River Cities' Reader - Issue 879 - April 2, 2015

River Cities’ Reader • Vol. 22 No. 879 • April 2 - 15, 20152 Business • Politics • Arts • Culture • Now You Know • RiverCitiesReader.com

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River Cities’ Reader • Vol. 22 No. 879 • April 2 - 15, 2015 3Business • Politics • Arts • Culture • Now You Know • RiverCitiesReader.com

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Schock’s Fall from Grace Hardly a Surprise

by Rich MillerCapitolFax.com

ILLINOIS POLITICS

Congressman Aaron Schock’s resignation is not only a blow to national Republi-cans – for whom he’d raised millions –

but especially to Illinois Republicans.Just eight weeks ago, Schock was

widely believed to be next in line to chair the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC). But his rapid fall from grace ruined his career and deprived the NRCC of a chance to project a far more youthful public image.

The Illinois House Republicans are heartbroken by this loss. Schock is a former state House member and he retained quite a bit of personal affection from and even admiration by his onetime colleagues and staffers. But it’s the loss of his assistance that will be felt the most. Schock has been very helpful to the point of being almost indispensable to the House Republicans. He’s helped recruit candidates, raised money for them, and helped them campaign. And he was quite successful.

Ever since he defeated a sitting Democratic Representative in a solidly Democratic district at the age of 23, Schock has been the House GOP’s wonder boy. And they’ve used his help and his model to win other districts, including Adam Brown and Michael Unes taking Democratic districts with Schock’s assistance in 2010.

The Illinois Republicans don’t remember Schock as the jet-setting, rule-shortcutting playboy he became in Washington, DC. When he was in Springfield, Schock was rarely seen on the nightlife circuit, often traveling back to Peoria after the day’s session ended to meet with constituents. He was always a young man on a mission, and he seemed to fully understand back then that if he wanted to continue his meteoric rise up the political ladder, he had to make sure he was always in tune and in touch with the folks back home.

So what the heck happened here? Well, Democrats didn’t do him any

favors by drawing him the most Republican congressional district in the state. Schock did stay in touch with his constituents via regular trips back home, but with his political safety all but assured, he apparently no longer felt the need to be “in tune” with his district.

And his 24/7 fundraising meant he was constantly hanging out with wealthy people. Personally interacting with people who

literally have money to burn can have an intoxicating effect, particularly on somebody who has always personally striven to be rich. We saw much the same thing happen to former Governor Rod Blagojevich and former U.S. Representatie Jesse Jackson Jr., who both lived well beyond their means to try to keep up with their rich buddies.

Schock’s first job was in the fifth grade, doing database management for a chain of book stores. He was investing in the stock market when he was barely a teenager. When he was talking about running for governor a couple of years ago, he said if he lost he’d just go make lots of money. Schock was always confident in his own political and financial skills. He just knew he would reach the highest

rungs of whatever ladder he climbed.But that aborted bid for governor forced

Schock to rethink his future and focus his sole attention on rising through the congressional ranks. He held a leadership post and looked like he had an eventual straight shot to the very top, but he was sidetracked last year when his ally, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, unexpectedly lost his primary election. He then set his sights on the NRCC, and the chairmanship was literally within his grasp.

Several factors were at work here: the complacency caused by Schock’s safe GOP district, his realization that Congress was the only venue he’d probably ever have for stardom, his single-mindedness about how raising money was his only ticket to the top, his personal quest for wealth, and his apparent need to emulate the lifestyles of the folks he was raising money from. All that – plus whatever else happened that we don’t know about – somehow led him to start cutting corners. And when you start doing that, it’s very difficult to stop. Indeed, it often leads to much worse things. Just ask Rod or Jesse.

And now Schock is under federal investigation. The final chapter won’t be written on this book for quite a while. Hopefully, after this is all over, after he has paid his price (if any), Schock can put those truly amazing skills of his to work again for the people he once clearly loved. He’s only 33 years old. He’ll have plenty of time to redeem himself.

Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax (a daily political newsletter) and CapitolFax.com.

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With Nightlight, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods Go from the Quad Cities to HollywoodA Foot in the Door

The train rumbles toward you, and then it’s over you, throwing sparks. It’s a short train, but it’s nonetheless a har-

rowing seven seconds – looking, sounding, and feeling uncomfortably real.

That’s because, on a practical level, it is real.This happens less than 10 minutes into

the new, nationally distributed horror movie Nightlight by writers/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the filmmaking duo from the Quad Cities now based in Los Angeles.

“That whole sequence was a lot of fun to figure out,” Beck said in a recent phone interview. The special-effects team proposed using computer animation for the train, he said, but he and Woods asked: “Could we actually get a real freight train on these tracks?”

We’ve been introduced to five teens who’ve come to a supposedly haunted forest for “flashlight games.” One involves laying down a flashlight on railroad ties, running down the tracks to a specific point, and then running back and grabbing the flashlight. There’s not much to it ... except for the train.

This bit lasts roughly a minute and 40 seconds, done in a single shot.

“The scene starts with the train incredibly far away, [and] it just gets closer and closer,” Woods said.

We can only hear the train’s horn as the first three people complete the task – getting louder with each blast. With the fourth teen, we can see the headlight peeking through the trees as the engine comes around a bend.

And after Shelby, our protagonist, puts her flashlight on the ties, we see the train itself, with her sprinting toward it and then back toward her flashlight.

She jumps away just before the train hits her, but her flashlight – which belonged to a friend who committed suicide and provides the point of view for all the movie’s action – remains on the tracks, and the audience gets an unsettling understanding of what it would feel like to be under a freight train moving at full speed.

“There’s something hopefully suspenseful about being stuck on these rails,” Woods said.

Quite intentionally, Beck and Woods have updated one of the wonders of early cinema: the Lumière brothers’ famous 1896 film that put audiences in the path of a locomotive.

Movies, Beck said, “can be like a magic trick, and I think it’s really rare to see that. And so you want to bring that original spectacle to it. ... You want to give modern-day audiences that, and it’s really difficult when they’re very jaded and they’ve seen everything. ... So the aspiration is to really challenge yourself as a filmmaker to come

up with something incredibly unique. And sometimes you get it, and sometimes you don’t, or sometimes you think you’ve got it but it doesn’t really work.”

It absolutely works in Nightlight, and it’s not merely the result of that moment, of the visual and aural elements that put the audience underneath the train. It’s the escalating tension in the single shot, as Shelby shifts from observer to participant. It’s the helplessness the audience feels when it’s been abandoned by Shelby on the train tracks. (In a neat trick, our anxiety is rooted less in her fate than our own.)

And it’s definitely a function of Beck and Woods using an actual moving train. Despite the verisimilitude of today’s computer-generated imagery, audiences know deep down the difference between pixels and metal.

“It was really fun to try to choreograph the dance of getting the timing perfect when you’re using practical [rather than digital] effects,” Woods said. “Really trying to get all the different departments on the film to do the ballet with us was so much fun, but also very terrifying, because every day on set we’re like, ‘Is this going to be a disaster? Are we going to be able to pull this off?’ It was very intimidating.”

“The challenge was making sure it was safe,” Beck said, “but also making sure it felt like the train was close enough to the stunt

performer to make it feel real.”And given that beyond the train stunt, the

POV flashlight (and the equipment used to mimic it) goes underwater and over a cliff, it’s somewhat miraculous that no camera met its demise during the making of Nightlight.

“For a moment there, we thought were going to blow $100,000 on our expensive camera being run over by a train,” Beck said. “You would think more things would have been destroyed. Our insurance [carrier] was very happy with us.”

“Waiting Waiting Waiting”From 2002 to 2006 – while they were

students at Bettendorf High School and then the University of Iowa – Beck and Woods (separately and together) wrote, directed, and produced nine short and feature-length movies under their Bluebox Limited (now Bluebox Films) banner.

In the nine years since the release of their 60-minute contemporary Western The Bride Wore Blood, however, there’s been little: the 2010 short film Impulse, and the 2012 TV pilot Spread (which MTV declined to order to series).

Beck moved to Los Angeles after college graduation in 2007, and Woods has lived there about half as long. The period since The Bride Wore Blood contains the familiar story of DIY artists trying to find a foothold in

Hollywood. They worked at a movie theater. They wrote. They knocked on doors.

“We spent those years writing a ton of scripts, and writing things either for the marketplace or things that we could shoot back in Iowa,” Beck said. “We probably have six or seven scripts that could result from that three-and-a-half-/four-year period.”

They could have continued to do what they’d done in high school and college, Woods said: “When we wanted to make a movie, we just go out and make a movie.”

But Beck said they had higher goals: “As much as we love making movies in Iowa, our aspirations were always to have a foot in the studio system. So obviously there’s the benefit of living out here and just pounding down doors until something inevitably happens. It’s a struggle at the same time.”

“When you do it on a professional level,” Woods said, “you’re just waiting waiting waiting and developing and developing and developing.”

“When it got to be around 2009,” Beck said, “Bryan and I were just getting really frustrated by not directing anything. ... It gets really depressing after a while.”

So, in a fashion, the 30-year-old filmmakers have finally made it – at roughly the same age that many prominent directors began their major-feature-film careers.

Nightlight was released March 27 by

COVER STORY

Shelby Young in Nightlight


Only six actors appear in writers/directors Scott Beck’s and Bryan Woods’ supernatural thriller

Nightlight, and the film’s most inventive performance, by a considerable margin, is given by its lead. That this lead isn’t actually one of the aforementioned six – and is, in fact, an inanimate object – isn’t quite the detriment you’d think.

Following a video-blog prelude in which we meet the morose high-schooler Ethan (Kyle Fain), whose suicide proves the catalyst for the traumas to follow, we find ourselves, some months later, in the car of Ethan’s former friend and crush Robin (Shelby Young). With her pooch Kramer in the backseat, Robin has driven out to the purportedly haunted Covington Forest at night, having been invited to play flashlight games with fellow teens she refers to as “the cool kids”: the British hottie Ben (Mitch Hewer), the Jewish jokester Chris (Carter Jenkins), and the mostly interchangeable mean girls Nia and Amelia (Chloe Bridges and Taylor Ashley Murphy). And while that video-blog opener may have suggested it, Robin’s introduction – given the static, low-angle compositions and Young’s aiming-for-naturalistic readings – confirms it: Nightlight is yet another “found footage” scare flick, and set in a Blair Witch-y locale to boot.

Yet before the scene ends, and almost before you have the opportunity to sigh, “Here we go again ... ,” your eye is caught by something unusual and unanticipated. Wait a second, you slowly realize, this “found footage” is actually the POV of Robin’s flashlight?! It is indeed, and for the next 80 minutes, Beck and Woods go to town with their ingenious conceit: Everything on-screen (minus the Ethan footage) is shown from the flashlight’s illuminated perspective, and when its batteries fail, which happens a lot, we’re momentarily left in the dark, too. Nightlight’s young actors acquit themselves decently enough, but the flashlight, at all times, is the star of the show.

For long stretches, this spin on an intensely tired fright-film trope – one so presentationally clever yet so seemingly obvious that you can’t believe you haven’t seen it done before – tickled me to no end. In broad terms, having Robin’s flashlight serve as the camera, rather than having a camera serve as the camera, gets rid of a couple of typically irksome genre pitfalls. With the

characters unaware that they’re being filmed, because (in Nightlight’s reality) they’re not, the cast doesn’t have to indulge in any dully self-aware mugging for the footage’s presumed viewers, and we’re happily spared the shrieks of “Put the f---ing camera down and let’s get the f--- out of here!” that feel like every other exclamation in the Paranormal Activity of your choosing.

And the flashlight/camera angle pays even greater dividends when employed more specifically. The movie is at its finest and most nerve-racking in a very early scene that finds Robin, in one of the teens’ more ill-advised games, forced to outrun an approaching train. With Robin’s flashlight positioned on the tracks facing the terrified girl, and the train coming thisclose to making contact, the sequence – which doesn’t boast any evident CGI effects – is thrillingly intense, never more so than when the locomotive passes over the flashlight, over us, as it blares off into the distance. Every good Beck/Woods movie has at least one “How the hell did they do that?” shot, and this is Nightlight’s biggie.

That flashlight, however, keeps delivering memorable POV imagery: when, in the hands of another teen, it tumbles down a cliff and we see the kid’s body splatter against an upside-down tree; when it hovers over a pair of sleeping girls and continues to rise, proof that nothing human can be holding it; when it shines directly on Kramer, whose eyes, as dogs’ eyes do, immediately glow a malevolent, glassy red. (Considering how well-trained he is, I hoped for a bit more from Kramer than merely serving as the canine equivalent of Alien’s cat Jonesy, but he quickly becomes an afterthought.)

With Andrew M. Davis serving as cinematographer, Beck’s and Woods’ handling of the visuals is so imaginative, and their directorial facility so impressive, that it’s all the more disappointing to find Nightlight saddled with such an unsatisfying script. The problem isn’t the simplicity of the movie’s “Five teens walk into the woods ... ” setup; given sufficient talent, that’s really all the premise you need for effective low-budget horror. The problem is that it isn’t simple enough.

Early on, Chris has a lengthy, exposition-heavy monologue in which

by Jeff Ignatius [email protected] The Woods Beckon

Bluebox Limited’s Nightlight, Now Available on VOD

by Mike [email protected]

Continued On Page 16Continued On Page 16

Lionsgate Entertainment – theatrically in 10 major cities, and on-demand nationwide (including iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, and DirectTV, but not Mediacom or Dish). The writing/directing duo can now say it’s gotten reviews from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Hollywood Reporter, and RogerEbert.com.

Beck and Woods also have a contract to direct XOXO, which has an impressive pedigree. Its producers include Oscar nominees Darren Aronofsky (the writer/director of Pi and Requiem for a Dream and the director of The Wrestler, Black Swan, and Noah) and Michael London (producer of Sideways and Milk), and the script was written by Mark Heyman (Black Swan).

But Beck and Woods know that nothing is certain, and it’s unlikely they’ll want Nightlight to be the apex of their careers. The contract for XOXO doesn’t mean the movie will actually get made – or that they’ll end up directing it if it does. And while they do now have those reviews from prestigious institutions, they’re not the sort one wants to frame and put on the wall – except, perhaps, as motivational tools.

“Every project we take on is just like fighting fighting fighting hustling hustling hustling,” Woods said. “It’s pretty nonstop. Even right now, we have five or six projects going, and you never know what’s going to pop. You try to juggle as many projects as you can at the same time because it’s just a fight.”

“It feels ... everyday that we could lose everything tomorrow,” Beck said.

Still, he added, they appreciate the victories – the day Lionsgate picked up Nightlight, the day they were selected to direct XOXO: “We definitely try to drink in those moments.”

“They are few and far between,” Woods said, “because most of our job is just sheer rejection.”

But although Nightlight clearly represents a success, before the movie’s release Woods said that “we’re certainly super-nervous about it, because we’ve never had a work of ours exposed to that many people at once, so we’re kind of shielding ourselves over here ... . We hope it finds an audience that will appreciate it and enjoy that we took some risks and experimented with the form.”

“The Audience Is Going to Fall Off a Cliff”

That experimentation isn’t evident in the broad strokes of Nightlight. Five young people in woods that have a dark history, the

handheld camera ... . In 1999, The Blair Witch Project proved the commercial viability of this relatively inexpensive style of horror movie, and “found footage” has become ubiquitous – and synonymous with cheap and lazy filmmaking.

But Beck and Woods weren’t lazy with Nightlight. Their inspirations and aspirations were actually pretty damned highfalutin: They wanted to reinvigorate the found-footage style of horror movie and take advantage of some of its natural formal characteristics – in particular lengthy shots and a rigid point of view.

The idea, Woods said, “came from an appetite for the found-footage subgenre – like Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity – but also feeling a bit of a fatigue with those movies. As much as we enjoyed them, and as fun and scary as they were to see in theaters with big audiences, it also started to feel ... a little tired. We wanted to try to find a new window into a genre that we loved.”

So they had the idea of using the point of view of one character’s flashlight instead of a video camera (or video cameras) held by characters – which had the immense benefit of avoiding that pesky narrative problem of characters shooting footage while being chased by monsters or soiling themselves in fear.

“It really came from our childhood – just playing flashlight games in the woods,” Beck said. “As filmmakers, ... we wanted to tap into the fear that we felt when doing that ... : You’re all alone in the woods with only a beam of light. ... I think it’s just an incredibly immersive experience for the audience.”

“The promise of the premise is the audience has to go where the flashlight goes,” Woods said. “If the flashlight falls off a cliff, the audience is going to fall off a cliff. If the flashlight falls in a creek, we’re going to go down a creek. You’re kind of stuck with it.”

There was also the appeal of the function of flashlights, he continued – which is also a metaphor for what horror movies do: “What they do is look into the dark. ... And to force the audience to look into the dark and look into the shadows at something they might not want to see, we were just kind of hoping that would be a scary experience.”

Beck added that shooting in widescreen meant that the flashlight’s circle of illumination was surrounded by darkness: “It was a great inherent visual opportunity to have the audience looking off into the periphery and wonder what might be out there. ... It was fun to play with the balance of darkness and light from this perspective.”


Prior to her career – or rather, careers – as a jazz vocalist, composer,

author, and actor, Nnenna Freelon was employed in the worthy but far less glamorous field of health-care administra-tion. She says, however, that in her late 20s, while working as a North Carolina-based admin-istrator in the early 1980s, “I suddenly had an epiphany that I was not happy, even though I loved working in a hospital environment. Because even in that job, I used to find myself in patients’ rooms singing.

“I just had a nay-saying kind of narrative,” she continues. “You know, ‘I want to sing, but I don’t want to live in New York or California ... .’ It just didn’t seem attainable. But I remember whining, blah blah blah, to my grandmother about it, who was 93 at the time, and she said something to me that was very profound. She said, ‘Bloom where you’re planted. If God wants you to sing, He can handle wherever you are and whichever situation you’re in – what you know, what you don’t know – and nothing is too hard.’”

Considering her accomplishments over the past 25 years alone – with Freelon still residing in Durham, North Carolina – it’s fair to say that her professional career didn’t bloom so much as explode.

Since the release of her self-titled debut in 1992, Nnenna (pronounced NEE-na) Freelon has recorded 11 additional studio albums, amassed six Grammy nominations, and won the prestigious Billie Holiday Award from France’s Académie du Jazz. She has sung at Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, and on TV’s In Performance at the White House, and her legendary appearance at the 43rd Annual Grammy Awards netted Freelon a standing ovation. She has scored raves from Variety magazine (“her phrasing is original, surprising”) and the Washington Post (“a bright, rhythmically infectious performance”), and has toured with the likes of Al Jarreau, George Benson, and even Ray Charles.

make it to stardom!’ kind of thing.”

At least not always. “I was actually offered a recording contract as a young person, and my parents were not having it. They really felt that that kind of life was a difficult life. And looking back on it now, the person offering the contract probably was kind of shady, but I didn’t know that.”

With a laugh, she adds, “So I owe thanks to some good parents who could see beyond short-term goals. One of my mother’s favorite sayings was ‘A delay is not a denial.’ It’s true.”

Freelon’s future career in the arts was consequently delayed while she received her degree in health-care administration from Boston’s Simmons College, and moved to North Carolina to raise three children – Pierce, Maya, and Deen – with architect husband Philip. It’s him, along with her grandmother, whom Freelon credits for helping her leave her “back-of-the-house job away from people” at a Durham hospital.

“My husband really encouraged me,” says Freelon. “He said, ‘You can’t use your being married, your having children, where you are, whatever age you are – you can’t use that as an excuse for your unfulfilled dreams. If you want to do this, I’ll help you, but you have to decide what it is you want to do.’”

What Freelon wanted to do was sing professionally, “and initially, I had my eye on mentors who I didn’t know. People like Dr. Billy Taylor, whose music I loved but who seemed so far away from me. But right in my own community in Durham, there were jazz masters – people who really knew the music and could teach me what I needed to know. One of them was Yusaf Salim, a wonderful piano player who took me under his wing and knew every song in every key, the entire American songbook. He had a wonderful worldview about music and felt, ‘If you can speak, you can sing.’”

Before long, says Freelon with a laugh, “I was the queen of the local scene. I mean,

And when Quad City Arts’ latest Visiting Artist performs locally between April 8 and 18, audiences will be treated not only to simultaneously soothing and thrilling jazz interpretations, but highlights from her current, nationally touring passion project The Clothesline Muse, a blend of music, drama, dance, and visual art in which Freelon stars, and for which she composed the score.

“As soon as I gave myself permission to do what I was really put on this planet to do,” says Freelon during our recent phone interview, “everything became lighter. It didn’t become easy, but the angst and the heaviness and the darkness of ‘Should I? Shouldn’t I?’ went away, and I could apply myself with full permission. And then all of a sudden, strangely enough, the people that I needed to help me in that next stage of the journey appeared. And were probably there all along.”

A Delay Is Not a DenialA native of Cambridge, Massachusetts,

Freelon says, “I got my start singing in the church, like many people. And my parents both have lovely voices, so singing was always a very natural, wonderful way of expression in our house. From my mother I got a love of gospel, and from my father a love of jazz.”

Yet while she displayed musical interest and vocal talent at a young age, Freelon says that for her singing “was very much for the joy of doing it, not a driven ‘Oh, I want to

Bloom Where You’re Plantedby Mike Schulz

[email protected]

Vol. 22 · No. 879 April 2 - 15, 2015

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Arts Editor, Calendar Editor: Mike Schulz • [email protected]

Contributing Writers: Amy Alkon, Rob Brezsny, Rich Miller, Sherry C. Maurer, Frederick Morden, Bruce Walters,

Thom White

ADVERTISING Advertising Coordinator: Nathan Klaus

Advertising rates, publishing schedule, demographics, and more are available at

QCAdvertising.comDESIGN/PRODUCTION

Art Director, Production Manager: Shawn Eldridge • [email protected]

Graphic Artist: Nathan Klaus • [email protected] Design/Production Interns:

ADMINISTRATION Business Manager: Kathleen McCarthy

Office Administrator, Classifieds Manager, Circulation Manager: Rick Martin • [email protected]

Distribution: William Cook, Ron Thompson, Cheri DeLay, Greg FitzPatrick, Daniel Levsen,

Jay Strickland, Doug Wilming

Quad City Arts Visiting Artist Nnenna Freelon, at Area Venues April 8 through 18

Continued On Page 17

MUSIC


The Shook Twins came into posses-

sion of the magical, giant golden egg in 2010. According to the story on the band’s Web site, Laurie Shook hap-pened upon a young man holding the thing, and when she asked about it, he said a woman gave it to him and told him to sign it and pass it on to the next person.

Laurie Shook was that person, and she promises on ShookTwins.com that she will eventually hand the egg off to somebody else: “Until then, it shall be musical!”

In that way, the egg is being passed every night the Shook Twins perform – including almost certainly April 16 at the Redstone Room. Laurie and her identical twin Katelyn don’t appear eager to part with it, but they turned the egg into an instrument: Laurie filled it with popcorn (making it a giant egg shaker) and mic-ed it (making it a drum).

The twins seem earnest in believing the egg has magical properties, and that’s in keeping with a general belief in positive energy and mysticism. (One writing session, Laurie said in a 2011 interview, was inspired by a visit to what she called a roommate’s “spell nook.”)

I mention the egg, however, because it’s just a tellingly distinctive aspect of the band (which in the Quad Cities will also include bassist Kyle Volkman and guitar and mandolin player Niko Daoussis). As Katelyn said in a recent phone interview, the egg and the beat-boxing and the looping and the telephone mic are elements that make the Shook Twins “a little more interesting than two folk-singer girls.”

Those are good narrative hooks – and they give the group sonic tools for more-dynamic live performance – but they’re ultimately window dressing. On the Shook Twins’ third studio album, last year’s What We Do, the songs and performances stand tall on their own, anchored by the twins’ singing. Their voices can be sweet or haunting – and, on “Daemons,” both simultaneously. They’re more often earthy and sensual, and the two women’s harmonies create lovely moments of graceful emphasis.

It helps a great deal that the production (by Ryan Hadlock, who also did The Lumineers’ self-titled hit) and arrangements are varied and surprising – folk instruments

by Jeff Ignatius [email protected]

Keepers of the Golden EggThe Shook Twins, April 16 at the Redstone Room

in expansive and detailed pop treatments. The title track finds the Shooks mimicking plucked strings with their voices in an aggressive stereo mix – coming at the listener from all

directions. “Daemons” has a too-direct message, but it also has a thrilling tension between delicate prettiness and thick darkness. “Ryan really helped make that a lot more ominous and eerie-sounding,” Katelyn said, adding that she thought it ended up appealingly “creaky”: “I thought it sounded like an old wooden ship.”

That song’s dimmer mood, though, is unusual for an album that is generally infused with an elevating warmth and brightness. Opener “Thoughts All in” has exhilarating vocals in the chorus (“Keep it all on fire”) joined perfectly with electric guitar, banjo, and fiddle that obliterate any preconception of “two folk-singer girls.” Similarly, “Shake” has a serious rhythmic groove and density making old-time instruments feel entirely modern.

The Shook Twins for What We Do wanted to record closer to their home base of Portland, Oregon, and also wanted to record in one long session for the first time. The choice of Hadlock, Katelyn said, was an attempt to see if a bigger-name producer could boost the band’s profile. “We just decided to make a more legit record,” she said.

And to pay for the session, the Shook Twins had a concurrent Kickstarter campaign, which Katelyn said was “exciting and also nerve-racking.” The band had a $25,000 goal, and of course there was no guarantee they’d meet it.

Fortunately, Katelyn said, the money came in – more than $26,000 in 30 days: “It was a consistent flow of fans willing to donate, so we didn’t feel stressed out or anything. It just actually fueled the whole process.”

The Shook Twins will perform on Thursday, April 16, at the Redstone Room (129 Main Street, Davenport; RiverMusicExperience.org). The show starts at 7:30 p.m. and also features Barstool Boogaloo and Victor & Penny. Tickets are $10 to $12.

For more information on the Shook Twins, visit ShookTwins.com.

MUSIC


The fifth time is appar-ently the

charm for writer Greta Grosch and composer/lyricist Drew Jansen, as the final installment in the Church Base-ment Ladies series is, for me, the most cohesive and amus-ing from beginning to end. Primar-ily, this is because there’s a clear plot that ties together the story as, through flashbacks, we learn about the founding of the show’s rural-Minnesota church, the initial introduction of the titular ladies to their base-ment kitchen, and the eventual disbanding of the congregation. This musical is the history of the ladies’ Lutheran church in its entirety, a thread that pulls together the proceedings in a beautiful way.

In truth, I think I laughed louder and longer during the first few minutes of Friday’s The Church Basement Ladies in: The Last (Potluck) Supper than I did during any of the Circa ’21 Dinner Playhouse’s productions of three (of the four) previous installments. These opening moments involve Rachelle Walljasper’s handy farm gal Mavis and Kay Francis’ curmudgeonly Vivian climbing over each other, atop the kitchen sink, to talk with Tom Walljasper’s Pastor Gunderson through the basement window, as the two play up the ridiculousness of the situation without taking it over-the-top. We only see their legs and hear their grunts and groans, but they make comedy gold of it as they essentially wrestle atop a sink counter that barely has room for just one of them. While the set is mostly the same one used for the other Church Basement Ladies musicals at Circa ’21, this bit involving the women’s flailing legs and rolling bodies, which is already hilarious, also shows off a clever piece in scenic designer Scott Herbst’s set that allows a view of what’s happening on both sides of the window at the same time.

While this sink-climbing scene is, for me, the show’s funniest moment, there are so many more laughs throughout director Curt Wollan’s piece, particularly when the actors portray other characters. One involves the women, dressed in hats and ties, imagining their husbands at a cemetery board meeting voicelessly deciding, as board members, mundane things about the handling of the grounds. There are also short bits involving the Scandinavian founders of the church, and even the never-before-seen (but mentioned in every previous installment) woman who brings the same hot dish to pass for every church function, whom the ladies refuse to serve because of their distaste for it, and for her. We’re also privy to seeing just how much

THEATRE By Thom [email protected] Heroines

The Church Basement Ladies in: The Last (Potluck) Supper, at the Circa ’21 Dinner Playhouse through May 16

Kaitlyn Casanova’s beleaguered mother-of-two Beverly is like her mother (Deborah Kennedy’s even-handed Karin), as some of the flashbacks include similar lessons they’re taught by the other ladies – such as how to make egg coffee and handle a

rude teenager – and expressions of impatience from each, proving the adage “Like mother, like daughter” to be true.

While Jansen’s songs feature mostly unmemorable melodies and wordy lyrics, there are a few moments of brilliance within them, particularly in the clever rhyming of such lines as “Let me croon a verse about how God created the universe” in the musical’s opening number “On the Eighth Day.” There are also several big numbers that elicit toe-tapping and allow choreographer Andrea Moore to inject some physical fun into them, such as “You Can Learn a Lot about a Lady,” the Latin themed “Mom-bo,” and the disco number that samples several familiar hits including “I Will Survive” and “This Gal.”

Grosch’s book, meanwhile, maintains a perfect balance in including familiar bits from previous Church Basement Ladies stories – such as Mavis’ “One, two, three, uff-da!” as she opens the furnace room door with her rear end – and new humor, as when a flashback introduction from one of the ladies includes the line, “I think I was wearing this same dress.” This fifth and final piece in the story feels fresh, even though we’re revisiting women so many Circa ’21 patrons have come to love throughout this series. Personally speaking, I wish this were the series’ first musical because it sets things up so well, offering a better perspective on the lives of these women, and particularly their emotional investments in their church.

I haven’t written very positively about the Church Basement Ladies franchise for past Circa ’21 productions, and I stand behind those reviews. The Church Basement Ladies in: The Last (Potluck) Supper, however, struck all the right cords for me, thanks to a featured plotline that, unlike in previous pieces, ties up all loose ends. In this case, the last is certainly not the least.

The Church Basement Ladies in: The Last (Potluck) Supper runs at the Circa ’21 Dinner Playhouse (1828 Third Avenue, Rock Island) through May 16, and more information and tickets are available by calling (309)786-7733 extension 2 or visiting Circa21.com.

Kaitlyn Casanova, Deborah Kennedy, Tom Walljasper, Rachelle Walljasper, and Kay Francis


Alison Brie, Edwina Findley, Craig T. Nelson, and, best of all, the rapper Tip “T.I.” Harris, spectacularly funny and threatening and charismatic as Hart’s prison-savvy cousin. If Get Hard itself seems to vanish after T.I. exits, that’s because it’s hiding in his pocket.

HOMEA lonely alien meets a lonely little girl

in Home, and amazingly, throughout the 90 minutes of this animated adventure, home was about the last place I wanted to be. Director Tim Johnson’s zippy, colorful, incredibly clever outing – one that, I kid you not, is all about the comedic awkwardness of accidentally hitting “reply all” instead of “reply” – is somewhat bland in typical, family-friendly ways. It’s also fabulously atypical in many others, from the scale of its slapstick (watch the Eiffel Tower turn upside-down mid-air!) to the race and gender of its central characters (listen to Rihanna and Jennifer Lopez sing and act beautifully!) to the deep emotionalism of its climactic scenes (fail miserably as you attempt not to cry!). All told, Home is a great, smart, silly time with additionally marvelous vocal work by Steve Martin and Breaking Bad’s Badger Matt Jones, and Jim Parsons is lovable perfection as our squat, purple hero Oh – as in, “Oh, I really, really like this movie.”

For reviews of Insurgent, The Gunman, Do You Believe?, and other current releases, visit RiverCitiesReader.com.

Follow Mike on Twitter at Twitter.com/MikeSchulzNow.

Movie ReviewsIT FOLLOWS

Any horror fan who came of age with Halloween, Friday the 13th, and their many sequels knows the ironclad rule regarding imperiled teens: If they have sex, they’re gonna die. So maybe you’ll have to be of a certain generation – or have an affinity for a certain breed of shocker – to get the most from It Follows, writer/director David Robert Mitchell’s intensely witty, pretty damned scary tale of a young woman diagnosed with a literally murderous, and ambulatory, STD.

After a seemingly fun date, with a seemingly nice guy, that ends in backseat intercourse, our pretty blonde lead Jay (Maika Monroe) finds herself chloroformed and bound to a wheelchair in an abandoned building in downtown Detroit. With a panicked apology, her new beau Hugh (Jake Weary) explains what’s happening: Through their lovemaking, he’s saddled Jay with a supernatural curse in which she’ll be persistently followed, and eventually killed, by malevolent figures that only she can see. (It Follows’ prelude shows a similar victim’s ghastly end.) Yet there is a “cure.” Jay can have sex with someone else and pass the curse on to him – and pray that he quickly passes it on in turn, or the invisible marauders will return their attentions to Jay.

Staring at that paragraph, I realize it might be impossible to make Mitchell’s film sound like anything beyond horror-porn sleaze, and It Follows certainly doesn’t shy away from its exploitative bent. (Try as I might, I can’t quite figure out why so many of the unearthly tormentors need to be naked.) Yet the movie casts a hypnotic, tantalizing spell. Mitchell’s Detroit is some unaccountable hybrid of the past and present: Modern

teens watch ’50s monster movies on antenna-ed black-and-white TVs; a girl reads from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot on her clam-shaped iPhone; parents bring kids to see 1963’s Charade at the one-screen movie house complete with live organist. Between its off-kilter mise en scène, its air of moody disquiet, and Mitchell’s languid, dream-like rhythms, all of It Follows feels like it’s taking place in Mulholland Dr.’s Club Silencio, but with a throbbing, insistent synth score in place of lip-synched Roy Orbison. (Composer Rich Vreeland’s “I’m here, damn it!” soundscape, with its heavy debt to John Carpenter, is the rare ultra-aggressive score that’s absolutely right for the material.)

And good God but the film is creepy, whether Mitchell is freaking you out with in-your-face terrors – beware the hallway’s hulking giant – or startling you with peripheral images of slowly approaching figures whom Jay’s friends might or might not see. (In one especially potent beachfront bit, we’re convinced a background figure is her pal Yara until a reverse-angle shot shows Yara, instead, contentedly floating on the lake.) There are several storyline inconsistencies and unresolved detours, and those who crave less-subtle scares and more narrative closure will likely hate the experience; I wasn’t at all surprised, upon leaving the auditorium, to hear a teen patron say, “That was the worst movie I’ve ever

seen.” Yet this well-acted (particularly by Monroe and Keir Gilchrist), sharply written, fascinatingly designed, inventively staged outing is like no other horror movie since Under the Skin – It Follows you home and doesn’t go away.

GET HARDWill Ferrell is tall and white. Kevin Hart

is short and black. And therein lie the central, endlessly repeated jokes of director Etan Cohen’s Get Hard, in which Ferrell’s heading-for-San-Quentin millionaire solicits Hart’s car-wash entrepreneur for aid in surviving prison because, ya know, he must’ve been in prison, right? (But he wasn’t! Oh, the irony!) Top-loaded with race-relations, gay-panic, and sexual-assault gags too toothless to qualify as dangerous, let alone offensive, the movie’s about as bad as you’d expect, and a little worse when it suddenly remembers it needs a plot and dives headfirst into execrable-’80s-action-comedy territory. But it boasts some good things. Despite their material, Ferrell and Hart make a charming odd couple, the former as goofy as usual, the latter less manic than usual. Each has a few winning solo moments, with Ferrell’s increasingly byzantine attempts at profanity and Hart’s prison-yard impersonations their finest. And while you certainly wish better for them than this, the supporting cast features

Lay It Forward

Maika Monroe in It Follows

by Mike Schulz • [email protected] Mike Schulz • [email protected]


MusicThe Ghost WolvesRozz-ToxSaturday, April 11, 9 p.m.

The married musicians of The Ghost Wolves, Carley and Jonny Wolf, will be performing at

Rock Island’s Rozz-Tox on April 11, and according WanderingSound.com’s Lenny Kaye, the artists’ “feral take on transgressive rock ’n’ roll” finds them “showing a joy in the turn-it-up that evokes the visceral virtues of rock at its most raw and elemental.” So plan on having a blast. Kaye goes on to write that during a recent SXSW concert, one of Carley’s particular slide solos “scratched me behind the ears, wagged my tail, and made me chase a ball.” So plan on also bringing some kibble to nosh on.

Pictured here with their dog Winter who accompanies them on tour (although there’s no word on whether he helps pay for gas), Carley and Jonny

followed vastly different musical paths prior to The Ghost Wolves’ 2011 debut. Carley toured as a mandolin player with San Francisco’s old-time bluegrass band The Crooked Jades, and Jonny performed on two tours with country sensation Junior Brown.

But as an Austin, Texas-based two-piece, the spouses have been exhilarating music fans and critics with their self-described “stomp and roll” that blends elements of garage rock, punk, and the blues, and that led SpectrumCulture.com to call the Ghost Wolves “an energetic rock outfit at a time when there seems to be less energy in rock every day.”

Not if Carley and Jonny have anything to say about it! And on their two albums to date – 2011’s In Ya Neck! and 2014’s Man, Woman, Beast – they do. So how well-acquainted with their output are you? Try filling in the blanks on the six tunes to the left found in The Ghost Wolves’ discography.

The Ghost Wolves’ Rock Island concert opens with a set by Pop Goes the Evil, and more information is available by calling (309)200-0978 or visiting RozzTox.com.

What’s Happenin’

RiverCitiesReader.com

MusicLiz LongleyThe Redstone RoomWednesday, April 15, 7:30 p.m.

Davenport’s Redstone Room will host a very special concert event on April

15, and I know what you’re thinking: Ugh – April 15. That annual day of dread, knowing the obligation you have to attend to before midnight that, as usual, you’re almost criminally – perhaps literally criminally – unprepared for.

I’m referring, of course, to April 15 being my dad’s birthday. How does this date keep sneaking up on me? I mean, I had a whole year to pick out the perfect tie!

Happily, though, this year’s April 15 will be made much sweeter via the Redstone Room concert with songwriting chanteuse Liz Longley, whose album-release tour makes a local stop in support of her new, self-titled offering.

A 2010 graduate of the Berklee College of Music with musical leanings toward pop, folk, and Americana, the 27-year-old Longley had been the beneficiary of accolades and praise long before reviewers listened to her 11-track

Liz Longley album. According to a March interview in The Huffington Post, acclaim for Longley’s smooth, soulful vocal stylings and lyrical honesty actually began as early as ninth grade, when the nascent artist received a standing ovation for performing her first composition, “Bye Bye Baby.”

Since then, however, admiration for the Pennsylvania native has only grown, and on a national scale, to boot. Prior to her Berklee graduation, Longley was the recipient of the 2009 Rocky Mountain Folk Festival’s songwriting showcase and the 2010 BMI John Lennon Songwriting Scholarship Competition, and also scored a songwriting citation from the

MusicWeedeaterRock Island Brewing CompanyThursday, April 9, 8 p.m.

The grunge-, sludge-, and stoner-metal musicians of

Weedeater will play a sure-to-be-electrifying concert at the Rock Island Brewing Company on April 8, and I could easily spend my space here talking about the North Carolina outfit’s incredible 17-year touring history, or the group’s four successful albums, or that time frontman Dave “Dixie” Collins accidentally shot off his toe with a shotgun.

I could also dedicate my word count to snippets from some of Weedeater’s more ecstatic reviews. Such as SputnikMusic.com’s rave about Collins’ “teeth-rattling bass and throat-searing vocals” and the Answers: 1 – D, 2 – A, 3 – E, 4 – B, 5 – C, 6 – F. That last number is certainly catchy, but for Heaven’s sake, don’t ever try it. I hear wolves don’t like that.

1) “I’m Yo ____”2) “____ Fang Thang”3) “Big ____”4) “Broke ____”5) “First ____”6) “Ride the ____”

A) BabyB) JokeC) LoveD) MuddaE) StarF) Wolf


What Else Is Happenin’What’s Happenin’ by Mike Schulz

[email protected]

MUSICThursday, April 2 – ZZ Top.

Concert with the chart-topping musicians and members of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Adler Theatre (136 East Third Street, Davenport). 7:30 p.m. $55-75. For tickets, call (800)745-3000 or visit AdlerTheatre.com.

Thursday, April 2 – Daphne Willis. Alternative-country, rock, and folk musician in concert, with an opening set by Gina Venier. The Redstone Room (129 Main Street, Davenport). 7:30 p.m. $9.50-10. For tickets and information, call (563)326-1333 or visit RiverMusicExperience.org.

Friday, April 3 – Ricky Nelson Remembered. Tribute concert to the pop star with Matthew and Gunnar Nelson. Quad-Cities Waterfront Convention Center (2021 State Street, Bettendorf). 7:30 p.m. For information, call (800)724-5828 or visit Bettendorf.IsleOfCapriCasinos.com.

Friday, April 3 – Darlingside. Indie-folk musicians in concert, with an opening set by Tall Heights. The Redstone Room (129 Main Street, Davenport). 8:30 p.m. $9.50-10. For tickets and information, call (563)326-1333 or visit RiverMusicExperience.org. For a 2014 interview with Darlingside’s Don Mitchell, visit RCReader.com/y/darlingside.

Friday, April 3 – Sara Rachele. Concert with the New York-based singer/songwriter, with an opening set by Erin Moore. Rozz-Tox (2108 Third Avenue, Rock Island). 9 p.m. $5-


Liz Longley album. According to a March interview in The Huffington Post, acclaim for Longley’s smooth, soulful vocal stylings and lyrical honesty actually began as early as ninth grade, when the nascent artist received a standing ovation for performing her first composition, “Bye Bye Baby.”

Since then, however, admiration for the Pennsylvania native has only grown, and on a national scale, to boot. Prior to her Berklee graduation, Longley was the recipient of the 2009 Rocky Mountain Folk Festival’s songwriting showcase and the 2010 BMI John Lennon Songwriting Scholarship Competition, and also scored a songwriting citation from the

International Acoustic Music Awards.But it’s with her first album for Sugar Hill

Records, and the plaudits accompanying it, that Longley has officially joined the ranks of her generation’s most gifted singer/songwriters. American Songwriter magazine, for instance, praises the artist’s “sweet, clear, sensitive voice, strong sense of melody, and introspective lyrics,” and states that “every track boasts a memorable musical or lyrical hook that feels natural and organic.” Philadelphia Weekly writes, “Liz Longley hits that scintillating sweet spot for female singer-songwriters: not quite country, a little folksy, far from schmaltzy, and patently gutsy.”

And PopDose.com raves, “Liz Longley’s self-titled debut on the legendary Sugar Hill label is a thing of beauty,” and adds that “her songs, which are lyric-smart and melody-rich, immediately hit all the right notes and heights.” So reserve tickets for this phenomenal talent’s concert on April 15. It starts at 7:30 p.m. and will be over before midnight, so there’ll still be time to get my dad a gift.

Liz Longley’s Redstone Room concert features an opening set by Brian Wright, and more information and tickets are available by calling (563)326-1333 or visiting RiverMusicExperience.org.

MusicWeedeaterRock Island Brewing CompanyThursday, April 9, 8 p.m.

The grunge-, sludge-, and stoner-metal musicians of

Weedeater will play a sure-to-be-electrifying concert at the Rock Island Brewing Company on April 8, and I could easily spend my space here talking about the North Carolina outfit’s incredible 17-year touring history, or the group’s four successful albums, or that time frontman Dave “Dixie” Collins accidentally shot off his toe with a shotgun.

I could also dedicate my word count to snippets from some of Weedeater’s more ecstatic reviews. Such as SputnikMusic.com’s rave about Collins’ “teeth-rattling bass and throat-searing vocals” and the

band’s “atmospheric and progressive styles.” Or this one from Pitchfork.com: “Bassist and frontman Dave ‘Dixie’ Collins howls as if the bong resin covering his larynx were scraped clean with razor blades soaked in brown whiskey, and guitarist Dave ‘Shep’

Shepherd saturates the space between Collins’ meat-hook bass melodies with ample fuzz.” (That’s a compliment, right?)

But in all honesty, I can’t think of a better way to promote Weedeater’s upcoming RIBCO concert than by letting the band’s online biography from Weedeater.com do it for me. So:

“Their unfiltered and unrefined energy surges uncontrollably through the band and anyone who bears witness to their live show. Spite and deep resentment somehow fuse with comedy and maximum volume to produce

an indignant, vomitous (both figuratively and sometimes literally) performance that is forced upon the willing yet hapless crowd. You are instantly swallowed whole by both Dixie and Shep’s nearly indistinguishable monster bass and guitar tones, and you are absolutely beaten to a bloody pulp and scared for your life by Keko [Kirkum]’s crazed yet amazingly potent bashing of his kit, with sticks that look like tree trunks turning into a splintered mess by the end of every song. If you had any sense, you might actually take a step back and contemplate your safety for a moment, but then you come to your senses (sort of, anyway) and realize you’re at a f---ing Weedeater show, and this is why you came here, and there is no way to deny what you are witnessing. Pure, unabashed, musical violence in every form.”

Any questions?Weedeater performs with opening sets by

King Parrot and Crater, and more information on the night is available by calling (309)793-1999 or visiting RIBCO.com.


10. For information, call (309)200-0978 or visit RozzTox.com.

Friday, April 3, and Saturday, April 4 – Natty Scratch. A 43rd-anniversary weekend featuring all the band’s original members. Friday: The Rusty Nail (2606 West Locust Street, Davenport); 8:30 p.m.; for information, call (563)386-1900. Saturday: Main Event (3819 State Street, Bettendorf); 8:30 p.m.; for information, call (563)359-3938.

Saturday, April 4 – Harper & Midwest Kind. Australian singer/songwriter Peter D. Harper and his ensemble in concert, with an opening set by Dan Hubbard. The Redstone Room (129 Main Street, Davenport). 8 p.m. $12-15. For tickets and information, call (563)326-1333 or visit RiverMusicExperience.org.

Saturday, April 4 – Har-di-Har. Spouses and “freak pop” musicians Julie and Andrew Thoreen in concert, with opening sets by Condor & Jaybird and Tambourine. Rozz-Tox (2108 Third Avenue, Rock Island). 9 p.m. $5-10. For information, call (309)200-0978 or visit RozzTox.com. For a 2013 interview with Julie Thoreen, visit RCReader.com/y/hardihar.

Sunday, April 5 – Iowa All-Star Tour. Concert with the Midwestern musicians Brooks Strause, Dana T, Dylan Sires & Neighbors, Curt Oren, and Extravision. Rozz-Tox (2108 Third Avenue, Rock Island). 7 p.m. $5-10. For information, call (309)200-0978 or visit RozzTox.com.

Friday, April 10 – The Schwag. Grateful Dead tribute musicians in concert. Rock Island Brewing Company (1815 Second Avenue, Rock Island). 9:30 p.m. $10. For information, call (309)793-4060 or visit RIBCO.com.

Friday, April 10 – Mason Jennings. Concert with the folk-pop singer/songwriter. The Redstone Room (129 Main Street, Davenport). 7 p.m. $27.50-32.50. For tickets and information, call (563)326-1333 or visit RiverMusicExperience.org.

Saturday, April 11, and Sunday, April 12 – Quad City Symphony Orchestra. Mark Russell Smith conducts a world premiere by James Stephenson, Schoenberg’s Friede auf Erden, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, featuring guests from Quad City Choral Arts and the Handel Oratorio Society under

the direction of Mark Hurty. Saturday: Adler Theatre (136 East Third Street, Davenport), 8 p.m. Sunday: Augustana College’s Centennial Hall (3703

Seventh Avenue, Rock Island), 2 p.m. $13.50-66.35. For tickets, call (800)745-3000 or visit QCSymphony.com.

Saturday, April 11 – Galactic Cowboy Orchestra. Jazz, classical, bluegrass, and Southern-rock musicians in concert. The Redstone Room (129 Main Street,

Davenport). 8 p.m. $9.50-10. For tickets and information, call (563)326-1333 or visit RiverMusicExperience.org.

Tuesday, April 14 – Abraham Lincoln in Song. Chris Vallillo weaves original, contemporary, and traditional songs and narratives into a performance commemorating the 150th anniversary of the president’s death. Butterworth Center (1105 Eighth Street, Moline). 7 p.m. Free. For information, call (309)743-2701 or visit ButterworthCenter.com.

Wednesday, April 15 – Shana Falana. Concert with the Brooklyn-based pop artist. Rozz-Tox (2108 Third Avenue, Rock Island). 8 p.m. $5-10. For information, call (309)200-0978 or visit RozzTox.com.

THEATREThursday, April 9, through Sunday,

April 19 – The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). A slapstick blend of the Bard’s works by Adam Long, Daniel Singer, and Jess Winfield, directed by Tom Morrow. Richmond Hill Barn Theatre (600 Robinson Drive, Geneseo). Thursdays through Saturdays 7:30 p.m., Sundays 3 p.m. $10. For tickets and information, call (309)944-2244 or visit RHPlayers.com.

Friday, April 10, through Saturday, April 18 – God of Carnage. Yasmina Reza’s Tony-winning dark comedy about warring married couples, directed by Kevin Babbitt. Scott Community College Student Life Center (Room 2400 through Door 5, 500 Belmont Road, Bettendorf). Fridays and Saturdays 7 p.m. $7 at the door. For information, call (563)441-4339 or e-mail [email protected].

Monday, April 13 – Molly Brown: More Than Unsinkable. Barbara Kay presents a one-woman show on the Titanic survivor and social reformer. Moline Public Library (3210 41st Street, Moline). 6:30 p.m. Free. For information, call (309)524-2470 or visit MolineLibrary.com.

Tuesday, April 14, through Friday, May 15 – Fancy Nancy: The Musical. Family show based on Jane O’Connor’s children’s book, directed by Andrea Moore. Circa ’21 Dinner Playhouse (1828 Third Avenue, Rock Island). 10 a.m. and/or 1 p.m. performances on select Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. $8.50 For tickets and information, call (309)786-7733 extension 2 or visit Circa21.com.

COMEDYSaturday, April 4, and Saturday,

April 11 – Rock City Live. Sean Leary and My Verona Productions present a sketch-comedy show in the vein of Saturday Night Live. Circa ’21 Speakeasy (1818 Third Avenue, Rock Island). 8 p.m. $10-12. For tickets and information, call (309)786-7733 extension 2 or visit Circa21.com.

Friday, April 10 – Ben Kronberg. An evening of stand-up with the nationally touring comedian and star of the Web series Ted & Gracie. The Backroom Comedy Theater (1510 Harrison Street, Davenport). 7 p.m. $10-12. For tickets and information, call (309)781-9617 or visit BlacklistComedy.com.

MOVIESTuesday, April 14 – Discovering

the Dutch. A World Adventure Series screening presented by filmmaker Sandy Mortimer. Putnam Museum (1717 West 12th Street, Davenport). 1 and 7 p.m. $6.50-8.50. For tickets and information, call (563)324-1933 or visit Putnam.org.

SPORTSSaturday, April 11 – Quad City

Rollers. Matches with the all-female flat-track roller-derby team. QCCA Expo Center (2621 Fourth Avenue, Rock Island). 6 p.m. $10-12. For tickets and information, visit Facebook.com/QuadCityRollers.

EXHIBITSFriday, April 3, through Friday, May

15 – Gender: A Printmaking Portfolio Exchange. Printmaking exhibit in the university’s “Exploring Gender” series.

St. Ambrose University’s Morrissey Gallery (2010 Gaines Street, Davenport). Mondays through Fridays 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Free. For information, call (563)333-6444 or visit SAU.edu/morrissey.

Saturday, April 4, through Sunday, April 12 – Young Artists at the Figge: North Scott. Exhibit of works by elementary art students. Figge Art Museum (225 West Second Street, Davenport). Tuesdays through Saturdays 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thursdays 10 a.m.-9 p.m., Sundays noon-5 p.m. Free with $4-7 museum admission.

For information, call (563)326-7804 or visit FiggeArtMuseum.org.

Sunday, April 12, through Sunday, July 26 – From Woof to Wolf: The Dogs of Deutschland. Exhibit showcasing German dogs through photos and written material. German American Heritage Center (712 West Second Street,

Davenport). Tuesdays through Saturdays 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Sundays noon-4 p.m. Free with $3-5 museum admission. For information, call (563)322-8844 or visit GAHC.org.

EVENTSSaturday, April 11 – Bacon & Beer

Festival. Event featuring presentations and samples from the region’s top eateries, pork purveyors, and craft breweries. Davenport RiverCenter (136 East Third Street, Davenport). 4:30-8:30 p.m. $25-50. For tickets, call (800)745-3000 or visit RiverCtr.com.

Saturday, April 11 – 5K Run/Walk for Epilepsy. Fundraiser featuring family activities and an after-party, with proceeds helping to fund the Epilepsy Foundation’s “camPossible!” camp for youths with epilepsy. Augustana College’s PepsiCo Recreation Center (639 38th Street, Rock Island). 9 a.m.-noon. $17-30 registration. For information and to register, call (309)373-0377 or e-mail [email protected].

Saturday, April 11 – QC Annual Father/Daughter Dance. Formal event hosted by Timrek3 Productions. Golden Leaf Banquet & Convention Center (2902 East Kimberly Road, Davenport). 6 p.m. $30 plus $20 for each additional daughter. For information and to reserve, call (470)231-4748 or visit Timrek3Productions.com.


What Else Is Happenin’

Mason Jennings @ The Redstone Room - April 10

Ben Kronberg @ The Backroom Comedy Theater - April 10



A Foot in the Doorby Jeff Ignatius

[email protected]

Throughout Nightlight, Beck and Woods are tremendously playful – in their cruelly suspenseful way of keeping characters off-screen for long periods of time, and especially in messing with audience assumptions of who (or what) is holding the flashlight at any given moment.

And they throw so much into the stew – monsters, wild animals, ghosts, possession – that the movie might best be appreciated as a poker-faced parody of found-footage scare flicks.

But lest you think Beck and Woods are merely horror junkies, they were the ones who mentioned the Lumières – along with some more-contemporary heroes.

Woods said Nightlight drew significantly from Gus Van Sant’s “Death Trilogy”: Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days. “He just kind of follows these characters with these long tracking shots,” he said, and he and Beck thought “it would be interesting to appropriate that style into the horror genre. To be able to follow characters around for extended periods of time ... could be really suspenseful in a horror context.” (Ironically, Van Sant has finished the drama The Sea of Trees, which takes place in Japan’s Suicide Forest – one inspiration for Nightlight.)

Beck and Woods also wanted to make a movie that looked better than its peers.

“This film in general is very odd for us,” Beck said. “This ... was much more a documentary approach. But we still wanted to make sure there was something visually aesthetic to it. That’s our sensibility.”

“Found footage you associate with a low-budget, kind of ugly-looking movie,” Woods said. “While I do not think we achieved this at all, our mantra was always like: ‘What if Stanley Kubrick made a found-footage movie? What would it look like? What would a high-end version look like?’ That was what we were aspiring to. ... We wanted to do something that had an aesthetic prettiness to it as well as be terrifying.”

Woods was laughing as he was saying this, because while one can clearly see an eye for strong compositions in much of the duo’s other work, there really aren’t many opportunities for that when the movie is shot from the point of view of a flashlight. “I think what we realized by the end of the movie,” he said, “was [that] Stanley Kubrick would just never make a found-footage movie.”

If the style didn’t quite fit with Beck’s and Woods’ natural tendencies – or their Kubrick-ian ideal – the long takes, at least, aligned with their vision. “I think we just know as viewers what we respond to, and certainly we respond to movies like Children of Men,” Woods said. “We love to see directors using every tool of cinema that they have at their

disposal. ... There’s something so ineffective about a movie that’s just covered from every angle with quick cuts and your basic close-up. There’s something not moving about that, for us as viewers.”

“There’s many ways to shoot a movie,” Beck added, “but ideally you come up with the one right way to shoot it that really conveys the information as succinctly as possible.”

“There’s No Handbook for That”

Beck said he and Woods started outlining Nightlight in 2010 or 2011, when they were still working in a movie theater.

Those jobs, Woods said, certainly informed their writing – from a love of a collective horror-movie experience to understanding teenagers: “It’s a great way to stay in touch with real life and real people. ... Having a sense of what they’re interested in, how they

sound when they talk, it was rocket fuel for writing.”

“We were just trying to formulate the script and figure out how the hell we can get out of these minimum-wage jobs and actually make a movie,” Beck said. “L.A.’s expensive, and it’s not always a fun place to live when you’re not actually making movies. ...

“We did write it with a couple paths of production in mind,” he continued. Although he wouldn’t say how much the movie cost to make, “there was also the version where it could have been done for ... $100,000, for instance, or $200,000, where it would be much more pared down and we could bring it back to Iowa and shoot it.”

How they actually got the film made (with a bigger budget) illustrates the time and work that go into starting a career in the film industry. Impulse was a key to getting to the MTV pilot, and it didn’t hurt that the duo had a prior relationship with MTV Films because

of a 2005 development deal won in an mtvU contest.

The pilot, in turn, “was the directing sample that we took with the script for Nightlight that was able to sell us as writers/directors,” Beck said.

The Nightlight script – with the directing sample Spread – landed the movie financing, with London as one of the producers.

The movie was shot for five weeks in Utah in summer 2012, and post-production took it into summer 2013 – time needed to get Nightlight into a form that made sense for the horror movie it was.

“It’s very experimental,” Woods said, “and there’s really no rules for how to make a flashlight movie. There’s no handbook for that.”

So while Beck and Woods were fond of those long, Van Sant-y takes, they weren’t always compatible with a genre in which 90 minutes is a typical length. There was a lot of

COVER STORY

he reveals the tortured history of the haunted woods and outlines the rules for surviving them: Keep your flashlight off whenever possible, don’t write your name anywhere, and whatever you do, never enter the church. (Chris’ ghost-story pause after saying “whatever you do ... ” made me hope he’d follow it with “ ... don’t feed them after midnight,” but while we do get an amusingly offhanded Ghostbusters gag, there’s no direct reference to Gremlins.) Yet Chris goes on to explain that everything in Covington Forest – the rocks, the trees, the animals – is possessed by the spirits of those who committed suicide there. Not only that, but the teens are advised that these spirits will play tricks with their minds, and they’re not to trust what they see, what they hear, or even – with supernaturally imposed narcolepsy being one of the region’s side effects – what they themselves do.

Well ... that kind of bites. Because if absolutely anything goes and we can’t believe in anything, how are we supposed to find any of this scary? Rules are essential for successful fright films, as is, generally speaking, some connection to real-world experience; imagine how much less terrifying Halloween would’ve been had we been informed that Michael Myers could not only walk, but teleport and fly.

Consequently, Nightlight’s “The only rule is ... there are no rules!” stratagem works against the film. Characters fall asleep in one place and wake up in another, the dead lumber around many minutes after they’ve perished, noses and eyes and fingertips bleed for no reason, unconscious teens levitate, a Groot-like tree figure occasionally pops up, and one twist means as much, or as little, as the next. There’s that famous line in The Incredibles: “When everyone’s super, no one will be.” In a horror movie, when anything can happen, nothing truly interesting will happen.

(The movie’s most intriguing bit is actually, in all probability, an accidental one. Near the end of a teary Robin monologue midway through, we suddenly see someone roaming around in the darkness behind her, appearing center-screen and trudging off to the left. He’s never referenced and his movements don’t suggest anything remotely supernatural, and you’re left with the feeling that this shadowy figure – likely a crew member merely in the wrong place at the wrong time – was just an embarrassing, unnoticed-’til-it-was-too-late-to-fix gaffe, like the notorious “ghost kid” in Three Men & a Baby.)

But sterling technique, and a sense of humor, can outweigh a lot of narrative complaints, and Nightlight has both

to spare. Despite the pummeling, predictable bangs and booms that arrive in tandem with shock cuts in this musical-score-less entertainment, the sound design is superb; I particularly liked the strange noise conceived for the flashlight flickering on and off, which is like an electric crackle laced with jingle bells. Beck and Woods also do wonderfully well with their creepy scenes of sustained quiet, and film editor Russell Andrew’s cutting is especially strong in the early, lighthearted scenes, punctuating punchlines with such razor-sharp skill that it barely matters whether the jokes are funny or not. (About half the time, they are; the best one has the hopelessly uncool Robin attempting, unsuccessfully, to get in the others’ good graces by joining their Twitter conversation: “Do you guys follow the president?!”) Flaws and all, the movie is a sturdy genre entry, and an excellent calling card for its gifted writers/directors. Not long into the film, Nia, or maybe it’s Amelia, says to the boys, “Whatever this game is, I’m sure it’d be much more fun with beer.” I can’t really argue otherwise, but Nightlight is still plenty of fun without it.

Nightlight is currently available on VOD providers including iTunes, Amazon.com, and Direct TV.

The Woods Beckonby Mike Schulz

[email protected] From Page 7



2015 tour in West Palm Beach in January, and it’s been so much fun and has gotten great reactions.”

While Quad Citians won’t be able to see the complete Clothesline Muse production during Freelon’s area stay, many of her local engagements will feature the performer “talking about my reflections on creating the piece and singing some of the music from the piece, and I’ll have a few visuals with me.”

Then, in April 18’s residency-ending concert at the Bettendorf High School Performing Arts Center, Freelon’s performance “is going to be myself with my trio, and we’ll be doing songs from my last album Homefree. So there’ll be a variety of different events while I’m circulating through the community. It’s going to be a total smorgasbord.”

And the menu, of course, will also find the Quad City Arts Visiting Artist performing for children in her numerous appearances at local schools, which delights this passionate, longtime advocate for arts education who served four years as the national spokesperson for the initiative Partners in Education.

“I grew up as an artist,” she says, “and I grew up as a mother, and those things are kind of mooshed together for me. I feel I’m a better mother because I’m an artist, and I know I’m a better artist because I’m a mother. So I love being able to share my journey with students. I always tell them that there was a time when I only knew, like, 10 tunes. But you begin where you are, and you go from there.

“You have to totally look at the wonder of the blessings that come when you’re open to doing what you’re supposed to be doing, and how beautiful it is when you have a life you love. It’s not always easy, but when you’re not dreading going to work, and when the work you do feeds you, then it can’t help but feed everybody else around you.”

Nnenna Freelon’s Quad City Arts Visiting Artist residency concludes with an April 18 concert at the Bettendorf High School Performing Arts Center (3333 18th Street) at 7 p.m.; admission is free, though donations are encouraged. Freelon will also perform free public events at Black Hawk College (Building 4, room 115, 6600 34th Avenue, Moline) on April 8 at 11 a.m.; the Moline Public Library (3210 41st Street) on April 11 at 3 p.m.; and the Deere-Wiman Carriage House (817 11th Avenue, Moline) on April 17 at 3 p.m.

For more information on Nnenna Freelon and her area residency, visit Nnenna.com and QuadCityArts.com.


Bloom Where You’re Plantedby Mike Schulz

[email protected]

I could tell you about Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Fuquay-Varina ... tiny places and strawberry festivals and all the cracks in between. I was everywhere. And I don’t look on that time with anything but fondness, because that’s how you cut your teeth, and learn to deal with different kinds of audiences.

“I still remember when I had a regular Thursday night at the Sheraton,” she continues. “In the lobby. That’s when I learned literally hundreds of tunes. People would come and say, ‘Oh, do you know this tune? This one would be great for you!’ And it got to be a thing where musicians would come and hang out – even people who were passing through to do shows would sit in. So I got to work with a lot of different people and it was really a great experience, learning how to test the temperature of the room and know what kind of repertoire works in which situation.”

Her local career, however, became an international one thanks in large part to Freelon’s 1990 introduction to the legendary jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis. “I met him at a Southern Arts Federation jazz conference,” she says, “and we became friends, and he continues to be a mentor and a great role model for me. Every time there was an opportunity to speak my name in a positive way or recommend me for something, he did. My record contract with Columbia Records was a direct result of his speaking on my behalf to George Butler, who was the producer of my first record.”

Following the fast success of 1992’s Nnenna Freelon, which climbed to number 11 on Billboard’s jazz charts, Freelon began a busy recording and touring schedule that continues to this day, and that has found her sharing stages with the likes of Aretha Franklin, Anita Baker, Herbie Hancock, and – during one especially memorable tour – Ray Charles.

“I mean, you want to talk about an amazing artist,” says Freelon. “He had an ability to read an audience without actually seeing them, and know just which tune to call. So I would just stand in the wings watching a master – a master – do his thing. It was an incredible education.

“I’ve had all these opportunities to travel the world,” she continues, “and to travel with our kids. And I’ve been so lucky, because I’ve been able to impress on them that I got here on the wings of my art. We got here through love, and we got here because I’m doing what I love, and they’ve all carried that notion with them into their lives. Do what you love, and let the money chase you. You don’t do it the other way around.”

Two Hats, at LeastCurrently, Freelon is spreading her artistic

wings even further – and also stretching her acting, singing, and compositional muscles – with the touring production The Clothesline Muse.

“I always wanted to branch out and do some other things that involve the voice,” she says, “but that also involved acting. I mean, I always dreamed that I would be on Broadway one day. And I’ve auditioned several times for Aida, I’ve auditioned for The Color Purple. But there are very few roles, and what roles there are, you know, ‘You’re too old,’ ‘You’re too young,’ ‘You’re too this or that ... .’”

She laughs. “You can’t take it personally. But I finally realized, you know, ‘If you want to do this in your lifetime, you may have to write something yourself.’ And in speaking with my mentors and people who are well-versed in this world, they all gave me the same advice: ‘Write about something you know about. Don’t write something so outside of your own personal experience that it rings false.’”

Using the experiences of her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother – as well as some of her own – as inspiration, what Freelon wrote was The Clothesline Muse. “It’s a multi-disciplinary piece,” she explains, “and a collaboration between three artists: myself; my daughter Maya Freelon-Asante, who’s a wonderful visual artist and did the set design and the projections; and her mother-in-law Dr. Kariamu Welsh, who choreographed the dance in the piece. So it’s dance, it’s visual, and it’s music. And I wrote the music and am in the piece, so that’s two hats, at least, that I’m wearing.

“It’s the story of a grandmother, Grandma Blu, who’s an elderly washerwoman who is very tied to her clothesline and clothesline culture. She sees the clothesline as a place of memory and history, and wants to share her knowledge with her granddaughter Mary Mack, who’s a little hard-headed and a very modern young woman. She’s plugged into her online culture and social media, and wants nothing to do with the clothesline or grandma’s stories.

“So through the evening,” Freelon continues, “you get this inter-generational clash of values, and this tug-of-war as Mary begins to understand that there’s more than meets the eye here, and more hanging on that line than just sheets. Every story in the piece comes out of grandma’s clothes basket, and every article of clothing has a story, and they’re all told through visual images and music and dance. We premiered it in Philadelphia in April of 2014 and began the

MUSICby Jeff Ignatius [email protected]

work, in other words, getting the movie from its longest (110 minutes) to its final version (85 minutes).

“What we found was that while that [longer] version of the film was more artistically satisfying,” Woods said, “it was also a bit alienating and harder to connect with characters.”

“As much as it can be enticing and immersive,” Beck said, “it’s also immersive to the point where I don’t know if it would sustain itself for two hours.”

That post-production period was also important for the movie’s impressive sound design, which follows through on the title sequence’s visual promise of the audience effectively being inside a flashlight.

All that culminated with a distributor screening that also included a hundred non-industry audience members. (Keep in mind that finishing a movie doesn’t mean that anybody will actually see the thing.) “The distributors would be watching the movie with the audience watching the movie to see how they react,” Woods said. “It was super-scary, because we had no idea how the audience would react. They could have booed us off the screen. You never know. ... Luckily, the reaction was really positive.”

Lionsgate bought the movie and released it unmolested. “Usually, they have issues with it, or they want to fix things with it,” Beck said. “But ... they really loved the finished product. ... They slapped the Lionsgate logo on the front and on the end, and that was pretty much it.”

That distributor screening underscores the importance of relationships and timing to a Hollywood career. Beck and Woods received the script for XOXO from their agents in late 2013 (“Are you sure you meant to send to us?” Beck said with a laugh. “We just fell in love with it immediately.”), and they pitched their take on it to Lionsgate within a few days of the Nightlight screening. London’s company was already attached to XOXO.

Beck called it “very fortuitous” that Lionsgate bought Nightlight at the same time it was selecting a director for XOXO – and that he and Woods already had a working relationship with London.

But even though they have a foot in the door in Hollywood, Beck and Woods promised that they won’t just become directors for hire – or retire their Bluebox Films production company.

“Our model has and always will be that there are situations where we will come aboard as directors if it’s a script that we really, really love,” Beck said. “But it’s so odd and so hard to find a script that connects with us. Usually that means Bryan and I want to write our own material.”


– is abstract and intangible.) What we find most motivating are “approach goals,” positive outcomes we strive toward. To recast breaking up in that way, offer yourself an immediate and tangible reward, such as treating yourself to a big sloppy dessert right after you do the deed.

Telling him in a timely way is something you do not just for him but for you, because what you do becomes who you are: Murder and you’re a murderer. Garden and you’re a gardener. Keep a guy on the hook and … well, okay, that one goes a little off track. But doing the right thing, the kind thing, would take what? Five uncomfortable minutes on the phone? The cumulative dread of doing it probably feels way worse than the actual doing. Plus, the momentary awfulness seems a small price to pay to become a different sort of person – one who doesn’t make a guy feel like the kid whose mom was supposed to pick him up after soccer but instead moved to Belize.

Baby Got BackpackI saw your recent column about a hiking

date, and I was wondering whether I’d seem cheap if I asked a woman on a hike for the first date. A buddy says it’d seem rude to a woman to not be wined and dined, and I’d come off as chintzy or poor. I’m neither, but hiking’s fun, and I like the idea of not spending big on first dates (most of which are busts anyway).

– Mountain Man

On a first date, a woman should be getting to know you, not getting to know how much you can put on your MasterCard before the waiter comes over with a big pair of scissors. Sure, some women will find you cheap for suggesting a hike – mainly those who resent having to trudge up hills to procure a funding source with a penis. However, even women who are into exercising aren’t always into doing it where they may get close enough to a bear to see that it could use one of those little nose hair trimmers. For these women, you might offer “activity date” alternatives, like bowling or attending a street fair or a gallery opening. These might also work better for first dates with any women you barely know – alluring as it is to hear, “Hi, I’m a total stranger, and I’d like to take you off to a dark, wooded area where there’s no cell-phone reception.” (Your shallow grave or mine?)

Got A Problem? Ask Amy Alkon.171 Pier Ave, #280, Santa Monica, CA 90405

or e-mail [email protected] (AdviceGoddess.com)©2015, Amy Alkon, all rights reserved.

Askthe Advice GoddessBY AMY ALKON

Wane of TerrorI’ve been seeing this guy long-distance.

I haven’t really been feeling it and kind of let it drop off, thinking he’d get the hint. He keeps texting and calling. I keep telling him I’m just really busy. The truth is I’ve met somebody else. Do I have to tell him?

– Dreading It

Even milk and meat have the courtesy to let you know when they’re expiring. You, on the other hand, reeled in a guy’s heart, watched it flop around on the carpet, and then misplaced it under a pile of old newspapers.

“Life is short!” you hear people say. And it can be – if you’re in the habit of Snapchatting while meandering across bus lanes. But as the Stoic philosopher Seneca said, “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.” Unfortunately, other people sometimes waste it for us, such as by expecting us to “get the hint” that they’re done with us. By the way, men, especially, tend to be poor at hint-taking. So yes, you actually have to tell the guy – rather than continue with your current approach: “I dumped you. You’re smart. You’ll figure it out eventually.”

To be human is to procrastinate – to put off till tomorrow (or the second Tuesday in never) what we could do today. Behavioral-science research finds that we are biased toward the right now, irrationally overvaluing a small payoff we can have right away over a substantially larger one down the road. We’re especially quick to put off anything that involves duty (and its conjoined twin, discomfort). This is irrational because deferring almost always costs far more – like if we delay going to the doctor until we have not only a tumor but one with 3,651 Facebook friends.

Likewise, instead of cleverly escaping the stress of breaking up, you’ve built stressing about it into your daily routine: Coffee … ignore uncomfortable text … feed the cat … duck his call. It seems that ending the daily feel-bads should be motivation enough for you to clue the guy in. The problem is, the human motivational system tends to be in-activated by “avoidance goals” – negative outcomes we’re trying to avoid, such as avoiding feeling guilty for stringing a guy along. (It doesn’t help that the “reward” here – shifting from feeling guilty to feeling relieved


Cloud,” which is also known as “Daffodils.” The poem sprung from him after a walk he took with his sister around Lake Ullswater in the English Lake District. There they were delighted to find a long, thick belt of daffodils growing close to the water. In his poem, Wordsworth praises the “ten thousand” flowers that were “Continuous as the stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way.” If you are ever going to have your own version of a daffodil explosion that inspires a burst of creativity, Sagittarius, it will come in the coming weeks.

CAPRICORN (December 22-January 19): Your subconscious desires and your conscious desires

seem to be at odds. What you say you want is not in precise alignment with what your deep self wants. That’s why I’m worried that “Don’t! Stop!” might be close to morphing into “Don’t stop!” – or vice versa. It’s all pretty confusing. Who’s in charge here? Your false self or your true self? Your wounded, conditioned, habit-bound personality or your wise, eternal, ever-growing soul? I’d say it’s a good time to retreat into your sanctuary and get back in touch with your primal purpose.

AQUARIUS (January 20-February 18): Sometimes you’re cool, but

other times you’re hot. You veer from acting aloof and distracted to being friendly and attentive. You careen from bouts of laziness to bursts of disciplined efficiency. It seems that you’re always either building bridges or burning them, and on occasion you are building and burning them at the same time. In short, Aquarius, you are a master of vacillation and a slippery lover of the in-between. When you’re not completely off-target and out of touch, you’ve got a knack for wild-guessing the future and seeing through the false appearances that everyone else regards as the gospel truth. I, for one, am thoroughly entertained!

PISCES (February 19-March 20): How can you ripen the initiatives you have set in motion in recent weeks? Of the

good new trends you have launched, which can you now install as permanent enhancements in your daily rhythm? Is there anything you might do to cash in on the quantum leaps that have occurred, maybe even figure out a way to make money from them? It’s time for you to shift from being lyrically dreamy to fiercely practical. You’re ready to convert lucky breaks into enduring opportunities. Homework: Before bed on the next five nights, remember everything that happened during the day. Do it with compassion and objectivity. Testify at FreeWillAstrology.com.

think that everyone who uses it is deluded or stupid. I say that both of these groups are wrong. Both have a simplistic, uninformed perspective. The more correct view is that some astrology is nonsense and some is a potent psychological tool. Some of it is based on superstition and some is rooted in a robust mytho-poetic understanding of archetypes. I encourage you to employ a similar appreciation for paradox as you evaluate a certain influence that is currently making a big splash in your life. In one sense, this influence is like snake oil, and you should be skeptical about it. But in another sense it’s good medicine that can truly heal.

VIRGO (August 23-September 22): According to the Biblical stories, Peter was Christ’s closest disciple, but acted

like a traitor when trouble came. After Christ was arrested, in the hours before the trial, Peter denied knowing his cherished teacher three different times. His fear trumped his love, leading him to violate his sacred commitment. Is there anything remotely comparable to that scenario developing in your own sphere, Virgo? If you recognize any tendencies in yourself to shrink from your devotion or violate your highest principles, I urge you to root them out. Be brave. Stay strong and true in your duty to a person or place or cause that you love.

LIBRA (September 23-October 22): Marketing experts say

consumers need persistent prodding before they will open their minds to possibilities that are outside their entrenched habits. The average person has to be exposed to a new product at least eight times before it fully registers on his or her awareness. Remember this rule of thumb as you seek attention and support for your brainstorms. Make use of the art of repetition. Not just any old boring, tedious kind of repetition, though. You’ve got to be as sincere and fresh about presenting your goodies the eighth time as you were the first.

SCORPIO (October 23-November 21): In Cole Porter’s song “I Get a Kick Out of You,” he testifies that he

gets no kick from champagne. In fact, “Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all,” he sings. The same is true about cocaine. “I’m sure that if I took even one sniff that would bore me terrifically, too,” Porter declares. With this as your nudge, Scorpio, and in accordance with the astrological omens, I encourage you to identify the titillations that no longer provide you with the pleasurable jolt they once did. Acknowledge the joys that have grown stale and the adventures whose rewards have waned. It’s time for you to go in search of a new array of provocative fun and games.

SAGITTARIUS (November 22-December 21): The English writer William Wordsworth (1770-

1830) wrote hundreds of poems. Among his most famous was “I Wandered Lonely as a

Go to RealAstrology.com to check out Rob Brezsny's EXPANDED WEEKLY AUDIO HOROSCOPES

& DAILY TEXT MESSAGE HOROSCOPESThe audio horoscopes are also available by phone at

1-877-873-4888 or 1-900-950-7700

FREE WILL ASTROLOGY by Rob BrezsnyARIES (March 21-April 19): “Choconiverous” is an English slang word that’s defined as having the tendency, when eating a chocolate

Easter Bunny, to bite the head off first. I recommend that you adopt this direct approach in everything you do in the coming weeks. Don’t get bogged down with preliminaries. Don’t get sidetracked by minor details, trivial distractions, or peripheral concerns. It’s your duty to swoop straight into the center of the action. Be clear about what you want and unapologetic about getting it.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The American snack cake known as a Twinkie contains 68-percent

air. Among its 37 other mostly worthless ingredients are sugar, water, cornstarch, the emulsifier polysorbate 60, the filler sodium stearoyl lactylate, and food coloring. You can’t get a lot of nutritious value by eating it. Now let’s consider the fruit known as the watermelon. It’s 91 percent water and six percent sugar. And yet it also contains a good amount of Vitamin C, lycopene, and antioxidants, all of which are healthy for you. So if you are going to eat a whole lot of nothing, watermelon is a far better nothing than a Twinkie. Let that serve as an apt metaphor for you in the coming week.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): You may be as close as you have ever gotten to finding the long-lost Holy

Grail – or Captain Kidd’s pirate treasure, for that matter, or Marie Antoinette’s jewels, or Tinkerbell’s magical fairy dust, or the smoking-gun evidence that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Francis Bacon. At the very least, I suspect you are ever-so-near to your personal equivalent of those precious goods. Is there anything you can do to increase your chances of actually getting it? Here’s one tip: Visualize in detail how acquiring the prize would inspire you to become even more generous and magnanimous than you already are.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): People are paying attention to you in new ways. That’s what you wanted, right?

You’ve been emanating subliminal signals that convey messages like “Gaze into my eternal eyes” and “Bask in the cozy glow of my crafty empathy.” So now what? Here’s one possibility: Go to the next level. Show the even-more-interesting beauty that you’re hiding below the surface. You may not think you’re ready to offer the gifts you have been “saving for later.” But you always think that. I dare you to reveal more of your deep secret power.

LEO (July 23-August 22): Some people believe unquestioningly in the truth and power of astrology. They

imagine it’s an exact science that can unfailingly discern character and predict the future. Other people believe all astrology is nonsense. They


March 19 Answers: Page 4HEIR UNAPPARENT · April 2, 2015

ACROSS1. Abbr. in a reference5. The best10. Laid out16. _ Perignon19. Novella by Colette20. Kind of wave21. Sleep-inducer22. “Norma _”23. Start of a quip by Bob Hope: 5 wds.26. Part of NATO: Abbr.27. Steamship area28. That stings!29. Epic poetry31. A chordophone32. Bung34. “Happy Days _ _ Again”35. Tractable38. A pronoun39. Salad plant40. Jet black41. Mobile42. Sacha Baron Cohen role43. Prosciutto46. Pout47. A deadly sin48. Ordinary49. You bet!50. Sun. talk51. Uncouth ones52. Kindness53. Oceanian country54. Like some gardens56. French 101 verb57. Realize58. Part 2 of quip: 6 wds.62. _ pete63. Swerve64. _ l’oeil65. Cell terminal66. Bucephalus, e.g.67. Orderly crowd68. A state: Abbr.71. Entre _72. Lots and lots73. Laughing74. Computer maker75. Bad: Prefix

76. Rope with a noose77. Picayune78. _ brevis79. Positions80. Transparent fabric81. Hound82. Eighth sign85. “To _ own self be true...”86. Promenade87. Said grace88. Earthy deposit89. Region of Italy93. Sea bird94. End of the quip: 5 wds.98. B-F link99. Spenser’s “_ Queene”100. Join101. Shoe brand102. Longing103. Collections of cars104. Like some communities105. Doyen

DOWN1. Sponsorship: Var.2. At full _3. American author4. Source of salvation5. Fashion6. Gamut7. Brink8. Afflict or trouble9. Extinct bird10. Spacecraft part11. Swiftly12. Plant tissue13. Perfectly14. Otherworldly15. Most profound16. Hang17. Western18. Battle royal24. Without pretense25. Sound30. Interjections32. “Blue Suede _”33. Fishing locale34. Data in rows and columns35. Some pols

36. Woodwind37. Lion-hearted38. Regulating devices39. Think41. Read for errors42. Wilkes- _43. Compassionate quality44. Arum45. Average47. Disney character48. “Little Women” name49. Stayed awake: 2 wds.51. Chap52. Cried like a kitten53. Galumph55. Drops57. Underway58. Get at59. Body of mullahs60. Regrets61. Socratic _62. Material for castles66. Defunct alliance67. Championship69. Otherwise70. Raucous sound72. Leftover73. Check74. Deplored76. Make unreachable: 2 wds.77. Old French soldier78. _ _ mer79. Crowbar80. Violent pangs81. Prickly82. High on drugs: Var.83. Unrefined84. Of a wood85. Merely implied86. Dull surface88. Mud89. In a _90. Agreeable91. Quechuan92. Dramatic conflict95. Pipe fitting96. Haul97. Kind of evidence


Live Music Live Music Live Music Email all listings to [email protected] • Deadline 5 p.m. Thursday before publication

2015/04/05 (Sun)

Father John Misty - King Tuff -Englert Theatre, 221 East Washington St. Iowa City, IA

Iowa All-Star Tour: Brooks Strause - Dana T - Dylan Sires & Neighbors - Curt Oren - Extravision -Rozz-Tox, 2108 3rd Ave. Rock Island, IL

Sunday Jazz Brunch w/ the Josh Duf-fee Jazz Quartet (9am) -Bix Bistro, 200 E. 3rd St. Davenport, IA

Wild Savages -Gabe’s, 330 E. Washing-ton St. Iowa City, IA

2015/04/06 (Mon)

Moeller Mondays Presents -Rozz-Tox, 2108 3rd Ave. Rock Island, IL

The Homeless Open Mic Projec t (1pm) -The Center, 1411 Brady St. Davenport, IA

The Things They Carried - Battle Red - Crater -Gabe’s, 330 E. Washington St. Iowa City, IA

2015/04/07 (Tue)

Chris Avey Live -My Place the Pub, 4405 State St. Bettendorf, IA

Happyness -Gabe’s, 330 E. Washington St. Iowa City, IA

Live Lunch w/ Steve Couch (noon) -RME Community Stage, 131 W. 2nd St. Davenport, IA

Nevada Nevada - Toby Brown Band - Phil Bonello -Rozz-Tox, 2108 3rd Ave. Rock Island, IL

2015/04/08 (Wed)

Burlington Street Bluegrass Band -The Mill, 120 E. Burlington St. Iowa City, IA

2015/04/01 (Wed)

Airyck Sterrett - Matt Rissi - Giant Child - bTsunami -Iowa City Yacht Club, 13 S Linn St Iowa City, IA

Chris Avey Experience Acoustic Show -Rascals Live, 1414 15th St. Moline, IL

Daphne Willis - Gina Venier -The Redstone Room, 129 Main St Dav-enport, IA

Dave Ellis & Guests -Grumpy’s Saloon, 2120 E 11th St Davenport, IA

How to Dress Well - MAIDS - Jack Lion -Gabe’s, 330 E. Washington St. Iowa City, IA

Mission Creek Festival 2015: Chris Forsyth & the Solar Motel Band - White Mystery - Burning Hand -The Mill, 120 E. Burlington St. Iowa City, IA

Real Estate - Ryley Walker -Englert Theatre, 221 East Washington St. Iowa City, IA

ZZ Top -Adler Theatre, 136 E. 3rd St. Davenport, IA

2015/04/03 (Fri)

Ben Miller Band - Mayflies - Cedar County Cobras -Iowa City Yacht Club, 13 S Linn St Iowa City, IA

Blues Rock It w/ “Detroit” Larry Davi-son -The Muddy Waters, 1708 State St. Bettendorf, IA

Buddy Olson (5:30pm) - 43rd Natty Scratch Reunion (8:30pm) -The Rusty Nail, 2606 W. Locust St. Dav-enport, IA

Com Truise - Mr. Nasti - Cuticle -Gabe’s, 330 E. Washington St. Iowa City, IA

Cosmic -11th Street Precinct, 1107 Mound St. Davenport, IA


Joe Pug - Field Report (8pm) - Cygne - Bluebird’s Ghost -Gabe’s, 330 E. Washington St. Iowa City, IA

Night Crawlers (5:30pm) -The Rusty Nail, 2606 W. Locust St. Davenport, IA

Nnenna Freelon (11am) -Black Hawk College - Quad City Campus, 6600 34th Ave. Moline, IL

2015/04/09 (Thu)

Bruiser Queen - Dueling at Dawn -Gabe’s, 330 E. Washington St. Iowa City, IA

Jazz Repertory Ensemble - Guitar Ensemble (6pm) -The Mill, 120 E. Burlington St. Iowa City, IA

Jef & Doc -11th Street Precinct, 1107 Mound St. Davenport, IA

Jeffery Broussard & the Creole Cow-boys -CSPS/Legion Arts, 1103 3rd St SE Cedar Rapids, IA

Joe Smith & the Spicy Pickles - Dan Dimonte -Iowa City Yacht Club, 13 S Linn St Iowa City, IA

Lojo Russo -Grumpy’s Saloon, 2120 E 11th St Davenport, IA

The Knox Faculty and Friends Combo -The Burg’s Bar & Grill, 58 S. Cherry Galesburg, IL

Weedeater - King Parrot - Crater -RIBCO, 1815 2nd Ave. Rock Island, IL

2015/04/10 (Fri)

Buku - Bruuuce - Dem Boys - Dr. Edmond - Cryptic -Gabe’s, 330 E. Washington St. Iowa City, IA

Chuck Murphy -Eagle Ridge Resort & Spa, 444 Eagle Ridge Dr Galena, IL

Easter Egg Scramble: Jordan Dan-ielsen, Jef Spradley & Carolynn Johnston (9am) -Village of East Davenport, Davenport, IA

Har-di-Har - Condor & Jaybird - Tam-bourine -Rozz-Tox, 2108 3rd Ave. Rock Island, IL

Harper & Midwest Kind - Dan Hubbard -The Redstone Room, 129 Main St Davenport, IA

Jazz w/ Jim Buennig (6pm) -Cool Beanz Coffeehouse, 1325 30th St. Rock Island, IL

Johnny Don’t -Kilkenny’s, 300 W. 3rd St. Davenport, IA

Justin Morrissey & Band -11th Street Precinct, 1107 Mound St. Daven-port, IA

Megarad -The Blue Moose Tap, 211 Iowa Ave. Iowa City, IA

Mission Creek Festival 2015: Horse Feathers - Nevada Nevada - Nada-lands -The Mill, 120 E. Burlington St. Iowa City, IA

North of 40 -Purgatory’s Pub, 2104 State St Bettendorf, IA

Darlingside - Tall Heights -The Red-stone Room, 129 Main St Daven-port, IA

Have Your Cake -RIBCO, 1815 2nd Ave. Rock Island, IL

Johnny Don’t -Kilkenny’s, 300 W. 3rd St. Davenport, IA

Jordan Danielsen & Jef Spradley -The Faithful Pilot Cafe & Spirits, 117 N Cody Rd LeClaire, IA

Megarad -2nd Ave. Dance Club, 1815 2nd Ave. Rock Island, IL

Mission Creek Festival 2015: The Sea & Cake - Swearing at Motorists - The Multiple Cat -The Mill, 120 E. Burlington St. Iowa City, IA

Ricky Nelson Remembered -Quad-Cities Waterfront Convention Center, 2021 State St. Bettendorf, IA

Sara Rachele - Erin Moore -Rozz-Tox, 2108 3rd Ave. Rock Island, IL

Shovels & Rope - The Inlaws - Brian Johannesen & Ryan Joseph An-derson -Englert Theatre, 221 East Washington St. Iowa City, IA

Sisters of Oh Mercy (8pm) - The Past Masters (9:30pm) -Riverside Casino and Golf Resort, 3184 Highway 22 Riverside, IA

The Chris & Wes Show -My Place the Pub, 4405 State St. Bettendorf, IA

2015/04/04 (Sat)

43rd Natty Scratch Reunion -Main Event, 3819 State St. Bettendorf, IA

Blues Rock It w/ “Detroit” Larry Davi-son -City Limits Saloon & Grill, 4514 9th St. Rock Island, IL

Cody Road -Broken Saddle, 1417 5th Ave. Moline, IL

Diamond Rugs - New Madrid - The Sapwoods -Gabe’s, 330 E. Washing-ton St. Iowa City, IA

River Prairie Minstrels (6pm) -RME Community Stage, 131 W. 2nd St. Davenport, IA

Russ Reyman Request Piano Bar -The Phoenix Restaurant & Martini Bar, 111 West 2nd St. Davenport, IA

Sisters of Oh Mercy (8pm) - The Past Masters (9:30pm) -Riverside Casino and Golf Resort, 3184 Highway 22 Riverside, IA

Squrl - Younger - Foul Tip -Iowa City Yacht Club, 13 S Linn St Iowa City, IA

The Fritters - Nic & Emma Arp -Uptown Bill’s Coffee House, 730 S. Dubuque St. Iowa City, IA

The Harris Collection -RIBCO, 1815 2nd Ave. Rock Island, IL

The Undertones -My Place the Pub, 4405 State St. Bettendorf, IA

Vice Squad -The Rusty Nail, 2606 W. Locust St. Davenport, IA

Wicked Liz & the Bellyswirls -The Muddy Waters, 1708 State St. Bet-tendorf, IA

Galactic Cowboy Orchestra @ The Redstone Room - April 11

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Search • Discover • Share • Review

More than 700 Restaurant Listings

QuadCitiesDiningGuide.com


2015/04/14 (Tue)

Abraham Lincoln in Song -Butter-worth Center, 1105 8th Street Mo-line, IL

Chris Avey Live -My Place the Pub, 4405 State St. Bettendorf, IA

2015/04/15 (Wed)

Black Violin -Englert Theatre, 221 East Washington St. Iowa City, IA


Liz Longley - Brian Wright -The Redstone Room, 129 Main St Dav-enport, IA

Shana Falana -Rozz-Tox, 2108 3rd Ave. Rock Island, IL

Subterranean All-Stars -Gabe’s, 330 E. Washington St. Iowa City, IA

The Hitman (5:30pm) -The Rusty Nail, 2606 W. Locust St. Davenport, IA

2015/04/16 (Thu)

Christopher the Conquered -Rozz-Tox, 2108 3rd Ave. Rock Island, IL

Chuck Murphy -Crow Valley Golf Club, 4315 E 60th St Davenport, IA

Dave Ellis & Guests -Grumpy’s Saloon, 2120 E 11th St Davenport, IA

Freakabout -Iowa City Yacht Club, 13 S Linn St Iowa City, IA

Jason Carl -11th Street Precinct, 1107 Mound St. Davenport, IA

Jazz Jam w/ the North Scott Jazz Combo -RME Community Stage, 131 W. 2nd St. Davenport, IA

Shook Twins - Barstool Boogaloo - Vic-tory & Penny -The Redstone Room, 129 Main St Davenport, IA

Soul Beautiful (6pm) -Cool Beanz Coffeehouse, 1325 30th St. Rock Island, IL

2015/04/17 (Fri)

Bella Diva -Riverside Casino and Golf Resort, 3184 Highway 22 River-side, IA

Benefit for Angie Hargrove: Gloria Hardiman - Tony Brown - Kevin B.F. Burt - Craig Erickson - Johnny Kilowatt - Mama Teague - Tanya English - Ed English - Sean Seaton -The Mill, 120 E. Burlington St. Iowa City, IA

Blues Rock-It -The Muddy Waters, 1708 State St. Bettendorf, IA

Bucktown Revue -Nighswander The-atre, 2822 Eastern Ave Davenport, IA

Corporate Rock -11th Street Precinct, 1107 Mound St. Davenport, IA

Dale Thomas Band -Walcott Coliseum, 116 E Bryant St Walcott, IA

Goodcat - Gramps the Vamp -Iowa City Yacht Club, 13 S Linn St Iowa City, IA

Jucifer - Heavyweight - Acoustic Guil-lotine - ASEETHE -Gabe’s, 330 E. Washington St. Iowa City, IA

Justin Morrissey -Brix, 425 15th St. Moline, IL

Kopecky -The Redstone Room, 129 Main St Davenport, IA

Meet the Press -RIBCO, 1815 2nd Ave. Rock Island, IL

Nnenna Freelon (3pm) -Deere-Wiman Carriage House, 817 11th Ave. Mo-line, IL

Soul Beautiful - The Blacklights -Rozz-Tox, 2108 3rd Ave. Rock Island, IL

Greg & Rich Acoustic Duo (2pm) -Len Brown’s North Shore Inn, 700 N. Shore Dr. Moline, IL

Hang Union - Buhu -Gabe’s, 330 E. Washington St. Iowa City, IA

Quad City Symphony Orchestra Mas-terworks VI: Peace and Brother-hood Ode to Joy (2pm) -Centennial Hall, Augustana College, 3703 7th Ave. Rock Island, IL

Reverend Raven & the Chain Smokin’ Altar Boys (6pm) -The Muddy Waters, 1708 State St. Bettendorf, IA

Sunday Jazz Brunch w/ the Josh Duf-fee Jazz Quartet (9am) -Bix Bistro, 200 E. 3rd St. Davenport, IA

2015/04/13 (Mon)

Dead Horses -Gabe’s, 330 E. Washington St. Iowa City, IA

Moeller Mondays Presents -Rozz-Tox, 2108 3rd Ave. Rock Island, IL

The Manny Lopez Big Band (6pm) -The Circa ‘21 Speakeasy, 1818 3rd Ave. Rock Island, IL

The Mercury Brothers -The Muddy Waters, 1708 State St. Bettendorf, IA

The Schwag -RIBCO, 1815 2nd Ave. Rock Island, IL

2015/04/11 (Sat)

Band du Jour -East Moline American Legion, 829 16th Ave. East Moline, IL

Bill Sackter Birthday Bash -Uptown Bill’s Coffee House, 730 S. Dubuque St. Iowa City, IA

Blues Rock It w/ “Detroit” Larr y Davison -Jim’s Knoxville Tap, 8716 Knoxville Rd. Milan, IL

Brushville -RIBCO, 1815 2nd Ave. Rock Island, IL

Chuck Murphy -Eagle Ridge Resort & Spa, 444 Eagle Ridge Dr Galena, IL

Clozee - SharkWeek - Funkmaster Hill -Gabe’s, 330 E. Washington St. Iowa City, IA

Code 415 -Purgatory’s Pub, 2104 State St Bettendorf, IA

Flannel Season - Milk Duct Tape - Knubby -Iowa City Yacht Club, 13 S Linn St Iowa City, IA

Galactic Cowboy Orchestra - Milltown -The Redstone Room, 129 Main St Davenport, IA

Gosh - Dog Hairs - Chill Smith - Blue Movies - Concrete Muse -Los Mon-tes Mexican Restaurant, 2006 16th St. Moline, IL

Jewel Kisses - Doug Allen & the Chicago Mob -Riverside Casino and Golf Resort, 3184 Highway 22 Riverside, IA

Justin Morrissey -My Place the Pub, 4405 State St. Bettendorf, IA

Claire Lynch Band -CSPS/Legion Arts, 1103 3rd St SE Cedar Rapids, IA

Dead Larry - Von Stomper - Intele-scope -Iowa City Yacht Club, 13 S Linn St Iowa City, IA

Dirty Water Boys -Broken Saddle, 1417 5th Ave. Moline, IL

Greg & Rich Acoustic Duo -Bleyart’s Tap, 2210 E. 11th St. Davenport, IA

Howard Fishman: The Basement Tapes Project (7 & 9:30pm) -The Mill, 120 E. Burlington St. Iowa City, IA

Jerry Beauchamp Dance -Walcott Coliseum, 116 E Bryant St Walcott, IA

Jewel Kisses - Doug Allen & the Chicago Mob -Riverside Casino and Golf Resort, 3184 Highway 22 Riverside, IA

Justin Morrissey -River House, 1510 River Dr. Moline, IL

Live Lunch w/ Tony Hoeppner (noon) -RME Community Stage, 131 W. 2nd St. Davenport, IA

Mason Jennings -The Redstone Room, 129 Main St Davenport, IA

Night People’s Rob & Gary -My Place the Pub, 4405 State St. Bettendorf, IA

Open Mic Coffeehouse -First Lutheran Church - Rock Island, 1600 20th St. Rock Island, IL

Tangent -11th Street Precinct, 1107 Mound St. Davenport, IA

Teaadora Nikolova - Gosh! - Garrin Jost -Rozz-Tox, 2108 3rd Ave. Rock Island, IL

The Hitman (5pm) - Nor th of 40 (8:30pm) -The Rusty Nail, 2606 W. Locust St. Davenport, IA

The Knox Alumni Big Band (8pm) - Lowdown Brass Band (9:30pm) -The Burg’s Bar & Grill, 58 S. Cherry Galesburg, IL

Knox Jazz Ensemble - Anat Cohen Quartet (5pm) -The Orpheum The-atre, 57 S. Kellogg St. Galesburg, IL

Nicole Green Tyler -Broken Saddle, 1417 5th Ave. Moline, IL

Nnenna Freelon (3pm) -Moline Public Library, 3210 41st St. Moline, IL

Q uad Cit y Symphony O rchestra Masterworks VI: Peace and Broth-erhood Ode to Joy -Adler Theatre, 136 E. 3rd St. Davenport, IA

Russ Reyman Request Piano Bar -The Phoenix Restaurant & Martini Bar, 111 West 2nd St. Davenport, IA

Sam Baker -Princeton Coffeehouse, 25 E. Marion St. Princeton, IL

Smooth Groove -The Rusty Nail, 2606 W. Locust St. Davenport, IA

The Ghost Wolves - Pop Goes the Evil -Rozz-Tox, 2108 3rd Ave. Rock Island, IL

The Jason Carl Band -11th Street Pre-cinct, 1107 Mound St. Davenport, IA

2015/04/12 (Sun)

Becky & the Ivanhoe Dutchmen (1:30pm) -Walcott Coliseum, 116 E Bryant St Walcott, IA

Live Music Live Music Live Music

13MONDAY

Nevada Nevada @ Rozz-Tox - April 7


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Danish MoDern Design for LivingThrough June 21, 2015

Organized by the Museum of Danish America in Elk Horn, Iowa, this exhibition brings together a wonderful selection of the most influential pieces of post-war furniture design and reminds us how Danish design and our daily lives were intertwined in the post-war era.

Davenport, Iowa • 563.326.7804 www.figgeartmuseum.org

Exhibition opEning

Helge Sibast, Chair Model No. 8, 1953, Sibast Furniture, collection of Rosalie Anderson; image courtesy of the Museum of Danish America; Jens Quistgaard, Covered Bowl, 1955, Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Kaj Bojesen, Hippo, Monkey and Bear Figures, Goldstein Museum of Design; Verner Panton, Wire Cone Chair, 1958-1966, Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Sponsored by


TUESDAYS

ABC Karaoke – The Rusty Nail, 2606 W. Locust St., Davenport, IA.

Acoustic Jam Night w/ Steve McFate – Tim’s Corner Tap, 4018 14th Ave., Rock Island, IL.

Acoustic Music Club (4:30pm) – River Music Experience, 129 N. Main Street, Davenport, IA.

Blues Café (Apr. 7 only, 6:30pm) – RME Community Stage, 129 N. Main St., Davenport, IA.

Karaoke Night – Brady Street Pub, 217 Brady St., Davenport, IA.

Open Mic Night (6:30pm) – Cool Beanz Coffeehouse, 1325 330th St., Rock Island, IL.

Open Mic w/ Corey Wallace – 11th Street Precinct, 1107 Mound St., Davenport, IA.

Underground Open Mic w/ Kate Kane – Iowa City Yacht Club, 13 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA.

WEDNESDAYS


Brady Street Pub Open Jam – Brady Street Pub, 217 Brady St., Davenport, IA.

Jam Session w/ Ben Soltau – Iowa City Yacht Club, 13 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA.

Karaoke Night – 11th Street Precinct, 1107 Mound St., Davenport, IA.

Karaoke Night – Circle Tap, 1345 West Locust Street, Davenport, IA.

Karaoke Night – My Place the Pub, 4405 State St., Bettendorf, IA.

Karaoke Night – RIBCO, 1815 2nd Ave., Rock Island, IL.

Karaoke Night – Thirsty’s on Third, 2202 W. Third St., Davenport, IA.

Youth Open Mic (6:30pm) – RME Commu-nity Stage, 129 N. Main St., Davenport, IA.

SATURDAY 11

ComedySportz (7pm) – The Establish-ment, 220 19th St., Rock Island, IL.

Rock City Live (8pm) – Circa ‘21 Speak-easy, 1818 Third Avenue, Rock Is-land, IL.

Studio Series: Nocturne Falls (9:30pm) – The Establishment, 220 19th St., Rock Island, IL.

The Blacklist: Blacklist Against Human-ity (9pm) – The Backroom Comedy Theater, 1510 N. Harrison St., Dav-enport, IA.

SUNDAY 12

The Circumstantial Comedy Show (9pm) – BREW, 1104 Jersey Ridge Rd., Davenport, IA.

MONDAY 13

The Catacombs of Comedy Showcase (10pm) – Iowa City Yacht Club, 13 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA.

WEDNESDAY 15

Comedy Open Mic (7:30pm) – Penguin’s Comedy Club, 208 Second Ave. SE, Cedar Rapids, IA.

Comedy Open Mic Night (7:30pm) – The Backroom Comedy Theater, 1510 N. Harrison St., Davenport, IA.

Twisted Mics Music & Entertainment (Apr. 3 only) – Broken Saddle, 1417 5th Ave., Moline, IL.

SATURDAYS

Community Folk Sing (Apr. 11 only, 3pm) – Uptown Bill’s Coffee House, 730 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City.

Irish Session (Apr. 4 only, 3pm) – Uptown Bill’s Coffee House, 730 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City.

Karaoke Night – The Grove Tap, 108 S. 1st St., Long Grove, IA.

Karaoke Night – Roadrunners Road-house, 3803 Rockingham Rd., Dav-enport, IA.


Open Mic Night – Downtown Central Perk, 226 W. 3rd St., Davenport, IA.

Songwriters’ Round Table (Apr. 11 only, noon) – River Music Experience, 129 N. Main St., Davenport, IA.

Twisted Mics Music & Entertainment – Barrel House Moline, 1321 Fifth Ave., Moline, IL.

SUNDAYS


Drum Circle (Apr. 5 only, 5:30pm) – Unitarian Universalist Church of the Quad Cities, 3707 Eastern Ave., Davenport, IA.

Karaoke Night – 11th Street Precinct, 1107 Mound St., Davenport, IA.

MONDAYS

Open Mic w/ J. Knight – The Mill, 120 E. Burlington St., Iowa City, IA.

ComedySUNDAY 5The Circumstantial Comedy Show

(9pm) – BREW, 1104 Jersey Ridge Rd., Davenport, IA.

MONDAY 6

The Catacombs of Comedy Showcase (10pm) – Iowa City Yacht Club, 13 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA.

WEDNESDAY 8

Comedy Open Mic (7:30pm) – Penguin’s Comedy Club, 208 Second Ave. SE, Cedar Rapids, IA.

Comedy Open Mic Night (7:30pm) – The Backroom Comedy Theater, 1510 N. Harrison St., Davenport, IA.

THURSDAY 9

The Bix Beiderbomb Comedy Workshop (8pm) – Boozie’s Bar & Grill, 114 ½ W. 3rd St., Davenport, IA.

FRIDAY 10

Ben Kronberg (7pm) – The Backroom Comedy Theater, 1510 N. Harrison St., Davenport, IA.


Studio Series: A Midsummer Night’s Im-prov (9:30pm) – The Establishment, 220 19th St., Rock Island, IL.

THURSDAY 2The Bix Beiderbomb Comedy Workshop

(8pm) – Boozie’s Bar & Grill, 114 ½ W. 3rd St., Davenport, IA.

FRIDAY 3

Bob Kelly Improv Comedy Show (2pm) – Eldridge Library, 200 N. Sixth St., Eldridge, IA.


Studio Series: Dodgeball (9:30pm) – The Establishment, 220 19th St., Rock Island, IL.

The Blacklist: Comedy Gang Bang (9pm) – The Backroom Comedy Theater, 1510 N. Harrison St., Davenport, IA.

SATURDAY 4


Rock City Live (8pm) – Circa ‘21 Speak-easy, 1818 Third Avenue, Rock Is-land, IL.

Stand Up. Speed Date. (7pm) – RIBCO, 1815 2nd Ave., Rock Island, IL.

Studio Series: Wisenheimer w/ Dan Logan (9:30pm) – The Establishment, 220 19th St., Rock Island, IL.

The Blacklist: Blacklist Against Human-ity (9pm) – The Backroom Comedy Theater, 1510 N. Harrison St., Dav-enport, IA.

Wayne Wiskow & Chad Errio (7pm) – The Backroom Comedy Theater, 1510 N. Harrison St., Davenport, IA.

6MONDAY

THURSDAYS


C.J. the D.J. – RIBCO, 1815 2nd Ave., Rock Island, IL.

Cobra Kai Karaoke – The Backroom Comedy Theater, 1510 N. Harrison St., Davenport, IA.

D.J. Night w/ 90s Music – Thirsty’s on Third, 2202 W. Third St., Davenport, IA.

Karaoke Night – My Place the Pub, 4405 State St., Bettendorf, IA.

Mixology DJ Night (Apr. 9 only) – Gabe’s, 330 E. Washington St., Iowa City.

Open Jam w/ Bret Dale & Zach Harris – The Muddy Waters, 1708 State St., Bettendorf, IA.

Open Mic Night – Uptown Bill’s Coffee House, 730 S. Dubuque Street, Iowa City, IA.

Thumpin’ Thursdays DJs - Rascals Live, 1414 15th Street, Moline, IL.

Twisted Mics Music & Entertainment – Broken Saddle, 1417 5th Ave. , Moline, IL.

FRIDAYS

Cross Creek Karaoke – Firehouse Bar & Gri l l , 2006 Hickor y Grove Rd. , Davenport, IA.

Karaoke Night – Circle Tap, 1345 West Locust Street, Davenport, IA.

Karaoke Night – The Grove Tap, 108 S. 1st St., Long Grove, IA.

Karaoke Night – Roadrunners Road-house, 3803 Rockingham Rd., Dav-enport, IA.


Soulshake DJ Night (Apr. 10 only) – Gabe’s, 330 E. Washington St. , Iowa City.

THURSDAYS

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SATURDAYS

SUNDAYS

MONDAYS

TUESDAYS

15WEDNESDAY

9THURSDAY

5SUNDAY

4SATURDAY

0010FRIDAY

DJs/Karaoke/Jams/Open Mics

30 12SUNDAY

11SATURDAY

13MONDAY

Thanks for putting the "US" in Symbiosus (sic), and Supporting the Reader, Highlighted Advertisers!

Switch to U.S. Cellular® and we’ll pay off your old contract up to $350.

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Things we want you to know: While supplies last. A new 2-yr. agmt. (subject to a pro-rated $150 early termination fee for basic phones, modems and hotspot devices and a $350 early termination fee for Smartphones and tablets) required. Agmt. terms apply as long as you are a cstmr. $40 device act. fee and credit approval apply. Regulatory Cost Recovery Fee applies (currently $1.82/line/month); this is not a tax or gvmt. required charge. Add. fees, taxes and terms apply and vary by svc. and eqmt. Promotional phones subject to change. Application and data network usage charges may apply when accessing applications. 4G LTE not available in all areas. See uscellular.com/4G for complete coverage details. 4G LTE service provided through King Street Wireless, a partner of U.S. Cellular. LTE is a trademark of ETSI. Buy any Smartphone and get an LG G Pad 7.0 LTE tablet for $0.01. Activation required on all devices. Valid on consumer accounts and business accounts up to 20 lines. Contract Payoff Promo: Offer valid on up to 6 consumer lines or 25 business lines. Must port in current number to U.S. Cellular and purchase new Smartphone or tablet through a Retail Installment Contract on a Shared Connect Plan. Submit final bill identifying early termination fee (ETF) charged by carrier within 60 days of activation date to www.uscellular.com/contractpayoff or via mail to U.S. Cellular Contract Payoff Program 5591-61; PO Box 752257; El Paso, TX 88575-2257. Customer will be reimbursed for the ETF reflected on final bill up to $350/line. Reimbursement in form of a U.S. Cellular MasterCard Debit Card.™ To be eligible, customer must register for My Account. Offer expires 4/9/15. U.S. Cellular MasterCard Debit Cards issued by MetaBank, Member FDIC pursuant to license from MasterCard International Incorporated. Cardholders are subject to terms and conditions of the card as set forth by the issuing bank. Card does not have cash access and can be used at any merchants that accept MasterCard Debit Cards. Card valid through expiration date shown on front of card. Allow 10–12 weeks for processing. While supplies last. Not available at all locations. Retail Installment Contracts: Retail Installment Contract (Contract) and monthly payments according to the Payment Schedule in the Contract required. If you are in default or terminate your Contract, we may require you to immediately pay the entire unpaid Amount Financed as well as our collection costs, attorneys’ fees and court costs related to enforcing your obligations under the Contract. Kansas Customers: In areas in which U.S. Cellular receives support from the Federal Universal Service Fund, all reasonable requests for service must be met. Unresolved questions concerning services availability can be directed to the Kansas Corporation Commission Office of Public Affairs and Consumer Protection at 1-800-662-0027. Limited-time offer. Trademarks and trade names are the property of their respective owners. Additional terms apply. See store or uscellular.com for details. ©2015 U.S. Cellular

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Applicable Shared Connect Plan and purchase of qualifying Smartphone required.

New 2-yr. agmt. and $40 act. fee apply. While supplies last.

Available in Black and White. While supplies last.

For a limited time, get an LG G Pad™ 7.0 tablet for just a penny with the purchase of any

Smartphone right now at Wireless Central!

Proud to be your local U.S. Cellular Store• No need to take a number here• Full Service Store• Bring this ad in to our location and get 15% off an

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Rock Island1733 30th Street1-309-788-6800

Silvis1600 John Deere Rd.1-309-796-7000

HoursMonday-Friday: 9:00 a.m. - 8:00 p.m.Saturday: 9:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m.Sunday: 12:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Davenport3502 W. Kimberly Rd.1-563-386-8887


Documents

River Cities' Reader - Issue 879 - April 2, 2015