At an hour and 46 minutes, Christopher Nolan’s World War II thriller Dunkirk is the director’s shortest feature film since his 69-minute 1998 debut Following. It may also be his most wholly satisfying. I’d suggest that maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here, but who gives a damn about lessons when confronted with a work this masterful, powerful, and emotionally overwhelming?

In the end, Mike Zolnierowicz had only one choice. Governor Bruce Rauner’s top political lieutenant and former chief of staff, the man everyone calls “Z” who was most responsible for winning the 2014 Republican primary, simply had to resign late in the afternoon on Friday, July 14.

The week began with the early-Monday firing of Richard Goldberg, Z’s close friend and hand-picked successor as Rauner’s chief of staff. Rumors had circulated for months that First Lady Diana Rauner had turned on Goldberg and wanted him out, and in the previous few weeks it was known among a select few that the governor had been calling around looking for a possible replacement, including calling a couple of people in Indiana who declined the offer.

But Z and others were caught totally off-guard when Goldberg was abruptly fired and not offered a position in the vast campaign apparatus that Z had constructed. Rauner had not only made a major decision without consulting Z, his supposedly number-one guy; he had also needlessly kicked Goldberg to the curb.

Bix Beiderbecke Museum & Archive organizers (from left) Howard Braren, Geri Bowers, and Carol Schaefer in front of a re-creation of the Hudson Lake stage.

(Author’s note: After this article was published, the opening date of the museum was changed to Thursday, August 3.)

When the Bix Beiderbecke Museum & Archive opens to the public on July 24 in the River Music Experience basement, a major draw will be seeing and being in the presence of artifacts from the legendary jazz cornetist’s life – clothes he wore, instruments he played, reproductions of letters he wrote.

As museum developer Joe Hines said: “An exhibit like this doesn’t offer explanations; it [gives] impressions.”

While that might be typical of a biographical museum, the process of collecting those impressions and putting them under one roof has required extraordinary effort over decades.

One of the joys of life is outsmarting the bureaucrats and regulators. They are constantly seeking to ruin our lives with demands that we comply with. Free men and women must resist.

Here are five easy hacks to fight back.

To download a PDF of the puzzle, click here.

Based in Atlanta, The Coathangers collective boasts Meredith Franco on bass, Stephanie Luke on drums, and Julia Kugel on guitar, with their stage noms de guerre Minnie, Rusty, and Crook Kid Coathanger. Like those monikers, much of the musicians’ repertoire is intentionally jokey, ranging from their 2007 debut album’s ode to Tonya Harding to Nosebleed Weekend’s “Squeeki Tiki,” in which one of the instruments employed is a dog’s squeaky toy.

But as fans and reviewers will attest, what isn’t a joke is the group’s ferocious talent, and their insistence that full-throttled punk rock needn’t be nihilistic. As ConsequenceOfSound.net attested, the trio’s latest album “exemplifies what The Coathangers have been doing better than pretty much everyone for the past decade: blowing off the rules in the name of fun, and making damn catchy records almost as an afterthought.”

With its focus on gatherings held when the women are 44, 49, 54, and 77, the script requires quick repartee and timing, and under the direction of Jacque Cohoon, the stage quintet does not disappoint. At the July 11 preview performance, in fact, the audience's laughter came so often, and was so hearty, that the actresses – complete with Southern accents and charm – had to sometimes wait for it to die down, although they consistently kept the pace lively and energetic.

Sixty-six characters, a beheading, star-crossed lovers, a woman and child on the run, wedding and funeral parties for the same guy (on the same day), a crazy judge, songs, and another beheading all add up to an incredible evening of theatre courtesy of Bertolt Brecht and the Prenzie Players. Brecht is known for his “epic theatre” works and, true to form, the Prenzies' staging of The Caucasian Chalk Circle incorporates a play-within-a-play – or rather, a parable-within-a-play – alongside social commentary, occasionally absurd humor, sentimentality, satire, and music. (Whew!) And meeting this challenge are director Kate Farence, her creative crew, and her stellar cast of 15 (10 of whom play multiple roles),  who made for exciting theatre on July 14's opening night.

Across the street from my childhood home was an open lot with worn-down dirt spots and paths etched into the grass, shaping a makeshift baseball diamond – like something from the film The Sandlot. I played ball there every summer, all summer, from kindergarten through high school, and getting a new baseball glove was always the best, except when you initially put the glove on your hand and realized it was stiff and awkward.

When, exactly, did romantic comedies become extinct? I’m not even talking about “classic” rom-coms such as When Harry Met Sally... or Sleepless in Seattle, or that exceptional Julia Louis-Dreyfus/James Gandolfini charmer Enough Said from 2013 (the most recent example of a truly topnotch one I can think of). I’m talking about the genre as a regular staple of moviegoing, with headliners such as Sandra Bullock and Jennifer Lopez and, God help us, Katherine Heigl falling for lesser stars in vehicles that were once as abundant as Blumhouse horror flicks or crap reboots of ’80s TV shows. For anyone missing such offerings, I would direct you to director Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick, which just might stand as the most hysterical, moving, swoon-worthy rom-com of the millennium. For anyone not missing such offerings, I’d direct you to The Big Sick even more quickly, just so you can see what this genre is capable of when everything – and I mean everything – goes magically right.

After Governor Bruce Rauner hired Illinois Policy Institute President Kristina Rasmussen as his new chief of staff, I reached out to one of the House Republicans who voted to override the governor’s budget and tax-hike vetoes. How was he feeling?

“You mean after the irate phone calls and e-mails and the letter that arrived at my house today telling me and my wife (by name) to move out?” he texted back. “I’m doing fine – seriously I am. I can just guess what the new chief of staff might have in store for me.”

Rasmussen’s anti-tax group essentially weaponized its Facebook page against lawmakers during the run-up to and aftermath of the overrides of Rauner’s vetoes.

Everybody wants to see that hot, innovative musical. You know the one. It’s cool and diverse, sexy, sacred to its fans, and combines hip music and lyrics with some phenomenal choreography. The one in which a man and woman fall into a forbidden love that takes place amidst a bloody war between rival armies with a deadly duel as part of its climax. C’mon, you know the show I'm taking about, right?

No, not Hamilton. Sheesh.

To download a PDF of the puzzle, click here.

As stage bummers go, The Trojan Women has always been one of the most glorious – an astoundingly eloquent and affecting anti-war argument that plumbs depths of almost immeasurable sadness. Yet as Genesius Guild’s current presentation of the Greek tragedy reminds us, Euripides’ play can also deliver a fantastic amount of joy, at least if you, too, annually wish that Guild offerings gave their female participants a little more to do.

Don Denton, Shelley Walljasper and ensemble members in Zombie Prom

I mean no offense, but I just have to get this off my chest: Zombie Prom – the first production in the inaugural season of new theatre company the Mississippi Bend Players, directed by Broadway veteran Philip Wm. McKinley – is dumb. There, I said it. I mean, we're talking about a kitschy, '50s-era musical comedy in which a pubescent zombie goes to a high-school prom, for God's sake.

But before QC theatre elites call for my head, hear me out, because the gift of having a talent such as McKinley helm this type of production is that he knows how to create a show boasting a complete vision, and he also utilizes top-level talent to take a silly script and turn it into something exceptionally entertaining.

After years of ugly gridlock and weeks of groups and political leaders whipping up an already-disgusted populace over a 1.2-percentage-point income-tax increase, lots of legislators were understandably on edge last week.

Representative Will Guzzardi (D-Chicago) tweeted ahead of the votes to override Governor Bruce Rauner’s vetoes of a budget package that it was “hard not to think about the [recent Virginia] congressional shooting showing up to work today.”

And so people were naturally a bit rattled when a woman triggered a more-than-two-hour delay of those override votes as police and a hazardous-materials team frantically combed the Statehouse.

<em>Spider-Man: Homecoming</em>

The first joke of Spider-Man: Homecoming is the prologue’s arrival of the U.S. Department of Damage Control to tidy up a mess made by the Avengers. Damage Control has apparently been part of the Marvel Comics universe for nearly three decades, but this is its first movie appearance, and the name is amusing for its unusual bureaucratic bluntness.

The last joke is a multifaceted nugget in the final seconds before the end credits roll – part intentionally premature cut, part nod to the movie’s PG-13 rating, and part capper to the teenage trials of poor Peter Parker. (He’s repeatedly called “Penis Parker” by one of his classmates, which was probably a major contributor to the MPAA’s decision.)

In between, Homecoming is an almost-constant steam of minor marvels contributing to a shapely whole brimming with pleasure. Like its protagonist when he’s Spider-Man, the movie has an infectiously exuberant youthful zing.

Urban, Third Place: Dale Fehr, Hampton, Illinois (<em>The Bench</em>)

The River Cities’ Reader’s 2017 photo contest received more than 100 entries in four categories: “Uniquely Quad Cities,” “Reflection,” “Urban,” and “Rural.” Here are our winners and favorites.

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