Section B·Page 7
The University Daily Kansan
Thursday, August 16, 1999
Entertainment
Rock climbing provides real higher education
By Kate McCarty Special to the Kansan
Some adventurous University of Kansas students tired of the same old Friday night routine will be spending a few weekends scaling cliffs.
The Rock-Climbing club takes several out-of-state trips each semester. The group has traveled to Arkansas, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Texas, Wyoming and Iowa, climbing cliffs as high as 70 feet.
The first trip this semester was to Sam's Throne, Ark. Bryan Caldwell, Gardner senior and club president, said the club accepted between 20 and 30 beginning climbers. The club is also planning trips to Warsaw, Mo., and Allenspark, Co.
Bowen Pope, Lawrence junior,
joined the club last fall.
"I've been climbing on and off since my freshman year," he said. "I started to really get into it, and I made a lot of great friends."
Caldwell said the best way for a person interested in climbing to get involved was to take advantage of open climbing hours at Robinson Center's wall in room 207. All equipment is provided and experienced climbers are readily available to teach the basics.
"The club is a great way to get outside," Caldwell said. "It's a really fun and relaxed atmosphere. The people are great."
Melanie Michael, Cheney sophomore, didn't know that Robinson had a climbing wall until last semester. "I was watching my friends play basketball across the hall, and some guy came out and said 'try this.' So I did, and I loved it." she said.
Michael said the best thing about being in the club was that she was able to challenge herself.
Lindsay Millsap, Naperville, Ill., senior, spotters Ashley, Wichita senior, as she scales the climbing wall. Open climbing hours are Mondays 9 to 10:30 p.m., Thursday 7 to 9 p.m. and Saturdays 4 to 8 p.m at Robinson Center. Photo by Melissa Thornton/KANSAN
Lushbox's newest release supports local music award
By Chris Eckert
Kansan music critic
Lushbox is currently working on its full-length debut, but the band has released a five-song EP, Despues la Operación Sere Una Nina for anyone who wants to hear the sound that garnered the group the 1999 Klammie Local Music Award for Best New Band.
Although short, Despues la Operacion showcases the range of Lushbox's songs. The opening song, "La Sala de Partos" features shuffling indie-rock drums and the sound of a guitar jangling over male vocals and female harmonies. The rest of the album leans towards more powerful instrumentation and strong female vocals, with some male harmonies.
Songs like "Thin Walls" and "Coffee" feature lyrics about everyday life, paying bills, learning for privacy and anonymity in a
small town and drugging yourself to stay awake through the obligations of life. While "Coffee" is more whimsical, "Thin Walls" is a more cynical world view, building to a driving chorus that declares, "you have all cannibalized yourself."
Undoubtedly the strangest track on the EP is "Judo Chop," a thirty-second track that is a TV commercial snippet more than a song and
it sounds like the chorus to some lost new wave/punk single from 1980, repeating the title against a spring-loaded guitar riff.
Commentary
The EP's final track, "Niki," is perhaps the strongest and the most straightforward rock song. Describing a strained relationship with a girl, the track is radio-ready rock with a melody reminiscent of a plugged-in version of R.E.M.'s "New Test Leper."
Lushbox is currently working on its full length debut in a Kansas City, Mo., studio, while playing occasionally in the area. Come fall, if the song quality and variation that Lushbox achieves on Despues la Operation can be sustained in its full-length album, more Klammie awards should be in its future.
— Edited by Matt Gardner
Former Best Actress recalls her past
The Associated Press
LONDON — Luise Rainer was in San Francisco with husband Clifford Odets in 1938 when she got news of her second consecutive Academy Award for best actress. But a night of triumph soon became one of tears.
"Clifford had just had a great fight with me and told me how no good I was and all that," Rainer said of her stormy marriage to the seminal American playwright of Awake and Sing and Waiting for Letty.
"By golly," she said, her recollection clear, her exuberance unbridled. "I phoned home (in Los Angeles) and was told I must come home right away because the papers were asking, 'Was I shunning or not caring about the Academy?' I hadn't even dreamed of getting another Academy Award, and there I was unhappy in my private life and miserable."
In those days, winners were announced hours before the ceremony began at 11 p.m. So despite her domestic distress, Rainer had enough time to drive to Los Angeles and accept her trophy.
"I remember Odets drove me three times around the Biltmore, where the Oscars were given out, because I was so full of tears."
Rainer sits forward, as if ready for her close-up, in a regally appointed apartment that this particular afternoon functions almost as a stage.
Her inmate theatricality undimmed by the years, Rainer doesn't so much answer as emote when asked about her emotionally charged and often enigmatic life.
Once known as the "Viennese teardrop," Rainer did what might seem unimaginable: Having made history as the first performer ever to win back-to-back Academy Awards — for the Great Ziegfeld (1936) and The Good Earth (1937) — she simply walked out of show biz and superstardom.
Five decades later, at 89, she's an aging yet animated beauty in a
profession that prizes youth.
In the 1930s, she was a European emigre to the West Coast who replaced Myrna Loy in a little-known film called *Escapade* and went on to beat out Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo for the Oscar.
"When I got two Oscars, they thought, 'Oh, they can throw me into anything,'." Rainer said.
But the diminutive theater-trained performer from Dusseldorf, Germany, fell foul of MGM impresario Louis B. Mayer and found that life on the post-Oscar fast track was a labor not necessarily of love.
"I had a seven-year contract that I broke and went away," says Rainer.
"I was a machine, practically, a tool in a big, big factory, and I could not do anything."
Ernest Hemingway may be one of the few 20th-century greats whom Rainer did not know.
Perhaps there are far too many adventures still ahead to let her dwell on the past.