Kansas City: a great town with a slight insecurity complex

What the rest of us can learn from that…

Not long after moving to Kansas City I got invited to give a lecture at Harvard University which ought to give you some valuable insight into the exact worth of a Harvard education.

As I like to think of it: I’m not the kind of person who attends Harvard, I’m the kind of person who lectures at Harvard and if that doesn’t make you want to go to Yale, nothing will.

Anyway…

I have enjoyed Boston and Cambridge every time I’ve been there and I hope to go again, but there is a certain amount of…let’s say…pretension that you might occasionally encounter when visiting Cambridge, like the night we went to a local bar with music so loud it could loosen your back fillings and make your ears spurt blood and some dude was sitting there in the gloom reading Nietzsche.

Because let’s face it, when you’re reading a critique of truth in favor of perspectivism and a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and related theory of master-slave morality and the aesthetic affirmation of life in response to the death of God and the profound crisis of nihilism and the notion of Apollonian and Dionysian forces and a characterization of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power, it’s best comprehended while slightly shitfaced and the Ramones are turned up to 11.

(I got all that off Friedrich Nietzsche’s Wikipedia biography so if you don’t understand it, relax, because it’s Wikipedia and might not be true and maybe someone wrote it as a joke, plus my laptop is telling me “perspectivism” is not a real word so we don’t have to learn it or care what it means unless you find yourself in a Cambridge bar and want to impress some hot undergraduate from Shitkicker, Iowa by casually saying, “Nice perspectivism.”)

Which reminds me…

In a Harvard classroom Q&A some kid raised his hand and asked a question that included the phrase “As Nabokov says” which seemed almost as pretentious as the Nietzsche guy, so I asked the kid if he was referring to the Nabokov that was an All-Pro tight end for the Chicago Bears just to show I was no slouch when it came to obscure references.

Not sure anyone but me got or appreciated the joke, but I’m under the general impression that nihilists aren’t that in to stand-up comedy — “Take my wife, because life is a meaningless illusion” — so I feel pretty confident I can blame them, not me.

Anyway…

I got back to Kansas City and tried to describe what I’d experienced in Cambridge and in the bar where I was talking about East Coast Pretension with a Capital P a spontaneous Bunny Hop Conga Line broke out with everybody hopping around and laughing and not one person reading Nietzsche or quoting Nabokov which made me think: “I really like this town.”

Unfortunately, this town has a slight inferiority complex.

The Paris of the Plains

Kansas City has a lot to offer, but like a lot of towns that aren’t New York or San Francisco or LA or Fresno “Garden Spot of the Central Valley If You Like It Hotter Than The Devil’s Testicles” (Fresno’s unofficial motto) it has a slight inferiority complex which comes out when it tries to compare itself to other cities.

Google “Paris of the Plains” and you’ll find someone asking how Kansas City got that nickname and the short answer is it didn’t.

I’ve lived here for four decades and I’ve never heard anyone who wasn’t trying to sell a book or working for the Chamber of Commerce or narrating a TV special call Kansas City the “Paris of the Plains.”

It’s kinda like some guy trying to get people to call him “Spike” or “Flash” when his real name is Leonard and everyone thinks he’s a dork.

BTW: Apparently Pittsburgh is trying to get the “Paris of Appalachia” label to stick to it which kind of seems like the “New York of Siberia” because the two things don’t really go together, even though I hear Pittsburgh is a pretty cool town, but – let’s face it – it’s still Pittsburgh which in my opinion is probably a good thing.

More on that shortly.

In any case, if either town gets people to start using their preferred nickname, from now on I want to be known as the “Brad Pitt of the Midwest” which is kind of redundant because Brad is actually from Springfield, Missouri so I guess we already have one of those, but we’ve already got a Paris and that hasn’t stopped KC or Pittsburgh, so my request stands.

Moving on.

Kansas City food

When I first arrived in KC I’d ask people where I should eat and they’d tell me to go to some upscale restaurant where they served a sprig of parsley and one shrimp artfully arranged on a plate the size of a Conestoga wagon wheel because I think they wanted me to be impressed about how sophisticated KC was and I’d ask if they ate there and they’d say they didn’t, but I probably didn’t want to go to their favorite restaurant because it was a dive, which was exactly the kind of place I was looking for.

For instance:

The picture posted is a Rosedale BBQ pulled chicken sandwich, fries and potato salad which is about a billion and a half calories and will put you in a food coma and not long after I ate this I took a nap on my couch because apparently my body needed to shut down every other system while my stomach worked on digesting all that food.

Worth noting: after I finished the sandwich there was enough pulled chicken that fell out from between the two buns to make another meal which I believe is a sign you came to the right place.

Kansas City is a great “joint” town and has fantastic food at reasonable prices if you know where to go which will require you to waterboard some local citizen (look for a fat one because it means they’re eating well) because otherwise they’ll send you to a high-priced haute cuisine place where the food might be prepared by virgin angels, but will be way too expensive and there won’t be enough to fill you up so you’ll need to stop by Rosedale to get some fries to eat on the way home.

True story:

For a long time Rosedale wrapped its to-go orders in Kansas City Star newspapers and locals theorized part of the unique Rosedale flavor was due to a secret ingredient: printer’s ink.

Kansas City history

OK, so I move here and start reading about my new home and its history and the history is incredible, but like a lot of towns KC doesn’t make the most of it because some of it might be embarrassing if you have a stick up your ass and in my experience most people at the upper crust of society do, so they go around calling this the “Paris of the Plains” when the “Sodom & Gomorrah of the Midwest” would be much more accurate.

I once read (right now can’t remember where) that there was a Kansas City nightclub where the waitresses were naked and had their pubic hair shaved into the symbols on a deck of cards (hearts, diamonds, spades or clubs) and I really hope that’s true although I’d have to see a spade or a club to know for sure because that’s some highly technical shaving, which, while food for thought, is not the point I want to make but this is:

That shit was going on in the 1920s and 30s which tells me people have been getting up to highjinks for a long, long time which makes me feel better about some of my own activities.

“People are weird” and that’s a direct quote from Caligula’s horse.

Anyway…

Kansas City’s history is filled with gangsters, gunslingers, hookers, jazz musicians and corrupt politicians, but all too often its fascinating history gets ignored like the cousin who’s been divorced three times and spent a stretch in jail and there was that time he got caught smuggling parakeets into Canada and nobody talks about him because he’s considered a family embarrassment even though he’s got the best stories and is wildly entertaining at family weddings right up until he makes a pass at the bride and then passes out on the wedding cake.

For example:

You can go to Union Station and put your finger in some bullet holes left over from the Union Station Massacre where gangsters shot it out with the FBI, but you’d never know what took place there unless somebody local points it out. If I was in charge (and let’s thank God I’m not because I’m pretty busy eating BBQ) they’d reenact that event every Saturday and twice on Sundays.

The sketchy history that some people want to ignore is what makes Kansas City interesting.

One more story before I go

So I go to New York for the first time and about two blocks from my hotel we hit a traffic jam and we’re just sitting there so the cabbie decides to start a conversation by asking me where I’m from and I say Kansas City.

He then feels it necessary to inform me we don’t have shit in Kansas City and here in New York they have the Statue of Liberty and the Museum of Modern Art and the Opera and Madison Square Garden and Broadway and I’m looking at the guy and thinking, “Yeah…and how often do you go to any of that?”

Since I can see my hotel and I’m worn out listening to this dude I say I’ll walk from here and pay my fare, but before I leave I lean into his window and say:

“Y’know what we got in Kansas City? Traffic that moves.”

I never thought much about Kansas City until I moved here, but I’m assuming if I knew more about Cincinnati or Indianapolis or Pittsburgh they have some of the same kinds of dives and joints and unique history and, much like people, they ought to quit trying to be something they’re not and spend more time enjoying what they are.

And if you’re ever on Southwest Boulevard in Kansas City and feel hungry, I can highly recommend the pulled chicken sandwich.