The Zoo Bar - 02 Jul 2008

by B.J. Huchtemann The worn wooden floors and posters on the walls are saturated with soul. Lincoln’s Zoo Bar is a place where music, history and love mix to make magic. Look closely at the posters. They tell the story. The old handbills are overlapped, faded and peeling providing a visual history of the last 50 years or so of blues music. There were shows here by artists like Luther Allison, Magic Slim, Albert Collins, Charlie Musselwhite, James Harman, Koko Taylor, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Son Seals, Robert Cray, Jay McShann, John Hammond and Doug Sahm and Matt Guitar Murphy. More recently, contemporary blues and roots favorites have packed fans into the little club at 136 N. 14th St. The list includes plenty of festival — caliber artists including Tommy Castro, Kim Wilson, Curtis Salgado, Tab Benoit, Janiva Magness, Candye Kane, Watermelon Slim & The Workers and the Hacienda Brothers featuring Dave Gonzalez and the late Chris Gaffney. Larry Boehmer, longtime former owner, explained the Zoo’s special vibe. “It’s the positive energy that you can feel on a good night, when the band is really cookin’, the crowd is so into it,” he said. “And it’s the love, I think, between the musicians and the crowd, and it really happens here, you know — partly ’cause the room is small, and partly ’cause the place feels right for this kind of music ... the energy is, it’s magical at times.”

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Shining Star - 25 Jun 2008

Mildred Brown put shine on Omaha Star by Amy Helene Forss Even her business card was impressive: “Mildred D. Brown, editor and publisher of The Omaha Star, Nebraska’s Only Black Newspaper Reaching a Multi-Million Dollar Market.” The card, one of the very few in existence, remains a cherished memento for its owner, Edgar Hicks. How the FC Stone stockbroker acquired the card explains Brown’s limitless generosity. “When I quit my job here in Omaha with Cargill back in 1975, to buy a seat on a Chicago grain exchange, one of the first persons I told was Mrs. Brown,” Hicks said. “I don’t really know how I got that close to her, for I did not see her that often.” Knowing that Hicks had no acquaintances in Chicago, she gave him her business card and wrote the phone number of her brother, Bennie, on the back. She told Hicks to call him. “He was my personal ‘welcome wagon’ in Chicago,” he said. Hicks says he will always subscribe to the Omaha Star as an honor and an obligation to Brown’s memory. Miss Brown, or “Millie,” created a powerful legacy in North Omaha between 1938 and 1989. She dedicated her life to improving the black community during her 50-year ownership of the Omaha Star.

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Joy Division - 19 Jun 2008

Omaha’s favorite British expatriate artist comes clean about his new exhibit at Joslyn by Sarah Baker It’s too early on a Friday in June, and Steve Joy is speaking in tiny Red Cloud, Nebraska, holding court in a first-floor art gallery inside the town’s restored opera house. He’s here for the annual Willa Cather conference, and he’s supposed to explain to a small group of senior citizens and Cather scholars what, exactly, these big pieces made of warm-toned squares and rectangles have to do with the author of My Antonia. Instead, he scolds Nebraskans who bitch about gas prices and then hop in their SUVs. He gripes about modern architecture. He bemoans the deterioration of art education. Then he focuses on Omaha: The city doesn’t know design. People there think Nebraska Furniture Mart is the pinnacle of interior decorating — Joy, by comparison, relishes the fact that he’s banned from the store. Omaha doesn’t even have an IKEA. Here’s the weird thing, though — Joy has lived in New York City, Sri Lanka and Hong Kong, vacationed on exotic islands and spent years wandering through Italian and French villages to understand the history of art and find himself. And yet Joy has chosen to call Omaha home for the past decade. It’s in Omaha, which has no mountains, no oceans and no connection to the art world, where Joy’s career retrospective will open at the Joslyn Art Museum later this month. “I came to Omaha. It had none of that,” he said. “But I find it the best place to work. I create my best work there.”

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It's the Thought That Counts - 12 Jun 2008

Humorist Davis Sedaris on Writing, Readings and Meeting his Fans by Kyle Tonniges Bestselling author/humorist David Sedaris was in high spirits as he prepared to embark on a month-long tour of 29 cities to promote and sign copies of his sixth book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. His tour will bring him to Omaha’s Bookworm located at 87th and Pacific streets Sunday, June 15, where he will sign copies of his works beginning at 1 p.m. “I am such a good packer,” he boasted in a telephone interview from his home in London. “I have a list on my computer of what I need to pack.” Along with the usual things, he brings practical items like the folding cutlery he picked up in Japan. He also brings plenty of gifts for teenagers. “I’m just so honored when teenagers come because they’ve always got better stuff to do,” he said. “I save the shampoos and conditioners from my hotel [to give as gifts] but those don’t last that long. Today I got these coasters that are cut out of a Turkish newspaper. So that’s a good little present, because they’re lightweight. And there’s a hundred of them. They were $30, so that works out to about 30 cents per teenager.”

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Trouble at the Top of the World - 05 Jun 2008

Tibetan monks bring healing to the Heartland despite turmoil in their fatherland by Michael Braunstein The timing couldn’t be worse for the Chinese regime. Eight is a lucky number in Chinese folklore but the eyes of the world are seeing violence and human rights violations by the Chinese government in the Himalayan province of Tibet — barely two months before the Beijing Olympics begin at 8 p.m., 8.8.2008. Tibetan people continue to rise up in demanding freedom. That also means the timing couldn’t be better for six Tibetan monks bringing their message of peace and world harmony to Omaha. When the Red Army marched into the highest region on earth in 1959, the legitimate government of Tibet was forced to flee. Tibet had been a theocracy since the early 1600s, ruled by a succession of Buddhist leaders known as the Dalai Lamas. Chinese occupation meant Buddhism, and all religion, was outlawed. Along with government leaders, thousands of monks fled over the world’s highest mountain range into India and exile. Hundreds of temples and monasteries in Tibet were sacked of centuries-old artifacts, gutted and burned to the ground. In what is now known to China as the Tibet Autonomous Region, most remaining temples and monasteries serve as tourist attractions, run by the Chinese.

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New Light - 29 May 2008

Ron Hansen’s Exiles revives unconventional poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins by Leo Adam Biga Celebrated author Ron Hansen spent the past two years as the literary equivalent of a dispossessed father. He looked on as his classic 1983 novel The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was adapted to the screen in 2006 and released to solid reviews in 2007. While thrilled with writer-director Andrew Dominick’s faithful film adaptation, the proud papa found himself severed from his precious baby. Necessarily, the film was Dominik’s, not his. With the May 20 publication of his new book, Exiles (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Hansen needn’t share his new progeny with anyone or anything, with the possible exception of his subject’s legacy, which has loomed large in his life. The book is a rumination on 19th-century English thinker, priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and on the 1875 shipwreck that inspired his greatest work, The Wreck of the Deutschland. Hansen, a devout Catholic, explores spiritual questions, formational struggles and elemental dimensions examined by Hopkins. Hansen has taught Hopkins’ work at Santa Clara University, where he is the Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ Professor of the Arts and Humanities.

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Trailblazers - 22 May 2008

Work-study wonders at innovative new Catholic high school By Leo Adam Biga Few school startups have attracted the attention drawn by St. Peter Claver Cristo Rey. From the time plans for the Catholic high school in south Omaha were announced in 2005, through the end of its first academic year next week, it has captured public imagination and media notice. Housed in the former St. Mary’s school building at 36th and Q Streets, Claver is within walking distance of the historic stockyards site, Hispanic eateries and markets, and Metropolitan Community College’s south campus. A Salvation Army facility is going up nearby, where the Wilson packing plant used to stand. That the school’s elicited so much attention is largely due to its membership in the national Cristo Rey Network, a branded nonprofit educational association based in Chicago. 60 Minutes profiled it. The private CR urban schools model gives disadvantaged inner city children a Catholic, college prep education. It requires they work a paid internship in white collar Corporate America. Wages help defray tuition and provide schools a revenue stream. Member schools share 10 mission effectiveness standards. Staff from CR schools around the nation attend in-service workshops.

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Augusto Boal and the People's Theater - 14 May 2008

Drama conference/movement activates audience by Steve Eskew Augusto Boal is the proud founder and facilitator extraordinaire of the international movement known as Theatre of the Oppressed. His goal, and that of the theater project, is to encourage the poor to fight race and class discrimination. For his efforts, he was once imprisoned, tortured and exiled from his native Brazil. Things have changed. “This is great excitement to me. For the first time in my long life I’m not enemy of the government of Brazil,” Boal said in a telephone interview from Rio de Janeiro. “Now we work together with ‘Cultura Viva.’ Through this we have developed over 300 points for exhibition of a living culture; it’s strictly designed to encourage artists to produce uncensored art.” On May 22 he will be in Omaha for the movement’s 14th conference in the United States, the seventh in Omaha.

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Kleeb’s Components - 08 May 2008

Breaking down a prairie politician by Warren Francke The question about Scott Kleeb, as he runs for the United States Senate, gets down to image v. substance: Is he more ranch hand, academic or politician? He looks the tall cowboy as you follow him from a fund-raiser north of Memorial Park to a Democratic Party meeting near Clancy’s Pub off 72nd Street. Then to a rock concert downtown at Slowdown and, finally on Sunday, after a pancake breakfast in a south Omaha union hall, he sits down long enough at a Starbucks on West Center to talk about his past life and his present Senate campaign. Sure, you could hear what Scott Kleeb had to say at the fund-raiser and at the party committee meeting. Later, he didn’t compete with the folk rock wailing of The Night Gallery as Sara White sang and sawed her cello at Slowdown. “It’s their show,” he explained, referring to four bands at the “Listen Up!” rally. So he didn’t say much there or at the AFL-CIO breakfast where union president Kenny Mass was raffling meat in the packinghouse hangout west of the tracks on Q Street. But then came a chance encounter just as he sat down with a slab of pumpkin loaf and a cup of black coffee. “No whiskey,” his communication director, Joe Zepecky, joked. If you read his Yale tabloid treatment as one of the 50 most beautiful people on campus, “the paragon of prairie perfection,” you saw him described as a “whiskey-and-black-coffee-drinking type of man,” not to mention “bull-riding, steak-eating and tobacco-spitting.”

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Classical Cowboy - 30 Apr 2008

On a horse, Spanish guitar progeny is the Real McCoy by Leo Adam Biga Spanish classical guitar could be said to flow from a single source — Francisco Tarrega. At the turn of the 20th century, Tarrega, the father of this passionate art form, passed on his legacy to his musical progeny — a few prized pupils. These pupils, in turn, taught the art to select disciples, and so on down the line. Improbably, this line of maestros, the great interpreters of Spanish classical guitar, includes a longtime area resident who is an American to boot. Hadley Heavin grew up a cowboy, jock and blues-rock lead guitar player in Baxter Springs, Kan. He learned guitar at 5 and began riding horses soon after, eventually adding rodeo, football, basketball, track and baseball to his resume. Since 1982, the Vietnam combat vet has been a University of Nebraska at Omaha music instructor. In the late ’70s, Heavin became the primary student of the late Segundo Pastor. Decades before, Pastor was the favorite student of Daniel Fortea, once the anointed disciple of Tarrega himself. So it is that this musical lineage has been passed from Tarrega to Fortea to Pastor to Heavin. “When I play Spanish music, I play it very much probably how Tarrega played it, because it was passed down that way,” Heavin said. “I’m probably just one of a handful of people in the world that got that experience.”

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