The Family Fang is currently being made into a film, with Nicole Kidman playing the mother Camille.

This Thursday at 7:00 p.m., author Kevin Wilson will be at Prairie Lights reading from his first novel, The Family Fang, a darkly comedic story of a married pair of performance artists and the two children they involve in their art. The novel, published in August of 2011, follows his 2009 collection of short stories entitled Tunneling to the Center of the Earth. Though The Family Fang often delves–in full scene and with intricate detail–into the ridiculous performances conducted by parents Caleb and Camille, the real focus is on the children who, now adults, are struggling with the failures of their own lives as well as the legacy of their parents’ art, for which they were often merely tools.

I don’t need to tell you how good The Family Fang is. I don’t need to tell you, because there are hundreds of more practiced and established critics ready to tell you it’s a book deserving of your time. It placed on Time magazine’s Top 10 Fiction Books of 2011, Esquire’s 10 Best Books of 2011, Booklist’s Top Ten First Novels of 2011, and enough other lists that you would need a list just to keep track of them all. I spoke with Mr. Wilson over the phone and asked him how he felt about the positive press.

“In some ways it feels like winning the lottery,” he said. “You can toil on something for ten years and then nobody looks at it or cares about it.” Mr. Wilson added, “the basic answer is that it was wonderful, because it meant that maybe more people would read it, which is all you really want.”

If this is true, Mr. Wilson has gotten everything he could ever want. The book is a New York Times Bestseller.

I asked where the idea for the novel came from. It turns out The Family Fang was not the first novel he had in the works.

“I wrote about 150 pages of a very southern gothic, strange Cormac McCarthy-style fairy tail, and [the publishers] did not like it. They did not want it.” Mr. Wilson found himself struggling without direction, feeling the publisher’s deadline closing in, trying to work but instead occupied by and obsessed with one single thing: his newly born son.

“When I needed to write a novel, all I could think about was what it means to be a parent.” Yet Mr. Wilson wasn’t worried about how the child was changing his life, he only cared about how he might affect his son’s. “Everything we did for him, I felt like we were ruining him. Every decision we made was going to affect the rest of his life, and that was a really difficult way to go about interacting with someone.”

This is how The Family Fang was born. Instead of portraying parents who shared his anxiety about how they were affecting their children’s lives, he wrote two characters–Camille and Caleb Fang–that weren’t the least bit interested in such trifles.

Caleb Fang’s mentor, a famous performance artist by the name of Hobart Waxman, had warned him not to have children, because “Kids kill art.” The Fangs prove him hopelessly wrong, becoming renowned in the art world as a family unit. Yet when the children Annie and Buster–otherwise known as Child A and Child B–confront the former mentor near the climax of the novel, he tells them the reverse of that maxim is actually true. In fact, art kills kids. “We’re still alive,” says Buster, but he’s missing the point. Years of being treated as fellow artists and co-conspirators, instead of simply as children, have cause irreparable damage to the two of them. The consequences of every decision are incomprehensible and hopelessly far-reaching, especially when it comes to forming a new generation of decision makers.

The Family Fang, it should be noted, is by no means a treatise against art. Mr. Wilson loves performance art, and has since his youth. A 15 year-old Mr. Wilson read about artist Chris Burden being shot in the arm with a rifle–a performance piece which is reinterpreted in the novel–and “thought it was just the greatest thing [he’d] ever head of. It meant that art didn’t have to exist in the specific ways that I had been told. It could… spill over into things that felt like, I don’t know, magic, or fairy tales, or even make the real world a little better.”

Perhaps one of The Family Fang’s underlying messages is a simple warning: Your choices as a parent mean absolutely everything to how your children develop, and you had damn well better remember that.

So are the reviews correct? Is Mr. Wilsons debut novel as wonderful as the critics say? For the most part, sure. It is in fact as clever as it is readable. It is rather imaginative, and certainly well-polished. The back-and-forth narrative style is well-utilized, and helps to develop protagonists Buster and Annie as their own entities, born of the same family but now suffering from different problems. The flashbacks to the performance pieces can be fascinating, but never linger too long. And yet I have some qualms.

For one, the language is a bit simplistic. It’s polished, yes, but at times feels utilitarian. I have a particular taste for literary prose, and while I don’t demand sweeping gorgeous prose in every paragraph–and while it may simply not be Mr. Wilson’s style–I felt underwhelmed at times. The dialogue shines throughout most of the book, but one scene, the above-mentioned confrontation with mentor Hobart Waxman, disappointed. It could have been a climactic, dark and heartbreaking scene. Instead Mr. Waxman, by now a tired old man, doesn’t seem to have a unique voice of his own, and acts as a prop to deliver information and backstory to the children.

Finally, though Annie and Buster feel like very real characters, their parents are never quite given enough chance to be made human. Sure, there are quirky, obsessed people in the world, but they have more relatable qualities than the novel’s borderline-insane married couple. The Family Fang has been favorably compared to the films of Wes Anderson. I agree that there are positive similarities. But there is also a similar complaint: when watching Mr. Anderson’s films I often wish the characters would shut up and act like real people.

These complaints of mine shouldn’t stop anyone from attending the reading. I’ll definitely be there, and as close to the front row as possible. I’ve been to countless readings, and the one pattern I’ve noticed is that the very best ones–after which the listener leaves feeling fulfilled, having connected on some level with the author and taken part in a sort of thing which would never happen outside of that little space in the upstairs of Prairie Lights–are conducted by authors who genuinely want to be there to share their work with you. From our interview, I can confidently say Mr. Wilson, a charming man who claimed to be just as nervous to speak with me as I was with him, is just that sort of person.

“When I was younger,” he told me, “in college, and I was really interested in writing but not sure how to go about doing it, readings were, for me, as good as going to concerts.” He admitted he “would actually record readings, and listen to them in [his] car on cassette tapes all the time.” This recent book tour has brought back some of those memories, except this time it’s him behind the podium. Just last week he read in Portland, “and it was engaging, and great, and it’s what I remember when I would go to readings and I’d see somebody that I’d really like.”

Mr. Wilson has never been to Iowa City. He’s excited to visit, if for no other reason than as a lover of independent book stores. “Prairie lights, for the Midwest, is the book store.”

I told Mr. Wilson he could expect a warm welcome in Iowa City. He joked that, “If four people show up, I will be happy. If nobody shows up I will be sad. If one person shows up I’ll probably be sadder.” Here’s to hoping there’s more than one.

Direct Link: May 20, 2012

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MISSION CREEK + KRUI LOW FREQUENCY SERIES PRESENT: SHABAZZ PALACES w/ CUTICLE – Live @ Gabe’s (April 25, 2012)

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CUTICLE

SHABAZZ PALACES

“32 Leaves”

“Youlogy”

Brooks Strause and GOLDENDUST ::: LIVE at Record Collector for Record Store Day 2012

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BROOKS STRAUSE

“Lady Heartless Desire”

“The Question”

GOLDENDUST

THURSDAY

Hoodie Allen w./ Mod Sun // Blue Moose // 7:00 PM // $15 Adv., $17 Day Of, All Ages

Steven Markowitz graduated college in 2010 and immediately got a job at Google. That’s a pretty awesome gig, but Markowitz decided to put Google on the back burner when his second life as a rapper began to take off. Under the moniker Hoodie Allen, Markowitz has released three albums and toured the country with acts like Das Racist and RJD2. His latest album, All American was iTunes’ top album upon its release. Hoodie’s got some quick wit and makes super relevant cultural references that make you think, “whoa, that just happened.” Hoodie Allen is poppy and fun. The Jewish kid from New York isn’t trying to be anything he’s not – not taking himself too seriously, but delivering some hot hip hop bangers.

FRIDAY

Deer Tick w./ Teenage Mysticism, Turbo Fruits // Blue Moose // 9:30 PM // $15, 19+

I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I saw Deer Tick for the first time. I had heard the albums and enjoyed them, but nothing could have really prepared me for the madness of the live show. I have a vivid memory of front man John McCauley fearlessly and very nakedly leading his band late into the night on The Mill’s stage. It was a beautiful drunken mess. All that aside, the band’s sound is not compromised when mixed with alcohol. McCauley’s signature raspy voice remains captivating as ever, even when the band is going on two hours of live performance. Their last album, Divine Providence came out last year and the EP, Tim dropped in February. Bottom line: Deer Tick rules and this show is going to be rowdy. Teenage Mysticism and Turbo Fruits open.

“City of Witerature” Reading // Haunted Bookshop // 7:00 PM // FREE, All Ages

I probably don’t cover as many readings as I ought to because really good ones happen quite often in this town. The Haunted Bookshop is hosting a good one on Friday though. Here’s the email I received from the event’s host, PATV’s Mr. Yale Cohn:

Book readings don’t always have to feature maudlin and sentimental memoirs about domestic abuse or testicular cancer scares, or thoughtful and well-meaning tomes about environmental pollution that are about as fun to read as a history of Brussel Sprout domestication. Well, maybe they do, but at least ours will feature the funny ones!

Hosted by local television personality Yale Cohn (www.talkingwithyale.com) our first event will feature an All-Star line up of local and national talent who will take to the stage to shake off the stuffiness all too often associated with reading events by reading some of their funniest material:

Larry Baker, author of “Flamingo Rising”, “Athens America”, “A Good Man,” and the upcoming “Love and Other Delusions.”
http://redroom.com/member/larry-baker

Joe Blair, whose just-published “By the Iowa Sea” is generating rave reviews.
http://joeblairwriter.com/

Joseph Dobrian, author of “Willie Wilden” and the upcoming collection of his journalism and essays “Seldom Right – But Never In Doubt.”
http://williewilden.com/

And last but not least, Polly Frost, who will be performing her show “How to Survive Your Adult Relationship with Your Family,” the following evening at the Englert Theater, and whose humor has been published in numerous magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Scene4 Magazine, Identity Theory, Exquisite Corpse, Art Design Cafe and Narrative Magazine.
http://www.pollyfrost.com/

Funny, irreverent and off beat, this ain’t your gramma’s reading series.

SATURDAY

Dylan Ettinger w./ Goldendust, Cuticle // Public Space One // 9:00 PM // All Ages

Dylan Ettinger of Bloomington, Indiana makes spacey experimental synth pop. He’s released a whole mess of things on the L.A.’s Not Not Fun, a label who is known around here for keeping a close eye on the Iowa City scene. A fitting example who is also on the bill: Cuticle, who recently released Mother Rhythm Earth Memory with Not Not Fun. Joining them is Iowa City’s Goldendust who have released tracks on local label, Night-People. Goldendust will release an LP on Night-People soon, I think. If you’ve never seen these bands before, go check it out. If you have, I don’t need to be telling you.

~LV

You want to see your event here? Email dates and details to Weekender@LittleVillageMag.com!

Aseethe

With its debut full-length, Reverent Burden, Iowa City drone metal outfit Aseethe finally has enough wax to stretch out and show their stuff. The album is comprised of two mysterious, side-long pieces on a vinyl, without track titles or even clearly marked a or b sides.

Aseethe opens the longer of the two epic cuts with a four-plus minute display of eerie, aural horror. Metal clacks and clicks, like tree branches against a window pane, as the faint buzz of guitar feedback swells and retreats through a bed of electronic hissing that floats on the mix like fog on the moors. Just past the four minute mark, the fog seems to lift, but just for a brief moment. The trio attack their instruments with the plodding, hypnotic crush of the tide slamming against a rocky ridge.

The second, shorter piece—a relatively lean 12-minute catacomb-rattler—packs more punch than its longer partner. Though an equally mesmerizing dirge, the composition of the second track is more complex. The riff which carries its first movement, providing a backdrop for ethereal squeals of guitar and vocal howls, adds just a little swing to the stomp. The bass and the drums not only get beaten to hell but they also have a bit of melodic direction. The second movement draws out the drone of each mammoth crash. Aseethe bleeds each towering crunch of its last ounce of sustenance before unleashing another bash.

The third movement is the biggest stand out of Reverent Burden. After bleeding every decibel out of one last chord, the vocals enter and the most forceful and propulsive riffage of the whole album commences. It’s a relentless, mid-tempo attack fortified by the splash of cymbals and clamber of snare and tom beats, punctuated with deathly howls and searing flashes of guitar. After nearly a half hour of being slowly pummeled, it’s one hell of a release to cap off the album.

John Schlotfelt is currently fighting the “blue screen of death” on his laptop; pray for him as he wages this epic, and almost certainly hopeless war against technology and his desire to not pay for a new computer.

Caterwaulla

Since I was born in 1957, my life corresponds approximately to the life-span of rock and roll.  In that 55-plus years, there have been times when rock has seemed to be tired and played out. But there’s always some snotty group of kids who come along and beat it back into shape. Caterwaulla is one of the latest groups to have a go.

Their self-titled debut isn’t a revolutionary addition to the rock canon, but there are some fresh elements to Caterwaulla’s music, beginning with the strong voice of lead singer Lauren Murphie. Murphie’s singing hints at her percursors—Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde, Grace Slick—but the great thing about the voice as an instrument is that everyone’s is unique. Murphie’s voice has the kind of power and timbre that will cut through the roar of any band, but she uses dynamics skillfully to keep the listener from feeling like they’re being yelled at.

Terry Yin’s electric violin adds distinctive texture to Caterwaulla, taking the parts usually taken by lead guitar and freeing Gabe Starbeck to focus on rhythm guitar most of the time, which is the heart and soul of the rock sound. Gabe takes a few short solos along the way, but this isn’t a band that leans on jamming to make their point.

The song “Cat Lady” stands out to me as a roaring show stopper. It’s a classic F-you breakup song with showcase moments for each band member, but it’s solidly grounded in pentatonic blues riffing and rave-up cymbal crash drumming. It reminds me of the story about Chuck Berry insisting Jerry Lee Lewis open for him, and Jerry Lee gives a literally scorching performance, setting his piano on fire. Caterwaulla is a hard act to follow, even without actual pyrotechnics.

Kent Williams bought the first copy of Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols to arrive in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Larry Baker, Photo by Ofer Sivan

An excerpt from the new novel Love and Other Delusions, by Larry Baker

“My name is Alice Marcher. I’m your teacher, for better or for worse. Tomorrow is my birthday, and I expect presents.”

Danny sat in the back of the room, near the door, sullen and slouching, wearing baggy black jeans and a white oxford cloth shirt that was two sizes too big. He was going to work at the Centre Theatre after class. Because there was a freakishly large boy in front of him, he had to lean sideways to get a good view of his teacher. That was when she first saw him too, his head appearing as if out of the shoulder of a giant.

Ten years later, in bed together, they would both misremember the moment. Neither would claim it was love at first sight, but both wanted that first eye contact to have had some significance. With him almost thirty and her turning forty, they were breaking up for the second time, and there was a lot of history to romanticize. In another few years they would break up for a third and final time, but whereas all three had been her idea, the second break up was mutual and sentimental. They had convinced themselves that they were doing the logical thing. So that second time was important, to organize their history between them, to reminisce, to even videotape a tour of St. Augustine as they drove around and talked to each other about all the places that meant something to them. But they still glossed over that first look with too much sentiment. Their first private words to each other, however, were etched indelibly.

That day in class, Alice had looked at Danny and smiled. The head out of the shoulder image was amusing to her. But it was the opening day of her own drama, and she had a script to follow. Danny was just another member of her audience, “I would prefer diamonds, but use your best judgment.” The Dean had warned her about irony, about most students’ failure to understand it. Alice didn’t care. The Dean was her husband. He understood her, and she always assumed that he would protect her.

The woman Danny saw that morning seemed tall, but was not, with long black hair pulled tightly behind her ears and a face that was interesting but not beautiful. The individual features were unremarkable, but the sum of her face was in her eyes, and those other features, as soon as Danny got close to her, coalesced around those dark brown eyes and became a seduction. In all the years of looking at that face, Danny never saw it change, except when they were about to have sex. Eventually, it seemed as if most of their time together was a slow dance always leading to sex, so her face was not as it was when he first saw it, but more often as it was when their bodies came closer together, soon to be one.

Alice had no impression of Danny until the end of that first class. Roll taken, syllabus explained, first assignment given, she dismissed class early. As she made her opening presentation, she had walked slowly around the room, forcing her students to turn their heads and follow her, finishing her waltz at the back of the room, a few feet away from Danny.

“See you tomorrow. Reading quiz first thing. Extra points for presents. Now, go and sin no more,” she said, opening the door behind Danny and standing back as the rush began. Within seconds the only people left in the room were her, Danny, and the giant student in front of him, who was having trouble getting out of the standard-sized desk. Alice first really noticed Danny when he stood up. He was over six feet tall and had remarkable blue-green eyes. Her first impression was that he was a young man who had probably done time in the military and was starting his life over, perhaps mid to late twenties, thirty at the outside. The most incongruous part of his appearance was that his hair was too long for his face. A man his age, she thought, would look better with a good haircut, but he certainly had potential.

As Danny had stood he had taken a more direct look at her face while she was looking in the other direction. She had looked younger from a distance, and her wedding ring was obvious when she came closer.

The turning point for her, the moment Danny separated himself from the blur of her other thoughts that morning, was when he turned back to help the other student get out of his desk. He put one hand on the back of the chair to hold it in place and offered his other hand to the giant, who squirmed out and then up from his desk, grunting as he rose, his red face beaded with sweat. He thanked Danny for his help, but, seeing his teacher, he lowered his head and left the room embarrassed. Alice watched him lumber past her and then turned back to see Danny staring at her. His face was different. He was stunning. It was this moment of their history they both remembered accurately, their first private conversation.

“What do you really want for your birthday,” he had asked.

The thing that she remembered best about that moment was that she was at first speechless because she was still thinking about his helping the giant. It seemed like such a kind gesture, almost gracious, as if Danny were a servant and a lord at the same time. And she was aware that she was staring at his face, as if he had stepped off a movie screen and entered her world.

“I want to be surprised,” she finally said.

The conversation lasted twenty more minutes, the two of them not moving from that spot at the back of the classroom, in no hurry since the next class would not start for half an hour. The opening two sentences were all they remembered, but that was enough. The rest was just small talk between teacher and new student. Details to supply a context. Personal traits were revealed immediately, traits that might have required weeks or months to be revealed around someone else, someone who was a close friend, someone who could be trusted, but revealed instantaneously with each other within minutes of meeting.

As she and Danny talked that first morning, she started to think about him in ways that she had thought about other men; but then she discovered that he was eighteen, a shock to her, and disappointing because it narrowed his appeal to her. As mature as he seemed, as much of an adult as he was required to be by his home life, he was still too young. Handsome, but a child. She had made many mistakes in her life, wrong choices in men, but cradle-robbing was not on the list. Other women she knew could joke about young hard boys as perfect lovers, quickly renewable and easily disposable, but Alice had a horror of becoming a cliché.

Danny went to the Centre and sorted his feelings. In their constant self-analysis over the years, Alice most resented his refusal, or his inability, to express those feelings. When he had told her that he went to work that first day and did not think about her, her feelings had been hurt, but he was untruthful. She admitted to looking forward to seeing him again, and he had tried to convince her that he had not thought about her, so she reminded him that he had, indeed, brought her a present on her birthday, so he must have thought of her after that first day, right? Of course he had, he admitted, but not, evidently, as much as she had thought about him. The pattern was established early. She did most of the talking, and he was silent a lot, silence that she somehow interpreted as depth, but that he knew was merely insecurity. “My god, Alice,” he would tell her on his thirtieth birthday, “I was a teenager. You were a married woman with a master’s degree, my teacher. I was absolutely intimidated by you for those first few years. I thought I would bore you, and, besides, you had no problem doing most of the talking.”

But he had thought about her that first afternoon, about how nobody else in class seemed to understand her humor, how she walked, how she had stood next to him as class ended and he first noticed how she smelled. The only other woman whose smell he could remember was his mother. Hers was sweeter than Alice’s, almost heavy sweet, almost whorish, and it had never faded in Danny’s mind. Alice’s smell was lighter, virginal and sensual at the same time, if that could be a smell, but it had been enough to have him keep his notebook in front of him as he talked to her after class. He sat in the Centre later and thought about going to Sears or Penney’s after work, to the perfume counter, testing every sampler until he found the same smell, and buying her a tiny bottle. That would be the perfect gift. But his sister needed to be taken shopping for a new swim suit, he had promised her, and his father had a prescription to refill, and there was no time, as always, for Danny to shop for himself. So he improvised.

Alice stood in front of her class the next day and asked, “And my presents?” With a mute group in front of her, she glanced at Danny but he did not look back. Disappointed, she laughed, “Why is it that nobody ever believes me? Every year, the same. Oh well, I’ll just add some extra questions to the quiz.” That, they believed.

After class, Danny lingered, waiting for all the others to leave the room, including the giant, and Alice knew he had something for her. She stayed at her podium. “Mr. Shay, Mr. Shay, you’re my last hope. Bring that diamond up here.” Another moment they would remember.

He walked to the front of the room and handed her an envelope, obviously a birthday card. Inside the card were two passes to the Centre Theatre. Alice almost cried, “Oh, Danny, how did you know I love the movies?”

“Everybody likes the movies,” he had said.

“Not like me, Danny, not like me.”

Larry Baker served two terms on the City Council in Iowa City and he currently serves on the Board of Adjustment. He has published four novels and numerous short stories. His first novel, The Flamingo Rising, was a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie in 2001.

Tom Garland

Tom Garland is no stranger to the Iowa City comedic scene. Emcee of the Yacht Club’s weekly comedy night, One Night Stand, the stand-up performer and touring comic has fully embraced and helped expand on what Iowa City has to offer up-and-coming comics.

Garland has opened for such acts as Joel McHale, Alonzo Bodden and Steve-O, and now has released a full-length album for digital sale on iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody and more.

On the basis of Leash Your Kids, it would seem that Garland’s biggest comedic influences are Dave Atell and Jim Gaffigan, blending observational humor with more in-your-face themes.

The 16-track, 56-minute album was recorded in March at the Yacht Club with the assistance of local comic Don Tjernagel, in one take, with no edits or laugh tracks.

“We wanted to bring the listener in as close to the intimate Iowa-Comedy-scene feel as possible,” Garland said.

With subject matter ranging from rewriting the Bible to hot button headlines like Jerry Sandusky, Garland fearlessly forges through his routine despite the mixed audience reactions caught on the recording.

The real meat of Leash Your Kids is found in the graphic personal stories Garland shares with punchlines often taken at his own expense. The stories take the album to a deeply personal place where Garland exposes his own flaws as a boyfriend and human being.

With moments of hilarity and moments of silent awkwardness, Garland’s stand-up album shows potential not only for an up-and-coming comic, but also an up-and-coming local scene.

Erin Tiesman is a web writer and freelance journalist living and laughing her rear end off in the heart of Eastern Iowa.

Surf Zombies
Lust For Rust
facebook.com/surfzombiesband

My dad tells a story about seeing the seminal surf-rock band The Ventures at the Melody Mill Ballroom outside of Dubuque in the early 1960s. He happened upon a comb on the sink in the bathroom left by the band. He picked it up and shortly after sold it still dripping with pomade from the pompadoured greasers to a collection of girls spellbound by the band.

Brook Hoover first heard surf music when his uncle played part of “Pipeline” by the Chantays on a guitar for him at age 14, and from then surf music would be a staple in the music he made. The latest Surf Zombies record, Lust for Rust, finds Brook with a newly-minted lineup that adds Ian Williams (The Wheelers) on guitar and Tyler Russell on drums to the band along with longtime bass player Joel McDowell.

Songs by The Ventures, the Surfaris, The Chantays, Dick Dale and others serve as the template for decades of surf rock. Lust for Rust also follows these templates: galloping rhythms, BIG reverby tremolo guitar; but updates the sound with the occasional edgy distortion thanks to some influence by Williams, who also produced the album.

I have memories of laying on the floor in front of the large console stereo staring at the beautiful girls on the covers of the records dad spun by The Ventures. The raw energy of the tribal drums and the blistering guitar soundtrack seemed at once electric, sexual and forbidden. This intersection of rock music with our baser instincts exists in its purest form in instrumental guitar rock. I thank The Surf Zombies for giving me another album full.

Michael Roeder is a self-proclaimed “music savant.” When he’s not writing for Little Village he blogs at www.playbsides.com.

Trumpet Blossom Café, 310 East Prentiss St. Iowa City, Iowa

Grand Opening Celebration
Trumpet Blossom Café
(310 East Prentiss St.)
May 19, 2 p.m. – Midnight

Iowa City was left with a void in January with the swift and unfortunate demolition of vegetarian staple, The Red Avocado. As a new apartment complex begins to rise up in its place this month, The Trumpet Blossom Café comes to the rescue, providing Iowa City with a new place to grab a vegan meal. The Trumpet Blossom is located on Prentiss St. (behind The Vine and next to 30th Century Bicycle) and is now open for business. Their menu features healthy lunch and dinner meals that are organic and locally grown with an extensive drink list featuring many beers from regional breweries.

The Grand Opening Celebration will be chock-full of food and drink specials. Watch out for an all-inclusive deal that will consist of an appetizer, entrée, desert, a non-alcoholic drink, a mixed drink and a tap beer. There will also be live music by local musicians throughout the evening.

Musical Lineup:
Happy Hour: Irene Schroeder
Early Evening: Dustin Busch
Late Night: Brooks Strause

I’d heard whispers about that space: that it was cavernous, that it was beautiful. That for whatever reason the owner refused to let people use it, that he didn’t want to be a landlord, that he just wanted it gone. Basically, this was downtown Iowa City’s equivalent of the suburban haunted house with the grumpy, mysterious groundskeeper narrative, and I needed to ride my bike to it and get lost inside.

Golden Dust performs in the Deadwood space during Mission Creek 2012.

That opportunity arose when Mission Creek Festival hosted two all-ages experimental music shows at the end of March. Inside the indeed cavernous, urban-decay-baroque graffiti lies the once-palatial space with a stage, big back room, storage and even an empty bar built right in. One Deadwood employee called it “the single biggest waste of real estate in Iowa City.” But there we were, enjoying experimental musicians wail away on guitars riding waves of reverb. I spoke with Craig Eley, one of the MCF masterminds, riding high in the mid-week tremolo of music, arts and food events all over town. I asked him how he rented the space. “We came to (Jim) with a really nice pitch,” he told me, “and I think being part of the festival really helped … The festival has great relationships with a lot of venues. This is an unbelievable space, an unbelievable room.”

When I asked him about any plans to run more shows up there, Craig optimistically told me, “You know, that’s really not up to me. Jim has reasons and times he wants to use it and doesn’t. When it’s available and possible—the right time—, we’d love to use it again.” As I looked around at the high ceilings and graffiti-mapped walls with crumbling veneer right out of a warehouse in a Hollywood gangster movie, and then at Iowa City’s gratefully hip swaying to the music, I wondered when would it be “the right time?”

So I knew I had to meet the mystery man himself. And he was as pleasantly awesome as the misunderstood tend to be. Jim Bell has the face and handshake of a man you can trust. His smile is the kind that might make one want to tell their life story on a porch, or at least buy a drink from The Deadwood, a place he bought 21 years ago April 6. “It means I’m just getting broken in,” Jim says, and he laughs good and clean with a smile full of trustworthy teeth. “I understand the questions, but don’t know all the answers yet.”

I asked Jim about the history of the building and about its current state of shallow-breathing disrepair. “I bought the building 12 years ago,” he explained. “There was a viable tenant up there for many years; it was BJ Records, then another person trying to do a similar thing. Then it became vacant; obviously, the CD market sort of crashed. Then the tornado came through and damaged some of the structural members in the roof. The trusses cracked. We had to take out the suspended ceiling and the duct work in order to put beams up there supporting the trusses. That was 2 years ago, the tornado was 3 years ago. It’s been vacant since then. I’ve been thinking about trying to put a few apartments up there. The space is 40 feet by 80 feet (!). I was getting $2500 a month rent when a tenant was up there, but the bathrooms need to be updated. It needs $50-$100 thousand to make it viable for a business, $200 thousand might convert it to apartments. So there’s a barrier for entry. I would need $2000 a month rent plus the cost of remodeling and we could finance that over a long term. And the nice bar area? If you thought you could make money doing two shows a day, a couple all-ages shows, this would be a great venue for that. But there’s not drinking upstairs. Our liquor license covers the ground floor.”

Suddenly, the haunted house is a lot more like a Jenga tower of subtle rules, a limbo game against city codes, and one misstep in planning can see it tumble down. But just what could such a tricky venue be viable for? “…for art shows—we’ve had 6 or 8 people display art up there. You could do a party or live music, as long as it’s not too hot … that ventilation was taken out with the suspended ceiling. It’s an interesting space with 22 foot high ceilings! They used to play basketball up there pre-World War II. It’s a big room with a visually stunning appeal … we have zoning issues. Lack of ventilation. Lack of bathroom facilities. It would be a major commitment to put those in. As long as you have fire extinguishers and exit lights, you can do things occasionally like art exhibits or events on a small scale, as long as you’re not trying to make a lot of money, like a fundraiser or small concert.”

“You know,” Jim tells me with the “listen to this” eyes of a kid at heart. “That used to be a tuberculosis ward during World War II. A lot of people died up there!” This is back to being a haunted house story.

“People were in here, spook people who look for the harmonics of ghosts. They got one good vibe of a spook.”

“When?” I asked excitedly.

“Oh, this was a week or two ago,” Jim says. “They had real fancy equipment that detects electrical disturbances. They were in the basement and upstairs late at night. We’ve always known this building was haunted. Some people have seen them in the basement, I’ve felt them go past. We just ignore them. We know they’re not evil spirits. But you can feel them when it’s quiet. The ghosts stay away when it’s loud and busy.”

Attention artists: I channeled your spirits and spoke thus: “Jim, could artists use the space for shows?”

“If artists wanted to pitch ideas,” Jim said, and stopped. “Certain bands can come in and make money, but other ones run people out. But upstairs is another world. There are insurance liabilities and, of course, we’d like to make at least SOME money doing it. … I look at the economy and when I’m going to commit that much money, work, time and effort to making it viable. It’s not losing money, so I’m content to wait for the right time, the right economy.”

May this house of restless spirits not rest too long.

Russell Jaffe is filling in for R.A.D. Wudnaughton, who has become stricken with image poisoning after encountering some particularly evocative visuals.

Harriet Woodford, photographs by Steve Erickson

Photos by Steve Erickson | On display until June 8, 2012 | UI Hospitals and Clinics (Near the Rooftop Cafe on the 8th Floor) | FREE

Benefit ft. Alejandro Escovedo w/ Illinois John Fever| May 19, 2012 | The Mill | $50/$60. | 19+ after 10 p.m.

Diagnosed with breast cancer in Oct. 2010, Iowa City resident and Leaf Kitchen co-owner Harriet Woodford underwent 5 months of chemotherapy and 2 months of daily radiation treatments, along with a mastectomy. Currently cancer-free, she is grateful for her journey, and aware that it might not be over.

She watched her body transform day by day. Weight came off, her hair fell out with chemotherapy, and she lost a breast. As she watched herself change, she enlisted the help of photographer Steve Erickson, friend and preparator at the University of Iowa Museum of Art, to help document the metamorphosis.

“My diagnosis and surgery was so quick that after coming home, it was difficult for me to accept my body and what just happened,” Woodford said.

In the photography project, she and Erickson utilize a technique called a shadow box, which creates a dark background, but brings out detail in the image, making it look more three dimensional. The images–over 200 total–are striking in detail. From the stitches on her chest to photos with her family, Harriet’s life was captured frame by frame.

There are shots of her torso revealing her chest with one healthy breast and one missing, another of her holding her cat, and a  few that she had taken with her parents.

“I don’t know why, but I thought it would help me see myself better if I could see myself in a photo,” Woodford said. “Something not me, but still me.”

The project is now on display at the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics in the Project Art gallery. It can also be seen at bodyspirits.blogspot.com.

“Cancer sounds horrible and it is/was,” Woodford writes in an email, “my decision to make it very beautiful and to make it art was just my way of coping.”

Harriet and her father William. Photographs by Steve Erickson

She went through the ordeal with her father, William, who battled cancer for over a decade. He died in May, 2011, at age 87.

“He was a really great man and I think he stayed strong for me until my radiation was done,” Woodford said, adding that her father ended radiation treatment in April and went into hospice care. “There’s a great portrait of us when we’re both bald. It’s really striking seeing that portrait, even though it hangs in my house.”

In retrospect, Woodford sees the project as a chance to see herself “literally and figuratively,” facing the scrutiny for her shaved head and the loss of one breast.

“Women’s breasts are often identified as what it means to be a ‘woman,’ and to have one removed makes you experience a whole range of emotions from, ‘I’m more than just my body,’ to ‘Am  I still attractive?’ Having a creative outlet for me was very helpful,” she said.

For Woodford, the project helped her mark the time from the minute her body stopped being attacked by chemicals to the rejuvenation and repair process. “It was awful, it was like the worst flu ever but it never went away,” Woodford recalls. “Having a photo shoot somehow defined events and time. I knew it would get better.”

And it did. Throughout her treatment, Woodford said she realized how much she meant to her family and friends, and she has also gotten feedback about her portraits at the hospital, people finding them beautiful and inspiring.

“I had no idea how people would react, but it’s cool,” she said. “Whatever we can do for one another is what it’s all about–life, that is.”

Now cancer-free, Woodford faces the expensive medical bills from her treatment. To help ease the debt, her friend and touring musician Alejandro Escovedo is hosting a benefit for her on May 19 at The Mill at 8 p.m.

Escovedo, of Austin, Texas–himself a survivor of a life-threatening bout with Hepatitis C–will be performing an acoustic set featuring new material.

Woodford wrote that Escovedo is “an amazing musician and an old friend who wants to help,” explaining that they decided to do the show after catching up in person last year when he performed for Iowa City’s annual Iowa Arts Festival.

Of the upcoming benefit, Woodford says “I really want this benefit to be more of a thank you. I’m cancer-free one year; it’s pretty amazing.”

Slip Silo - Monsoons / www.slipsilo.com

Slip Silo and Koplant No are two local groups which share two members (Brian Lewis on trumpet, keyboards and laptop, Drew Morton on bass, synth and vocals) with adjacent releases. This invites a classic English Final “Contrast and Compare” review.

Firstly, Slip Silo (also starring Matt Logan on vocals and guitar and Justin Leduc on percussion) is the more conventionally poppy side of the coin … without really being conventional at all. These guys studied in The University of Iowa’s Jazz program, so they have the chops and music theory to write and perform sophisticated music. Thankfully, they don’t mistake widdly trickiness for sophistication. Their songs are songs, not scaffolding for exhibitionist soloing.

Lewis’s keyboards owe more to left-field electronica than any jazz precursor, and his trumpet playing is fluidly integral to the arrangements. Rock music rarely features trumpet as a lead instrument and yet it really works here.

I get the impression that they had some Radiohead CDs mixed in with their Mingus and Coltrane, but Slip Silo stay out of Radiohead’s shadow. They emulate the UK’s grandest mopes only in that they fearlessly experiment, but integrate their experimentation into accessible song forms. Leduc’s drumming elevates every song with propulsive, restless virtuosity. He finds the freedom to jab and weave within the song structure, sometimes (as on “I Need To Know”) approaching the barely-controlled chaos of Keith Moon.

Slip Silo’s music is hard to describe by comparison to contemporary groups, which is good. The thing I’m reminded of most is the brief time in the 1970s when bands like Genesis, Brian Eno, Soft Machine and Traffic pushed rock music into new, weird directions. Slip Silo gets plenty weird, but they do so without leaving the listener behind.

Koplant No - Transit EP / www.koplantno.com

On Transit EP Koplant No incorporates Rob Baner on drums, vibraphone and sampled percussion, and Joel Vanderhayden on Saxophone. If Slip Silo derive indirect inspiration from Radiohead, Koplant No derives theirs from Boards of Canada. For all the weird swirly noises they incorporate into these pieces, they’re more conventionally jazzy, but it’s a contemplative, through-composed music, closer to Carla Bley than the jazz of a dour traditionalist like Wynton Marsalis.

Maybe someone’s already doing this and I just haven’t heard it yet, but I’m impressed with how organically perfect the fractally dubbed-out abstract electronic textures fit with the trumpet and saxophone as lead instruments. It seems seductive, inevitable and necessary when Koplant No does it.

Monsoons and Transit EP are similar in the way they realize a common attitude of adventurous lyricism. None of these songs are three-chord bangers or one bar drum loops. I’ve been left cold by a lot of music I’ve heard coming out of university Jazz programs—always technically accomplished but lacking in soul and fire. These guys seem to have internalized the craft taught at the University without letting it become a straightjacket.  —Kent Williams

This is the craziest thing that ever happened in my taxi.

One day, many years ago, I got to work and scored an airport run right off the bat. Better yet, it was a package delivery out of a medical lab so pay was guaranteed. Plus, boxes always make decent passengers.

I was in the yard prepping the taxi when my friend P. snuck on me. God love her, P. had a crank habit and her bills were suffering. I-Wireless had cut her phone off and she needed it for work, so I’d thrown in the money to get her phone back. Today she wanted to repay me.

“It ain’t cash but it’s green,” she chirped, slipping me a cigarette cellophane pouched with marijuana. It was sort of green but looked like burrs you’d pull off your socks.

“Aw honey, don’t do that,” I told her. “Just get at me when you got cash.”

“Weed, money—same difference!”

With the delivery run leaving me no time to make a drop at home, I rolled to the lab, picked up the package and hit the road north. But I disliked carrying grass in the taxi. So I chuffed as much of the evidence as I could until it gave me headache and the remainder I stashed in my hip-pouch.

The box, meanwhile, said not a word.

When I reached the airport, an apparent disaster was underway. The highway was closed for a mile to both sides of the airport’s access road and cop cruisers were parked catawampus in the shoulders. This was in October, a couple of years after 9/11. From a rooftop in Brooklyn I’d watched the second plane come in and two years later I was still pretty wazzed out. My mind raced wondering what the hell was wrong now. Suddenly from the airport rushed a motorcade of gleaming black Suburbans and escort cars. These exited the access road and boomed north on Edgewood. Cruisers scrambled to join the parade.

The highway opened thereafter and I drove to the access road, which is how you get to FedEx. This is when I noticed men in suits roving the grounds. I saw others posted on the roof of the FedEx warehouse. They looked like snipers. My taxi whined to a halt at a police cruiser blocking the road, out of which leapt a serious dude. He wore a suit and a red tie, sunglasses, the earbud and haircut, and somewhere under the coat he kept a hefty sidearm.

It was then I’d realized the ashtray was open with the roach showing in its teeth. I was busy jamming it shut when the suit announced, “United States Secret Service! Stay in your car! We’re on lockdown!”

There was no turning back. “But I got to get to FedEx. It’s a medical delivery. Look—it’s human eyeballs.”

My heart was pounding but I wasn’t screwing around. I eagerly showed him the package. A bright orange sticker slapped on the box showed the drawing of an eyeball: CONTAINS HUMAN ORGANS/PLEASE RUSH.

He stared at me and at the box and then waved at the cruiser. Now the cop came jangling with the handcuffs. The agent checked my license and taxi badge, and he pulled the lading papers and saw the eyeballs were shipping from the eye bank to a university in Texas.

“Pop the trunk,” he said to me, and to the cop, “Let’s give her a look.”

Were they going to check everywhere? My eyes clapped on the ashtray as the cop brought out from his side a telescoping mirror which he used to peep the undercarriage.

The agent spoke to me, his hand snaking through the window to unzip and search my hip-sack, “So do you live in Iowa City? Are you a student? How long have you driven a cab? I bet you see some wild things.”

“None wilder than this, sir! What’s all going on here?”

“Let’s step out of the car, please.”

I would later learn Dick Cheney had just landed on Air Force Two and that this routine was standard protocol. But I sweated a river standing half through a jumping jack as the agent patted me down. As my luck further had it, I was wearing that HOMELAND SECURITY shirt—you know, the one that shows four of my indigenous kinfolk carrying long-guns, FIGHTING TERRORISM SINCE 1492.

The cop glanced at the taxi’s interior and gave his thumbs-up. But the agent wanted another look in my purse. As advertised, the hip-sack had two “stash” pockets. I kept one filled with quarters and I’d stuffed the ditchweed in the other. Special Agent found the quarters first.

This was going to end badly. I’d be arrested by Secret Service and lose my job and make national news all at once. I could imagine the scene as it was viewed from the perimeter through a fence, “In related news, a taxi driver was arrested at the airport on drug charges….” And for fucking ditchweed, no less. But then I felt the agent tugging the zippers closed over both stash pockets.

“Go deliver your package.”

I flopped back in the taxi and my hands shook as I steered past the roadblock. Why did he let me go? I didn’t want to know.

I made the delivery without note and rushed for the exit. It was then I saw another suit running through the trees, hustling to keep pace and barking in his radio. At the roadblock my agent just waved me through, grinning at me like a cat. So I continued my egress. But a county cruiser pulled me over soon as I hit the public roadway and I saw the sky turn red. It hit me then: The agent had let me go because Secret Service got to do its job and I got to do mine. Now Linn County was going to do its job too.

The deputy, to my surprise, was full of apologies.

“I’ve just been informed you had clearance, sir. You are free to go and to have a good day!”

Vic Pasternak will unsuccessfully seek the Republican bid for President of the United States. Please write him in.