Cirque Stupendo takes over the Ped Mall this Saturday! See the show guaranteed to amaze onlookers young and old with mind boggling juggling and shocking feats of balance and strength! But that’s not all, folks. There’s plenty of excellent live music entertainment to be had this weekend, so come on in and see what you might be missing.

Greetings Iowa City and Thank You for this sun. Anybody get flooded? Yup. Sucks? Yeah. 
THURSDAY
Health Screenings | Emma Goldman Clinic | 3-7 pm | FREE
A great reason to support this weekend’s Pride festivities is to celebrate this aspect of GLBT culture: Few communities do more to keep the conversation alive. You know [...]

I’d have to confess I haven’t seen a Iowa City Community Theatre production since my brother was in a couple of shows in the 90s. But I have no doubt they’re a worthy organization, and since it’s Community Theater, it’s only going to be as good as we in the community make it.

The Weekender usually offers a list of tips for things to do in Iowa City. It’s easy, there’s a constant stream of amazing music and activities, and you all want to hear about them, or you wouldn’t read this. But the greatest thing to do in summer is the simplest one: Just being outside.

Being in public. Catching a breeze and seeing who or what’s been hiding indoors all winter. This weekend there are plenty of shows and activities that you can hit up, but the simpler pleasures of hanging out in Iowa City’s public spaces are going to be harder to come by this year than they have been in the past, and well, I wanna talk about it.

THURSDAY
Simon Joyner w Miracles of God and Brooks Strause | $10 | 8 pm
Simon Joyner is calling this his “Living Rooms and Discrete Spaces” tour and I think they are trying to keep it low-profile, but this show is too cool to not get any sort of mention at all, [...]

This Tuesday night at the Mill, The Local Natives and Suckers, two bands on Frenchkiss Records, split the bill.
LA’s Local Natives are touring in support of 2010’s Gorilla Manor, 12 upbeat indie gems bursting with incantatory vocal harmonies and propellant drums. Sonically, the band can look through both ends of binoculars: often, they’ll use their [...]

THURSDAY
IHearIC | Clinton St Music Bldg 6 (across Court St from the Post office) | 8-9 pm | FREE
Jared Fowler, co-curator of the Mission Creek series “Dawn’s at Dusk,” brings back a night of short sets, a diverse array of performers, all promising that if you don’t like it, don’t worry – it will be [...]

Prairie Pop: May 2010 – British collage artist Vicki Bennett balances her avant-garde sensibilities with a dose of goofiness–perhaps more so than some of her other peers in the sound collage underground. The British experimental music magazine The Wire describes her music as “a freeform, unfolding imaginary landscape that is liberally peppered with slapstick.” Bennett–who performs under the name People Like Us–demolishes the demarcations between high and low culture, and she has brought her unique aesthetic to highbrow arbiters such as Tate Modern, the Walker Art Center, and the BBC.

Features: April 2010 – Spring: sunshine, green grass, flowers, warmth–and rain. This year all of us who weathered the floods of 2008 are watching the rainfall amounts and the thawing rivers north of us with a trepidation we never felt before those fateful days in June. The flood decimated the arts campus of the UI, [...]

Iowa City’s own banjo guru, Jon Eric, stopped by Little Village Live Wednesday to talk music and give us a few samples off his new album, “That Was Then, This is Now”.
Jon carries a certain authenticity when discussing his craft, and it’s hard to miss the genuine enthusiasm that comes across as he plucks the [...]