It's a sentiment that should come standard-issue with any virtuosity.

"I do have to check myself, because sometimes I can find myself doing overly complicated things, and I think, 'Wait, am I doing this because it makes the song good or because I'm trying to show off?'" said Kristian Dunn in a recent phone interview. "It usually ends up being the latter, and it gets cut. You've got to be tough with yourself in this kind of situation."

"This kind of situation" is pretty funny, because it's unlikely that El Ten Eleven has much company in what it does. An instrumental duo featuring Dunn on guitars (often a double-neck) and drummer Tim Fogarty, the band makes extensive use of looping and effects pedals to build tunes that would seem to need three or more players. "Fat Gym Riot," from 2008's These Promises Are Being Videotaped, climaxes with thick bass and twin (or perhaps triplet) lead guitars.

But when El Ten Eleven returns to RIBCO on September 27, there will be just Fogarty and Dunn and the latter's 13 pedals, trying to make the extraordinarily complicated seem like merely good music.

The blurb that accompanies any write-up of the New Orleans-based rock band Cowboy Mouth comes from Cake magazine: "On a bad night they'll tear the roof off the joint, and on a good night, they'll save your soul."

For drummer, singer, and primary songwriter Fred LeBlanc, a great live show -- which will be on display at RIBCO on Friday -- is both natural and a necessity.

The band has been around for two decades now, with the constant core of LeBlanc and guitarist, singer, and songwriter John Thomas Griffith. By LeBlanc's count, Cowboy Mouth has had 427 bassists and 1,628 guitar players.

"The crux of the band has always been me and John," LeBlanc said in a recent interview. "John and I always had a chemistry, and we always built a band around that. We had all done stints in major labels before the band, and so it was: What do we have that they cannot steal from us? They can steal songs from us; they have. They can steal recordings from us; they have. But they can't steal playing live. ... That's how we built our reputation."

(Author's note: This article was originally published in September 2010, but it serves as a fitting review of the career of Ray Bradbury, who died on June 5, 2012.)

"But of course he was going away, there was nothing else to do, the time was up, the clock had run out, and he was going very far away indeed."

Unless one believes that Mr. Electrico's command to Ray Bradbury should be taken literally, the famed author will likely not be on this planet to celebrate his 100th birthday.

For those unfamiliar with the Bradbury mythology, Mr. Electrico was a carnival magician Bradbury saw in 1932, when he was 12. Sam Weller describes the event in his 2005 biography The Bradbury Chronicles: "Mr. Electrico then approached the bespectacled, wide-eyed boy in the front row. Taking the [electrified] sword, he tapped Ray on each shoulder, then on the brow, and finally on the tip of his nose and cried, 'Live forever!'"

"Why did he say that?" Bradbury said to Weller. "I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. Just weeks after Mr. Electrico said this to me, I started writing every day. I never stopped."

Immortality, of course, already belongs to Bradbury. His 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 stands alongside Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (published in 1932) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949) as a mid-20th Century cautionary-tale classic imagining a future full of numbing technology and invasive government. (See the sidebar "Pleasure to Burn -- Reading Fahrenheit 451.")

The book is the subject of the Moline Public Library's Quad Cities-wide "Big Read" campaign, which begins September 27 with a keynote lecture by Weller and closes on October 31 -- Bradbury's favorite holiday. (For a list of Big Read events, see the sidebar "Fahrenheit 451 -- Area Book Discussions, Panel Discussions, and Film Screenings.") But while Fahrenheit 451 is undoubtedly Bradbury's lasting long-form work, Weller noted in an interview last week that the book isn't typical of the author.

In Sean O'Harrow's telling, the Figge Art Museum is gaining an ally as much as it's losing an executive director.

It was announced last week that O'Harrow has accepted the directorship of the University of Iowa Museum of Art (UIMA), at which he'll start on November 15. A national search for O'Harrow's replacement is expected to take at least four months.

"It is my faith in this region that is keeping me here," O'Harrow said in an interview Friday. "I think there's a lot that eastern Iowa can achieve. There are a lot of great museums and great cultural offerings which I think need to be better promoted, to a certain extent organized, maybe coordinated."

And he said that after three years as executive director, he's leaving the Figge in good shape. "It's a very stable institution right now, and it's offering some very high-quality programs," O'Harrow said. "And if I can help the UIMA, I think that would be a very powerful pairing ... . It was important for me to offer my services."