When Joe Kelley was organizing the current Church | State exhibit for the Bucktown Center for the Arts, artist Les Bell asked him: "Is this going to be a blue show or a red show?" Kelley recalled.

In an interview this week, Kelley said he was hoping to find something in between: "I was hoping it would be a purple show."

It's curious that two arenas that are often best kept separated - art and politics - share the language of color. Blue signifies the Democrats on the electoral map, and red the Republicans. And red used to represent the threat of communism, whose adherents were of course called pinkos.

Yet those color labels reduce complex subjects and issues - even the populations of entire regions - and rob them of nuance.

This 600th issue marks the Reader's 14th year in publication. My husband, Todd McGreevy, and I founded this paper for several important reasons: to stimulate alternative viewpoints from those in the mainstream media; to disseminate relevant, truthful, well-researched information conveyed through intelligent writing; to expose Quad Citians to the community's vibrant arts culture populated by individuals and groups with plenty of energy and talent; to provide the area's most comprehensive calendar of events as a resource for both patrons and venues to inspire connectivity; to offer advertisers the opportunity to reach a loyal, educated, and economically active consumer group that defines our exceptional readership; and finally to provide meaningful, productive, and lucrative employment opportunities that creatively engage individuals in the vital mission of conveying need-to-know information in a collaborative environment.

In a world where the size of album cover art continues to slide smaller with each new format, I salute Beck in his efforts to have a little fun with what visual space is left. Next week's release of his new Interscope CD, The Information, comes as a do-it-yourself project with a set of stickers and a blank cover as your workspace. Four different artists designed unique sticker sets, making each self-personalized cover a special little snowflake of love. Other goodies include homemade videos for every song, and the video for the first single, "Cell Phone's Dead," directed in black and white by the amazing Michel Gondry.

It is in times of crisis that a person learns who his or her true friends are. Alejandro Escovedo discovered he has a lot of friends.

Even if you haven't heard of Escovedo, you've likely heard of them: John Cale of the Velvet Underground, Los Lonely Boys, the Cowboy Junkies, Son Volt, Charlie Musselwhite, Lucinda Williams, Calexico, Steve Earle. Those people and more than two dozen others cut tracks for Por Vida: A Tribute to the Songs of Alejandro Escovedo. The goal wasn't merely to honor the man, or just offset some of his medical bills, but perhaps to save his life.

Singer/songwriter Escovedo is widely and deeply respected in the alt-country community, and he has the meager bank account to prove it. He even called his live disc More Miles Than Money. The alternative-country magazine No Depression called him its artist of the decade for the 1990s.