(upbeat music) - Welcome back to another edition of Kansas City Experience.

I'm Ieshia Downton.

Head on this month's episode of KCX, we check in with special effects artist, Jake Johnson and find out some of the history behind makeup effects.

- [Jake] The funny thing is that the forehead piece of the creature is actually from a different project.

And then the mouth was for a fright night personal project that I had done for a demo out in Los Angeles.

- [Ieshia] Barbecue has become a culinary competition and subject of much debate.

But how did it originate?

We look back at some of the forgotten history behind the origins of barbecue.

- African-Americans emerged from slavery with a competitive advantage in barbecue.

It was just understood that the very best barbecue was going to be made by an African-Americans.

- [Ieshia] Also this month, we learn how to make a Brazilian delicacy and log in for a virtual 90.9 the bridge session with Jealous Of The Birds.

But we start this month with a look at efforts to aid the unhoused in Kansas City.

Explore some practical solutions, and discuss ways to address the root causes of homelessness.

- [Luke] What lives in these woods, supposedly lives in these woods is deer, rabbit.

Not human beings.

I semi run this camp.

I'm taking care of 14 people.

Every day I make sure that they alive.

They warm at night, and they get up in the mornings.

I caught first degree frostbite in my thumbs.

They're artificial from middle on up to the tips of them.

So I worked my fingers to the bone sometimes to make that happen for my friends.

One of the guys ran over to me.

Hey man, you need to come on come on, six won't wake up.

Look right over here.

This is where I found six.

I've known him the three years that I was out here.

The coolest.

Outgoing.

Loving.

It's just sad, man.

It's really sad to lose a friend like that.

We found him with his eyes open, okay.

With his left hand, over his chest, holding his heart.

I broke down and I cried.

I said, he's gone.

That man did not have to freeze the death like he did.

- [Lynn] There is not one single solution to homelessness or to housing crisis.

There's a lot of things that would have to happen at the same time to effectively end homelessness or housing crisis.

- [Marqueia] You know, for people who are on the streets, their lives are consumed by the activities of daily living that most of us take for granted.

So knowing where you're going to sleep, where you're going to be safe, where you're going to be able to go to the bathroom.

All of those things are preoccupations that really drain people.

Trying to stay warm is absolutely exhausting And that our folks are really in a state of sleep deprivation a lot of the time.

Folks also need swift access to health care and behavioral health services.

And we do find that for some folks it's difficult to get into those programs.

They have difficulty navigating systems or there's long wait lists to be seen.

Those temporary fixes are actually life saving support for people that's needed.

- [Brian] We're standing here in the Bartle Hall Convention Center.

It is the largest facility that we have in Kansas City.

This is a side of our warming center for our unhoused population in not just Kansas city, but across the region.

- [Lisa] We also have our beds.

With bed numbers.

So we'll know which residents are here.

Some are volunteers.

We also have wheelchairs available for those that are handicapped.

This is our food station.

- [Brian] One of the great benefits about having a centralized location like this is we have a critical mass of the population we're able to better streamline and coordinate other related services.

(intense music) - So when I look at my people, sleeping in snow.

Yet y'all want me to help pass a contract that codifies all rights away from the city.

When it's extremely transparent that issues of the under served population.

- [Brandon] Shelters are a wonderful thing.

But if that shelter can only have a capacity for a couple of hours, then it guarantees that it's going to be a transient population.

It's just by design.

Volunteers are doing everything that they can.

But outside of the volunteers it's wasteful taxpayer spending.

When you talk about half a million dollars for a month of allowing people to stay inside of the center for a few hours That is not adequate.

So we talk about park and rec, clean up taxpayer dollars.

We're talking about 60 to $90,000 each cleanup.

Two to three clean ups per year.

So you do three or four sites.

You at about half a million.

The same when we talk about services from PD, arresting people, taking them to jail, sending them back out.

This is a lot of tax dollars that are being wasted.

- [Lisa] I have been over trying to get wraparound services of these entities that are getting large sums of money to come down.

I have been asking them to come down, set up a table, sit down here with these people.

They're not coming down and they're getting quite a bit of funding.

And these people are falling in the cracks.

- [Marqueia] Because grantmaking is a competitive process.

Providers are essentially fighting for scarce resources.

And so it doesn't breed collaboration because essentially you're working alongside each other but you're also rivals in some regard.

- [Dr. Tsemberis] The way that emergency homeless services are set up almost require the constant presence of people who are homeless in order to be financially viable.

Often you see nonprofits saying, Oh, we serve 40,000 meals.

We housed 12,000 people last year.

So you need the shelter filled every night in order to collect money, to make your business run.

So the business model is to keep homeless services filled rather than empty.

If the incentives were, you get paid for every person you put in permanent housing it would drive the whole system in a whole other direction.

And we don't need this whole middle level.

You know, homelessness bureaucracy.

- [James] They got empty beds that.

People refuse because they can't come.

They can't go.

They locked down and when you can't come and go, it's a weird man.

You in jail We get used like pawns and they don't know us.

They don't talk to us.

And they constantly saying that they speaking for us and they don't.

They not us.

Bending directly on the people that's impacted not on the way that somebody else see fit so they can get paid in the middle.

And everybody trying to fix us and we're not broken.

The system is broken.

- [News Reporter] Three presidential candidates have now visited Kansas city.

All of their trips here had one thing in common.

The Veterans Community Project.

- This village of tiny homes is solving veteran homelessness in Kansas City.

- [Wes] Everything that goes into the house is all rooted in dignity first.

These houses are designed to really speak to that trauma informed care approach that we take.

You get to completely exhale and just understand that it's just you in that four walls and a door.

This is what a finished product looks like.

Every single person that lives in this village has a very unique program that is designed specifically for them.

These offices that we use we've got a medical suite, our dental suite.

We've got a learning lab down there, and we have our fellowship hall, dog wash room.

All of those are in conjunction with partnerships that we have with local agencies around town there's Benilde Hall There's day warming centers.

There's evening warming centers and we need them desperately.

But, how can we capture those folks that are showing up to those places and immediately connect them to services, and immediately connect them to a way to elevate out of that system of going from shelter to shelter.

I would love to see this being done on a large scale for the entire population.

Several folks on my leadership have met with city councilors and other lawmakers in this city that are thinking along these same lines.

- [Brian] A couple of the programs that we're working on involve the use of a city owned property, land bank property, that we could use to build transitional and more permanent housing.

- [Brandon] And the whole idea behind the enclave is creating a tiny village of houses or buildings and make it resource head.

So in the center of this area you have a medical facility that we're looking to build.

That medical facility will access behavioral issues and drug issues.

We're looking to do it, not in an isolated area of the city, but an area of the city that is viable when it comes to transit in which we can not warehouse people that our houses are homeless, revived people that our houses are homeless a viable opportunity to work themselves out.

And this scenario what we're trying to do is create infrastructure and then create the regulation update infrastructure and the regulation of infrastructure will be adequate contracts with service providers.

These are all service providers that we typically don't engage in a pinpointed effort and it should have positive budget increase - [Marqueia] You know, we really do need a much more coordinated community response to homelessness.

And so that the trajectory for each person when we engage them from the streets all the way to their final destination that there's a much clearer pathway on that trajectory for each person that's tailored to meet their needs.

And that requires really deep coordination and collaboration, but also with those ancillary supports that keep people sustainable and stable in their housing.

As well as engaging with the systems that feed into homelessness.

So the family court system, criminal justice, child welfare all of those systems that essentially dump into homelessness.

- [Dr. Tsemberis] So homelessness is actually one of those words that doesn't describe thing.

It actually covers things up.

It covers up income disparity.

It covers up lack of affordable housing, unequal racially bias opportunities for housing.

Covers up so many structural problems.

And then you have someone who falls out of a society that is unfair for a group of people and way too beneficial for a small group of people.

And then they're called homeless.

As if it's their problem.

They didn't bring it on themselves.

We as a society are creating homelessness every single day.

We're manufacturing homelessness because of the structural inequities in our social system.

Even if we ended homelessness in America today, 50,000 rooms in Kansas City, like done we're done with it.

In six months we'll have new homeless people because we haven't changed the structures that produce homelessness.

You need better wages, affordable housing, support services for people who have mental illness and addiction.

It's not very complicated.

actually it's not like we have to invent something to do it.

We know how to do it, but there is no political will to do it.

- [James] I do want to put a band-aid over a shotgun on just to say we did something.

We need a place to live.

We need safe, affordable housing.

Period.

- Today, Art House takes you into the world of special makeup effects by way of Topeka's own Jake Jackson.

(intense music) That's right.

Jackson's work can be seen in a locally lensed, Kansas City horror film, I am Lisa, directed by the great Patrick Gray and his work can be seen in the new horror film short Crockpot directed by Kansas City's own Ty Jones.

(count down beeps) - She just wanted to help you - She just, she just nothing.

this wasn't just a kind gesture.

- When Ty sent me the script, I immediately was like oh my gosh, this is a freaking tales from the crypt episode And I think that's was my approach in terms of the creature was to make something that was very visually interesting because we were only going to see it for a few seconds but I wanted it to be something that it was kind of a gut punch when you saw it you were like, oh my goodness.

(monster growls) (slicing) It was actually a blend of a couple of prosthetics that I had laying around the shop actually I used them for two different projects.

That the funny thing is that the forehead piece of the creature is actually from a different project, which was, I am Lisa.

Was actually the Lisa werewolf prosthetic that I created for that.

And then the mouth was for a fright night personal project that I had done for a demo out in Los Angeles, at the son of monster blues a convention they blended really well together.

And then I just did a paint job of making it green and more monster-y.

There's just always something about the color green with monsters that kind of hearkens back to childhood for me of green monsters, I guess.

And then I did some special finger extensions and then prosthetics that went over the actors hands so that we could have these really cool gangly fingers in a few of the shots.

Ty and I had a great time working on, I worked with Patrick Gray on that, he was one of the producers on it as well.

So yeah, the cool thing is like, it was just a really great collaborative process working with everybody.

And all the people that we worked on with Crockpot, they all became friends if they weren't already friends and we've all worked on other projects and already planning and work on other projects, post CrockPot - Magic and wonder.

And even something God like about changing a human face, or an actor, a person into something entirely different.

- [Jake] I'm a, an advanced student of Dick's I'd always admired his work.

The very first makeup book I ever got when I was 17 years old, was Dick Smith's .

How to do Makeup, that he had created for originally for famous monsters of Filmland which was kind of like the book that got Rick Baker started - It's alive, it's alive.

You feel like you've actually created this person.

- [Jake] Dick was very good about telling his secrets to everybody.

- [Dick] There's a lot of misconceptions in film makeup.

One of them is that Marlon Brando had cotton stuffed in his cheeks with a Godfather, not true.

We made a dental plumper, which hooks in around the guys molars.

And it goes something like this, but of course it doesn't fit me.

- [Jake] So many people at that time when Dick's first started were very secretive.

It was all very Hollywood based.

It was all mechanical.

It was like, you were part of the show.

- [The Godfather] What have I done to make you treat me so disrespectfully.

- [Jake ] He pioneered a lot of the techniques that we used now.

I mean, we still use.

There's, oh, it's called an overlapping foam latex mask.

Before Dick Smith came along and realized, hey I can break down the sculpture into multiple pieces that can overlap each other and you can get much more of an articulated face out of it.

Everybody would just make one whole mask and try to glue it on.

Well, when you use the material latex or in this case only foam latex, it shrinks.

So then you had to pull and all this other stuff.

So he really revolutionized that.

I mean, Dick was an innovator.

I mean it wasn't just him being a brilliant makeup effects artist.

He really innovated and said, Hmm what can I, look at this thing, And this thing, what can I do put these together to make something interesting?

There's a makeup that we use called PAX paint which is stands for Pros-Aide and Liquitex.

And what Dick Smith did was he took the medical medical adhesive that's white but when it dries, it's translucent.

So you can't see it.

But he figured if I put acrylic paint in there I can make a paint that will hold and really seal these foam latex pieces.

And we still use that to this day, but no Dick Smith's makeup is, I mean, revolutionary I actually did a tribute makeup last year about this time of The Exorcist, cause I was always a huge fan of it.

And it was so simple in its final execution (growl) The history of makeup, to me it's important to know the history, whether it's Dick Smith or you go back to look at John Chambers who did Planet of the Apes or even Lon Chaney and Jack Pierce.

If you don't know that lineage of where these ideas and these processes came from then I think you're missing out on the opportunity to excel yourself.

Me going forward I'm going to continue to do short films.

I'm trying to get obviously I've been doing a lot more producing stuff like that, trying to help out with productions because ultimately my goal is to write and direct and produce my own featuring film which I did just secure the rights to an author's book.

My friend, Andy Rausch, who's a novelist getting every worked out a deal to where I'm going to be adapting his book up until one of us is dead into a feature length film.

Which hopefully will be going to production in early 2022.

So, yeah, so I'm just continuing with the work and collaborate with people that I love working with.

Like I love working with Patrick.

I love working with a lot of actors so I get a lot of calls from those people.

And I came in and they need make up effects artists in this.

So I think that the thing is we just have to be safer, we have to be more cognizant of what it is but at the same time we're filmmakers, we're storytellers.

We're going to find a way to tell the story.

We just have to do it in a much safer and more effective way so that we can keep doing stuff.

Cinema will never die.

They keep saying, oh it's going to change and it's going to die.

It's like storytelling's universal.

And all of us are still making stuff.

We're all figuring out new ways to tell stories.

And I think going forward that's what we're all going to do.

Not just to myself, we're going to find ways to make movies.

- Barbecue is Native American at it's foundation.

I think that gets glossed over with the typical barbecue history narrative talks about indigenous people in the Caribbean but there's a lot of dots that don't get connected.

When we start talking about barbecue in the American South.

How do we go from this raised platform in the Caribbean to this trench method in the American South cause the trench method was not in the Caribbean.

So something else is going on.

Enslaved Native Americans where barbecues first clicks but because Indian slavery didn't work out they transitioned to African slavery.

And so then that's when enslaved Africans and then later in slave African-Americans become barbecues principal cooks.

(calm music) A lot of people start the story with Henry Perry.

But if you looked at kind of newspapers from the 18 hundreds, it was clear that there were some barbecue events that were happening in that part of Kansas.

As early as the 1870's, maybe even earlier.

And in many cases, barbecue came with slavery.

African-Americans emerged from slavery with a competitive advantage in barbecue.

It was just understood that the very best barbecue was going to be made by an African-American.

So that competitive advantage they leverage it to having a lot, I call it freelance barbecue gigs, around the country.

And then when we go to this shift from kind of rural barbecue to urban barbecue where you need more capital in order to have a barbecue business and one of the longstanding problems for African-Americans back then, and even today is access to capital and freedom from other people to just start their business where they want to, and grow their business how they want to.

- Of course we couldn't.

At that time, you didn't borrow money from the banks.

You had a vendor operators that was run by the vendor operating companies.

So, we borrowed the money from the jukebox vendor man.

And he loaned dad enough money to buy it and took the payment out of the jukebox that was in the place at the time and that's how we we got started but a $500 jukebox loan.

He had a lot of determination.

- The thing that really surprised me is how the way that Native Americans have been erased from the barbecue narrative is a template for what's happening to African-Americans now.

When white Europeans come to the American South and they see Native Americans cooking a certain way they all call it barbecue.

But then within 150 years, whatever native Americans were doing is not barbecue anymore.

What white barbecuers are doing is more and more being called the norm.

And the best example of this is sauce.

You'll hear people say, Oh yeah, real barbecue Doesn't have sauce.

African-Americans will be like, say, well, who says?

(pop sounds) Sauce is integral to African-American barbecue culture So because the drumbeat of what barbecue is is being narrowed and narrowed everything else is being pushed to the margins.

Now, I criticized the American Royal for not being diverse in terms of its barbecue hall of fame and to their credit.

They invited me on the board.

And so the last two years, and it's not all me, I'm working with other board members who are like-minded.

So we're getting more diverse classes inducted to the Barbecue Hall of Fame.

And I'm proud to say the very first African-American woman was inducted just this past year, but Desiree Robinson Cozy Corner in Memphis.

And there's just so many other people who need to get a shout out.

So my thing is, I'm just trying to remind people of the significant contributions that African Americans have made to a barbecue culture.

Something that's been lost the last couple of decades.

(chill music) - Hi, my name is Jessica Harris.

I'm a co-founder of Sweet Kiss Brigaderio And today we're going to show you how to make the classic Brigaderio.

(chill music) So you're probably wondering what is Brigaderio?

It's the most famous, popular and loved sweet in Brazil.

The ingredients are condensed milk, butter, cocoa powder, and cream.

So we're going to start by adding the condensed milk.

Then we're going to add the cocoa powder, little bit of butter because butter makes everything better and cream.

(chill music) After about 20 to 30 minutes, depending on how much you making you pour it in a container and this what it looks like very thick and it's ready to be hand-rolled.

(chill music) The milk chocolate is the most popular one.

The reason why it's called Brigaderio, because a Brigadier in Brazil was running for office in 1945 and the ladies wanted to make something to raise money for his campaign.

And so they combined the condensed milk with cocoa powder and became the most popular treat in Brazil ever.

(chill music) - The first one I'm going to play is probably the first song I ever properly wrote back whenever I was 18.

And it's called Goji Berry Sunset.

(Whistling) ♪Goji Berry Sunset ♪ ♪ That's how it all started ♪ ♪ Sitting on the lakeside ♪ ♪ Talking about old times ♪ ♪ Arms laced with red thread ♪ ♪ Forget the things that I said ♪ ♪ Quote a line from Tennyson ♪ ♪ Poetry is medicine ♪ ♪ Your name ♪ ♪ Fizzes on my tongue ♪ ♪ Oh your name ♪ ♪ It fizzes on my tongue ♪ ♪ Damn that name ♪ (Whistling) ♪ Walking though the bluebells ♪ ♪ Pollen dust and pastels ♪ ♪ Bury the Bible ♪ ♪ Now you're being tribal ♪ ♪ We told too many bad jokes ♪ ♪ Sherbet laughs and cold coke ♪ ♪ Maybe you're my favorite ♪ ♪ I like the beard don't shave it ♪ ♪ Your name fizzes on my tongue ♪ ♪ Oh your name ♪ ♪ It fizzes on my tongue ♪ ♪ Your name fizzes on my tongue ♪ ♪ Damn that name ♪ (Whistles)