The Country Star's Alter Ego

The Country Star’s Alter Ego Music writer Stephen Deusner’s latest book came out from Bloomsbury in their 33 1/3 series of books about specific albums. The album he wrote about is Garth Brooks In…The Life of Chris Gaines. It’s a strange album title, for a very strange album. We’ll talk about what a huge deal Garth Brooks was in the 1990s, the character he created – that’s Chris Gaines – we’ll talk about Brooks as a musician, Chris Gaines as a musician, and how the accusations against Garth Brooks in the fall of 2024 affected how Deusner approached his book release. Painting and Curating the ForestNature takes center stage in artist Meg Lagodzki's work. That Includes two exhibits, one of which she curated, that are currently on display in Bloomington. In “No Innocent Landscape” She shares the Process Gallery at Maxwell Hall with artist Max Fertik. Her pieces there depict the splintered remains of storm damaged trees. She also curated Forest: 90 years of the Hoosier National Forest. Her work there is shown alongside other artists, bringing different perspectives on the natural world. Forest: 90 years of the Hoosier National Forest is up at the John Waldron Arts Center through October 26th. And No Innocent Landscape is on view through October 31st. The Bloomington Book Festival On Friday, October 24th, the best-selling Hoosier writers John Green and Michael Koryta will be talking at Bloomington’s Buskirk Chumley Theater. On Saturday, October 25th, there’s a children’s book swap at Morgenstern Books, and at the Dimension Mill there’s poetry on demand, a children’s book writing class, a panel about how a book gets published and more. On Sunday, October 26th at Morgenstern Books, there’s a fiction and nonfiction book swap – we like to think you have to exchange fiction for nonfiction and vice versa. There are more events at the Dimension Mill.  This is all part of the second annual Bloomington Book Festival. We spoke with the organizers, Jenna Bowman and Jenn Cristy. Ali Cherri video installation at Eskenazi MuseumKayte talks with Leila Reichert, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Eskenazi Museum, about the latest exhibition in the Time-based Media Gallery. It’s a three-channel video installation by the Lebanese Artist Ali Cherri. The 2022 piece is part of a larger work focused on a group of young men making mud bricks along the banks of the Nile in Northern Sudan. The simple, hand and body labor of mixing mud, shaping bricks, drying bricks, baking them in primitive kilns takes place in the shadow of the Merowe Dam. The construction of the dam displaced more the 50,000 people and altered the landscape and lifeways of the people in the region. Overlaying the lush cinematography are female voices in French, Arabic and English reflecting on myths of Gods crafting humans from mud. The exhibit opens October 18, 2025.