Is Omaha experiencing a 'cultural renaissance'?

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BY BRIAN CHRISTOPHERSON / Lincoln Journal Star

OMAHA— It is, and was 15 years ago, a place of good manners, good steak and good suburban lawn care.

It is, and was, the home of a zoo that’s better than good and an investor worth $52 billion, a sum 400 times greater than the city of Lincoln’s operating budget.

Omaha is and was all these things and maybe, if you find common ground with the bookworm from San Francisco, it was something else.

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(LJS File)

(LJS File)

“Just a stodgy, corporate, boring sort of town. Very few places to see live music. Very few ethnic restaurants that were any good. Very few places to keep people in their 20s in town.”

Amanda Lynch lights a cigarette.

“It was hard to get vegetables.”

Of course, all this was of minor matter. She assumed she would not be here long.

That was 15 years ago.

It’s still not a vegetable town. This is a football-game-on-the-set-and-a-12-ounce-sirloin-kind-of-town always, but now it’s less ... what’s the word? Stodgy?

Maybe, and then some. The indie rockers got out their guitars. An art center became known on other continents. “Bistros” appeared. So did modern poets, and what’s more, people liked hearing them.

Apparently it’s fit to print the news that Omaha has undergone a cultural renaissance of sorts.

Approval arrived from The New York Times this spring in a story written by boyhood Omahan Kurt Andersen. “Omaha’s Culture Club” came with sincere flattery, if not the expected hint of coastal pretentiousness.

"It isn’t yet Seattle or Austin, but it’s no longer some kind of Great Plains version of Hartford or Fresno, either. 'Alternative' and 'independent' aren’t just marketing catchwords in Omaha. The blossoming is real and multifarious."

It is not the first time Omaha has been mentioned as an up-and-comer. Nationally recognized publications have been smooching Lincoln’s neighbor for something close to five years now. It’s been called “the next Seattle” and “the Athens of the Midwest.”

The Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, even the much-maligned but much-utilized Wikipedia. All have decided Omaha’s scene is worthy of mention.

The root of the attention always seems the same: Saddle Creek Records, home to some lauded indie rockers — most notably Bright Eyes, but also Azure Ray, The Faint, Cursive and a band fittingly named The Good Life.

The label was an idea formed by Robb Nansel, former Omaha Creighton Prep and University of Nebraska-Lincoln student. His thesis project turned to gold.

“The Saddle Creek Empire,” Amanda Lynch likes to call Nansel’s realized dream, and it is tough to argue that label.

Such an empire it has become that the question has been asked aloud: Why doesn’t the Saddle Creek crew skedaddle to brighter lights?

“This was very grassroots. We started the label with 10 dollars in our back pocket,” answers the 33-year-old Nansel. “To have a little success and then leave seems kind of cheap.”

To the same question — why do business in Omaha when New York would have you? — Nansel’s business partner, 31-year-old Jason Kulbel, gives a simple Nebraskan answer.

“Well, we live here.”

Last week, Saddle Creek opened a new expanse called Slowdown, just off the fringe of the Old Market. The complex is the new home to the record company’s offices, but also houses a bar with a performing stage, an independent art house called Film Streams and — soon coming — a Blue Line coffee shop, Urban Outfitters store, restaurant and apartments.

So Saddle Creek stays put as a star on Omaha’s map, a place some budding artists from around the country now set as a destination point.

And maybe it was just the music that caused a few ripples nationally and those ripples caused a town’s ego to inflate. Perception is a close relative of reality, after all.

But no, there’s more to it than Saddle Creek, insiders say.

“It’s not just bands moving here. It’s creative people,” says Mark Masuoka, executive director of the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. “And those creative people are bringing friends.”

The Bemis Center was founded in 1981, led by the charge of Ree Schonlau, who turned a factory into a multiple-studio facility that now attracts aspiring artists from all over the world to a three-month residency program.

Five floors, 100,000 square feet and located along the cobblestone streets of the Old Market. Masuoka says during the last selection process, the Bemis Center received 700 applications from artists in 65 countries hoping to come to Omaha.

The Bemis Center has made Omaha “a talent magnet,” in Masuoka’s words, “an incubator of amazingly great ideas.”

It is Masuoka’s second stint in Omaha. He came here once in the ’80s as part of the Bemis program before moving to a job in Denver.

Denver was many times bigger and never lacking in unique goings-on, but still Masuoka says, “I never felt the community aspect like I do here. You talk to artists here and they say, ‘This is where I want to be.’”

Timothy Schaffert wanted to be in New York.  “I loved the city. I loved Woody Allen. I saw it as a more sophisticated life,” Schaffert says.

So the 39-year-old novelist moved closer to Woody. Life was expensive in Brooklyn and no more joyous.

“You see the garbage, you see the rats and poverty, and it loses some of its romance. Plus, there’s a lot of culture, but it’s expensive culture.”

Soon he was back in his home state, settling in Omaha. He’s since published three novels and, in 2005, started the Omaha Lit Fest, a weekend event in September that welcomes all literary types. Last year, about 700 people showed up.

The festival featured a panel on blogging, a panel on writing about sex, a panel on writing memoirs. Cocktail parties, too.

The drinks aren’t 12 bucks, either.

“The cultural scene here is accessible,” Schaffert says.

And it’s a scene that extends bigger than just Saddle Creek Records and the Old Market.

He points out the Benson neighborhood — around 60th and Maple — with live music venues Mick’s Music & Bar and The Waiting Room Lounge, opened by One Percent Productions, which has done a good plenty for the indie music scene in Omaha, too.

And there’s the Dundee area — around 50th and Underwood — home to the Dundee Art Gallery, Dundee Dell bar and restaurant, and other popular eateries like Mark’s Bistro and Dario’s Brasserie.

It is a scene that does not exclude poetry. Slam poetry, specifically, has taken off in Omaha. Matt Mason helps orchestrate the action and says it’s not uncommon to have 100 people show up to readings.

“I just think there are a lot of young creative types that happen to be here,” says 28-year-old Joey Lynch, an artist who just recently moved from Lincoln to the Old Market.

 What makes life better is those young creative types often cross talents to help one another. Joey’s no guitar god, but he does have a knack for the visual.

Hence his recent time on tour with Bright Eyes (Conor Oberst, to his former classmates back at Prep). Joey provided visual elements to live shows. Here’s a 20-something living in Nebraska and loving it.

“In the peer group that I know,” he says, “people aren’t ready to leave, they’re just working a lot. There’s this great balance of work and play.”

Joey still has ties to Lincoln. Along with artists Peggy Gomez and Jake Gillespie, he helped create the Tugboat Gallery, an exhibit that started a few years ago allowing local talent to show work that otherwise might go unnoticed.

Not to be left behind by Omaha, the first Tugboat showing in Lincoln drew about 700 people.

For whatever attention Omaha had received nationally, most artists compared its cultural scene similarly to Lincoln’s, save for the presence of Saddle Creek Records.

Despite his fondness for the vibe in Omaha, Joey says he actually prefers Lincoln’s downtown to Omaha’s.

There are more young entrepreneurs in downtown Lincoln, he says. Omaha has “some community feeling, but it doesn’t feel like Lincoln, where you walk down the street and are going to run into five people you know on that block.”

Scott Wendt, owner of Bluestem Books in Lincoln’s Haymarket, doesn’t consider Omaha ahead of Lincoln.

Omaha has the music. Lincoln has the big university. Both towns have used bookstores that compare favorably with about any large city in the United States, he says. So call it a draw.

Eventually Wendt smiles and says: “If I want the urban experience, I’ll go to Omaha to catch a flight to Chicago.”

So back to Amanda, who sits with cigarette at the front of a bookstore. Jackson Street Booksellers, she says, has 150,000 books. She might know. She is a co-owner.

A big-city girl all her life, she came to Omaha those 15 years ago by way of a friend. Carl Ashford had grown up in Omaha. He left at 18 with little intent on coming back.

But a mother’s sickness made Omaha home again. Then came an offer.

The Mercer family owned a good amount of real estate in the Old Market and wanted to fill it with more progressive shops and restaurants. A bookstore was one thing they wished to include.

Amanda and Ashford had long relished the idea of their own store, but that dream was too pricey in San Francisco.

Not in Omaha.

These days, there are so many books in their store, it is something of an Olympic event to dodge the stacked mountains that take up aisle space.

In the early years, she says: “Most of our customers who were university students left or planned on leaving.”

These hopes of better tomorrows spent elsewhere were commonly spouted about until one day they became harder to hear.

The town has its warts, as does every town, but aspirations could be met in a place like Omaha, Nebraska.

Who knows? One day you might even wake up and find that your little store got a mention in The Times by the author as his “all-time favorite used bookstore in America.”

Hey, you’ll take it.

“You always need to have the next best place,” she says. “I remember when they said it was Athens, Georgia, then it was Akron, Ohio. Now it’s Omaha. It’s not bad for the ego.”

Reach Brian Christopherson at 473-7438 or bchristopherson@journalstar.com.