Last Tuesday Grand Tetons, Bo & The Locomotive and The Wandering Bears played The Mill’s Tuesday Night Social Club. Here are a couple of songs from the sets of Bo & The Locomotive and The Wandering Bears. Bo & The Locomotive Bo & The Locomotive The Wandering Bears
Iowa City Mill
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Iowa City Weekender: October 21-23
THURSDAY
Phantogram w. Josiah Wolf | The Blue Moose Tap House | 6 p.m. | $12, all ages
Electronic/rock duo Phantogram is astounding. They’ve already gained notoriety in Iowa City for upstaging an Antlers headlining show at the Blue Moose Tap House. Now they return, as sure as ever, with their slick beats, lilting vocals, and sick guitar hooks to tear up Iowa City in their own right.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
VIDEO: Vagabonds live @ College Green Park
Last Saturday afternoon, local folk sweethearts The Vagabonds graced College Green Park with their presence and old-timey tunes. Here are just a couple of the tracks they performed. Sam Blickhan and Sarah Mannix, members of the Vagabonds, can be seen tonight at the Mill performing in another of their local music projects The Wandering Bears.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Little Village vs. NaNoWriMo
November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) the annual, pseudo-masochistic event that challenges all-comers to write a 50,000 word (175 page) novel within 30 days.
Considering our unending references to Iowa City as a “City of Literature,” the Little Village crew decided it would be a great idea to, well, participate. Consider it our very special, unsolicited donation to Iowa City’s literary soup.
We’ve selected five writers within Little Village to write their own introductory paragraph(s) to a NaNoWriMo novel, but here comes the rub. Only one author’s submission will be expanded into a full novel throughout the month of November. What’s more, the remaining four writers will stick around to help co-author the Little Village NaNoWriMo project, and you’ll be able watch it all unfold right here. Call it literary chaos.
Posted inArts & Entertainment, Community/News
Event Photos: Food in Harmony – 9/25
The Mill hosted a fundraiser benefiting the Local Foods Connection on Sept 25th. The evening was packed with music from a variety of local artists, art and handmade goods, raffles, a silent auction, dancing, food and booze….it was a great night and I was glad to be asked to capture some shots from the event.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Iowa City Weekender: October 14-17
Greetings Weekenders, Can I get a Chi-Chi-Chi? Can I get a Le-Le-Le? How about a VIVA CHILE! Sorry, this might be yesterday’s news but the images and sounds of celebration are really getting to me this morning, tugging on the ol’ heart strings, making my eyes leaky, you know how it is sometimes. Okay, deep […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Iowa City Weekender: October 7-10
It’s a beautiful world in Iowa City. Especially when we’re all doing our part to 1) Save the environment, and 2) Keep the art alive by going out to look at it, buy it, enjoy it and dance to it. Fortunately there are plenty of opportunities to do all of that this weekend. Here’s a checklist to help you make sure you have your fair share of the fun!
Posted inCommunity/News
Riverfront Rising
It’s already getting dark on Sunday when you hop off the train, just back from a weekend in Chicago. As the sun sets over the river, you take a stroll through the riverfront prairie before hitting up a few concerts: maybe a traveling symphony, followed by an electric mass of sound at the underground White Lightning Wherehouse. Ears still ringing, you wander back to your yuppie high-rise, grabbing a late night gyro on the ground floor before heading up to your condo in the solar powered elevator.
This could be a typical night in Iowa City’s “Riverfront Crossings” neighborhood, an 8-by-12 block area south of Burlington, east of the river and west of Gilbert Street.
Posted inCommunity/News
A Keg on Every Corner
Were there a facility large enough to house us all I suspect we’d have long ago been ordered by the court to attend some ambiguously-named in-patient rehab facility where our bags would be searched for mouthwash, daily urine tests would be administered and T-shirts commemorating pub crawls would be confiscated at the door.
Posted inCommunity/News
Men at Work
Times being what they are, I recently spent a day in a homeless shelter.
Along with a dozen other visitors, I toured Chicago’s 133-year-old Pacific Garden Mission, which recently moved into a large new building. Our guide showed us the three stark dormitories in which guests sleep, the security desk overlooking the staging area in which guests are checked for “things of the world,” the “hot box” in which guests’ clothing is decontaminated overnight.
We met no overnighters, only sharply dressed “program men,” full-time mission residents who devote themselves to a two-year course of bible study and life-skills training.
During dinner, visitors were politely but firmly encouraged to sit in the middle of the mission’s dining hall. This helped to separate female and male residents, important for practical and religious reasons..
Posted inArts & Entertainment, Prairie Pop
Prairie Pop: Big Fela
Fela Anikulapo Kuti is Nigeria’s Bob Marley. Fortunately, up to this point, he hasn’t been turned into the sort of dorm-room-poster-trustafarian-Legend caricature that Uncle Bob became. Lost in the bong haze is another Bob Marley–a global political figure who used music as a weapon, sort of like Malcolm X riding a massive wave of bass all up in your face.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
On the Beat: October’s bag of tricks
Best known for Halloween, its costume-and-trickery grand finale, October leaves almost everything to the imagination. The theme of surprise and disguise has also been a trend this year in local music promotion. With the rapidly changing venue scene, including new owners/bookers/venues, a bunch of shows popped up that had people saying, “Really? That show is happening there?.
