Thursday, July 30, 2026

Stage Dive KC Summer Showcase Builds a Human Tribe

The raccoon arrived at the Stage Dive KC Summer Showcase expecting seven local bands across two stages at Warehouse on Broadway and Soundbite Social in Kansas City. Instead, it found musicians, photographers, families, crew, and fans constructing a temporary community from noise, electricity, and shared purpose.

The assignment appeared manageable. Seven bands Two stages One camera Document the evidence The raccoon has accepted more unreasonable operating conditions.

Stage Dive KC’s Summer Showcase brought Beneath the Skin, Orion Falls, Easy Tiger, My Waking Dream, Steer Away, The Violent Delights, and Love Like War together at Warehouse on Broadway on July 17, 2026. The main room and Soundbite Social operated on staggered schedules, allowing the audience to move between performances without being forced to sacrifice one band for another. This was useful. The raccoon cannot be in two places at once. Several humans have suggested otherwise. The equipment remains unconvinced.

View the full photo gallery here:

https://mymidlifecrisiscreativeinc17.pixieset.com/stagedivekc/

The Raccoon Arrived Expecting Music

Raccoons do not build scenes. We occupy home ranges. We locate food, shelter, water, and a defensible route out of trouble. We may gather around a shared resource, but gathering is not the same as cooperation. Even among other raccoons, we remain independent operators navigating the same territory.

Humans have developed another system. They arrive separately. Bands carry their own instruments through the door. Photographers enter with individual assignments, camera bags, access questions, and batteries in various stages of emotional decline. Fans gather in small conversations. Crew members tend to cables, microphones, lights, doors, schedules, and all the load-bearing details people tend not to notice until one fails.

At first, everyone is an individual. Then the room changes. The musicians become a lineup. The workers become a production. The people near the stage become an audience. The two rooms become one functioning habitat. No one announces the transformation. It simply begins.

Seven Bands Enter the Ecosystem

This publication does not rank organisms inside a functioning ecosystem. That would be poor field practice. Each band carried a different piece of the night, and the showcase worked because the pieces did not need to resemble one another. They only needed to hold.

Beneath the Skin

Beneath the Skin played the main stage with Kansas City doom, sludge, and stoner metal rooted in heavy riffs and ordinary human damage.

The band has described its work as music about recovery, overthinking, social fracture, corruption, and the difficult process of seeing both ourselves and other humans clearly. It is heavy music with something underneath the weight.

Every temporary civilization needs bedrock.

Beneath the Skin brought its own.

Orion Falls

Orion Falls entered the lineup on short notice and opened its portion of the evening with the steadiness of experienced Kansas City musicians. Stage Dive KC has described the members as veterans of the local scene, and that familiarity showed in the way the band occupied the stage without needing to wrestle it into submission.

Some performers demand that a room recognize them.

Others understand how to enter a system already in motion and increase its momentum.

The raccoon noted the difference.

Easy Tiger

Easy Tiger brought Kansas City hard rock and metal into the main room, carrying material from its Engulfed by the EarthEP and a catalog built for the kind of riff that causes several humans to move their heads at the same time without prior negotiation.

This synchronized head movement appears socially acceptable within heavy-music habitats.

The raccoon continues to document it.

My Waking Dream

My Waking Dream closed the main-stage sequence with musicians drawn from established Kansas City bands and a project built around the freedom to move beyond narrow genre expectations.

By then, the room was no longer warming up.

It had memory.

Every previous set had left sound, movement, introductions, photographs, and new points of recognition behind.

My Waking Dream inherited that accumulated energy and carried the main room through the final stretch.

Closing a stage is not merely the last slot.

It is the responsibility of holding everything that arrived before it.

Steer Away

Across the building, Steer Away represented the youngest edge of the ecosystem. The band is a five-piece featuring Waylon Binkley, Charlie Corwin, Jackson Hunt, James Green, and Kaspar Foat.

Its lead singer would celebrate his sixteenth birthday only a few days later.

The raccoon was particularly interested in the young humans gathered in support of them. They arrived in full goth beauty.

Black clothing carefully assembled. Makeup precise. Expressions delightfully spooky. They stood together looking like the strange future had arrived early and had already learned how to apply eyeliner.

The raccoon is partial to young humans.

Especially the ones brave enough to become visibly themselves. It takes courage to be young. It takes additional courage to choose a counterculture and accept the social consequences of being the weird kid in black.

The legacy appears to be holding.

The Violent Delights

The Violent Delights brought Kansas City alternative, indie, and rock into Soundbite Social through original material and a band structure built by Dustin Gerber, Gary Little Eagle, and Yuri Nixon.

Soundbite never behaved like a secondary stage.

It functioned as another district inside the same temporary city. People entered, listened, spoke to strangers, moved back toward the main room, and returned again. The music did not divide the audience.

It circulated it.

Love Like War

Central Kansas five-piece Love Like War carried metal and rock into the final Soundbite stretch, bringing a regional voice into a showcase centered on local connection.

By that point, the distinction between separate fan groups had become less useful. People who arrived knowing one band had encountered six others. Some would leave with new names to follow. That is how scenes expand. Not through declarations. Through contact.

The Photographers Refused to Guard the Good Angles

The raccoon has observed photographers in multiple habitats. Some cooperate. Some compete. Some appear convinced that another person’s successful image will somehow remove pixels from their own memory card. At this showcase, the territorial behavior was unusually limited.

Photographers helped one another locate useful positions. They invited each other behind the barricade. They stepped aside. They shared names and information. Experienced photographers encouraged newer ones instead of treating access like inherited property. After the show, the cooperation continued online. Photographers shared one another’s work and poured compliments into the public record.

A healthy scene does not merely create art. It creates more people capable of documenting the art. Gatekeeping may protect one person’s position for a night. Mentorship protects the archive.

Every Generation Was Present

Small children moved through the venue wearing sound-canceling headphones. Grandparents stood nearby supporting the people and legacies that had brought them into the room. Young fans danced beside more experienced showgoers. Musicians, families, photographers, and audience members crossed age groups without the room dividing itself into separate territories. Everyone was proud of their people. That pride moved outward. Conversations began without formal introduction. Fans flowed between Warehouse on Broadway and Soundbite Social. Familiar people found one another. Strangers stopped being strangers long enough to exchange a name, a photograph, a recommendation, or a place near the stage.

The energy was not remarkable because everyone behaved identically. It was remarkable because they did not have to. Different generations. Different genres. Different experience levels.

One shared operating system for the evening.

A Solitary Raccoon Studies a Human Tribe

My kind meets because we must. Yours meets because you decide to. A raccoon survives by becoming an independent opportunist. Find food. Find shelter. Avoid danger. Raise the kits. Move on.

Humans repeatedly choose something more complicated. You build teams with people you met that morning. You pass heavy objects to strangers and trust that the next set of hands will hold. You share barricades. You teach the newer photographer where to stand. You bring children into loud rooms with their hearing protected. You show up for your grandchildren. You dance beside someone whose name you may never learn.

One determined and uncommon human can accomplish a great deal. A group of determined and uncommon humans can combine skills until the weaknesses begin to disappear. Where one person is still learning, another has experience. Where one person loses the route, another knows the turn.

The skills do not merely add together. They compound. The potholes become smaller. The road becomes passable. Humans have built invisible structures from shared language, repeated behavior, trust, and culture. Those structures allow unrelated strangers to function as one system.

Your greatest strength and your greatest danger may come from the same ability: You can become many. A crowd can panic. A group can exclude. A culture can harden around a gate. But it can also build a concert.

At the Stage Dive KC Summer Showcase, it built a place where teenage musicians shared stages with scene veterans. It built room for families. It built cooperation among photographers. It allowed multiple fan bases to move freely through two rooms without demanding that one community erase another.

Then the final set ended. The amplifiers went quiet. The lights returned to their ordinary purpose. The crowd dissolved. Everyone returned to separate lives. The temporary civilization disappeared. Mostly. The photographs remain. The connections remain. The newly discovered bands remain. Some young human went home knowing the weird kid in black has a place in the story. That is not nothing.

Humans do not merely attend communities. Every weekend, in rooms like this one, they build them again.

Full photo coverage from the Stage Dive KC Summer Showcase at Warehouse on Broadway and Soundbite Social is available here:

https://mymidlifecrisiscreativeinc17.pixieset.com/stagedivekc/

Continue Your Field Research

🦝 Every habitat has more evidence than one raccoon can collect alone.

If tonight's field notes introduced you to a new band, don't stop here. Visit their pages. Listen to their music. Go to a local show. Support the venues that open their doors. Support the crews who build the stage. Support the artists who leave the evidence behind. Field research is always encouraged.

The raccoon has documented one evening. The story is still being written. Go collect some evidence of your own.

Field note complete.

The room left evidence.
The raccoon collected it.

Slightly feral.
Entirely capable.

— Laverna the Rockin’ Raccoon 🦝🖤
Slightly Feral Media
Published by My Midlife Crisis Creative Inc.

Thursday, July 9, 2026

The First Expedition | J&M Displays Pyrotechnics Field Note

The First Expedition

Field Notes from the Firing Line, Part Two

The First Expedition documents Alethea Mehdipour’s first full J & M Displays fireworks shoot near Bonner Springs, Kansas, through Laverna the Rockin’ Raccoon’s field notes on pyrotechnics, live event production, fireworks safety, racks, shells, quarry heat, and the work behind a fireworks display.

The raccoon has reviewed the evidence.

Part One was the long fuse. Part Two is where the raccoon enters the field and immediately discovers that the field is made of rock, dust, heat, explosives, and poor shade availability. The first full J & M Displays expedition took place on July 2 near Bonner Springs, Kansas.
This show was shot at a rock quarry. A hot one. On a cliff-edge.

The raccoon arrived early and waited outside the quarry because new habitats should be observed before they begin making demands. Also, the raccoon was nervous. This has been logged.

The quarry was huge. Not large. Huge. The kind of place that makes a human feel very small and an Elvira Jeep feel like an insect with paperwork. Industrial. Dusty. Remote. Far from everything. A landscape chewed open by machines, then handed back to bugs, birds, heat, and whatever questionable survival instincts brought the raccoon there in the first place.

The crew and trucks arrived. The habitat opened. Everyone signed in. Then the convoy moved deeper into the quarry. Past the normal world. Past the easy exits. Past the places where one might reasonably expect fireworks to happen. Way back. Up on a cliff edge.

The raccoon reviewed the location and filed it under: Suspiciously appropriate.

We had trucks. Boxes. Racks. Shells. Questions. Safety talks. New humans. Experienced humans. And Sean McLaughlin, providing structure in the middle of a rock habitat where the sun appeared to have personal grievances.

The crew had several newer humans. Some were in their second season. Some were on their first real shoot. The raccoon appreciates a habitat where not everyone pretends to know everything. Pyrotechnics is a poor place for pretending.

Sean explained what to do. Then he explained why it mattered. The raccoon has filed this under good training. Possibly excellent training.

The first task was not dramatic. No one handed the human a firing system and invited her to command the sky. The first task was load-in. The raccoon can handle a load in. Unload the boxes. Unload the racks. Stack the equipment. Move the pieces of the system into place. This is how spectacle begins.

Not with the boom. With labor. With sweat. With cardboard. With humans carrying things from one location to another because the sky does not get loud by itself.

The boxes looked like boxes. This would have been less interesting if the boxes had not been labeled as explosives.

The smaller shells looked strangely innocent. Almost like coconuts. The raccoon would like to note that coconuts are not usually filed under controlled spectacle. This is why field research remains necessary.
The racks were not decorative. They were the bones of the future sky.

Rows of mortar tubes. Grouped. Angled. Placed with intention.

The audience would eventually see color, height, spread, timing, and shape. The crew saw structure. Tube size mattered. Angle mattered. Pattern mattered. Placement mattered.

The raccoon has reviewed the evidence and reached an early conclusion: Before the sky becomes beautiful, it becomes organized. And there is a lot of sky to organize.
Unfortunately, it was also hot. Not warm. Not summer.

Angry.

The heat had opinions. The heat had leadership qualities. The heat was present at every meeting and refused to be voted out. The crew took breaks. Drank water. Used sunscreen. Moved canopies along the rows as the work moved. Shade became equipment. Survival became part of the system.
At dusk, it started sounding wild. Animals. Bugs. Distance.
Dust. Heat. Cardboard. Explosives.

A strange little orchestra for a raccoon standing on a cliff edge with a camera, questions, credentials pending, and the growing suspicion that she had entered exactly the right habitat.

The first full expedition was not glamorous. Glamour is rarely where the useful evidence lives.

This Field Note is mostly visual because sometimes the photographs explain the system better than a paragraph can.

The audience would eventually see fireworks.
The raccoon saw the system being built.

Photo Field Notes

The Quarry Habitat

The Set-Up:

The Coconuts

The Equipment

The Masterminds

The Details

The Spectacle

Field Note Complete

The first full expedition did not begin with fireworks in the sky. It began with a quarry. A cliff edge. Rental trucks. Boxes labeled explosives. Shells that looked too innocent for their future plans. Racks arranged with intention. Angry heat. Canopies moving like survival stations. Safety talks. A training lead who explained the why. And a crew of humans building a fireworks display one piece at a time.

This is the work the audience rarely sees. Before the fireworks display, there is structure. Before the finale, there is labor. Before the boom, there is a system.

The raccoon entered the quarry with a camera, questions, credentials pending, and the growing suspicion that she had entered exactly the right habitat. The audience eventually saw fireworks. The raccoon saw the work that made the sky possible.

If you missed Part One of Field Notes from the Firing Line, read it here:

https://slightyferalmedia.blogspot.com/2026/07/look-on-my-facepyrotechnics-live-event-production.html

Next Field Note:

Part Three is coming soon: If It Could Happen, It Did Field Notes from the Firing Line, Part Three

Full Photo Gallery

The full Pyrotechnics Day 1 gallery is available here:

https://mymidlifecrisiscreativeinc17.pixieset.com/pyrotechnics-day1/

The raccoon collected more evidence than could reasonably fit inside one Field Note. This is common. The sky was loud. The camera was busy.

Field note complete.

The sky left evidence. The raccoon collected it.

Slightly feral.

Entirely capable.

Credentials pending.

— Laverna the Rockin’ Raccoon 🦝🎆

Slightly Feral Media

Published by My Midlife Crisis Creative Inc.

Filed as:

Field Notes • Pyrotechnics • Fireworks • Fireworks Display • J&M Displays • Live Event Production • Special Effects • Stagehand • Bonner Springs • Kansas

Navigation

Thursday, July 30, 2026

Stage Dive KC Summer Showcase Builds a Human Tribe

Stage Dive KC Summer Showcase Builds a Human Tribe

The Raccoon Arrived Expecting Music

Seven Bands Enter the Ecosystem

Beneath the Skin

Orion Falls

Easy Tiger

My Waking Dream

Steer Away

The Violent Delights

Love Like War

The Photographers Refused to Guard the Good Angles

Every Generation Was Present

A Solitary Raccoon Studies a Human Tribe

Continue Your Field Research

Stage Dive KC

Beneath the Skin

Steer Away

Easy Tiger

Orion Falls

Love Like War

My Waking Dream

Violent Delights

Field note complete.

Thursday, July 9, 2026

The First Expedition | J&M Displays Pyrotechnics Field Note

The First Expedition

Field Notes from the Firing Line, Part Two

The raccoon has reviewed the evidence.

Angry.

This Field Note is mostly visual because sometimes the photographs explain the system better than a paragraph can.

Photo Field Notes

The Quarry Habitat

The Set-Up:

The Coconuts

The Equipment

The Masterminds

The Details

The Spectacle

Field Note Complete

FIELD NOTE //Gravity Is Not for Everyone: Violenteer, Circling Over, Burn Barrel and DRIFTER at miniBar Kansas City