Although there are changes in store for this year's event, River Action's 11th-annual celebration of paddle sports Floatzilla is still set for launch on August 15, with participants and spectators gathering at Rock Island's Sunset Park in their kayaks and canoes to enjoy a day in the great outdoors while maintaining safe social-distancing measures.
This feature collects articles published online by Quad Cities-area media outlets and by CapitolFax.com and the state-politics sections of the Des Moines Register and the State Journal-Register.
Wrapping up the annually popular outdoor programs that have provided Quad Citians with entertainment and education for years, topics such as flood preparation, downtown Rock Island, and construction of the I-74 Bridge will be explored in River Action's season-ending presentations of Channel Cat Talks and Riverine Walks – “Explore the River Series” celebrations of the Quad Cities' unique culture and landscape taking place several times weekly from August 4 through 29.
With the Bettendorf venue again open to the public and welcoming children of all ages, the Family Museum will house the interactive touring exhibition Curious George: Let's Get Curious! from June 6 through September 13, leading visitors on a fun math-, science-, and engineering-based adventure while emphasizing the central roles played by parents and caregivers.
Whatever your outdoor wants and needs, our area's many parks and recreation facilities can provide. The following is your guide to more than 120 great places to get some much-needed and much-deserved outdoor time in the Quad Cities, with the locations delineated by city and mentions of specific amenities included.
In June, we published Denis Rancourt's white paper titled “Masks Don’t Work: A Review of Science Relevant to COVID-19 Social Policy.” As of this date, the article has been viewed over 460,000 times world-wide. And, as the Reader's publisher I pledged to publish all letters, guest commentaries, or studies refuting Rancourt's general premise that this mask-wearing culture and shaming could be more harmful than helpful.
"I need to be able to look myself in the mirror every day," was how Representative Terra Costa Howard (D-Glen Ellyn) explained to me recently why she decided to call for House Speaker Michael Madigan's resignation. "More importantly," the freshman suburban Democrat said, "I had to look at my daughters and remind them what it means to do what's right."
Mainstream media and accommodating social-network censors are fueling America's polarization and immobilization. Red flags should be waving like crazy amid blatant censorship of mainstream health and science professionals who are finally amassing to set the record straight on the junk science abundant in the mainstream media's coverage of COVID-19.
The calls were mostly brief and to the point, recipients said. House Speaker Michael Madigan just wanted to know where his members stood last week after two of his members demanded he step aside as House Speaker and Democratic Party of Illinois chairman. Did they agree with their fellow Democratic state Representatives Terra Costa Howard and Stephanie Kifowit that he should resign? he asked.
A couple of days after the July 17 disclosures in ComEd's deferred-prosecution agreement with the US Attorney's office, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan called individual House Democrats to try and reassure them that all would be well.
According to multiple legislators, the House Speaker told his members that he had done nothing wrong and that he never did things like recommend unqualified people for jobs, and fully expected that, if they were hired, they would actually show up for work.
After delivering the Quad Cities' first live theatrical production in five months with the July thriller The Turn of the Screw, Moline's Black Box Theatre is set to deliver more summertime chills from August 20 to 30 with The 39 Steps: A Radio Play, author Joe Landry's unique take on Alfred Hitchcock's classic suspense film.
English people have a deserved reputation for rigid politeness, avoiding embarrassment, and keeping improprieties secret. These personality traits help drive much of the comedy of English farces. They drive this English story in an entirely different direction. Inside the proper tea kettle of this crowd, there's a bubbling mass of depravity and perversion threatening to boil, shriek, and spew forth secrets. Here, the unspeakable is spoken – for the most part … eventually … – with plenty of mystery yet to wonder over.
Described by the Los Angeles Times as “an ingenious twist on an old-school ghost story” and, according to the British Theatre Guide, boasting “plenty of moments that are funny, frightening, or exciting,” playwright Jeffrey Hatcher's take on Henry James' classic chiller The Turn of the Screw enjoys a four-performance run at Moline's Black Box Theatre July 16 through 19 – the Quad Cities' first stage production since theatres nationwide closed in mid-March.
A longstanding, beloved Quad Cities entertainment troupe will soon be delivering distinctly 2020 performances, with the striptease artists and comedians of Bottoms Up Quad City Burlesque, on June 19 and 20, hosting live-streaming presentations of their two latest productions.
Dan Danielowski, executive director of the Timber Lake Playhouse in Mt. Carroll, discusses the theatre's operations during this period of social distancing. We spoke on Wednesday, May 20.
What does it mean for journeyman musician and revered songwriter Phil Elverum to make an album under the name The Microphones in 2020? The project Mount Eerie has been his mainstay since the early 2000s. The Microphones began years before and documented some of his earliest work around which his reputation was formed and his role in the lineage of institutions such as K Records and the traditions of what we now know as bedroom pop, lo-fi music, and emo was solidified.
Awash in meat smoke and bongwater, Davenport-based self-professed “bbq death metal” duo Pit Lord recently released their new album Seasonings in the Abyss.
Rock Island’s own Randall Hall dropped a transfixing full-length album titled Oracle in mid-June that documents a cycle of his extended saxophone experiments and electro-acoustic compositions – all with the intent to, as he explains, “delve into the mythic, the esoteric, and the apophatic.” Loaded with fierce atonal sax shred, passages of freewheeling improvisation in more consonant modes, and interstitial segments of processed spoken word and electronics that build on his central theme of ancient Greek mysticism, Oracle lands as a fully realized and diverse statement of purpose from Randall Hall with seemingly few other precedents in the Quad Cities scene.
Iconic Italian film composer Ennio Morricone passed away on July 7 at the age of 91. Active as a musician and composer from the late-1940s (!) all the way up to his death, Morricone ranks among the most acclaimed artists in the medium of film music. However, it’s safe to say, as the iconoclastic New York composer John Zorn asserted in his New York Times obituary/tribute, that the influence of Morricone's work moved far beyond the paradigm of film scoring and that he should rightly be considered one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, full stop.
Davenport-based experimental folk artist/singer-songwriter/“???”-core producer Bo Jaywalker has dropped no less than eight individual releases on his Bandcamp page since the last time we checked in with him regarding his Bo Jaywalker LP in April.
The following quintet of 1982 to 1991 releases is composed of four contemporary movies and one period piece – with that “period,” at the time of its filming, all of 19 years old – that personally inspire smiles and tears across the board through memorably satisfying takes on adult romance. One of them, in its first minutes, finds Daniel Day-Lewis whispering to a woman, in unexpectedly romantic fashion, “Take off your clothes” … and he does it while wearing a face mask! Well, okay, not a face mask. He actually says it with a towel wrapped on his face. But still … covered faces on-screen can be sexy, too! So maybe there is hope!
After a lengthy illness, British director and two-time Oscar nominee Alan Parker passed away on July 31 at the age of 76. At the time of his death, Parker hadn't made a film since 2003's The Life of David Gale, which isn't exactly the fondest of cinematic farewells. But he could always be counted on to get critics talking. In 1982, a reviewer called his latest work “perhaps the most revealing American movie of the era.” In, 1987, a reviewer wrote, “Alan Parker has technique to burn … and that's what he should do with it.” And it was the same reviewer.
If you've got a few hours to spare, you can do a deep dive into all of the contenders at the Emmy Awards' official Web site. But if you're looking for something shorter, less comprehensive, and certainly less authoritative considering just how much TV I don't see on a yearly basis, here are a dozen personal, arguably meaningless takeaways from yesterday's announcement.
Now playing at area drive-ins.
Multi-hued works by a Black Hawk College alumna will be featured in the school's ArtSpace Gallery from August 10 through October 2, as the Moline college hosts a showcase for interdisciplinary artist Nicole Davis in her her exhibition Let the Circle Be Unbroken.
In celebration of the Figge Art Museum's 15th anniversary, the Davenport venue will be hosting an exclusive virtual tour of New York's William Louis-Dreyfus Collection on August 13, with the online events including an overview of the collection with the foundation's Christina Kee and Mary Anne Costello, as well as interviews with artists Hester Simpson and John Newman.
Co-presented by the Figge Art Museum in conjunction with the venue's 15th-anniversary celebration, simultaneous live and virtual presentations will be held at Davenport's Hot Glass art studio on August 14, with founder and executive director Joel Ryder delivering a fascinating live glass-blowing demonstration and the resulting artwork auctioned off at the evening's end.
On display from August 15 through November 8, and co-sponsored by the Jewish Federation of the Quad Cities and Schafer Interiors, Rob Lipnick: Mountains, Faces, Stories, & Stacks serves as the latest exhibition at Davenport's Figge Art Museum, its collection including beautiful ceramic pieces and striking assemblages by a well-known area educator.
Born in Haiti and raised in Miami, the noted painter, sculptor, and exhibitor Edouard Duval-Carrié Studio takes part in a special virtual presentation on August 16, offering online guests a tour of his studio and the chance to ask questions in a program hosted by the Figge Art Museum and held in celebration of the Davenport venue's 15th anniversary.
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