BELLYARD by BELLYARD Iowa music is nothing if not eclectic. Put a track by early ’90s prog-punkers Fetal Pig side-by-side with something spawned in the late ’90s by genre-less ramblers Why Make Clocks, for example. You’d be forgiven for not being aware that both acts were fronted by Des Moines’ Sump Pump Records maestro Dan […]
Genevieve Trainor
Genevieve Trainor lives in Iowa City, Iowa. Passions include heavy music, hoppy beer, and hidden rooms.
Posted inCommunity/News
Iowa City fencing coach Judy O’Donnell invites all ages to poke fun
Iowa City Fencing Center founder, director and head coach Judy O’Donnell moved to Iowa in 2000, when her husband took a job at the University of Iowa. Ten years later, after advising for the university’s club fencers and taking on more private students than she had room for, O’Donnell opened the Fencing Center. “You can […]
Posted inCommunity/News
In need of some emotional healing? Join the herd, recommends this Iowa City therapist
Since 2006, fresh off earning her degree, Natalie Benway-Correll has worked as a LISW (licensed independent social worker) in Iowa City. But a couple of years ago, her experiences as a therapist during the COVID-19 pandemic led to a search for something more. “During the pandemic, I was seeing — based on all the conversations […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Book Review: ‘The Witch of Woodland’ by Laurel Snyder
If I were Zipporah Chava McConnell, writing an essay about The Witch of Woodland (the newest middle grade novel from Laurel Snyder, published by Walden Pond Press) for class, I’d probably talk a lot about the themes of Silence and Space. Any theme that recurs is worth mentioning, right? And isn’t it strange? A book […]
Posted inAlbum Reviews
Album Review: The Ruralists — ‘Trying’
Trying by The Ruralists “I pray to the saints,” begins the Ruralists’ “pandemic album,” Trying. Then, later, with the strained tension of drawn out tones and stretched-then-resolving chords, album opener “HereNow” continues, “And I wait/on the word/on the whisper never heard/though I listen with all my might.” The northwestern Iowa band includes several members who […]
Posted inBook Reviews
Book Review: ‘Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America’ by Tara A. Bynum
Scholar Tara A. Bynum, an assistant professor in the University of Iowa Departments of English and African American Studies, is exploring interiority — and exemplifying it. In her recently published monograph Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America (University of Illinois Press), Bynum leverages her research in pre-1800 Black literary history for a deep […]
Posted inAlbum Reviews
Album Review: Greg Wheeler and the Poly Mall Cops — ‘Manic Fever’
Greg Wheeler and the Poly Mall Cops – Manic Fever by Greg Wheeler & The Poly Mall Cops You didn’t realize you were waiting for this moment. But I promise you, you were. Later this month, on March 24, just a couple weeks ahead of their appearance at Iowa City’s Mission Creek Festival, Des Moines […]
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Two Des Moines theater companies, founded a century apart, join forces to stage August Wilson’s ‘The Piano Lesson’
When last year’s revival of August Wilson’s 1987 play The Piano Lesson closed on Broadway on Jan. 29, it was the highest grossing show that week. In fact, the production, which opened Oct. 13, became the highest grossing play revival and highest grossing Wilson play on Broadway. Wilson is regularly among the most-produced playwrights in […]
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Book Review: ‘What Napoleon Could Not Do’ by DK Nnuro
Early in DK Nnuro’s debut novel, a Ghanaian father presiding over his son’s divorce ritual is introduced by his well-read brother to the concept of schadenfreude. “Delighting in [someone else’s] misery,” it’s defined. Again and again, the characters in What Napoleon Could Not Do (out Feb. 7 from Riverhead Books) dance around this concept, and […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Book Review: ‘The Wounded Age’ and ‘Eastern Tales’ by Ferit Edgü, translated by Aron Aji
Born in 1936 in Istanbul (and approaching his 87th birthday on Feb. 24), Ferit Edgü has been writing beloved and award-winning work in his native Turkish since 1959. He’s published novels, stories, essays, poetry and even a children’s book. He’s been adapted to film, awarded the Sait Faik Literature Prize and the Sedat Simavi Prize […]
Posted inBook Reviews
Book Review: ‘Music-Making in U.S. Prisons’ by Mary L. Cohen and Stuart P. Duncan
In the 1864 novella Notes From the Underground, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky proposes the proto-existentialist notion of “perverse freedom.” There are never no choices in life, because one can always, at any time, choose to act against one’s own self-interest — to act in a way that’s contrary to all expected motivations. Dostoevsky himself spent […]
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After 37 years, Bob Dorr will end his IPR rock history show ‘Backtracks’ this month
“Thirty-seven years and four months, but who’s counting?” That’s how long Iowa blues icon Bob Dorr has been hosting his rock and roll history show, Backtracks — a mainstay of Iowa Public Radio’s top-notch music programming. But on New Year’s Eve 2022, that all comes to an end. Dorr isn’t retiring, thankfully: The voice that […]
