Following an unanticipated year off, the eagerly awaited six-day festival boasting games, competitions, vendors, and concert sets by more than two dozen national and local acts returns with the 2021 Mississippi Valley Fair, its August 3 through 8 engagement at Davenport's Mississippi Valley Fairgrounds boasting grandstand performances by chart-toppers, multi-platinum sellers, and multiple-award winners.
This feature lists all headlines with links to the articles by date/time published online by Quad Cities-area media outlets and the state-politics sections of the Des Moines Register and the State Journal-Register.
Delivering a blend of local history, environmental issues, education, entertainment, and fresh air, Davenport's River Action concludes its series of 2021 outdoor presentations in the final month of the annual Channel Cat Talks and Riverine Walks, weekly programs that, from August 3 through September 4, will address such topics as early Civil War history, Mississippi River flood levels, the history of Campbell's Island, and iconic musicians Bix Beiderbecke and Louie Bellson.
From August 12 through 14, an eagerly awaited summertime tradition finally returns both on and in between the LeClaire and Port Byron Levees, as the 2021 Great River Tug Fest delivers outdoor family fun with carnival attractions, live music, arts and crafts vendors, fireworks displays, and the hotly anticipated tug-of-war over the Mississippi River.
In 1992, downtown Rock Island hosted its very first outdoor festival with the debut of its Caribbean-themed celebration Ya Maka My Weekend. Twenty-nine years later, after an unanticipated summer off, the District's longest-running annual tradition will continue with the 2021 Ya Maka My Weekend on August 14, an eagerly awaited event boasting a marketplace, arts and crafts vendors, ethnic food of all flavors, and concert sets by five sizzling musical acts hosted by Assane Dia.
On Saturday, August 14, 2021 the River Cities' Reader is hosting a US Constitution training class taught by my good friend Michael Badnarik. Michael Badnarik's Constitution classes are entertaining and enlightening while one learns the Liberty philosophy and how property rights are to be protected via the Constitution. In these current times, more and more people are paying attention to local, state and federal government behavior. And, more and more people are realizing that it is the we the people's responsibility to hold government accountable. Our elected government officials and sworn peace officers have all taken an oath to uphold the US Constitution. How can the people hold its government accountable if they don't know and understand the Constitution? The class is limited to 25 students, is $225 and includes a catered lunch, and the hard back copy of Michael's course text book Good to be King.
This past May, Illinois House Deputy Majority Leader Jehan Gordon Booth (D-Peoria) and Governor JB Pritzker worked out a deal with some key state business groups to mandate seven days of paid-leave per year for every employee in Illinois. Workers wouldn’t have to give any reasons for the guaranteed paid leave.
Illinois Legislative Inspector General Carol Pope announced her resignation last week and will leave office by December 15. She cited several reasons, including her thwarted attempt to issue subpoenas without any checks or balances. “True ethics reform,” she said of the legislature, “is not a priority.”
Publisher's Note: The Reader is pleased to present our second Q&A with the Scott and Rock Island County Health Departments on controversies, contradictions, and conflicts that continue to plague the COVID-19 pandemic narrative. Questions were sent to both county health departments and simultaneously published in our June 2021 edition. And once again, to their huge credit, Scott and Rock Island health officials have fully engaged in this process, providing comprehensive responses for Quad Citians to consider.
As I write this, two of the three national credit-rating agencies have upgraded the State of Illinois’ rating in a week’s time. And the only remaining hold-out owes us one. Big time.
Lauded by the Wall Street Journal as “charming and dramatically persuasive,” and by the New York Daily News as “a valentine to the wonder and weirdness of love,” the 2014 Tony Award nominee for Best Play Outside Mullingar opens the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre's long-awaited 2021 season, the show's August 5 through 15 run – the Geneseo company's first new show since 2019 – sure to demonstrate why the New York Times called it a work of “lyrical writing” and “consistent pleasure.”
Lauded by The New Yorker as “a singular astonishment” and by Variety as “short and sweet and strangely haunting,” the critically acclaimed, Tony-nominated romance Constellations wraps up the 2021 season at the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre, its August 5 through 15 run demonstrating why the New York Times was inspired to ask, “Who knew that higher physics could be so sexy, so accessible – and so emotionally devastating?”
Boasting a book and lyrics by Oscar and Pulitzer Prize winner Alfred Uhry, and based on a novella literary legend Eudora Welty, the Tony Award-winning musical The Robber Bridegroom, from August 5 through 15, serves as the latest summer presentation at Mt. Carroll's Timber Lake Playhouse, the show praised by the New York Times for its “rambunctious rhythms … visual wit, and gleefully macabre gags.”
Winner of five 2013 Tony Awards and London's record-holder for the most Olivier Awards ever won by a musical, the Broadway smash Matilda: The Musical continues Quad City Music Guild's summer of live performances at Moline's Prospect Park Auditorium, its August 6 through 15 run treating family audiences to a delightful entertainment that the New York Times called “an exhilarating tale of empowerment” told with “astonishing slyness and grace.”
I had the pleasure of attending Friday’s performance of The Mountaintop at the Quad Cities’ newest live-theatre venue, the Mockingbird on Main. Penned by American playwright Katori Hall, this story is a fictional depiction of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his last night on earth, the eve of his assassination. As as directed by Kira Rangel, with production design by Savannah Bay Strandin and Tristan Tapscott, this piece takes patrons into the unique inner struggles of one of the most influential civil-rights leaders of all time.
With their most recent album, 2019's Brothers, described by SoundsLikeNashville.com as a recording that showcases the duo's “talent for delivering exuberance in their music” and “positive spirits and honest chemistry,” Nashville's Locash serves as the Mississippi Valley Fair's August 4 grandstand headliners, performing from a repertoire that has found chart-topping hits in “I Know Somebody” and “One Big Country Song.”
Returning to a weekend of live performances following last year's virtual version of the event, the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Festival will, from August 5 through 7, again enjoy residency at the Rhythm City Casino Resort Event Center, with the Davenport venue hosting no fewer than 25 individual sets by nine assemblages of thrilling jazz talents.
Boasting 16 number-one singles on the Billboard Mainstream Rock charts, the most of any band in history, the post-grunge and alternative-metal icons on Shinedown perform the August 5 grandstand concert at the Mississippi Valley Fair, the group's list of chart-topping songs including “Get Up,” “Monsters,” “Attention Attention,” and 2020's “Atlas Falls.”
Touring in support of his forthcoming album that Rolling Stone has called the “most stylistically expansive and sharply focused” of the artist's career, country, blues, and Americana singer/songwriter Charley Crockett headlines an August 6 concert at the Raccoon Motel, the musician's discography already boasting seven studio albums and 23 singles over a mere seven years.
Appearing as the fifth grandstand act in this year's Mississippi Valley Fair, the chart-topping country musicians of Old Dominion perform hits from their acclaimed, three-album repertoire on August 6, the popular touring ensemble having scored four Academy of Country Music Awards and eight top-10 Billboard singles over the past six years.
Director Jaume Collet-Serra's family adventure may be as self-referential and avaricious as any of the Mouse House's live-action blockbusters, but the film's cheerful spirit and charm prove utterly infectious, and I wound up having more and more fun as the film progressed.
M. Night Shymalan's new cinematic freakout, inauspiciously yet evocatively titled Old, could easily be mistaken for a masterpiece if you don't understand a word of English.
Director Malcolm D. Lee's LeBron-James-meets-the-Looney-Tunes adventure, beyond feeling cynical and desperate, may be the most flabbergasting, relentlessly self-promoting entertainment I've ever endured. Lee's movie is constantly selling, yet the only thing it actually gave me was a headache.
Winner of the Dublin International Film Festival's “Best Film” citation for 2019 and included among the National Board of Review's top-five foreign-language films for its year, writer/director Christian Petzoid's Transit, on August 13, serves as the latest presentation in the Kinogarten series of acclaimed, German-themed works hosted by Rock Island's Rozz-Tox and Davenport's German American Heritage Center,
Now playing at area theaters.
Members of the Figge Art Museum who have admired the many works in the venue's current Tom Uttech: Origin are invited to enjoy a live audience with the artist himself, as the virtual August 4 presentation A Conversation with Tom Uttech finds the gifted Wisconsin painter and photographer discussing his process and inspirations while also answering participants' questions.
A 39-year tradition that has attracted more than 25,000 people each summer to downtown Iowa City, the Iowa Arts Festival, from August 13 to 15, will host more than 90 visual artists, include an Emerging Artist Area geared toward elevating student work, and feature a beverage garden, a variety of culinary delights, children’s activities, and thrilling live-music performances on the Main and Ped Mall Stages.
Human figures, evocative colors, and a new yet familiar Quad Cities landmark are among the visuals showcased in the latest exhibitions at Rock Island's Quad City Arts Center, with the venue, through August 13, highlighting new paintings by Port Byron's Laura Vincent-Arnold in Internal Landscapes and Bettendorf's John Born in Bridging the Divide.
The celebration of a talent known for combining real and imagined elements inspired by nature in his captivating works, the Figge Art Museum's new exhibition Tom Uttech: Origin, on display through August 15, will feature Kisibakwad, the beloved painting from the Figge collection, alongside a selection of the artist's large-scale photographs from the collection of the Museum of Wisconsin Art.
A gifted and prolific artist dedicated to exploring the power of language and the mystical nature of the psyche, Lesley Dill will be the special guest in an August 18 virtual artist talk hosted by Davenport's Figge Art Museum, the award-winning talent on hand to discuss her artistic process and the works in her current Figge exhibition Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me.
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