An eagerly awaited wintertime treat peppered, this year, with a hint of Halloween, the annual celebration Icestravaganza returns to downtown Davenport in Icestravaganza 2021: A Chilling Winter at the Freight House, with this safe and family-friendly event – taking place from January 15 through 17 – boasting spooky ice sculptures of witches, haunted house, jack-o-lanters, and ghouls.
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.
With Wapsi River Center naturalist Becky Baugh leading what promises to be a fascinating presentation, the Davenport Public Library will host a virtual program for bird watchers of all ages in The Great Backyard Bird Count, a January 19 program offering information on an important annual event sponsored by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society.
Delivered as part of the Davenport Public Library's virtual 3rd Thursday at Hoover's Presidential Library & Museum programming, historian Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky will present the January 21 Zoom webinar The Origins of the Presidential Cabinet, an inside look at an institution that isn't isn't the Constitution, but has been a crucial political element for every American president since George Washington.
In 2014, rising mixed-martial-arts stars Conor McGregor and Dustin Poirier met in Las Vegas, both hoping to pave their way to a world championship. Since then, McGregor has won titles in two weight classes, while Poirier secured an interim lightweight crown, both becoming UFC superstars in the process. And on January 23, the two kick off 2021 with what promises to be an epic rematch in UFC 257: Poirier vs. McGregor 2, a free event being televised in Davenport's Rhythm City Casino Resort Rhythm Room.
Below is a short list of the underreported or misreported topics and events in 2020, including several earlier items. Each of these is contributing to the changing global landscape, yet most Americans are grossly unfamiliar with their contexts. Enlarging awareness and understanding of these topics can more positively guide our future actions if we are better informed about the path we are collectively being nudged toward. What is the downside of questioning everything?
“This isn’t their Republican Party anymore!” Donald Trump Jr declared on January 6 during a fiery speech near the U.S. Capitol. “This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party,” the President’s son insisted. “Today, Republicans, you get to pick a side for the future of this party. I suggest you choose wisely.” And then, later in the day, all heck broke loose
I reached out to several House Democrats who could be considered politically vulnerable in 2022 to ask them how they plan to vote on Speaker Michael Madigan’s re-election in January. With one exception, I didn’t make much headway.
“What if” games are never quite accurate, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Governor JB Pritzker had the opportunity, and most probably the votes, to balance the state budget with an income-tax hike during 2019, his “honeymoon” year with the General Assembly. Instead, the governor came into office and proposed what was essentially a pension payment holiday and other magic budgetary solutions.
Last month (issue #979), the Reader published 11 questions relative to COVID-19 for the Scott County and Rock Island County Health Departments. Both departments deferred to Scott County Medical Director Dr. Louis Katz for responses and we are pleased to share his unedited responses, along with the original questions, below. (For my responses to these answers with additional supporting documentation, see "Questioning Unreliable PCR Testing Is Hardly Trivial.")
Reviews by Jeff Ashcraft, Patricia Baugh-Riechers, Audra Beals, Pamela Briggs, Dee Canfield, Kim Eastland, Emily Heninger, Heather Herkelman, Paula Jolly, Victoria Navarro, Mark Ruebling, Mike Schulz, Joy Thompson, Oz Torres, Brent Tubbs, Jill (Pearson) Walsh, and Thom White.
Taking the Antoinette Perrys as our inspiration, we theatre lovers at the Reader have decided that Our Show Must Go On, too. So even though we've been given far fewer titles to choose from than usual, with our own categories and the excellent work within abbreviated out of necessity, we happily welcome you, ladies and gentlemen, to the Fifth-Annual Reader Tony Awards!
Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the inspiration for the Oscar-nominated Nicole Kidman film, playwright David Lindsay-Abaire's family drama Rabbit Hole will enjoy a one-night-only virtual reading in a January 8 event hosted by Princeton's Festival 56, with the acclaimed work lauded by Entertainment Weekly as “a transcendent and deeply affecting new play which shifts perfectly from hilarity to grief.”
A virtual dose of holiday cheer featuring some of Iowa City's and Coralville's most familiar performers, City Circle Theatre Company's online presentation A Christmas Cabaret will be available for home viewing from December 18 through 25, this collection of song-and-dance vignettes professionally recorded and edited by CoralVision, and boasting dynamically talented stars of stage and television.
Davenport-based producer K1ng Supr3m3 breaks out the crates and gathers together a network of dusty samples and fluid drum patterns for ジャンプドライブ (Japanese Katakana for “Jump Drive,” which might lead us to believe that these tracks were sourced from a particularly packed flash USB stick).
A recap of 2020 is unnecessary for this article. We all know what kind of year it was. Its upside was the incredible amount of good music that made its way to the ears of a world that needed to hear it - perhaps more than at any other time in recent history.
A one-of-a-kind blend of bluegrass and comedy coming to the Quad Cities from a remote part of the Arkansas Ozark Mountains region, the family musicians of The Cleverlys take the stage at Davenport's Rhythm City Casino Resort Rhythm Room on January 21, the quintet's talents leading the New York Times to write, “If Earl Scruggs, Dolly Parton, and Spinal Tap spawned a litter of puppies, it would be the Cleverlys.”
Avant-garde composer, multi-instrumentalist, and soft-music pioneer Harold Budd passed away earlier this month at the age of 84. Though considered a major forerunner of styles of music that would come to be named “ambient” and “New Age” in their various forms, Budd rejected these terms outright. From his viewpoint, his music floated in its own stratum, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20th-century minimalism or neoclassical composition.
It feels gauche to compile a year-end list of music in 2020, a year in which the daily conditions of the music industry suffered a pandemic-borne cataclysm and the future of live music was subsumed
I want to put 2020 behind us as much as you all likely do. So in lieu of a lengthy intro to my annual Movies of the Year article, this time with downbeat commentary on delayed releases and shuttered cineplexes and the potential demise of the traditional film experience and everything else we don't want to reflect on, what say we just skip to the good stuff?
Over the past two weeks, barring review-writing and performing general upkeep on the Reader Web site, I've been on vacation. And I did what many of my fellow stay-cationers likely did during the holidays this year: I watched movies. Lots of movies. A few of them at an actual movie theater.
There might be a perfectly valid, comic-book-related reason for this that I neither know about nor particularly care about. But seriously: Why, in director Patty Jenkins' sequel to her 2017 smash, are we watching a Wonder Woman adventure set in the mid-'80s?
How is it that Tom Hanks portrayed Mister Rogers only last year and has already landed in the role of someone just as upstanding, decent, and effectively communicative with children?
Now playing at area theaters.
Forgeries, mental illness, intrigue, and rapid fame – the dramatic circumstances of Ralph Albert Blakelock’s life often overshadow the merits of his work. But the Figge Art Museum hopes to amend that in the Davenport venue's January 16 through April 25 exhibition, Blakelock: By the Light of the Moon, a showcase of eight exceptional artworks from the museum collection.
Rarely considered pieces of furniture will be made fascinating in a current Figge Art Museum exhibit, with the Davenport venue, through January 17, showcasing fully functional artworks in Seating by Design – an exhibition the museum's executive director Michelle Hargrave says should “inspire ideas and new ways to consider the things that we are sitting on so much. Particularly nowadays while we're spending so much time in our homes.”
Colorful paintings and fascinating installations will be showcased in the first 2021 exhibitions at the Quad City Arts Center, with the Rock Island venue, from January 11 through March 19, housing installations by Wisconsin artist Keith Kaziak in Turn on the News and paintings by Rock Island native Elaine Rexdale in Machinations of a Colorholic.
Held in conjunction with the venue's new January exhibition Blakelock: By the Light of the Moon, the Figge Art Museum's Assistant Curator Vanessa Sage will host a Virtual Curator Talk on January 21, delivering a fascinating discussion on the artist's dynamic paintings, his place in art history, and his connections to the National Academy of Design.
As home to one of the largest collections of Haitian art in the United States, the Figge Art Museum is set to celebrate its vast assemblage of beautiful, evocative, fascinating pieces in Haitian Masterworks, a new exhibition, on display through January 24, that will focus on prevalent themes in Haitian art including spirituality, transformation, the natural world, everyday life, and Haitian history.
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