Little Village magazine issue 299: Oct. 2021 by Little Village Magazine

ISSUE 299 October 2021

A L W A Y S

F R E E

But Iowa agriculture is due for a revolution. PG. 28

FOOD

ART

COMICS

FILM

POSTER INSIDE!

Pork out! A guide to local meat

Eliza Reinhardt & her dog reimagine classic paintings

Iowa City’s poet puppeteer

Ten ’01 horror movies scarier than a Furby

Voter Purge & Witching Hour

PG. 34

PG. 36

PG. 48

PG. 52

CENTERFOLD

OCTOBER 22–23 • HANCHER AUDITORIUM HANCHER.UIOWA.EDU • (319) 335-1160 OR 800-HANCHER The performance on Saturday, October 23 at 1:00 pm will feature an American Sign Language interpreter and audio description.

2 October 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299

Photo: Laura Domela

STORM LARGE HOLIDAY ORDEAL Saturday, December 4, 7:30 pm “Storm” and “large” are not, generally speaking, words you want to hear together in early December. But you want to hear Storm Large take on the holidays in her third Hancher performance. An undeniable force of nature, she’ll light up the holidays with a tempest of seasonal favorites.

$10

STUDENT & YOUTH TICKETS

TICKETS Adults $25 / $35 / $45 College Students $10 / $10 / $40 Youth $10 / $10 / $22

EVENT PARTNERS Joseph N. Christopher Lowell A. Luhman, M.D. Alan and Amy Reed Mark and Sheila Reed Tom Rocklin and Barbara McFadden Ralph Schultz Family Foundation Marvin and Helen Schumacher Douglas and Vance Van Daele Larry and Miechelle Weber

Order online hancher.uiowa.edu Call (319) 335-1160 or 800-HANCHER Accessibility Services (319) 335-1158

Discover more at hancher.uiowa.edu Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to attend all University of Iowa sponsored events. If you are a person with a disability who requires a reasonable accommodation in order to participate in this program, please contact Hancher in advance at (319) 335-1158.

HERMITAGE PIANO TRIO Friday, November 12, 7:30 pm Three exceptional soloists who are even more impressive when making music together, the Hermitage Piano Trio takes its name from St. Petersburg’s venerable Hermitage State Museum. The Washington Post praises the trio for performing with “…such power and sweeping passion it [leaves] you nearly out of breath.” PROGRAM (subject to change) Amy Beach: Piano Trio, Op. 150 Ravel: Piano Trio in A Minor Intermission Rachmaninoff: Trio Élégiaque No. 2 in D Minor, Op. 9

$10

STUDENT & YOUTH TICKETS

TICKETS Adults $25 / $35 / $45 College Students $10 / $10 / $40 Youth $10 / $10 / $22 Order online hancher.uiowa.edu Call (319) 335-1160 or 800-HANCHER

EVENT PARTNERS François M. and Doris E. Abboud Douglas and Linda Behrendt Dale and Cyndy Crider Deborah and Rodney Zeitler

Accessibility Services (319) 335-1158

OCTOBER

AN EVENING WITH

JAKE SHIMABUKURO $15 – $56.50 RESERVED

OCTOBER

DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS

NURSE BLAKE

LUCY DACUS

$15 – $37.50 RESERVED

OCTOBER

WITH BUFFALO NICHOLS

$15 – $25 GA

OCTOBER

THE PTO COMEDY TOUR

$20 - $55 RESERVED

SPONSORED BY BRADLEY AND RILEY PC & HERTEEN AND STOCKER JEWELERS

SPONSORED BY TUESDAY AGENCY

DISTORTION AND BLUE HEARTS! WITH JASON NARDUCY

PRESENTED BY: MISSION CREEK

OCTOBER

25 & 26

AN EVENING WITH

DAR WILLIAMS

DAVID SEDARIS $53 RESERVED

OCTOBER

JOHN HIATT AND THE JERRY DOUGLAS BAND $55.50 – $75.50 RESERVED

WITH HEATHER MALONEY

$15 - $50 RESERVED

SPONSORED BY: KIM SCHILLIG, REALTOR DISCERNING EYE

PRESENTED BY: SHOW & TELL

OCTOBER

NOVEMBER

ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW

BILLY PRINE & THE PRINE TIME PLAYERS PRESENT: THE SONGS OF JOHN PRINE

TODD SNIDER

$20 – $22 GA

PRESENTED BY: COMICS IN ACTION & THE ENGLERT THEATRE

NOVEMBER

WITH CHICAGO FARMER

$15 - 25 RESERVED

$20 - $39 RESERVED

ENGLERT.ORG - 221 E. WASHINGTON ST. - 319.688.2653

Split Pea Soup Ingredients • • • • • • •

2.5 qts water 1 lb dry split peas 2 tbsp butter or oil 1 large carrot, cut to ½-inch pieces ½ large yellow onion, minced 8-16 ounces of Oasis Street Food hummus (depending on desired thickness of soup) 1 tsp black pepper

Method 1.

Boil the peas in a large pot until soft, approximately 1 hour, checking back periodically to skim off the starch that floats to the top with a slotted spoon. Don’t drain off the water!

Add the butter or oil to a saucepan. Sauté carrots and onions until the onions are translucent and fragrant.

Add Oasis Street Food hummus to the pot of peas and fold until combined. Let simmer until smooth.

4. Add the sautéed carrots and onions and the pepper to the pot. Bring to a boil and cook until the carrots are softened to your liking.

319.358.7342 info@oasisstreetfood.com 206 N. Linn St. Iowa City, IA 52245

"MOST TRUSTED REALTOR IN THE CRANDIC"

Phoebe Martin, Realtor® &

Thank you so much to everyone

Allison Hall, Realtor®

in our community for awarding

Assistant to Phoebe Martin

us with this honor for yet

Blank & McCune, the Real Estate Co. 506 E. College Street Iowa City, IA 52240 319.541.8695 phoebe@phoebemartinrealtor.com phoebemartinrealtor.com

another year. It has been an amazing first year with Blank & McCune, and we sincerely look forward to serving you all in 2021. Cheers to the New Year!

Iowa City auto repair for Subaru, BMW, Mini, Porsche, Audi, VW, Jaguar, Land Rover, Volvo, Saab, Honda, Toyota, Lexus, Nissan, Acura and more

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NEWS & CULTURE FROM IOWA CITY Since 2001

Portrait of a Young Woman, Nicolaes Eliasz. Pickenoy, 1632. Recreation by Eliza Reinhardt

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14 - Top Stories 16 - Advertising Partners 18 - Interactions 28 - War on Meat 34 - Bread & Butter 36 - Finnegan’s Nap 48 - Prairie Pop 52 - Flick Picks 54 - A-List 56 - Events Calendar 73 - Dear Kiki 75 - Astrology 77 - Album Reviews 79 - Book Review 83 - Crossword

Uncle Sam (R-IA) wants YOU to

Her classic art recreations

“I got into puppeteering to impress a

Red Meat

Eliza & Finn

Artist, ‘Weirdo’

buy meat, while small farmers are

have gone viral, but her own

boy,” Lauren Haldeman says. “I don’t

tired of being priced out.

story is a true tour de force.

know why I thought that would work.”

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Little Village (ISSN 2328-3351) is an independent, community-supported news and

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culture publication based in Iowa City, published monthly by Little Village, LLC, 623 S Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA 52240. Through journalism, essays and events, we work

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to improve our community according to core values: environmental sustainability,

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Tuesdays & Saturdays

www.CoralvillePublicLibrary.org Current Hours Mon-Th: 10:00 am - 7:00 pm Fri: 10:00 am - 6:00 pm Sat: 10:00 am - 4:00 pm Sun: 12:00 - 4:00 pm

October Events

10:30 am

Storytimes

Free & Open to the Public

Oct. 13

10:00 am

It’s a Mystery

Book Group

At the Coralville Library unless otherwise noted

Oct. 27 7:00 pm

By Robert Louis Stevenson

Oct. 21 7:00 pm

Novel Coversations Book Group

Paranormal Iowa with Chad Lewis

Oct. 25 6:00 pm

Virtual Event

Spooky Tubas Family Event

Virtual Event

Oct. 28 6:00 pm

Movie Night

Oct. 20 Oct. 18 - 24 Various Locations The winner of the prestigious Paul Engle Prize will be announced. Sponsored by the City of Coralville. Prize conferral at CPL in the Spring. 12 October 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299

Oct. 6

Teen Craft Kit

while supplies last

Craft-to-Go for adults

1401 Fifth St. Coralville, IA 319-248-1850 reference@coralville.org

while supplies last

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NEWS & CULTURE FROM IOWA CITY Since 2001 littlevillagemag.com

EDITORIAL

PRODUCTION

Publisher

Web Developer

Issue 299, Volume 30

Arts Editor

Adith Rai

October 2021

Genevieve Trainor

adith@littlevillagemag.com Cover by Jordan Sellergren

genevieve@littlevillagemag.com Digital Director Managing Editor

Drew Bulman

Emma McClatchey

drewb@littlevillagemag.com

and Jason Smith Kim Reynolds, Joni Ernst and

emma@littlevillagemag.com

Fox News claim Democrats want Videographer

to ban meat, a lie obscuring real

News Director

Jason Smith

threats to farmers, animals and

Paul Brennan

jason@littlevillagemag.com

the climate. Also in this issue: 2001

paul@littlevillagemag.com

horror movies, an in-depth profile Marketing Analytics

Art Director

Coordinator

Jordan Sellergren

Malcolm MacDougall

jordan@littlevillagemag.com

malcolm@littlevillagemag.com

Multimedia Journalist

SALES & ADMINISTRATION

on artist Eliza Reinhardt and more!

Meet this month’s guest contributors:

Adria Carpenter

President, Little Village, LLC

Christopher Burns lives in a

Kembrew McLeod is a founding

adria@littlevillagemag.com

Matthew Steele

state of uncertainty between

Little Village columnist and

matt@littlevillagemag.com

Iowa City and the Quantum

the chair of Communications

Realm. In between fluctuations

Studies at the University of Iowa.

Copy Editor Celine Robins

Marketing Director &

he writes weird stories and

celine@littlevillagemag.com

Copywriter

plays music with the Shining

Celine Robins

Realm.

Events Editor, Design Assistant

Spanish Language Editor

of Carleton College and a Dr. Dawson is the founder

freelance writer, with a special

Advertising

of @hiphophealing, a local

focus on food and agriculture.

Nolan Petersen, Matthew Steele

business dedicated to

She is rich in produce.

ads@littlevillagemag.com

cultivating hip hop’s elements

Sid Peterson sid@littlevillagemag.com

Zoe Pharo is a recent graduate

celine@littlevillagemag.com

Angela Pico

through mind, body and soul. Creative Services

Kent Williams lives, works, writes and complains in Iowa

Calendar/Event Listings

Website design, Email marketing,

Nicholas Dolan is currently

calendar@littlevillagemag.com

E-commerce, Videography

training to be an English

creative@littlevillagemag.com

teacher. He is also trying to

Adam Witte is a former teacher

improve his Spanish and is

and current student. He lives

CIRCULATION

in need of a conversational

in Iowa City with a beautiful

Distribution Manager

Spanish buddy. He can be

librarian and their accidental

October Contributors

Joseph Servey

contacted at nmdlan97@

menagerie.

Chris Burns, Dr. Dawson, Nicho-

joseph@littlevillagemag.com

gmail.com.

Corrections editor@littlevillagemag.com

City.

las Dolan, Sarah Elgatian, Lauren Haldeman, Glen Lowry, Oglesby

Distribution

MacDougall, John Martinek, Kembrew

Terrance Banks,

McLeod, Zoe Pharo, Eliza Reinhardt,

Charlie Cacciatore

Tom Tomorrow, Sam Locke Ward,

distro@littlevillagemag.com

Kent Williams, Adam Witte OFFICES SOCIAL MEDIA

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LittleVillageMag.com

Top Stories Daily news updates, events, restaurant reviews and videos at LittleVillageMag.com.

Protesters in Iowa City call for closure of Fiji fraternity after alleged

Students die-in on Pentacrest, protesting the ‘perpetual state of stress’

sexual assault; house is vandalized By Adria Carpenter, Sept. 1

caused by UI’s lax COVID rules By Adria Carpenter, Sept. 3

A crowd of more than 2,000 people gathered at the University of Iowa’s

The die-in protest was organized by COGS, the union that represents

Fiji fraternity on Tuesday night to protest an alleged sexual assault by

graduate student workers at UI, to “demand better COVID policies across

members of the fraternity last year, calling for the preparators to held

campus,” including vaccine and mask mandates, online course options

responsible. Although most protesters were peaceful, some vandalized

and robust testing protocols.

the Fiji house with graffitti and broken windows.

New Iowa Poll finds majority approve of Gov. Reynolds’ overall

Video: Englert Theatre reopens to the public, ‘excited’

handling of pandemic, but disapprove of her mask and vaccine policies

for the path forward Story by Genevieve Trainor, video

By Paul Brennan, Sept. 27

by Jason Smith, Sept. 15

A majority of Iowans approve of Gov. Kim Reynolds’ overall handling

After a long hiatus, the Englert Theatre is once again

of the COVID-19 pandemic, but they also disapprove of the governor’s

opening its doors to the public, albeit with strict

actions on face masks and vaccines. Those seemingly contradictory

COVID-19 procedures in place. Interim Executive Director

results are included in the latest Iowa Poll published by the Des Moines

John Schickendanz and Board President Carl Brown sat

down with Little Village to discuss the theater’s updates

opinions.

and future direction.

WATCH New Beginnings at the Englert Theatre

Subscribe to our newsletter for the very latest news, events, dining recommendations and LV Perks: LittleVillageMag.com/Subscribe 14 October 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299

FilmScene on the Ped Mall is back and better than ever! It feels just like home, but with some exciting improvements. OCTOBER 8

OCTOBER 15

EL PLANETA

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

Join us each opening weekend for themed prizes and drink specials! Details at ICFILMSCENE.ORG

THANK YOU TO THIS ISSUE’S ADVERTISING PARTNERS This issue of Little Village is supported by: Adamantine Spine Moving (32) Arnott & Kirk (83) Artifacts (10) The Art of Music (50) Ascended Electronics (46) Bethanne’s Finest (65) Cedar Rapids Czech Village New Bohemia co-op (52-53) - The Daisy - NewBoCo - Parlor City Pub & Eatery - Black Earth Gallery - Goldfinch Cyclery Chomp (80) City of Iowa City (49) CIVIC (50) The Club Car (23) Coralville Public Library (12) CSPS (39) The Dandy Lion (66) Deetz (61) The Englert Theatre (5) FilmScene (15) FirmStone Real Estate (25) Greater Muscatine Chamber of Commerce & Industry (67)

Grinnell College Museum of Art (63) Goodfellow Printing, Inc. (39) Hancher Auditorium (2-4) Honeybee Hair Parlor (27) ICCA (62) Iowa City Downtown co-op (21) - Yotopia - Beadology - Release Body Modification - Record Collector - Critical Hit Games - The Konnexion Iowa City Northside Marketplace (74) - Home Ec. Workshop - Russ’ Northside Service, Inc. - John’s Grocery - R.S.V.P. - Pagliai’s Pizza - Dodge St. Tire - Marco’s Grilled Cheese - High Ground - Hamburg Inn No. 2 - The Haunted Bookshop - George’s Iowa City Public Library (78)

Iowa Department of Public Health (71) Iowa Public Radio (62) Johnson County Health Path Clinic (82) Johnson County Public Health (67) ImOn (84) Iowa City Burger Haul (32) KCCK Jazz 88.3 (71) Kim Schillig, Realtor (50) KRUI 89.7 FM (18) League of Women Voters of Johnson County (45) Leash of Life (65) Linn County Conservation (23) Mailboxes of Iowa City (50) Martin Construction (76) Merge (62) Micky’s Irish Pub (27) Musician’s Pro Shop (39) Multicultural Development Center of Iowa (25) New Pioneer Food Co-op (69) MYEP (25)

National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library (72) Nodo (31) Oasis Street Food (6) Obermann Center (49) Perez Family Tacos (31) Phoebe Martin, Realtor (7) Public Space One (20) RAYGUN (55) Red Vespa (73) Revival (25) Ricardo Rangel, Jr., Realtor (65) Riverside Theatre (51) Scratch Cupcakery (51) Shakespeare’s Pub & Grill (23) Teddy’s Bigger Burgers (47) Waterloo Center for the Arts (46) Whitedog (8) Wig & Pen (9) Willis Dady Homeless Services (70) Willow & Stock (56) Viewpoint IA Photography (25) World of Bikes (31)

Little Village magazine print readership 25,000—40,000 per issue LittleVillageMag.com readership 200,000 monthly article views 74,000 unique monthly visitors

RECENT READER SURVEY DATA MEDIAN AGE: 37 25—34: 26% 35—44: 22% 45—54: 17% 55—64: 14% 65+: 10% 18—24: 9%

AVERAGE NUMBER OF CHILDREN 1.85

MEDIAN PERSONAL INCOME: $55k 26%: $40k—60k 18%: $60k—80k 17%: $100k+ 17%: $20k—40k 12%: <$20k 11%: $80k—$100k

GENDER

EDUCATION Masters: 34% Bachelors: 31% Ph.D: 18% Some college: 9% Associates: 7%

AVERAGE NUMBER OF YEARS LIVING IN EASTERN IOWA

Female: 63% Male: 34% Nonbinary/other: 3%

Join Little Village’s family of advertisers and start making a strong, personal connection with the local community today. Request a media kit:

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Interactions LV encourages community members, including candidates for office, to submit letters to Editor@LittleVillageMag.com. To be considered for print publication, letters should be under 500 words. Preference is given to letters that have not been published elsewhere. Letter to the editor: Johnson County supervisors owe public an apology for comments during BearCat discussion (Aug. 30) I’d be interested to meet whoever wrote this letter. They obviously are living in some type of bubble. People don’t realize how many shootings actually happen in IC. A lot of it is due to not being reported by the media, however we also get overshadowed by our neighbors to the north. I mean we literally just had an FBI raid on Fairchild Street not that long ago… —Dylan R.

THE IOWA CITY POLICE LOG A coffee table book

ON SALE NOW LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/POLICE—LOG

Keep the MRAP, it is a valuable tool in the protection arsenal for law enforcement. They deserve the best protection possible, and anyone who thinks this type of event can’t happen in Johnson Co. has their head in sand. I was led into Jessup Hall to confront Gang Lu’s atrocities by a UIPD officer who wasn’t allowed to have a gun... because of the same lunacy expressed by some. I fought to arm our police so we first responders can be protected back then. —Mike H. It’s disheartening to see so many folks in the comments who fail to understand the grim reality of law enforcement

F U T I L E W R AT H

VENMO @littlevillagemag PAYPAL lv@littlevillagemag.com

S A M LO C K E WA R D

LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299 October 2021 19

I N T E R A C T I O N S in Johnson County. The truth is in the arithmetic: every single benefit these vehicles may have in certain situations is offset by a hundred problems their routine usage causes in the community. After reviewing the deployment records of the MRAP, it is clear to everybody that Johnson County law enforcement has a pattern of using armored vehicles disproportionately and for mere show. This problem will be exacerbated by purchasing a smaller, “less threatening” but nonetheless militarized BearCat. —Dan K.

NEWS SO BIG WE CAN’T FIT IT IN THIS AD SPACE

20 October 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299

Daily reminder: You can still respect the police while not wanting to also turn them into a militarized version of themselves. —Jordan L. ‘It’s simply unacceptable’: U.S. Department of Education launches investigation of Iowa’s ban on mask

STRESS FRACTURES

mandates in schools (Aug. 30) There is no parental choice, when my kids can’t get vaccinated and their school can’t take precautions to keep them as safe as possible. —Blaine C. My niece is having to be homeschooled again this year because she’s immunocompromised, and is not safe in school, thanks to Kim Reynolds. She is so lonely for her friends. This ban is absolutely, 100% discrimination, but Republicans have never cared about disabled people, so I’m not surprised. — Corvin G. Protesters in Iowa City call for closure of Fiji fraternity after alleged sexual assault; house is vandalized (Sept. 1) Women have had it. Rapists get off scot free, and now Texas has put a $10,000

JOHN MARTINEK

IOWA CITY DOWNTOWN LittleVillageMag.com bounty on the heads of women of childbearing age. —Delta R. Okay, these protests will be used as justification of why Jo Co law enforcement needs a $200k tactical vehicle purchased, I’ll bet a nickel. —Randy P. ‘A very clear disability discrimination situation’: ACLU and 11 Iowa families sue over state ban on school mask mandates (Sept. 3)

millions of live & active cultures

that’s a lot of culture, even by iowa city standards

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Always buying & selling quality vinyl records, CDs & turntables.

Not to mention that being forced into such situations is detrimental to mental well-being. Those with disabilities are vulnerable to anxiety and depression. —Ariane P. Biden announces aggressive plan to fight COVID, Reynolds immediately rejects it; cases and hospitalizations continue increasing in Iowa (Sept. 9) Medical autonomy applies to both abortion and vaccs. —PJ B. Sounds like a dictator to me lol. U suck Biden. —Mallory G. Not sure if this qualifies as a dictator move. From what I’ve read, he’s not so much making mask mandates as removing laws that prevent schools from making those choices for themselves. If anything, Reynolds passing a law that says no school can enact mask requirements is more dictatorshippy. I mean, “A bill signed in May by Reynolds would strip any private business open to the public of state contracts or grants if it requires people entering its premises to show proof of vaccination.” —Ben S. ‘This is Iowa’: State spends millions in federal pandemic aid to promote tourism; school kids now have state’s highest percentage of new COVID cases (Sept. 10) To be fair Iowa’s all about tourism. —John H. You can always count on her to do the worst thing among the possible choices. —Grainne M.

116 S Linn St (319) 337-5029

CLOSED Tuesdays www.recordcollector.co

Magic the Gathering. Video Games. Warhammer. Warmachine. RPGs. Board Games. X-Wing. Dice. LotR. HeroClix. Miniatures. GoT. Blood Bowl. L5R. Pokemon. Yu-Gi-Oh. Kidrobot Vinyl. Retro toys. Pop vinyl & plushies. Gaming & collectible supplies. Huge Magic singles inventory plus we buy/trade MtG cards. Weekly drafts, FNM, league play, and frequent tourneys. Now buying/selling/trading video games & toys! Bring in your Nintendo Gameboy, NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube, Sega, WiiU, Xbox 360, PS1-2-3, & other used games, consoles, action figures, and toys for cash or trade credit! Fun atmosphere and great customer service!

115 S. Linn Street (by the Public Library), Iowa City Tel: 319-333-1260; Email: chg@criticalhitgames.net www.criticalhitgames.net @criticalhitgamesiowacity

LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299 October 2021 21

I N T E R A C T I O N S

LittleVillageMag.com

Iowa’s ban on school mask mandates halted by federal judge (Sept. 13) Judge Pratt, quoting Justice Brennan, also reminded us that “forcing children to bear the brunt of societal discord is ‘illogical and unjust’.” A real leader would’ve said something similar a lot sooner, instead of forcing us all to take sides against our neighbors, but we are where we are. —Christopher B. And taxpayers will foot the bill when Governor Reynolds appeals. —Nancy S. Iowa’s ban on school mask mandates halted by federal judge (Sept. 13) Volunteers paint by-the-numbers on Iowa City’s Resource Management Building, celebrating wildlife and the city’s recycling and compost collectors. Local artist Erika Danner designed the mural, completed in September. Adria Carpenter / Little Village

While we criticize (and rightly so) Kim Reynolds for refusing to

Print is personal. Little Village readers hold this magazine close to their hearts—and it’s not just because that’s where it’s easiest to read. To get up close and personal with your community, contact Little Village today: Ads@LittleVillageMag.com (319) 855-1474

SINCE 2001—ALWAYS FREE

22 October 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299

LittleVillageMag.com implement mandates to curb COVID, events, like Northside Oktoberfest and BrewFest, that have a huge potential to draw hundreds of people igniting the spread of Covid, are still being held. If the community is committed to reducing the spread of Covid, events such as Oktoberfest need to be postponed for another year. —Ariane P. School board approves mask mandate for Iowa City schools (Sept. 14) Woot! Iowa City schools have hit the bare minimum safety standards required by human decency! Celebrate good times come on! —liesaboutkiwis on Reddit COVID-19: Almost 12,000 new cases, 64 more deaths; UI’s ‘few protections’ get national attention (Sept. 15) The University’s refusal to mandate masks makes me sad to have graduated from Iowa. The institution used to be progressive allowing faculty to speak truth to power. Democracy depends on our educational systems and our journalistic processes to function as a lighthouse in a storm. Right now, faculty and staff who must daily interact with students who don’t wear masks are the canaries in the coal mine. Just how many are the UI administration willing to lose? Out of state enrollment is important at Iowa. How do you think this is working for you? —Maureen M. Interesting read, there’s a comparison

LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299 October 2021 23

Where is your Little Village? Copies of Little Village are available at more than 400 locations in Eastern Iowa. Check out the live map of all our locations to find your neighborhood rack:

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in there on how different Collins Aerospace’s approach is to the University of Iowa’s. (It makes me grateful to work at Collins!) —Kristyn D.

exemptions for their kids. —Jeff K.

False news retweeted by Rep. Miller-Meeks earns AP fact check, tweet still not deleted (Sept. 17)

Her campaign donation to Hinson in 2019 is extremely problematic, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Hard pass. #Amara4CR —Brook E.

Fascists are notoriously bad at satire. —Tim A. Gov. Reynolds’ attorneys ask judge to let order allowing school mask mandates expire, claim it’s an ‘undue burden’ on the state (Sept. 21) She’s never had to miss work because of a kid/kids in quarantine and it shows. —Crystal T. The ban puts an undue burden on the kids, on the staff, and on everyone they come into contact with, not to mention the medical workers who have to care for COVID-19 patients. —Lisa W.

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Maybe these mothers [in the affidavits] should follow their own reasoning that us parents who do want masking have been expected to follow: If you don’t want to mask your kid when sending them to school, then maybe you should just stay home and homeschool them. —Bethany B. The comment about “breathing in germs” from a mask is third-grade nonsense. Educated adults don’t refer to microorganisms as “germs” and the claim has zero evidence. The parents cited in the suit have received

Op-ed: Tiffany O’Donnell has surface style and troubling substance (By Chad Cooper, Sept. 21)

Supporting the policies parroted by #Qashley Hinson should be automatically disqualifying for any candidate. —@Giant_ Cyclone on Twitter If the election were held today she would win because I don’t think a lot of people know her policies. She’s just friendly and nice … no substance, hasn’t offended you, hasn’t done anything for you. —Lazeraction on Reddit BETH MALICKI FOR PRESIDENT. —Hank W. Dr. Caitlin Pedati, who has guided Iowa’s COVID-19 response, is leaving her job as IDPH medical director (Sept. 22) This seems like very good news. I hope she finds a new job in a field other than public health. —Pam H.W. Take the weird metrics with you. —Marty S. University of Iowa is adding a women’s wrestling team (Sept. 23) Yesssss! I was part of the first women’s wrestling team in Iowa in high school— Spencer, Iowa! (Circa 20022004). —Megan O.

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“The affordable “dude tipped my housing crisis is coworker 12.5% at something an iowa city real in this restaurant community. in 2019 $18 million and i will is our bring it up opportunity every time to really focus he’s in the on that. We’re headlines” not going to —Twitter user find another @t_a_ylorann, Jason Smith / Little Village opportunity like referring to 2020 this.” —Iowa City Mayor Pro presidential candidate Tem Mazahir Salih, on Alex Yang (in the news for how to spend the starting a new political city’s ARPA party), in a viral pandemic tweet on Sept. relief 23 “I am “In a time being of crisis + forced to polarization behave in Iowa needs ways that strong effective are contrary ldrship that u can to the best count on I’ve got m ICPL video still fro science more work 2do for and the best public-health u.” —Sen. Chuck Grassley, advice. And I cannot even announcing his 2022 discuss this with my reelection campaign via students.” Twitter —University of Iowa Professor “I remember Silvia Secchi, people getting quoted in the up and streaming New Yorker out. We stayed because we just “The wanted to see how University of it all unfolded … Iowa’s stadium I just remember via Be n Rog ers also does not require thinking he was vaccines or masks, and either on drugs, he was here’s the crowd waving drunk or he made a bet with at the hospital behind the the [Saturday Night Live] stadium. ‘Hi, hospital! cast members who could be See you in two to the most offensive.” 14 days!’” —Linn County Supervisor —Stephen Ben Rogers, recalling Colbert on Norm Macdonald’s the Kinnick infamous 1997 standWave, up show in Iowa City after the Hawkeyes’ first home game Monclair Film Fest

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KITCHEN NOW OPEN UNTIL 1AM THURSDAY, FRIDAY, SATURDAY Chuck Grassley, in elected office since 1959, is running again (Sept. 24) I thought for sure he’d retire early and let Kim appoint his grandson to finish the term and run for the seat in 2022. Chuckles must not think the grandson can beat whoever ends up the Democratic challenger. —Kathleen H. Grassley has done well for Iowa, but he needs to move on. —Linda D. Iowa City mask mandate extended, as state reports more than 10,000 new COVID cases and 81 deaths (Sept. 30) Thank you for your courage to lead!! —Anne S. Unfortunately there are few places that are actually enforcing it. The grocery stores are really bad now,

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Community

LittleVillageMag.com

Then They Came for the Pork Chops Republicans’ “war on meat” pits farmers against climate advocates while big ag cashes in. BY ZOE PHARO AND PAUL BRENNAN

or most Americans, the 2021 War on Meat was a blink-and-you-miss-it moment in conservative culture-war politics, the kind typically sparked by a red Starbucks cup or the marketing of a slightly more gender-neutral Barbie doll or Mr. Potato Head. By the time Fox News announced on April 23 that a War on Meat was on—the Biden administration, Fox anchors warned, was planning to limit Americans’ red meat intake to four pounds a year, a bogus claim they lifted from a British tabloid—Iowans were already veterans. But Iowa’s war had nothing to do with the phony meat quota or even President Biden. It sprung from a cloud of feigned outrage over Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, daring to declare March 20, 2021 “MeatOut Day.” The nonbinding resolution was the sort that designates a statewide Monarch Butterfly Week or Enjoy Ice Cream Month. But MeatOut Day, an effort to promote the benefits of a plant-based diet, outraged the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association and state Republicans. They declared March 20 “Meat Producers Appreciation Day” instead. That’s how things might have stayed—except Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts decided to weigh in. The GOP governor proclaimed March 20 to be “Meat on the Menu Day” in Nebraska. Gov. Kim Reynolds was a little slower to launch a counteroffensive against the Colorado MeatOut menace, but she went bigger than Ricketts. On March 19, Reynolds issued her own proclamation, declaring April to be “Meat on the Table Month” and calling upon Iowans to purchase pork and beef products to show support for farmers. Reynolds also saw a chance to raise some campaign cash, and she fired off a fundraising email that warned, “Democrats and liberal special interest groups are trying to cancel our meat industry.” The solution? Send the governor’s reelection campaign some money. Fox’s war didn’t go so well for the home team. The meat-quota story was so clearly ridiculous, the network quietly retracted it after a few days. It did have an afterlife, though: Conservatives posed as dinner table warriors on social media, posting photos of heaping plates of beef and pork. As most Republicans moved on to other culture wars, with critical race theory emerging as a favorite target, Sen. Joni Ernst (who made her childhood experience castrating hogs the center

28 October 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299

of her first campaign) showed up fighting a rearguard action in the War on Meat. “The Left’s War on Meat is being waged at the expense of America’s hardworking farmers and producers,” Ernst tweeted on July 10, as she introduced her latest policy proposal. The TASTEE (Telling Agencies to Stop Tweaking what Employees Eat) Act would ensure that “federal agencies can’t ban meat and other agriculture products in our government dining halls.” Ernst, who was first sworn in as a senator in 2015, created the TASTEE Act to respond to something that happened in 2012. That year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched its short-lived “Meatless Monday” initiative. In an

WHY INVENT A WAR ON MEAT WHEN YOU CAN UNITE THE NATION AROUND SUSTAINABLE FARMING? interoffice newsletter about going “greener,” the department encouraged employees to consider forgoing meat one day a week for their own health and that of the climate. Ernst frequently unveils stunt bills that don’t stand a chance of becoming law, but which seem crafted to get attention from rightwing media. TASTEE, however, landed with a thud. Ernst could only attract one cosponsor, Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican who only joined the Senate in January. Even Sen. Chuck Grassley gave it a pass, maybe because he’d already denounced the USDA Meatless Monday suggestion back in 2012. “I will eat more meat on Monday to compensate for stupid USDA recommendation abt a meatless Monday,” Grassley tweeted nine years before Ernst’s TASTEE tweet. Rhetoric in the various Wars on Meat is clownish, but it’s important to note it serves the same

function rodeo clowns do. It distracts from real problems. Consider what the USDA said in its 2012 newsletter that outraged Grassley and (eventually) Ernst. “The production of meat, especially beef (and dairy as well), has a large environmental impact,” read the newsletter. “According to the U.N., animal agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gases and climate change. It also wastes resources. It takes 7,000 kg of grain to make 1,000 kg of beef. In addition, beef production requires a lot of water, fertilizer, fossil fuels, and pesticides.” That’s true, and it’s surprising an adult would respond by saying, “I will eat more meat on Mondays.” Or, rather, it would be if such statements didn’t help politicians court big ag donors. The meat fearmongering has also been successful in rallying rural communities around GOP leaders. Farmers often say they feel neglected or ignored, and as stories in the media about upscale New York restaurants going meat-free and Burger King adding the Impossible Burger to its menu proliferate, and more academic studies document the environmental costs of how meat is produced—all of which can seem like threats to a farmer’s livelihood—it can be comforting to hear politicians say they’ll go to war for you. Johnson County cattle farmer Erinn Spevacek said she applauded Gov. Reynolds for Meat on the Table Month. “She didn’t give us a day or a week,” Spevacek said. “She gave us a month, and I was really proud of that, because I think it speaks volumes.” For Spevacek, who raises around 250 beef cattle using a cow-calf operation—in which a permanent herd of cows is kept to produce calves for sale—the War on Meat is “all over the place,” especially in grocery stores. For example, she sees it in deceptive food labelling that misleads consumers, such as when brands market their meat products as healthier by labelling them “antibiotic-free”—something the USDA requires of all meat sold in stores. Spevacek also sees damage being caused by outspoken opposition to concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, when that opposition argument fails to take size into account. Industrial-style CAFOs give a bad name to all farms that utilize indoor facilities, including hers, she said. “There’s actually a science to the building that

LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299 October 2021 29

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LittleVillageMag.com

Remembering the Iowa Cow War, 90 years later

he War on Meat (2021 edition) may just be a Republican talking point, but 90 years ago, National Guard troops armed with literal rifles and

bayonets were deployed against cattle farmers in eastern Iowa in what became known as the Iowa Cow War of 1931. This largely forgotten

The Davenport Democrat and Leader, 1931. Courtesy of Iowa State University Library Special Collections and University Archives

incident involved angry people rejecting science and putting others at risk of contagious disease, as well as a radio personality stoking fears of a government conspiracy that didn’t exist. If all that sounds familiar, consider this: In 1931, the Republican governor of Iowa who deployed the Guard troops was firmly on the side of science. Bovine tuberculosis is a serious threat to cows, and it can even infect humans in some circumstances. In 1929, after 10 years of a voluntary testing program for bovine TB, Iowa made testing mandatory. At the time, many farmers rejected the idea that tuberculosis was a serious problem. Even some who did accept the danger would rather not have their animals tested, because a cow testing positive had to be destroyed. Although farmers received a payment from the government for each culled cow, the compensation was considered too low and it was more profitable to send potentially contaminated milk and meat to market. Resistance to testing was particularly high in Cedar County, where fear and uncertainty was being sown by a Muscatine radio station, KTNT. The station’s owner, Norman Baker, was convinced the testing program was a government plot against farmers that relied on fake science, and he used KTNT to spread that message. As one history of the Cow War puts it, “Baker verbally assaulted the medical and veterinary professions, Iowa politicians, farm magazines and state universities while fanning the flames of rebellion in Cedar County. He repeatedly spoke out against the TB testing, stating that it aborted cows and dropped their milk production.” On March 8, more than 500 farmers confronted state veterinarians and the deputies escorting them near Tipton, preventing the veterinarians from doing scheduled TB tests. Eleven days later, more than 1,000 opponents of the testing program held a raucous protest at the Iowa State Capitol. Confrontations between anti-testers and state officials continued in Cedar County. State veterinarians were threatened, and in April, farmers shoved Assistant Attorney General Oral Swift into a barbed wire fence when he accompanied a testing crew. Gov. Dan Turner mobilized the Iowa National Guard. He was prepared to use it to ensure TB testing was done, but he agreed to meet with a representative from the anti-testing farmers in Iowa City. The meeting went well, and the governor demobilized the members of the Guard, who were awaiting orders in Cedar Rapids. A pause in testing followed, as farmers sued in an attempt to get an injunction against the TB detection program. After the lawsuit failed, testing resumed. In August, the confrontations resumed. In September, there was a violent confrontation in which approximately 400 farmers and other anti-testers, armed with clubs and throwing stones, attacked 63 state veterinarians and their law enforcement escorts in Tipton. This time, Turner called up the Guard and sent 1,700 Guardsmen—one-third of the entire Iowa National Guard—into Cedar County. The troops were stationed at the Cedar County Fairground, but accompanied state veterinarians wherever they encountered resistance in eastern Iowa. Faced with armed Guardsmen, the resistance faded away, and the testing was completed. The violent resistance didn’t repeat itself in following years. Testing wasn’t the sinister plot KTNT insisted it was. And even farmers who had infected cows destroyed eventually came to understand the benefits of controlling a dangerous, highly contagious disease in their herds by listening to science.

—Paul Brennan

30 October 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299

we have,” Spevacek said. “It’s going to be dry; it’s going to be warm. It’s better than pulling that calf out of snow and ice, or mud.” “I know here, locally, people do not like [livestock] buildings,” she continued. “And with that last land use plan, they’re anti-CAFO.” She was referring to Johnson County’s 2018 Land Use Plan, which, among other strategic goals, aimed to “discourage concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in Johnson County,” and to gain more regulating power over these operations. But those statements are the Johnson County equivalent of Gov. Polis’s MeatOut Day proclamation. The Iowa legislature long ago stripped county and city governments of any authority to regulate CAFOs. It is unimaginable that state legislators will change that in the foreseeable future. “It’s such an emotional topic,” said Pat Heiden, chair of the Johnson County Board of Supervisors, who was raised on a dairy farm in western Iowa. On the one hand, Heiden said, “[CAFOs] are an efficient and cheap way to meet consumer demand for protein and serve as a means for beginning farmers to get into the business.” However, with CAFOs come a “significant manure management problem that threatens our air and water quality.” But even pasture-raised meat and rotational grazing—in which animals are moved through portions of a pasture while the other sections “rest,” allowing the plants to recover and deepen their root systems—gets the side-eye from some consumers, according to Jamie Bierman of Twisted Oaks Meats. She said she’s encountered pushback while selling her grass-fed beef cuts at the Iowa City Farmers Market. “It seems to be that they feel we are destroying the environment,” Bierman said of some market-goers. “And if I had the time, I would take them all out here and just show them what we’re doing. It would be so wonderful if they could actually see that our grasslands are sequestering more carbon, producing more clean oxygen than trees are.” Bierman, a fifth-generation farmer in east-central Iowa, grew up in a more conventional mode of farming, but has been transitioning for nearly a decade into a more regenerative model. At first, Twisted Oaks’ move to rotational grazing was primarily economical. “The impetus was that we had a $30,000 creep feed bill that we couldn’t pay,” she said. Creep feeding is the practice of providing supplemental feed, such as grain, to nursing calves. Bierman recalls that, in her frustration, she told the feed truck to stop coming, and “everything turned out fine. Everything just lived on grass.”

LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299 October 2021 31

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Now, the Biermans rotate their animals across nine pastures, allowing them to graze for a day before moving them to the next spot. It wasn’t long before Bierman noticed the ecological advantages of this system, as well as the cost-savings. “We started seeing it immediately: The health of our animals was better, we were happier, the soil was, well, soil. Our plants would actually break down.” Meat and dairy farming is one of the leading causes of climate change, making up 5 percent of global CO2 emissions, but it may also be part of the solution. Grasslands are great at sequestering carbon, and while traditional agricultural practices (including the mass production of soybeans, popular in meat alternatives) often involve disturbing or destroying grassland ecosystems, managed grazing, as Bierman now practices, can encourage plant growth. The animals’ manure fertilizes the flora, while their hooves till the soil naturally. As the need to reduce factors contributing to climate change has become more urgent, more research has been done into how carefully managed grazing may be able to sequester more

carbon than the other greenhouse gases it produces, greatly reducing the environmental impact of raising beef. But there are no signs that such practices are being implemented at any noticeable scale in the United States—certainly not in Iowa. Less carbon, smaller feeding bills for farmers, content grass-fed animals, healthier soil, more nutritious meat—managed grazing seems to be an overall win. Why invent a war on meat when you can unite the nation around sustainable farming? The answer is depressingly simple: big ag’s big money. Farming since the 1970s has prized “efficiency, specialization and industrialization,” according to University of Missouri agriculture professor John Ikerd, a contributor to “Regenerative Farming and the Green New Deal,” a proposal for reforming U.S. agriculture by Data for Progress, a progressive think tank. Farmers depend on government subsidies for around a third of their income, yet those subsidies incentivize maximum yield on a few cash crops (corn, soybeans), leading to monocultures and unhealthy topsoil more vulnerable to the floods and droughts brought by climate change.

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“Our current system has done a bang-up job teaching me how to emit carbon and deplete finite resources to raise food,” according to Iowa farmer Seth Watkins, who contributed to the Data for Progress report on regenerative farming. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask for research funding and policy that helps me raise food, put carbon back into our soil, and restore the natural resources that we all depend on.” CAFOs containing thousands of animals account for the majority of meat raised in the United States. The waste products from that industrial-style farming damage the environment,and the health of CAFO workers, but the massive scale of those operations makes the cost of raising animals much cheaper than doing it the way it is done at smaller, more sustainable and more humane livestock operations. All aspects of American agriculture are magnified in Iowa, the most ag-intensive state in the country. There are now only 85,000 farms in Iowa, compared to over 200,000 in 1950, yet the state is home to an unfathomable 23.6 million pigs, more than any other state. Cows also outnumber people in the state at 3.7 million.

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This system isn’t economically sustainable, either. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated unacceptable working conditions in meatpacking plants and exposed the fragility of the food system in Iowa, at a time when farms continue to be consolidated and increase in size. Now, just four meat processing companies dominate the pork, beef and chicken markets in the U.S.: Tyson Foods, Cargill Meat Solutions, JBS and National Beef. “The meatpackers have created both a security and an insecurity,” Bierman said. The security is that “a lot of food is provided rather cheaply for the masses. … However, the insecurity is that there are only a few major players in that game.” The “big four” control such an overwhelming share of the market—they process about 85 percent of meat cut into steaks and roasts and 70 percent of the meat ground into hamburger, according to the North American Meat Institute—it prevents smaller operations from competing. It also allows the big meat producers to keep reducing the price paid to farmers for their animals. That’s one of the biggest reasons small farmers who raise animals are struggling, even giving

up—not nonbinding resolutions in Colorado or nine-year-old suggestions in a USDA newsletter. And as smaller farmers are squeezed ever tighter, large corporations see their profits rise. But don’t expect to hear Reynolds denounce the big four as she campaigns for reelection, even as she extols how pro-farmer she is. Corporations crushing farms as they damage the environment isn’t a war she’s interested in fighting. “What I really want people to understand is that meat that is raised right does require our life, it requires all of our time,” Bierman said. “It requires most of our resources financially and ecologically, so I’m paying between six and 10 times more than your big packers, just to get you this meat.” Not all meat is created equal. “Good meat” is more expensive, but supports the local economy, keeping dollars in sustainable farming and rural communities. According to local farmers, the best way to know about the meat you’re getting is to have a personal relationship with the producer. “All things are a practice, right? So farming is definitely a practice. And that means that you’re always improving or looking to improve,”

Bierman said. “But you wouldn’t know if your farmer’s that way if you don’t decide to get to know them.” For many Americans, nothing quite hits the spot like juicy, savory, real meat. Americans’ average meat intake has increased 40 percent since 1961, and despite the invention of new, tastier and affordable meat alternatives, a study out of the University of Illinois shows Americans have grown steadily more carnivorous in recent years. But that doesn’t mean many consumers aren’t trying to eat good meat—to strike that balance between cost, convenience, quality and ethical consumption. “For [your] own peace of mind,” Bierman said, “you need to find a farmer that you like and trust.” Zoe Pharo is grateful to have found a home in Iowa this summer. She owes tremendous thanks to Kate of Wild Woods Farm and Carmen, Maja, Helaina, Carlos and Meredith of Sundog Farm for fueling this article. Paul Brennan is Little Village’s news director.

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LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299 October 2021 33

Bread & Butter Guide

No, Really, Where Can We Find the Beef? A lean guide to local meat BY EMMA MCCLATCHEY

ou don’t have to give up your favorite fleshy entrees in order to eat ethically—but it won’t be as easy as swinging by Walmart for a $6 pound of ground beef, either. Cutting out the middlemen in the food supply chain takes some legwork on the part of farmers and consumers, but has numerous potential environmental, economic and health benefits. Step one is knowing who and where your local producers are and arranging a meat-cute. Browse this list of tips, farms and CSAs (short for Community Supported Agriculture, a way of pre-ordering produce directly from producers), and meat shops as a starter pack to a guilt-free meat diet in eastern Iowa.

Avoid waste. Food waste represents around 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The single best way to reduce your carbon footprint—not to mention save money—is to eat the food you buy. Track your meat intake, save up for a bigger freezer, host an impromptu dinner party, donate food—whatever keeps it

out of the landfill.

TIPS

FARMS

Hit the farmers market or take a drive. Meet

These farmers have easy-to-navigate websites

your meat farmer where they’re at. Most

for folks new to buying meat direct from the

welcome visitors to the farm, and are happy

farm. For a much more exhaustive directory of

to explain their practices and prices. Build a

Iowa farms, visit practicalfarmers.org

relationship with the person who raised your Thanksgiving turkey.

Crooked Gap Farm (Knoxville) crookedgapfarm.wordpress.com

Top: Cattle at Erinn Spevacek’s farm in northeast Iowa City. Above: Jamie Bierman of Twisted Oaks Meats wears a shirt that reads “grass fed.” Zoe Pharo / Little Village

Freeze! Buying in bulk or joining a meat CSA

Farmers: Ethan and Rebecca Book

can save you money and shopping trips, but

The meat: Woodlot-pastured pork, grass-fed

only if you eat what you buy. Label and store

beef and lamb, rabbit, poultry

your meat properly, and consider investing in a

Offers a customizable “you choose” meat CSA.

deep freezer.

Delivers to Knoxville and Des Moines

Ask restaurants where they get their meat,

Heartland Fresh Family Farm (South

Farmers: Wendy Johnson and Johnny Rafkin

especially those that claim to be farm-to-table.

Donnellson)

The meat: pastured chicken, organic-raised

You may feel like a Portlandia hipster, but it can

heartlandfreshfamilyfarm.com

pork, grass-fed lamb

encourage transparency on the part of local

Farmers: Leslie and Mark Hulsebus

Offers a meat and eggs CSA, with monthly pick-

businesses and let them know customers care

The meat: Pastured beef, free-range poultry

up at the farm

about their suppliers.

Delivers across Iowa and the Midwest

Don’t be afraid to try something new. If a seller

Humble Hands Harvest (Decorah)

midwestbestbeef.com

you trust recommends a cut or product not on

humblehandsharvest.com

Farmers: David and Annette Hill

your list, consider expanding your palate. Ask

Farmers: Hannah Breckbill, Emily Fagan and

The meat: Grass-fed and grain-finished Angus

questions, search out new recipes and offer

Emily Spangler

beef, pasture-raised Berkshire pork

feedback. Who knows? Venison, beef tongue or

The meat: Pastured pork, grass-fed certified

Offers a monthly, customizable beef CSA for

ground ostrich (all lean!) may become your new

organic lamb

pick-up in Dubuque, Cedar Rapids and Iowa City.

craving.

Offers a vegetable CSA with meat add-on

Available at the Iowa City and Dubuque farmers

Available at the Decorah Farmers Market.

markets

Jóia Food Farm (Charles City) Joiafoodfarm.com

Midwest Best Beef (Holy Cross)

34 October 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299

LittleVillageMag.com/Dining

Over the Moon Farm & Flowers, Coggon overthemoonfarmandflowers.com Farmers: Shae Pesek and Anna Hankins The meat: Heritage breed Berkshire pork, Pesek Family Farm Angus beef, pasture-raised chicken and turkeys

The other, other, other white meat

rehbergspork.com

Farmers: Donny and Lea Rehberg

dough at the beginning,

The meat: Berkshire pork, raised unconfined and

but forgot the starter in

on a vegetarian grain/soybean feed

the fridge until last week.)

Available at the Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, Marion

As an anti-factory-farming

and Hiawatha farmers markets

activist, I found myself

Offers a monthly meat CSA (fall is full, but spots are still open for winter, as of Oct. 1). Delivers to Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, Marion and Manchester Rehberg’s Pork (Walker)

y pandemic project ended up being more unconvention-

al than most. (I tried sour-

drawn to alternative food Striegel Acres (Oskaloosa)

sources. I began raising and

striegelacres.com

processing rabbits for meat

Farmers: Marion and Marj Striegel

and fur.

The meat: Free-range ostrich (red meat, low-fat) Available for online order

Rabbits are a rare meat here in the States, but in other countries such as

Twisted Oaks Meats (Tipton)

France, they’re a dietary

Twistedoaksmeats.com

staple as regular as roast

Farmers: The Bierman family

chicken. Once you start

The meat: Grass-fed beef, pastured pork and

raising them, it isn’t hard to

lamb, free-range chicken and turkey

see why. There are a lot of

Available at the Iowa City Farmers Market,

upsides.

Oglesby MacDougall

Wednesdays and Saturdays. Delivers to Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, West Branch, Davenport and

They breed like, well, rabbits. At max rotation, three rabbits (one buck, two does) can pro-

Des Moines

vide up to 300 pounds of meat per year. That’s just a little over what the average American adult eats annually (about 264 pounds, according to the University of Illinois).

West Fork Farmstead (West Chester) westforkfarmstead.com

They’re compact. I raise my rabbits in nine-square-foot hutches for each adult, and usually

Farmers: Brian, Nancy and Natasha Wilson

only put two or three of the babies into each hutch maximum, which still gives them plenty

The meat: Grass-fed beef, heritage pork,

of room. In total, the top amount of space taken up when we’ve got a litter or two of babies

pastured chicken

is around 72 square feet of backyard space.

Delivers to Iowa City, Coralville, North Liberty, Kalona and Wellman

They’re pretty dang good (and good for you). It’s a cliche, but it’s true: Rabbits taste like chicken, specifically rich dark meat. They also have lower fat content than chickens, so

STORES

they’re a great protein-rich addition to a salad or sandwich!

Anvil Meat Market and Deli (Closing after Oct. 31)

Raising your meat is direct action. What’s a more direct way to protest the system than by

92 16th Ave SW, Cedar Rapids

seizing the means of (rabbit) production? There’s no surer way to make sure that your meat

anvilmeatmarketanddeli.com

came from a healthy, caring environment than by raising it yourself.

Big Boy Meats

It’s a great way to understand the true cost of your food. This one’s a little more of a tough

1100 3rd Street SE, Cedar Rapids

sell, but when you have to kill and process your meat, it gets a little more special and a little

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more important. It’s not just a slab of pork you picked up at the Fareway, it’s the rabbit you raised and cared for. It’s a hard feeling, but a good one.

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Renaissance Dog Artist Eliza Reinhardt and her dog Finn have recreated over 300 classic paintings since the pandemic began. Little Village sat down with the artist to ask why. BY ADAM WITTE

here is this thing that humans—not all of them but, observationally, a sizable majority—do to suffering: They want it to mean something. We want that meaning to make the suffering noble, and we want that noble suffering to reframe that tragedy as beneficial for us. Just watch someone (your humble narrator, for instance) unexpectedly confronted with bad news—international crisis, historical atrocity, personal tragedy—and odds are that the first thing their (my) brain will do is run that information through a rose-colored filter, sifting for the necessary wisdom harshly learned, the promise of opportunity in catastrophe, the gratitude which can only be found through hardship. Halt, they’ll (I’ll) say. There is no reason to experience sadness or anger or uncertainty, because if you just look at it this way… If it weren’t for the rain, there would be no rainbow. If it weren’t for the accident, you’d never have learned to appreciate the things that really matter. If the bubonic plague hadn’t killed half of Florence, the Renaissance could never have happened. But artist and Instagrammer Eliza Reinhardt, for one, is not interested in revisionist positivity. People, well-meaning if careless people, are always joking about how lucky she is, how they wish they could be in her shoes. She’s been hearing if for as long as she can remember. Which is not to say that the Iowa City native is not positive. She is relentlessly joyful, the kind of indefatigably UP! that not even a four-hour Zoom interview from the “violent heat” of her home in Texas can deflate. The closest she will come to swearing is to say that something is “a bummer.” Finn, the 4-year-old Australian Shepherd she shares with her partner, Ryan Dorman, is sprawled across her lap, rolled onto his back, the better to receive tummy rubs. Eliza’s bright blue eyes, framed in shadow the same pink as strawberry Starburst, are expressive like a silent movie heroine. She frequently pushes back the bangs of a tousled mullet, which is at the precise nexus of glam-metal frontman and professional wrestling enthusiast. “I do not love when people joke about it,” she explains. Eliza wears at least one ring on every finger, and she talks with her hands as if tracing a Pollock mural, nearly every sentence punctuated with a flash or snap of silver. “They’re like ‘Oh, I wish I had amnesia; I could just forget everything bad that happened’ or ‘Boom—childhood trauma

36 October 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299

The Thundershower, Lyman Saÿen, 1917-1918. Recreation by Eliza Reinhardt

erased!’ People think you just get to start over, like a clean slate, but it’s like severing a whole time period, and it’s not fun.” You can understand why people would say

those things, though. What happened to Eliza was so rare and random and mysterious that even her doctors can’t fully explain it, and what is the common person supposed to do with that? You

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reframe it into something you recognize or control: a punchline or a parable. And the story of Finn and Eliza fits neatly in that Hollywood trope of triumph over adversity, creation from destruction, viral contagion begatting viral fame. For a little more than a year, Finn and Eliza have been collaborating to recreate famous works of art using only themselves and common household supplies as the medium. After more than 300 recreations, they have garnered more than 10,000 followers on Instagram, includ-

Later—maybe it was the next day or maybe the following week—Eliza went to open the back door for her dad, and she passed out. “I have been diagnosed with vasovagal syncope,” she explains. Sometimes her nerve impulses get crossed: Her blood pressure might plummet at the same moment her heart rate slows, and it’s lights out. “It has to do with hydration and how I don’t retain water well. It’s under control now, but there was a while when there was a lot of fainting.”

Meekness, Eustache Le Sueur, 1650. Recreation by Eliza Reinhardt

her retrograde amnesia, which blotted out more and more of her past. Before long, Eliza had lost all her memories; everything before the moment her head struck the door was blank, like a canvas painted over or a photograph faded into mist. “I didn’t know who anyone was; I didn’t know what anything was.” She forgot how to read, how to write, how to walk. She never returned to West High; while her classmates rented limos for prom and walked across the stage with diplomas, Eliza rode in a wheelchair from neurotherapy to physical therapy and back home again. People were always asking what she didn’t remember, but the question confused her. The memories—every favorite song and birthday party and geometry lesson and every face she’d ever known—weren’t “missing.” They were erased. Obliterated. There were no holes whose shape suggested what had been lost; there was only a void without edges. In a TikTok from Jan. 9, 2021, more than seven years after her accident, Eliza tries to explain what losing 18 years feels like. “I had to relearn to walk. I had to relearn to brush my teeth. I didn’t even remember that those were things people did.” People were drawn to her story, which quickly climbed to nearly half-a-million views. In the comments section was that familiar relentless positivity: Wouldn’t it be great to forget every bad thing that happened? Every broken heart and emotional trauma and middle school dance and awkward orthodontics, released, pardoned? How lucky can you get? “What people don’t get is the constant confusion of where you are or what is going on. The

BEFORE LONG, ELIZA HAD LOST ALL HER MEMORIES; EVERYTHING BEFORE THE MOMENT HER HEAD STRUCK THE DOOR WAS BLANK, LIKE A CANVAS PAINTED OVER OR A PHOTOGRAPH FADED INTO MIST. “I DIDN’T KNOW WHO ANYONE WAS; I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT ANYTHING WAS.” ing the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which regularly, giddily, retweets Finn and Eliza’s reproductions of the collection. It is the kind of movie Drew Barrymore might make. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. We need to first go back, back before Chewy and BarkBox started shipping Finn free goodie bags, back before that one TikTok went six-figure viral, before the pandemic, before art school, back before Eliza can even remember. Back to April 2013. A senior at Iowa City West High, a mere two months from graduation, Eliza went to the hospital for surgery to correct a series of wrist injuries. The procedure went fine, and she returned home in an impressive cast.

When she fainted, Eliza fell backward into the door and struck her head right on the door knob. She experienced some seizure activity (or maybe that was later, she can’t be sure), but when she opened her eyes, everything seemed fine. She’d had concussions before, from basketball and cheerleading, and besides, they would be back at the hospital in the morning for a cast change; they would ask the doctors about it then. “I didn’t know who my mom was when she came to wake me up. When we got to the hospital, I didn’t know my name or my birthday, so they admitted me.” Tests and scans revealed no significant swelling or any bleeding in the brain, nothing to explain

constant asking for help—the total lack of independence.” Her mother had to push her in a wheelchair for weeks before physical therapy got her on her feet again, but other problems were more persistent. “I had a lot of trouble with words. I could look at a banana and I would know what it was but I could not figure out what it was called. I could feel my brain trying to get it, but it wouldn’t come out.” Eliza twists the rings on her fingers as she recalls. “I was like a shell. There was no personality.” She shakes her head, checks to see if Finn is sleeping peacefully on the couch, and sighs. “People only see the ‘you get to start over’ part, but in the moment it was very scary.” LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299 October 2021 37

Culture

The Misshapen Polyp Floated on the Shores, a Sort of Smiling and Hideous Cyclops, Odilon Redon, 1883. Recreation by Eliza Reinhardt

Which brings us back to the plague and the renaissance. “Renaissance,” as anyone who took intro to art history (as Eliza would when she resumed her education) knows, means “rebirth.” It just so happens that this flourishing era of artistic and scientific discovery directly followed a period when the Black Death killed as much as half the population of Eurasia and Northern Africa, some 200 million people—which makes you wonder if it is possible for something to start over without first coming to an end, and whether clichés contain, at their core, some splinter of truth. Things began to return to Eliza. Not her memories—those remain distant to this day—but once Eliza’s condition was stable, her love for learning returned with a vengeance. “At some point, everybody else seemed more scared than I was.” She brightens here: “Once I knew things were going to be alright, I got excited. I got to learn everything, and I have always loved to learn.” Her coordination and strength improved, graduating from the wheelchair to walking with support to a pigeon-toed shuffle all on her own. The subject of college had lingered all summer, but in the end, Eliza and her parents agreed: She would go to the University of Iowa and live in the dorms, her parents just across town if she needed anything. College turned out to be a surprisingly comfortable context for an amnesiac: everyone was working to molt their hometown identity and grow into someone new. “It was really nice to be surrounded by people who also don’t know people or where they are. I 38 October 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299

didn’t feel like a crazy person.” Not everything was seamless. A girl bounced up to Eliza during freshman orientation and asked her how she was doing. Eliza smiled back, said she was great, that her name was Eliza and that she was going to be a freshman. The girl stared back in disbelief; they had gone to school together since they were 6, they were friends. At some point Eliza realized she didn’t remember what she liked to eat, so her friends helped make a chart to hang near the mini-fridge: the foods she liked, those she didn’t and those flavors which depended on the day. The social aspect was the hardest: “There were things I learned, like trust and whatnot—who you can and cannot trust. So you learn that kind of the hard way, like you do when you are 4 years old. But you are learning that with college kids.” Here she smiles and shakes her head at the potential peril. “Luckily I had good friends to assist.” During her freshman and sophomore years, Eliza grew more confident, felt closer to her whole self, but her amnesia never abated. Her doctors now hypothesized that those earlier concussions had a cumulative effect; that last fainting spell and injury was a tipping point. Along with all her childhood memories, Eliza lost all her “schooling knowledge.” Algebra and geometry had been erased, along with world history, biology and chemistry. She took every class that sparked her interest, but always felt behind, too far back to catch up. It was her mom who suggested she take a drawing class. Jennifer Black Reinhardt earned

her own degree in fine art and worked in graphic design before forging a career as the author and illustrator of a dozen or so children’s books. She was also the third generation of working female artists in the family, but had never pressured Eliza to take up the family business. Eliza signed up for an art class and liked it enough (“More than anything else I’d taken!”) to declare, tentatively, an art major. “[The next semester,] I was in John [Dilg]’s life drawing class, and he told me I was not a drawer, but he bet I was a painter,” Eliza recalls. That might have been difficult news for a newly declared art major, but Eliza felt it already. “I am very attracted to the physicality of paint. I do not like the little tiny mark that a pencil makes. I like the mark of paint and how large it is. I took one painting class and I loved it, and that was it.” For the next three years, Eliza studied almost nothing but painting. “I still was not great at communicating, still had language issues … but I could paint it out, and talk about things that way. Painting became a way to cope through what was going on.” Five years after a brain injury took everything she’d ever known, Eliza graduated from the University of Iowa with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts, with a focus in painting. Her boyfriend, Ryan, completed his track and field career and a BFA in Photography that same spring, and the wide world beckoned. Eliza took a position at the City Museum in St. Louis, itself a century-old shoe warehouse reborn as 600,000 square feet of installation and gallery space. They packed a car

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with everything they owned, leaving just enough space for Ryan’s new puppy Finn, and drove off into the sunset. There it is again—you can feel it too, can’t you? That temptation to polish the silver lining to shame the cloud. The neurological trauma that disrupted her life was actually divine intervention—a benevolent lightning bolt that burned her hollow, only so that she might be refilled, reborn. An unexpected renaissance after years of struggle and uncertainty. Which is how this story would end if such things were true. Within a year of moving to St. Louis, the City Museum closed indefinitely due to COVID-19 (an entirely non-metaphorical plague symbolizing nothing more than itself). Eliza was laid off, then a second time from her part-time job in a gallery. Ryan’s job in a grocery store labeled him an “essential worker,” so Eliza found herself spending long days alone. Just like that, the world was unfamiliar and distant again. “I painted a lot in the beginning,” Eliza explained, hoping the same inspiration which transcended her illness might sustain her through quarantine. And it might have done, if Ryan’s puppy—the anxious, spastic little Finnegan—hadn’t needed her so much. “Finn was 2-and-a-half, and he was a tornado. I would go in my studio, and Finn would cry and scratch at the door.” Eliza smiles at Finn curled on the couch, who lifts his head expectantly at the sound of his name, little plug of tail humming. The Australian Shepherd is a working dog, bred to herd sheep and cattle, which were in short supply in downtown St. Louis, though that may not have made much difference. “He doesn’t really have a herding instinct with other dogs or with kids,” Eliza explains. “He does with cars, trucks, skateboarders—anything with wheels he thinks he needs to get in line, but livestock?” Finn’s collar jangles from the couch as he shakes his head, then yawns and curls back into sleep. With no job to do, Finn could not focus or relax, which meant Eliza couldn’t either. “I didn’t know what to do. I was taking him to the dog park four times a day, and he would calm down for, like, 15 minutes, but then he was at it again.” Again, it was her mother who offered a kind word at the right moment. The Metropolitan Museum in New York was also closed, but via social media @MetMuseum invited art lovers to choose any work from their collection to recreate in their home using whatever items were at hand, an idea borrowed from @ TussenKunstEnQuarantiane (“Between Art and Quarantine”), an account which had appeared in

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Woman with a Sunflower, Mary Cassatt, 1905. Recreation by Eliza Reinhardt

the Netherlands a few weeks earlier, as Europe experienced the first wave of COVID contagion and closure. “She sent me the link and said ‘Why don’t you try to do this and include Finn as a dog?’ I remember vividly going to the Met collection online and searching ‘dog painting.’” Mather Brown, born in Boston in 1761, studied under Gilbert Stuart, the foremost portrait artist in the colonies, before moving to England to become the first American-born artist to study at the Royal Academy in 1782. He missed out on the revolution, but, in 1786, painted the first known portrait of Thomas Jefferson (who also sat out the revolution in London, which was itself enjoying a small outbreak of Scarlet Fever that summer). That same year, Brown created a portrait in oils of an unnamed wealthy matron, bewigged and powdered and Fragonarded with lace. On the seat cushion to her left, a springer spaniel stares expectantly at the woman who stares back at the viewer. Two-hundred thirty-five years later, this was the first image result the Met’s website offered up to Eliza and Finn. That first Instagram post was a modest recreation. Eliza sits on the couch in their St. Louis loft which she has covered with a blanket to match the color of the settee in Brown’s portrait. Her Def Leppard shag is pulled up to suggest a powdered wig. Finn sits to her left, but stares out of frame. 40 October 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299

Eliza uploaded that first recreation collaboration on April 2, 2020, just two days short of the seven-year anniversary of the wrist surgery which led to her vasovagal syncope which led to her concussion which led to everything else. It got 207 likes. A few days later Eliza and Finn recreated Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Madonna and Child, c. 1290 (about 50 years before the Black Death would kill half the inhabitants of Buoninsegna’s hometown of Siena). Eliza is wrapped in a bathrobe with the hood up to mimic Mary’s veil, and she cradles Finn, sitting in for Jesus, who stares directly at the viewer. The yellow glow of sodium lights in an underground parking garage approximates the gold leaf of di Buoninsegna’s icon. Only 101 likes—and their first critical reviews. “The only times when we have even gotten weird threat comment-things are when he takes the place of God or Jesus. Then people get really weird and wish horrible things on him. And me.” She shrugs. “I’m not making a mockery of it. There is no bad intent on my end at all. It’s just ...” again her fingers curl, grasping for the right word before language fails her and she settles: “... funny to me.” Funny word, “funny.” It can mean either “strange” or “off-putting” (see above), or it can be reinterpreted as “humorous” or “light-hearted,” which is what Eliza (and Finn) leaned into at the

start. “In the beginning I relied heavily on the funny factor,” Eliza explains, almost as an apology. The fire and brimstone of humorless evangelicals gave her no pause, but potentially blaspheming the dogma of art criticism had her momentarily penitent. “I was nervous in the beginning to poke fun at things or make statements in the work. Coming from ‘Art Land,’ having to defend every move you make in your work, makes you feel like you are walking on eggshells.” The intense self-reflection demanded in a fine arts education, coupled with the sometimes brutal critique from peers and instructors, can sharpen the talent and resolve of some artists, but can snuff out the creative impulse just as easily. Eliza has many friends from the university who stopped painting after art school, because of art school. “There is this weird idea that you have to make art for a reason, that you must explain or defend it; you can’t just make it because you want to.” Eliza’s concussion and amnesia taught her language was unreliable, but her education showed it could be menacing. But these portraits were different. They weren’t Art exactly—more like the Venn overlap of performance art and pillow forts. The stakes were low: just her Instagram, just a couple hours to research and set up, just a silly thing to do to keep your spastic dog from gnawing on the furniture during

LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299 October 2021 41

42 October 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299

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lockdown. At first, Eliza and Finn stuck to portraiture, but quickly exhausted every painting in the Met’s collection with a dog in it. Finn stood in for cats and monkeys in Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, then bathing infants for Mary Cassatt’s domestic scenes, then a unicorn from a medieval tapestry— but always a figure posed to mimic the original. Finn had a job now, something to do, which calmed his nerves immensely. He started taking direction, learning where to look for this image, how to sit patiently with a Post-It note mustache for that portrait. Occasionally, he brought a favorite toy or bone and demanded it be included in the shot. And Eliza began painting again, first backdrops for their reproductions, then her own skin to evoke Picasso’s cubism or Van Gogh’s thick lines. And then something happened that was—funny. “I think it was the Mask of Fear (1932) by Paul Klee,” she recalls, hoisting Finn off the ground into her lap, as if to ask if that is how he remembers it as well. “It is a big mask with four black feet on the bottom.” Those four little feet sparked something in her brain. What if Finn wasn’t a dog? Not even a figure at all, but a mark, a brushstroke? It had the electric flavor of something familiar but unexpected. What

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had started as a whimsical side project to distract her from the fact she couldn’t paint had come full circle, back to the visceral thrill that attracted her to painting in Dilg’s class. “It’s interesting how the way I paint comes out in [our recreations]. I love the mark-making of paint, how one mark can say so much. You don’t have to form this rendered face, you can make a very powerful image with marks. I can use the dog, fabric, socks, and those things emulate a brushstroke for me. It is a mark I am laying with an object.” To make that happen, Eliza had to change perspective as well: Instead of posing vertically, as if for a portrait, she made the floor of their studio the canvas. With no equipment to take an overhead shot, Eliza grabbed a ladder and used packing tape to fix her iPhone to the ceiling (a method she uses to this day). Stray articles of clothing and fabric were selected for color and arranged to evoke the shading and line of the artist’s paint. Finn was wrapped up in an old sweatshirt to match the color of the mask, mostly hidden, with only his nose and four paws peeking out like marks on a canvas. 3,182 likes. And the rest, as they say, is history. Where they

had been cautious and representational before, Eliza and Finn now embraced abstraction and absurdity. They had been the subject of those early experiments, but now Finn and Eliza sank into the images they created, submerged or swaddled in T-shirts and towels and fleece blankets. Totems of the quarantine experience—rolls of toilet paper, disposable face masks, so many food delivery containers—were incorporated as if to pay tribute to the pestilence which led to this renaissance. By dismissing the idea that art needed to have something to say, Eliza gave herself room to say something honest. And the world responded. First, the art world, with the Met, the Getty, and the Tate all reposting Eliza and Finn’s reproductions of works in their collection. Professors T.J. Norris and Thomas Agran from Iowa both reached out to offer support and praise. “No one has said, ‘This is such a joke,’” Eliza says, and exhales. That was exactly what she feared colleagues and mentors might say of her work on the canvas, and here they were, praising work that was, at the beginning at least, very much a joke. Even more surprising was the response of the broader social media landscape. Her Instagram

LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299 October 2021 45

Culture

following, just a few hundred friends and family before that first recreation, shot up over 10,000, and most of those people did not come for the art. “It took off pretty quickly once we started pushing the limits on what he was. People are so amused by a dog in clothing,” Eliza smiles and gives Finn’s belly the kind of scratch that can really get a leg going. “People tell us all the time: ‘I know nothing about art, I just love dogs.’” But here’s the funny thing: They came for a cute picture, a joyful image during the dark days, but then they get curious, start to think about what they are seeing, start to learn and grow. “In these photos, playing to humor, pushing it to the point of absurdity, I think it makes things less frightening. People without formal training are drawn to the image because it is so out there that you feel comfortable,” she says. It’s just a silly picture of a woman and her dog; what could be less threatening? “You can’t interpret something wrong when it’s this weird.” Parents emailed to tell Eliza how they sit with their kids and pour over the paintings to find where Finn is hidden, to decipher the items Eliza uses in place of the objects in the original: a

hammer to replace a phone receiver, a handful of Q-tips tucked into Finn’s fur to indicate a porcupine’s thick bristles, action figures and troll dolls to represent tortured souls in Heironymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. “It is interesting to need to replace an object with something I have. Is it more important to have the shape of the object or the color? Or the size? Those decisions are very interesting, and it makes me excited when people pick up on them.” Suddenly people were really paying attention to how the image was made, then returning to the original to compare. Fans messaged Eliza to say they were curating a collection of favorite artists introduced to them by Finn. Eliza, in turn, began choosing which artists she and Finn represented with more care. While their reproductions of Starry Night or The Mona Lisa had name recognition that increased the traffic for those posts, Eliza and Finn began to intentionally incorporate lesser-known artists, directing their modest spotlight on female and BIPOC artists whose works have been dismissed or suppressed by the academy. She started including micro biographies of the artists along with the images.

“When my mom told me March was Women’s History Month, I made it my goal to do a different female artist every day, no repeats.” She poured over the online archives from the National Museum of Women Artists in Washington D.C., to which she’d won a free membership with a picture of Finn. By now Ryan and Eliza and Finn had left St. Louis for Denton, Texas, but little changed for Finn and Eliza (except for the fact that Eliza has become an enthusiastic convert to “y’all”: “Such a great word,” she sighs dreamily, delighted by its utility and how it’s always right there when you need it). Every morning begins with an online search for their image that day. She will research the artist for a short write-up, then spend four or five hours staging their scene. There is something freeing about the fleeting, impermanent nature of the work: one image a day, every day. “With oil painting, you work on a single image for weeks, and that can get draining and tired. But this? It is new every day, and if it doesn’t work out, I’ll do a new one tomorrow. It’s not the end of the world.” Which is a great attitude to have, especially during a pandemic that looked, for a

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minute there, very much like the beginning of the end of the world. And Finn, the once twitchy Aussie pup, previously so stressed that he chewed on door frames, is now, not two years later, the very picture of relaxation. He flomps (there is no other word for it) across Eliza’s lap, his black-and-white furry body gone liquid in repose, like Michaelangelo’s Pieta or Dali’s minute hand. Eliza insists that Finn, like any great artist, can be feisty, a prima donna, but his deep snoring undermines the assertion. “People adore Finn,” she whispers, so as not to wake him. “I knew people would like him, but the way people act about him is hilarious. They treat him like royalty.” Finn receives birthday presents. The PR departments from Blue Buffalo and Chewy have sent him boxes stuffed with high-end dog swag, like a generous patron to a Renaissance artist. He can tell the difference between the sound of a UPS truck transmission and one from Amazon (UPS delivers his Chewy goodies). Recently Finn started receiving care packages from BarkBox, where Eliza started as a part-time intern in February. “When I applied, they recognized Finn,” Eliza

says by way of explaining how she got the job. “The first contract I signed with BarkBox was for ‘Eliza and Finn.’” A few people have recognized him from Instagram, and the reactions can be intense. “I picked him up from day care and the girl came running out with Finn and exclaimed ‘This is Finn! Finn from Reddit! This is the real Finn!’ And I said, ‘Yes. And I’m Eliza. Nice to meet you.’” BarkBox recently brought Finn and Eliza on full-time to help manage their social media. Finn has taken this celebrity in stride. When Eliza self-published a collection of their quarantine recreations, Isolation Painting Recreations, Volume 1: How a Girl and Her Dog Survived a Pandemic, Finn happily honored all requests for a signed copy (more an inky paw print, but distinctively his own). The first print run sold out on Etsy almost immediately, as did the second, then third, then fourth. Eliza has sold more than 500 copies of the book, and she plans to order more in preparation for the holiday shopping season. The 2021 calendar sold out as well, and Eliza is putting the finishing touches on her 2022 calendar which will be stocked on her Etsy site (though probably not for long!).

But before that can happen, Finn must get to work. Spread across the studio floor is a disaster of color and potential. Somehow he and his human must take this chaos of running shoes and cardboard scraps and rawhide bones and Barbie dolls and cotton balls and paint brushes and stuffed animals and pizza boxes, looking for all the world like the rubble after something catastrophic, and reconsider it, give it a new life as something beautiful. He slides off Eliza’s lap and looks expectantly up at her, but it is not until Eliza asks him “Finn, wanna take a picture?” that his nubbin of tail really gets going, and Finn is ready for his close-up. Good boy. If Adam Witte were a painting, he would wish to be something from the renaissance full of chubby Rubenesque cherubs frolicking naked in the clouds, but fears a collab between Munch’s The Scream and Where’s Waldo? might be more likely. Either way, he is just grateful to spend every Starry, Starry Night with the woman whose Mona Lisa smile would be worth cutting off an ear to behold.

LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299 October 2021 47

Culture Prairie Pop

Weird and Wonderful Master-of-all-trades Lauren Haldeman looks back on what brought her to Iowa City and ahead to the release of her nonfiction poetry graphic novel. BY KEMBREW MCLEOD

auren Haldeman isn’t a mere double-threat, or even a run-of-the-mill triple-threat. No, Iowa City’s resident polymath has more tricks up her sleeve than I can count on both hands and a few spare toes. Working across mediums and forms—poetry, puppetry, animation, illustration, printmaking, painting, film and music, to name a few— she has created a kaleidoscopic body of work that is rooted in raw-nerve emotion and wrapped in whimsical, eccentric flourishes. Over the past two decades, Haldeman has been seen around town rocking a zip hoodie and short “momboy” hair while writing code on her laptop; performing hybrid puppet shows and poetry readings; playing in random musical projects with her accordion, drums or guitar; and sketching illustrations in Prairie Lights’ Cafe. Throughout the pandemic, she documented our twilight zone year with comics that she posted on Twitter and Instagram, like a panel that read, “Quarantine’s Motto: There’s No Time Like the Endless Present.” “I think I drew close to 200 COVID comics,” Haldeman said. “It was very therapeutic. You know, it was a way to structure the day and make contact with people outside of the house, through the internet. I would post a drawing and hear from all sorts of people. And that would make me feel less alone.” Haldeman’s lifelong creative journey began in Fairfax Station, Virginia when she announced to a fifth-grade friend, “I’m going to write and illustrate books!” Like all dreams, it was easy going from there, right? “Not at all,” she said. “It took me, like, 30 years to publish my first book. It was a long haul.” Her hometown sits between Washington D.C. and the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, and it is full of deep wilderness, haunted historic locations and old battlefields. But while there are certain sense memories that trigger nostalgia for her, Haldeman considers Iowa City her home now. Her westward trek began in 1997 when she was working at a bookstore during her senior year of high school, where she came across the school rankings in U.S. News & World Report, which placed the University of Iowa number at the top of the list for writing and printmaking. “I thought, ‘What? Iowa?’” Poetry and printmaking were her main jams at 48 October 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299

Panel from ‘Team Photograph’ by Lauren Haldeman

“I HAD NEVER REALLY SEEN A TOWN LIKE THIS BEFORE, WHERE YOU CAN WALK MOST ANYWHERE AND GET YOUR GROCERIES OR A COFFEE OR MOST THINGS ON FOOT. WHERE PEOPLE MADE THEIR OWN T-SHIRTS AND BREWED BEER AND DUG GARDEN PLOTS AND JUST DID A LOT OF MAKING, INSTEAD OF BUYING. AND IOWA CITY IS WEIRD, YOU KNOW? AND I WAS A WEIRDO. I FELT AT HOME.”

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the time, and even though she had already enrolled at Syracuse University—with a roommate and classes lined up that fall—Haldeman took it as a sign and applied for late enrollment at the University of Iowa. A few months later, the 18-year-old moved to Iowa City. “I had never really seen a town like this before,” Haldeman said, “where you can walk most anywhere and get your groceries or a coffee or most things on foot. Where people made their own T-shirts and brewed beer and dug garden plots and just did a lot of making, instead of buying. And Iowa City is weird, you know? And I was a weirdo. I felt at home.” Throw in a few dozen people who built their own chicken coops, mainlined coffee and books in local shops and screen-printed posters, and Haldeman realized she had found her people. It was in Iowa City where she discovered a semisecret community of creators and self-invented artists who were all a bit odd and a little nonbinary, which made her feel “normal” for the first time. Haldeman followed her undergraduate writing degree with an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Since then, she has blurred art forms by blending poetry with puppetry using a tiny theater called a “cranky”: a wooden box with two dowels and a long scroll of paper between them that reveals an illustration of a line from her poem, which she recites while cranking. It was a precursor to her recent poetry comics, and it’s yet another example of how she instinctively blurs the boundaries between art forms. “I got into puppeteering to impress a boy. I don’t know why I thought that would work,” Haldeman explained. “I found the Eulenspiegel Puppet Center in West Liberty, Iowa, and I started interning there. I would help build sets and puppets, and I eventually became part of the shows.” Starting in 2004, she spent three summers interning at Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont, staging massive puppet shows every weekend and using their wood shop to build her cranky box—to which Haldeman has been adding poetry scrolls ever since. Poetry and puppetry don’t pay bills in our imperfect world, so Haldeman’s day job involves working as a software coder, web developer and editor for the University of Iowa’s Writing University website, along with freelance web design side-hustles. “I figured out that coding could make me some money,” Haldeman said. “People pay you for that skill, but it is also creative. It feels a bit like poetry, because you are using this actual code to make something happen. And when you get the code

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right, the response is immediate. I really liked that too—instant gratification!” Although she has taken the poetry path less traveled, her work has still achieved more conventional prestige, with publication in Poetry Magazine, Tin House, Colorado Review and Fence. She received the 2017 Colorado Prize for Poetry for her second book, Instead of Dying, which was a reimagining of her brother’s life if he hadn’t died, from mundane experiences to extraordinary things like becoming a deep sea diver and discovering a new element. It followed Haldeman’s first book of poetry, Calenday, which was released the same year as her exquisitely titled 2014 chapbook, The Eccentricity Is Zero. Her third collection, Team Photograph, will be published by Sarabande Books in November 2022. “I had been drawing single poem comics for a while, from poems in my two previous books,” Haldeman said, explaining the origins of Team Photograph. “I really liked how people responded to them. It seemed like the illustrations really opened the poems up more to the reader, and I liked that. I also noticed that my kid liked them. That was a big plus.” Team Photograph incorporates visual memoir elements with sections of poetry—a hybrid of nonfiction, graphic novel and poetry. It started as a long-simmering poetry manuscript that has been in the works for about two decades, but Haldeman felt it needed descriptor paragraphs to introduce each section, which made her realize, “I should draw these tiny narratives as comics!” Fairfax Station was named after the train depot at its center, which acted as a triage stop during the Civil War, and the town’s spectral landscape provides the setting for Team Photograph. It opens with a graphic memoir section about the ghosts of wounded wraiths who visited Haldeman when she was a child in her family home, causing her to hallucinate while drifting between waking

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and sleep states. These ghostlike entities also visited her on the edges of the soccer field where she regularly played, in which metallic fragments from old battles sometimes surfaced atop the grass-covered soil. “In Virginia,” Haldeman writes over the course of a series of panels, “in the house in Fairfax Station, I frequently saw people: soldiers, postcolonial gravediggers, women in 19th century nightgowns. During these hypnagogic visitations, everything else seems normal: The room looks the same, the light and shadows all look the same. It is not a dream world. It is the real world.” Each of these colorfully illustrated backstories set up the grouping of poems in Team Photograph’s seven chapters (or “fields”), planting imagery in the reader’s mind that make the black and white text of the chapter all the more rich. “I illustrated all of the graphic memoir sections myself,” Haldeman said. “They start each section and explain the poetry that follows. So, for example, there is a part of the book where the character begins to do erasure poems from an old Washington Post article. In the graphic novel section of this part, you see illustrations of the character beginning the process, and then the section that immediately follows contains the erasure poems themselves.” With its mix of eye-popping visuals, impressionistic prose and poetic wordplay, this sui generis book blends memoir and historical nonfiction by bringing together Haldeman’s many talents. All that’s missing are songs, so I am proposing Team Photograph: The Musical, which would incorporate her cranky theater, puppetry and an accordion score—all performed by this unique artist who wears many hats. Come on, let’s make this happen!

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Culture

2001: A Halloween Watchlist

The optimistic ’90s are over, the War on Terror has yet to begin and movie tickets cost about $5.50. This Halloween, return to ’01 for your cinematic scares! By Emma McClatchey

voters again with films like Black Swan, The Witch and Get Out. Like any year, 2001 embraces cash-grab sequels and schlocky thrillers, and launches at least one new franchise of questionable quality. Yet, The Blair Witch Project (1999) recently demonstrated that low-budget scares can still dominate the box office, even as CGI technology advances. And the 2000 Best Picture winner, American Beauty, proved the seedy underbelly of Clinton-era suburbia was the perfect stage for

001. Wikipedia and BitTorrent launch. Apple

a psychological thriller. In the spirit of inducing some

introduces iTunes and

Halloween déjà vu, I’ve compiled a

the iPod. Rudy Giuliani is

list of 10 horror films from 2001 that

Time’s Person of the Year. Britney

exemplify the fantastical fears of the

dons a python. The kids won’t

Y2K era. Some are classics, others

shut up about Harry Potter, and

cringey, but all are utterly oh-one.

Mulholland Drive, 2001

Bones

Hannibal

lots of money, and it is certainly

Horror, crime

Horror, thriller

a frightening affair (particularly

are desperately trying to replicate

Available to stream on all rental

Streaming on Amazon Prime Video

when Gary Oldman’s disfigured

the success of Scream, The Matrix

platforms, $3.99

your brother won’t shut up about Ocean’s 11. Hollywood’s horror producers

and The Sixth Sense. Americans

pedophile pig farmer gets in on Imagine Clarice Starling and

the murder game), but it wouldn’t

are scared of loner teens and

Into the pantheon of great movie

Hannibal Lecter hooked up.

fetch the accolades Silence did 10

tech-savvy serial killers—not yet

taglines I submit “This Halloween,

Thomas Harris readers don’t have

years earlier.

the foreign terrorists and random,

unleash the Dogg.” Between al-

to. Harris’ 1999 novel Hannibal

soulless violence that will color

bums Tha Last Meal (’00) and

is so bizarre and disappointing,

Donnie Darko

post-9/11 cinema.

Paid tha Cost to Be da Bo$$ (’02),

Jodie Foster refused to star in

Sci-fi, psychological thriller

Snoop Dogg did a turn as Jimmy

an adaptation of it. Still, the box

Streaming on Amazon Prime Video

London, New York and Atlanta

Bones, a switchblade-wielding

office prospects of a Silence of

remain unconquered by zombie

ghost stalking his murderers

the Lambs sequel were too tempt-

I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda

hordes. Saw and The Human

and sending them to hell. Bones

ing for the studio, so Julianne

sad. This indie mega-cult classic

Centipede have yet to catapult

flopped at the box office, but has

Moore stepped up to the plate

follows the young and troubled

shock horror into popular culture.

since been reappraised as a stylish

glass and screenwriters got to

Donnie (an iconic bebe Jake

It’ll be a decade before horror

attempt to bring blaxploitation

work trying to salvage the story.

Gyllenhaal), who falls under the

starts to court critics and Oscar

into the 21st century.

Hannibal (2001) did indeed make

malevolent influence of a giant

Nary a vampire sparkles;

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performance, and recall the buoy-

photosensitive children start

starring Justin Long and a winged

ant star power of director-actor

seeing ghosts in their English

demonic creature that awakens

Bill Paxton.

country home. The Others shares

every 23 years to feed on teens. It

surface similarities with M. Night

spawned two sequels, and a third

The Hole

Shyamalan films—a quiet, fam-

is due to be released before the

Mystery, thriller

ily-focused plot and third-act

year is up—the first in a new trilo-

Streaming on Amazon Prime Video

twist—but the WWII setting and

gy, developed without Salva’s in-

sweeping performance of Nicole

volvement. Here’s hopin’, because

Four British teenagers get them-

Kidman (who broke up with Tom

the Creeper is damn freaky.

selves locked in an abandoned

Cruise in 2001, good for her!) ele-

underground bomb shelter. Yes,

vate this eerie ghost story.

Thora Birch’s British accent leaves

Action, horror

something to be desired. Yes,

Thirteen Ghosts

Available to stream on all rental

there’s too much moody teen ro-

Horror, action

platforms, $3.99

mance. But this is a star-making

Streaming on HBO Max

performance for 15-year-old Kiera

OK, I’m cheating a bit—this Wesley

Knightly—and nightmare fuel for

They don’t make ‘em like this any-

Snipesequel came out in March

anyone with a fear of claustropho-

more, and that’s probably a good

2002. But it’s still the half-breed

bia, starvation or clogged toilets.

thing. This grungy, convoluted

progeny of 2001: campy and goth,

ghost flick, edited by Cocaine™,

like Tim Burton’s Batman films;

features an eclectic ensemble of

world-building, amid a mini gold-

Drama, mystery

ghost hunters—including Tony

en era for fantasy film franchises

Streaming on Amazon Prime

Shalhoub, fresh off Spy Kids (also

(Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings);

Video, Showtime

2001), and Matthew Lillard, a year

gory and violent, but not “grit-

out from his debut as live-action

ty” like Nolan’s Dark Knight, or

Mulholland Drive

demon rabbit named Frank who

Blade II

mayyyy not have his best interest in mind. Oh yeah, and Frank says

David Lynch can’t let a new de-

Shaggy—locked in an extremely

stringently family- and China mar-

the world’s going to end in 28

cade start without making an

haunted mansion.

ket-friendly like Marvel Cinematic

days.

audience question the fabric of

Universe entries. And the emer-

reality. A film better experienced

Jeepers Creepers

gence of director Guillermo Del

Frailty

than described, Mulholland Drive

Horror, suspense

Toro as a big-budget horror mag-

Horror, drama

stars Naomi Watts at her absolute

Streaming on… eh, who cares

nate would be one of the more

Streaming on Amazon Prime

best (and queerest!), roaming the

Video, for free on YouTube

streets of L.A. to help her new girl-

I can’t in good conscience recom-

horror, his filmography influencing

friend solve a mystery. In typical

mend this movie. It was written

current vampire series helmers

Lynchian fashion, shit gets surreal.

and directed by Victor Salva, who

Taika Waititi

12 years earlier was convicted

and Jemaine

A man raised by a god-fearing, homicidal father tells the FBI his

significant developments of ’00s

brother is responsible for a string

The Others

of sexually abusing a child and

Clement

of recent murders. Frailty is far

Horror, mystery

possession of child sexual abuse

(What We

from a revelation, but it’s nice

Not currently available to stream

imagery. Jeepers Creepers was

Do in the

one of the most traditional and

Shadows).

to see flickers of the future Rust Cohle in Matthew McConaughey’s

A mother and her two

lucrative horror movies of 2001,

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Culture A-List

Eve Maret’s Synthesizer Heart The electronic artist and Witching Hour performer gets comfortable with her own voice.

BY KENT WILLIAMS

ve Maret will be a featured performer at this year’s Witching Hour Festival, an exploration of the creative process and a celebration of new work produced by Little Village and the Englert Theatre. Full schedule and ticketing for this year’s Witching Hour will be available soon at witchinghourfestival.com. Nashville-based electronic musician Eve Maret has accomplished a lot in the five years since her debut album, Say So, was released. She takes inspiration from bands like Can, Neu and Silver Apples, and spins them together with the work of more recent pioneers like Autechre and Plaid. You can hear echoes of the past in Maret’s music, but she resists genre classification. She incorporates her voice—both singing and speaking—into her work in ways that smear the division between singing and synthesis, using autotune, vocoding, pitch shifting and sampling. In a phone interview in early September, Maret told me she’d grown up in St. Louis, with parents who were “big music fanatics.” “They took me to concerts and I just loved it,” she said. “I felt so engaged and my imagination was exploding every time I went.” In high school she enrolled in guitar, bass and drums lessons, before heading to college at Belmont University in Nashville. At Belmont she made a connection to drummer Chester Thompson, who played and recorded with Frank Zappa. “It was totally by chance I could take lessons with him, and it was just a total godsend. It was what kind of saved me at the time,” Maret said. “It was a rough time of my life, but to get to study drums with him and to really pursue music and be supported in that was really amazing.” Being exposed to German electronic music like Kraftwerk and Nue led Maret to find a strong identification with electronic music. “I decided to buy a synthesizer on a whim, without really knowing anything at all, off of Craigslist for $100 and it totally changed my life,” she said. “That synthesizer doesn’t work anymore, but I still keep it around as a memento because it’s so special to me at this point.” People who don’t listen to electronic music will encounter her music as a sweet, optimistic, beautiful mess, perhaps overwhelming at first listen. But there’s a method here, an expression of her artistic personality. Her technical skill with electronic synthesis imposes order while allowing 54 October 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299

for surprise and delight. When Maret’s father died, she felt a new “awareness,” she said, of the brevity of life and her place in it. She knew it was time to go all in on a career as a musician. “His passing was really difficult for me but also a gift in the sense that it affirmed my dreams,” Maret said. “From that point I’ve just been trying to make as much music as I can and explore who I am through sound and it’s been an amazing journey.” Since electronic music is mostly abstract, what does adding your voice and lyrics do for you? What’s motivating you there?

I’ve always been interested in the idea of pop music and the idea of music that is universally

Witching Hour Festival Various Venues, Iowa City, Friday and Saturday, Nov. 5 and 6, $15-25

accessible, that anyone can access it and experience it and feel what the music is conveying ... I’m really interested in creating songs that I hope can do that. Although I love spending time making really abstract, improvised, exploratory works, crafting songs is something I think is really difficult, and a really good yang to the yin of my improvised music practice. There are messages that I feel I need to express for myself and for others that generally have themes of empowerment and uplifting. There is definitely

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magic in some music with lyrics. It’s funny because I’ve never been very comfortable with my voice, necessarily, but when I discovered the Roland VP-3, this vocal transformer, I feel like it allowed me to do what I’d been trying to do for a while. Just like the playfulness of it—it felt more comfortable to play my voice in a sense rather than just for it to exist as it is, to think of it more as a texture or an instrument than me. But I still feel like I come through that, or I definitely hope that that happens. You’re singing through a vocoder, or it’s mixed with vocoded vocal, which kind of perfects the pitch. It reminded me of the “Still Alive” song from the Portal video game. I love that! I’ve always been interested

in ... odd vocals and I think that contributes to why it’s still part of my practice today. Of course everyone has been influenced by Kraftwerk, but also Laurie Anderson is a really big deal for me. It’s an opportunity to experiment a little bit, so I don’t want to pass it up.

Electronic music has been maledominated despite there being a lot of pioneers like Delia Derbyshire and Susan Ciani. It seems that right now is a moment where female, trans and non-binary artists are gaining note. It’s interesting because yes,

right now is the moment for women and nonbinary and trans people and people of color. But it’s also like, we’ve always been here. I think there’s a process of needing to rewrite history in some ways that’s happening. So people are getting clear about how women have been influencing the genre for a really long time—and all kinds of people we haven’t heard about because people in power are the white men. But that’s changing, and it’s a really beautiful thing. I’m excited about the new music that’s being created in the world and I’m very eager to hear what it might be like. One thing that stuck out with me listening to your album was the song “Synthesizer Hearts.” The line, “When synthesizer hearts replace our hearts”—what can you say about that lyric? What does that mean to you? I was on tour and it was my first

tour, and I was in Philadelphia, and I was staying with a friend who owns a synth repair shop they run from their home. It’s amazing; they’re called Belltown Synthworks. I was overwhelmed in the most wonderful way, and I remember looking around this room of theirs, and there’s a Prophet V—like my favorite synthesizer—and all these amazing vintage synthesizers. Literally the phrase just came to me and I wrote it down on an iPhone

note and made a minute-long loop of me singing that phrase and some synthesizers and drum tracks. I left it that way for months, I didn’t know what to do with it. Then I got an [Ableton] Push and I embarked on this journey to make it as abstract as possible, and to just create the song from that little loop that I didn’t know how to complete. I’m not trying to say, “Oh, all of humankind should have their hearts replaced with a synthesizer.” It’s more so me exploring the relationship between myself and my synthesizers, and how it’s so magical that a synthesizer can sometimes express my feelings better than I can express my feelings. I just feel it’s a beautiful alchemical thing that happens with making music. The role of the instrument is very important. Your piece “7” is a long improvisation using just one instrument. How does improvising on a single instrument feel? How is that different from working with your whole studio and software? I think

working with one instrument and improvising is really the most basic form for me to meditate. It feels riskier and more exciting in a way, because I’ve presented myself with this challenge of, “OK! No plans!” There’s no controlling; it’s simply listening and following my intuition. That’s a practice that’s really important, and it is the foundation of my recording practice too, my song crafting. For many years open-ended jamming is how I’ve made a lot of music, or the root of it, I guess. I started doing these solo improv explorations during quarantine because I was thinking, “You know, why not?” And I wanted to know my synthesizer better and really see all that it had to show me. So I’ve kind of dedicated myself to spending time every day recording these improvised sessions. I still keep up with that from time to time. It’s been really fun and surprising and sometimes chaotic and disappointing, and sometimes really feels great and groovy. It’s a mixed bag but I feel like it is a lot of fun for me to just kind of let go of control and see what happens! I was also interested in seeing what kind of compositions would naturally arise. It’s funny to me; I’ll listen back to some of the improvisations and they’ll start to feel … like I’ll start to kind of get a grasp of what the structure is. It’s a journey through different spaces.

Kent Williams is a writer & electronic musician in Iowa. He’s released music on the pertin_nce and Triplicate Records labels, in addition to several self-released albums on Bandcamp. chaircrusher.com

EDITORS’ PICKS: October 2021

EVENTS:October October 2021 Planning an event? Submit event info to calendar@littlevillagemag. com. Include event name, date, time, venue, street address, admission price and a brief description (no all-caps, exclamation points or advertising verbiage, please). To find more events, visit littlevillagemag.com/calendar. Please check venue listing in case details have changed.

Let the Right One In,

fresh cut, beautifully arranged, locally-sourced flowers

Theatre Cedar Rapids, Oct. 1531, ThursdaysSaturdays at 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 2:30 p.m., $25-35

There are certain expectations established when you learn that the title of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s 2004 vampire novel Let the Right One In was inspired by a Morrissey song (1992’s “Let the Right One Slip In”). A little moodiness, a little ennui, a little teen angst maybe. Certainly, Morrissey’s reputation for elaborate and theatrical douchebaggery sets the scene well for a spooky, atmospheric teen vampire tale. But this story has infiltrated the public consciousness in ways that would make even Moz jealous. So far, it’s had a 2008 Swedish movie adaptation, a 2010 U.S. film adaptation (Let Me In, controversial for eviscerating the tale’s trans elements), a TV series originally developed for A&E that will finally go into production for Showtime next year and, oh yeah, this 2012 stage adaptation by Jack Thorne. TCR takes the play on full-throttle, with deliciously eerie poster design that promises no escape from the honesty of horror theater. Patrick Dulaney directs this coming-of-age love story. TCR is currently requiring mask-wearing of all audience members, but will email all ticket-holders the day prior to a performance with any updates to safety protocols. More dazzling performances

Weddings & Events • Local Delivery Workshops • Flower Subscriptions Wrapped Bouquets • Custom Arrangements

207 NORTH LINN STREET, IOWA CITY 319.338.1332 • WILLOWANDSTOCK.COM 56 October 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299

Thursday, Oct. 7 at 7 p.m.

ICBF Thursday-Sunday, Oct. 21-31

Improv First Thursdays: Improv

Riverside Theatre Presents: The Grand

Incubator and LAS Podcast

Inquisitor, University of Iowa Main

Network, CSPS Hall, Cedar

Library Gallery, Iowa City, Free (regis-

Rapids, $5

tration required)

Tuesday, Oct. 12 at 8 p.m. 40th

Friday-Sunday, Oct. 22-24 ICCT

Annual UI Dance Gala, Online,

Presents: Vintage Hitchcock: A Live

Free

Radio Play, Online, $5

Thursday-Sunday, Oct. 14-

Friday & Saturday, Oct. 29-30 at 8 p.m.

17 Revival Theatre Company

SPT Theatre Presents Tales from the

Presents: End of the Rainbow,

Writers Room: Around the World in 80

CSPS Hall, Cedar Rapids, $25-47

Days, CSPS Hall, Cedar Rapids, $25-30.

AROUND THE CRANDIC

LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM More timeless tunes Thursday, Oct. 7 at 7:30 p.m. An Evening with Jake Shimbukuro, Englert Theatre, Iowa City, $15-56.50 Sunday, Oct. 10 at 3 p.m. Family Folk Machine Presents: Never So Far: A Fall Concert, Lower City Park Festival Stage, Iowa City, Free (donations accepted) Sunday, Oct. 10 at 3 p.m. Jordan Sellergren, Sutliff Cider, Free Sunday, Oct. 10 at 7:30 p.m. Drive-By Truckers

via David Dondero

w/ Buffalo Nichols, Englert Theatre, $15-37.50 Sunday, Oct. 10 at 8 p.m. PRIMUS - A Tribute to Kings, McGrath Amphitheatre, Cedar Rapids, $35-227 Wednesday, Oct. 13 at 7:30 p.m. Pokey LaFarge w/ Esther Rose, Englert Theatre, $15-26.50 Tuesday, Oct. 19 at 8:30 p.m. Twin Tombs w/ Closet Witch, Father Christmas, Psyop, Trumpet Blossom Cafe, Iowa City, $10 donation Friday, Oct. 22 at 8 p.m. I AM KAWEHI, CSPS Hall, Cedar Rapids, $15-50 Friday, Oct. 22 at 9 p.m. Feed Me Weird Things Presents: Midwife w/ Amulets, Trumpet Blossom Cafe, Iowa City, $10-15 Saturday, Oct. 23 at 7:30 p.m. Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives w/ Cedar County Cobras, Englert Theatre, $15-180 Sunday, Oct. 24 at 7:30 p.m. Dosh with Sinner via Dave Moore

Frenz, Trumpet Blossom Cafe, Iowa City, $10 Sunday, Oct. 24 at 7:30 p.m. Bob Mould Solo Electric: Distortion and Blue Hearts! w/ Jason

David Dondero and Dave Moore—Sunset Matinee, Uptown Bill’s Coffee House, Iowa City, Sunday, Oct. 17 at 5 p.m., $10

Minnesota-born troubadour David Dondero is bringing his Living Room Show tour through Iowa City for an extra special gig at the former Uptown Bill’s Coffee House space at 730 S. Dubuque St. The celebrated singer-songwriter will be the last performer on that storied stage, as the PS1 Media Arts Co-op, which currently owns the building, prepares for a big move. Better yet, Iowa’s own Dave Moore opens the show for a legendary double feature that hearkens back to the folk roots of the venue. There couldn’t possibly be a more appropriate way to say goodbye. Masks required, as well as either proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test. Seating is limited to 50 people.

Narducy, Englert Theatre, $20-35 Wednesday, Oct. 27 at 7:30 p.m. Dar Williams w/ Heather Maloney, Englert Theatre, $15-50 Thursday, Oct. 28 at 9 p.m. Jon Mueller w/ Claire Nunez, Trumpet Blossom Cafe, Iowa City, $5-10 Friday, Oct. 29 at 7:30 p.m. John Hiatt and The Jerry Douglas Band, Englert Theatre, $55.50 Monday, Nov. 1 at 7 p.m. Billy Prine & The Prine Time Players Present: The Songs Of John Prine, Englert Theatre, $20-39 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299 October 2021 57

EDITORS’ PICKS: October 2021

AROUND THE CRANDIC More artistic adventures Friday, Oct. 8 at 5 p.m. Gallery Walk, Downtown Iowa City, Free Sunday, Oct. 17 at 1 p.m. Art in the Afternoon | Jonathan McHugh, ArtiFactory, Iowa City, Free Thursday, Oct. 21 at 7 p.m. New Conversations on African Art, Online, Stanley Museum, Free Friday, Oct. 22 at 5 p.m. Artist Reception: Juncture by Ellen Kleckner, Gilded Pear Gallery, Cedar Rapids, Free Saturday, Oct. 23 at 2 p.m. Stanley Creates: Coffee Painting,

via Ellen Kleckner

Warning Dove, Prism Reform

Online, Free

Opening Reception: Prism Reform, Warning Dove, Blick Art Materials, Iowa City, Friday, Oct. 8 at 5 p.m., Free Even with an opening reception during

Iowa City’s Gallery Walk, even with a their display in a retail space rather than a traditional gallery with fewer hours, I can absolutely guarantee that not as many people who should see Prism Reform will see Prism Reform. For that reason, it behooves you, dear reader, to bust your ass to make certain you get down there. Warning Dove is an arts collective of sorts made up of Jay Schleidt, Tyler Luetkehans and Jerry Glover. Schleid wanted to introduce his two friends and collaborators to each other (he and Luetkehans work together on Mustard-in-Law; he and Glover have been riffing off each other’s art and poetry since ’99). “A large out-of-control art project is the only way to forge those bonds,” he said. The “absurdist mixed-media collaborations” of Prism Reform were achieved by the trio swapping canvasses back and forth.

58 October 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299

READER PHOTO SUBMISSIONS for our January Arts Issue

2021 AAN Awards Finalist for Best Special Section

Submissions should include:

• Original, previously unpublished color or b/w photography • 300 dpi or higher .tif or .jpg files • Regional relevance DEADLINE • Photographer’s full name and contact info November • 50-word description 30, 2021 Submit to jordan@littlevillagemag.com or mail/deliver prints to 623 S Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA 52240

Nick Rohlman, originally published in the January 2020 Arts Issue

now accepting

LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299 October 2021 59

EDITORS’ PICKS: October 2021

AROUND THE CRANDIC

More revelatory readings Wednesday, Oct. 6 at 7 p.m. Antonio de Jesús López w/ Brenda Hillman, Online, Prairie Lights, Free Sunday, Oct. 10 at 7 p.m. 508 Press Poem Zine Release w/ Lisa K. Roberts and Antifahorn, Public Space One Gardens, Free Wednesday, Oct. 13 at 7 p.m. Geoffrey Hilsabeck w/ Suzanne Buffam, Online, Prairie Lights, Free ICBF Thursday, Oct. 14 at 7 p.m. Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Online, Free Thursday, Oct. 14 at 7 p.m. Achy Obejas w/ Ana Merino, Online, Prairie Lights, Free Monday, Oct. 18 at 6 p.m. Fermentation Journeys: An Evening with Sandor Katz, via Debra Marquart

Online, Prairie Lights, Free ICBF Monday, Oct. 18 at 7 p.m. The Writers’ Rooms, Iowa City Public Library, Free ICBF Tuesday, Oct. 19 at 7 p.m. Julie Hanson

Iowa City Book Festival,

Various Venues, Monday-Sunday, Oct. 18-24 The 13th Annual Iowa City Book

Festival is taking a hybrid approach to their schedule, with virtual events interwoven with in-person readings as well as a variety of other programming outside of the literary sphere (look for the ICBF throughout the calendar). Things technically kick off on Thursday, Oct. 14, in conjunction with Simon & Schuster’s AuthorFest, with a virtual conversation with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. Events not to miss include a chance to explore the various offerings of the Writers’ Rooms, a series of themed community writing groups; Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduates Julie Hanson and Marc Rahe at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 19; and the final in-person literature event of the festival, Iowa Poet Laureate Debra Marquart with Iowa’s first Student Poet Ambassador, Shreya Khullar, who attends West High in Iowa City. The hybrid nature of the event opens the festival offerings to a wider audience both within Iowa City and across the country.

NEWS YOU CAN TRUST.

90.9

NEWS | STUDIO ONE

910

NEWS

Stream online: IowaPublicRadio.org or the IPR app.

Your Opportunity to Engage with Arts and Culture CulturalCorridor.org

and Marc Rahe, ICPL, Free ICBF Wednesday, Oct. 20 at 7 p.m. Habib Tengour and Pierre Joris, ICPL, Free ICBF Thursday, Oct. 21 at 7 p.m. Reuben Jonathan Miller, Online, Free ICBF Thursday, Oct. 21 at 7 p.m. Gina Frangello and Emily Rapp Black, Online, Free ICBF Friday, Oct. 22 at 12 p.m. UI International Writing Program Panel, ICPL, Free

LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM

ICBF Saturday, Oct. 23 at 11:30 a.m. Gregory Galloway, ICPL, Free ICBF Saturday, Oct. 23 at 1 p.m.Reading Through the Roarin’ ’20s, UI Main Library Special Collections, Free ICBF Saturday, Oct. 23 at 1 p.m. Kristy Nabhan-Warren, ICPL, Free ICBF Saturday, Oct. 23 at 2:30 p.m. Laura Gellot, UI Main Library, Free ICBF Saturday, Oct. 23 at 2:30 p.m. Chuy Renteria, ICPL, Free ICBF Saturday, Oct. 23 at 4 p.m. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Online, Free ICBF Sunday, Oct. 24 at 1 p.m. Debra Marquart and Shreya Khullar, ICPL, Free Sunday, Oct. 24 at 1 p.m. Fall Festival,

Queer/ Dialogue September 7– December 12, 2021 Curated by Daniel Strong, associate director, and Greg Manuel, guest curator

SCAN THE CODE FOR AN EXHIBITION PREVIEW

GCMoA presents eight artists whose works enable dialogue at the intersections of identity expression — race, gender, individuality and otherness, equity within differences — with a focus on the body as expressive terrain.

Sidekick Coffee & Books, Iowa City, Free ICBF Sunday, Oct. 24 at 2:30 p.m. Fiona Sampson, Online, Free Monday and Tuesday, Oct. 25 & 26 An Evening w/ David Sedaris, Englert Theatre, $53 Wednesday, Oct. 27 at 7 p.m. Vanessa Jimenez Gabb and Dot Devota, Online, Prairie Lights, Free Thursday, Oct. 28 at 7 p.m. Jessie Daniels w/ Lyz Lenz, Online, Prairie Lights, Free Tuesday, Nov. 2 at 7 p.m. Amy Butcher w/

The Museum is open to the public and always free. Face masks required. For information about the exhibition and related in-person and virtual programming, visit: grinnell.edu/museum. Minors under age 18 need to be accompanied by an adult. Grinnell College is not responsible for minors on campus or at College sponsored events.

Melissa Febos, Online, Prairie Lights, Free

NEWS: WHAT EVEN IS IT? Find out by subscribing to the Little Village Daily Digest LittleVillageMag.com/Subscribe

EDITORS’ PICKS: October 2021

AROUND THE CRANDIC More community connections! Thursday, Oct. 7 at 6 p.m. University of Iowa Student Legal Services: Renting 101!, Online, Free Friday, Oct. 8 at 7 p.m.

courtesy of Cedar Valley Habitat for Humanity

Spooky Legends of Linn County, History Center, Cedar Rapids, $5 Thursday and Friday, Oct. 14-15 Iowa Ideas Conference 2021 ft. Peggy Whitson, Online, Free Friday-Sunday, Oct. 15-17 ICON 46: Seeking Further Horizons, Cedar Rapids Marriott, $50-125

Recycle Gala Trashion Show, Olympic

South Side Theatre, Cedar Rapids, Tuesday, Oct. 19 at 6 p.m., $40200 Recycle Gala, a fundraiser for the Cedar Valley Habitat for Humanity, doesn’t celebrate trashy fashion—

necessarily. There’s no limits on the style, really. But the crux of the fun is that it’s fashion actually created out of trash. The competition requires that the piece either deconstruct existing clothing or use found materials. Each entry needs to contain at least one item found at Habitat for Humanity ReStore. Tickets for the gala are $40 for general admission, $100 for VIP balcony seats and $200 for a runway-adjacent sofa that seats three. The evening will include food, drinks, music and a live auction.

Monday, Oct. 18 at 5 p.m. Why Anne Frank Still Matters—An Obermann Conversation, Online, Free Saturday-Sunday, Oct. 23-24 Iowa Somatic Psychology and Movement Therapies Summit, Movement for All, LLC, Iowa City, $300-350

MOST COMMENDABLE COVID-19 MITIGATION GAME • BEST DEFENDER OF SCIENCE • BEST PANDEMIC REMODEL • BEST PANDEMIC MOOD-BOOSTER • BEST PANDEMIC BEACON OF RATIONALITY • BEST VACCINE ADVOCATE • BEST SWITCH TO STREAMING • BEST STREAMED PERFORMANCE • BEST PANDEMIC ADAPTATION - RETAIL • WORST PANDEMIC RESPONSE BY A PUBLIC FIGURE • BEST PANDEMIC ADAPTATION—RECREATION • BEST PANDEMIC ADAPTATION—ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT • BEST PANDEMIC ADAPTATION—COMMUNITY • BEST PANDEMIC ADAPTATION—GOODS AND SERVICES • BEST PANDEMIC ADAPTATION—ARTIST • BEST LOCAL BAND • BEST 2021 SONG BY LOCAL ARTIST (SINCE NOV. 1ST, 2020) • BEST 2021 ALBUM BY LOCAL ARTIST (SINCE NOV. 1ST, 2020) • BEST SONGWRITER • BEST LOCAL PODCAST • BEST OVERALL MUSICIAN • BEST ARTS PRESENTER (ORGANIZATION, VENUE OR INDIVIDUAL) • BEST LOCAL THEATER COMPANY • BEST THEATRICAL PRODUCTION OF 2021 (LIVE OR VIRTUAL) (SINCE NOV. 1ST, 2020) • BEST CONCERT OF 2021 (LIVE OR VIRTUAL) (SINCE NOV. 1ST, 2020) • BEST FESTIVAL OF 2021 (LIVE OR VIRTUAL) (SINCE NOV. 1ST, 2020) • BEST PUBLIC ART • BEST LOCAL STAND-UP COMEDIAN • BEST LOCAL AUTHOR • BEST LOCAL ARTIST • BEST PLACE TO DANCE • BEST MOVIE THEATER • BEST LOCAL RECORD LABEL • BEST LOCAL RECORDING STUDIO • BEST COMMUNITY (I.E. NON-PROFESSIONAL) MUSIC OR THEATER GROUP • BEST PLACE TO SEE LOCAL MUSIC • BEST CULTURAL EVENT • BEST DRAG PERFORMER • BEST POET/SPOKEN WORD ARTIST • BEST RADIO STATION • BEST PLACE FOR A CHEAP DATE • BEST FREE FUN • BEST PLACE FOR A KID’S BIRTHDAY PARTY • BEST LIBRARY • BEST ART GALLERY OR MUSEUM • BEST SCIENCE OR HISTORY MUSEUM • BEST HISTORIC BUILDING • BEST PLACE TO VOLUNTEER • BEST ELECTED OFFICIAL • BEST NONPROFIT DIRECTOR • BEST COMMUNITY ADVOCATE • BEST ENVIRONMENTAL ADVOCATE • BEST NONPROFIT FOR COMMUNITY ACCESS • BEST ARTS NONPROFIT • BEST YOUTH NONPROFIT • HARDEST FIGHTIN’ UNION • BEST TOURIST ATTRACTION • BEST YARD/GARDEN • MOST TRUSTED FUNERAL HOME • BEST SHOPPING DISTRICT • BEST VIEW • BEST PUBLIC RESTROOM • BEST LOCAL TWITTER ACCOUNT • BEST LOCAL FACEBOOK PAGE • BEST LOCAL HERO • BEST LOCAL ENTREPRENEUR • BEST LGBTQ+ HANGOUT • BEST PANDEMIC MOOD-BOOSTER • BEST PANDEMIC BEACON OF RATIONALITY • BEST RESTAURANT • BEST COCKTAIL MENU • BEST CHEF • BEST BARTENDER • BEST RESTAURANT STAFF • BEST FOOD-SCENE GAME-CHANGER • BEST GROCERY STORE • BEST PRODUCE • BEST FARMERS MARKET VENDOR • BEST CSA (COMMUNITY-SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE) • BEST LOCAL FARM • BEST CRAFT BREWERY • BEST COFFEEHOUSE • BEST RESTAURANT FOR DELIVERY/TAKEOUT • BEST PLACE FOR A BUSINESS LUNCH • BEST RESTAURANT TO TAKE YOUR PARENTS TO • BEST RESTAURANT FOR A FIRST DATE • BEST PIZZA • BEST BURGER • BEST FRIES • BEST BAKERY • BEST COLD TREATS • BEST BREAKFAST/BRUNCH • BEST LATE-NIGHT FOOD • BEST BARBECUE • BEST SOUL FOOD • BEST LATIN/SOUTH AMERICAN CUISINE OR MARKET • BEST EUROPEAN CUISINE OR MARKET • BEST MIDDLE EASTERN/MEDITERRANEAN CUISINE OR MARKET • BEST AFRICAN CUISINE OR MARKET • BEST EAST/SOUTHEAST ASIAN CUISINE OR MARKET (CHINA, JAPAN, THAILAND, VIETNAM, ETC.) • BEST SOUTH ASIAN CUISINE OR MARKET (INDIA, PAKISTAN, ETC.) • BEST SEAFOOD • BEST PATIO/OUTDOOR DINING • BEST LIQUOR STORE • BEST ATMOSPHERE • BEST GLUTEN-FREE-FRIENDLY OPTIONS • BEST USE OF LOCAL INGREDIENTS • BEST CHICKEN WINGS • BEST BEER SELECTION • BEST WINE SELECTION • BEST SUSHI • BEST PUB FOOD • BEST DIVE BAR • BEST DOUGHNUTS • BEST RESTAURANT TO CURE YOUR HANGOVER • BEST TACOS • MOST INNOVATIVE MENU • BEST APPETIZERS/SMALL PLATES • BEST VEGAN OPTIONS • BEST CATERING • BEST RETAIL STAFF • BEST VINTAGE OR CONSIGNMENT STORE • BEST STORE FOR GIFT SHOPPING • BEST STORE TO SPLURGE ON YOURSELF AT • MOST UNIQUE SHOP • BEST BANK OR CREDIT UNION • MOST TRUSTED MECHANIC • MOST TRUSTED PLUMBER • BEST HOME IMPROVEMENT COMPANY • MOST TRUSTED ELECTRICIAN • MOST TRUSTED REALTOR • MOST TRUSTED IN AUTO SALES • BEST TATTOO ARTIST • BEST BODY PIERCER • BEST HAIR SALON • BEST NAIL SALON • BEST VET CLINIC • BEST PHOTOGRAPHER/VIDEOGRAPHER (INDIVIDUAL OR BUSINESS) • BEST WEDDING VENUE • BEST HOME DECOR STORE • BEST ATTORNEY/LAW FIRM • BEST DAYCARE • BEST ROOFING COMPANY • BEST CONVENIENCE STORE • BEST HVAC COMPANY • BEST LANDSCAPER • BEST TOBACCO/VAPE SHOP • BEST SHOE STORE • BEST MUSICAL INSTRUMENT STORE • BEST FINANCIAL PLANNER/TAX SERVICE • BEST INSURANCE AGENCY • BEST JEWELRY STORE • BEST PET BOARDING/GROOMING • BEST BOOKSTORE • BEST PEST CONTROL • BEST BARBER • BEST HOTEL • BEST APPLIANCE STORE • BEST BRIDAL BOUTIQUE • BEST COMIC BOOK/GAMING STORE • BEST FLORIST • BEST FLOORING/CARPET STORE • BEST GARDEN STORE • BEST RECORD STORE • BEST TOY STORE • BEST STORE FOR KIDS’ BOOKS • BEST HOUSE CLEANING SERVICE • BEST ANTIQUE STORE • BEST AUTO DETAILING/CAR WASH • BEST MOVERS • BEST LOCALLY MADE PRODUCT • BEST PLACE TO EXPERIENCE NATURE • BEST BIKE TRAIL • BEST GYM • BEST FITNESS INSTRUCTOR • BEST MASSAGE THERAPIST • BEST PLACE TO READ A BOOK • BEST PLACE TO PEOPLE-WATCH • BEST PICNIC SPOT • BEST CAMPGROUND • BEST COMMUNITY SPORTS LEAGUE • MOST TRUSTED PHYSICIAN • BEST WOMEN’S HEALTH CLINIC • BEST MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES PROVIDER • BEST CRISIS MANAGEMENT SERVICE/ORGANIZATION • BEST PHYSICAL THERAPIST • BEST CHIROPRACTOR • BEST AESTHETICIAN/DERMATOLOGIST • BEST EYE CLINIC • BEST ASSISTED LIVING COMMUNITY/RETIREMENT HOME • BEST BOWLING ALLEY • BEST DENTIST/ORTHODONTIST • BEST PLACE TO PLAY POOL • BEST PLACE TO SKATE • BEST TRIVIA NIGHT • BEST KARAOKE NIGHT • BEST BIKE SHOP • BEST SPORTING GOODS STORE • BEST PHARMACY • BEST YOGA STUDIO • BEST DOG PARK • BEST SUMMER CAMP

THANK YOU TO ALL WHO VOTED IN 2021!

Winners will be announced in the December issue of Little Village

THE ol' CRANDIC

62 October 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299

EDITORS’ PICKS: October 2021

CEDAR FALLS / WATERLOO

LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM What’s good, Waterloo? Saturday, Oct. 9 at 8 p.m. Host Country w/ Joel Sires, the Deeves, Octopus College Hill, Cedar Falls, $10 Sunday, Oct. 10 at 2 p.m. Cedar Falls Authors Festival, Hearst Center for the Arts, Free Friday, Oct. 15 at 8 p.m. Good Morning Midnight w/ Salt Fox, Octopus College Hill, $10 Saturday, Oct. 16 at 10 a.m. 1st Ever Beer & Bacon Event, Downtown Cedar Falls, Free Saturday, Oct. 23 at 9 p.m. Carnage the Executioner w/ Hummingbird Horizon, Tim Boobie, Octopus College Hill, $10 Thursday, Oct. 28 at 5:30 p.m. Black Hawk Children’s Theatre: Trick-ROAR-Treat, Waterloo

Jordan Sellergren

Center for the Arts Phelps Youth Pavilion, $2-5 Thursday, Oct. 28 at 7 p.m. Final Thursday Reading Series: Maribeth Boelts, Hearst Center for the Arts,

Trick or Treat Downtown,

Friday, Oct. 29 at 3:30 p.m., Cedar Falls AND Saturday, Oct. 30 at 10 a.m., Waterloo

Kids have multiple chances to don their costumes and stock up on treats. Both Cedar Falls Downtown District and Main Street Waterloo are getting in on the fun. Merchants will be set up at participating locations to help raise parents’ dentist bills (and celebrate the holiday!). Dress up the whole family and join friends and neighbors for these spooky events!

Cedar Falls, Free Saturday, Oct. 30 at 7 p.m. Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony Presents: Villains & Superheros, GBPAC Great Hall, Cedar Falls, $6.75-55.75

THE WEEKENDER YOUR WEEKLY EDITOR-CURATED ARTS COMPENDIUM, A.K.A.

st uf f to do IN YOUR INBOX EVERY THURSDAY LittleVillageMag.com/Subscribe

64 October 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299

LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299 October 2021 65

EDITORS’ PICKS: October 2021

QUAD CITIES

Quad City Harm Reduction Presents: Online Narcan Training, Friday,

Upcoming in the QC

Quad City Harm Reduction’s Outreach Coordinator will conduct a training over Google Meet for those interested in learning to administer Narcan. Narcan is used to save the lives of people experiencing opioid overdoses and can be administered by anyone. This free training is available to all who are interested. QCHR will also advise attendees on where to find Narcan kits and how to help those who are suspected of overdosing.

Saturday, Oct. 16 at 12 p.m. Reproductive

Oct. 15 at 7 p.m., FREE

Saturday, Oct. 9 at 6 p.m. The Project LGBTQIA+ Mixer, Rozz-Tox, Rock Island, Free Tuesday, Oct. 12 at 11:30 a.m. Start The Talk: Youth & Agencies On Local Issues, Waterfront Convention Center, Bettendorf, Free Wednesday, Oct. 13 at 6:30 p.m. The Artsy Stitchers knitting group, The Artsy Bookworm, Rock Island, Free

Rights Resource Fair, Centennial Park, Davenport, Free Friday, Oct. 22 at 7 p.m. Garden Movie Screening: Hocus Pocus, Rozz-Tox, Rock Island, Free Sunday, Oct. 24 at 2 p.m. I Am Baptized: Martin Luther & Birthplace Eisleben, Online, German American Heritage Center —Sarah Elgatian

66 October 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299

uscatine WE E K E N D

, atine c s u m

Join us for the 1st Annual Pearl City Vintage Market on the Muscatine Riverfront!

Check out our calendar for event details!

The market will feature handmade and vintage goods along with food, fall-themed beverages, kids activities & live music!

SATURDAY

OCTOBER 9, 20

1M0AM - 3PM USCATINE RIVE

RFRONT

EDITORS’ PICKS: October 2021

DES MOINES

Upcoming Des Moines events Thursday-Sunday, Oct. 7-10 Cirque Italia, Jordan Creek Town Center, Des Moines, $10 Friday, Oct. 8 at 7 p.m. CHOWDOWN Improv Comedy, TeeHee’s Comedy Club, Des Moines, $15-20 Saturday-Sunday, Oct. 9-10 Madison County Covered Bridges Festival, Winterset Square, Winterset, Free-$2 Tuesday-Sunday, Oct. 12-17 The Band’s Visit, Des Moines Civic Center, $40-154 Friday, Oct. 15 at 6 p.m. Beacon of Life’s Cake Gala Fundraiser, The River Center, Des Moines, $75-135 Friday-Saturday, Oct. 15-23 World Premiere: Escaping the Labyrinth, Des Moines via Salisbury House & Gardens

Community Playhouse, $29-43 Sunday, Oct. 17 at 2:30 p.m. The Iowa Files: Vanished Villages: The Rise & Fall Of 13 Iowa Ghost Towns, West Des Moines Public Library, Free Sunday, Oct. 17 at 4 p.m. Nitro Circus “You Got This” Tour, Lauridsen Skatepark, Des Moines, Free-$79

Ghoulish Gala, Salisbury House &

Gardens, Des Moines, Saturday, Oct. 16 at 6 p.m., $125 If Halloween is your thing, this is the party not to miss. Macabre-inspired costumes or elegant attire are encouraged at this evening of mysteries and entertainment, with new twists at every turn. Hors d’oeuvres begin at 6 p.m. and the dance party kicks off at 8 p.m. Ticket price includes hors d’oeuvres and a selection of wine, beer, a signature cocktail and non-alcoholic drinks. A cash bar will also be available. There’s even a board on the Salisbury House Pinterest with devilish inspiration.

Friday, Oct. 22 at 7 p.m. Druids w/ Traffic Death, xBk Live, Des Moines, $10 Friday-Sunday, Oct. 22-24 Cardboard Caucus Board Game Convention, Hilton Garden Inn, West Des Moines, Free-$45 Thursday, Oct. 28 at 8 p.m. Elizabeth Moen w/ Lily DeTaeye, The Maintenance Shop, Des Moines, $15

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Treasures Slovakia of

Courtesy of

SLOVAK NATIONAL MUSEUM

Experience the rich history and culture of Slovakia going back more than 500 years. With over 120 rare and signiﬁcant artworks and artifacts, many have never le�t Slovakia before.

Open through March 20, 2022

Brass pin from the Horehronie region. Early 20th century.

Little Village magazine issue 299: Oct. 2021

Articles inside

Astrology

Flick Picks

Dear Kiki

A-List

War on Meat

bread & butter

top Stories

Album reviews