white with foam

Cakehouse really is my favorite, for two reasons: one, it’s hard to get a cup of coffee in the ID, and two, those killer salty-sweet coconut buns.

In another century, I used to work on the very north end of Rainier Avenue, which was probably when my love for the ID began. I’d go for lunch sometimes at the old Waji’s, or venture into an herbalist for ginseng or some mysterio-lixir to repurpose into homemade soda. I even met the Murakami sisters when they ran the wonderfully random Higo variety store. Sometimes — like, when I was high — the neighborhood felt like a Moroccan bazaar: smelly, ancient, and very anti-retail.

So I should have guessed that this week’s workshop in branding and business promotion, put on by SCIDpda and delivered in part by yours truly, would go over like a lead balloon. But so what? Like Ciardi says, “the least song, clod, consumes the singer.” And yes, for a while the preparation really did consume me. Even if our audience of two were to act on just one of the ideas we suggested, that’s one advertising effort that their competitors don’t pursue. Graphically, it’s an untamed prairie, which is always fun, and can give the greenhorn designer and client a chance to find their voice.

Here’s the heartbreak, though. As far back as I can remember, the business owners there never failed to give great service, even through the cultural and linguistic barriers. And at the places where I’m a regular, I’ll keep going back even if that standard should go flaccid now and then. The problem is how to get new customers — how to increase foot traffic, and the foot traffic problem is twofold: first, back in that other century I was telling you about, the stadium consortia, in an effort to get taxpayers to help finance their little playgrounds, argued that all those hungry lo-fans coming to events would make a night of it at local eateries before the game. Which would make sense if there were no food available in the stadiums themselves. In practice, if anyone gets a game-day business spike it’s the Moriguchis and the folks who rent space in their food court. Everyone else loses their street parking, and gets a plate of steamed bupkis in return.

Second, the neighborhood is skeeving out. King Street can be a real gauntlet even in broad daylight. On the periphery of Hing Hay Park, you could equip yourself for a lost weekend in no time. And how many locations for their dumpster did Hop Thanh reject before choosing this one— literally on the corner of 12th & Jackson? I don’t mean to make light of deep social ills; in fact, the services are available, prominently, for those who need. I’m just saying it’s hard out there for a pimp. Of flowers.

Maybe the light rail or streetcar will help, I don’t know. BTW, who remembers a restaurant in the Ding How Shopping Center called “House of Good Taste”? That always made me chuckle.

Anyway, this is the context for any advertising efforts that seek to broaden an ID business’ customer base. Well, this is part of the context. Another part is what my friend Dan once said: that there’s more soul in one square block of the ID than all of, say, Fremont and Wallingford combined. The photographer Andrew Hida, once a co-exhibitor and always il miglior fabbro, has a show up now in a space under Fort St. George that fondles the contours of that soul in documentary fashion. And if you’ve ever had the contours of your soul fondled, I think you know…seriously, geography notwithstanding, it’s really good. His stuff feels uncomposed and accidental, and yet. He mounts photos that I probably wouldn’t chimp on twice before throwing them away, including a series on mi vato Bill Lee, one of the many tireless forces fighting the good fight for the neighborhood.

Tom Waits: Step Right Up
“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.”

Tags:   advertising · International District · Little Saigon · NihonmachiNo Comments.

Today I had to poop so badly the soles of my feet hurt. I thought, well, that’s strange. So I went and read up about reflexology and TCM until I glazed over. The blockage was literal and the relief immediate and palpable, which made a reflexological reading of the whole episode very satisfactory. In the manner of the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, I call this abandonment of reason in the face of gratifying anecdote the qi whiz effect.

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I can’t remember the last time I set foot inside a church. My streak continued on a technicality: the service that Mom and I went to Sunday morning took place out on the lawn of Rosedale UCC. They had invited the congregations of two other churches to join them: St. Paul AME Zion and Colonial in Prairie Village. So the group was multi-generational, multi-denominational, multi-racial, and multi-speciesal with the addition of three dogs under the big low-hanging tree there.

I like to have gagged when the service started off with “He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands.” Clapping on the downbeat and whatnot. The theme that had been developed for the day was an environmental one, born of the central concept of The Green Bible: that the ostensibly patriarchal dominion passages in the Bible are in fact promoting proper stewardship of the earth because it’s, you know, god’s creation. Just as there are plenty of collective, non-canonical arguments against murder, covetousness and other bad behaviors, so are there good reasons to not shit where one eats, planetarially speaking. This thought helped me pass among the god-fearing people gathered that morning outside the old brick neighborhood church.

And yet, and yet. Few things will clog passion better than self-consciousness, and few sources of self-consciousness are more loathesome than the armchair cultural anthropologist in church. So I really was trying to get into it — even as I spoke and sang and ate of the potluck bounty. Here are the actual lies that actually came out of my actual mouth:

You shut in the sea with doors when it burst forth.
You set bars and doors, and said,
Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stopped.

Ultimately, though, it was the confession, the apology to the earth itself, that literally choked me up. I thought of the Gulf of Mexico, which was surely there subtextually, and felt ashamed to even address the extent of the damage with pretty iambs:

Forgive our reckless plundering and waste.
Forgive our greed and carelessness of power.
Forgive our haste that tempers unaware.
Help us to share, consider, save, and store.

I suspect Mom has little truck with such formalities, either. She’s a hands-on worshipper, and it was her I took my cues from that day. So we drove down to the farmer’s market on Southwest Boulevard and Rainbow and helped set up tents. This market accepts Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program chit, a screaming deal that very few people know about. It was mom’s understanding that we were going to be handing out literature to spread this particular gospel, but instead, after the setup, we ended up operating the Colonial Church bread sale until it was clear they had plenty of hands. I went up the hill to get a few jugs of cold water, and after distributing that all around the market, we were more or less done.

By the time we got back, Mary and the girls were at Mom’s, poolside. She had gathered some flowers from Jim’s yard, and Mom threw a chicken in the oven just before we headed out to the cemetery to visit with Dad and Grandma & Grandpa Edgerton. Mom always complains about the sorry-ass state of the tree, at the base of which is a plaque honoring my dad. He might appreciate the grand cosmic joke of such an anemic representative of nature’s wonder, but Mom sure doesn’t. It’s something to talk about, I guess, while we’re there.

After dinner I went with Mary and Rachel down to the area east of the Plaza to see (and shoot) in the formal gardens of the Kauffman Legacy Park and the Nelson. I had never seen the Bloch Building addition to the Nelson, and I was anxious to be there at the Blue Hour. We arrived a little early, so we also had time to walk around the limestone houses in Hyde Park and eat some ice cream by the famous (and surprisingly boho) J.C. Nichols Fountain. Back at the Nelson, with the sky darkening, Rachel hopped right in to the wide, shallow pool out front — and was promptly chided against doing so by a booming, disembodied voice from somewhere above the rooftops. Later, that same voice corrected us once more for posing with the headless “Standing Figure” statues; it was so startling that we didn’t even get what would have surely been a hilarious photo.

Other photos still here, on Flickr, including one from the grain elevator grounds that makes me giggle every time.

Tags:   Kansas City · Kauffman Memorial · Nelson-Atkins Museum · RosedaleNo Comments.

Last fall, my sister Mary moved from the Fairview neighborhood in Olathe to a house well over twice as big in a subdivision called Persimmon Hill. There she has the luxury of naming rooms by function: the Workout Room, the Loom Room, the Spare. Her house in Fairview was so close to the tracks that all conversation paused when a train went by; in Persimmon Hill, it wasn’t long before a neighbor asked if she’d be cutting her lawn anytime soon.

The new redheads on the block soon caught the eye of another neighbor: Jim, two-three doors down and recently widowed. Jim is all Kansas: a barrel-chested, early-rising hard worker. He’s good people; naturally, Rachel, the youngest of Mary’s girls, who’s twelve and around whom the world revolves, distrusts him for that. After dinner we sat out on the porch, the grownups, with dark beer and cigars, trading stories as the grill cooled and the humidity softened. Rachel, who wanted to join us but wanted her freedom too, flicked the lights on and off or flitted around inside, restlessly. Her word for that, when it’s done online, is creeping.

A languid schedule obtained the next day. I was anxious to get to Mom’s — actually, to her car keys — so that I might tour the city with my camera, an itch that got itself scratched in due time. Photo safaris are like fishing: you study the vacillations of your prey and put yourself in their general area, and with patience, luck, and a lot of casting, you might have a good day. It also helps to make yourself sincere, like Linus awaiting the Great Pumpkin.

That was my frame of mind as I cruised the south city and first-ring suburbs that afternoon. For better or worse, I found myself guided by the GPS of where I used to could go by bicycle: Johnson Drive down to 95th, Metcalf to Holmes, and ended up after an hour or so in the stocked pond, as it were, of Metcalf South, where Mom used to buy my Toughskins. Today, Met South has two anchors, an arts theater, and precious little in between. And yet they keep it neat as a pin, as if Hickory Farms and the Orange Julius are merely vacationing. It’s very strange.

I had just enough time to get back to Mom’s and shower off the top filmy layer before heading down to Rosedale Barbecue for dinner. And yes, I did give her gas money. It was a crew of old friends: Rob, who came during the “eye of the storm” of a massive software upgrade at work; Elizabeth, the best storyteller in all of Overland Park; and Tim, all the way from Eudora, along with their respective spouses Candi, Chucho and Kendra. Among KC barbecue joints, Rosedale is a sentimental favorite of mine as it was the one my Dad liked best. It’s divey, but clean. Burnished. Plus, they were having a Memorial Day sale: a full rack, fifteen bones, for $11.95. Some of the couples shared full racks.

Come to think of it, the fishing conceit might apply around that table, too. Even though the format discouraged good one-to-one, I still got such a kick out of being there with some of my oldest friends. We’ve been in that boat a long time, and each of us has our tales and our trophies from the dark waters that surround…okay, maybe not so much.

Next: two surprises from unexpected corners. Meantime, a few more photos are available here, on Flickr.

Tags:   Kansas City · Rosedale · Shawnee Mission2 Comments

For a fee, A.C. Newman blogged for Rolling Stone about the making of the terrific new New Pornos album. This entry talks about the pedigree of the early-released “Your Hands (Together),” and how the rhythm is the same shuffle as that of their own “Mass Romantic,” which in turn, according to the band’s drummer, comes from the song “Kansas City.” It could plausibly claim lineage from any number of songs of that era — “King of the Road,” frex, or “Saturday Night Fish Fry.” But neither of them provides as neat a segue to announcing my upcoming trip to Cowtown next weekend.

Our time on Earth is brief, and a few days in my home town even more so. Seventy-one hours of in-country sentimental tourism, to be exact. Naturally, things on the ground will quickly evaporate that notion; I expect my nieces will see to that. But here’s what I want to do:

+ Hang out with the family, and meet my sister’s new beau;
+ Hold court at Rosedale Barbecue with some high school friends;
+ Distribute food, or information, or something, with my mom at a farmer’s market; and
+ Take wicked cool photos.

I probably won’t make it over to Lee’s Summit, but if I did, I would kiss Pat Metheny right on the mouth for this. Mostly, I’m just looking forward to kicking off the summer in style.

KCK’s own Janelle Monae: Wondaland

Tags:   Kansas CityNo Comments.