paul Migliazzo, weren’t using the extra space.

“It had the windows busted out, it had no heating or cooling — it was pretty rough,” Watne says. “For several years, we were up there making noise on Monday nights after work.”

At the time, Watne — who’s also a visual artist, and is now professor of painting and drawing at UMKC and the curator and director of the UMKC Gallery of Art — kept an art studio at Studios, Inc., which offers three-year residencies to mid-career artists.

When Watne’s time was up at Studios Inc., he approached the Migliazzos about converting the band’s practice space into art studios. The Migliazzos agreed. A few years later, Posterworx moved out of the downstairs space, and the studios — now known as Kunstraum, a German word meaning “art space” — expanded downstairs. Early

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THE PITCH | JULY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

Kunstraum artists included Watne’s bandmate Michael Schonhoff and Phil Shafer, who paints murals around town under the name Sike.

Eventually, two dozen artists kept studios at Kunstraum. Rent was intentionally affordable: $150 to $300 a month, depending on the studio size.

“I wanted to ride it out as long as I could, because it’s hard to find anything even close to being as affordable,” says Steve Snell, a Kunstraum artist.

But Snell knew it wouldn’t last, and over the past year it became obvious to him and others that the Migliazzos were preparing to sell the building.

“Most of us could sense that the relative lack of investment in the building — leaking sewer pipes, etc. — was probably because it was going to be flipped at some point,” says Corey Antis, another artist with a studio in Kunstraum.

In April, the Migliazzos formally told the artists that they were selling the building, and that everybody had until June 18 to clear out their stuff.

The Kunstraum building, Paul Migliaz-

zo tells The Pitch, “is worth more than what we’re getting out of it.” He’s familiar with the cycle he’s perpetuating by selling the building.

“Artists come in, help revitalize the area, and then they end up getting priced out of that very area,” Migliazzo says. “It becomes less and less possible for them to stay as those properties become more profitable for the owners.”

Gentrification, of course, is as real in KC as it is in every other city living under late capitalism. The process is by now so inevitable-seeming that some Kunstraum artists currently being displaced don’t even begrudge Migliazzo for selling the studios.

“Those guys have been really great,” Watne says of the Migliazzos. “I think we’ve had a really great partnership. If there’s an opportunity to partner with them again, I would definitely jump at that opportunity.”

“It’s frustrating to have to move out,” Snell says, “but I don’t blame Paul. They have to make a living and everything. I just hope that there is continued affordable studio spaces. It’s what makes Kansas City an attractive place to be a contemporary artist.”

But as spaces like Kunstraum vanish,

Kansas City is well on its way to being a place where artists actually can’t live cheaply anymore. Several studios and art spaces in addition to Kunstraum have announced they are closing in just the past few months, the result of landlords selling buildings or raising the price of their leases. And as these artists look for new studio spaces, they’re finding that the rent is too damn high. “[There’s] an acute lack of working space for artists in Kansas City right now,” Antis says.

While cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Miami offer artists institutions, scenes, and opportunity for wide exposure, the draw in Kansas City is a little different.

“Affordable space is a critical component in the KC ecosystem,” says David Hughes, founder of Charlotte Street Foundation, one of the biggest nonprofit sources of arts programming and funding in Kansas City.

Put simply: rent’s cheap here. Many artists in Kansas City have looked at what’s on offer in bigger cities and decided to stay put because what we have is in some ways even better: freedom to experiment. You can be an artist here, you can focus on your

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craft here, you can have a little space here.

That’s the story we’ve been telling ourselves about KC. But is it even true anymore?

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From the outside, it looked as though The Drugstore might survive the wave of gentrification rolling across Kansas City. The midtown space — located in the historic Katz Drugstore building at the corner of Westport Road and Main Street — houses studios for 26 artists and has become a vital community hub since opening in 2012.

Best of all, its landlord was Redeemer Fellowship, a nearby church that has made it its partial mission to spruce up the neighborhood. (Redeemer is a landlord to Oddly Correct and a handful of other businesses near Westport and Main.) The church won the Katz building at auction in 2011 and decided to dedicate it to the arts, in furtherance of its community-oriented mission. Under church ownership, the Drugstore wasn’t vulnerable to rising property taxes as the neighborhood transformed — a change that, in many ways, was set in motion by the Drugstore artists’ renewal of the Katz building space.

Rent for artists at the Drugstore is unbeatably cheap: $75 per month. The money goes into an account controlled by the residents, who have used the funds for programming, building materials and supplies, and occasional maintenance. A few residents have specific administrative roles and

contribute labor in exchange for their spaces, but the Drugstore is generally self-governed as a collective.

This spring, Drugstore artists decided to use their funds to support resident-planned programs in the building’s front gallery space, which are scheduled throughout this summer.

the need for new HVAC. The meeting didn’t go quite as planned.

“They’re [Redeemer] like, ‘Oh, by the way we’re going to sell the building,’” Graham recalls.

In an interview with The Pitch, Andy Bean, the church’s director of operations, cites high mortgage and utility bills and the

“THERE’S AN ACUTE LACK OF WORKING SPACE FOR ARTISTS IN KANSAS CITY RIGHT NOW.”

“We developed a model of somewhat self-sustaining programming,” says Patricia Graham, a visual artist who also used her Drugstore studio space to teach private music lessons.

Graham says that, this spring, Drugstore artists planned a meeting with Redeemer to share their vision and talk about

increasing costs of maintaining a deteriorating structure built in 1934 as Redeemer’s reasons for putting the building on the market.

“We simply lack the capital in our ministry budget to invest in developing or improving the facility in the way we think the neighborhood and community deserves,” Bean says.

Snell (left) and Watne pack up at Kunstraum. The landlord is selling the Crossroads building.

Drugstore residents have been asked to be cleared out by the end of August.

As at Kunstraum, there’s a mix of resentment and understanding among the 26 artists now scattered to the wind. Redeemer has said it plans to “make sure that whatever the building looks like in the future is something that is good for our city.” And the church has pledged to give Drugstore residents $10,000 as a collective to help with the move or purchase of a new building. But some have questioned if that amount is sufficient, given how much value the artists at the Drugstore have brought to the building and the neighborhood.

“This is now a cornerstone of activity in the city,” says Don Wilkinson, another Drugstore artist. “And it’s become one partly because of us.”

“Their profit margin is going to be fucking crazy on that building,” says Patricia Bordallo Dibildox. “They bought it for nothing.”

In addition to keeping a studio at the Drugstore, Bordallo Dibildox is the co-director of Front/Space, an experimental, artist-run gallery in a storefront apartment in the Crossroads. Front/Space’s goal is not to sell artwork, like a commercial gallery, but to start conversations.

“Front/Space has always had shows that are developing work,” says Bordallo Dibildox.

“You have the freedom to fuck up. You have the freedom to go for an idea that maybe you thought you’d fuck up, and then it turns out great. It allows artists to be artists.”

Bordallo Dibildox and her co-direc-

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Aguilar (left) and Bordallo Dibildox can no longer afford the rent at their Crossroads gallery Front/Space.

“Every month feels like a fight to even exist,” Bordallo Dibildox says.

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tor, Jahaira Aguilar, took the reins of Front/ Space last spring; the space has been in operation since 2010. They’ve admirably continued the mission. In April, for example, the duo Emotional Store (artists Scotty Wagner and Bailey Hikawa) took over the space and made a completely site-specific work at Front/Space in two days. “That’s something that more established galleries would be like, ‘What the fuck?’” Aguilar says. “And that’s the beauty of Front/Space.”

But rent’s rising, and Front/Space is moving on. Bordallo Dibildox and Aguilar had been discussing sustainable alternatives to their $1600 monthly rent when their landlord recently informed them it would be going up even higher if they signed another lease.

The additional $100 per month sought by the landlord may seem relatively small, but art spaces operate on razor-thin margins. Front/ Space’s co-directors are unpaid and hustle throughout the year to raise money to cover expenses. (Half the organization’s annual budget is raised at the exuberant live-drawing event Hot Hands, which has been hosted at the Drugstore. They intend to put on a Hot Hands in 2020, though the venue remains to be determined.) For Front/Space, the rent hike was the tipping point.

“Every month feels like a fight to even exist,” Bordallo Dibildox says of the financial

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pressure of running the space.

With some freed-up funds and new flexibility, Front/Space will continue its work in a nomadic fashion, putting on exhibitions in spaces around the city. It will be able to commit more time and energy to exhibitions and programs, better support artists, and, Bordallo Dibildox says, “be more daring.” But Bordallo Dibildox, who also works in continuing education at the Kansas City Art Institute, thinks Kansas City is about to see a drop in the number of artists that stick around after graduation.

“Either you stay and don’t make work and don’t exhibit it, or you go to someplace you can do that,” she says. “With rent prices [in Kansas City] now that are almost matching Chicago prices, why wouldn’t you just go there?”

Melaney Mitchell, Drugstore artist and founder of the art blog Informality, agrees.

“KCAI fundamentally teaches object making,” says Mitchell, who, like many artists I interviewed for this story, is a KCAI alum. “All these studio artists are going to be graduating from there with object-oriented, functional studio practices that they want to cultivate with no fucking place in this entire city to be able to afford a studio space. And they’re all just going to be like, ‘Well fuck, what do we do now? Leave? Go back home?’”

“WITH RENT PRICES IN KANSAS CITY NOW THAT ARE ALMOST MATCHING CHICAGO, WHY WOULDN’T YOU JUST GO THERE?”

That’s exactly what Julia Cole and others are afraid of.

“There needs to be, right away, shortterm fixes so we don’t lose artists who are getting displaced from their studio spaces to other cities,” Cole says.

As an artist deeply engaged in community issues, Cole — the Rocket Grants program coordinator at Charlotte Street Foundation — is well acquainted with Kansas City’s attempts to address gentrification. In 2017, in conjunction with UMKC’s Center for Neighborhoods, she convened “Development without Displacement,” a wide-ranging discussion about solutions to the inevitable housing crisis that has now fully arrived in Kansas City. (She’s also an adjunct at KCAI.) Cole points to previous measures taken to retain artists in KC. In 2006, as First Fridays began to expand, the Crossroads Community Association became concerned about how to ensure artists would remain in the neighborhood. The CCA worked with city officials and the Planned Industrial Expansion Authority (PIEA) to create a tax abatement plan for arts-related businesses and organizations that occupy at least 51 percent of a building. Locking in that abatement in 2006 was essential, as property taxes for some Crossroads properties ballooned as much as 500 percent in 2007. Owners who qualified received 100 percent abatement for 10 years.

The benefits of artists in the neighborhood are many, Cole says.

“Artists can look at a space that most people see as ugly, dirty, blighted … and say ‘No, but look, what if we did this?’” Cole says. “They see the potential in something, and then they engage with it, and they make it a space that’s useful or beautiful for the community. And then immediately, other people see that, and their perception and value becomes fiscal. Artists are seeing a different kind of value and really helping that to bloom. And that gets translated by the community into dollars.”

When the Crossroads artists’ tax break was due to expire, in December 2016, the city passed an additional 15 years of abatement at 50 percent. Without these abatements, it’s likely the Crossroads would have lost more studios and galleries than it already has. For example, Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, an origin point for First Fridays, is still holding on.

“But,” Cole says, “artists can no longer afford to buy in here [the Crossroads]. It’s effectively useless unless you’re already in here. There needs to be some other thinking that goes on about these longer-term programs. How does the community remain porous to artists?”

The PIEA abatement allowed building owners to charge cheap rent to artists as the value of their buildings steadily rose.

But when the owners cash in and sell the buildings, the asking price is now far be-

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Watne removes clip lights inside his Kunstraum space as filmmaker and performance artist Diana Heise holds the ladder. They’re married and both kept studios at Kunstraum.

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yond what most artists and galleries can afford. So they’re bought by banks and chains and professional developers — the kinds of landlords with little incentive to rent at below-market values to artists and galleries.

It’s an especially bitter outcome for those artists and galleries because the increasing property values often have little to do with the physical condition of the building and are instead directly linked to the appeal created by the artists.

“Unless the city makes it attractive for property owners to work with creative partners, it seems obvious that the financial incentive to do other things with the real estate is too high to pass up,” Antis says, “Their [property owners’] argument is that they shouldn’t lose money, and I respect that — they made an investment. But that logic also, in my view, fundamentally misunderstands the reciprocal exchange between the creative class in the city and what they offer to the investing and developing interests.”

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Left to their own devices, the forces of gentrification and capitalism will eventually eat everything. We’re seeing that happen in cities like San Francisco and New York City.

But Kansas City is behind the curve. We might still have a chance to stem the tide for artists trying to work here. But how?

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THE PITCH | JULY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

Hughes, the Charlotte Street founder, has some general suggestions for ways Kansas Citians can tangibly support local artists: Attending open studios and asking artists questions, donating unused office space for artists to work in, integrating artists on planning teams and committees, paying artists for their time (not just their objects).

But after years spent cultivating support for the arts in the city’s philanthropists, Hughes’ attention has recently turned to local government.

“What’s needed now, I think, is more education of public officials,” he says. “And while there is little to no money available from the city, still, thoughtful public policies regarding art and artists are urgently needed.”

To that end, Hughes recently hosted a gathering of about 40 artists with Jolie Justus, a 4th District Councilwoman who recently lost her bid for mayor. It was an informal get-acquainted session for Justus to hear and learn what’s on artists’ minds.

In my conversation with the Front/Space co-directors, Aguilar brings up the meeting with Justus, and Bordallo Dibildox groans.

“Her answers were so inadequate,” she says.

Aguilar adds: “Patricia is sitting there saying that she’s exhausted of constantly working for free. And [Justus said], ‘You know, when you get to that point when you are so exhausted — because I am, too — find someone and pass that torch to them, and

“WHAT’S NEEDED NOW, I THINK, IS MORE EDUCATION OF PUBLIC OFFICIALS.”

let them carry the torch for you. And then when you’re ready to come back, they can pass it back to you.’”

“That’s not the way it works,” says Bordallo Dibildox, adding that if she gives one torch away, she’s still holding three. “If we [artists] are not holding the torch to the very roach tip of it, we will all burn, and no one else is going to carry it,” Aguilar says.

Point being: city officials, and perhaps the public in general, often lack awareness of the heavy workload artists are carrying — and how they’re bearing that load without any institutional support.

Nor do many understand the importance of actual space to an artist.

“People think we can exist with a little easel in our bathroom,” Bordallo Dibildox says. “We need a space.”

Whitney Manney, who runs a full-time fashion design business from her studio at the Drugstore, notes that the closing of the Drugstore isn’t just about a bunch of artists needing to find a new room to paint in.

“I think there’s a lack of understanding that we are not hobbyists,” Manney says. “I think Kansas City as a whole has the idea about artists that we’re just willing to starve and do without — that this is just something we do for fun. Everybody else has a place of employment that they get to go to that’s not their dining room or their basement. Why should we have to be OK with our dining rooms or our basements or our parent’s garages being our physical place of work?”

Many artists being ousted from these spaces find their work disrupted and plans derailed, while their schedule of exhibitions, proposals, and commitments plows on.

“I have some exhibitions coming up soon,” says Drugstore resident Andrew Ordonez. “I don’t want to compromise the visions that I’ve proposed to those people [because] I have to work out of my bedroom.”

Losing a shared studio building also means artists are losing the opportunity for the cross-pollination of ideas and support that it allows.

“This has been transformative to my practice,” says Mitchell of working at the Drugstore. “The dialogues, the people that I’ve been around. It’s really the community. The way that this was structured with its open walls opened me up to different possibilities.”

Since learning about their studios closing, many Drugstore residents have organized to try to explore what it would look like to create a new Drugstore in a new location — ideally as a nonprofit, in a building they own. They’ve divided themselves into committees for getting nonprofit status, seeking funding, and finding a building.

“If we want to keep going forward, and we don’t want to run into this again, our goal should be to buy a building somewhere,” says Andrew Erdrich, a Drugstore artist since 2014.

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FEATURE

Mitchell, a writer, painter and art organizer, says the communal working environment at the Drugstore has been transformative to her practice.

They also met with Megan Crigger, KCMO’s Director of Creative Services, to seek guidance. She pledged her support and resources and connected them with the Economic Development Corporation, the public-private organization responsible for all your favorite TIF projects. Residents express gratitude and relief at her help. Navigating the world of commercial real estate is new to all of them.

Crigger knows the issue of artists needing space is multifaceted: “My main message is that one unit and one approach is not going to solve the problem,” Criggers says.

And she’s aware of what is at stake: “If we continue to allow for unaffordability to keep moving people out of the core and then out of the city limits, then [Kansas City] will ultimately lose.”

Having watched as developer after developer received generous tax abatements in Kansas City over the last decade, I ask Crigger what kinds of incentives or tax breaks an actual arts organization like the Drugstore might have access to.

“Typically, nonprofits don’t qualify

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THE PITCH | JULY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

for state or federal incentives,” Crigger says. “If it’s a nonprofit, or if it’s an individual artist, I would imagine that there would be some need to partner either with the city in a formal way or with the private sector to bring the kind of capital to the project.”

In other words, not only do wellheeled private developers have access to the capital necessary to execute a project in Kansas City, they are also able to access government incentives that nonprofits and individuals cannot.

The city is well aware of the need for artist spaces. In 2015, KCMO invited Artspace, a nationwide nonprofit arts-related developer, to do a study about building live-work and studio spaces for artists here.

After a pre-feasibility report estimated there to be 6,000 artists in the city, Artspace returned in 2017 for a more thorough market report on what kind of development would work best in KC. “It gives us a snapshot of data that we as staff can [use to] talk about the condition and state of artists in Kansas City to our pol-

IN ADDITION TO EASY CAPITAL, WELL-HEELED PRIVATE DEVELOPERS CAN ACCESS GOVERNMENT INCENTIVES THAT NONPROFITS AND INDIVIDUALS CANNOT.

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icy leaders,” says Crigger.

But no deal has actually been made to have Artspace start a development here.

“The study was finished and delivered to the city, and nothing has happened, right?” Cole says. “So, somewhere along the line, someone said, ‘Oh, we can’t afford this now,’ or ‘This isn’t a priority.’ There’s an idea that everybody has about what it takes to have Kansas City be this art city and have artists draw tourism and all the rest of it. But when it comes to actually doing the things that are going to make it happen, there is something that is not being fulfilled.”

Crigger says the lack of movement is due to the fact that Artspace’s model only works if the building is cheap or free, and they haven’t found the right space. (“We don’t want to deter economic growth for our city, but we want to make sure that there’s not negative impact for those who live here, and that everyone benefits from that growth,” Crigger says.)

But according to Justus at the aforementioned community meeting, there are currently 9,000 unoccupied retail and resi-

dential spaces in Kansas City. Mightn’t the city gift a few of those spaces to the very local artists Kansas City’s leaders love to brag about?

“I was like, ‘How do we get those spaces?’” Bordallo Dibildox says. “And she [Justus] didn’t know the process or any answer.”

“If art is important to your city, and to the growth of the city, the same way sports teams are, and you’ve got buildings you don’t know what to do with,” says Drugstore resident Don Wilkinson, “then give them to us or sell them to us for, like, no money whatsoever. We’ve already shown we can do this. And it can be a lot more. It can be a model.”

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Unfortunately, even though Kansas City has had years to prepare for the onslaught of the affordability crisis that occurred first in more prominent cities, our leaders have shown little interest in devising new ideas and strategies in advance of it arriving on our shores. That extends to the larger issue of affordable housing as well as the more specific subset related to artist work spaces.

Instead, under Mayor Sly James, we have devoted our resources to splashy,

big-ticket national marketing efforts like Open Spaces, a citywide arts festival to which KCMO committed $875,000 (half a million in funding, plus a $375,000 loan it’s still on the hook for).

The festival provided a gorgeous, twomonth spectacle. “But now here we are, six months after it closed, and how many galleries or art spaces are closing, and how many condos are being built where studios used to be?” Mitchell says. “You’re forgetting about the fucking artists [that live here].”

“It’s always about being the other place instead of just taking something organic and growing it,” says Brandon Frederick, a Drugstore artist. “That’s exactly what Open Spaces was: ‘Let’s make this thing that’s not true to what Kansas City is, or to what the art scene is here, and let’s just plop it in and emulate New York, New Orleans.’”

Frederick continues: “Nobody’s going to fucking care if you just try to be the other place. What people want to see is something new and different and authentic and real.

That is the major shift that has to happen in thinking about the arts in this city — especially from people who are not a part of the arts community. Right now, I just feel like all they do is recycle ideas. We don’t need to be another Portland.”

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Manney runs a full-time fashion design business from her studio at the Drugstore. “I think there’s a lack of understanding that we’re not hobbyists,” she says.

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thepitchkc.com | JULY 2019 | THE PITCH

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“We [artists] have to work together,” Frederick says. “I think now is the time.”

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THE PITCH | JULY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

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Cole also believes that local artists are best poised to find solutions for themselves.

“We can invent solutions here, homegrown solutions, that could then be exported to other communities that are struggling with this, instead of just throwing our hands up and saying, ‘What can we do?’” Cole says.

“We really need to be drawing on the people who are here, who have all this experience, many of whom have been doing research in other places around the country. They know the conditions here, they know the opportunities here, the challenges, and can design things that will be uniquely designed to meet this set of circumstances. There’s a huge sense of possibility and opportunity.”

In an ideal world, Mitchell says, “We would have an artist’s union that could go to the city and make demands and have oversight and have seats at the table with whoever the next mayor is.”

“When you’re all together, you have a larger voice, and people will listen to you more,” says Frederick. “We think about these things similarly as artists. If we can form a structure around that, then the more power we will have to see these things come to reality. We have to work together. I think now is the time.”

There have been preliminary, informal meetings among artists to discuss what it

would look like to move forward with unionization. Mitchell says the loss of the Drugstore has been a galvanizing event. It has “lit a fire under all our asses,” she says. “For me, it’s been a big wake up call to see what I can bring of value with my labor to my community.”

Mitchell continues: “Sustainability is not going to come from a capitalist plan.

Sustainability is going to come when artists recognize that sometimes it’s less important to be in your own studio making your own work. Sometimes it’s more important to look around you and say, ‘How do I protect this precious practice that I’m doing by protecting the precious practices of everyone else around me?’”

Kansas City has been largely successful over the past decade at branding itself as an arts-friendly city. But as Wilkinson notes, “They don’t use the term ‘artists’ — they use the term ‘art.’ We have to remind them that we make the art. And we need a place to do it.”

Aguilar, at Front/Space, says Kansas City needs to decide if it wants to actually be a city for artists, rather than just call itself one.

“If all you want is the polished condos and the block parties every First Friday, then there’s not going to be any room for us,” he says. “We won’t be able to fit into that picture.”

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21

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DAVID HUDNALL

PAVED PARADISE AT THE LAKE OF THE OZARKS, THEY’VE PUT UP A MARGARITAVILLE WHERE TAN-TAR-A USED TO BE. BY DAVID HUDNALL

There’s that great scene in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz where the Band’s Levon Helm is talking about how music flows together in the middle of America. “Bluegrass or country music, you know, if it comes down to that area, and if it mixes there with the rhythm and if it dances, then you’ve got a combination of all those different kinds of music,” Helm says in his marvelous Ozark drawl. “Country, bluegrass, blues music.

Show music.”

“A melting pot,” Scorsese says. “And what’s it called?” A languid smile crosses Helm’s face.

“Rock and roll,” he replies.

I was thinking about this the other day while learning about the history of TanTar-A, the first major resort at the Lake of the Ozarks. Opened in 1960 by a St. Louis real estate developer named Burton Duenke (pronounced dinky), the name is said to translate in Blackfoot Indian to “one who

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THE PITCH | JULY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

moves swiftly.” But the Blackfoot Indians aren’t from anywhere near the Ozarks — their reservation is in Montana. And a few years ago a Duenke heir told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that Tan-Tar-A was just the name of a boat Duenke’s wife saw while on vacation. In the Bahamas. Meanwhile, the design motifs at Tan-Tar-A were vaguely Asian, with lots of bamboo and flowers and Chinese lettering. The story behind that is apparently that somebody once told Duenke the land reminded him of northern China.

I choose to view this stew of jumbled and incongruous facts as distinctly Missourian — kind of like how we pronounce the town of Versailles as though the word is plural. An ignorant but somehow beautiful melting pot. Rock and roll.

And now, a new wrinkle in the TanTar-A tale: the resort is no longer called Tan-Tar-A. It is called Margaritaville, and Jimmy Buffett owns the place. (Technically,

a hospitality investment firm that licenses the name Margaritaville and various other Buffett brands is the owner.) As of May 1, Tan-Tar-A is now officially on Island Time®.

Like a benign version of Gene Simmons, Jimmy Buffett has spent the last 30plus years systematically monetizing the beachy, blissed-out lifestyle his 1970s hits — “Margaritville,” “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” and “Fins” — celebrate. Parrotheads, a Boomer-heavy subculture of Buffett enthusiasts, buy up Buffett paraphernalia in astounding numbers. An incomplete list of Buffett’s licensed products includes a SiriusXM channel (Margaritaville Radio); Margaritaville Foods (frozen shrimp, tropical cakes, salad dressing, salsa, and, hell yeah, margarita mix); and Landshark Lager (made

by Anheuser-Busch under the name Margaritaville Brewing Company). There is even a Jimmy Buffett retirement community in Florida called Latitude Margaritaville.

Then there are the Margaritaville resorts, of which the former Tan-Tar-A is now one. (There are 12 Margaritavilles in all, with many more in the pipeline.) Tan-Tar-A wasn’t exactly a small, independent business — it was bought by Marriott in the late 1970s and later sold to various investment entities — and over the last few decades the place had begun to show its age. But everybody at the Lake knows Tan-Tar-A. I suspected that its transformation into a Jimmy Buffett theme park would be big news down there. So I texted a friend of mine, a native of the Lake, and asked him.

“Oh yeah, everybody’s talking about it,” he said. “You’re really staying there?”

I was. Well — they invited me.

I’ve been to the Lake probably 30 times in my life. I don’t know — maybe 50 times?

If the number was 100, I would not be surprised. I went to college an hour away, and I’ve had several friends whose parents owned

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houses at the Lake, and as a kid we spent a handful of vacations down there. On one of those vacations, we stayed at Tan-Tar-A. It was in 1996; I was 14. Tan-Tar-A has traditional hotel rooms, but there are also cabins nearby in the woods, and we stayed in one of those. Other things at Tan-Tar-A in 1996, as I remember the experience: a miniature golf course, a video arcade, a bowling alley, and a Sbarro. I had the time of my life.

All that stuff is still there, it turns out, though the Sbarro is now a pizza place called Frank & Lola’s. There’s also an indoor water park (lazy river, some water slides), horseback riding, an 18-hole golf course, wave

runner and paddle boat rentals, at least three pools (one with a swim-up bar), and about seven different places you can obtain food or beverages.

At JB’s Boathouse Grill (formerly Black Bear Lodge), I ask our server — a wisecracking boomer named Scott; Tommy Lee Jones with a sunglasses strap — where we should go, what we should do. I mention the Landshark Bar, a lakefront establishment on the property that seems to be hopping on the Friday afternoon we arrive. Scott describes Landshark as having a “party atmosphere,” as opposed to the more subdued vibe at this bar and grill.

“You should see some of the boats that pull up there,” Scott says of the Landshark Bar. “Million dollars, easy.”

Implicit in this comment is what I detect to be mild discomfort with the way the Lake is changing. I pick up on that same attitude later on a scenic boat cruise, when the old-timer captain quotes some of the prices per square foot in the “big rambling mansions” we pass by. And I notice it again at Woody’s, a local watering hole up the road from Margaritaville, where I meet my aforementioned Lake friend, who happens to be back home visiting family this weekend. He hasn’t lived in Missouri for ten years, the

Lake for almost 20. I inform him that our Uber driver told us that Billy Ray Cyrus is playing a show that night at a bar called Shady Gators.

“The Lake has gotten so Vegas-y, so party,” he says. “What I can’t figure out is, who owns all these ridiculous boats? They’re everywhere. How are there so many people at the Lake of the Ozarks who can afford a boat that costs $750,000?”

I don’t get it either. But boy are they out there. While dining at Windrose Marker 26 — the resort’s fancy restaurant, it’s somewhat hidden on the property and requires reservations; no cheeseburgers in this parDAVID HUDNALL

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THE PITCH | JULY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

GET AWAY

adise, probably on purpose — we sit a table over from a guy whose brand-new seaplane is bobbing out on the dock. On a scenic cruise, we pass multiple massive yachts and sexy cigarette boats. I wave and give them peace signs, and they mostly return the gesture.

The establishment that most embodies the Margaritaville mindset is Landshark Bar, an indoor-outdoor bar sitting on a patch of lakefront that until recently was occupied by a cemetery and a half-dozen sixties-era cabins. Goodbye to all that. Now, it’s where you go to blow out your flip flop, where there’s booze in the blender, where the tourists are

Also, I basically like my job. This is something I didn’t quite appreciate about Parrothead culture until I got to Margaritaville: The whole experience is built around the notion that everybody’s just trying to get away from their normie nine-to-five lives and pound some dang Landsharks and margs on the sand. The bartenders at the lobby bar wear bowling shirts that say “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” on the back.

In our room, the throw pillows are etched with phrases like “Escape to Paradise” and “Changes in Latitude / Changes in Attitude.”

These Buffett maxims serve as a kind of zen poetry for Margaritaville’s actual target de-

THE THROW PILLOWS ARE ETCHED WITH PHRASES LIKE “ESCAPE TO PARADISE” AND “CHANGES IN LATITUDE, CHANGES IN ATTITUDE.” THESE BUFFETT MAXIMS SERVE AS A KIND OF ZEN POETRY FOR MARGARITAVILLE’S TARGET DEMOGRAPHIC.

covered in oil. Buffett lyrics, painted on slabs of wood, adorn the walls: “Welcome to Fin Land”; “Stranded on a Sand Bar.” This is where you see ladies in swimsuit bottoms that are not quite thongs, but close, and shirtless dudes (and dads) with pre-distressed Cardinals caps casually flexing while gripping Bud Lights (or Landshark Lagers, which taste exactly like Bud Lights).

But there are children here, too; it’s not as rowdy as other Lake bars I’ve been to. It even closes at 10 p.m. I’m told that this is the sleepier side of the Lake; Shady Gators and Horny Toad is where the foam parties and boat races and wet T-shirt contests tend to go down, and that’s pretty far from Margaritaville. (“We’re still very focused on families here,” Ann Walters, a 23-year Tan-Tar-A employee who’s now Margaritaville’s head of sales, tells me. “And we will continue to do a lot of conference business — we have 89,000 square feet of indoor meeting space.”)

If it’s not already clear, I am not even remotely close to the demographics Margaritaville is after. I’m a millennial (an old one, but technically I am one). I have no kids. I live in the city part of a city. I enjoy mocking pretentious restaurants, sure, but that’s also where I prefer to have dinner. I’ve never walked up to a stranger and said, “So, where ya from?”

mographic, which best I can tell is suburban baby boomers who’ve made good money selling medical equipment, owning HVAC repair companies, or pushing paper at Monsanto. Ironically, many of these people could live full-time the getaway fantasy Margaritaville is selling, if only they weren’t so addicted to hoarding our nation’s wealth.

Because Margaritaville is not really geared toward somebody like me, I figured I’d punt on actually critiquing the place (beyond the, uh, 1,500 words I’ve already written) and instead get some input from a real-life Parrothead. So I messaged the Kansas City Parrothead Club on Facebook and a few hours later found myself talking with a guy named Bob Whiteacre.

Bob, a retired banker who turns 70 this year, lives in the north-central Missouri town of Lucerne. But he’s often in the Kansas City area; his girlfriend lives in Basehor. He actually called me from a four-day Parrothead festival at Table Rock Lake.

“Yeah, we’re just settin’ around, listening to some trop-rock, having some adult beverages, doing a little dancing, having a little conversation,” Bob said. “This is the third year we’ve done this down here, and it’s getting bigger every year.”

In August, many of these Parrotheads will descend upon Margaritaville for a sim-

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ilar weekend party. Bob said that, in 1980, when he became the chairman of the Missouri Young Bankers Association, the bankers’ annual conference was held at TanTar-A. One of his first orders of business was to move it to the Four Seasons.

“It had really gone downhill at that point,” Bob said. “The carpet in a lot of the

The Landshark Bar sits on land formerly occupied by cabins and a cemetery.

DAVID HUDNALL

rooms was all ratty. It was no good then.”

But he came down to Margaritaville earlier this year and found it to be to his liking.

“We ate there, had mimosas at the bar, went to the Landshark and the tiki bar nearby and had a few drinks — I thought it was great,” Bob said. “I’ve been to quite a few Margaritavilles around the country — Panama City, Vegas, Key West, they got one in Tulsa — and I think that [the Lake of the Ozarks Margaritaville] is my favorite.”

I have to admit, chatting with Bob, I found myself wondering if I might one day have what it takes to be a Parrothead. He just seemed so nice and happy. Unfortunately, I have a low tolerance for steel drums. But if you’re interested, the KC Parrotheads — there’s about 90 in the club right now, but membership fluctuates due to people retiring and moving south — meet monthly, often at Sharkeez in Lee’s Summit, Bob said.

Look ‘em up on Facebook. Or just escape to Margaritaville at your earliest convenience.

It’s five o’clock somewhere, baby. thepitchkc.com | JULY 2019 | THE PITCH

27

CAFE

A chalkboard wall lists Black Sheep’s daily specials, which skew more complex than the perennial standards.

ZACH BAUMAN

DOWN TO EARTH BLACK SHEEP + MARKET ON WEST 39TH STREET HAS THE RIGHT INGREDIENTS TO BECOME A NEIGHBORHOOD FAVORITE. BY LIZ COOK

It’s a great relief to eat a simple, well-prepared meal that isn’t trying to impress the neighbors. I’ve grown tired of restaurants “elevating” classic dishes, an inane descriptor that seems to be industry shorthand for “putting a short rib on it.” I’m ready to bring them back down to earth.

Enter Black Sheep + Market, the second restaurant for Chef Michael Foust (who opened The Farmhouse in the River Market) and his partners Vincent Parades, Ryan Wellfort, and Marty Enslein.

Black Sheep opened on West 39th Street last September in the former home of Thai

restaurant Aep (and before that, Thomas).

From the beginning, it felt like a sort of defense against the cranks using “farm-totable” as a synonym for Portlandia hipsterdom. Sure, the restaurant has exposed brick, dark wood, and a rooftop patio lined with string lights. There’s a chalkboard wall with the day’s specials and a list of local farmers and ranchers. Succulents are involved. But the food at Black Sheep is a little less expensive and a little more familiar — enough, perhaps, to placate the cranks.

The grilled cheese sandwich was just that: classic, kid-friendly toast, well-buttered

THE PRICES ARE RIGHT FOR THE RESTAURANT’S APPROACHABLE ETHOS.

and well-browned, clamped around cheddar cheese that oozed like it was auditioning for a Kraft commercial. The enormous buttermilk pancakes — thick and fluffy as cotton — were a similarly straightforward comfort.

The richest offering might be the biscuits and gravy, which are cribbed from The Farmhouse’s menu (a half order makes a hearty meal). The skyscraper biscuits had a crisp crust and soft mantle, with enough structure to withstand the deluge of savory country gravy. All three dishes can be ordered at any time of day; if you like breakfast at 8 p.m., you’re in good hands here.

Sometimes the simplicity of the menu backfires, spotlighting blunders that busier flavors or presentations might mask. I adore The Farmhouse’s grits, but the grits at Black Sheep were undersalted. The “French toast sticks” conjured visions of drive-through dunkers but were just…ordinary pieces of egg-sogged French toast. And a chipotle chicken quiche had a flaky crust and a brisk pepper burn but was cold in the middle.

My favorite entrée was a plate of shatteringly crisp fried catfish with a deceptively light-tasting breading. The fish was flavorful on its own but excellent dunked in the house hot sauce, which reminded me of a spicegussied Louisiana style. I ordered a little ramekin of that sauce on the side for most of my other meals.

My only gripe with the catfish was the side of fries, which arrived the appetizing color of toast but the limp texture of Wonderbread. The “house ketchup” served alongside was a tangless marinara in search of a mozzarella stick. (To be fair to Black Sheep, house ketchups are rarely any good; they’re the “Is Pepsi OK?” of condiments.)

The house salsa tasted suspiciously like that ketchup — sweet and anemically acidic. But I didn’t need it to enjoy a juicy slab of hamsteak with farm-fresh fried eggs and a flour tortilla. Ditto the breakfast burrito, a hearty and well-proportioned mix of scrambled eggs, peppers, and potatoes, coated in a satiny cheese sauce and nestled alongside

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Top: the partially shaded patio is lined with fresh herb pots and ambient string lights. Below: The tangy house hot sauce seems made for crunchy strips of fried catfish.

ZACH BAUMAN

tender hashbrowns. I can think of few other dishes that fly so close to the sun, indulgence-wise, without tasting rich or heavy.

The prices are right for the restaurant’s approachable ethos. Most meals here fall in the $6 to $12 range, and portions are generous. Two of the most expensive dishes on the menu are the meatloaf ($14) and pot roast ($16) specials, which rotate frequently. The beef meatloaf I sampled was frosted with a pleasantly abrasive smoked pepper sauce but was a bit too dry (I recognize that the words I’m about to write are supremely unappetizing, but: I prefer a more gelatinous loaf). The meatloaf also arrived with an unintentional garnish: a wee green caterpillar that had been roasted along with the meatloaf veggies (RIP). I did not eat the caterpillar.

It would take a small arsenal of caterpillars to turn me off the collard greens, which are unequivocally the best side on the menu. Black Sheep serves both vegetarian and “carnivore” versions, but order the latter if your diet allows.

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Top: Fluffy, crisp-edged biscuits hold their shape beneath a blanket of country gravy. Below: Collard ZACH BAUMAN greens cooked with carrots and pork take on a caramel sweetness.

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morsels of pork and chubby coins of carrot until the greens were perfumed with meat and almost caramel-sweet. A whole strip of thick, crisp bacon was plated alongside, making the side filling enough for a meal.

The rotating specials (check the chalkboard) are often more intricate than the menu mainstays, allowing Foust and Co. room to experiment with new ingredients.

On a recent visit, I enjoyed a creamy baked pimento dip and a deviled duck egg dressed with crunchy commas of housemade beef jerky.

The cocktails, too, are a bit more complex and priced accordingly. The Spicy Mary ($8) was a thin-bodied bloody and Spicy In Name Only. I preferred the Rosemary’s Baby ($13), which mixed botanical gin, rosemary syrup, and CBD. I don’t know that the CBD made much of a difference, but the drink was saucy and smooth with soft citrus flavors and a luxurious rosemary nose.

My favorite cocktail was the Solstice Margarita ($12), a clean-lined blend of cucumber, sunny jalapeno, and lemon. The drink was a fresh-tasting summer quencher

with a subtle heat that didn’t detract from the smooth and sweet.

Nondrinkers have solid options here, too. Black Sheep’s menu currently has two spirit-free drinks billed as “mocktails” (and priced about $5). The Refreshinator was an attractive lilac-color with the nostalgic taste of a glass of purple Kool-Aid after a muggy bike ride home from the pool.

But the lavender chamomile soda was one of the most interesting drinks I’ve tried this summer. A cold snap of citrus woke up the chamomile’s sleepy sweetness, while the lavender added a slight squeaky softness.

The only description on the menu was, “It’s delicious!” I agree.

Drinks are slow out of the bar right now, which is notable when the ticket times for food are so short. But I suspect this is more an issue of understaffing than inexperience.

Black Sheep has all the right ingredients: friendly service, cozy vibes, and simple, unfussy food. With a few menu tweaks, it could become a reliable neighborhood favorite.

The repeat customers I saw across my visits suggest it already has.

EAT

Eat ThisNow CHEESE SLIPPERS AT MESSENGER CAFE

About ten years ago, Fred Spompinato, the original owner-operator of the Westside’s beloved Fervere bakery, started selling cheese slippers on summer Saturday nights. His over-the-top cheesy creations were a quick hit.

Before long, customers were waiting upwards of an hour for the slippers, whose flavors changed from week to week. In 2015, Spominato sold his bakery to Ibis Bakery owners Chris and Kate Matsch. The Matches have honorably continued the beloved tradition, though with a few modifications. As of this year, cheese slipper nights are at Ibis’ Crossroads location at Messenger Cafe. And they’re on Friday nights instead of Saturday nights.

But the cheese slippers are still made by hand, using Spominato’s original techniques and that perfect recipe: organic, house-milled wheat flour, olive oil, yeast, organic wheat starter, sea salt, water. Then, heaps upon heaps of cheese, including Tillamook medium aged cheddar, Alma Creamery smoked cheddar, shredded cheddar, Cedar Grove garlic cheese curds. And whatever seasonal and specialty ingredients chef James Loub chooses for that week, be it nduja, broccoli rabe, heirloom tomatoes, or pickled peppers. Get to Messenger every Friday through September, starting at 6 p.m.

We are just glad they’re still around. --April Fleming

DRINK

Drink This Now THE JALAPEÑO-CARROT MARTINI AT FRESHWATER

A big part of the culture at Freshwater — and one of the best reasons to visit — is James Beard-nominated chef Calvin Davis’ insistence on using as many ingredients as possible from local sources: proteins, herbs, seasonal vegetables. This is reflected in the dishes, which change from day to day depending on what’s available. But it’s also a part of the drink menu. Cocktails here utilize fresh-squeezed juices made with local veggies, house shrubs, sodas, and fresh herbs. Our current seasonal favorite at Freshwater is bartender Marlon Kayhill’s jalapeño-carrot martini. Jalapeño-infused vodka (made in-house) is blended with fresh-squeezed carrot juice and shaken along with a few dashes of Scrappy’s Firewater Bitters. Kayhill adds a dash of salt and a touch of lemon juice, plus tarragon and mint for garnish. The result is a dangerously refreshing, veg-forward cocktail that’s got some great heat. --April Fleming

thepitchkc.com | JULY 2019 | THE PITCH

31

FOOD

(E)LFK IS EAST LAWRENCE THE BEST CULINARY NEIGHBORHOOD IN THE GREAT STATE OF KANSAS? BY APRIL FLEMING

The last several years have seen a great deal of development in East Lawrence, a section of the college town that’s east of Massachusetts Street and north of 23rd Street. But the growth there hasn’t been gross and corporate; it has managed to maintain the essential rebellious and artistic qualities we’ve always loved about Lawrence. The Warehouse District, at 8th and Pennsylvania Streets, is now home to a smattering of galleries, affordable apartments, and some of the city’s best eating and drinking destinations. But there are other gems in the neighborhood, too. Here’s our guide to it all.

Bon Bon

804 Pennsylvania Street bonbonlawrence.com

Glorious Thai sticky wings, tempura-fried fresh garden veggies, and crispy confit La Belle Farms duck served with house-made ramen noodles (*drool emoji*) are just a few of the reasons to pop into the century-old former fireworks warehouse that houses Simon and Codi Bates’ three-year-old Bon Bon. The cocktail menu — classics, thoughtful seasonals, mocktails, and more — and the quarter-acre garden across the street (which provides much of the produce for the restaurant) are a few more. And as of this year, there’s more Bon Bon to love: a permanent kitchen to replace Bon Bon’s food truck, a bigger menu with more variety, and a new, modern, 40-seat glass-and-steel expansion, complete with garage doors that open in favorable weather to the large outdoor patio.

1900 Barker

1900 Barker Avenue, 1900barker.com

In a modest white East Lawrence building that formerly housed a laundromat, baker Taylor Petrehn has built a pastry paradise. Here, you can get impeccable 27-layer (!) croissants, cinnamon buns, galettes, quiche, and cookies, in addition to the nine handcrafted breads that are available daily. (A few of our favorites include various organic sourdough styles, the chewy Danish Rye, and a decadent cheese slipper-like smoked cheese bread.) The coffee is pretty outstanding, too. Petrehn’s efforts have earned him not one but two James Beard Award nominations, a rare honor around these parts, and one that’s certainly very well-deserved.

Lawrence Beer Company 826 Pennsylvania Street lawrencebeerco.com

Lawrence Beer Company just does everything so damn well. Brewmaster Sam Mc-

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THE PITCH | JULY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

Top: There’s more to love lately at Bon Bon. Below: Lawrence Beer Company’s triumphant burger.

APRIL FLEMING

FOOD

Clain is super versatile, creating everything from hoppy, full-powered IPAs to tart Berliner Weisse-style beers to bright, seasonal saisons to deep, full-bodied stouts — all of them wonderful. Executive chef Ken Baker keeps the menu straightforward, but his team cooks at a very high level, serving up one of Lawrence’s best burgers alongside waffle fries with pimento cheese, plus tons of seasonal veggie options (pickled peach crostini, garden-fresh salads, fire-grilled asparagus). We’ve been crushing on LBC since it opened a few years ago, and we’re still just as dazzled by this welcoming neighborhood spot.

Decade Coffee

920 Delaware, decadelawrence.com

What started out as a weekends-only coffee hangout in a quiet neighborhood has evolved into a full cafe, coffee shop, and cocktail bar that also hosts local arts exhibitions and readings. Morning: Pick up a pour-over, cortado, or even a house-blended tea to drink while bathing in the natural light that beams in through the old warehouse windows. Afternoon: Try a sundried tomato grilled cheese or a vegan avocado-mushroom bowl with coconut rice for lunch. Evening: Seasonally inspired cocktails, mocktails, and sodas.

At Fields & Ivy Brewery, they farm and harvest their own grain.

Fields & Ivy Brewery

706 East 23rd Street fieldsandivy.com

Cory Johnston is a partner in the Great Plains Custom Grains Company, which produces custom local strains of corn, wheat, and barley for local distillers and breweries.

With Fields & Ivy, which Johnston opened earlier this year in East Lawrence, he’s getting into the brewery business in a more direct way. Johnston’s brewery, the new-

est in Lawrence, features a steam-powered production floor with bottling and canning lines, a live music venue, a wood-fired pizza restaurant with 130 seats, and a large outdoor beer garden.

Culinaria

512 East 9th Street culinariafoodandwine.com

Husband-and-wife team Aaron and Regan Pillar offer veg-heavy, Mediterranean-in-

APRIL FLEMING

spired dishes at their beautiful 40-seat restaurant, located in a 100-year-old limestone building near 9th and New Jersey streets. Among your options here: crispy roasted pork shoulder with pomegranate molasses; creamy labneh (a soft cheese made with yogurt) drizzled with Calabrian chili oil and served with crusty bread; and pan-roasted squash served with Spanish chorizo and goat cheese. The cocktail and wine menus are also stellar.

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thepitchkc.com | JULY 2019 | THE PITCH

33

ARTS

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL CELLIST EMAN CHALSHOTORI IS EAGER TO SPREAD THE LOVE. BY LIBBY HANSSEN

SHANE LINDEN

When Eman Chalshotori was in fourth grade, his teacher would punish kids in detention by playing the radio’s classical station.

The students would complain and beg the teacher to change the station. One day, Chalshotori decided he would try a different tack.

“In a fit of defiance I was like, Well, I’m going to turn it up, and I’m going to like it,” he says.

Little did he know.

Last year, this first-call KC cellist graduated with a master’s degree in cello performance from the University of Missouri-Conservatory of Music and Dance.

He can be found all over the region: principal cellist with the Topeka Symphony Orchestra; assistant principal for the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas; soloist with Topeka Symphony, UMKC Conservatory Orchestra, and Medical Arts Symphony; and member of Midwest Chamber Ensemble and Vivant.

Chalshotori has also performed with newEar Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, KCRep, TEDxKC, Kansas Public Radio, and Musical Theater Heritage. He’s recorded tracks for poet Jen Harris, singer-songwriter Elspeth Summer, and Calvin Arsenia with Quixotic.

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THE PITCH | JULY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

It seems inevitable that the list will only get longer over the coming years, but it wasn’t always such a sure bet. Classical music wasn’t a part of Chalshotori’s life growing up in Oklahoma City. In middle school, he started on violin but switched to cello primarily because he wouldn’t have to share with anyone else (the public school didn’t have enough violins for everyone). When he was in ninth grade, though, he went to see a random Oklahoma City Philharmonic concert on a voucher program they ran for public schools. It was his first professional orchestra concert. He didn’t know what to expect. The ticket misidentified the soloist, Lynn Harrell, as a pianist, so it was a shock to hear the world-class cellist perform Anton Dvorak’s Cello Concerto.

“I know that I didn’t sit for the rest of the concert,” Chalshotori recalls. “I went backstage with my then-date”— He corrects himself: “I dragged her backstage because I just wanted to be close and see it.”

The ensemble followed the concerto with Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Chalshotori shakes his head, a little chagrined to admit such a cliché lightning bolt moment.

“For me, if it wasn’t on the radio, or it wasn’t on my dad’s mix tapes of Iranian music, we just didn’t go out and do stuff like that,” he says. “So it was really my first experience with something completely different.”

Chalshotori finds ways to share these transformational experiences during his performances, through anecdotes and personal history, along with any apropos theoretical or biographical information about the piece. In his recent performance for InterUrban ArtHouse’s Listening Room, he brought together a group of friends to play music he has loved since high school. In future recitals, he plans to present favored workhorses together with fresh pieces.

“We create enough space to open ourselves up enough to allow something new to come in,” he says.

That’s something Chalshotori shares with his students at the UMKC Academy and Musical Bridges, too. “Even if they don’t end up going into music,” he says, they can “still enjoy their instrument and find an appreciation for the work that goes into it.”

This month, you can hear Chalshotori live with pianist Charles Dickinson for the release of Midwest Chamber Ensemble’s

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third and latest album, “Vieux Amis-Nouveaux Costumes (Old Friends in New Clothes),” featuring the work of composer Philip Lasser. In September, he opens the 2019-2020 Ruel Joyce recital series with a “good ol’ classical shmassical” recital, and then in January, he performs all of Ludwig Beethoven’s cello sonatas with Dickinson for Midwest Chamber Ensemble.

“The whole process of learning about [all this music] has been so incredible,” Chalshotori says, “and I just love being able to impart that to other people.”

MUSIC

Of her transition, Nixon says, “I needed to do this in front of the people I grew up with and have those tough conversations.”

LONG WAY HOME FOR THE CREEPY JINGLES’ JOCELYN NIXON, MOVING BACK TO KC WAS JUST THE BEGINNING. BY NICK SPACEK

Those last six months in Texas were rough, Jocelyn Nixon says, drinking a lemonade at Lawrence’s Decade on an afternoon in early June.

“I’d left [Kansas City] to work on my marriage,” Nixon continues. “My wife at the time was offered a job and I figured, Yeah, Austin, great music city. I should see what happens. A music city like Austin was the silver lining in moving away from my band.”

That band was Abracadabras, a hooky, Britrock-inspired group that was active around Kansas City from 2006 to 2009 or so. Nixon fronted the band, which also included brothers Collin and Kyle Raus-

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THE PITCH | JULY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

ch, who now play in the pop act Shy Boys.

“That was, like, the first band,” Nixon says.

“I’d been writing songs since I was probably about 22, and that was our first band together. So it was like we all grew up together … Once I went to Austin, I felt like it was time for me to stand on my own.”

The marriage hit the skids a few years in, but Nixon continued writing music. She released a solo project called English Major, a divorce record of sorts. Five years in, though, everything finally seemed to come to a head.

“The traffic, the cost of living — our rent went up $750,” Nixon says. “It was almost impossible to stay. I was like, Why am I killing myself to do this? I was also starting to come to terms with my own personal identity, and it blew into this existential crisis, where I was like, I can’t keep this bottled up anymore.”

Nixon’s referring to her recent transition into life as a woman, a process she’d started early during her time in Austin — “Tweezing my eyebrows, laser hair removal, therapy, going out more in femme,” she says — but largely abandoned after her marriage fell apart and she stepped into a new relationship. But the desire to transition hadn’t gone away; Nixon was just burying it.

“I was depressed to the point where I kind of — there’s that line in ‘Yer Blues,’ where John Lennon’s like, Feel so suicidal/ Even hate my rock and roll. I was like, ‘Oh,

I get that line,’” Nixon says. “I didn’t ever feel like I was going to commit suicide, but I had this fantasy of faking my death and becoming a new person, which was all sort of leading me to transition, but I was just miserable, and I just didn’t want to be around it.”

She decided to leave Austin and return to KC, though moving back home as she transitioned wasn’t something Nixon was initially eager to do. “I thought it was scarier to move back,” she says. But then she realized that, as she says, “I needed to do this in front of the people I grew up with, and have those tough conversations, and tell them who I really am and how I really feel. It felt like the most honest way to do things, and it felt like the most authentic way to bridge my past to my present.”

Nixon started hormones and came out as a woman after she moved back home to KC. She says everyone’s been cool about it — tons of support.

“When I came out, I felt stupid, because I was like, ‘I should’ve done this sooner,’” she says. “An immediate weight lifted off of me, just from carrying the weight of that consuming all my mental faculties at all times. It just shot my nervous system.”

Then came the Creepy Jingles.

Nixon had quit playing music toward the end of her time in Austin, and she gave herself a few years during her transition to “get my head right and heal from a break-

ORANGE BLOSSOM PHOTOGRAPHY

up, and also, approaching this new phase in my life,” as she puts it. But she kept writing songs. She started jamming with Nick Robertson, a drummer. Then they brought in Travis McKenzie, a former Abracadabras guitarist, and the Creepy Jingles were born.

They played around for a few years and then, last year, began recording what would become their debut self-titled EP. “We took it slow, doing it like, once a week, and then once fall rolled around, we were like, ‘Let’s record some things,’” Nixon says. They took the music to Ross Brown, another Shy Boy, who recorded and mixed the EP in his basement. Collin Rausch ended up playing bass on it (Adam York has since joined the group as the full-time bass player).

“It was kind of like a little family reunion,” Nixon says of reuniting with some of his old bandmates.

The EP was released on High Dive Records at the beginning of May. It’s confident and exuberant, a Kinksy mishmash of Britpop garage rock.

We finish our lemonades and get ready to head back outside. I tell Nixon she strikes me today as somebody who’s quite sure of who she is.

“I am now,” she says. “I don’t know if I was years ago. I felt like I had to adopt a mask or a character to protect myself a little bit onstage. Now it feels very me, and I’m very comfortable.”

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37

MUSIC

VIKTORIA GOKUN

ACT TWO

ON HIS THRILL JOCKEY DEBUT, MATT HILL OF UMBERTO LEAVES THE HORROR SHOW BEHIND.

BY NICK SPACEK

Under the moniker Umberto, former Kansas Citian Matt Hill has, over the course of four full-length LPs and numerous singles, made music that could accurately be described as soundtracks to horror films that exist only in Hill’s mind. (He’s also done actual film scores.) Hill lit out for Los Angeles in 2013, a few years after the Umberto project started. The thinking was fairly straightforward: If he was making things that sounded like movie soundtracks, it made sense to live in the place where movies are created.

“That was the main reason: film scoring,” Hill says by phone from Los Angeles.

“It’s really been helpful. Just moving here, it helps a lot more, getting film stuff. Just being here, you can go into meetings. People want to meet.”

Lately, though, the whole horror-synthesizer thing has been wearing thin.

“It’s not interesting to me anymore,” Hill says of the horror sound. “I don’t want to be stuck being known just for that. I don’t know why anybody would want to keep doing the same stuff over and over again.”

Umberto’s latest album, Helpless Spec-

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THE PITCH | JULY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

tator, arrives July 12 via the venerable Chicago indie label Thrill Jockey. As Hill says, the record is a departure from the horror-inspired, beat-driven, synthesizer-focused LPs of his early years, released on labels like Not Not Fun and Death Waltz Recording Co. Thrill Jockey seems to represent the beginning of a new chapter in the story. It’s more acoustic and naturalist, featuring piano, strings, and pedal steel. Listening to these atmospheric soundscapes, you can hear why the same people who championed Tortoise might cotton to this version of Umberto.

Hill hasn’t completely discarded his old aesthetic; he still keeps a toe in the world of horror. He appeared on Fangoria’s Hollydoom compilation this year and on last year’s They Came from Rue Morgue sampler. Hill also scored the recent horror film Portraits, along with “All That We Destroy,” part of Hulu’s Into the Dark anthology series.

“I still like all that stuff,” Hill says of the horror films from the Seventies and Eighties that inspired his early records. “But you can only keep doing that for so long.”

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39

SAVAGE LOVE

GROWN UPS A DECISION POINT IN A SEXLESS MARRIAGE; ADULT BABY DIAPER LOVERS. BY DAN SAVAGE

Dear Dan: I found your column after a Google search. I saw your email address at the bottom and was hoping for some insight. My issue is this: Two years into our 23-year marriage, my wife declared that she didn’t want to kiss me or perform oral on me. Several years ago, she had an affair and confessed that she not only kissed this other person but performed oral on them as well. Why them and not me? Should I just go find someone willing to do what I want? I have a high sex drive, but I find that I don’t want to sleep with my wife anymore because there is never any foreplay and a few minutes into it she’s telling me to hurry up. I don’t feel wanted, and honestly I no longer desire her.

What do you make of this?

––Hurting Unwanted Husband Dear HUH: Before telling you what I make of your email, I want to tell you what I wish I could make out of your email: a time machine. If I could turn all those pixels and code and whatever else into a working time machine, I’d drag your ass back to 1996 (and try to talk you out of marrying your wife) or 1998 (and try to talk you into leaving her after two years of marriage). But since time machines aren’t a thing — at least not yet — we’ll have to talk about the here and now.

Your wife isn’t attracted to you, and never was, or hasn’t been for a long, long time. And now the feeling is mutual — you aren’t attracted to her anymore, either. And if you’re seriously wondering why she kissed and blew that other person — the person with whom she had an affair — when she hasn’t wanted to kiss or blow you for 20-plus years (“Why them and not me?”), HUH, the answer is as painful as it is obvious: Your wife was attracted to her affair partner (that’s why them) and she’s not attracted to you (that’s why not you).

Now, it’s possible your wife was attracted to you a long time ago; I assume she was kissing and blowing you while you were dat-

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THE PITCH | JULY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

ing and during the couple dozen months of marriage. (She wouldn’t have to announce she was going to stop doing those things if she’d never started.) But at some point relatively early in your marriage, HUH, your wife’s desire to swallow your spit and inhale your dick evaporated. It’s possible her desire to swallow/inhale the spit/dick of her affair partner would have evaporated in roughly the same amount of time, and she would have lost interest in him and his dick and his spit, as well. Some people have a hard time sustaining desire over time — and contrary to popular belief, women have a harder time sustaining desire in committed, romantic relationships than men do. (Wednesday Martin wrote an entire NYT best-selling book about it, Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free.)

Of course, it’s possible your wife isn’t the problem. You may have said or done something that extinguished your wife’s desire for you. Or, hey, maybe your personal hygiene leaves everything to be desired.

(I’ve received countless letters over the years from women whose husbands refuse to brush their teeth and/or can’t wipe their asses properly.) Or maybe you’re emotionally distant or cold or contemptuous or incredibly shitty in bed. Or maybe you’re not the problem! I don’t know you, HUH, and other than the very few details you included in your very brief letter, I don’t know what’s going on in your marriage.

But I do know this: If you can leave, HUH, you most likely should. But if you decide to stay because you want to stay, or because leaving is unthinkable for cultural or religious or financial reasons… well, seeing as how your wife hasn’t wanted to fuck you for decades, and seeing as how you no longer want to fuck your wife, you should release each other from the monogamous commit-

ment you made more than two decades ago.

If you can adjust your expectations — if you can both agree to define your marriage as companionate, i.e., you’re friends and life partners, not romantic or sexual partners — you may be able to appreciate your marriage for what it is. But to do that, you’ll have to let go of the anger and disappointment you feel over what it’s not.

And to be clear: If your marriage is companionate, you should both be free to seek sex with outside partners.

Dear Dan: Simple question, probably not a simple answer: How do you keep things exciting once the shiny, new phase of a relationship is over? Is it normal to reach a stage where you know someone so well that they’ve become boring? Isn’t that just the fucking worst?

––Same Old, Same Old Dear SOSO: Recognizing that some people actually enjoy boring — I have it on good authority that some people can get a thrill knitting sweaters and sitting still — there is something the rest of us can do to keep things exciting once the shiny, new phase of a relationship is over: go on strange and exciting new adventures together. Early on in the relationship, SOSO, your new partner was your exciting new adventure, and you were theirs. But now instead of being the exciting new adventure, you have to figure out what exciting new adventures you’d like to go on together — and then get out there and go on them.

Dear Dan: I’m a young, nonbinary ethical slut, and I have a question about a kink that one of my partners is discovering. We are very close, although we are not sexually active with each other at this point (we are currently long-distance). She has another partner with whom she is currently exploring “little” play. I feel personally uncomfortable with age-regres-

sion play, but I obviously want to be supportive and understanding. We have fairly good communication, and I am able to tell her when I feel uncomfortable and that I still love and support her but I just can’t talk about “little” play at the time. I would love to be able to talk about it with her and be supportive, and at the very least make sure I don’t say anything ignorant or hurtful to her. My question is this: How can I stretch my zone of comfort and learn about this kink in a healthy and educated way?

––A Little Uncomfortable Dear ALU: If you want to get more comfortable discussing “little” play, i.e., adults pretending to be small children with other consenting adults, the Dream a Little podcast is a good place to start. It’s hosted

by Lo, an AB/DL (adult baby/diaper lover) who has been a guest on my own podcast and who recently made an appearance in the column offering advice to a sad and lonely AB/DL. That said, ALU, you aren’t obligated to listen to your partner talk about this kink if the topic makes you uncomfortable — or just bores you senseless. Tell her that you support her and you know it’s exciting to explore a new kink, and while she doesn’t have to hide this from you, it’s not something you’re comfortable — at least for now — discussing at length.

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

thepitchkc.com | JULY 2019 | THE PITCH

41

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Exnations, with Keaton Conrad, 90’s kid, and Lava Dreams, RecordBar

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Blasters with Supersuckers, Wayne Hancock & Clownvis Presley MC, Knuckleheads

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JULY 5 The Irie Lions Streetlevel Uprising, Bottleneck An Evening with Bill Callahan, Lawrence Public Library Lawn (707 Vermont, Lawrence)

JULY 5-6 Concept Zero Dance Theater presents ALIBI, Polsky Theatre

Priests, with Olivia Neutron-John, RecordBar, 1520 Grand

The post-punk trio Priests hails from the D.C. area, but its latest, well-reviewed record is titled The Seduction of Kansas. The album, reportedly inspired by Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, is a political statement about the American heartland that references, not entirely positively, a number of Sunflower State icons: Pizza Hut, White Castle, the Koch Brothers, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Though RecordBar is technically located in Missouri, one imagines the members of Priests might have some interesting things to say at this KC show. Olivia Neutron-John opens.

EVENTS

JULY 9

JULY 12

An Evening with Jane Fonda, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts

The Vegabonds, Bottleneck

Michigan Rattlers, Uptown Theater

JULY 9-14

Reel Big Fish & The Aquabats, Uptown Theater 98 Degrees, Power and Light District / KC Live!

Cats, Starlight Theatre

Clips and Conversation with Kevin Willmott, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

JULY 10

JULY 13

Stand Up Science with Shane Mauss and the Here We Are Podcast, RecordBar

Chuck Prophet & The Mission Express, Knuckleheads

JULY 14

JULY 11

Primitive Man / Street Sects / Ebony Tusks, Bottleneck

Amanda Seales, Uptown Theater

JULY 14-28

Santana, Sprint Center

Fringe Festival, Multiple venues

CAITLIN COOK

Moon Hooch, Uptown Theater

weekdays 3pm-8pm

Johnnyswim- Moonlight Tour, Madrid Theatre

JULY 11-13 Salute Winefest, Cottonwood Inc

More than 400 performances and works of art will descend upon Kansas City in midJune, marking the arrival of Fringe Fest, now in its 15th year in KC. Shows that have caught our eye include a staging of Cowboy Mouth, a 1971 play originally written by Sam Shephard and Patti Smith, and something called “Man Cave: A One-Man Sci-Fi Climate Change Tragicomedy!”But there are literally too many shows to list (much less attend), so for the full list and ticket information, hit up kcfringe.org.

thepitchkc.com | JULY 2019 | THE PITCH

43

EVENTS

NOW HIRING Cooks, Dishwashers Housekeeping, Front Desk Text "PITCH" to 816-945-9936

For More Information

JULY 16

JULY 19-20

Alex Di Leo, Bottleneck

Once On This Island, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts

JULY 16-17 La Frontera, Musical Theater Heritage

JULY 17 Rob Zombie & Marilyn Manson, Providence Medical Center Amphitheater Snail Mail, Granada

JULY 18 Daniel Sloss: X, Uptown Theater Gold Frankincense and Myrrh, Bottleneck

JULY 18-20

Earth, Wind & Fire, Starlight Theatre Apollo 11: 50th anniversary screening, Lawrence Public Library

JULY 21 Khalid, Sprint Center The Growlers, Crossroads KC at Grinders MattyB, Arvest Bank/Midland

JULY 23 Band of Horses, Liberty Hall\

WENDY REDFERN

Lawrence Field Day Fest, Lawrence, KS

JULY 20

JULY 19 Joywave, Power and Light District / KC Live!

Shawn Mendes with Alessia Cara, Sprint Center

JULY 20 Big 3, Sprint Center 44

THE PITCH | JULY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

Built To Spill — Keep It Like A Secret Tour, Madrid Theatre

In 2017, at Riotfest, Built to Spill thrilled fans by playing its 1999 album Keep It Like a Secret in its entirety. The record — a stone-cold college-rock classic, featuring beloved BTS tracks like “Carry the Zero” and “You Were Right” — turns 20 this year, and in commemoration of that milestone, the Boise band is doing 80 North American dates at which it will again perform Keep It Like a Secret in full. Orua and Xetas open.

EVENTS

JULY 24

JULY 25 Jon Bellion: The Glory Sound Prep Tours, Uptown Theater

JULY 26 Sophistafunk, Bottleneck

JULY 27 Tenacious D, Starlight Theatre Foxy by Proxy presents: Screen Qweens! A Multimedia Experience, Liberty Hall Baroness, Granada

JULY 28 Author Talk: Andrew Shaffer, Lawrence Public Library

JULY 29 Thunderpussy, Uptown Theater

COURTESY OF NERDLESQUE FESTIVAL

Billy Bob Thornton & the Boxmasters, Knuckleheads

JULY 30-AUGUST 3 KC Nerdlesque Festival, Just Off Broadway Theatre

The raw excitement of a Comic-Con meets the titillation of a burlesque show at the KC Nerdlesque Festival, where established producers and internationally renowned performers converge at Just Off Broadway for a sixday celebration of sexy geekdom, trivia, karaoke, workshops, and theater. This year — the festival’s second — includes headliners Jeez Loueez of Chicago, J.D. Hickcock of Dallas, and Kansas City’s own stars Annie Cherry and Damian Blake. Nightly tickets, GA all-access passes, and VIP passes are all available. More at kcnerdfest.com.

JULY 30-AUGUST 4 A Bronx Tale, Starlight Theatre

thepitchkc.com | JULY 2019 | THE PITCH

45

AUCTION DATE: 8/7/19 WEATHER PERMITTING

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BUY, SELL, TRADE

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

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Piano, Voice, and Guitar lessons Available from professional musician and instructor. Instructor teaches in a fun and meaningful context from ages 4 to the young at heart. Sessions are 1⁄2 hour and 1 hour. Students who sign up before July 31st will receive $5 off For more info Please call/text Kathleen 913-206-2151 or Email: klmamuric@yahoo.com

THEPITCHKC.COM

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The following vehicles will be sold at public auction on Wednesday, August 7th 2019 unless claimed by owner and all tow and storage charges are paid in full. For information, please contact Insurance Auto Auction at 913-422-9303.

YR MAKE/MODEL

VIN#

1998 Chevrolet Suburban

3GNFK16R4WG115521

2014 Nissan Rogue

5N1AT2ML1EC798280

2015 Jeep Wrangler

1C4BJWDG5FL569157

2008 Jeep Commander

1J8HG48K38C106120

2014 Dodge Charger

2C3CDXCT8EH142670

2008 Mazda 3

JM1BK12F381834957

1997 Toyota Camry

4T1BG22K8VU079962

2003 Isuzu Axiom

4S2DF58X934603674

2014 Toyota Rav4

JTMBFREV0ED091707

2011 Hyundai Sonata

5NPEB4AC0BH285921

2007 Nissan Altima

1N4AL21E47C182558

2010 Chrysler Town & Country

2A4RR5D10AR217501

2017 Ford Focus

1FADP3FE7HL324841

2014 Ford Focus

1FADP3F28EL150392

2011 Chevrolet Silverado

1GCRKSE30BZ203128

2017 Ram 1500

3C6RR7KT1HG735453

2016 Ram 1500

1C6RR7LT8GS225008

2015 Ford Edge

2FMTK4J89FBB35029

2012 Honda Accord

1HGCP2F38CA130470

2014 Nissan Maxima

1N4AA5AP4EC469839

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

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19301 East Eastland Center Court | Independence, MO 64055 eastlandcourt@clovergroupinc.com thepitchkc.com | JULY 2019 | THE PITCH

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LOST WAX

TWISTA

JULY 12

JULY 13

BLUE CORNER BATTLES AUGUST 2

HUNKS

THE SHOW

STRANGELOVE

THE DEPECHE MODE EXPERIENCE

JULY 26

I HEART THE 80’S

AUGUST 9 & 10

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TICKETS ON SALE NOW

Tickets available at VooDooKC.com or Ticketmaster.com/voodookc.

Located minutes from Downtown Kansas City. Unlimited Free Parking.

Know When To Stop Before You Start.® Gambling Problem? Call 1-888-BETSOFF. Subject to change or cancellation. Phone and online orders are subject to service fees. Must be 21 or older to gamble or obtain a Caesars Rewards card. ©2019, Caesars License Company, LLC.

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THE PITCH | JULY 2019 | thepitchkc.com