Blogs

By CHRIS PACKHAM

Look: We admit it. We were scooped by The Kansas City Star Thursday so forcefully that a tiny, vital part inside of us broke. Now we can feel it rattling around inside, like a cigarette butt in a beer can. I’ve personally apologized to our entire editorial staff for the complete failure of The Pitch's Night & Day section to highlight what is obviously the biggest entertainment story to hit Kansas City since marshmallowy singer Garth Brooks occupied the Sprint Center for a record-setting nine nights. Note that I’m using the word occupy the same way that hippies were described as “occupying” university administration buildings, often while wearing nothing but hemp sandals. Like the hippies, Brooks had to be forcibly dislodged by a hail of obsessive Timothy Finn blog reviews. And come to think of it, we totally missed the Garth Brooks story, too. So we’re 0-2 on this whole thing.

You win this round, Kansas City Star Preview section. Tonight, the 2006 Disney sensation High School Musical makes its Sprint Center debut translated into the girly idiom of figure skating — as clearly pictured in this huge image, reproduced in color at enormous expense, on the cover of yesterday's Preview section.

Adapting classic works for ice makes them that much better, the same way that reinterpreting Star Trek in the idiom of teddy bears adds layers of semiotic complexity to the glass case where your grandma keeps her Hummel figurine collection. Though I am forced to follow the example of the Kansas City Star Preview section in explicitly recommending High School Musical: The Ice Tour to readers of The Pitch, I would also like to point out that the excellent pun in the Preview headline, “High School Musical: The Ice Tour Is on the Rink of Success,” is followed up by this amazing play on words in the subhead: “Disney’s super franchise shows no signs of melting down anytime soon.” Then, inside, I found the headline “Ice Cool Musical.” While we’re doing our Daniel-san wax-on, wax-off in Preview’s backyard, hopefully Preview will also teach us which odd jobs will give us the muscle memory for crafting puns.

Shows are at 7 p.m. Friday; 11 a.m., 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. Saturday; and 3 p.m. Sunday.

It seems really weird that other events are happening on the same weekend — mostly on regular-friction terra firma rather than ON ICE! But outside the Sprint Center, things are proceeding pretty much normally. On Saturday alone, you can see:

Sterilize Stereo, American Catastrophe and Red Water Revival at the Brick (1727 McGee, 816-421-1634)

Hopeless Destroyers, Young Livers, the Rich Boys and Brutally Frank at Davey's Uptown Ramblers Club (3402 Main, 816-753-1909)

Electric Six, Willowz and We Are the Fury at the Record Bar (1020 Westport Road, 816-753-5207)

Ad Astra Per Aspera at Love Garden Sounds (936 ½ Massachusetts, Lawrence, 785-843-1551)

It's like they didn't even realize that High School Musical on Ice was getting "Japan Bombs Pearl Harbor"-grade front-page status in the Preview section. Maybe the bands will get some small turnout of their most hardcore fans.

Finally, after the prolonged weekend of rocking, you might consider attending the free screening of the 1980 East German film Solo Sunny at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (4420 Warwick, 816-753-5784) as part of the Behind the Wall Film Classics Series. I'm assuming that you somehow didn't manage to get tickets to every single performance of a certain lip-synced ice-skating extravaganza and you still need something to do. The film, which screens at 2 p.m., was the recipient of the coveted Silver Bear Award, which was the rickety and unreliable Party-sanctioned version of the Oscar, kind of the Yugo to the Academy Awards' Gran Torino. It addresses the longings and frustrations of German youth at the time — much the same way that High School Musical on Ice addresses the hopes and dreams of privileged Western kids on a smooth, Zambonied expanse of ice.

As a final act of contrition and an apes-in-the-wild display of submission to The Kansas City Star, I have crafted the image at right. Like a disgraced Japanese business executive in a movie caricaturing Japanese business culture, I now end my period of public self-flagellation.

I hope to demonstrate better judgment in the future.

After all that smack talk last week between KU and MU fans, it appears Missourians have gotten the last laugh. Here's the latest e-mail volley.

By ERIC BARTON

Over the years, we here at The Pitch haven’t been fans of Phill Kine. We’ve called him a “douche bag,” a “dimwit” and a “conservative cyborg.” We’ve put a dunce cap on him and dressed him up like a doctor ready to prod kissing teenagers.

But today, we’re defending the guy.

Last night, KCTV Channel 5’s chief investigative reporter, Ash-har Quraishi, aired this anti-Kline report based largely on data that any journalist should’ve seen as faulty.

Quraishi’s report mostly used Johnson County documents that you can find here, here and here; they note the times when Kline, the Johnson County district attorney, used his keycard to access his secured parking area. Quraishi concluded that the documents prove Kline doesn’t show up for work on many days, and when he does, he works an average of just 29 hours a week.

The problem is that the keycard data is faulty. That’s clear by the fact that on some days it shows Kline coming in but never leaving, or vice versa. The keycard data also wouldn’t track Kline’s movements if he parked elsewhere or rode to work with someone else. Insiders in Kline’s office have told The Pitch that Kline sometimes hitches a ride to work. Also, there are several weeks of missing data, because the county says keycard information is routinely purged from the system. So it's impossible to tell which days he actually shows up by using the keycard documents.

Quraishi mentioned these problems in his report. But he still used them to draw faulty conclusions about how much time Kline is in the office.

We’re familiar with these documents because we tried to draw the same conclusions. Pitch reporter Justin Kendall requested the documents back in May, after a tipster told him that Kline rarely showed up for work. In this letter, our records request was denied by Cynthia Dunham, the assistant county counselor. Dunham cited a state law that allows government agencies to keep confidential any records related to security.

KCTV made the same request, and Dunham refused the station’s request, too. But KCTV sued the county on June 4 (click here to read the lawsuit). Senior Judge John Weckel agreed with KCTV, and on September 5 he ordered the county to turn over the records (click here to read the judge’s ruling).

The county then released the records to The Pitch and KCTV. After reviewing the records, The Pitch decided against publishing them.

Quraishi also tried to determine whether Kline is really living in Johnson County. Kline’s critics have charged that he isn’t actually living at the Stilwell apartment he rents. KCTV staked out the apartment overnight and saw no sign of him. The camera crew also tailed him from work and found that he went to the home he still owns in Topeka.

That portion of the report could be more damning. State law requires Kline to live in the county where he’s a public official. But the footage also felt creepy, especially when it showed hidden-camera video of Kline’s wife, Deborah, picking up their daughter from school.

Kline wouldn’t comment for Quraishi’s report. Quraishi caught him in his car outside the Johnson County Courthouse one day, but Kline pulled away during the interview.

Kline didn’t return our phone call this morning. His spokesman, Brian Burgess, said his office has a “general policy” of not commenting to The Pitch. But he did say that he tried to explain to Quraishi that the keycard data was flawed. “They wanted [Kline] to explain where he was during these gaps, and we said, ‘What gaps?’”

According to Web site Kansas Meadowlark, Kline spoke about the surveillance at a November 14 meeting of the Zenith Boosters Club. Kline complained about a camera crew tailing his daughter and the KCTV helicopter hovering over his property, according to this post. (Zenith head Jack Cashill declined to allow The Pitch to attend that meeting.)

Quraishi and his editor, Sam Zeff, KCTV’s executive producer for special projects, defended the report during a phone call with The Pitch this afternoon. They said they discussed the shortcomings of the data but decided it was backed up with “numerous” interviews with people who knew that Kline wasn’t in the office much. “We felt very comfortable with the conclusions we made with the data,” Zeff said. As for showing video of Deborah Kline and tailing the couple’s daughter, Zeff defended their actions by saying that Deborah Kline had made herself part of the story when she registered to vote using the Stilwell address.

“We stand by our report,” Zeff said. “We’re very proud of what we’ve done.”

Hey, we don’t see a problem with investigating Kline. We just think the data should back up the claims.

By JEN CHEN

A fan caught the scripted insanity of ESPN’s
College GameDay at Arrowhead.

In the aftermath of Saturday’s big game, here’s the only post-game analysis you need. And by “analysis,” I really mean my random thoughts about things other than yards and downs.

I sat through ESPN’s College GameDay, which broadcast that morning from the Arrowhead lot. The GameDay crew divided Kansas and Missouri fans into two sections that were separated by an aisle. Both sides brought clever signs. On the Kansas side, I liked the cutout of Grandpa Simpson. Near it was a talky bubble with his famous quote, “I’ll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize Missourah!” (For Simpsons nerds, that’s from the “Gummi Venus de Milo” episode, when Homer’s accused of sexually harassing the babysitter. In it, Marge asks Grandpa why his American flag has 49 stars; hence, his response).

Missouri and KU fans clearly put a lot of thought into their signs, which included:

• “Obesity Lives Here.” OK, that’s a cheap shot about Mangino’s weight, but the play on ESPN’s “College Football Lives Here” slogan is still kind of funny.


• “Kansas Football: A Tradition Since September.”


• A cutout of Mangino’s head accompanied by another massive cutout of a cupcake with a Mizzou logo on it.

During GameDay, the Mangino-cupcake was standing on the Kansas side. I was confused by that – where these Kansas fans implying that Mangino plays cupcake teams? Or were they Missouri fans who crossed the Home Depot-sponsored border and infiltrated the Kansas section? My boyfriend figured out that they meant that Mizzou’s a cupcake team. Apparently, the Star was confused, too; it printed a picture of these guys in Sunday’s paper and identified them as Mizzou fans (even though they’re clearly wearing KU shirts).

After the game, I also sat through Channel 9’s hilariously awful post-game broadcast. Here’s a brief rundown of its painfulness:

• KMBC’s Jim Flink interviews sports guy Andy Fales for like 10 minutes in a post-game circle jerk. They’re standing on the field, right in front of one of those crane-operated cameras. Jim starts of by saying something like, “It’s bedlam here!” Behind them, beyond the crane, the stadium is clearing out. Jim sounds like he’s auditioning for ESPN, as evidenced by his use of the term “big daddy mo.” Apparently, in sports dork talk, that means “momentum.” Hey guys, we just watched the game too. How about interviewing some players instead of each other?


• After the Jim-n-Andy show, the news switched to the standard “fan reaction” story. It cut to reporter Marcus Moore, who was supposedly at a raucous gamewatch at someone’s apartment up north. Yeah, behind him were six guys sitting on sofas. This just in: Sausagefest in NKC! Marcus swore that the party really was rockin’ earlier that night.


• The only useful part of the news was a snippet from Gary Pinkel’s press conference. Then, Karen Kornacki interviewed a Fiesta Bowl official. She asked him if the KU-MU game would influence who they’d pick for their game. He was like, hello, there’s a formula (note: this is an approximation of the actual interview, since I was a bit sleepy by this point). Karen then wrangled a KU player for an interview, but a couple of sentences into it, he got pulled away from some KU authority type.

Other than that, the game was great. Let the overhype begin for next weekend’s game!

By ERIC BARTON

This is not a scene from Arrowhead.

How insane is it that Mizzou is the No. 1 football program in the nation? According to this front page article in The New York Times today, it's like Albania playing for the World Cup title or Adam Sandler up for an Oscar. Yeah, it's that insane.

The article goes on to say that MU football typically does little more than cause reporters to use "thesauruses to find new ways to describe the Tigers’ football futility." The school is "better known for its journalism school than its football teams," the article continued.

But at least those in the ivory tower of journalism did come to this conclusion about Mizzou's season: "It would be difficult to make up a better story than the one that has unfolded this season in Columbia, Mo."

That's true as long as you're not a KU grad.

By C.J. JANOVY

Saturday night’s big football game at Arrowhead was exciting for all of Kansas City, sure. But I have only one thing to say about the experience of watching it at home. The only thing I really remember about the night is this Aflac commercial that perversely bastardizes the classic 1964 stop-motion animated Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer television special. I’m old enough to have witnessed all sorts of commercial degradation of once-great pop-culture artifacts, and I’m cynical enough not to be surprised when it happens. But this one caught me off guard. Apparently this commercial isn’t new, but I’d never seen it before. Now, Christmas will never be the same. Fuck you, Aflac.

I think it was Ludwig von Mises, considered by many to be the greatest economist of the 20th century, who said, “It’s the goddamnedest thing when the subprime lending market collapses and your mortgage division hemorrhages money for months on end and then your shareholders overwhelmingly reject your leadership by voting for dissident board candidates. Fuck.”

On the one hand, I have an antisocial personality spectrum diagnosis that causes me to take pleasure in the misfortune of other people. But then, over here, you have my short attention span, which makes it hard for me to follow the details of the collapse of the housing market. With H&R Block’s management shuffle, these two neurological pathologies have achieved a kind of equilibrium – I don’t necessarily need to know the details of chairman Mark A Ernst’s recent resignation. I just feel good knowing that the business community is regarding him pretty much the way Internet folks regard that photo of the poor bastard with elephantiasis of the testicles. I’ve been told that there’s an editorial injunction against posting that picture because we totally overused it during Saundra McFadden-Weaver’s trial on mortgage-fraud charges.

Now Ludwig von Mises’ words seem almost prescient. They’ll be chaining up a white ghost bike outside the H&R Block Center at 13th and Main in Ernst’s memory, and also pouring out a Labatt 50, but Richard C. Breeden, formerly of the Securities and Exchange Commission, is stepping forward as the new chairman to lead H&R Block back into the vanguard of tax-preparation services. The shareholders like him, but they also liked Ernst just fine when he was generating billions of dollars in a risky market. Now, all of a sudden, they’re feeling conservative again and wearing wingtips and decorating their houses with grandma furniture.

If anyone needs a mono-line subprime mortgage originator cheap, please call Breeden. He needs to unload Option One, Block’s mortgage unit, as quickly as possible, and will entertain any offer. --Chris Packham

Besides the ass-busting effort required to mount a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, is there any particular reason why turkey, mashed potatoes, yams, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie are only served in November? That’s my favorite kind of question: The kind that answers itself, freeing me up to spend more time on the things that matter, which, this weekend, will be drinking.

Yes, A Christmas Carol is playing at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre again, capping off another spectacular season of all the stuff the KC Rep does while prepping the next year’s production of A Christmas Carol. I don’t know who’s involved this year, so let’s just say Robert Gibby Brand. Also, Friday is a big shopping day – unless you’re celebrating National Buy Nothing Day, which, while a laudable blow against rampant consumerism, is pretty much ignored by everyone except for hippies. All that traditional stuff and more happens this Thanksgiving weekend, and what I’m saying is that you should instead ignore all of it and go run up some bar tabs around town.

At 10 p.m. on Friday, hit the Karaoke Ball at the Brick (1727 McGee). David Wayne Reed joins Alicia Solo of the Beautiful Bodies for an amateur singing competition with prizes. The bar will feature holiday drink specials including pumpkin beer and Wild Turkey -- these may unnecessarily remind you that it’s a special special time of year that you should be spending with family and loved ones and being thankful for the religious freedom we gained when our puritan ancestors launched their helicopters against the British. But try to ignore all that until you get a good buzz going and then maybe belt out “The Final Countdown.”

When anyone asks me the question, “If you could live your life as somebody else, who would you be?” the answer that immediately springs into my head is “A really hot chick.” But the one time I actually said it out loud, I totally came to regret it. So now I usually say I’d like to be Frank Sinatra, because what an unbelievably awesome life he led. Although I’d like to skip the final succession of heart attacks, please, if that’s OK.

Were you aware of the Copa Room at 3421 Broadway? It’s a shrine to Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. So if you want to drink and you simultaneously need to entertain elderly relatives who came into town for Thanksgiving, the bar serves up signature cocktails with a Rat Pack theme, and hosts live music Wednesday through Saturday.

No matter which radio station you listen to, all the music getting airplay these days has something in common: the songs eventually come to an end. The “weedla-weedla” guitar solos and similar forms of musical self-indulgence from decades past are increasingly rare. There’s nothing I like more than a good jam band, unless you’re talking about cherry pie, the undisputed king of pies. But anyway. The 75th Street Brewery (520 West 75th Street) hosts Brew Jam every Sunday night at 8. It’s billed as the longest-running acoustic jam in Kansas City, and we’ll give the band the benefit of the doubt and assume that they play only one song each night. And if they’re taking requests, I wouldn’t say no to a three-hour version of Elvis Presley’s timeless classic “Viva Viagra.”

And since the show takes place at a brewery, there will be beer, which is the whole point. -- Chris Packham

If you’ve been to one of the metro’s more spacious liquor stores lately, you might’ve spotted Boulevard Brewing Company’s newest brews. You really can’t miss them: The Smokestack Series, as they’re called, are sold in champagne-style bottles, complete with a cork and antique-looking labels. They sit on wire racks that might otherwise display the newest offering from Napa Valley, rather than Southwest Boulevard.

I say the metro’s spacious liquor stores because not everywhere can carry these things. Some of the smaller shops complain that the 25.4-ounce bottles don’t fit in their beer cases. But if you’re looking for a bottle of beer to impress some dinner guest, these things are pretty damn striking (despite that they're so hard to uncork that it made several of us look like big pussies). And after The Pitch staff downed all four of them the other day, I’m happy to say the beer inside the bottles is pretty damn good.

Back in August, The Pitch reported that Boulevard was facing stiff competition from other specialty beers and was having trouble moving Lunar ale. But these four new Smokestack Series beers aren’t meant to be mass marketed like Lunar. That’s evident with the hefty price tag; I bought ours from Cellar Rat for $7.49 each, which is like buying two beers for the price of a six-pack. But it seems likely connoisseurs, at the least, will shell out a bit more dough for the uniqueness of a champagne bottle full of gourmet beer.

And unique they are. After our afternoon taste test, here’s our take on the four new brews:

Back when I was a cub reporter, my editor sent me to cover an auction of wild horses. They had been collected on the Western plains and were being sold to farmers who would tame them. When I approached the pen, the dozen or so horses scampered away in a tight pack. Wild horses stick together for strength, and when approached by a stranger, they rushed together in a group to the farthest corner. As I rounded the pen, the horses pressed together and sprinted from corner to corner in their protective herd.

I thought of those horses a lot lately while watching the press corps that covers the Chiefs.

I spent a few days on and off over the last three weeks tailing Herm Edwards for this week's cover story in The Pitch. I found myself fascinated by the habits of the beat reporters who huddle together like those wild horses, day after day, as they churn out stories on who’s injured or which player is saying what.