Week of Aug. 30, 2023

From the editor’s desk

Our annual Best of Northern Nevada issue, with readers’ choices across about 230 categories, is arriving at newsstands this weekend and next week. The results will be posted at RenoNR.com on Friday at 8 a.m. This year, more than 7,000 RN&R readers had their say in the final round of voting, choosing some perennial favorites as well as first-time contenders. If you were one of those 7,000—thank you!

The Reno Tahoe International Art Show debuted last year and garnered praise from artists, gallerists, arts organizations and attendees alike. It was such a success that when it returns for its second year Sept. 14-17, its footprint at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center will be doubled. Jessica Santina talked to the co-founders, father-daughter duo Kevin O’Keefe and Briana Dolan, about why Reno is the perfect place for an international arts show.

Adam Sandler and his youngest daughter, Sunny Sandler, star in You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, which Bob Grimm writes is “an adorable and consistently funny teen comedy” that is full of “plenty of giggles, with more than a few belly laughs thrown in.” It’s on Netflix.

After a suffering from Jedi fatigue brought on by Disney’s lackluster parade of Star Wars television spinoffs, Grimm approached Ahsoka, the latest TV series in the franchise, with trepidation. But after viewing two episodes of the eight-part tale, our reviewer didn’t hate it, “which is a step in the right direction for Star Wars at this point. … Things seem to be on a minor upswing for the suddenly beleaguered franchise,” Grimm wrote.

Pink Floyd has a doppelganger called Brit Floyd, a cover band that RN&R photo editor David Robert says is as close as concert-goers can get to the real thing. Robert’s photo gallery of images he shot at Brit Floyd’s performance at the Grand Sierra Resort gives readers a taste of the light show that rivals the real band’s visual extravaganza.

Art for Recovery began in Reno in 2014, when the nonprofit organization put out the call for area artists to decorate antique doors salvaged from what is now the Lear Theater. That effort was so successful the call for artists continued as an annual event. The project’s first decade is commemorated in a new 300-page coffee-table book, Art for Recovery: A Decade of Creative Expression to Inspire Change in Treating Addiction, with prints of 260 artworks depicting the darkness of addiction—and the brightness of recovery.

Our latest Western Lit feature spotlights The Ledger of Mistakes, a book of poems byKathy Nelson. The poems explore the complexities of mother-daughter love—a relationship under pressure that tracks a journey from grief to love reclaimed. The Reno-based poet explains that while the work arises from personal experience, “it achieves not journalistic autobiography, but, through language and image, the emotional truth that can arise from poetry.”

I’ll see you in the funny papers.

Take care,

—Frank X. Mullen, Editor