The Reader 1803

M A RCH 2 0 1 8 | volUME 25 | ISSU E 03

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The State of Juvenile Justice in Nebraska THURSDAY MARCH 22, 2018, 7-9 PM

UNO BARBARA WEITZ COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT CENTER

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COVER: Unequal Justice, Juvenile Detention is Down, But Bias Persists

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Sponsored by: The League of Women Voters of Greater Omaha, League of COVER: Working to Help Local Youth Women Voters of Nebraska and Partnership for Kids

PURPOSE To honor the work of Kim Culp founding Director of the Douglas County Juvenile Assessment Center (JAC) by engaging and informing the community on important issues affecting youth in the juvenile justice system.

There will be a panel presentation by these key individuals working in the juvenile justice field:

DISPROPORTIONATE MINORITY CONTACT (DMC)

Chris Rodgers, Douglas County Commissioner

NEBRASKA JUVENILE PROBATION, OVERVIEW AND PRIORITIES 60 years ago: Launched on March 17, 1958 the Vanguard 1 Jeanne Brandner, Deputy, Probation AdministratorKim developed a myriad of programs through was the Juvenile Services Division first satellite to have solar electric power. Although communication the JAC and nonprofits in Omaha, always with with it was lost in 1964, it remains the oldest manmade object still in orbit an emphasis on relationship building, cultural along with the upper stage of the rocket that got it there.

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PICKS: Cool Things Heartland Healing: competence and understanding the impact of the child welfare system on children’s lives.

Out of Your Mind To Do in March

Anne Hobbs, PhD, Director, UNO Juvenile Justice Institute

JUVENILE JUSTICE PROGRESS OVER THE PAST 10 After retirement, Kim was active in the League YEARS/UPCOMING LEGISLATION of Women Voters of Greater Omaha, serving as Juliet Summers, JD, Juvenile Justice Policy Coordinator, Vice-President at the time of her May 2017 Voices for Children death.

Publisher/Editor John Heaston john@thereader.com

INSPECTOR GENERAL’S REPORT Graphic Designer Ken Guthrie, Sebastian Molina OUR SISTER MEDIA Julie Rogers, Inspector General, Child Welfare & CHANNELS Assistant Editor JoAnna LeFlore joanna@thereader.com Juvenile Probation Rock Star Intern Cheyenne Alexis

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS heartland healing: Michael Braunstein Free & Open to the Public: Contact information-Elaine Johnson / elaineomaha@gmail.com / 402-630-5199 info@heartlandhealing.com

arts/visual: Mike Krainak mixedmedia@thereader.com eat: Sara Locke crumbs@thereader.com Theater: Celebrating HOODOO: film: Ryan Syrek cuttingroom@thereader.com Performing Arts Awardees Nebraska Steps Up hoodoo: B.J. Huchtemann bjhuchtemann@gmail.com

music: James Walmsley backbeat@thereader.com over the edge: Tim McMahan tim.mcmahan@gmail.com theater: coldcream@thereader.com

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FILM: Prodigal Filmmaker

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Omaha Jobs: Diversity and Inclusion “Diversity” and “Inclusion” aren’t simply buzzwords that float among human resource circles.

They are tactics with proven merit in the corporate world and beyond.

uncomfortable. He lets you know he’s not a fan of hugs asks you to not hug him again. You respect his personal boundaries and opt for a hearty handshake the next time. Problem solved.

“Diversity” and “Inclusion” are not just about creating a workplace with a variety of people to make everyone happy. It’s also about doing what’s best for a company to help make the staff more productive and forward-thinking.

If, on the other hand, your co-worker doesn’t feel you’re open to any criticism, he likely won’t approach you to begin with. This makes a once-inclusive workplace feel less so by a person who would rather not be embraced – especially if everyone else thinks hugs are the greeting norm.

It turns out diversity and inclusion are truly what’s best for any workplace. A more diverse and inclusive workplace promotes creativity since not everyone thinks the same way. Different people from different backgrounds who all work together are a true recipe for innovation.

So what should you do if you look around and realize you work in a homogenous workplace devoid of diversity? The good news is diversity and inclusion mustn’t always start at the top and work its way down. Even if you’re not a manager, you can still prompt a positive change in your workplace.

Ask questions. Find out if your workplace actually has a policy in place to promote diversity and inclusion. If not, ask why they don’t. Maybe your workplace simply doesn’t understand the positive impact diversity and inclusion can have. Perhaps they don’t know how to get started. Sometimes simply asking the question helps managers and co-workers realize a new way of thinking is needed.

Ask questions. When someone is different from you, to respond with genuine curiosity is appropriate and can spark valuable conversations. If you don’t know how someone prefers to be addressed or what type of food they want at the office potluck, just ask. It ensures you won’t accidentally offend your co-workers and will help them feel their voices are being heard.

Any workplace desiring a collaborative culture should embrace and promote diversity and inclusion, and will certainly benefit from their efforts.

Thursday March 15, 2018 April 12, 2018 May 31, 2018

Be inclusive. You can’t claim you want to promote workplace diversity and inclusion and then tell culturally-offensive jokes in the office. An inclusive, diverse workplace requires employees willing to be personally accountable for fostering a diverse, inclusive culture.

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After all, a company can make all the claims they want about being inclusive, but if new employees are met with closed-minded colleagues, the mask of an inclusive workplace quickly dissolves.

Be open. Different people think differently. That’s what prompts creativity. Before you dismiss an idea as strange or too “outside of the box,” try to understand and be willing to work differently at the suggestions of co-workers. You never know when an off-the-wall suggestion will promote productivity and make things better.

Understand the concepts of diversity and inclusion. “Diversity” and “inclusion” refer to more than cultural backgrounds. To hire people from varying socio-economic backgrounds is a form of diversity just like hiring people with varied educational backgrounds.

The idea is to get different ways of thinking into play and increase the odds of better overall thinking.

It’s not all about you. How you were raised helps define the type of person you are and what you deem acceptable. People raised differently from you likely have a different idea of what’s acceptable and what’s not For example, if you grew up in a culture where big hugs are the norm for greeting, you probably think nothing of wrapping your arms around a co-worker to say hello. But if that person was brought up honoring personal space, there’s a good chance you’ll make that co-worker terribly uncomfortable. While hugging seems acceptable to you, it’s not to the other person.

To project your own ideals onto those around you regardless of their wishes is a surefire way to make a workplace feel less inclusive.

Be open and approachable. Suppose your bear hug to a co-worker made him

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J

uvenile justice reform in Nebraska has long been a hot topic of debate, study and legislation.

A labyrinth of statutes, jurisdictions, agencies and rules makes navigating the system difficult. Youth committing even minor offenses can face detention, probation or diversion depending on who they intersect with in the system. Child welfare professionals seek rehabilitation. Prosecutors push accountability.

Different philosophies, policies and competing interests can lead to unnecessary confinement, Lives get disrupted. Slow case processing can keep kids in an-in-system limbo awaiting adjudication.

“There’s so many things that influence why a kid makes a decision,” Pannkuk said. “We’ve had kids shoplift because they needed hygiene products or candy bars, so it was more a child welfare issue – but then it became a criminal justice issue. For it really to be effective it needs to work at an individual level. We’re talking about a macro system trying to operate at a micro level. A lot of times big systems don’t respond well to the individual piece.”

“It’s so easy for others to judge families,” Douglas County Youth Center director Mark LeFlore said. “I’m not saying families aren’t responsible but there’s shared responsibility. You just can’t put it all on the family. Families in a lot of cases are doing their best and they need to be recognized for their efforts, not minimized.”

“If you’re on an unlawful absence warrant or if you’re a runaway you’re going to stay twice as long in detention as a non-minority for the same charge”

A major Douglas County juvenile justice reform initiative, Operation Youth Success, uses a collective impact model to try and improve system coordination and communication for desired better youth outcomes. Its stakeholder players span law enforcement officials and judges to educators and service providers.

“A work group is working specifically trying to cut times kids are detained and the time it takes cases to get through court,” said OYS director Janee Pannkuk.

“We’re collecting data on where are those bottlenecks.”

Extenuating circumstances aren’t always acknowledged.

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March 2018

| THE READER |

COVER

“A youth makes a mistake and it has a ripple effect on families. In some cases that individual helps support the family by working or is directly responsible for younger siblings while the parent works. With that individual out of the house, it changes the dynamics and families struggle with those changes.”

When youth are detained without cause, said UNO Justice Center director Roger Spohn, “you’re probably going to make this kid worse rather than better.”

If that youth is an African-American male in Douglas County, then his contact with the system is on average longer and harsher than for his white counterparts.

Disproportionate Minority Contact (DMC) plagues the state’s juvenile justice system.

“If you’re on an unlawful absence warrant or if you’re a runaway you’re going to stay twice as long in detention as a nonminority for the same charge,” LeFlore said.

“It’s not working equally or equitably for all of our different youth,” Voices for Children in Nebraska analyst Juliet Summers said.

“The best example of that is youth in detention. We’ve cut our detention numbers statewide almost in half but the disproportionality has gone dramatically up. We need to figure out what we’re doing systemically that is not supporting particular groups of youth in receiving the same positive outcomes.”

“We have to have the data to make sure it’s not assumptions or anecdotes but facts.”

Spohn said while OYS “has had some real wins – reducing arrests in Omaha schools and bringing good training to School Resource Officers” – they’ve had less success with DMC.

“Different parts of the state have different battles they’re fighting.

In Douglas County, it’s AfricanAmerican youth disadvantaged, but in other parts of the state it’s Native American youth and Hispanic youth.”

LeFlore agrees bias persists.

“We’re going to have to change the conversation, do a better job understanding how this is occurring and have some coming together of those involved in the decisionmaking process to ask ourselves, ‘What can we do differently?’”

“We’re finding we need to dig a lot deeper, especially when it comes to Disproportionate Minority Contact,” Pannkuk said.

Observers applaud the recent hire of A’Jamal Byndon as Douglas County’s first DMC Coordinator.

“That’s a big accomplishment,” said LaVon Stennis-Williams, who with LeFlore co-chairs the DMC committee for Operation Youth Success.

But DMC issues extend statewide, said Juvenile Justice Institute director Anne Hobbs.

“Different parts of the state have different battles they’re fighting. In Douglas County, it’s African-American youth disadvantaged, but in other parts of the state it’s Native American youth and Hispanic youth.”

Another large effort charged with reform is the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) launched in 2011.

“We now have seven years of initiatives and we’re no closer to bringing a more compassionate, effective, fair system to our kids than when we first got started,” said Stennis-Williams.

No one system touch point is the answer,

Juliet A. Summers, J.D., Policy Coordinator for Child Welfare and Juvenile Justice, Voices for Children in Nebraska

“I was of the mindset that if we did everything better at the Youth Center it would effect the overall numbers in juvenile justice,” LeFlore said.

“We added significant programming, levels of education, extra teachers, brought in community providers, surveyed the students, got recognized as a facility of excellence.

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Despite those efforts recidivism has gone up, minorities coming back into the system continues at a high rate. I see the same young people coming back over and over.

“The challenge is how do we address the needs of youth on a pathway into the juvenile justice system to systematically change that pathway. One thing for sure – it’s going to take more than the Youth Center.

It’s clear not one segment alone is enough to change the numbers. It’s going to take all of the players.”

UNO’s Justice Center recently released a report recommending a needs assessment to work alongside the risk assessment adopted a few years ago.

“In Douglas County, I believe great strides have been made in proper assessment of youth to determine levels of risk to reoffend,” said center director Ryan Spohn.

“These assessments are then used to prevent the unnecessary juvenile justice filings or detentions of low and medium-risk youth.

“A lot of these youth are high needs youth, with problems in the home or at school. They may have come out as low or medium risk but there are needs that need to be addressed or the next time they come to the attention of authorities they may be higher risk. Alternatives to Detention providers don’t know youth needs in the absence of an assessment, so they aren’t identified, at least not in an evidencebased fashion.

ly if our goal is to help this youth and their family be better.”

The center also recommends training for any professionals involved in the system.

Spohn said, “They’ll be better outcomes for youth if everybody’s on the same page and has the same definition of things.”

Similarly, he said, “sharing information across systems only makes sense, particular-

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March 2018

is

para-

“Every youth “More information should be given evabout their situation is ery opportunity. It a good thing, When we shouldn’t be because interview youth and famof where you live or ily who’ve been through the color of your skin the system we often find or whether you’re nobody asked what they poor or not,” LeFlore thought the causes were said. or what could be done Stennis-Williams about this. Youth Impact and LeFlore want Initiative has been sucmore diversity among cessful for Crossover juvenile justice profesYouth in both the child sionals.

Dr. Ryan Spohn, Director, welfare and juvenile Nebraska Center for Justice Research “A diverse staff justice systems. The iniallows you to learn tiative brings that youth and family together with professionals from from the beauty of diversity and understand both sides. The prosecutor’s there, too, and the cultural issues and situations,” Stenniswith that information they’re able to find a Williams said. better solution like diversion.”

She and LeFlore also advocate for Spohn believes JDAI has been less than successful in keeping some low and medium risk youth out of detention – which is the whole point of the thing,” adding, “We still probably do have youth that end up in detention that shouldn’t be there.”

“It’s really important we reserve incarceration for the kids who scare us, not for the kids who just make us anger or irritate us,” Summers said.

“It in itself can be so harmful, especially to lower risk youth.”

“You really can’t get systems change without community involvement and engagement and getting people around the tables and having honest conversations”

“Even if needs are identified, there’s not a funding source or formal entity or agency for addressing those needs. I think that’s a shortcoming of our system.

Iowa has a Child in Need of Care program targeting high need status offenders. The idea is that this is a high needs youth, so let’s assess for needs and address them before they become a delinquent.”

Equity mount.

“The success rate is much better if they’re at home with their family. It’s more cost effective, too,” Pannkuk said.

“Any funding that can go towards prevention and intervention rather than punishment and detention, which is incredibly expensive, would be a smarter way to spend the dollars we have,” Spohn said.

Stennis-Williams witnesses the fallout through the Reconnect Success diversion program she runs.

“When I see kids come into my program, I see the system failure. When I go to the Nebraska Correctional Youth Facility, I see the result of that failure.”

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legacy and current system families to have more voice and agency at the table. “Those closest to the problem are closest to the solution,” she said. “We have to create a genuinely inclusive environment that welcomes to hear the frustrations folks are having,” LeFlore said.

part because the kids don’t just disappear – they’re just addressed by different stages of the system.”

“There’s been some small gains but not enough to make the impact we need to reform our system,” Stennis-Williams said.

“These kids and families are suffering. It’s time for Douglas County to step in and take ownership of juvenile justice reform.”

She wants the county “to create an office of public advocacy to look at the numbers and then drill down to see what’s causing it and then make recommendations” Juvenile Justice Center’s Anne Hobbs said progress has been made but added, “It’s just hard to see because we’re in the middle of the stream.” She said more uniform best practices would net more progress.

“There’s a ton of diversion models and programs and every county attorney runs them just a little bit differently. We need to figure out what works in Nebraska. To do that you need all the programs to use the same definitions, agree to the same terminology and then enter data into a system and then you’ll get results from across the state on the same program types.”

“It’s time for Douglas County to step in and take ownership of juvenile justice reform.”

“You really can’t get systems change without community involvement and engagement and getting people around the tables and having honest conversations,” Summers said.

Pannkuk said OYS endeavors to move to “a customer service as opposed to systemdriven approach.”

Though statutes require Douglas County youth be provided legal counsel, Summers said in much of Neb. “there can be incredible differences in the access kids get to this constitutional right for an advocate.”

LeFlore said minus counsel youth and families often lack the ability to make informed choices.

Wherever reforms happen, Spohn said, there’s a cascade effect.

“It’s not like if there’s a change in one level of juvenile justice it doesn’t impact the other levels. All these systems are interconnected. Any progress in one part may look like we’ve taken a step back in another

Her center built, with the Nebraska Crime Commission, a statewide evaluation system that does just that.

“We’re able now to evaluate all those programs across the entire state using the same scoring mechanism. As a state we’re now counting things the same way and, as ridiculous as it sounds, in Douglas County there’s now agreement on certain race and ethnic categories.”

Spohn is cautiously hopeful but rues the system’s local, siloed nature makes it resistant to widespread change.

“One frustration is getting people to listen and learn as opposed to rebut,” Pannkuk said. “The bigger frustration is just the complete complexity of the system. The devil’s in the details. You’ve got multiple large entities trying to figure out how best to serve the uniqueness of one individual. But they’re trying, they’re all really trying.”

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Juvenile Justice Advocacy:

Working to Help Local Youth

By Cheril Lee

M

ost of the kids Boys Town assists are referred from juvenile court, “They’re still at home, but there are some things going on where they’re at risk of having to leave. So we go into the homes and do family preservation work so kids can stay in their schools, homes and communities,” said Nick Juliano, Director of Regional Advocacy and Public Policy at Boys Town.

Juliano explained kids have the best outcomes when they’re able to stay in their routines.

“Ideally, we want kids with their families, with their parents or their extended families. And we want kids staying in their schools and staying in their homes,” Juliano said.

He acknowledged there are some kids who cannot remain in their homes and these kids then go to live at Boys Town. Juliano said it could be because there’s a safety issue or maybe they live in a community where they’re continuing to violate the law or they’re skipping school. Eventually though, these children will return home to their family and their school.

But Boys Town is about much more than just housing. According to Juliano, “We are involved in quite a bit of advocacy work and public policy work around juvenile justice reform here in Omaha. We work on committees and with youth impact programs. We want to make sure there are good policies for young people that are in the juvenile justice system so when they do get into trouble and are in juvenile court, they can get the services they need.”

He said kids are referred to Boys Town for any issue you can think of but that it all starts with a law violation, where they end up in juvenile court or the Juvenile Assessment Center (JAC) because of that violation.

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“Often times, there’s other things going on in that home with the parents or with the young person whether it’s mental health issues or substance abuse issues.

Truancy is prevalent in that group of kids that will end up at the JAC or in juvenile court,” said Juliano.

Then there are the typical challenges families face, including poverty.

“Poverty impacts where families are able to live and may expose them to environments where there may be more crime. Or the student may have more unstructured time where they’re not in sports or other extracurricular activities, so they’re hanging around and getting into trouble,” he said.

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Juliano believes there’s an increasing recognition both here in Douglas County and nationally, with the research and best practices, that what a young person ends up in court for is an issue, but that it doesn’t tell the whole story.

“You’ve got, sometimes, kids that are at home taking care of younger brothers and sisters when they should be attending school and doing other things. You have kids that are unsupervised and obviously are on the streets getting in trouble,” he said.

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Substance abuse and mental health issues are becoming an increasingly common part of these kids’ experiences.

Juliano said one of the models here in Douglas County is called Youth Impact.

He described it as a national crossover model which recognizes that young kids who have adverse experiences or are the victims of abuse or neglect when they are young, tend to be more likely to become delinquents and get in trouble when they are older.

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March 2018

9

rectly with South High School and Marrs Middle School.

“And our primary approach there is to work with a school counselor, a gang interventionist, and families directly, when an adult in a young person’s life is seeing they are starting to have school problems,” Juliano said.

Staff can work with families in their homes. They can also provide care coordination, which means meeting with the families, helping them connect with the school and making sure that they are getting the supports that they need from the school as well as linking them with other kinds of services in the community.

Boys Town has a strong presence in South Omaha including an outpatient behavioral health clinic. If a parent or someone from the school thinks there may be an emerging mental health or substance abuse issue, they can come in and get an assessment and a referral as well, if needed.

They also provide parent training, giving parents the skills to work with their kids, and address their behaviors.

“We are really trying to get to the family sooner. For South High, we operate an alternative school for 9th and 10th graders. Kids who get suspended have an option to attend a school in their office with South High’s curriculum and laptops. It also gives suspended students the opportunity to continue working on their academic credits and the behaviors that led to their suspension,” Juliano said.

Another challenge is the large population of parents who are not native-English speakers. Some are having immigration challenges or a tough time assimilating into our culture. Boys Town tries to provide a broad base for all families.

Boys Town’s work is funded through a variety of sources. Their in-home programs are funded directly by the Probation Administration. If its in-home work is a court referral, we have a contract where Probation will fund those services. If they’re kids in the Child Welfare System, they have a contract with PromiseShip.

“But largely, in South Omaha, the vast majority of the families we serve are not yet involved with the system. So, the

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March 2018

program I described in South Omaha is funded about 60% by Boys Town directly and about 40% from grants through community foundations, the United Way and other foundations and funders,” he said.

That model serves kids before they enter the system, so the funding that comes along with kids being involved in the system is not available to most of those families in South Omaha. In North Omaha, Boys Town has a mix of some system-involved families. In those cases, the behavioral health piece is largely private insurance or Medicaid.

“So, we kind of put it all together the best we can to serve as many kids as we can,” Juliano said.

Shawne Coonfare, Director of the Juvenile Assessment Center (JAC), says the JAC’s general philosophy is if a youth is eligible to be diverted from formal court processing, then they need to do that.

“It’s really more about supporting youth and young people in what they need than keeping them out of court.

What’s most important to us is that we are supporting the young citizens of Douglas County. And, by doing that, many of them don’t need to proceed to court,” said Coonfare.

The JAC provides assessments for juveniles for the County Attorney’s office.

Coonfare explained the CA’s office has the legal responsibility of determining further processing and further charging decisions. So they rely on the JAC to use a standardized, validated, risk-assessment instrument and other screening instruments that can help them determine the real risk and needs for that individual youth.

Coonfare said not all kids are the same, “Two young people might be shoplifting together at Claire’s, and they both come to the JAC. They meet individually with an assessment professional here as do their parents or guardians. We look at the youth holistically, within the framework of our validated risk-assessment instruments and determine what are their risk and needs. One youth may actually have low risk, not have many needs and so may receive a recommended warning letter from the County Attorney. And another youth, in that same incident, may show a really high risk to continue offending behavior and other unhealthy

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behavior and needs some interventions put in place, like a therapy intervention or decision-making, something like that.”

The Kim Culp Juvenile Justice Forum

The common charges kids face every year are theft, shoplifting, substance abuse and fighting. The actual issue areas the JAC is seeing are concerning.

Juvenile Justice

The State of

“We’re really seeing an increase in mental health issues that kids are facing and challenging family situations. So we are trying to find services to address whole families rather than just the youth,” she said.

in Nebraska

Coonfare said they’re also seeing kids experiencing suicidal ideation so they’re trying to make sure they get the right things in place for kids around those issues.

March 22, 2018 | 7-9 pm UNO Barbara Weitz CEC Bldg

For the last decade, the JAC has been funded about 50% by grants and 50% by County General Funds.

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“It’s really that steadfast support of the County Board of Commissioners that we rely on for our functioning – to see kids and get them connected with services,” she said.

There will be a panel presentation by these key individuals working in the juvenile justice field:

DISPROPORTIONATE MINORITY CONTACT (DMC) Chris Rodgers, Douglas County Commissioner

There are also large grants right now from the Nebraska Crime Commission that pay providers in the community, so the JAC can make referrals to those providers to serve kids.

Over the last 15 years, the JAC has not only gotten good at their jobs, but

they also continue to seek out ways to get better. Coonfare explained that includes some research projects they have going on with UNO and UNL. She said these projects continually offer the JAC opportunities to examine their processes so they can get better at serving kids.

For parents who are struggling with youth behavior, at any age, Coonfare recommends contacting the Nebraska Family Helpline.

NEBRASKA JUVENILE PROBATION, OVERVIEW AND PRIORITIES The Kim Culp Juvenile Justice Forum Jeanne Brandner, Deputy, Probation The State of Juvenile Justice in Nebraska AdministratorJuvenile Services Division The Kim Culp Juvenile Justice Forum The Kim Culp Juvenile Justice Forum

THURSDAY MARCH 22, 2018, 7-9 PM

UNO BARBARA WEITZ COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT CENTER

The State of Juvenile Justice in Nebraska

PROGRAMS THAT WORK IN NEBRASKA Anne Hobbs, PhD, Director, UNO Juvenile Justice Institute THURSDAY THURSDAY MARCH MARCH 22, 22, 2018, 2018, 7-9 7-9 PM PM

UNO WEITZ

UNO BARBARA BARBARA WEITZ COMMUNITY COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT ENGAGEMENT CENTER CENTER

Sponsored by: The League of Women Voters of Greater Omaha, League of Women Voters of Nebraska and Partnership for Kids

Sponsored by: The League of Women Voters of Greater Omaha, League of Sponsored by: The League of Women Voters of Greater Omaha, League of Women Voters of Nebraska and Partnership for Kids There will be a panel presentation by these key Women Voters of Nebraska and Partnership for Kids

JUVENILE JUSTICE PROGRESS OVER THE PAST 10 YEARS/ UPCOMING LEGISLATION Juliet Summers, JD, Juvenile Justice Policy Coordinator, Voices for Children

PURPOSE

To honor the work of Kim Culp founding Director of the Douglas County Juvenile PURPOSE PURPOSE Assessment Center (JAC) by engaging and To honor the work of Kim Culp founding To honor the work of Kim Culp founding informing the community on important issues Director of the Douglas County Juvenile Director of the Douglas County Juvenile affecting youth in the juvenile justice system.

Assessment Center (JAC) by engaging and Assessment Center (JAC) by engaging and

“Anyone who needs help trying to connect a youth with any kind of services, call the Nebraska Family Helpline and they will help match resources in the community for any, any youth issue,” she said.

informing the community on important issues informing the community on important issues affecting youth in the juvenile justice system.

affecting youth in the juvenile justice system.

Kim developed a myriad of programs through

the JAC and nonprofits in Omaha, always with Kim developed a myriad of programs through Kim developed a myriad of programs through an emphasis on relationship building, cultural the JAC and nonprofits in Omaha, always with the JAC and nonprofits in Omaha, always with competence and understanding the impact of an emphasis on relationship building, cultural an emphasis on relationship building, cultural the child welfare system on children’s lives. competence and understanding the impact of competence and understanding the impact of the child welfare system on children’s lives. the child welfare system on children’s lives.

After retirement, Kim was active in the League

of Women Voters of Greater Omaha, serving as After retirement, Kim was active in the League After retirement, Kim was active in the League of Women Voters of Greater Omaha, serving as Vice-President at the time of her May 2017 of Women Voters of Greater Omaha, serving as Vice-President at the time of her May 2017 death.

Vice-President at the time of her May 2017

individuals working in the juvenile justice field:

There will be a panel presentation by these key There will be a panel presentation by these key DISPROPORTIONATE MINORITY CONTACT (DMC) individuals working in the juvenile justice field: individuals working in the juvenile justice field: Chris Rodgers, Douglas County Commissioner DISPROPORTIONATE DISPROPORTIONATE MINORITY MINORITY CONTACT CONTACT (DMC) (DMC)

Chris Rodgers, Douglas County Commissioner NEBRASKA JUVENILE PROBATION, Chris Rodgers, Douglas County Commissioner OVERVIEW AND PRIORITIES

Jeanne Brandner, Deputy, Probation AdministratorNEBRASKA NEBRASKA JUVENILE JUVENILE PROBATION, PROBATION, Juvenile Services Division OVERVIEW OVERVIEW AND AND PRIORITIES PRIORITIES Jeanne Jeanne Brandner, Deputy, Probation AdministratorBrandner, Deputy, Probation AdministratorJuvenile Services Division Juvenile Services Division PROGRAMS THAT WORK IN NEBRASKA

Anne Hobbs, PhD, Director, UNO Juvenile Justice PROGRAMS PROGRAMS THAT THAT WORK WORK IN IN NEBRASKA NEBRASKA Institute

Anne Hobbs, PhD, Director, UNO Juvenile Justice Anne Hobbs, PhD, Director, UNO Juvenile Justice Institute Institute JUVENILE JUSTICE PROGRESS OVER THE PAST 10 YEARS/UPCOMING LEGISLATION JUVENILE JUSTICE PROGRESS OVER THE PAST 10

INSPECTOR GENERAL’S REPORT Julie Rogers, Inspector General, Child Welfare & Juvenile Probation death. death.

JUVENILE JUSTICE PROGRESS OVER THE PAST 10 Juliet Summers, JD, Juvenile Justice Policy Coordinator, YEARS/UPCOMING YEARS/UPCOMING LEGISLATION LEGISLATION Voices for Children Juliet Summers, JD, Juvenile Justice Policy Coordinator, Juliet Summers, JD, Juvenile Justice Policy Coordinator,

Voices for Children Voices for Children INSPECTOR GENERAL’S REPORT

INSPECTOR Julie Rogers, Inspector General, Child Welfare & INSPECTOR GENERAL’S GENERAL’S REPORT REPORT Julie Rogers, Inspector General, Child Welfare & Julie Rogers, Inspector General, Child Welfare & Juvenile Probation Juvenile Probation Juvenile Probation

Nebraska Family Helpline, 888-866-8660; Boys Town, www.BoysTown.org

Free & Open to the Public: Contact information-Elaine Johnson / elaineomaha@gmail.com / 402-630-5199 Free & Open to the Public: Contact information-Elaine Johnson / elaineomaha@gmail.com / 402-630-5199 Free & Open to the Public: Contact information-Elaine Johnson / elaineomaha@gmail.com / 402-630-5199

COVER

| THE READER |

March 2018

11

BON [APP]ETIT! A Virtual Dining Experience

BY SARA LOCKE

T

EAT

here is an app for everything right now, from identifying spiders running around your apartment to brokering business buyouts. Sure, there is a hum from citizens who wish people would put down their smart phones and take part in “real life”, but nobody can hear them because they’re taking an online course over their lunchbreak, learning a new language at the gym, or hosting a conference call with Japan while out walking their dog.

There is no fighting it. Smart phones aren’t the future, they’re the present. In fact, unless you’re holding an actual copy of our paper in your hand, it’s likely you’re reading these very words on your smart phone, whether through the link on Facebook, or through your subscription to The Reader on your Issuu App. So other than subscribing to updates from your favorite food column, (that’s us, by the way) are you using the right apps to get the most out of your local dining experience? We’ve put together a list of some of the more useful products in the sea of dining apps available.

For the Reserved Diner

Planners, parents, and those who just have a high respect for time use every second wisely.

Their minutes are sacred currency and of the highest value, and standing in a restaurant lobby waiting an unpredictable amount of time for a table just doesn’t fit their budget. OpenTable allows you to view menus, see reviews, and book a table from anywhere. Earn points toward dining, and skip the wait! continued on page 15 y

SARA LOCKE is the Contributing Editor for The Reader’s Food section. She is fluent in both sarcasm and pig Latin, and is definitely going to eat the contents of her to-go box in her car on her way home. Follow her restaurant reviews and weekly what-todos online at http://thereader. com/dining/crumbs . Follow @ TheReaderOmahaDish on Instagram to find out what else she’s sinking her teeth into.

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MARCH 2018

| THE READER |

EAT

1:30-2pm - Opening Music by Wakanda 2:15pm - Urban Food Forests by Omaha Permaculture’s Graham Herbst

4:30pm - Teaming Up with Local Food Coops to Develop Food Pipelines with Lone Tree Foods & Nebraska Food Coop 5:10pm - Using SNAP Creatively to Increase Access for Local, RegeNErative Food with Alliance For A Better Omaha’s Craig Howell

RegeNErating Nebraska Communities 2:55pm - Refugee From The Soil Up Farming by Christine Ross of Refugee Women’s Organization of Nebraska

3:40pm - Omaha Urban Farming Panel with Big Muddy, Big Garden, City Sprouts South, plus Aquaponics with Whispering Roots

RegeNErate North Omaha – Sunday, March 25th 2-7:30pm Metro Community College Institute for the Culinary Arts

FREE to the Public Including a Local, RegeNErative Dinner Prepared in African American Tradition & Catered by The Institute for the Culinary Arts RSVP Your Spot at Eventbrite on the RegeNErate Nebraska Facebook Page or by Emailing Graham@GCResolve.com

6:05pm Regeneration Intl’s Ronnie Cummins on the 4per1000 Soil Initiative Moderated by Tena Hahn Rodriguez of Inclusive Communities & Social Justice Advocate Anthony Rogers-Wright

| THE READER |

MARCH 2018

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MARCH 2018

| THE READER |

and adjustable tip are included in the final cost, so once you submit your order, all that’s left to do is answer your door.

I have personally used this app to order food for friends who were sick, injured, or who had recently delivered a baby. Nothing says love like a hot meal you didn’t have to cook yourself! Simplify the “meal train” and send them a Skip the Dishes gift card!

y continued on page 12 For the Sensitive Type

Food allergies and sensitivities were once a lifetime sentence to dining in. Now, more establishments are sensitive to sensitivity, and are going to extreme lengths to help people avoid their trigger foods. AllergyEats App, free from Itunes, allows you to scout out restaurants that claim to cater to food allergies. It specifies which allergen the restaurant avoids, a sneak peek at the menu, and allows customers to rate the experience and flag places who are dishonest about their practices.

Available allergen options are tree nuts, peanuts, dairy, eggs, wheat, gluten, fish, shellfish, sesame, and soy. The more users on the app, the more accurate and comprehensive it becomes!

For the Dieter Vegan, vegetarian, keto, Atkins, paleo, diabetic, celiac, or on a heart healthy diet? The solution is Tasteful, free from Itunes. You have the option to not only select your dietary preference, but to narrow your choices by cuisine, cost, and location. Whether you’re looking to shake up your weekend routine, or are on the road and don’t know where to go, Tasteful can find the food to fit your macros!

For the Indecisive Adventurer

For the Dining (In)trovert Some of us work long, hard hours and find there is just no time to shop, prep, and cook at the end of the day. Some of us want to enjoy the finest dining in Omaha without putting on pants.

Whatever your reason for refusing to go sit in a restaurant, there is a solution! Skip The Dishes, UberEats, and Fast Guys Delivery are all waiting to bring you your favorite dish, no shoes, no shirt, no problem.

Search by address and all participating restaurants in your delivery area will appear before you. You can browse menus, make notes, and pay right from the app. The delivery charge

Meal of Fortune uses your location to grab more than a dozen nearby restaurants with excellent Yelp ratings. Can’t decide where to dine? Give the wheel a spin and settle the argument without resorting to sulking over greasy takeout again. Once the wheel has decided, you can choose to spin again, or click the link to visit the establishment’s Yelp page and find out what other diners ordered and what they thought of it.

For the Aspiring Connoisseur Delectable is your pocket Sommelier. Simply scan the label and the app delivers expert advice about pairings, insider info on the vintage, and walks you through the notes as you taste. Enjoy the art of the savor as Delectable shows you how to dissect the drink, drawing out the subtlety in each glass. Free for Iphone and Android.

Groupon Ya, ya. You probably already have this app, but are you using it to its full potential?

Explore all restaurants available and choose something new! Take the opportunity to indulge in a tasting experience at half the cost, removing any risk associated with trying a new place. Just remember to always tip on the pre-groupon total. There are no discounts on excellent service!

What apps do you use to elevate your dining experience? Leave us a note here, on Facebook, or email us at Crumbs@TheReader.Com

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EAT

| THE READER |

MARCH 2018

15

OUT OF YOUR MIND

HEARTLAND HEALING

BY MICHAEL BRAUNSTEIN

HEARTLAND HEALING is a metaphysically-based polemic describing alternatives to conventional methods of healing the body, mind and planet by MICHAEL BRAUNSTEIN. It is provided as information and entertainment, certainly not medical advice. Important to remember and pass on to others: for a weekly dose of Heartland Healing, visit HeartlandHealing.com and like us on Facebook. .

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MARCH 2018

L

et’s go back to the beginning…Well, not really the “beginning,” beginning but you’ll know what I mean. Consider the time when you first took on a body. That’s right, all the way back to the womb. You were floating, weightless, at complete ease in a dark, warm, quiet cocoon. No real sense of touch, no need to breathe, eat or look at your cell phone. All your cares were met.

Every adult understands the concept that we have two parts of the mind, a conscious mind and a subconscious mind. We know the conscious mind’s role. It does stuff like analyze and calculate. It looks at data and offers opinions as to right action. In short, the conscious mind thinks.

The subconscious, on the other hand, runs everything else. It controls all bodily functions, ranging from digestion, heart rate, blood pressure, immune system, muscle movement, eye focus, perspiration… everything else. It organizes the repair of damaged cells in the event of trauma, operates body systems when we sleep and more. The subconscious doesn’t think. It feels. It always has been that way.

How do we know the subconscious is doing all that important stuff?

Easy. We can communicate with it and readily influence those physical markers. A filmmaker does it all the time. Any decent Hollywood director can present you with scenes that will raise your blood pressure, elevate heart rate, respiration, make you sweat and even turn you on — all through your subconscious.

Oh, and another amazing thing about the subconscious mind: it stores information with almost infinite capacity. The subconscious mind is like a huge hard drive, able to store vast amounts, a lifetime’s worth of information and allow access to it at a moment’s notice.

The conscious mind, though, is like RAM memory in your computer: It’s limited in scope, easily filled up and doesn’t store much. Plus, there’s hell to pay when you run out.

It’s not that difficult to communicate with the subconscious.

Hypnotherapists do it intentionally all the time. Everyone is capable of it.

We just need the conscious mind to step aside.

One part of our mind is a noisy bully. The other, more powerful part, the subconscious, is a patient enabler. Let’s examine the disadvantages of having a bully in the pulpit.

“When I was born, I had no head. My eye was single and my body was filled with light.” - The Incredible String Band. The conscious mind is ordinarily associated with the head, the subconscious with heart, (even though mind is not located in the body). No one should rationally dispute the fact that when you were born, you indeed had a mind. Of course you had a mind. All those things listed above that are run by the subconscious mind were in place and operating even before your birth.

What you didn’t have when born was a conscious, analytical mind that computed data. You had no “head”, no intellect.

We exit the womb with a subconscious mind capable of feeling physical things for the first time. We experience physical effects as feeling. The physical experience of hunger? We feel hungry. Cold? We feel cold. We open our eyes and instead of a dark, safe, quiet, wet, warm, weightless experience, we are bombarded with a barrage of sensory cues. A woman picks us up and we feel better. We feel warmer. We suckle and feel no hunger. We breathe for the first time and we hear our voice.

We make a sound — “Waaah!” — and that sound brings the woman back to us. We have begun the process of discovering and developing a mechanism to interface with the newly entered physical world of form.

That mechanism is the conscious mind.

| THE READER |

HEARTLAND HEALING

Different sounds result in different results. We learn language. We learn to identify separate things in the physical world. We establish a belief in separateness. We build a conscious mind. We develop that offshoot of our real mind that is supposed to be a tool, a servant, for our true mind, the subconscious.

When our subconscious establishes that something should occur, that we need to interface with the physical world, we would direct the conscious mind to carry out the will of the feeling that the subconscious identified. The intellectual mind originated as a tool for the real, inner self and a way for that self to enact what was needed or proper based on what the heartmind determined, what felt right.

But something happens as a human grows up. As the intellect becomes enthralled with its power to collect data and information, it starts listening to the information it retrieves rather than listening to instructions from the self. Pretty soon, the intellect is telling the subconscious what should be done, based on data it retrieved from USAToday or teachers or friends or television or the internet or doctors or “they”. And we all know how sketchy that information can be. Pretty soon, the conscious mind, a mind that can only crunch numbers, analyze and collect data is making decisions based on what the world is telling it. And that information changes almost daily. The tool that was built by us to serve us is telling the adult us what to do. The inmate took over the asylum.

“One light. Light that is one though the lamps be many.” - Incredible String Band Somewhere along the learning curve of life, many people find that making decisions based on data the world feeds us doesn’t work out. Things go wrong no matter how much data the conscious mind crunches. The only way to take back the ability to do right action is to place responsibility in the part of the mind that isn’t data-driven.

The subconscious is still in contact with that One Light. We just need to remember who’s boss in there.

Be well.

Heartland Healing is a metaphysically based polemic describing alternatives to conventional methods of healing the body, mind and planet. It is provided as information and entertainment, certainly not medical advice. Important to remember and pass on to others: for a weekly dose of Heartland Healing, visit HeartlandHealing.com. and like us on Facebook. https://youtu.be/g8ywW0nf6Ro http://www.headless.org

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FEBRUARY MARCH 2018 2018

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OMAHA’S PREMIER LIVE MUSIC VENUE

T U R N

I T

U P

LIVE MUSIC SCHEDULE - MARCH 2018.

THURSDAY, MARCH 1 STEVE RAYBINE 6:30 TO 9:30 PM

TUESDAY, MARCH 13 JOHNNY GOMEZ & JR 6:30 TO 9:30 PM

SATURDAY, MARCH 24 JOYSTICK 9:00 TO 1:00 AM

FRIDAY, MARCH 2 LIVE WIRE 9:00 TO 1:00 AM

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14 GENERATIONS 6:30 TO 9:30 PM

SATURDAY, MARCH 3 THE CONFIDENTIALS 9:00 TO 1:00 AM

THURSDAY, MARCH 15 CHAD STONER 6:30 TO 9:30 PM

MONDAY, MARCH 26 GOOCH AND HIS BIG LAS VEGAS BAND 6:30 TO 9:30 PM

MONDAY, MARCH 5 GOOCH AND HIS BIG LAS VEGAS BAND 6:30 TO 9:30 PM

FRIDAY, MARCH 16 ENVY 9:00 TO 1:00 AM

TUESDAY, MARCH 27 SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION 6:30 TO 9:30 PM

SATURDAY, MARCH 1 7 St. Patrick’s DAY TAXI DRIVER 9:00 TO 1:00 AM

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 28 PERSUADERS 6:30 TO 9:30 PM

MONDAY, MARCH 19 GOOCH AND HIS BIG LAS VEGAS BAND 6:30 TO 9:30 PM

THURSDAY, MARCH 29 FINEST HOUR 6:30 TO 9:30 PM

TUESDAY, MARCH 6 JOE MCCARTHY 6:30 TO 9:30 PM WEDNESDAY, MARCH 7 THE GREASE BAND 6:30 TO 9:30 PM THURSDAY, MARCH 8 PRAIRIE CATS 6:30 TO 9:30 PM FRIDAY, MARCH 9 SOUL DAWG 9:00 TO 1:00 AM SATURDAY, MARCH 10 ECKOPHONIC 9:00 TO 1:00 AM MONDAY, MARCH 12 GOOCH AND HIS BIG LAS VEGAS BAND 6:30 TO 9:30 PM

TUESDAY, MARCH 20 SCOTT EVANS 6:30 TO 9:30 PM

FRIDAY, MARCH 30 HI Fl HANGOVER 9:00 TO 1:00 AM

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 21 THE 70’5 BAND 6:30 TO 9:30 PM

SATURDAY, MARCH 31 TBA 9:00 TO 1:00 AM

THURSDAY, MARCH 22 DADDY MAC & THE FLAC 6:30 TO 9:30 PM

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FRIDAY, MARCH 23 THE SIX 9:00 TO 1:00 AM

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MARCH 2018

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“Happy Hour “ Mon., Wed., Thurs. and Friday 3:30 To 6:30pm Tuesday All Day 3:30 Until Close

March 2, 4 p.m.

‘Room to Move’

Modern Arts Midtown modernartsmidtown.com MAM exhibit showcases Spence’s panoramic vision of Nebraska landscape This March, Modern Arts Midtown will display the impressive landscape photographs of John Spence. Known for his colorful, and dramatic panoramas, Spence has photographed in almost all of Nebraska’s 93 counties. Opening March 2nd, Room to Move features his large-format, dye sublimation prints of Nebraska.

Born in Texas and raised in Beatrice, Nebraska, the artist has been photographing for more than 40 years. He worked in the Nebraska Public Television film unit and is an independent film and video producer.

Photographic tropes like “the right place at the right time” don’t do justice to Spence’s emotional response to the place at hand. According to the artist, “the right state of mind” is additionally essential.

Through an adept use of color and perspective, along with their imposing size, the works provide an epic view of the Midwest and reflect Spence’s connection to the landscape. Gallery owner Larry Roots said of Spence’s work: “Witnessing these images evokes a pride in the startling beauty we call ‘the good life.’”

The exhibit opens at MAM on March 2nd, with a reception for the artist from

4p.m.-6p.m. For more details and gallery hours, go to modernartsmidtown.com. ~Kent Behrens

And if you’re heading to Austin for SXSW, the Nebraska Exposed showcase is on March 14 at Cheers Shot Bar.

March 2

Nebraska Exposed SXSW Benefit Show Duffy’s Tavern Duffyslincoln.com/calendar/

For the third year in a row, KZUM and the Lincoln Partnership for Economic Development host a strong selection of Nebraska artists at a “Nebraska Exposed” showcase at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. The slate includes R&B project Mesonjixx, folk songwriter Orion Walsh and Omaha indietronica band State Disco. Before they head south, though, five bands also participating in Nebraska Exposed — A Different Breed, Better Friend, HAKIM, The Dilla Kids and SAS — are raising money for the trip with a show at Duffy’s Tavern. Entry is $5, and search “Nebraska Exposed SXSW Benefit Show” on Facebook for more information.

~Hear Nebraska

March 4

Let There Be Light

Jewish Community Center jewishomaha.org/jcc/ During the long, SAD months of winter, Kaneko isn’t the only organization thinking about shedding some light on art. Beginning March 4, the art gallery at the Jewish Community Center will host the exhibition Out of the Darkness.

The show features the works of fabric artists Juli-Ann Gasper and Jeanie Holt, photographer Mike Beck and painter Dana Newman. What unifies their works are the effects produced by the secret hidden in their wooden frames, which are embedded with programmed LED lighting.

The brain child of Holt and her engineer husband, Dennis, the frames’ illumination sequences result in a changing perception of tone, depth and mood of each artwork. Organizers purposefully put together a range of media to illustrate the various and dramatic applications this technique offers.

Out of the Darkness opens on March 4 and runs through the 31st at the Jewish Community Center, 333 S. 132nd Street.

Regular gallery hours are Sunday 11am5pm, Monday-Thursday 8am-9pm, and

pickS

Friday 8am-5pm. An artists’ reception is scheduled for March 11 from 1-5pm; lighting engineer Dennis Holt will offer a program on his framing techniques on March 13 beginning at 7pm. The gallery is free and open to the public.

| THE READER |

~Janet L. Farber

March 2018

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March 6, 5:30 p.m.

Double Your Pleasure Connect Gallery connectgallery.net

During the last 25 years, Wroblewski has translated mythic and natural themes into expressive bronze sculpture. Using the lost wax process and revising the wax positive, he creates unique, singular cast bronze figures and masks that are fluid and organic.

Longtime Connect Gallery artists Julie Schram and Pete Wroblewski will be back as featured artists for the gallery’s March exhibitions, opening Mar. 6 from 5:30-9 p.m., with a new selection of large-scale pencil drawings and sculpture respectively.

Featuring subjects with a friendly familiarity, Schram brings them to life using shadow, texture and an intricate use of pencil strokes.

A sleeping cat in a sunny patch shows a broad range of light and detailed variation of surface. In a portrait, a woman in a wintry ensemble wears a hat dappled so well that it seems almost tactile. Schram’s work offers a rich depiction of portraiture that feels intimate both to her and her viewer.

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March 2018

Sculptor Pete Wroblewski appears in Connect’s,Tiny Art Gallery (TAG, a shipping container converted to a climate controlled gallery) with work that is both figurative and abstract.

Julie Schram and Pete Wroblewski are featured March 6 through 31 with an artist’s reception on Friday, March 9 at Connect Gallery, 3901 Leavenworth Street. For more information and gallery hours, visit connectgallery.net. ~Melinda Kozel

Starkweather

by Doug Marr Florence City Hall florencetheater.org

Based on the true events that captured and terrified the state of Nebraska in 1958, Starkweather – written by local author Doug Marr – is a riveting recount of the fear Nebraskans felt before these killers were captured and the trial of two teenagers accused of the worst crime in state history.

Showtimes are Thursday thru Saturday at 7:00pm, Saturday & Sunday at 2:00pm.

For details about purchasing tickets call 402-455-6341. Directed by: Molly Anderson. Disclaimer: This show contains adult language or situations. Children under 17 will not be admitted. ~Staff Pick

pickS

March 9, 6 p.m.

www. fuggetaboutit.idc

Union for Contemporary Art u-ca.org Lincoln artist Matthew Sontheimer is something of a contrarian.

As an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Sontheimer once told the Kearney Hub newspaper, “Everything I tell my drawing students to do, it’s what I don’t do in my work.” This from an interview in response to his MONA solo exhibit nearly a year ago.

March 7-11

| THE READER |

“I am very interested in intimacy,” he said during an artist reception at the Museum of Nebraska Art. “I want the viewer to get right on top of the work to read it.”

And in the “process,” avoid the superficial, the ordinary.

And, in a commercial environment driven by social media and the likes of Linkedin, Sontheimer admits he doesn’t even have a website. That’s right…I still don’t have a website is more than an anthem. It’s the title of his next solo exhibited at the Union for Contemporary Art opening March 9, 6-9 p.m.

Sontheimer’s maze-like drawings and photographs explore how we access, process, adapt to, ignore, and otherwise live with information. Text-centric compositions follow the artist’s internal dialogue, presented as an ongoing conversation between two fictional characters.

Expressing the sometimes discordant speeds of thinking and making, Sontheimer’s works are filled with revisions, sidebars, and tangents that provide a wry running commentary about his own process. In short, rather than employing conventional methods, socially or artistically, the artist wants to connect with his audience with his richly dense art…up close.

Over the course of Matthew Sontheimer’s exhibition which continues through April 14, U-CA will hold an ongoing public discourse its calling Flagging Conversations in multiple formats, seeking how queries and responses can help one understand community more intimately.

To keep this dialogue visible, questions and answers both posed and provided by the community will be stitched into flags and displayed at The Union later this spring.

That’s right…I still don’t have a website, opens March 9, 6-9 p.m. and continues through April 14 at the Union for Contemporary Art, 2423 N. 24th St. Visit u-ca. org for more info and gallery hours. ~ Mike Krainak

March 9-18

Urinetown, the Musical

Chanticleer Theater (830 Franklin Avenue, Council Bluffs) chanticleertheater.com

In a Gotham-like city, a terrible water shortage, caused by a 20-year drought, has led to a government-enforced ban on private toilets. The citizens must use public amenities, regulated by a single malevolent company that profits by charging admission for one of humanity’s most basic needs. Amid the people, a hero decides that he’s had enough and plans a revolution to lead them all to freedom! Urinetown is an hilariously funny and touchingly honest musical satire of the legal system, capitalism, social irresponsibility, populism, bureaucracy, corporate mismanagement, municipal politics and musical continued on page 22 y

E L M W O O D PA R K S AT URDAY, A PRIL 21

KID'S ACTIVITIES • EXHIBITORS • LIVE MUSIC

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W W W. E A R T H D AY O M A H A . O R G pickS

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theatre itself! Showtimes are Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30, Sundays at 2:00pm with tickets between $10-20. Directed by: Jerry Brabec ~Staff Pick

March 9-25

The Fantasticks

Bellevue Little Theater 203 W. Mission, Bellevue fb.com/Bellevuelittletheatre/ ‘ T h e Fantasticks’ is a funny and romantic musical about a boy, a girl, and their two fathers who try to keep them apart.

The narrator, El Gallo, asks the members of the audience to use their imagination and follow him into a world of moonlight and magic.

The boy and the girl fall in love, grow apart and finally find their way back to each other after realizing the truth in El Gallo’s words that, “without a hurt, the heart is hollow.” Directed by: D. Laureen Pickle .

Showtimes: Fridays and Saturdays @ 7:30, Sundays at 2:00pm.

Detroit post-punk band Protomartyr formed back in 2008, but they first gained significant traction in indie rock circles in 2015 with the release of their third LP, The Agent Intellect. The album met critical praise, earning spots on year-end lists from Spin, Consequence of Sound and Rolling Stone. After signing with Domino Records in 2017, the band dropped Relatives in Descent, which saw the band combining its gothic rock leanings with major-key punk rock and even power-pop — imagine if Parquet Courts and Iceage joined forces for an album. Once again, Protomartyr received acclaim from music critics, and now the band is out supporting the record, hitting the Slowdown front room this month with Michigan instrumental rock band Hydropark. Tickets are $12, and more information can be found at onepercentproductions.com. ~Hear Nebraska

March 16

We’re Trying Records Presents:

writer Good Morning Midnight, Minneapolis emo band Heart to Gold and Saddle Creek indie pop band Twinsmith. Entry is $10 per day, and proceeds will be donated to Youth Emergency Services. Find more information and the full lineup by searching “We’re Trying Records Presents: House Fest II at Lucy’s Pub” on Facebook. ~Hear Nebraska

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The inaugural House Fest in 2017 was an undeniable success, cramming hundreds into one house in northwest Omaha to see 30 local and touring DIY bands play on two stages — one in the garage and the other in the basement. This year, We’re Trying Records and Lucy’s Pub are back and looking to capitalize on the success of last year’s event, and an outdoor stage will replace the basement stage this time around. Lineup highlights include Omaha hardcore band Jocko, indie pop band Jacob James Wilton, Iowa City singer-song-

| THE READER |

pickS

Nureyev’s Eyes Bluebarn Theatre bluebarn.org

with Cro-Mags

The Royal Grove Facebook.com/theroyalgrove/ The newly reopened Lincoln music venue The Royal Grove will get a chance to test the strength of its PA system when sludge metal originators Eyehategod stop through Lincoln this month with New York crossover thrash band Cro-Mags.

Neither band has a new record to support, but perhaps the fact that the bands are still constantly touring is a testament to the longevity of their existing work.

~Staff Pick

Slowdown Onepercentproductions.com

March 22-April 15th

Eyehategod

Lucy’s Pub Facebook.com/weretryingrec/

Protomartyr

~Hear Nebraska

March 19

House Fest II

March 16

$20, and head to The Royal Grove’s Facebook page for more information.

Eyehategod rose as one of the leaders of the early-’90s New Orleans sludge scene, with other bands like Crowbar and Acid Bath and taking heavy inspiration from sludge metal, doom metal and grunge godfathers The Melvins. But Eyehategod’s early work characterized the genre’s sound to come with glacial guitar riffs and drawn-out seven-minute-plus songs. Similarly, Cro-Mags paved the way for much of the 1980s New York hardcore scene and the crossover thrash sound they pioneered with bands like Agnostic Front and Sick of It All. Omaha punk mainstays RAF and stoner metal quartet Super Moon open The Royal Grove show. Tickets are

The Bluebarn will be hosting the regional premiere of Nureyev’s Eyes, a new play by David Rush. Directed by Darin Anthony, and featuring Jed Peterson and Sam Woods in the main roles, the play will have a corresponding art show with a selection of 13 full-scale reproductions of Jamie Wyeth’s sketches, studies, and paintings of Rudolf Nureyev will be on display in the Mammel Lobby.

During the 70’s, the painter Jamie Wyeth did a series of studies and paintings of Rudolf Nureyev, the legendary ballet dancer who defected from Russia and revitalized western ballet. This play imagines what their electric encounters may have been like, what secrets were revealed about the world of painting and international dance, and how their relationship evolved…changing each of them.

There are many other Out of the Blue events planned in conjunction with the play. Check their website for announcements during the run of the play. ~Reader staff

pickS

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March 22

Hatebreed, Knocked Loose and more

Sokol Auditorium & Underground Sokolauditorium.com Sokol hosts a hardcore fan’s dream show this month, bringing a stacked, nine-band bill of metalcore and beatdown bands to both stages at the Little Bohemia music venue. Metalcore legends Hatebreed headline the show with the genre’s current torchbearers, Knocked Loose. But the lineup’s bright spots only start there. Sludge metal four-piece Crowbar, Metal Blade Records up-and-comers Twitching Tongues, L.A. hardcore staples Terror and Philadelphia beatdown band Jesus Piece fill out the bill’s midsection. Tickets start at $24, and more information can be found at sokolauditorium.com. Omaha punks Jocko kick things off early at 5:20 p.m. ~Hear Nebraska

March 22

Russian Circles The Waiting Room Waitingroomlounge.com

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March 2018

Long before bands like Deafheaven and Oathbreaker were modifying the boundaries of metal music by mixing atmospheric depth with shrieked vocals and tremolo riffing, Boston’s Isis was laying the groundwork for those bands and the evolution of the post-metal genre. With lengthy songs focused more on sonic repetition and crescendos than their growled vocals, Isis sparked a generation of followers like Chicago’s Russian Circles, which plays The Waiting Room this month. Russian Circles’ sound is still rooted in the same slow-building textures as Isis. But rather than relying strictly on the constantly cacophonous and chugging guitars, the band borrows as much from post-rock artists like Mogwai, developing delicate walls of clean guitar tones before stomping on the distortion. Russian Circles’ most recent LP, Guidance, dropped in 2016 with critics praising itfor its expert combination of heavy peaks and melodic intervals. Omaha metal band Pro-Magnum opens the show at The Waiting Room. Tickets are $15, and information is available at waitingroomlounge.com. ~Hear Nebraska

March 22

Primarily threedimensional and tactile, they are a playful mélange of rudimentary shapes and lines, using humble materials like scrap lumber, paper, sponge, cardboard, fabric, and often elementary applications of color. Much of his work floats between the constructivist and the deconstructivist.

Fujita is joined by Nebraska native Barbara Takenaga. Initially a print-maker, Takenaga is now known for her optically charged abstract paintings.

Her Mandelbrot-like paintings evade a single source and can be viewed as both cosmically boundless and microscopic.

The patterns that permeate her paintings are reminiscent of starling murmurations, tribal scarification, and 1960’s op art. It rapidly becomes a spatial portrait or a cosmic landscape. beginning.break.rapid opens at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, with a talk and opening reception on March 22nd, and runs through June 2nd. For more details and venue hours, go to bemiscenter.org.

beginning.break.rapid: Kenji Fujita and March 24

Barbara Takanaga

Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts bemiscenter.org Two-person Bemis exhibit features dynamic 3D and 2D abstract art of Fujita, Takanaga

~Kent Behrens

Lorde

with Run The Jewels and Mitski Pinnacle Bank Arena Pinnaclebankarena.com

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pickS

~Hear Nebraska

March 26vvvvv, 7:30pm

‘APPROPRIATE’

by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Omaha Community Playhouse Omahaplayhouse.com Every estranged member of the Lafayette clan has descended upon the crumbling Arkansas homestead to settle the accounts of the newly-dead patriarch. As his three adult children sort through a lifetime of hoarded mementos and junk, they collide over clutter, debt and a contentious family history. But after a disturbing discovery surfaces among their father’s possessions, the reunion takes a turn for the explosive, unleashing a series of crackling surprises and confrontations. This is a staged reading of a play, directed by Christopher Scott. Free to the public. ~Staff Pick

March 30

The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts presents beginning.break.rapid: Kenji Fujita and Barbara Takanaga, opening March 22nd. The exhibition is guest-curated by artist and educator Sheila Pepe.

Native New Yorker Fujita, who teaches at Bard College and the School of Visual Arts, has been exhibiting his sculptures and assemblages since the early 1980’s.

His mixed media work runs the gamut from flat works to sculpture.

ine with last year’s Melodrama, which received a Grammy nomination for album of the year. Melodrama isn’t littered with minimalist production in the same way Pure Heroine was — rather, from trackto-track, the album is a creative step forward featuring dense electronic glitching and piano progressions that build to monstrous hooks (see: “Green Light”).

Two artists blazing the indie spheres, Run The Jewels — who headlined Maha Music Festival in 2017 — and Mitski, open the show. Tickets range from $39.50-$99.50, and seating information is available at pinnaclebankarena.com.

A$AP Ferg

with Denzel Curry It’s not always a given that a pop starlet can repeat the popularity and acclaim of their debut, but New Zealand singersongwriter Lorde managed to hang on to the critical approval of 2013’s Pure Hero-

Sokol Auditorium sokolauditorium.com Since the release of his debut Trap Lord in 2013 and his rise along with Harlem-based collective A$AP Mob, A$AP Ferg has solidified himself as one of the preeminent names in today’s hip-hop/

FOLLOW US ON trap-rap landscape.

Ferg most recently dropped his third LP Still Striving in August 2017, which is loaded with bangers and high-profile features from rappers like Meek Mill, Busta Rhymes and A$AP Mob cohort A$AP Rocky. Couple Ferg’s infectious instrumentals and hooks with an opening performance from underground rap heavyweight Denzel Curry — who dropped the experimentally produced 13 EP last summer — and hip-hop chaos should ensue when their tour stops at Sokol Auditorium. English trap artist IDK is also on the tour. Advanced tickets are $29.50, and more information is available at sokolauditorium.com.

7300 Q ST | RALSTONARENA.COM

THURSDAY, MARCH 15 ACOUSTIC SENSATIONS PRESENTS THE BELLES 7PM FREE CONCERT

7pm Thursday, mar 15 free concert

~Hear Nebraska

March 30

Threesome Egos

WEDNESDAY MARCH 28

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 28 HUMMING HOUSE SPECAIL GUEST ALYSSA SIEBKEN 8PM $10

EP Release

The Commons LNK fb.com/3sumEgos/

Lincoln alt-rock band Threesome Egos only started performing live within the last year, but they’re already gearing up to release their debut EP at the end of the month. If the band’s live shows give any hint at what the recorded songs will sound like, the album should feature a healthy dose of wah-wah guitar leads, walking basslines and frontman Pierce Bower’s impassioned, classic rock-influenced vocals.

Lincoln bands Death Cow and Melancollin & the HippySchitzos open the show.

Admission is free, but a donation to The Commons LNK is encouraged. Find more information by searching “Threesome Egos EP Release” on Facebook. ~Hear Nebraska

SPECIAL GUEST

Kim Carnes

SATURDAY MAY 05 // 7:30PM

SATURDAY, JULY 28, 2018 | 8PM

SATURDAY, MAY 05 GREAT WESTERN BANK PRESENTS LITTLE RIVER BAND WITH SPECIAL GUEST KIM CARNES 7:30PM $25/ $35 / $45

SATURDAY, JULY 28 GREAT WESTERN BANK PRESENTS GABRIEL IGLESIAS 8PM $45 / $50 / $75

pickS

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March 2018

25

LANGUAGE ARTS

Artist Ruscha indulges in more than a bit of ‘Word/Play’ in his major exhibit at Joslyn Art Museum B Y J A N E T L . FA R B E R

ART

ED RUSCHA, CLARENCE JONES, 2001, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, PHILLIP SCHRAGER COLLECTION OF CONTEMPORARY ART, © ED RUSCHA

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o trot out the most hackneyed of clichés, it is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. And what if that picture is words? If typography is a main feature? If message and image compete for attention? If they are complimentary? Contradictory? Do the words create meaning or make it more elusive?

These are questions posed by the current major exhibition at Joslyn Art Museum: Word/Play: Prints, Photographs, and Paintings by Ed Ruscha, on view through May 6.

Ruscha (pronounced Roo-shay), an early influencer in the West Coast Pop and conceptual art revolutions, remains at age 80 an iconic figure on the international scene. This show, the first extensive local look at this LA dwelling, Omaha-born artist, homes in on the work that distinguishes his long career with its emphasis on manipulating visual and verbal codes.

The first gallery opens with “Clarence Jones,” a blockbuster of a painting lent by the Phillip Schrager Collection that serves as a fitting broadside for the

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ART

exhibition. It fronts as a magisterial mountain landscape painting, a rugged, Manifest Destiny tinged Bierstadt for the 21th century. This vista is overlaid with a message in a clean, white font: “CLARENCE JONES/1906-1987/ REALLY KNEW HOW TO SHARPEN KNIVES.” Suddenly, the painting moves from a rousing sublime to moving epitaph. Who was the late lamented Clarence Jones? Was he a latter-day frontiersman, a Jeremiah Johnson? Or was he just some random guy, whose distinction was to have a mad talent for whetting? If a proper memorial, why is the message posted on the front of the canvas, billboard style? Is Ed Ruscha shouting at us in all caps?

Enigmatic as his word works are, the artist has not stayed entirely silent about the origins of his compositions. Text accompanying the exhibition explains that Ruscha’s Jones is essentially a fictional construct, an everyman, blue collar Joe whose specific skill set is symbolic of all sorts of lost, ordinary or underappreciated arts among those he’s known throughout his life.

ED RUSCHA, ST. TROPEZ, 1965/2003, SILVER GELATIN PRINT, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GAGOSIAN

ED RUSCHA, STANDARD STATION, 1966, SCREEN PRINT, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GAGOSIAN

Ruscha describes his view as one of “sardonic Standard gas station in Amarillo, Texas, taken on There’s the clever rhyming word scheme; Ruscha also demonstrates an affinity for short, affection for the forgotten person who doesn’t exist.” a Route 66 journey in 1962. The small, square Ruscha would in the course of his career show punchy word combinations that prick the ear So “Clarence Jones” is an epitaph, a image captures the station from a driver’s eye a deft talent for exploiting the look and sound or have a good mouth feel. “Sponge Puddle,” gravestone etched large. Looking closely at the view, but it’s the perspectival thrust of the long, of words, phrases and quotes, whether read or “Wall Rocket” and “History Kids” are all splashed believably rendered landscape, you notice a narrow Standard sign, with its big block letters, overheard. onto his familiar mountainside backdrops. painterly quality that seems impersonal and that becomes a talisman for future artworks.

While most of his text compositions utilize an “Baby Jet” is a curious excursion into a shaped formulaic, like a giant paint-by-number. It is an A suite of related screen prints illustrates invented “Boy Scout utility modern” typeface, canvas—notice the slightly bowed sides—which image meant to be seen at a distance, like a how Ruscha developed his muse into dynamic these prints are rendered in a Gothic script, subtly gives it the sensation of looking out of an stage backdrop. This too is intentional. compositions that play with architectural reflective of the visit to London that inspired airplane window.

The soaring peaks are borrowed, stolen and abstraction, color attitude and the power of a them. Additionally, the words are rendered Perhaps most irreverent (or half past clever) imagined, quotes or amalgams from travel single word of text to be both a design device large against washy, atmospheric backgrounds are Ruscha’s mirror paintings, such as “Lion in brochures, magazines and corporate logos. To and content-rich signifier. intended to mimic the drawing experiments he Oil” and “Never Odd or Even.” Each is a verbal Ruscha, they are anonymous; “background A favorite in the group is “Cheese Mold was conducting with materials such as cherry pie and visual palindrome, as both the phrases noise, like backup singers,” he told an opening- Standard with Olive,” in which a pimiento- filling, eggs and chocolate syrup. and mountain images scan the same in each night audience at the museum. If that’s the case, stuffed green olive floats incongruously in the Some works seem to reflect back especially on horizontal direction. The effect ends up being the words are a form of lyrics. upper right. “I’m dead serious about being Ruscha’s early but short stint in graphic design. somewhat surprising, as the eye is acclimated to Just how Ruscha developed his art of nonsensical,” said the artist.

“Barns and Farms,” a classic text painting with think of a mountain peak as a form of Isosceles elevating the ordinary is traced through the If typography from road signs, ads and glowing sunset background, encapsulates simply triangle, as well as to read the text for language nearly retrospective selection of artworks in the consumer products weren’t enough of an but effectively every cliché about a bucolic rural and not letters. exhibition. The next gallery showcases his early accessible reminder about the stickiness of America; it is instantly telling, despite the fact that In the end, the show confirms Ruscha’s cred as breakout work, largely based in black-and-white words, then there was the presence of the famed there is neither barn nor farm in sight. “Cold Beer an artist nimble in a wide variety of media, a wry photography, in which items such as cans of Hollywood sign on the LA horizon.

Beautiful Girls,” a lithograph of white text set master of the mundane, and an unsentimental Spam or turpentine are given a kind of deadpan Ruscha made it the subject of artworks in many against a cloud-dappled sky, seems to epitomize observer of the world with a keen ear for its passport photo treatment. media, even explaining that it acted for him as someone’s daydream of perfection. verbal music. Art should, after all, speak to the A half dozen artist books (and, yes, you may a kind of daily barometer of LA’s famous smog Many of the more recent works in the exhibition viewer. And with this show, one thing’s for sure: leaf through them) as well as a series of urban levels. The inky and atmospheric “Hollywood” represent the range of Ruscha’s love of wordplay. you’ll get your words’ worth. rooftop views demonstrate his penchant for using lithographs in the exhibition are perhaps more There is a large lithograph of a gauzy sky, the Word/Play: Prints, Photographs, and camera as a fact-collecting tool. His images are factually climatological than romantic. sun obscured by a group of passing clouds. Paintings by Ed Ruscha runs through May neutral but incisive, unsentimentally recognizing By the early 1970s, Ruscha was concentrating SIN, it proclaims in all caps. Is it an apocalyptic 6, 2018, at Joslyn Art Museum. There is an a kind of rote but formal repetition within the more on text—both its formal and messaging warning? It’s titled “Sin—Without.” Is it merely admission fee for this show. The museum is built environment. potential—as its own subject. The screen print suite a translation of the Spanish word? Is it a clever located at 2200 Dodge Street. For further Among the icons in Ruscha’s considerable “News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews, Dues” illustrates play on “he who is without sin”? Perhaps all of information, visit www.joslyn.org or call oeuvre is a black-and-white photograph of a several important transitions in his work. the above?

402/342-3300.

ART

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CELEBRATING LOCAL PERFORMANCE ART AWARDEES B Y B E A U F I E L D B E R R Y- F I S H E R IMAGES BY DEBRA S. KAPLAN

C

THEATER

DOMINIQUE MORGAN AND BEAUFIELD BERRY-FISHER KEPT THE CROWD ROLLING AND THE AWARDS MOVING, SHARING THE HONOR AS THE SHOWS FIRST BLACK

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For a full list of winners, please see OEA-AWARDS.ORG

JOYFULLY, BEST DANCE PRODUCTION FOR THE “AFRICAN CULTURE CONNECTION”

CHLOE IRWIN, BEST YOUTH PERFORMER IN PRANCER AT THE ROSE.

FEBRUARY 2018

ongratulations to all of our winners and nominees, and all of the artists in Omaha that keep creativity, soul, and passion alive and shared with our community. We truly appreciate and value the hard work of all of our cities talents. And as your theater team at the Reader, we are dedicated to telling your stories.

THEATER

DOUG AND LAURA MARR, LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD FOR DEDICATION TO OMAHA PERFORMING ARTS COMMUNITY.

STEVE KRAMBECK, BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A MUSICAL FOR OCP’S BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

RONI SHELLEY PEREZ, BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL FOR, PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT AT THE BLUEBARN.

APRIL 6-22, 2018 | ONEFESTIVALOMAHA.ORG

THEATER

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NEBRASKA STEPS UP

HOODOO

BY B.J. HUCHTEMANN

HOODOO focuses on blues, roots, Americana and occasional other music styles with an emphasis on live music performances. Hoodoo columnist B.J. Huchtemann is a senior contributing writer and veteran music journalist who received the Blues Foundation’s 2015 Keeping the Blues Alive Award for Journalism.

Follow her blog at hoodoorootsblues.blogspot.com and on www.thereader.com.

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RICHARD THOMPSON SPEAKS AT FOLK ALLIANCE INTERNATIONAL Highlights from local music calendars for your dancing pleasure plus a recap of Folk Alliance International in Kansas City featuring a very successful showcase of Nebraska roots music organized by KZUM.

T

his month BSO Presents at Chrome Lounge hosts the Brian England Groove Prescription with Brad Cordle and opening act The Redwoods Thursday, March 1. Knockout Memphis-based guitarist Jeff Jensen and his band rock the house Thursday, March 8. Phenomenal blues vocalist and entertainer Sugaray Rayford is up Thursday, March 15. The Bel Airs return with their irresistible mix of blues, vintage rock and New Orleans music Thursday, March 22. Anthony Gomes performs Thursday, March 29. All Thursday shows are 6-9 p.m.

There is a special show Saturday, March 24, 6-9 p.m. with the Johnny Winter All-Star Band led by John Paul Nelson. The evening features a screening of the 2014 documentary “Down & Dirty: The Johnny Winter Story” at 6 p.m. See omahablues.com for details on Chrome blue shows and other area blues-roots calendar listings.

Zoo Bar Blues Lincoln’s Zoo Bar has announced the dates and line-up for the summer anniversary ZooFest. Mark your calendar for Friday and Saturday, July 6 and 7. Headliners include Los Lobos, Tommy Castro & The Painkillers, Dale Watson & His Lone Stars, Nikki Hill and more. See zoobar.com for details.

Highlights of the Zoo’s March calendar include the amazing Carolyn Wonderland Saturday, March 24, 6 p.m. Stick around to see terrific K.C. guitarist Chris Meck & The Guilty Birds at 9 p.m. See chrismeckandtheguiltybirds.com.

Sugaray Rayford is up Wednesday, March 15, The Bel Airs play Wednesday, March 21 and John Paul Nelson and the Johnny Winter All-Stars perform Wednesday, March 28.

Tinsley Ellis plugs in Monday, March 19, for an early show. Please check zoobar.com for times, early shows usually start at 6 p.m.

Get the Folk Out The Nebraska roots music scene has been getting some great recognition in 2018. In January, the Blues Society of Omaha was honored with a Keeping the Blues Alive Award. The BSO

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HOODOO

received the award from the Blues Foundation in Memphis partly in recognition of the BluesEd youth performance and development program that provides music education and performance opportunities for youth. See BluesEd.com for more information.This is the sixth KBA to be awarded to Omaha-LIncoln metro area recipients.

In February, I attended the 30th Annual Folk Alliance International in Kansas City. The annual event is part artist development conference, part live performance showcase and a gathering for all kinds of folk music. In addition to the expected traditional folk forms, world music, blues and even swing were represented.

Lincoln community radio station KZUM hosted their first private showcase. The term private showcase is a bit misleading, private showcases take over three full floors of the host hotel, Kansas City’s Westin at Crown Center. Each private showcase room hosted artists from 10 p.m. to as late as 4 a.m. each night. It’s a bit like 300 pop-up, music-driven speakeasies. In attendance are fellow musicians, industry folks including radio DJs, concert promoters, booking agents and dedicated fans. Usually the beds have been removed, folding chairs have been added and presenters armed with painter’s tape have transformed the spaces with Christmas lights, posters and more. Most presenters also have a beer or liquor sponsor, providing of-age attendees with free alcoholic beverages. KZUM’s showcase hosted sets by Matt Cox, Will Hutchinson, Mike Semrad & The River Hawks, The Wildwoods, The Fremonts, Andrea Von Kampen, Hope Dunbar and Jack Hotel. The showcase offered slick swag from buttons and stickers to a compilation disc of all the artists and free beer from sponsor Blue Blood Brewing Co.

By Saturday, I was hearing people I didn’t know saying that KZUM’s Nebraska Room 701 was “a must” among the private showcases. A cool accomplishment that reflects the caliber of our local talent and the organizational efforts of KZUM to make the room happen. For photos and videos from the KZUM FAI private showcase scroll back to Feb. 15-17 posts at Facebook.com/kzumradio. For more on Folk Alliance see folk.org.

Folk Alliance also featured ten official multi-act showcases from 6-10 p.m. each night Thursday-Sunday in various ballrooms and event rooms around the hotel. Performers included blues acts like Ruthie Foster and Guy Davis, Tex-Mex from Flaco Jiménez and Los Texmaniacs featuring Redd Volkaert, popular folk artists like Anaïs Mitchell and Sam Baker plus traditional, popular and even experimental urban folk from around the world.

Daytime included more showcases, panel discussions, film screenings and a Music Camp with sessions for musicians to learn from pro teachers. A special highlight was the Thursday talk with Richard Thompson who spoke about his early years as an artist, the early London music scene and more in an engaging and often humorous conversation with moderator and folk authority Stephen Winick.

Next year Folk Alliance moves to Montreal, but it is expected to come back to K.C. in several years.

Hot Notes Steve Earle & The Dukes featuring The Mastersons are back Tuesday, March 20, 8 p.m. at The Waiting Room. Sunday Roadhouse hosts Amy LaVere and Will Sexton March 4, Chuck Mead March 22 and Radney Foster March 25. All three shows are at Reverb Lounge. See sundayroadhouse.com for details.

FEBRUARY SPECIALS

Stop in on Friday's from 2/9 - 3/23 after the Holy Name Lenten Fish Fry and enjoy $2 Busch Lite Pints Omaha Beer Week - 2/16-2/25 - Specials: $10 Fish Bowls - $5 pints with glass/$4 refills

TOURS

South 24th St • Taste of South Omaha Heritage Murals • Omaha & South Omaha History

PRESENTATIONS

South 24th Street • Ethnic Groups Stockyards • Omaha History • South Omaha History Mexican American Baseball Leagues • Cinco de Mayo

February Entertainment fun includes: 2/16 Infusion

I

2,21 Deschutes

I

2,22 Pint 9

I

2/24 New Belgium

and special events each night

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BACKBEAT COLUMN

BY SAM CRISLER

DOMINIQUE MORGAN

J

MARCH 17 & 31 APRIL 21 MAY 12 OMAHAROLLERGIRLS.ORG 32

MARCH 2018

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ust when a random 50-degree-day “Radiant Boy” and “Lucy’s Arm” — which makes it seem as if winter has reared its dropped in July 2017 and marked a change ugly head for the last time, it comes back of pace for the band, focusing more on synths viciously with negative wind chills and ice and textures than the grungy alt-rock of 2015 EP harshing the morning commute. Fortunately, as End of Days. In the interview portion, the band winter hangs around, so does awards season, discussed that change, as well as Omaha’s DIY so we’ll start this month’s column discussing community, bad corn jokes and shopping at the winners at the 2018 Omaha Entertainment Target. The live video was available on YouTube and Arts Awards, which took place on Feb. 18 temporarily and has since been removed, but at Omaha Design Center and was hosted by Audiotree typically reposts the edited sessions R&B artist Dominique Morgan and playwright soon after the recording, so look for the video Beaufield Berry-Fisher. online sometime this month.

For those unfamiliar, the OEAAs celebrate Speaking of Omaha’s DIY community, Austinwork from local visual artists, performing artists by-way-of-Omaha record label We’re Trying and musicians with an annual awards show. The Records and Omaha house show venue Lucy’s night featured performances from rapper J. Crum, Pub announced in three waves the lineup for the experimental vocalist, Omaha Under the Radar second House Fest, which the two organizations music festival founder Amanda DeBoer Bartlett are coordinating. 30 artists are on the bill, and and longtime Omaha hardcore punk band RAF. highlights include Oklahoma City emo band Among the winners for music awards were J. Cheap Kites, local indie pop project Jacob James Crum for Best Hip-Hop/Rap artist, Dominique Wilton, Lincoln indie rock band Universe Contest Morgan for Best R&B artist, The Boner Killerz for and We’re Trying Records artists I See Land and Best Punk artist, Josh Hoyer & Soul Colossal for Runt. See the rest of the lineup by searching Artist of the Year and See Through Dresses for “We’re Trying Records Presents: House Fest II” on Album of the Year (Horse of the Other World) Facebook. Last year’s festival drew hundreds to and Best Alternative/Indie artist. See the full list the ranch-style house near 90th and Blondo to of winners at oea-awards.org. catch local indie bands like The Ambulanters, See Through Dresses are only continuing a hot Better Friend and The Way Out, as well as DIY streak, too, as the band recently recorded a live touring bands Chess Club, Kill Vargas and Remo session for Chicago-based music media outlet Drive — just before that band gained national Audiotree, which invites hundreds of touring attention and found itself on tours with Sorority indie bands each year for interviews and to Noise. If you go, expect the house to be just as perform live in studio. Audiotree then posts the packed as it was last year but with one notable live sessions on its YouTube page, which boasts change: the addition of an outdoor stage taking over 300,000 subscribers. See Through Dresses the place of the basement stage. stuck to performing songs from Horse of the In more festival news, Lincoln Exposed Other World — including “Catacombs,” “Violet,” celebrated its 13th anniversary in February, luring

hoards of music fans to five venues in downtown Lincoln — the Bourbon Theatre, Bodega’s Alley, The Zoo Bar, 1867 Bar and Duffy’s Tavern. The fest took place over four days, from Feb. 7-10 and, true to its namesake, featured an all-Lincoln lineup with over 100 acts. As with most years, the festival reaffirmed the vibrance of Lincoln’s music community, and it’s undeniable if a Wednesday night show at Duffy’s can generate a packed house. Following the fest’s end, organizer and FREAKABOUT frontwoman Cortney Kirby took to Facebook to express her gratitude.

“I’ve always loved Lincoln and the people in it, but that feeling always intensifies after Lincoln Exposed,” she said.

Also in Lincoln, The Bay hosted a benefit show, dubbed Latino Lives, on Feb. 17 spotlighting Hispanic artists in the Lincoln and Omaha DIY scenes, sporting a six-hour slate of music and eight visual artists. The show raised $1,115 to support more shows and events with the same mission. Aramara Quintos Tapia, the 18-yearold frontwoman of garage punk band Histrionic, coordinated the event, which filled The Bay’s spacious performance area with hundreds of fans — many of whom appeared to be under 20 years old. Between sets, attendees scanned the pieces from Latino artists or indulged in the free vanilla-strawberry cake. And during sets, raucous mosh pits sprouted for Omaha hardcore band Loud Minority, Lincoln psych-rock fourpiece Threesome Egos and Histrionic. Rapper HAKIM brought banger beats and smooth flows to close the night out. Between songs in Histrionic’s set, Quintos Tapia thanked the crowd for coming, saying she was overwhelmed with the turnout and would probably go home and cry out of happiness afterward.

Following a January packed with local albums from artists like HAKIM, Jacob James Wilton, Josh Hoyer & Soul Colossal and Omaha political punk quartet No Thanks, February tamed things down, with just a handful of tracks and EP’s to survey.

In last month’s column, we touched on the lead single, “How Simple,” from Philadelphia indie rock band Hop Along’s forthcoming third record Bark Your Head Off, Dog. It was a bit of a sonic departure from the band’s erratic song structures on earlier albums Get Disowned and Painted Shut, opting for a more pop-focused sound. The latest single from Bark Your Head Off, Dog, “Not Abel,” feels like a mix of Hop Along eras, as the verses sound more like freak-folk than anything the band has released since it was frontwoman Frances Quinlan’s solo project in the 2000s. But the song’s latter half breaks into what’s possibly the most infectiously catchy passage the band has ever committed to a record. Any worries of Hop Along taking a strictly pop-rock route on the new album after hearing “How Simple” have to be quelled. If anything, it’s even less clear how

the rest of the album will sound as a whole. We’ll have to wait until April 6 to find out.

In a bit of a change of pace from the indie rock of Saddle Creek, Lincoln death metal band Violent Death Equipment delivered its five-song EP, High Velocity Splatter in February. The three-piece has been around in a number of incarnations since the beginning of this decade, and High Velocity Splatter marks the first release at this juncture in the band’s existence. Produced by engineer Sean Joyce, the album roars with technically confounding riffs, frontman Cody Boyles’ guttural vocals and double-kick drum blast beats. Considering each song’s breakneck pace, it’s a wonder any of the songs reach past the three-minute mark, but Violent Death Equipment use this extra space to impart on brutal breakdowns and solos that simultaneously recall Converge and Covenant-era Morbid Angel. The band celebrated the album’s release on Feb. 16 at 1867 Bar with fellow metal bands Autumn Paradox, Carnographer and Topeka’s Dark Apostle.

Finally, Lincoln rapper Eddie Branch has been cutting his teeth at local shows for the past year and working with Lincoln-based collective Dreamscape Media Group, which has released projects from emcee Sleep Sinatra and producer PhantomJanitor. Near the beginning of February, Branch dropped his debut single, “Mancala,” which sees the rapper spitting with a monotone, Earl Sweatshirt-esque delivery over an industrialleaning, sparse instrumental that would fit snugly on a Clipping album. It’s a strong debut, with capable flows, mind-bending rhymes and forward-thinking production. Branch’s debut mixtape, Wake Me Up When It’s Over, is due for release through Dreamscape this spring.

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This column is part of an ongoing collaboration between The Reader and Hear Nebraska, a music journalism and production nonprofit seeking to engage and cultivate Nebraska’s music scene (and now, a program of new nonprofit umbrella Rabble Mill). Want more Nebraska music news? Keep up with local music happenings at hearnebraska.org and make sure to check out next month’s Backbeat Column.

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MARCH 2018

33

PRODIGAL FILMMAKER

Comes home again to screen new picture at Omaha Film Fest

BY LEO ADAM BIGA

JIM RASH (BERNARD) AND DAVID KOECHNER (HUEY) IN BERNARD AND HUEY DIRECTED BY DAN MIRVISH, WRITTEN BY JULES FEIFFER. COURTESY OF BUGEATER FILMS.

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MARCH 2018

he 13th Omaha Film Festival projects March 6-11 at Village Pointe Cinema with its eclectic mix of indie fare from around the world. But a film by Omaha native Dan Mirvish brings things home for area cineastes.

The fest’s opening and closing night films are prestige feature-length studio releases with big name stars: Borg McEnroe at 6 p.m. on March 6 and Beirut at 5:30 p.m. on March 11. The March 10 OFF Conference includes guest panels on Documentary Filmmaking, Writing for Pixar and Filmmaking in Nebraska. The March 11 Writers Theatre showcases live readings of scripts.

Mirvish, an L.A.-based director, will be at a 3:30 p.m. March 10 screening of his new narrative feature Bernard and Huey, whose script is by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jules Feiffer. The presence of indie veteran Mirvish, who co-founded Slamdance, is an important gesture for the local filmmaking community. He’s not only “one of our own” bringing back a well-reviewed new work with serious pedigree, but he’s emblematic of the inventive, resilient spirit that animates the indie industry.

The resourceful Mirvish is the author of The Cheerful Subversive’s Guide to Independent Filmmaking, an irreverent yet practical compendium of lessons learned over his 25-year filmmaking career.

Every Mirvish film – Omaha - The Movie (1995), Open House (2004), Between Us (2012) and now Bernard and Huey (2017) – has been an object lesson in opportunity meets accident meets persistence meets imagination.

He cobbles together micro budget projects financed by friends and family, doubling locations and stealing shots in guerilla-style fashion.

How he came to make his latest took things to new extremes. The original script went unproduced when Feiffer wrote it decades ago. Then it vanished.

Mirvish long admired his work as a cartoonist and scenarist. Feiffer’s adult cartoons in The Village Voice, The New Yorker and Playboy were hipster reads, Also a respected playwright (Little Murders), he adapted an unproduced play

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for what became the acclaimed Mike Nichols’ film Carnal Knowledge. He adapted Murders for Alan Arkin. He penned Popeye for Robert Altman.

Mirvish went to some lengths to track down the elusive script inspired by an old Feiffer cartoon series. The protagonists are similar to the lifelong male buddies in Carnal Knowledge, only these misogynists navigate a post sexual revolution-feminist age.

Just finding a copy of the script proved daunting as most players involved in trying to get it made decades earlier were dead. Upon rediscovering and reading it, Mirvish fell in love with the material.

“I thought it was a great satire on masculinity and men behaving badly.

Kind of timeless characters and even more so now a timely theme,” Mirvish said. “I thought it was very funny and similar to my sense of humor.”

Even after securing the property and Feiffer’s blessing to develop it, lawyers had to clear rights. All this took time. Meanwhile, Feiffer was anxious to see a film finally realized from the script and was in no mood for delays or misfires this go-round.

“Once we got the rights cleared away jules was like I’m 87, let’s make this thing already.”

Mirvish detailed the whole backstory on the project’s Kickstarter campaign Web page.

He knows things could have gone wrong to sabotage the project but he never lost faith it would work out and, more importantly, he never let the process defeat him.

“I have fun with the process and that’s kind of what I say in the book.

Look, if you’re not having fun doing all the stages of the game then you shouldn’t play because, you know, making films is not an intrinsically fun process all the time. It’s studded by long bouts of boredom, anxiety, stress and failure, so if you’re not finding the joy in that somewhere along the way, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.

JIM RASH (BERNARD) IN BERNARD AND HUEY DIRECTED BY DAN MIRVISH, WRITTEN BY JULES FEIFFER “When it comes to casting, for example, other filmmakers may complain, ‘Oh, it’s a Hollywood game these agents are playing.’ Yeah, it’s a game and you should have fun playing it, too, and you just have to play it better than they do, and that’s kind of how you have to look at the whole process. Yeah, there’s going to be challenges and downsides to everything but as long as you’re having fun during the other moments. it’s worth doing. That’s my attitude.”

Mirvish also takes satisfaction in having “hung in there” to do what it took to get it made.

“When we were able to finally sign all the paperwork, then it really was off to the races.

We had our Kickstarter campaign up within two months and were casting and financing and getting the film together. From that point it was actually a fairly quick process.”

His old producing partner and fellow Omaha native, Dana Altman, executive produced.

“Dana remembered Feiffer on the set of Popeye because Dana worked on that movie (for his grandfather Robert Altman), so there was that connection.”

Only minimal script changes were made.

Mirvish has a knack for attracting name talent to his little films and he did it again by getting two hot comedic actors: Jim Rash (Community) as Bernard and David Koechner (Anchorman) as Huey. Mirvish enjoyed having two leads with strong improv backgrounds: Koechner with Second City and SNL and Rash with The Groundlings. Rash is also a writer.

“It was just great having them around in rehearsal and then on set. We did four days dedicated to rehearsal, which is pretty rare even on a studio film.”

Flashbacks glimpse Bernard and Huey as young men and Mirvish found two actors, Jake O’Connor and Jay Renshaw, who make uncanny matches.

“Once we cast David and Jim, we had to look for younger versions of them, so we had an open casting call and we found these two terrific actors.

The young guys really shadowed the older guys.

That was a great experience for all four of them.

They really developed this kind of big sibling-little sibling relationship and kind of picked up each other’s little quirks and things.

“Jules and I talked about how it wasn’t about the physical look of these characters. They didn’t have to look like the cartoon. We met with many actors who didn’t. Ironically, Rash and Koechner look almost exactly like the cartoon characters – next to each other especially. In the end credits you see some original Feiffer cartoons. It’s nice to see what these guys are supposed to look like and they really kind of do. I mean, to the point when Feiffer first saw Rash he was like, ‘He’s great, but couldn’t you find someone more handsome?’ because Bernard was always an autobiographical dopple-ganger for Feiffer himself.”

Mirvish grew fond of the eternally clever and young Feiffer. He’s pleased that “Jules really liked the movie and was very happy with the casting.”

Feiffer remains prolific at 89. He just finished a new graphic novel and had a new musical open.

“For a man of any age, he’s hard to keep up with.

It’s a lot of fun whenever I see him because he’s always got these amazing stories.”

Character actor Richard Kind (Gotham), who personally knows Feiffer, has scene-stealing moments as Huey’s older brother Marty.

The women playing the female foils are receiving high praise for their performances: Mae Whitman (Parenthood) as Zelda; Sasha Alexander (Rizzoli & Isles) as Roz; Nancy Travis (Last Man Standing) as Mona; and Bellamy Young (Scandal) as Aggie.

Mirvish shot interiors in L.A. and exteriors in New York.

The film has a domestic distribution deal and awaits a foreign sales deal.

Mirvish hopes to return with the movie in the spring at the Dundee Theater – his neighborhood cinema growing up.

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MARCH 2018

35

OVER THE EDGE

TOO FEW WORDS ABOUT AN IMPORTANT MAN Eric L. Stoakes - 1966-2018

BY TIM MCMAHAN

ERIC STOAKES

T OVER THE EDGE

is a monthly column by Reader senior contributing writer Tim McMahan focused on culture, society, music, the media and the arts. Tim has been writing about Omaha and the local indie music scene for more than two decades. Catch his daily music reporting at Lazy-i.com, the city’s longest-running blog. Email Tim at tim.mcmahan@gmail.com.

36

MARCH 2018

he last time I saw Eric Stoakes was on a hot summer evening on the patio outside of O’Leaver’s. We both were there to see whatever band was playing in the club that night. I was wearing my usual jeans-and-T shirt combo. Eric — always the height of fashion — wore dark pants and a black sports coat over a graphic T-shirt. Suave.

We chatted about the band, his current job, The Reader and the people we knew — I guess you’d call it gossiping — for a good halfhour while Eric waited for his Uber to arrive. I hadn’t seen him in person for more than a year, but when we talked, it was as if we’d seen each other only the day before. That’s what years of working and writing and editing together does to two people.

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OVER THE EDGE

You may not know this but whenever you pick up a paper, there are dozens of people who work in the background to make what you’re holding in your hands the best it can be. Eric was one of those people.

I first met him 30 years ago during my last semester at UNO and my last semester writing for student newspaper The Gateway. He was a dashing young man with a long journalism career ahead of him.

It would be a number of years later that our paths would cross again, this time at The Reader. I was a freelance writer, and Eric was a production guy and editor who laid out the paper every week. I was — and still am — the worst procrastinator of any writer who’s ever worked for the paper, and it was only because of Eric that I got away with it for so long.

He would call and ask where my copy was, ask if I had any photos to go along with whatever interview I had written, and then would give me a few more days to file my copy. While other writers had Friday deadlines, Eric gave me ‘til the following Tuesday morning (maybe he was doing this for everyone, I don’t know). I’m sure mine was the last story to come in before the real deadline.

But despite my inherent lateness, Eric somehow always managed to put together a smashing layout that made whatever I’d written look much more important than it obviously was, that made the folks in the photos look heroic, and whose striking headlines (which he wrote and designed) forced you, gentle reader, to stop your flipping and set your eyes to the page.

Eric produced these kinds of design miracles not only for The Reader but for a boatload of other publications — off the top of my head, Kids Magazine, Medium (his design masterpiece), Encounter and Omaha Magazine. So many people have seen his work and never knew the person behind it, the big-hearted genius with the warmest eyes you ever saw and whose croak of a voice sounded like a sly mystery.

And now he’s gone. Eric passed away Feb. 16 after a respiratory infection that landed him in the hospital where he fought for a number of weeks. I found out via Facebook, where I’d been keeping tabs on his condition by way of posts from his friend Tara Spencer. I thought he’d pull out of it — he’d always done so in the past — but not this time.

If you didn’t know him, well, you don’t know what you missed. And chances are you’ll never understand the kind of profound impact he had on Omaha’s cultural scene, not only through his work as an editor at the city’s independent publications, but as an organizer of all kinds of fashion, art and animal-centric events. I hope he knew how important he was. I’m happy I had a chance to tell him that night at O’Leaver’s.

Over The Edge is a monthly column by Reader senior contributing writer Tim McMahan focused on culture, society, music, the media and the arts. Email Tim at tim.mcmahan@gmail.com