Screening as the final presentation in River Action's 2020 QC Environmental Film Series, the award-winning 2018 documentary Anthropocene: The Human Epoch plays at the Blue Grass Drive-in on September 27, an acclaimed work that Rotten Tomatoes' Critics Consensus described as “a sobering – and visually ravishing – look at the horrific ecological damage wrought by modern human civilization.”

With its author praised by the New York Times for “his knack for telling stories that, at the very moment when they seem to be settling into predictable paths, throw in a zinger,” Jeffrey Hatcher's darkly hilarious Three Viewings enjoys a September 24 through October 3 run at Moline's Black Box Theatre, the playwright lauded by the Los Angeles Times for “his gifts [that] are distinctive, unmistakable, and quite a bit of fun to boot.”

As contemporary romantic comedies go, The Broken Hearts Gallery is like something you'd create from a kit. The instructions are easy to follow, every expected piece is dutifully included, and there's no veering from the manual – what you wind up getting looks remarkably similar to what's pictured on the box. (Or, in this case, the poster.) But a pandemic-era lack of cineplex options can make you inordinately grateful for simple, much-appreciated qualities such as charm and wit and personality, all of which writer/director Natalie Krinsky's debut feature has in abundance.

Rock Island’s resident drone/ambient scientist Terry Skaggs seems to drop a new release under his dead lizard grin moniker at the crazy clip of one per month, further populating his bottomless Bandcamp page which now sits at 77 releases (!!!) with exercises in drifting electronic sculpture, neo-classical orchestral textures, and the occasional hushed electronic beat pattern.

On August 27, we celebrated what would have been Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda’s 83rd birthday. Though she passed away in 2007, the spirit of her music reaches more people now than ever before thanks to a series of high-profile reissue campaigns and dissemination across the Internet.

Although the pandemic is currently depriving us of movie sequels, the professional talents of Ballet Quad Cities are at least ensuring that local audiences get a live one with the company's Ballet on the Lawn: Take Two – a September 20 follow-up to the dancers' hugely successful outdoor presentations of Ballet on the Lawn that took place, as this new one will, at Davenport's Outing Club.

Hosted by the Quad City Symphony Orchestra's music director and conductor Mark Russell Smith, the organization's annual Signature Soirée will take place online this year on September 19, the virtual Moonlight Sonata event boasting performances by the symphony's resident concertmaster Naha Greenholtz and principal cellist Hannah Holman, a live auction, and a three-course dinner, chocolates, and a floral arrangement delivered to ticket-holders' homes.

Presented as part of the Quad City Engineering and Science Council's “Teacher's Night Out Series,” the first episode of Ken Burns' new documentary series The Gene: An Intimate History will be screened at the Blue Grass Drive-in on September 17 – a free event co-hosted by the Quad Cities' PBS station WQPT-TV, and the introduction to an acclaimed four-hour work that the U.K.'s The Telegraph awarded four stars and called “serious-minded, informative, and knowledgeable.”

Radio host, podcaster, and DIY history buff Kristian Day has become a patron saint and detailed archivist of the criss-crossing underground music circuits of Iowa. His podcast Iowa Basement Tapes has logged over 100 shows to date, all of which focus on bands that have essentially been forgotten by time, mostly after years of inaction.