Commentary

City of Wichita bean-counters are reportedly considering some cuts at CityArts, our downtown facility that provides arts education and instruction, gallery exhibition space and a small gift shop. But they say it’s too early to get concerned, so I thought I’d just get musical:

Every June, I leave Wichita to score US AP History exams for seven days. In a digital age, this is a thoroughly analogue event. This year, more than 450,000 high school students took the four-hour exam and produced more than 2.5 million essays. These essays are handwritten, with words and phrases scratched out and arrows directing you to where the “real” second paragraph can found on page four.

At some point we’ve all heard or said that something or other (quote) “is unacceptable.”

“Is unacceptable” is one of those phrases that seep through the language and bubble up seemingly everywhere.

But there are a few things very wrong with it.

“Is unacceptable” glosses over by whose standards acceptability is being measured. When we say it, what we really mean is that we don’t like something, but the passive construction allows us to avoid the fact that we’re the ones doing the unliking.

Fatima Farheen Mirza opens her debut novel A Place for Us with a wedding. Part of an Indian-American Muslim family, bride Haida is secure knowing her ever-supportive mother is watching over her; Huda, a typical middle child, is the least visible, trying to blend in, but sidelined most of the time; and youngest son Amar’s fraught tension with his father and on-and-off competition with his elder sister is shown through his mother’s worry. 

Matthew Wiseman is a Wichita musician who has played with Ricky Fitts, You’ll Be A Torso, Polar Opposite Bear, Powerlifter, Money Badger, Divorce Corpse and, now, Milkwave.

“The way I always describe it is a box. You put yourself in a box or you let people put you in a box. People only know me as a guitar player and they’re, like, ‘Oh, you are this guy.’ But, when I was 19 and I only Ibanez Talmans through a big solid state half stack and I only played as loud as I can is not the same musician I am today.

When Peter Coviello was a young college professor, he fell in love, got married, and became a step parent. When that marriage fell apart, he suffered the heartbreak of that failed marriage but more profoundly--the heartbreak of potentially losing a connection with his step daughters. 

What do we do when one version of us dies? When we can no longer be the person we used to be? Where do we find meaning when our purpose has been taken from us?

When a gallery in New York City has been in business for 15 years they say, “Wow, what a great run.”  A 40-year gallery run in New York is almost unheard of. Now, when a Wichita man opens up a gallery and it lasts for 40 years he must be referred to as “Senex Artis” - the Latin for “The Old Man of Art.”

Good and bad things have happened to music with the invention of headphones more than a hundred years ago. 

Damon Runyon was born into a family of newspapermen in 1880, in Manhattan, Kansas. He was a journalist and a fiction writer who met Pancho Villa in a bar while covering spring training in Texas, and whose best friend was an accountant for the Mob.