Walking the Walk - 23 Jul 2008

How a diverse group of concerned residents put on a march for change in North Omaha by Bryan Cohen Black and white pictures of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. surrounded the group of some 20 people gathered in the back of the AfraAmerican Bookstore. An older man wearing traditional African clothing sat quietly. Another donned a black beret. Former gang members sat with former police officers as Willie Hamilton and Cheryl Weston faced the crowd. It was the first public meeting to discuss a mass demonstration in north Omaha. A police action to disband a celebration in north Omaha combined with accumulating gun violence and lack of independent police oversight sparked the meeting. Hamilton and Weston listened as parents complained the community needed to do something. A younger man voiced concern that the message of older community members would not reach the youth. But when someone suggested the group should hold additional planning meetings, Hamilton was quick to respond. “We need to set a date and move,” said Hamilton. “We can do this — I know we can do this.” According to Hamilton, Tariq Al-Amin was an indispensable resource when he met with the Omaha Police to discuss the event. Al-Amin is a former Omaha Police officer and long-time public access television show host and community activist. “Some cops have a problem with me, so they attack the messenger more than the message,” said Al-Amin. “But they can’t BS me like they can with some other people. I know their history and processes.” On July 10, Hamilton and Al-Amin met with four OPD officers to discuss the demonstration. Al-Amin said the police suggested demonstrators walk down Florence Blvd., a predominantly residential throughway compared to 24th Street. “They wanted us to hide the march — that’s ridiculous,” said Al-Amin.

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Feel the Burn - 16 Jul 2008

by Joshua Hoyer Tab Benoit A voice from the wetlands of Louisiana Whether playing music or lobbying for social justice, you can be sure Tab Benoit speaks from the heart and has made the most of the fame his music has brought him. Following Hurricane Katrina, Benoit thought a long national conversation would ensue concerning his native south Louisiana, which historically has dealt with floods and natural disasters. It’s a place, he said, where people will give their last bit of food or clothing to someone who needs it more. A place where culture is rich because people realize color, religion and economic/social status don’t matter. Unfortunately, he said, more people know about Brittney Spears and Lindsay Lohan than New Orleans. “In New Orleans and south Louisiana everyone has the opportunity to help somebody and be what they want to be,” he said. “It’s the real American way. It’s like the one place that did it right, and look how it’s being treated.” Benoit briefed Congress in June on the situation in south Louisiana. He is also scheduled to play the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, some atypical venues for a blues musician. A resident of Houma, La., just south of New Orleans, Benoit understands the importance of having a voice that government listens too. In south Lousiana, he said, the people’s wishes have been disregarded because the public has no voice. “It’s a good time for artists to step in and help be communicators,” he said. “It’s an important time and we’ve got big decisions to make.” Benoit founded Voice of the Wetlands in 2003, long before hurricanes Katrina and Rita. He heads the organization that seeks global attention for south Louisiana and the world’s coastal erosion problem. Benoit said the state’s coastal wetlands are eroding at a rate of one acre per hour. In addition to endangering 40 percent of the nation’s refineries and the nation’s largest port, he said culture and music are at risk.

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When Laura Met Alex - 09 Jul 2008

Payne/Dern event an occasion to recall Citizen Ruth collaboration by Leo Adam Biga When Alexander Payne and Laura Dern chat on the main stage of the Holland Performing Arts Center for Films Streams’ first annual fundraiser July 13, they’ll naturally get around to Citizen Ruth. The 1996 abortion comedy he co-wrote with Jim Taylor marked Payne’s directorial debut. Dern’s portrayal of title character Ruth Stoops earned critical acclaim. Sixteen years ago Payne was an aspiring feature filmmaker. His UCLA graduate thesis project from a few years before, The Passion of Martin, turned heads. The newcomer showed enough promise to land a studio development deal, comparable to a college baseball star getting drafted by a major league franchise, inking a fat contract and getting assigned to the high minors. But he hadn’t broken through. He and Taylor finished their collaborative script, then titled The Devil Inside, that fall. They wanted a deal to let Payne direct. The script made the rounds, generating heat, but nobody would finance it. Too risky. Too political. Too controversial. It didn’t help that Payne was untested in features. Cut to Dern, already established as an edgy screen actress for bare-her-soul performances in Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk, Peter Bogdanovich’s Mask, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart and Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. She was Oscar-nominated as the free spirit title character in Martha Coolidge’s Rambling Rose, for which her mother, Diane Ladd, was also nominated. Her acting genes extend to her father and fellow Oscar nominee, Bruce Dern.

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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. With her arrival in 1937, at the age of 22, she began a campaign to uplift the black citizens of Omaha. It was the start of a serendipitous relationship between Miss Brown and the surrounding community. Brown committed herself to upholding the newspaper’s motto: “dedicated to the service of the people that no good cause shall lack a champion, and that evil shall not thrive unopposed.” She used a portion of the newspaper’s profits to sponsor scholarships for black students. Distribution of the paper provided employment for local children. In 1965, President Lyndon Baines Johnson commended Brown as “being the only black woman who was the owner/founder of a black newspaper still in existence.”

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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. The movement began in 1970 when, after receiving his doctorate from Columbia University, Boal returned to Brazil and founded the Newspaper Theatre. “I used it to demonstrate how citizens everywhere must constantly question all aspects of their existence to detect what’s right or wrong,” Boal said. Participants applied Boal’s innovative techniques to dramatize government oppression.

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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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Unequivocally Ernie - 23 Apr 2008

UNICAMERAL AND NEBRASKA LOSE HISTORIC INGREDIENT by Tessa Jeffers Lincoln — On the way to Room 1107, other offices welcome visitors with nameplates on open doors and beaming secretaries at the ready. The door to Room 1107 is shut, unmarked; no nameplate. Knockers must persist (some, like former state senator Kermit Brashear, have a secret knock). Once the door opens, it’s radical. Stacks upon stacks of papers, boxes atop boxes, hand-written notes, typed poems, yellowed newspaper clippings taped haphazardly in organized chaos. Literature on the death penalty, abortion, education — virtually every hot-button issue. One box is simply labeled “problems.” In an interview where she praised Sen. Ernie Chambers’ accomplishments and storied career, Sen. DiAnna Schimek of Lincoln joked, “I just don’t want Ernie to get a bigger head than he already has.” These loads of information in piles loom as knowledge evidence. One can infer that it’s all been taken in. No wonder his head is so big. “I have probably the biggest but healthiest ego of anybody you ever will meet,” Chambers said. “It is not based on illusion or delusion, but recognition of the abilities that I have and the fact that I will stand for what I believe. And whenever you do that, you’re comfortable with yourself. That is the best status to occupy on this Earth.”

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Making the Switch - 16 Apr 2008

Switchgrass offers more environmentally friendly ethanol. But with high corn and soybean prices, will farmers buy into this crop? By Sean McCarthy Last summer, United States Department of Agriculture Research Agronomist Rob Mitchell brought a few scientists from Japan to a poorly lit munitions depot near Mead, Neb. Today the depot stores tons of bales of grass; during World War II, it stored bombs destined for Japan. “They thought, ‘Wow, that’s kind of cool,’” Mitchell said. The Japanese scientists were examining the possible energy benefits of switchgrass, which gained worldwide attention when President George W. Bush in his 2006 State of the Union address called it a possible fuel alternative to reduce America’s foreign-oil “addiction.” Studies have shown three times more ethanol can be derived from an acre of switchgrass than an acre of corn, while producing 90 percent fewer greenhouse gases. The problem is that the grass is inefficient for farmers to produce on a short-term basis and Nebraska has no large plants capable of turning switchgrass into biofuel. Still, outside forces could bode well for switchgrass. Some environmental organizations and studies have concluded that, as much as oil, corn-based ethanol has negative social and environmental impact. Time magazine’s April 7 cover story examined how corn-based ethanol has led to deforestation and increased food prices worldwide.

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Saving Species - 16 Apr 2008

Omaha Zoo's Conservation Mission By Lindsay Trapnell Sitting down to talk to Dr. Doug Armstrong is akin to my vision of a Proust scholar, or a chess wizard. An expert within a specific, complex and somewhat insular field, he bubbles with enthusiasm at the opportunity to share his knowledge with me, the average layperson. Armstrong, associate director of medicine and research, heads a hardworking team at the Henry Doorly Zoo’s Bill and Berniece Grewcock Center for Conservation and Research (CCR). He is passionate about conservation, and appropriately proud of the work he’s doing. CCR scientists are part of a network seeking to ensure survival of animal and plant species. No small task.

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TrashTalk - 16 Apr 2008

Recycling for the economy is the new green by Andrea Heisinger Recycling has become one of many buzz words in the green movement of recent years, alongside hybrid cars and Al Gore. It’s even become a source of internet humor, listed at No. 64 on the popular blog “Stuff White People Like.” One may wonder if anyone actually recycles in Omaha. The answer is a tepid Wasteline newsletter. Green bins can be seen lining curbs on certain days of the week, containing that which would otherwise end up in the tangle of refuse at the landfill. So who picks it up? And where does it go?

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Producing Peace - 09 Apr 2008

Converting a permanent war economy by Andrew Norman Standing on a Colorado Springs street corner Monday, April 7, Mary Beth Sullivan answered the phone as she put down a sign that read, “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” Sullivan is a peacenik of the unabashed variety. A tree-hugging, rabblerousing idealist whose doomsday environmental scenarios and books-not-bombs economic schemes prove her naiveté. She thinks Americans care that 42.2 percent of their 2007 income tax dollars went to military spending, while just over 4 percent and 3 percent went to education and to the environment respectively, according to the National Priorities Project. If Sullivan is nuts it’s because she thinks Americans will consider their children’s children when they hear that government money devoted to healthcare, education, environmental sustainability and infrastructure can generate up to twice as many jobs per dollar as military spending, according to a 2007 study by the University of Massachusetts-Amherst’s Department of Economics and Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). If Sullivan is wacko it’s because she believes Americans are ready to talk about converting a permanent war economy into one promoting sustainability and peace. Other innocents and would-be kooks will hear her revolutionary notions when she speaks at the 16th-annual Space Organizing Conference & Protest at St. John’s Parish basement at Creighton University April 11-13. Local and national social leaders and activists like Los Alamos Study Group Director Greg Mello, Des Moines Catholic Worker co-founder Frank Cordaro and Lindis Percy, from England’s Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases, will offer workshops focused on U.S. Strategic Command’s recent mission evolution, missile-defense systems in Europe, U.S. military bases abroad and wars of the future. The event begins at 4 p.m. Friday with a rally at StratCom’s Kinney Gate.

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The Bob and Mike Show - 02 Apr 2008

Something Strange Is Happening at The Daily By Warren Francke A newspaper once boasted on page one, “Irreverence is our only sacred cow.” It wasn’t the Omaha World-Herald. But then the daily didn’t have Robert Nelson writing columns that tug the teats on an entire herd of Nebraska’s sacred cows. He even refers to what he does as “being a jerk.” Fans would never call his fellow columnist a jerk, but Mike Kelly sparked controversy when by picking on “our state religion and my personal religion,” Cornhusker football and his own Roman Catholic faith. “Stop squawking and become a Protestant,” a critic complained. What’s an alternative weekly like The Reader to do when a gray lady like the Herald zings sacred cows? Well, write about it. Answer questions. Like, what hath Nelson, the refugee from an alt-weekly, wrought, and will Cincinnati Mike try to out-jerk the kid from Falls City?

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