Tickets are on sale now for the 2021 edition of Mission Creek Festival, Duos. Following on the heels of the community-beloved Ghost Creek film this winter, Mission Creek is once again delving into a virtual format to present a slate of not-to-be-missed performers. The fest was conceived last fall, when it became clear to the […]
Genevieve Trainor
Genevieve Trainor lives in Iowa City, Iowa. Passions include heavy music, hoppy beer, and hidden rooms.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Video premiere: Penny Peach, ‘Laurelz’
Two weeks ago today, Penny Peach (a.k.a. Elly Hofmaier) dropped a debut EP, Brain Gamez, that you won’t want to miss. But I’m not going to steal the thunder from the full review (forthcoming). I’m just here to talk about “Laurelz,” track three on the release, which Little Village is thrilled to premiere the video […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Five questions (and a playlist!) with Blame Not the Bard
In the fall of 2014, Blame Not the Bard debuted as Jim and the Brix at that year’s Fiddlers Picnic. In the seven years since, through a new guitarist, an album, many Iowa Irish Fests and a pandemic, their love of traditional Irish music is as strong as ever. Andrew Philbrick (vocals and bass), Nikki […]
Posted inBook Reviews
Book Review: ‘Death of the Demon Machine: A Pop Anthology’
The backstory begins like this: Imagine Other Worlds with Authors (I.O.W.A.), a yearly multi-genre book signing event that began in the mid-2010s to uplift and highlight regional writers, was once plagued by the presence of a soda machine stuck in a musical loop. Throughout their entire event, the thing repeated and repeated and repeated. So, […]
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‘Blackness is many things’: Meka Jean breaks down the ‘partitions of identity’ in new visual LP
There’s a setting used in some of the ambient noise interstitial scenes between videos in Meka Jean’s “visual long play,” Still (a) Life, released at the end of January. It first appears between tracks two and three, “Distortion” and “Too Good for You.” It’s within the abandoned frame of a building, likely in Alabama, where […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Ghost Creek shimmers in the fog of our pandemic-fatigued minds
We’re in a pandemic, in case you haven’t noticed. And in a pandemic, especially as the parent of a toddler, time (to put a fine point on it) gets a bit — slippery. So on this past rather innocuous Tuesday night, when Ghost Creek premiered, I accessed the website at “about 7” rather than at […]
Posted inBook Reviews
Book Review: ‘Kink’ edited by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell
A 2018 study by sex toy company EdenFantasys revealed that 40 percent of respondents considered themselves kinky, with over one-third claiming a specific fetish. Still, there’s an overwhelming dearth of affirming literature out there: There’s a lot of exoticizing, quite a bit of shaming, but very little normalization. Enter Kink, a new anthology out Feb. […]
Posted inBook Reviews
Book Review: ‘Lucky’s Feet’ by Thomas M. Cook and Olayinka O. Adegbehingbe
In the 1950s, the University of Iowa was the setting for groundbreaking work being done on the condition of clubfoot, a congenital deformity which causes an infant’s foot or feet to turn inward. When left untreated, the condition — which affects one in every thousand births, the vast majority of which are in developing countries […]
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LaLa DeLo reflects on dreams deferred: A Martin Luther King Jr Day playlist
Community activator LaTasha DeLoach is an integral part of Iowa City in her role as coordinator for the Senior Center. But that position, just two and a half years strong, is only the tip of the iceberg that is her impact on our region. She sat on the Iowa City School Board in the mid-teens […]
Posted inBook Reviews
Book Review: ‘You Again’ by Debra Jo Immergut
The em-dash is by far my favorite punctuation. It’s useful as a break, a pivot point: It comes in handy often at Little Village, as we believe ellipses should only indicate removed material. The casual “pause ellipses” that pepper social media are a no-go in our stories and interviews, so that elapsed time, that silent […]
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Twenty for 2020: Songs that shaped Iowa’s sonic landscape
This is not a “best of.” For a brief moment, I thought I would try to collect the best songs of 2020 from Iowa artists. But there are too many fantastic releases this year that are on Bandcamp, and the only way I can make a mix is on Spotify. So I’m hamstrung. Once I […]
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Marvin Bell, UI professor and first Iowa Poet Laureate, has died
Marvin Bell, first Poet Laureate of Iowa, longtime Iowa Writers’ Workshop professor and first poetry editor of The Iowa Review, died on Monday, Dec. 14 after a months-long illness. He was 83. Bell earned his MFA from the Writers’ Workshop prior to his 40-year tenure teaching there. His students included such luminaries as James Galvin, […]
