The Cerny Brothers

I first interviewed the Cerny brothers six years ago, back when Scott and Robert were college students at Northern Illinois University. They were then the electronic-rock duo Planning the Rebellion, and I called their debut album "shockingly mature and assured."

Both of those things still apply, and you can add "ballsy" to mix.

Fronting their four-piece Cerny Brothers band, they'll be performing at the Redstone Room on December 22 as part of a holiday trip to the family home in Sherrard, Illinois.

Based in Los Angeles and playing an aggressive brand of acoustic Americana, Scott (now 24 years old) and Robert (25) brim with both confidence and an understanding of how the music industry works. They have big dreams they went to L.A. to fulfill, but talking to them last week, they weren't deluded about their chances, and they don't expect success to come knocking on their door.

"We've always made music and movies," Scott said of their move to California after college. "We just thought, 'What's the best place we could do both those things?'"

This is not one of those get-a-job-and-try-to-squeeze-in-our-passions-on-the-side things; they're all-in with music. "We don't have a backup plan," Scott said. "Fail or succeed, we have literally one objective": write songs, improve their live show, and "get good enough to a point where people can no longer ignore you. ... We're getting very good at going into a room and turning people who don't care about us into people that care about us."

Two events in the past few months raised the profile of foods with genetically modified ingredients - and also put a spotlight on how messy the issue can be.

The first was the publication in September of a study led by Gilles Eric Séralini involving the herbicide Roundup and herbicide-resistant Roundup Ready corn (technically known as NK603) - both Monsanto products. Rats in the study developed tumors, died prematurely, and suffered organ damage.

The second was the defeat in November of California Proposition 37, whose ballot summary read that it would have required the "labeling of food sold to consumers made from plants or animals with genetic material changed in specified ways."

There was a lot of heat with both events.

The Séralini study and its PR roll-out were met with an intense backlash from genetic-engineering apologists and much of the scientific community, and the European Food Safety Authority - among other scientific organizations - rejected its validity, saying it featured "inadequate design, analysis, and reporting."

In California, Prop 37 opponents - including Monsanto Company, E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Company, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association - spent more than $40 million to defeat the labeling ballot measure.

Yet combined and detached from the rhetoric and motivations on all sides, these two events neatly summarized the national and international debate over foods with genetically modified ingredients. Are they safe for human consumption? And should the government require the labeling of foods with genetically modified ingredients - the way nutrition and ingredient labels now note the presence of allergens?

Depending on whom you ask, the answer to the first question ranges from "absolutely" to "we don't know" to "absolutely not." And the answer to the second question is largely - but not wholly - determined by the answer to the first.

The elves at the market have been busy making all sorts of wonderful Christmas items, by hand in their homes and farms. You will find fragrant handmade soaps and candles, home made fudge, bakery items, cheeses, oils and vinegars, canned items from the Amish elves and honey for your sweet, and too much more to mention.

If you have stockings to fill just see Elf Dawn for her candy delights! Every flavor and size for all those good little girls and boys.

I am sure you can find it at the Market, and be sure to ask the vendors if you don't see something, they just might have it in their knapsack.

Christmas is coming the Goose is getting fat!

Please do put a penny in the old man's hat
If you haven't got a penny, a ha'penny will do
If you haven't got a ha'penny, then God bless you!

This Christmas carol puts a smile on my face every year, and I hope you are smiling too. All of the geese are spoken for this Christmas, but you still can put a fresh, pasture raised turkey on the table. Turkeys are still available from Behnke Poultry and you can visit their web site at www.behnkepoultry.com or call them at (563) 285-7844

A good deal for Christmas just got better! 

For each $25 in Freight House Farmers Market Gift Certificates you buy you will also receive your choice of a T-Shirt or Cookbook for FREE!

Be sure to buy plenty as they make great gifts.  Remember that the certificates support local farmers and vendors and 100% of the money stays local!  Great food, wonderful gifts and local vendors all will add to you Christmas this year.  Stop by the Market and pick some up on any Tuesday or Saturday during December. They are good all year round at all of the vendors so pick some up for yourself and enjoy the market all year.

Anna Ash

The first impression of Anna Ash's These Holy Days album is her distinctive, boldly quirky singing - soulful, pliable, and off-center, comfortable in breathy coos and pointed, high-pitched peaks. The title track features a piercing vibrato that's ethereally visceral, both heavenly and a bit frightening. That's the kind of voice that sounds like a natural extension of personality honed over a lifetime, an idiosyncratic instrument that nobody ever had the heart to constrain or correct.

But in a phone interview this week, Ash - who will be performing at Rozz-Tox on December 16 and recording a Daytrotter.com session the next day- revealed that she only discovered this marvel over the past five years, and she's still exploring it.

"I didn't really even know what my voice sounded like until I was like 19 or 20 years old," she said. " I was very shy about singing as a kid. I was never very good because I was so scared and so nervous."

Peter Geye. Photo by Matt and Jenae Batt.

It happens in the second paragraph of the first chapter of his first book. Peter Geye's 2010 debut, Safe from the Sea, concerns a father and son, but it quickly establishes another character: Minnesota's North Shore, hanging over Lake Superior on its way to Canada.

The son, Noah, has just arrived in Duluth. Geye sets the scene: "Now he could see the lake, a dark and undulating line that rolled onto the shore. The concussions were met with a hiss as the water sieved back through the pebbled beach. The fog had a crystalline sharpness, and he could feel on his cheeks the drizzle carried by the wind. It all felt so familiar, and he thought, I resemble this place. And then, My father, he was inhabited by it."

Both of those italicized statements could apply to Geye, who will be reading from his work November 29 as part of the River Readings at Augustana series. In a phone interview last week, the Minneapolis-based author discussed the importance of the North Shore and the wilderness above it as a place (to him) and a setting (for his two published novels and the one currently in progress). He said either he or his editor came up with the term "Northern Gothic" to describe his books - a descendant of the Southern Gothic of such writers as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Cormac McCarthy.

[Note: Commentary from the Reader's editor, published on this topic, can be found here.]

A riddle: What do you get if you add $209 billion to $54 billion to $15 billion?

If you answered "a lot," you're correct and not particularly inclined toward math.

If you answered $278 billion, you're adept at arithmetic and correct, if literal-minded.

If you answered the respective unfunded liabilities for Illinois' state-run pension funds, its retiree health-care system, and its pension bonds, you're correct and probably cheating.

And if you answered "a time bomb," you're probably most correct. Because while the numbers are important, they're constantly changing and open to interpretation, and the most important aspect of them is their magnitude. Whether it's cast as an $83-billion pension problem or a $278-billion benefits issue, the sheer size of it shows that it can't be solved with tinkering.

It doesn't take a genius to see through the "Clean the Slate" effort. Its newsletter, promoting 23 candidates for the Rock Island County Board, asks: "Tired of one party controlling all jobs in the county? Unless you are related to or know key people in the county government; your chances of being hired or promoted are unlikely."

There's no mention of party affiliation - and no branding by the Rock Island County Republicans - in the newsletter, which notes that it was paid for by the Clean the Slate PAC. On the other hand, its Web site (CleanSlate2012.net) includes a photo showing the Rock Island County Republicans logo, and the county-party Web site includes a link to Clean the Slate.

Even if the connections aren't explicit, Clean the Slate is a pretty naked attempt to recast the county-board election in nonpartisan, good-government terms. Republicans are clearly hoping that common-sense critiques will loosen the grip held on the body by the Democratic party.

Yet you'd be hard-pressed to argue that the initiative doesn't have valid points. The 25-seat Rock Island County Board presently has four Republican members, and the issue is less philosophical uniformity than organizational comfort. Because most county boards operate with little public or media scrutiny, the absence of oversight or internal opposition can result in their members acting with collective near-impunity. And Clean the Slate has articulated a handful of areas in which the Rock Island County Board needs improvement - from being more flexible with public comment to stopping nepotism to ending the practice of paid absenteeism for board members.

Jeff Wichmann

In what is likely a statement of the painfully obvious, Jeff Wichmann said that his new album A?hhhhh!!!!! is "something that, as far as I can tell, no one's ever created before, which is a koto/trumpet album with a lot of electronic blips and bleeps."

And that's not all. "I wanted to create an experimental rock album using the koto and the trumpet, as opposed to recording a koto album" of traditional compositions, Wichmann said in a recent phone interview. "Most koto players just do that. I found that limiting ... ."

Wichmann, a former Quad Citian (and former Reader employee) now based in Chicago, will be headlining the official release show for A?hhhhh!!!!! at Rozz-Tox on October 26, and it's almost certain to be a unique experience. The trumpeter and koto player will be joined by guitarist Jeff Kmieciak (a bandmate in Tenki, which plans to release its final album next year) and, on at least one song, Konrad (the Quad Cities electronic-music artist whose remix of the title track is included on the new record).

'Sketch for a Cubist Still Life' (1938), from the collection of the Augustana College Art Museum

The Abstract Expressionist artist Perle Fine once said, "If I feel something will not stand up 40 years from now, I am not interested in doing that kind of thing."

Susan Knowles, who curated the career retrospective Tranquil Power: The Art of Perle Fine that closes October 23 at the Augustana College Art Museum, believes that the artist's output met that high standard.

The irony is that Fine, late in her life and until the past decade, was largely "forgotten," Knowles said in a recent phone interview.

Part of that is a function of Abstract Expressionism being distilled in the cultural memory to a few key figures. "Now it seems like all we know is Pollock and de Kooning," Knowles said.

But even though Fine was an active, exemplary, and important participant in the mid-20th Century movement, her notoriety diminished over time while many of her peers' didn't. She was interviewed, covered by the media, collected, and invited by Willem de Kooning to join the exclusive Artists' Club. Yet when the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1978 organized a show about the "formative years" of Abstract Expressionism, for example, it omitted Fine.

The Swayback

There's something strange about the Colorado-based band The Swayback.

It's not that the quartet - which will perform at RIBCO on October 13 - does anything particularly unusual or fresh with its music. It's that with a basic guitar, bass, drum, and vocal foundation and accessible songs, the band has a clear, distinctive, and authoritative voice. Through conviction, chops, and polish, the Swayback enlivens modern-, classic-, and hard-rock formulas - and influences and references - without really altering them. It's workmanlike in the best sense.

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