The Commanders’ newest EP, Odd Disasters, is somehow simultaneously a tight, clean collection of succinct musical ideas and a vast, sprawling commentary on the current state of the human condition and how we got here.
Genevieve Trainor
Genevieve Trainor lives in Iowa City, Iowa. Passions include heavy music, hoppy beer, and hidden rooms.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Light artist Gerry Hofstetter illuminates the Old Capitol
Swiss light artist Gerry Hofstetter has an ambitious goal: Over the course of 2017-19, he and his daughter Céline (who is based in Los Angeles) will bring their Light Art Grand Tour USA to all 50 states. The tour identifies a key landmark in each state to work with, a place of historical and political significance, and transforms it into a transitory light art sculpture.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
U.S. Cellular brings Kesha to CR, celebrating 30 years of cell service
The pop star Kesha will perform at the U.S. Cellular center on Nov. 2 at 7:30 p.m. The venue’s namesake, U.S. Cellular, is presenting the concert to recognize the 30th anniversary of when it began offering cellular phone service in Cedar Rapids.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
“Art in Public” meets #MeToo at 6th Biennial Grant Wood Symposium
This year, the University of Iowa Grant Wood Symposium — now in its sixth biennial iteration — tackles the topic of public art. The symposium, a program of the UI Office of Outreach and Engagement, presented by the Grant Wood Art Colony, seeks to engage with Wood’s legacy, this year by exploring one of his greatest passions.
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Don’t miss William Elliott Whitmore on ‘Last Call with Carson Daly’ tonight!
If you’re getting impatient waiting for local alt-country fan favorite William Elliott Whitmore’s upcoming return to the Englert Theatre next weekend, you’ll be happy to know that all you have to do is stay up late tonight and tune in to NBC (KWWL channel 7 in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City). At 12:35 a.m. (so, technically tomorrow) you can catch the beloved Montrose, Iowa native’s network television debut on Last Call with Carson Daly. He joins The Good Place’s Jameela Jamil, Harry Potter alum Rupert Grint and star of The Lie and Slender Man Joey King.
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Five questions with: Bill MacKay
Feed Me Weird Things Vol. 3, Edition #11 brings the brilliant guitar improviser Bill MacKay from Chicago to Iowa City on Thursday, Sept. 27. MacKay lives on the unexpected razor’s edge between jazz and experimental folk, stylistically, but his guitar is conversational in a sense typically only associated with the blues.
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‘Marjorie Prime’ an incredibly sensitive meditation on aging and grief
The rub of science fiction is that it requires quite a bit of world building to be comprehensible to the audience. Director Jen Brown guides her actors into a subtlety that nicely highlights the universals of personality, humanity and family life without dwelling too long on the technicalities of 2050.
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‘Assassins’ is a necessary story, strikingly performed
If you like your musicals a little bit dark, a little bit thoughtful and a little bit acerbic, Jaret Morlan and his cast do a lovely job of bringing this weird, wonderful show to life.
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William Shatner on showing horses, his upcoming Christmas album and chasing opportunity
It was 52 years ago this month that a scrappy, upstart little sci-fi program premiered on NBC. In the captain’s chair of the NCC-1701, also known as the USS Enterprise, sat a Canadian, classically trained Shakespearean actor with only a few films, a couple of Broadway credits and a handful of one-off television spots to his name stateside. He was well-reviewed but hardly a household name.
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Woodstock’s break-out chanteuse Melanie heads to Cedar Rapids
Forty-nine years ago this week, a relatively unknown young woman took the stage at perhaps the seminal cultural event in U.S. history. Melanie Safka-Schekeryk was only 22 when the Woodstock Music and Art Fair — “3 Days of Peace & Music,” the posters read — took over a farm in upstate New York and changed the course of music.
Posted inAlbum Reviews
Album Review: Young Charles — Armageddon Party Dress
Mitch McAndrew, both the vocal and songwriting chops behind Young Charles, comes across on the band’s debut, Armageddon Party Dress, as a jazz composer who desperately wants to be a folk singer (with a slight addiction to pop melancholy). The genres fuse and break, weave in and out of each other in ways that evoke the mid- to late-’70s years when Joni Mitchell and Billy Joel were contemporaries.
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Video premiere: Anthony Worden, ‘Hang Tuff’
“Delicate swagger” is the perfect turn of phrase to capture the first single off of ‘Slouching Towards Tomorrow’ (which is available for preorder now). Little Village is pleased to present the video premiere of “Hang Tuff.”
