Riverside Chats

This show is ostensibly about the Midwest. The culture we create. The culture we consume. The way culture leads to art, to politics, and to history. But the Midwest can be a squishy concept without obvious shape or definition. Jon Lauck hopes to change that through his work contextualizing the overlooked cultural story and influence of the Midwest. He teaches history and political science at the University of South Dakota and is the author of The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest. In this conversation with Tom Knoblauch, Lauck outlines his mission to establish a new historical discourse grounded in fair readings of the American past by locating a middle ground in the center of the country.

Keith Rodger is a musician, producer and audio engineer who performs as Kethro. Rodger has made a name for himself in the music industry while based in his hometown of Omaha. In 2014, he started touring as an engineer with The Faint, Tuxedo, and CeeLo Green. He honed his craft as a DJ and sound designer at local outlets including eighty-nine-seven The River, Make Believe Studios and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.

Today, he’s in conversation with Maria Corpuz about the Omaha music scene, how it can grow, and how it’s changed since the COVID pandemic.

Mixed media artist Jeff Sedrel has a series of floral paintings in an exhibition at the Garden of the Zodiac Gallery through January 29. He was a 2017 Fellow at the Union for Contemporary Art under a collaborative multimedia project with Noah Sterba called Slowed Soul. Sedrel was nominated for two Omaha Entertainment and Arts Awards in 2020. His recent work has also been featured at Project Project, Landlock Gallery and the Michael Phipps Gallery, where he exhibited with Holly Kranker. Today he and Tom Knoblauch discuss his process, the efficacy of art in today's digital world, and why he felt compelled to focus on flowers for his latest work. 

If you’ve been listening to Riverside Chats for a while, you’ve heard conversations with a lot of people running for office. Some of them got elected. A lot didn’t. The kind of people who want this platform, to have an hour on the radio, are often ones looking to break into the political scene or to move from a lower level to something more prominent. But Nebraska, just like the country at large, often instead reelects incumbents. So though this show has highlighted many visions for a significantly changed Nebraska (and country in general), the truth is that things mostly look the same here year after year. So why is that? 

Today, Ja Keen Fox returns for a conversation with Tom Knoblauch about his theory of romantic activism, the lessons he has learned from organizing and working in the community in a time of Democratic defeat, and what he sees as the way out of Nebraska's political stasis.

Jody Keisner’s new memoir Under My Bed is an exploration of anxiety, control, fear, and ritual. Keisner teaches at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and is from rural Nebraska, which sets the stage for the central ritual of the book: checking under her bed to make sure she was safe. In this conversation with Tom Knoblauch, Keisner discusses anxiety, memoirs, self-exploration, and her writing process. Under My Bed is available now wherever you get books.

Tim Guthrie is a visual artist, art professor at Creighton, and an award winning filmmaker. His work has been included in collections at the Boise Art Museum, the Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art, the Plemmons Collection of Contemporary Art, and the Leigh Lane Edwards Collection of Contemporary Art. His documentary, Missing Piece, which chronicles his own grieving process after the death of his wife, has garnered significant attention and awards across the globe. In conversation with Tom Knoblauch on today's show, Guthrie discusses all of this along with his installations Extraordinary Rendition and Nuclear Dichotomies in his broader project of using art to both explore his reaction to the world around him and inspire critical thought. 

Charles Kay Jr. is a first-generation Thai-American visual artist whose work explores assimilation, identity and the American Dream. Kay’s parents immigrated from Thailand in the 1960s and anglicized their names to fit in. Much of Kay’s work explores the toll of assimilation on his own family and the immigrant experience at large. His exhibition “Unseen: Emerging from the Currents of Assimilation” is on display at Kaneko through February 5, 2023. In this conversation with Maria Corpuz, he shares his experience growing up in Omaha with immigrant parents, the racism he and his family have endured, and his changing relationship with his Asian-American identity.

Learn more about "Unseen" here. 

We talk about the climate crisis a lot on this show and a common theme that comes up is not just that we need to hope for miracle cures but that we need to rethink our relationship with the natural world. But what does that look like? Some people work to reduce their emissions through who they vote for or where their electricity comes from, and others seek to reduce the amount of plastic they consume. Another option is to embrace nature–which actually starts right in your yard. Today Tom Knoblauch talks with Aaron Urbanski, whose business Earth Sculptors converts lawns into food forests and implements sustainable lawn care services and restores diminishing wildlife habitats via sustainable local food systems.

Learn more at earthsculptors.com.

A lot of waves have been made in the past decade regarding student loans and the sometimes predatory nature of higher education. It has become a common refrain among Democrats to support varying degrees of student loan relief and forgiveness, essentially framed as an economic stimulus and a salve for those stuck with crippling debt. Republicans generally find this kind of targeted debt relief to be ridiculous, such as Don Bacon in September lamenting that reducing the debt incurred by young people seeking a degree would be a real problem for military recruitment and retention. 

Eyes now are on President Biden’s promise to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loans, which has been challenged in court by several states–including Nebraska–and will be playing out over the next several months. Today Matthew Wurstner is back on the show to give an overview of the student loan program, the attempted relief, and the likely outcome in court.

Many episodes of this show grapple with the perhaps unanswerable question: why is America the way it is? Is there something inherent in American culture that answers where we're going? Kurt Andersen has been exploring the nature of American culture throughout his varied career, from co-founding Spy Magazine, writing for Time and The New Yorker,  writing several novels, hosting the public radio show Studio 360, and most comprehensively through his recent two volume history of America: Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire and Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America. He’s here today in conversation with Tom Knoblauch about his intellectual journey and the answers he has found in both our fantasies and our histories—and what this means for America's future.