Magdalene In Crisis by Mr. Softheart Somewhere in the search engine results for “magnolia,” there is one of many paintings titled exactly that. It’s just a JPG of the original by Martin Johnson Heade, but thanks to the click-to-zoom functionality on slam.org, you can get close enough to see the wrinkles in the white paint. […]
Benjamin Jeffery
Posted inArts & Entertainment
From Cannes to Des Moines, violinist Geneviève Gros-Louis is making sure ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ audiences hear the Osage story
The occasion, as stated on the Varsity Cinema marquee, was the Des Moines premiere of Killers of the Flower Moon, another hefty, late-period offering from Martin Scorsese. Yet the night, and each of the 235 seats in the sold-out theater, belonged to Geneviève Gros-Louis, a Huron-Wendat Nation composer who played violin in the Des Moines […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Album Review: 24thankyou — ‘Everything I Was, Burning Slow’
Everything I Was, Burning Slow by 24thankyou The bedrooms in old, rented houses from Fairchild to South Lucas are held together by paint — layers upon layers of beiges and grays that do the semester’s tenants the courtesy of covering up mold colonies and mysterious stains. If those bedroom walls could talk through those layers […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
‘We have local acts that deserve to be on a stage of that size’: 100-year-old Hoyt Sherman Place theater to host GDP music festival on April 15
Gross Domestic Product sticks to the mission — but that’s about it. Since the all-local music festival first popped up in 2006, GDP has bounced between Des Moines neighborhoods to celebrate the various corners of both the city and the scene. That means no two years of the one-day festival look or sound the same. […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment, Statewide
Track and video premiere: Mr. Softheart, ‘Surface Tension’
It’s all part of the act for Mr. Softheart. That’s because this local three-piece has no regard for the basic building blocks of rock bands. At one of their shows, you’re sure to spy the image of Bambi on a deltoid muscle or the late ’80s linebacker-inspired cut of a Jockey crop top. But what […]
Posted inAlbum Reviews
Album Review: Arthur Russell — ‘Iowa Dream’
Iowa Dream by Arthur Russell It was awfully sweet what Kevin Costner’s Ray Kinsella said about Iowa — but nobody has made this place sound so good as Arthur Russell. Iowa is always polite, always wild, not the convenient setting of some canonical work of literature read in high school classrooms. The lines are all […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Interview: Pella’s Dave Keuning talks Iowa and outer space for the anniversary of Killers’ classic ‘Sam’s Town’
Dave Keuning is most comfortable in his element, which is neon. He is taller than a county courthouse and the many curls of pale auburn hair on his head deserve to rest on lush leopard patterns. Keuning plays guitar for the Killers in front of festival crowds the size of Thebes in the fourth century. […]
