Little Village Central Iowa Issue 11

A Bronzy Glow

How did Iowa end up with such a sexy Civil War memorial?

P. 18

Eat Out

Valentine’s Day treats from around the metro P. 22

Juicin’ It

One man’s mission to visit all five Des Moines strip clubs (and still be home by 11)

P. 20

retirement

P. 24

Last Waltz

Folk legend Greg brown prepares for

20 y.O.b.

Lessons were learned on this onenight, five-club crawl by strip club virgin Max Adams.

INDEPENDENT NEWS, CULTURE & EVENTS

Since 2001

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24 ramblin’ Man

Ahead of his final gigs, the Bob Dylan of Iowa reflects on a sevendecade musical odyssey.

26

Piano Players

While Iowa lawmakers attack “divisive concepts,” Iowa thespians are reviving Black classics.

6 Top Stories

7 ad Index

8 Interactions

12 Contact buzz

14 Fractured State

16 En Español

18 your Village

20 Strip Clubs

22 bread & butter

24 Prairie Pop

26 a-List

28 Events Calendar

33 Dear Kiki

35 astrology

39 album reviews

43 book reviews

47 Crossword

Little Village (ISSN 2328-3351) is an independent, community-supported news and 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 to improve our community according to core values: environmental sustainability, affordability and access, economic and labor justice, racial justice, gender equity, quality healthcare, quality education and critical culture. Letters to the editor(s) are always welcome. We reserve the right to fact check and edit for length and clarity. Please send letters, comments or corrections to editor@littlevillagemag.com.

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EDITORIAL

Publisher

arts Editor

Genevieve Trainor genevieve@littlevillagemag.com

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Emma McClatchey emma@littlevillagemag.com

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art and Production Director

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Multimedia Editor associate Publisher—DSM

Adria Carpenter adria@littlevillagemag.com

Photographer, Designer Sid Peterson sid@littlevillagemag.com

Multimedia Journalist Courtney Guein courtney@littlevillagemag.com

Spanish Language Editor Summer Santos

Calendar/Event Listings calendar@littlevillagemag.com

Corrections editor@littlevillagemag.com

February Contributors

Avery Gregurich, Dana James, Ethan Edvenson, Gabriel Greco, John Busbee, John Martinek, Kembrew McLeod, Kent Williams, Lauren Haldeman, Loren Thatcher, Max Adams, Michael Roeder, Sam Locke Ward, Sarah Elgatian, Tom Tomorrow, William Blair

INDEPENDENT NEWS, CULTURE & EVENTS

Since 2001 LittleVillageMag.com

PRODUCTION

Digital Director Drew Bulman drewb@littlevillagemag.com

Marketing analytics Coordinator Malcolm MacDougall malcolm@littlevillagemag.com

SALES & ADMINISTRATION

President, Little Village, LLC Matthew Steele matt@littlevillagemag.com

advertising Kim Bates, Genevieve Trainor, Joseph Servey, Malcolm MacDougall, Matthew Steele ads@littlevillagemag.com

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Distribution Manager Joseph Servey joseph@littlevillagemag.com

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Bill Rogers, Ellen Keplinger, Ethan Christian Edvenson, Huxley Maxwell, Justin Comer, Sam Standish distro@littlevillagemag.com

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Meet this month’s contributors:

avery Gregurich is a writer living and writing at the edge of the Iowa River in Marengo.

Dana Telsrow is a part-time portrait artist and full-time CEO of Really Cool Hats For Sale.

Ethan Edvenson is an emerging artist from Des Moines who creates gestural mixed media drawings.

Gabriel Greco is a creative portrait photographer based in Des Moines (@ gabegreco). He has a passion for color and making people feel their best.

Kembrew McLeod is a founding Little Village columnist and the chair of Communications Studies at the University of Iowa.

Kent Williams lives, works, writes and complains in Iowa City.

Loren Thacher is a writer, musician and radio host based on the Iowa/ Illinois border.

Send

Issue 11 , Volume 2

February 2022

Cover by Ethan Edvenson

Hello, LVer. Peruse at your pleasure: Folk hero Greg Brown’s best gigs, an enlightening tour of DSM adult clubs, Valentine’s Day eats and how two DSM theater troupes came together over August Wilson. Plus: Iowa’s bronze mommy, and more!

Max adams was born in Nebraska and raised between there and Iowa Falls. He is now a postgraduate student living in Des Moines.

Michael roeder is a self-declared Music Savant. When he isn’t writing for Little Village he blogs at playbsides.com.

Sarah Elgatian is a writer, activist and educator living in Iowa. She likes dark coffee, bright colors and long sentences. She dislikes meanness.

Summer Santos earned her Ph.D. and MFA from the University of Iowa, and works in immigration law as a paralegal. If you wish to contribute to En Español, email generalridley@gmail.com.

William blair is a publisher, editor and literary translator who lives near Iowa City. He hybridizes daylilies and reveres Iowa’s prairies and woodlands.

Culture writers, food reviewers and columnists, email: editor@littlevillagemag.com

Illustrators, photographers and comic artists, email: jordan@littlevillagemag.com

Top Stories

Catch

This 15-year-old songwriter from Des Moines is having fun writing sad music by Courtney Guein, Jan. 10

Addilyn Erica is only 15, but successfully balances being a teenager with growing as an artist. This was made clear with the release of her debut EP Some Days on Nov. 4, 2022, in which the Des Moines singer-songwriter spins stories of love, heartbreak and freedom.

In Condition of the State speech, Gov. reynolds boldly pushes for changes unpopular with most Iowans by Paul brennan, Jan. 11

On Tuesday night, Gov. Kim Reynolds called on the newly expanded Republican majorities in both houses of the Iowa Legislature to ignore critics, including the media and “so-called experts,” and push to divert tax money from public schools to private schools, eliminate certain state agencies, and fast-track other policy priorities.

‘Our public schools are not failing, elected officials are failing them’: Iowans opposing voucher bill flood legislature with comments by Emma McClatchey, Jan. 17

Gov. Reynolds’ education savings account plan is projected to cost $918 million over its first four years, not including administrative costs. Little Village compiled 60 comments posted by teachers, admin, parents and alumni of Iowa’s schools urging state legislators to vote no.

raGbraI announces route for 50th anniversary ride this summer by Paul brennan, Jan. 29

Fifty years ago, the first RAGBRAI crossed the state from west to east, starting in Sioux City and finishing in Davenport. RAGBRAI’s golden anniversary route will begin and end in those same cities, organizers announced on Saturday night.

AFresh Perspective

Adamantine Spine Moving (35)

Bravo Greater Des Moines (28)

Broadlawns Medical Center (25)

Campbell’s Nutrition (8)

Catch Des Moines (38)

Christopher’s Fine Jewelry (47)

Curate (14)

Des Moines Art Center (19)

Des Moines Metro Opera (17)

Des Moines Music Coalition (27)

Des Moines Performing Arts (2)

Des Moines Playhouse (13)

Des Moines Symphony (29)

Full Court Press (15)

Grinnell College Museum of Art (29)

Gruebel Legal Services (35)

House of Glass (19)

Infinite Resources: Amplified (9)

Independent Highland Park/Oak Park Neighborhood (42)

- Chuck’s Restaurant

- Bill’s Window and Screen Repair

- The Collective

- JoyPop

- The Slow Down

Independent Historic East Village (36-37)

- Botanical

- Wooly’s

- Raygun

- The Breakfast Club

Iowa City Downtown District (21)

Iowa Department of Public Health (17)

Iowa Environmental Council (12)

Iowa Public Radio (35)

Kum & Go (7)

Mainframe Studios (26)

Nearwood Winery & Vineyards (25)

Noce Jazz & Cabaret (30)

Oasis Street Food (7)

Orchestrate Iowa (48)

Primary Health Care (27)

Science Center of Iowa (44)

Sierra Club (23)

Think Iowa City (46)

University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art (4)

Varsity Cinema (21)

xBk (44)

recent eastern Iowa reader Survey Data 25,000—40,000 per issue

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reCeNT reaDer SurVey DaTa

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45-54: 17%

55-64: 14%

65+: 10%

aVeraGe

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Female: 49.25

Male: 47.25

Nonbinary/other: 2.5%

eDuCaTION

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Ph.D: 12.3%

Some college: 7.8%

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Interactions

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Hamburg Inn No. 2 closes ‘for physical and spiritual repairs,’ will reopen by February (Jan. 9)

Big 2023 energy. —Amy B.

Spiritual repairs? Is that an exorcism?

—TNM

Staff working for free ... they definitely need some get right with God time. Wow. When I worked there Steve would have never done that. —Becca C.

If he’s not paying them then what the fuck does he expect? Are they going to get back pay for their missed wages?

—Nora J.H.

Quite the fuster cluck it sounds like! Hope new management rights the ship or a new, local, owner takes over. —Tory B.

I hope it can rise again. Lots of good memories for me there. —Tom

T.

Just let it go gentle into that good night…

—Seth S.

In Condition of the State speech, Gov. reynolds boldly pushes for changes unpopular with most Iowans (Jan. 11)

She’s been pushing for these changes for years and people still voted for her by like a 20 point margin. So, I don’t know if we can really call them unpopular. Iowa Republicans will get exactly what they

HAVE AN OPINION?

Better write about it!

Editor@LittleVillageMag.com

voted for. —Jason A.

Welp… 2.5% increase for education means another year making 32k for this teacher, they won’t give us raises if they are getting beat by inflation. —SFL

Thanks Kim, it’s not like my expenses haven’t also increased substantially the last couple of years. We will spend decades recovering from decisions that this woman makes over her first administration. She will leave nothing undone before the 2nd administration is finished. The institutions on which the state has been successful will be damaged beyond repair and she will make sure that they will be so damaged that they can’t be recovered. Our state government is not broken. Well, I might find the Board of Regents somewhat broken but that’s because it’s completely controlled by Republicans. They can’t fill other government agencies with Republicans because they’re just not there to fill jobs

WORTH REPEATING INTERACTIONS

“Our first priority in this legislative session—and what I will be focusing on over the next four years—is making sure that every child is provided with a quality education that fits their needs.” —Gov. Kim Reynolds during the 2023 Condition of the State address

“Iowa’s communitarian culture has strongly supported public education since prior to statehood. Any attempts to diminish that will harm our children, our communities and our economic prospects.” —Stephen Ringlee, retired board president of the Ames Community School District, speaking out against Reynolds’ education plan

“When Sioux City loses 10 students, they barely notice it. When LawtonBronson loses 10 students (to a lower-performing school, mind you), we lose a teacher’s salary. This program will kill rural schools in Iowa. These schools are the touchstones for small-town life across this state. The ripple effect this dangerous program will have cannot be understated.” —Carrie, a high school teacher in the western Iowa town of Lawton

“You know, they’re held to, you know, they’re, most of this would deal with public schools, with public schools right now. So, you know, they would just be public schools.” —Gov. Kim Reynolds clarifying that her bill to ban “woke indoctrination” in classrooms will not apply to private schools, even though they will receive increased taxpayer funding through ESAs, in an interview with KCCI

“Iowa now funds students, not systems.” —Corey A. DeAngelis, millionaire school choice lobbyist from San Antonio, Texas, sharing a photo with Gov. Reynolds in the statehouse shortly after flying into Iowa to celebrate the passage of the ESA bill

at agencies like the Iowa Department of Public Health. People go into those jobs for reasons that Republicans would avoid them. … The Republicans know that they do not have demographics on their side or public opinion of young people, even in a state that is fairly conservative. Like Iowa, I find most young adults fairly tolerant and they can see through this. But the Republicans want to make sure they make an impact that lasts and they don’t really care what young people think and really what older people think for that matter. I find it hard to imagine that there’s a family in Iowa that hasn’t had a close personal experience with abortion. Even up there in northwestern, Iowa, where they would have you believe they never have sex, at least for recreational purposes. We may lose all the abortion clinics but we will regain Florence Crittenton homes for unwed mothers so that shamed parents in Northwest Iowa can send their daughters to work it out

on the farm. Another Magdalene laundry.

—Donald B.

State lawmaker accuses some educators of promoting socialism (Iowa Capital Dispatch, Jan. 19)

Where does all this paranoia come from?

—Ken M.

“I know from doing the reading that I do and the research that I do...” A few grafs later. “My wife told me.” Iowa’s answer to Ginny and Clarence. —Jim

P.

Against socialism, is he? I can rest easy, then, that he’s against taking my money and giving it to someone else to send their kid to private school. I mean c’mon, what kind of commie crap is that?!

—Travis L.

Dude looks like he wants to borrow my skinsuit. —Clarence J.

STRESS FRACTURES JOHN MARTINEK

If it were within the scope of my teaching, I would gladly hold class discussion comparing political ideologies “that conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy that were essential to the founding of the United States.” We would start with Christian nationalism and dominionism, since these are easily understandable as a threat to freedom and democracy, then

we’d move on to fascism, plutocracy, kleptocracy, kakistocracy, anocracy…

—Christopher B.

“A number of young people realize that a capitalist society where rich bald white men like me hold the majority of the wealth isn’t sustainable and we can’t have that!” —Alex G.

Gov. reynolds: admin costs, accountability standards for ESa plan unknown until after it’s approved, ‘parental rights bill’ will only affect public schools

(Jan. 23)

How is not knowing the cost fiscally conservative? —Mark

“Just give me access to the tax money, we’ll sort out all the details later when nobody is paying attention. Trust me.”

—Max Q.

MOMBOY LAUREN HALDEMAN

Create your Heart Out

The arts are trying to seduce you. Let them!

by JOHN buSbee

Few countries have monetized making an annual expression of love more than America. Thankfully, true love does not place the almighty dollar as the main ingredient for its most alluring recipe.

The arts offer a myriad of avenues to explore variant facets of love. Just as the beauty of nature is always around us, if we take the time to appreciate it, exploring love in the arts always holds a bounty of discoveries and rewards.

Artistic creation is a two-fold process: the action of creating art, and the reaction from those to whom it is shared. This love of creation and love of experiencing is the foundation for a richer, more contributory life.

Marc Chagall said, “Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.” Children provide the earliest such expressions, joyfully displayed in homes on the ubiquitous refrigerator gallery. The youngest are immersed in paints, drawing, music, reading—all creative stimulants that provide that early seed of artistic love.

Most of us started our creative journeys this way. Those seeds remain in us, awaiting proper encouragement to continue growing. Loving the arts needs to be nurtured and embraced as we age, while societal influences try to squelch this.

“To practice any art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. So do it,” was the directive given by Kurt Vonnegut, University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop alumnus. Its powerful message is a reminder for us to break out the paints and brushes, to sing in the shower, to dance in the streets, to

write in a journal. Your actions capture moments of love. Whether shared or not, they grow your soul.

The post-pandemic music scene is flourishing in Central Iowa. While many musicians maintained their pandemic connections through virtual concerts, they, like their fans, longed for the unmatched energy of sharing a performing space and letting the music fill the room. Des Moines’ arenas fill with fans when major national tours swing through, but the lifeblood of this region’s music scene remains the intimate venues that host regional music acts.

Great resources for hunting down those shows include Bryan Farland’s The List DSM (facebook.com/TheListDSM), Timothy Rose’s performing arts calendar A Gentle Guide to Des Moines Theatre (gentleguidetheatre.com), the Des Moines Public Art Foundation’s public art inventory (dsmpublicartfoundation.org/all-art), the State Historical Museum of Iowa, the Iowa Genealogical Society, the Des Moines Art Center, parks and recreation departments, libraries, indie bookstores—and, of course, Little Village and my Culture Buzz newsletter.

Chad Elliott loves delivering his music to the masses, while also honoring his other muses of painting, writing, illustrating, poetry and more. Performing more than 200 shows annually, he earned the title of “Iowa’s renaissance Man” from The Culture buzz. Sam Battaglieri

billion on Valentine’s Day in 2022. What does all that spending and gift-giving mean if we’re spinning some fairy tale for social media, but only half-present in the lives of the people we love?

Social media claws at us every second of the day. Dings and blinking notifications seduce us into watching mindless videos and perusing

I calmly told my mom—the most beautiful soul I’ve ever known—to go get her rest. That we loved her. Tell our dad we said hello. We stood, breaking, holding her hand as she died.

That’s love, too—mixed with duty, sacrifice and pain.

My enjoyment of Valentine’s Day stems from

Flights of Fancy

On social media, love can look and feel like a fantasy. But real-life love is deeper—and a lot more work.

by DaNa JaMeS

Americans consume fairy tales from birth. Storytelling is ingrained in our DNA. So it’s no surprise we want Valentine’s Day to be full of rich chocolate, roses and showy displays of affection.

Materialism is ingrained in us, too. Take a peek at any social media feed on Feb. 14 and Feb. 15, and you’ll find an infinite scroll of flowers, cards and gifts designed to solicit likes, shares and envy. According to the National Retail Federation, Americans spent an average of $23

endless posts. Iowa’s combative political climate and the nation’s messy democracy keeps us tense and on guard. The rising prices of food and costs of living heighten our anxiety about the future. And, after countless surges and several rounds of vaccination, COVID-19 is still infecting and killing people, despite not dominating the headlines.

It’s stressful. Who wouldn’t want a little retail therapy and fantasy to distract us from the litany of issues we face? So on Feb. 14, retailers will beam. Consumers will search for the perfect gifts, while their anxieties are temporarily cast aside. Sparkly balloons and crimson flowers will add splashes of color to an otherwise bleak winter landscape.

Fairy tales will have you believing love is about finding happiness with another person. That love is solely about how we feel toward someone or something. It is that, but it’s also deeper. Love is an act. Love is in our feelings manifested into deeds.

I was reminded of this last month when my friend’s mom died of cancer. No one prepares you to care for a dying loved one. Her circumstances took me back to my mother’s death in 2005, after she battled a long illness. It took me back to the moment my sister and I stood beside my mom’s hospital bed. Alarms sounding. Nurses whizzing by. In the midst of the trauma,

my mother, who wrote sweet messages in our greeting cards and bought us gifts. She taught me to take note of life’s important moments and helped me understand its breadth. Back before technology and social media controlled our existence, our lives revolved around each other, not phones, tablets and games.

Today, photos and videos are king. We lose time searching for just the right angle and the best grin to elicit the most engagement. Moments mark photo ops, not holidays or life whizzing past us.

Love might be eternal, but life is fleeting. People are under the mistaken impression they have all the time in the world. So they half listen and turn back to their phones and ignore those who matter most. They miss life happening. In these difficult times when so many people are struggling with their mental health, we need to be present for the people in our lives. We need to exude love, and we need to let people know they truly matter to us.

Americans will spend billions this Valentine’s Day showcasing fairytale versions of their lives on social media. But it’s the simple everyday acts of love that enrich us.

Black Iowa News has a shiny new website at blackiowanews.com.

FaIry TaLES WILL HaVE yOU bELIEVING LOVE IS abOUT FINDING HaPPINESS WITH aNOTHEr PErSON. THaT LOVE IS SOLELy abOUT HOW WE FEEL TOWarD SOMEONE Or SOMETHING.

Jordan Sellergren / Little Village

Machismo, masculinidad tóxica y chicos

Parte uno

Al fin de 2022, la policía en Romania detuvo a Andrew Tate como parte de su investigación del tráfico de personas. Si no sabes quien es Andrew Tate debes preguntar al chico adolescente más cerca de ti. La probabilidad es gran que él sabe quien es Tate y que él es un fan.

¿Los traficantes tienen fans? Sí, es verdad. Si me dudas, piensa en los sombreros MAGA. Andrew Tate obtuvo su amplia influencia por representar una vida lujosa, rica y exitosa, una vida donde era rodeado por mujeres hermosas y donde promocionaba su misoginia franca y sin vergüenza. Frecuentemente, Tate avanzaba que los hombres deben controlar las mujeres como propiedad, porque esa es como él ve a las mujeres, como propiedad.

Por supuesto, no es el único proveedor de estas actitudes. Pero su fama y influencia con chicos jóvenes es inquietante, sobre todo. De hecho, se confiesa en su sitio web a ser traficante donde explica casi como en la forma de un libro de texto el método amante de tráfico en personas como su procedimiento. Mas evidencia por creer que su persona es su personalidad en verdad.

¿Por qué han chicos se juntaban en masa a este tipo de retórico odioso? ¿Qué sobre este retorico tiene significado para ellos? He visto argumentos que es un fracaso de feminismo, que el feminismo no ofrece nada positiva a los chicos y en consecuencia escuchan a las voces que les ponen a las nubes y les hacen sentir bienvenidos. Yo comprendo la tentación a tomárselo este

argumento en serio. Después de todo, la frase ‘masculinidad toxica ha entrada la conversación sobre criar a los niños.

Si sabes que es un adjetivo el argumento falla. La masculinidad toxica no es la idea que la masculinidad por sí misma es toxica por naturaleza, pero un grupo de creencias y conductas toxicas se han vuelto asociadas con la masculinidad. Andrew Tate personifica esta idea, y personas como el desean que estos rasgos tóxicos sean la forma dominante de la masculinidad. Los resultados: una generación de hombres quienes sienten derecho a los cuerpos de mujeres, quienes usan violencia para obtener lo que quieren y quienes no pueden aceptar la respuesta ‘no’. El feminismo ofrece soluciones y masculinidades positivas. Entonces, ¿por qué no hablan de estas los youtuberos e influencers?

A manera de respuesta, permíteme a decir verdad sobre mis dificultades con masculinidad de cuando creía que era chico. Era joven y influenceable. Vi un mundo en que los hombres más odiosos tuvieron éxito y eta demasiada joven para entender que el éxito y la riqueza no son exactamente iguales. No sabía cómo redefinir mi perspectiva, ni más descubrir voces para ayudar (resulta que no soy hombre y no me habría ayudado). Pero esa es nuestro sistema. El éxito monetario es lo más exultado, el premio por el abuso de otras personas. Nuestra sociedad recompensa e incentiva la masculinidad toxica y los chicos responden a la llamada porque pueden ver las recompensas materiales. Reconocen como nuestra sociedad define el éxito y lo que esta definición requiere de ellos. Nuestro mundo pide un favor peligroso de los chicos, y demasiados no pueden ver las opciones mejores. Hablare de estas opciones en el próximo mes.

Machismo, Toxic Masculinity and boys

Part one

WrITTeN aND TraNSLaTeD by SuMMer SaNTOS

At the end of 2022, Romanian authorities arrested Andrew Tate as part of a human trafficking investigation. If you don’t know who Andrew Tate is, ask your nearest teenage boy—there’s a not insignificant chance that he both knows who Tate is and is a fan. Human traffickers have fanbases? Yes, they do. If you ever doubt that, just remember the

MAGA hats. Andrew Tate gained his influential reach by portraying a lavish, wealthy and successful lifestyle where he was surrounded by beautiful women and the shameless, straightforward misogyny he proudly proclaimed. Tate frequently promoted the idea that men should control women as if they were property, because that’s how he sees them: property.

Tate isn’t the only purveyor of these attitudes, of course, but his prominence and reach with young boys is particularly alarming. The fact is, his human trafficking is also openly admitted on his website, where he practically lays out the textbook format of the loverboy method of trafficking as his modus operandi, which lends further credence to the belief that his influencer persona is very close to the real thing.

Why do boys flock to this kind of rhetoric when it’s so obviously hateful? What about this speaks to them? I’ve seen people argue this as an issue with feminism—feminism isn’t offering anything positive for boys, the argument goes, and so they go to whoever does talk them up and make them feel wanted. The temptation to take that argument seriously is understandable—the term “toxic masculinity” has become part of our discussion about raising boys, after all.

But that argument falls apart when you know what an adjective is. Toxic masculinity is not the concept that masculinity itself is inherently toxic, but that a collection of toxic behaviors and beliefs have become associated with masculinity. Andrew Tate is the embodiment of this, and people like him aim to make these toxic traits the dominant form of masculinity, mold a generation of men who feel entitled to women’s bodies, who use violence to get what they want, who cannot accept no as an answer. Feminism does offer positive, expansive ways to be a man, so why aren’t those the ones being discussed by influencers and YouTubers?

By way of an answer, let me be honest about my own struggles with masculinity from when I thought I was a boy. I was young and impressionable. I saw a world where the more horrible kinds of men got success and I was too young to know success doesn’t simply equal wealth. I didn’t know how to reframe my view, let alone find voices to help (turns out, I’m not a man and it wouldn’t have helped anyway). But that’s our system: monetary success is held in highest regard, rewarding mistreatment of others. Our society rewards and encourages toxic masculinity and boys respond because they see the material rewards. They recognize how our society defines success and what that asks of them. Our world asks them to play a dangerous game, and too many young boys can’t see the better options.

Next month, I’ll dig into those options.

WINE BEER FOOD SHOWCASE

FRIDAY, MARCH 3, 6-9PM DOWNTOWN DSM MARRIOTT

Bottomless glasses and samples from 40+ Iowa vendors

Upgrade to the RESERVE EXPERIENCE for rare, fine wines and gourmet food All proceeds directly support DMMO’s music education programming

ALL-INCLUSIVE TICKETS GRAND SHOWCASE $50 RESERVE EXPERIENCE $125

For tickets, visit dmmo.org/wfbs or call 515-209-3257

Iowa Madonna

by PauL breNNaN

My friend says he read somewhere that Des Moines has the most erotic statue in the world. I moved here a few months ago, and have seen zero erotic statues. Do you know what he’s talking about? —CG, Des Moines

It’s probably not the most erotic statue in the world, but in his iconic memoir about growing in Des Moines in the ’50s and early ’60s, Bill Bryson did describe a 7-foot-tall bronze figure on the grounds of the Iowa State Capitol as “the most erotic statue in the nation.”

“Called ‘Iowa,’ it depicts a seated woman, who is holding her bare breasts in her hands, cupped from beneath in a startlingly provocative manner,” Bryson wrote in The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006).

The statue is part of the Iowa Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, which commemorates the 76,534 Iowans who fought in the Civil War. Of course, Civil War monuments aren’t known for being erotic, and this one didn’t start out that way.

Iowa contributed more troops per capita to the Union Army than any other state, so a large, official memorial would be expected. But 13 years after the end of the war, there was still no official state monument. James Harlan was determined to change that.

Harlan was a significant figure in Iowa politics. Born in Illinois, he moved to Iowa City after graduating from college in Indiana in 1845, and was appointed the city’s school superintendent. In 1853, he moved to Mount Pleasant, where he spent two years as president of Iowa Wesleyan University. He left after being elected to the U.S. Senate, and represented Iowa for 10 years before President Lincoln appointed him Secretary of the Interior. He served for just over a year before returning to the Senate for one final term.

In 1888, Harlan successfully pushed the Iowa Legislature to create a monument commission, and immediately became one of its leaders. The commission began accepting designs for a war memorial, and offered $500 for the best design. Artists from across the state and around the country submitted plans. In June 1889, the commission selected the design by Harriet Ketcham of Mount Pleasant.

Ketcham had an established reputation as a

sculptor in Iowa art circles, but her selection was still a surprise. If anyone thought Ketcham had an unfair advantage because she was friends with Harlan, had attended Iowa Wesleyan and once sculpted a flattering bust of the former senator, they were polite enough not to say so publicly.

Most of the submitted designs featured a towering column topped by a flag or the statue of a soldier or a Nike (the Greek winged goddess of victory, not the sneaker). Ketcham’s was more

basic: a general on horseback on top of a temple-shaped plinth. The plinth was to be flanked by two generic soldier statues and feature an allegorical female figure, one that was fully clothed and completely unerotic.

Ketcham’s design was widely panned when it was published. Too small, too lacking in grandeur. She started revising it.

The general was moved from the center of the temple-like plinth, and became one of four

A fitting tribute to “our young and vigorous state,” or lewd? History is still deciding.

an inscription above Des Moines’ infamous bronze woman reads, “Iowa, her affections, like the rivers of her borders flow to an inseparable union.” Adria Carpenter / Little Village

generals on horseback along its edges. A towering column took his place, with a wingless figure of victory at its top. Two large bas-reliefs, one depicting a battle and one of soldiers returning home, were added, as were 35 medallions featuring images of various veterans.

“Ketcham’s design also called for two more female allegorical figures on either end of the base of the monument,” Louise Rosenfield Noun wrote in her 1986 essay on the monument.

The first was History as a maternal figure reading to a child. The other was “a mourning Iowa placing garlands on a funeral urn.” Both would change before the monument was unveiled. History changed a little; Mourning Iowa changed a lot.

CIVIL War MONUMENTS

arEN’T KNOWN FOr bEING ErOTIC, aND THIS ONE DIDN’T STarT OUT THaT Way.

Ketcham never saw the finished monument. She died in 1890, and the Iowa Legislature didn’t approve funding for construction until 1892. In 1894, the commission hired Carl RohlSmith, a Danish-born sculptor living in Chicago, to complete the work. The commission chose Rohl-Smith not because they admired his work or his artistic vision, but because he submitted the lowest bid.

Rohl-Smith was supposed to stick to Ketcham’s design. He didn’t. When commission members saw sketches of his revisions, most were outraged. Especially Harlan.

Even by 19th-century standards. James Harlan was a prude. As Secretary of the Interior, he searched the desks of his clerks at night, looking for signs of inappropriate behavior. One night he found a book of poetry. Harlan flipped through it, shocked by the poems and by what the clerk had written in the margins. Harlan fired the clerk the next day, declaring such “filth” had no place in government.

The clerk was Walt Whitman. The book was Leaves of Grass, which Whitman was revising. Whitman got another job, Harlan became a footnote in literary history.

The commission eventually accepted RohlSmith’s revisions, but Harlan stayed mad for the rest of his life. In a speech he gave three months before his death in 1899, Harlan complained about “deformities” in the monument caused by Cont. >> on pg. 38

75

OF IOWA ART

FUNDING FOR THIS EXHIBITION IS PROVIDED BY: Harriet S. and J. Locke Macomber Art Center Fund

ABOVE Duane Slick (American/Meskwaki, born 1961) Turtle Mountain, from the “Aria for a Coyote Opera” Series, 2018 (detail)

by MaX aDaMS

The Des Moines metro is home to five adult entertainment venues, a.k.a. strip clubs, and as far as I can tell, no publication has attempted to visit and compare them all. Someone had to do it eventually, and who better than myself, a gay man who has never set foot in a strip club? And what better way to do it than all in one night?

I drew up an itinerary, took out some cash, and set out to write my (and perhaps Des Moines’) first erotic travelog. Hopefully I’ve managed to convey the character of each business, so you can assess your tastes and organize your own club crawl accordingly.

Outer Limits

The common man’s club

I begin my odyssey on the outside looking in at Outer Limits, a bar and strip club north of Des Moines on Highway 69 (nice). Nervous but maintaining a saunter, I opened two doors and was greeted by the doorman, and after coughing up the $5 cover, I found my seat. The decor is very 1972—streamers hanging from the ceiling, a wall of mirrors adjacent to the stage, columns with mirrors on them like a mahogany Von Maur, so on— which strikes me as charming, and soon I find a favorable vantage point in a velvet barstool near

the wall. I ask the gentleman nearby if it’s open, and he confirms with a friendliness that makes me feel silly for even asking.

The bar is dark as the illuminated performer on stage finishes her set. When she’s done, she takes the single fellow sitting at the stage to a private dance, and a couple new guys take their turn up close. Closer to the bar, heated debates over 1980s football and some raucous laughter from the fellas accompany sensual R&B deep-cuts pumped throughout the joint.

A whiteboard behind the bar says Daisy is next, and at the start of the next song she appears from a side room. The crowd of mostly middle-aged, blue-collar men give her their attention as she ascends the stage and begins her set, and after a few seconds the people up front continue watching while those by the bar return to their conversations. It’s clear that this is the Working Person’s club: farmers, people who work with machines. Your hometown heroes come here to take a load off. Outer Limits serves the public good, and I couldn’t have started my night anywhere better.

The Lumberyard Large and in charge

At this point I’m riding high, ready for whatever’s next—which is the Lumberyard, a BYOB club.

Handing over the $10 cover, I’m intrigued by the unexpectedly big, wooden entrance. Boosted bass fires through the walls like field artillery, and some guy with a goatee popped out to hit the bathroom, giving me a glimpse of a goddamn biplane hanging from the ceiling. When the host finishes affixing my “I can be here” paper bracelet, I’m bombarded by darkness. It’s like a haunted house—eyes adjust, though, even if we forget in the moment, and I have no problem finding a seat in a corner near the stage.

This place is at least twice as big as the prior establishment, with two stages and a massive projector screen on the back wall playing the Eagles’ game. Scanning back and forth between the impressively athletic dancing and the relaxed clientele, it isn’t too long before I realize that I’ve heard two Oliver Tree songs, which kind of throws me off but ultimately was the right call by the DJ. I’m approached by around 10 dancers, which is the norm for the rest of the night.

I watch the performer on stage climbing a pole—not even kidding—20 feet into the air. As she spins back down, I’m greeted by a very cheery dancer who just sat in the chair next to me. After making my intentions clear, she and I chat about

Visiting every Des Moines strip club in one night.

Like a siren’s song to a lonely sailor, Outer Limits beckons the everyman. Gabriel Greco / Little Village

the industry and her experience, where I learn that starting a strip club crawl at 7:30 p.m. is like eating lunch at the rooster’s crow. (Pro tip: When you do your five-club tour, start closer to 10.)

Eventually bidding my pal adieu, I waltz out the way I came and transition to the Minx.

The Minx Show Palace

For the confident gentleman

I get to Minx right at 9 p.m., relieved by the presence of so many other cars, given the timing revelation. The lounge space, separate from the bar, is comparable to Outer Limits in size. But in decor, they’re Flintstones and Jetsons. Outer Limits is straight out of Mean Streets, but clean and chill. The Minx Show Palace itself is a spectacle: fluorescent pink, blue and green lights; diamond tread aluminum lining the stage; metal furniture. A theming success if I’ve ever seen it.

I paid my $25 cover and passed the hostess into the lounge, before realizing the cars outside were a ruse. I am one-third of the clientele. Moments after I take my seat, a dancer emerges from the dressing room and B-lines for the older gentleman hogging an entire couch, taking him by the hand to a private dance—myself and the other client remain.

The performer on stage dances to a bass-forward remixed pop song; she doesn’t have to be putting in all this work for us two bozos. But there’s just no down time in the world of entertainment. That being said, it’s remarkably awkward being one of two guys watching someone dance exotically from a close distance.

In the four straight seconds of silence between songs, I dashed out the door. To be clear, I didn’t leave because of the place itself; it’s a cool spot. I left because I’m a victim of my insecurities. If I were to revisit any of the five clubs, this would be the first one, just to really see it in action. We grow, we learn and we take off for the Goldmine.

Big Earl’s Goldmine Old faithful

It’s 9:30 p.m. when I pass the doorman a crisp Hamilton at Big Earl’s. I’m bestowed another paper bracelet, though this one is branded, because Big Earl is clearly a shrewd businessman.

Cont. >> on pg. 42

LV recommends

Des Moines is for Lovers

Sweeten the meal this Valentine’s Day by sprinkling in some local flavors.

by SID PETErSON

No matter your relationship status or feelings surrounding Valentine’s Day, it’s a convenient excuse to indulge in a fancy meal, cocktail, dessert, or all three. Spend Tuesday, Feb. 14 in good spirits—and out of the waiting area—by supporting local businesses, planning ahead and getting straight to the good stuff.

Italian restaurant on Locust and 10th. It’ll be busy, of course, but if you can, try snagging a seat near the front windows and bar with the high-top tables and chairs. I’ve always thought it feels a bit more intimate and relaxed in that spot. Their menu is robust, yet not overwhelming, full of familiar, cherished Italian dishes. A few of my favorite meals on the menu are George’s Favorite Pizza, (named after George Formaro, Centro’s owner) which consists of mozzarella, Graziano’s Italian sausage, roasted red pepper, red onion and red sauce; the tomato basil soup with cheese tortellini; and Centro Salad with Italian greens, Gorgonzola, toasted pecans, red onion and balsamic vinaigrette. Yum!

Noodle Around at Home

IMHO, there are two excellent ways to eat your way through Valentine’s Day at home. One of my resolutions for the new year is to cook more. I have countless NYT Cooking and Bon Appetit recipes saved and am always looking for an excuse to dedicate a few hours to the kitchen. That being said, pick out the recipe, make yourself a list and head out to your favorite grocery.

Paint the Town Rosso

OK, so you’re planning to eat out on Valentine’s Day night with that (or those) special person(s) —hear me out for a moment. There are many wonderful places to treat yourself to a nice dinner, and many will inevitably be very busy. Wherever you end up, be sure to be extra patient with restaurant workers; you don’t want to be responsible for making the day of love feel like another amateur night for bar staff this close to St. Pat’s. Remember to RSVP as soon as you can if you have your heart set on going out on the 14th.

To me, nothing screams Valentine’s Day in Des Moines more than Centro, the classic long-standing

Sugar, Sugar

You’ll find me heading to Gateway Market for last-minute ingredients, dessert and wine. Their dessert section is divine, specifically their cakes. I predict I’ll be grabbing myself a couple of their pink champagne cupcakes and a bottle of red.

You may be thinking, Cooking an elaborate meal on a Tuesday night? No thank you! Fair enough! If you’re spending V-Day in DSM, the good people at Lucky Lotus will hook you up with exceptional takeout. You truly cannot go wrong with anything on their menu. If there’s two of you eating, I’d recommend ordering a few entrées and an appetizer to share. Sky’s the Limit is a great noodle option: rice noodles stirfried in a tangy savory sauce with green onions, bean sprouts and peanuts. Or, if you’re feeling a bit bolder, try a platter of Laap, Laos’s national dish: minced protein of your choice tossed in aromatic herbs and

LeeTy Delight’s banana pudding cinnamon rolls at Slow Down Coffee Co.

Four 12-packs of French macarons from la mie Bakery

The Honeybee latte + a pastry from Scenic route bakery

Charcuterie and a bottle of red wine to share from Clyde’s Fine Diner

Bon Appétite French-Inspired Cuisine Gift box from the allspice Culinarium

A box of champagne donuts from Hiland bakery

spices. The dish is served with sticky rice and lettuce.

An Art Fair Affair

If you haven’t been to an art event at Mainframe Studios yet, here’s an excellent chance! Tangerine Food Company’s annual Come Pho Luv event on the Saturday before the 14th is perfect for partners, pals or those flying solo.

A ticket to the event will include four food stations that’ll include pho, fried chicken, crepes and more. Guests will also receive five beer samples from Peace Tree Brewing. In addition to soaking in the excellent food and beverages, plan on partaking in many art experiences throughout the evening. There will be live music, a floral photo backdrop, tarot readings and workshops offered by Mainframe artists. Clay & Slay, an LGBTQ+ and woman-owned business will be offering two create-your-own-earrings workshop sessions for event-goers. Join them in creating a pair of your own polymer clay earrings.

Seasonal fruit pie from Pie bird Pies

Cheese bar’s classic fondue

Tiramisu from Smokey row Coffee Co.

The Valentine’s Day Stuffed Cookie box from Oh High bakery

A refreshing spirit free or house cocktail from the bartender’s Handshake

(Tip: Ask for the We’ll Take It From Here. Answer a question or two from a BH bartender and they’ll create something new, specifically for you!)

Gateway Market. Sid Peterson / LV

Even just waiting for a takeout order at Lucky Lotus is romantic! Sid Peterson / Little Village

Break Up with Coal

Just call us Cupid: there’s a better match for MidAmerican Energy than coal, and it’s clean energy. #CoalFreeMidAm

Love is in the air, but depending on coal is toxic. MidAm needs to break up with coal power and fall for clean energy.

If MidAm dumped its coal plants and invested in battery storage, solar, and more wind energy, Iowans would save $120 million.

It’s time for MidAm to stop playing with our hearts. Call on MidAmerican to dump coal and commit to clean energy. sc.org/IUBNoCoal

Emma Colman -Organizing Representative emma.colman@sierraclub.org

IG: @sierraclub_iowabc

FB: @sierraclubiowabc

Twitter: @IABeyondCoal

Hacklebarney brown

Greg Brown’s storied career in music is founded on family jam sessions and “complete freedom.”

by KEMbrEW MCLEOD

The term roots is often used to describe unadorned country and folk music—though it is sometimes invoked without much thought about its deeper, more resonant connotations. But by examining the life of Iowa’s most well-known purveyor of this tradition, Greg Brown, we can better understand how it is ingrained in history, culture and family.

“Mom taught me how to play guitar,” he recalled. “Most of the music I heard living in southern Iowa was around her. She was born out in the country, south of Fairfield, and there was a lot of music down there.”

Born in 1949, Brown grew up in the Hacklebarney area of Iowa, where the soft coal mines drew folks from Kentucky and Virginia who brought with them a wellspring of musical influences. As a boy, he played the ukulele and messed around with a pedal lap steel guitar, which his father hooked up to an old-timey radio with a big 14-inch speaker that served as an amplifier.

“My dad was a preacher,” he said. “They called them Holy Rollers back then, and we stayed in that church for about five or six years when I was a little boy, traveling around. There was lots of singing in that church, and gospel quartets would come through.”

Brown knew he wanted to play music from a pretty early age but he didn’t know if he’d be able to make a living at it, so he attended the University of Iowa, in part to get a student deferment that kept him out of the Vietnam War. After Brown secured a spot opening for Eric Anderson, the folksinger took a shine to him, and Brown left the straight academic life behind in 1969 to set out for New York City, where bohemian adven tures awaited.

“Eric invited me to come to New York,” Brown said, “so I went there that next sum mer and knocked around getting jobs at the little coffee shops in Greenwich Village. That’s really where I started out, and I had a steady gig at Gerdy’s Folk City.”

After four or five months, Brown started to miss his girlfriend living in Oregon, so he sold his guitar at a Village store and bought a standby airline ticket to be with her. They decided to move back to Iowa after a few months on the West Coast, but the young couple broke up while

driving through Wyoming, which set the stage for a few more years of rambling around.

“I think I was living in Des Moines for a while,” Brown said. “Anyway, I had a trio, and the woman in the band had worked with this

They never did successfully achieve blend, so Brown headed back to Iowa and began gigging with Richard Pinney around the Midwest. In 1974, the duo played a live set at a Rockford, Illinois club that was recorded for an album,

“HEarING My DaD SINGING aND PLayING IS ONE OF My FaVOrITE SOUNDS ON EarTH. IT’S SOMEHOW SO rOOTED, aND GIGaNTIC. WHEN HE’S SINGING aND PLayING, I FEEL SUCH aN UNFILTErED CONNECTION TO SOMETHING THaT IS SO MUCH bIGGEr THaN I aM Or HE IS.” —PIETA BROWN

guy who was living out in Las Vegas, Buck Ram. He was the manager for the Platters, and he invited us to come out and write songs, so we went out there and tried to ‘achieve blend’ for a while. That’s what he said we had to do: achieve blend.”

Hacklebarney, which sunk without a trace. “It wasn’t very good,” he said, “but that was OK, because not very many people heard it.”

Brown and his first wife split up a couple years after their daughter Pieta Brown was born in 1973, when they lived out in the country in a house with

Prairie Pop

Dana Telsrow / Little Village

no running water or indoor plumbing. The newly single musician moved back to Iowa City and held down jobs at the library and the hospital while he grew his solo career, one gig at a time. Brown often hosted late-night jam sessions at his place, where he’d wake up li’l Pieta to hang out and listen to music well into the night, then excuse her from school the next day.

“One of the reasons I loved waking up for those times is because my dad would make me tapioca pudding,” Pieta recalled. “Some of my earliest memories are of music. The sound of guitar. A foot tapping. The sound of the birds outside the open window out in the country. Yes, there were a lot of disapproving calls from the school system. I never really understood school, though. It never felt right to me. Waking up in the middle of the night to eat tapioca pudding and make music made way more sense.”

Those evenings planted seeds that flowered into several critically acclaimed albums since Pieta Brown’s 2002 debut, the natural outgrowth of a family tradition that was steeped in music. As a little girl, Pieta would go down to Hacklebarney with her dad to visit her great-grandparents, her great-uncle Roscoe, and a bearded fiddle-playing character named Buzz Fountain, who’d host gatherings called Selma Jams.

“Grampa Honey played the banjo and sang,” Pieta said. “Gramma Honey played the pump organ and sang. Those were my gramma’s parents, so the music goes way back in our family. At the Selma Jams, I got to dance around with a hat turned upside down collecting donations for the musicians. So, some things haven’t changed too much.”

At the end of the 1970s, Greg Brown decided that it was time to make a studio album, so he got together with some friends, like Dave Moore, and cut his first solo album, 44 & 66. Released in 1980, it was followed the next year by a stone-cold classic, The Iowa Waltz, another do-it-yourself affair.

Established record companies weren’t interested, so the can-do Midwesterner went down to the bank, took out a loan, and pressed up a batch of albums that he sold at gigs and in local record stores. This laid the foundation for an influential independent label, Red House, that championed left-of-the-dial folk artists in much the same way that indie labels like Dischord and SST incubated punk rock at the same time.

“I liked having a small label because I had complete freedom,” Brown said. “I could record whatever I wanted to, whenever I wanted to.”

These DIY albums soon got the attention of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion,

a black History Lesson

Two Des Moines theater companies, founded a century apart, join forces to stage an August Wilson hit.

by GENEVIEVE TraINOr

When last year’s revival of August Wilson’s 1987 play The Piano Lesson closed on Broadway on Jan. 29, it was the highest grossing show that week. In fact, the production, which opened Oct. 13, became the highest grossing play revival and highest grossing Wilson play on Broadway.

Wilson is regularly among the most-produced playwrights in the U.S., according to American Theatre’s annual surveys. For the 2022-23 season, he sits at number four on that list, beating out contemporaries like Sam Shepard and more modern darlings as well. Almost two decades after the playwright’s death, his work continues to move, challenge and inspire both artists and audiences.

The Des Moines Playhouse and Pyramid Theatre Company open their own production of The Piano Lesson on Feb. 3. It runs through Feb. 19.

This is the third show in a collaboration between the two theaters that kicked off in 2021 with Jonathan Norton’s A Love Offering, and continued last year with Beaufield Berry’s Buffalo Women (Pyramid previously collaborated with Riverside Theatre in Iowa City for a 2019 production of Wilson’s How I Learned What I Learned.)

Pyramid and the Playhouse embarked on these co-productions in an effort to introduce wider audiences to both companies. The Piano Lesson involves both actors and design team members who have experience with one theater or the other, as well as some who are new to both.

Founded as the Little Theatre in 1919, the

Playhouse is one of the oldest community theater’s in the U.S. (the phrase “community theater” was only coined two years earlier). Together with the Waterloo Community Playhouse, founded in 1916, the theater serves to cement Iowa’s amateur performance bona fides and helps explain why new companies seem to keep popping up in the state regularly to add to that enduring legacy.

Pyramid is one of those newer ones, formed in 2015 following a 2014 production of another Wilson classic, Fences. Their mission, as stated on their website, is “to provide a gateway to the arts for the Des Moines community by illuminating the presence of Black artists in the theatre canon and providing a means of artistic expression to emerging Black voices.” They are the only Black theater company in Iowa, and Iowa is one of just 27 states that have similar organizations.

Among those coming full-circle with Pyramid as it enters its 10th year of performances is KenMatt Martin. Recently appointed interim artistic

The Piano Lesson Des Moines Playhouse, opens Feb. 3, $29-43

director at Baltimore Center Stage, Martin is also one of the founders of Pyramid, and he directed that 2014 Fences. He’s back in town to direct The Piano Lesson. The cast of the show includes Tiffany Johnson, also a Pyramid founder (and its current producing artistic director), as Berniece.

Fittingly, The Piano Lesson, part of Wilson’s 10-play arc The Pittsburgh Cycle, is a story bound up in questions of history and legacy. Set in the 1930s, it centers on the struggle between a brother, Boy Willie (Emmett Saah Phillips Jr), and sister, Berniece, over what to do with a family heirloom, an old piano decorated with carvings by their enslaved great-grandfather.

The play is steeped in spectral uncertainty, a ghost story as much as a family drama. The implications of the past hover over all of it, even aside from the actual haunting involved. As with all of Wilson’s work, it captures the truth of a slice of Black history that many are unfamiliar with, especially those not descended from enslaved people.

It’s an excellent choice for a collaboration between a theater older than when the play is set, and a company dedicated to capturing Black experiences.

Wilson was writing in a time when any work about a Black experience was often taken by the community as speaking for all Black experiences. But he forces a distinct and personal perspective in all his writing, that perhaps only recently is the U.S. at large becoming ready for.

As the Iowa Legislature debates whether to add civil penalties of $500 to $5,000 to the 2021 law banning the teaching of “divisive concepts” in Iowa public schools, it’s crucial for art to continue exploring these histories, which teachers now need to take caution introducing to students. The timing couldn’t be better for Pyramid and the Playhouse to be raising the profile of stories like these to a wider Iowa audience.

THE ENVY CORPS PERFORMS DWELL

(with strings)

Genevieve Trainor is publisher of Little Village.

Courtney Guein / Little Village

INVESTING IN THE ARTS, INVESTING IN YOUR COMMUNITY.

EVENTS: FEbruAry

FEBRUARY 2023

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.

Local Author Fair, Beaverdale Books, Des Moines,

Saturday, Feb. 11 at 1 p.m., Free Book lovers, head up to Beaverdale Books to listen to and meet with six local authors on a Saturday in February. Lisa Avelleyra, Nicole Irene Cleveland, Melissa Devine, Nick Holmberg, Matt Meline Sr., CFP, Judy Constant Tyler will be present at Beaverdale Books. In one afternoon, these authors will take turns sharing recent works with attendees. Enjoy listening to the group’s heartwarming stories and previews of memoir and fiction novels. No tickets required to attend the author fair.

Literary Luxuries

Monday, Feb. 6 at 6:30 p.m. Meet the Author: Jolene Stratton Philo, Beaverdale Books, Des Moines, Free

Wednesday, Feb. 8 at 6:30 p.m. Meet the Author & Coat Drive w/Norene Paulson, Beaverdale Books, Free

Thursday, Feb. 9 at 5:30 p.m. Iowa Author Spotlight: Nick Holmberg, Central Library, Des Moines, Free

Monday, Feb. 13 at 6:30 p.m. Meet the Author: Tyler Granger, Beaverdale Books, Free

EDITORS’ PICKS: FEBRUARY 2023

Tuesday, Feb. 14 at 7 p.m. Des Moines Storytellers Project: Love, Hoyt Sherman Place, $12-28

Monday, Feb. 20 at 6:30 p.m.

Meet the Author: Joy Neal Kidney, Beaverdale Books, Free

Monday, Feb. 27 at 5:30 p.m. Botany Book Club, Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden, $8-48

The Film Lounge, Varsity

Cinema, Des Moines, Sunday, Feb.

RESERVE YOUR SEATS AT DMSYMPHONY.ORG

5 at 1 p.m., Free

Celebrate the work of Iowa filmmakers and Varsity Cinema’s recent re-opening at a special sneak peek watch-party. The Varsity will be screening an episode from season seven of Film Lounge, a television series that showcases short, independent films by Iowans. See episode 702 before it airs statewide on Iowa PBS! Each one-hour episode includes a collection of short films, and each screening will include a Q/A discussion with the participating Iowa filmmakers. No ticket is required to Film Lounge screenings.

Community Connections

Friday, Feb. 3 at 5 p.m. First Friday: Center Street, Mainframe Studios, Des Moines, Free

Friday, Feb. 3 at 5 p.m. Opening

Reception: Annick Ibsen, Moberg Gallery, Des Moines, Free

Saturday, Feb. 4 at 10 a.m. Sport Card Expo, Decades Event Center, West Des Moines, Free

Saturday, Feb. 4 at 8 p.m. 80’s Aprés Ski Party, Exile Brewing Co., Des Moines, Free

Sunday, Feb. 5 at 1:30 p.m.Postcards Exhibition Gallery Talk, Des Moines Art Center, Free

Thursday, Feb. 9 at 6 p.m. Capital City Pride: Zoey Luna, Temple Theater, Des Moines, Free

Thursday, Feb. 9 at 6 p.m. True Crime Lecture w/Sarah Cailean: Romance is Dead, Big Grove Brewery, Des Moines, $5

Friday and Saturday, Feb. 1011. The Art of Romance Art Exhibition, Des Moines New Age Shop, Free

Friday, Feb. 10 at 5 p.m. Exhibition Opening Celebration: 75 Years of Iowa Art, Des Moines Art Center, Free

January 27–April 8, 2023

Devices, Tools, Objects, and Props

RECENT WORK BY JEREMY CHEN

February 3–May 6, 2023

Fragmentary Visions

GRINNELL COLLEGE’S KELEKIAN COLLECTION

For updated information about events visit Grinnell.edu/museum

Left: Iran, 17th century. Large Dish with Coy Gazelle. “Kubachi” ware, underglaze blue decoration with overglaze patterning, 13 inches dia. Grinnell College Museum of Art Collection, Gift of Nanette Rodney Kelekian. Right: Jeremy Chen, A Space for My Body, 2022. Mixed media, 15 1/2 x 21 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches. Courtesy the artist

Saturday, Feb. 11 at 9 a.m. Cowles Ice Skating Party, Brenton Skating Plaza, Des Moines, $5 suggested donation

Saturday, Feb. 11 at 5:30 p.m. Come Pho Luv (+Beer), Mainframe Studios, Des Moines, $47

Monday, Feb. 13 at 6 p.m. Veg Life Vegan Potluck, Northwest Community Center, Des Moines, Free

Tuesday, Feb. 14 at 5 p.m. Valentine’s Day Skate, Brenton Skating Plaza, Free-$9.50

Tuesday and Friday, Feb. 14 and 17. 50 Shades of Green, Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden, $20-25

Thursday, Feb. 16 at 6 p.m. Cooking Class: Vegan Empanadas, North Side Library, Des Moines, Free

Sunday, Feb. 19 at 6 p.m. The Office Trivia, Bellhop, Des Moines, Free

Feminine Wiles Burlesque Revue, Stoner

Theatre, Des Moines, Friday, Feb. 24 at 7 p.m. $52.50 Midwest Burlesque performer, producer and instructor Leo LaFlash presents Feminine Wiles Burlesque Revue at the intimate Stoner Theater. The two-hour show is inspired by all things feminine and will feature striptease acts, comedy and more surprises. Prepare yourself for a fun, glamorous and provocative evening—we guarantee that you’ll be giggling and blushing in your seat all night long! Only those ages 18 and up will be permitted to the show.

Upcoming Burlesque

Friday, Feb. 10 at 7:30 p.m. Taste Test Improv Burlesque, Fox Brewing, West Des Moines, $25-45

bawdy and Soul Valentine’s burlesque Shows, The James Theater, Iowa City, Friday, Feb. 10 at 8 p.m., & The Olympic Theater, Cedar Rapids, Saturday, Feb. 11 at 8 p.m., $25

Saturday, Feb. 11 at 7 p.m. Bottoms Up QC Burlesque: Beach Party, The Circa 21 Speakeasy, Rock Island, $20-25

Saturday, Feb. 11 at 8 p.m. Pottery Peepshow: Art and Burlesque Event, Five Monkeys Inc., West Des Moines, $35

Tuesday, Feb. 14 at 6 p.m. Soultry Sensations: A Valentine’s Dinner Experience, The Garden, Des Moines, $20-75

Saturday, Feb. 18 at 8 p.m. MQCHOB

Presents: So This Is Love, Skylark, Rock Island, $30

Friday, Feb. 24 at 8 p.m. Dark Orchid Cabaret, The Garden, $15

Ballet Des Moines: Balanchine+, Hoyt Sherman Place, Des Moines, Friday and Saturday, Feb. 25 and 26, $42-82 Come see the classic work of George Balanchine, the Russian born artistic director and New York City Ballet’s co-founder and founding choreographer, performed live at Hoyt Sherman this month. His ballet, Who Cares? will be performed by members of Ballet Des Moines. If you’re wanting to attend an open studio rehearsal earlier in the month, consider checking out Beer, Ballet and a Big Slice that’ll take place on Thursday, Feb. 9 from 7-9 p.m. A $30 ticket includes craft beer from Lua Brewing, front row seat at the rehearsal, and a big slice of pizza from Dough Co.

Theatrical Thrills

Opening Friday, Feb. 3. August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, Des Moines Community Playhouse, $29-43

Opening Friday, Feb. 3. God of Carnage, Tallgrass Theatre Company, West Des Moines, $33-35

Friday, Feb. 3 at 9:30 p.m. Chad the Bird, Teehee’s Comedy Club, Des Moines, $15-20

Saturday, Feb. 4 at 7 p.m. Amber Autry: StandUp Comedy, Teehee’s Comedy Club, $15-20

Saturday, Feb. 4 at 7:30 pm. Cirque Wonderland: Aurora, Stoner Theater, Des Moines, $42.50

Closing Sunday, Feb. 5 Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation, Temple Theater, Des Moines, $20-48

Opening Tuesday, Feb. 7 Six, Des Moines Civic Center, $40-150

Thursday, Feb. 9 at 7 p.m. Beer, Ballet and a Big Slice, Ballet Des Moines, $30

Friday, Feb. 10 at 10 a.m. Friday Fun: The Mitten, Des Moines Community Playhouse, $6

Friday and Saturday, Feb. 10 and 11 Comedy XPeriment, Stoner Theater, $15

Opening Friday, Feb. 17 Singin’ in the Rain JR, CAP Community Theatre, Altoona, $10-16

Friday, Feb. 17 at 7 p.m. Lovesick Comedy, Teehee’s Comedy Club, $15-20

Saturday, Feb. 18 at 11 a.m. In the Year of the Boar & Jackie Robinson, Temple Theater, Des Moines, $12

Wednesday, Feb. 22 at 6:30 p.m. Gibney Company Masterclass, DanzArts Studios, Des Moines, $25

Opening Friday, Feb. 24 at 7 p.m. The Hundred Dresses, Des Moines Community Playhouse, $14-19

Friday, Feb. 25 at 7 p.m. My Best Friend is Black Comedy Variety Show, Teehee’s Comedy Show, $15-20

courtesy of DSM Ballet

Ebony Reign performs. Danny Carman

Mardi Gras w/ NOLA & BUBBA, Noce, Des Moines,

Tuesday, Feb. 21 at 6 p.m., $45-65 If you’re looking to go all out this year for Mardi Gras in Des Moines, grab tickets to NOLA Jazz Band’s celebration at Noce. The eight-member, five-generation group have been playing regularly together since 2015 and will blow you away with their energetic, heartfelt take on traditional jazz. Be sure to come to Noce hungry! Food will be catered in from Bubba, a neighboring southern comfort restaurant. Favorite dishes like jambalaya, pulled pork on okra, king cake and more delicious food will be offered. New-Orleans themed cocktails will also be on hand.

Musical Marvels

Saturday, Feb. 4 at 8 p.m. Ax and the Hatchetmen, xBk Live, Des Moines, $10-15

Saturday, Feb. 4 at 8 p.m. MINT, Wooly’s, Des Moines, $12

Saturday and Sunday, Feb. 5 and 6. DM Symphony: Mahler 5, Des Moines Civic Center, $15-70

Sunday, Feb. 5 at 1 p.m. GR!DSM Open Mic, xBk Live, Free-$5

Sundays, Feb. 5, 12, 19, 26 Botanical Blues, Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden, Free-$10

Friday-Saturday, Feb. 10-11. Winter Blues Fest, Des Moines Marriott Downtown, $25-55

Saturday, Feb. 11 at 7 p.m. Lauren Vilmain, Noce, Des Moines, $15-45

Saturday, Feb. 11 at 9 p.m. Darude, PLATFORM, Des Moines, $15

Sunday, Feb. 12 at 3 p.m. Local Music Showcase, Teehee’s Comedy Club, Des Moines, Free

Monday, Feb. 13 at 8 p.m. Bruce Cockburn, Hoyt Sherman Place, Des Moines, $49-59

Wednesday, Feb. 15 at 6 p.m. Thy Art is Murder, Wooly’s, $25

Thursday, Feb. 16 at 7 p.m. The Dip, Wooly’s, $22

Friday, Feb. 17 at 5 p.m. Freak Twent4, Lefty’s Live Music, Des Moines, $10

Friday, Feb. 17 at 7 p.m. Gabriel Espinosa’s ASHANTI, Noce, $20-45

Friday, Feb. 17 at 8 p.m. Zap Tura, xBk Live, $10-15

Saturday, Feb. 18 at 6:30 p.m. Elision EP Release Show, Gas Lamp, Des Moines, $12-15

Saturday, Feb. 18 at 8 p.m. Dueling Fiddles, xBk Live, $10-15

Tuesday, Feb. 21 at 8 p.m. An Evening w/Chuck Prophet, xBk Live, $20-25

Friday, Feb. 24 at 8:30 p.m. Not Quite Brothers, Wooly’s, $15

Saturday, Feb. 25 at 7 p.m. UI Jazz Faculty Quintet, Noce, $15-45

Saturday, Feb. 25 at 7:30 p.m. The Simon & Garfunkel Story, Des Moines Civic Center, $30-75

Saturday, Feb. 25 at 8 p.m. Stutterin’ Jimmy and the Goosebumps, xBk Live, $20-40

Sunday, Feb. 26 at 6:30 p.m. Larry McCray, Temple Theater, Des Moines, $20-45

Sunday, Feb. 26 at 7 p.m. Kelsie James EP Release Show, xBk Live, $10-15

Tuesday, Feb. 28 at 7 p.m. The Finesse Japan Tour Kickoff, xBk Live, Free w/RSVP

Thursday, March 2 at 7:30 p.m. Three Dog Night w/Danny McGaw, Hoyt Sherman Place, $45-89

Thursday, March 2 at 8 p.m. David Ramirez & Dylan LeBlanc, xBk Live, $20-25

Friday, March 3 at 8 p.m. Katy Guillen and the Drive & Frogpond, xBk Live, $10-15

Friday, March 3 at 9 p.m. Kyro’s World Tour w/Poundgame Addison, Lefty’s Live Music, $15-20

FIND

MORE EVENTS

Courtesy of NOLA Jazz Band

WEEKENDER YOUR WEEKLY EDITORCURATED ARTS COMPENDIUM, A.K.A.

Stuff to Do

Dear Kiki, Is polyamory worth the trouble? Lay it out for us.

Signed, Polycurioush

Dear Polycurioush, Well, that all depends. Are you polyamorous?

Polyamory is one of the many things outside the societal norm that is often erroneously referred to as a lifestyle choice. And, certainly, people can choose to engage with it or not. But

thrill to your partners’ joy, and their pleasure in your happiness will only serve to deepen it. But if you interact with the world more transactionally, then—while you can still choose a poly lifestyle and succeed—the work necessary to make it a success will drain you. This will be especially true if your primary partner (if you have one) does experience compersion and you do not.

the question of whether or not it is “worth the trouble” boils down to something intrinsic and innate.

Let’s look at the central element of polyamory: compersion. The convenient website whatiscompersion.com defines that term as, “our wholehearted participation in the happiness of others.” It’s used in poly circles to describe the feeling of joy you get seeing your partner happy with someone else.

But not everyone experiences that feeling of joy. It threw me for a loop the first time I realized that some people do not take thrill or pleasure in the happiness of others, sexual, romantic or otherwise. It wasn’t until adulthood that I discovered some people view some or all types social interaction as transactional, and when someone helps them or arbitrarily gifts them something, they feel a crippling sense of obligation in return, and would never want anyone else to feel that on their account.

I spent my youth giving, giving, giving—I always loved the feeling of basking in others’ happiness. When I found out the “truth” about Santa Claus, my first reaction was to become Santa for my family and drop random gifts under the tree without admitting they were from me. I genuinely thought I was a bad person for wanting to help people because it didn’t come from some sense of “doing the right thing,” but from a selfish desire to feel that ancillary joy.

If you are wired to experience compersion, and that compersion extends to intimate relationships, then polyamory is absolutely worth every inch of “trouble” it brings with it (really, it’s all just coordinating calendars). You will

Ultimately, Polycurioush, like any other “relationship style,” you need to look inward first when deciding whether it’s for you. If you are poly, it will be a whole lot of unrewarding work to spend your life in a monogamous relationship. If you’re not, consider other types of ethical nonmonogamy, like swinging, where you can sow your oats but still fall back on a central partnership. Or consider just being single. There’s nothing wrong with playing the field and not “settling down,” despite the lies society tells.

Also remember that, like all relationships, polyamory must be built on a foundation of radical honesty and trust. If you or your partner aren’t ready for that, then you need to work on your partnership first (ideally with the help of a poly-friendly couples counselor) before you introduce other human beings into your dynamic. More people can’t fix a flailing relationship; you wouldn’t, for example, have a baby to solve your problems, and adding other adults to the same mix won’t help either. We all deserve more respect than that.

xoxo, Kiki

IF yOU arE WIrED TO EXPErIENCE COMPErSION, THEN POLyaMOry IS abSOLUTELy WOrTH EVEry INCH OF “TrOUbLE” IT brINGS WITH IT (rEaLLy, IT’S aLL JUST COOrDINaTING CaLENDarS).

iHearIC: mars hojilla, dropbear, Rachel Saint and Robyn Groth, PS1 Close House, Iowa City, Sunday, Feb. 26

at 7:30 p.m., Free iHearIC, the long-standing free Iowa City concert series, is making its grand return after a three-year hiatus in a new-to-the-series venue, Public Space One Close House’s upstairs dancehall. They’re kicking their season off with an exciting, diverse lineup of local talent. mars hojilla is the solo indie alt-rock project of Myles Evangelista, a punk rock kid at heart based in IC, from Peoria, Illinois. dropbear, bassoonist Gabi Vanek and saxophonist Justin K Comer will also be performing, in addition to Rachel Saint, the electronic and rock project of Rachel Kellogg, and artist and poet Robyn Groth.

Eastward, ho!

Sunday, Feb. 5 at 1 p.m. Freeze Fest, Terry Trueblood

Recreation Area, Iowa City, Free

Friday, Feb. 10 at 7 p.m. Art Show

Reception: Art from the Inside Out, Artifactory, Iowa City, Free

Opening Friday, Feb. 10 at 7:30 p.m. Cabaret, Theatre Cedar Rapids, $18-48

Friday, Feb. 10 at 8 p.m. James Armstrong, CSPS Hall, Cedar Rapids, $25-30

Saturday, Feb. 11 at 7:30 p.m. A Valentine’s Evening w/the Dandelion Stompers, Ideal Theater & Bar, Cedar Rapids, $15-25

Saturday, Feb. 11 at 7:30 p.m. Kronos Quartet, Hancher Auditorium, Iowa City, $10-50

ZuZu African Acrobats,

Stephens Auditorium, Ames, Tuesday, Feb. 21, 7 p.m., $20-40

Iowa State University’s Stephens Auditorium is bringing ZuZu African Acrobats, a Tanzanian troupe that celebrates the 2,000-year-old Bantu culture of East Africa. In every performance, the troupe performs ancient traditions passed on by elders through acrobatics, drumming, singing, dancing, and gravity defying stunts. The cast includes nine acrobats; each has had extensive training and are capable of performing tricks like hoop diving, human pyramids, unicycling, juggling, and more. All ages are welcome.

Explore Ames!

Friday, Feb. 3 at 1 p.m. Home Voices Festival, Ames Public Library & Dog-Eared Books, Ames, Free

Saturday, Feb. 4 at 7 p.m. Witch Tiit & Space Camp, Alluvial Brewing, Ames, Free

Tuesday, Feb. 7 at 6 p.m. Reliable Readers Book Club & Poetry Slam, Lockwood Cafe, Ames, Free

Thursday, Feb. 9 at 8 p.m. Shawn Holt & The Teardrops, The M-Shop, Ames, $10-14

Monday, Feb. 13 at 7 p.m. Giggin’ Galentines: Comedy Show w/Megan Gogerty, The Green House, Iowa City, $5-10

Friday, Feb. 17 at 9 p.m. Sam Locke Ward, Gabe’s, Iowa City, $10

Saturday, Feb. 18 at 9 p.m. OHYUNG, Trumpet Blossom Cafe, Iowa City, $10-15

Saturday, Feb. 25 at 7:30 p.m. Englert

Local Showcase: Sean Tyler, The Wilted, 24thankyou, Englert Theatre, Iowa City, $10-15

Saturday, Feb. 25 at 10:30 a.m. Poetry, Music, and the Environment w/Iowa Poet Laureate Debra Marquart, Cedar Rapids Public Library, Free

Friday-Sunday, Feb. 10-12. Orchid Fest, Reiman Gardens, Ames, Free-$12

Sunday, Feb. 12 at 1 p.m. Sweetheart Pop-Up Market, Torrent Brewing Company, Ames, Free

Thursday, Feb. 16 at 6 p.m. For the Love of Books, DogEared Books, Free

Tuesday, Feb. 21 at 5 p.m. Sustainapalooza! ISU Memorial Union, Ames, Free

Friday, Feb. 24 at 7:30 p.m. The Somber Knight Don Quixote, ISU Theatre & Lectures, Fisher Theater, Ames, Free

mars hojilla, Caspian Voss

Courtesy of Stephens Auditorium

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): “I want to raise up the magic world all round me and live strongly and quietly there,” wrote Aquarian author Virginia Woolf in her diary. What do you think she meant by “raise up the magic world all round me”? More importantly, how would you raise up the magic world around you? Meditate fiercely and generously on that tantalizing project. The coming weeks will be an ideal time to attend to such a wondrous possibility. You now have extra power to conjure up healing, protection, inspiration, and mojo for yourself.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Before going to sleep, I asked my subconscious mind to bring a dream that would be helpful for you. Here’s what it gave me: In my dream, I was reading a comic book titled Zoe Stardust Quells Her Demon. On the first page, Zoe was facing a purple monster whose body was beastly but whose face looked a bit like hers. On page two, the monster chased Zoe down the street, but Zoe escaped. In the third scene, the monster was alone, licking its fur. In the fourth scene, Zoe sneaked up behind the monster and shot it with a blow dart that delivered a sedative, knocking it unconscious. In the final panel, Zoe had arranged for the monster to be transported to a lush uninhabited island where it could enjoy its life without bothering her. Now here’s my dream interpretation, Pisces: Don’t directly confront your inner foe or nagging demon. Approach stealthily and render it inert. Then banish it from your sphere, preferably forever.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Theoretically, you could offer to help a person who doesn’t like you. You could bring a gourmet vegan meal to a meat-eater or pay a compliment to a bigot. I suppose you could even sing beautiful love songs to annoyed passersby or recite passages from great literature to an 8-year-old immersed in his video game. But there are better ways to express your talents and dispense your gifts—especially now, when it’s crucial for your long-term mental health that you offer your blessings to recipients who will use them best and appreciate them most.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): In esoteric astrology, Taurus rules the third eye. Poetically speaking, this is a subtle organ of perception, a sixth sense that sees through mere appearances and discerns the secret or hidden nature of things. Some people are surprised to learn about this theory. Doesn’t traditional astrology say that you Bulls are sober and well-grounded? Here’s the bigger view: The penetrating vision of an evolved Taurus is potent because it peels away superficial truths and uncovers deeper truths. Would you like to tap into more of this potential superpower? The coming weeks will be a good time to do so.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): The ingredient you would need to fulfill the next stage of a fun dream is behind door #1. Behind door #2 is a vision of a creative twist you could do but haven’t managed yet. Behind door #3 is a clue that might help you achieve more disciplined freedom than you’ve known before. Do you think I’m exaggerating? I’m not. Here’s the catch: You may be able to open only one door before the magic spell wears off—unless you enlist the services of a consultant, ally, witch or guardian angel to help you bargain with fate to provide even more of the luck that may be available.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): I trust you are mostly ready for the educational adventures and experiments that are possible. The uncertainties that accompany them, whether real or imagined, will bring out the best in you. For optimal results, you should apply your nighttime thinking to daytime activities, and vice versa. Wiggle free of responsibilities unless they teach you noble truths. And finally, summon the intuitive powers that will sustain you and guide you through the brilliant shadow initiations. (P.S.: Take the wildest rides you dare as long as they are safe.)

By Rob Brezsny

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Fate has decreed, “Leos must be wanderers for a while.” You are under no obligation to obey this mandate, of course. Theoretically, you could resist it. But if you do indeed rebel, be sure your willpower is very strong. You will get away with outsmarting or revising fate only if your discipline is fierce and your determination is intense. OK? So let’s imagine that you will indeed bend fate’s decree to suit your needs. What would that look like? Here’s one possibility: The “wandering” you undertake can be done in the name of focused exploration rather than aimless meandering.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): I wish I could help you understand and manage a situation that has confused you. I’d love to bolster your strength to deal with substitutes that have been dissipating your commitment to the Real Things. In a perfect world, I could emancipate you from yearnings that are out of sync with your highest good. And maybe I’d be able to teach you to dissolve a habit that has weakened your willpower. And why can’t I be of full service to you in these ways? Because, according to my assessment, you have not completely acknowledged your need for this help. So neither I nor anyone else can provide it. But now that you’ve read this horoscope, I’m hoping you will make yourself more receptive to the necessary support and favors and relief.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): I can’t definitively predict you will receive an influx of cash in the next three weeks. It’s possible, though. And I’m not able to guarantee you’ll be the beneficiary of free lunches and unexpected gifts. But who knows? They could very well appear. Torrents of praise and appreciation may flow, too, though trickles are more likely. And there is a small chance of solicitous gestures coming your way from sexy angels and cute maestros. What I can promise you for sure, however, are fresh eruptions of savvy in your brain and sagacity in your heart. Here’s your keynote, as expressed by the Queen of Sheba 700 years ago: “Wisdom is sweeter than honey, brings more joy than wine, illumines more than the sun, is more precious than jewels.”

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Your assignment, Scorpio, is to cultivate a closer relationship with the cells that comprise your body. They are alive! Speak to them as you would to a beloved child or animal. In your meditations and fantasies, bless them with tender wishes. Let them know how grateful you are for the grand collaboration you have going, and affectionately urge them to do what’s best for all concerned. For you Scorpios, February is Love and Care for Your Inner Creatures Month.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Revamped and refurbished things are coming back for another look. Retreads and redemption-seekers are headed in your direction. I think you should consider giving them an audience. They are likely to be more fun or interesting or useful during their second time around. Dear Sagittarius, I suspect that the imminent future may also invite you to consider the possibility of accepting stand-ins and substitutes and imitators. They may turn out to be better than the so-called real things they replace. In conclusion, be receptive to Plan Bs, second choices, and alternate routes. They could lead you to the exact opportunities you didn’t know you needed.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Author Neil Gaiman declared, “I’ve never known anyone who was what he or she seemed.” While that may be generally accurate, it will be far less true about you Capricorns in the coming weeks. By my astrological reckoning, you will be very close to what you seem to be. The harmony between your deep inner self and your outer persona will be at record-breaking levels. No one will have to wonder if they must be wary of hidden agendas lurking below your surface. Everyone can be confident that what they see in you is what they will get from you. This is an amazing accomplishment! Congrats!

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>> Cont. from pg. 19

the “misconception” of an artist “born and educated in the north of Europe.”

When work on the monument finished in 1898, the commission decided not to hold a dedication ceremony. Many of its members disliked it. So did much of the public. Veterans complained about a number of things, including the monument’s location and whose images were memorialized on the medallions. But most of the criticism focused on the revised figure of Iowa, which was called “too lewd.”

The official guidebook to the monument published in 1898 described the Iowa statue as a “beautiful, youthful mother offering nourishment to her children,” and said it was an appropriate symbol of “our young and vigorous state.” The guidebook said anyone who views it is “elevated by its purity of suggestion,” and claimed “great art critics” had declared it “one of the finest art conceptions in America.” The guidebook did not, however, name any of those art critics.

Regardless of what critics thought, the statue did gain a following among generations of adolescent boys in Des Moines, as Bryson indicates. But even that admiration had its limits.

“[I]t was a long way to cycle just to see some copper tits,” Bryson recalled.

The tits are bronze, not copper. And they remain just where Rohl-Smith placed them: on the north side of the monument, pointed directly at the Iowa State Capitol.

––Paul Brennan

Mother Iowa cups her bodacious breasts. Adria Carpenter / Little Village

It will be a celebration when Greg Brown performs two retirement shows at the Englert this month. A lot of reverence will be there too, as a town gets the chance to pay tribute to one of its musical patron saints, hearing for a final time many beloved songs straight from their maker’s mouth.

Seth Avett of the Avett Brothers paid his own kind of tribute back in November, releasing Seth Avett Sings Greg Brown. There’s something about tribute albums that follow that title formula, Artist Sings X, that always feels profound, as if presenting their songs in just the right way will summon the artist themself out of the speakers. Seeing as Avett recorded the album in various hotel rooms in towns wherever he and his brother were playing that night, it feels particularly so, like he was inviting Brown to spend some time jamming with him in those many rented rooms.

Beginning with one of Brown’s most widely celebrated tunes, “The Poet Game,” Avett is remarkably delicate, careful to get every word exactly right. When he sings, “Why does the color of your skin or who you choose to love still lead to such anger and pain?”, he does so with an awareness that the ink may be dry on the page, but the question is as fresh as if it were rewritten every day. Brown was desperate when he asked it; Avett is resigned, exasperated by the time he finally finishes the verse.

“Good Morning Coffee” and “Just A Bum” are as buoyantly joyful as when Brown first presented them. Avett delights in trying out some

of Brown’s well-hewn Midwestern scat singing for himself on the former. On the latter, he harmonizes with himself throughout the tune, begging the question of just how Greg Brown filled so much space with just one voice. That mystery remains on “Telling Stories” when Avett sings the line “My dog was my buddy, the wind was green and yellow.” Avett gets the wonder right, but Mr. Brown alone has the ability to always sound like the fabled voice from on high, even when he sings sincerely about his dog and the colors of the wind.

Avett’s interpretation of “The Iowa Waltz” is particularly anthemic, in that grade school music program kind of way. Never mind that line about taking care of our own and our young, surely tongue in cheek even when Brown wrote it. Still, it’s an undeniable affirmation of a song, even for its saccharin. Or maybe because of it.

The tribute wraps up with “Tenderhearted Child”, the Greg Brown song which most rivals Dylan’s “Forever Young” as a “hopes for the ones who come after us” tune. There’s an authentic kind of romance to it: Avett alone in a hotel room singing this one to his own son, however miles and months away from this recording.

Avett’s is the third tribute album to be recorded of Greg Brown’s work: first Minnesota singer Prudence Johnson put out Songs of Greg Brown in 1991. A decade later Going Driftless: An Artist’s Tribute to Greg Brown was released, featuring 14 female performers, including Lucinda Williams, Ani DiFranco and Gillian Welch. Each of these albums are delightfully distinct and deserve a listen. With this tribute album, Avett provides the latest evidence that, throughout his pioneering career, Greg Brown has always written songs for other voices to sing. And after his two shows this month are through, soon that’s all that there will be, and it will have to be enough.

Don’t worry: Greg Brown has made sure that it will be.

—Avery Gregurich

SyLVee & THe Sea

The Less I Needed the Better I Felt PIETABROWN.BANDCAMP.COM

Pieta Brown says time she spent in Tucson and the friends she made there sparked a music career. These friendships continue to this day as she works with AZ legends like Howe Gelb from Giant Sand and Joey Burns and John Convertino from Calexico. She has appeared on three albums from Calexico, and they returned the favor on her 2017 album of collaborations titled Postcards.

Like many artists during the pandemic lockdown, Brown found herself working on music by herself. She recorded instrumental fragments, really sketches of music, to Convertino who fleshed them out with his drums and vibes. She sent some of these tracks to Don Was— of Was (Not Was), president of Blue Note Records, and who lent his bass to Brown’s 2009 EP Shimmer—to add upright bass, and to CARM— of Y Music and Bon Iver—to add horns. Her only rule to the players was “no charts, no fear, no thinking, no remorse.”

Considering that none of the musicians who participated in the recording were in the room together, the album, which is credited as Sylvee & The Sea. As stated in the liner notes, “The final mixes bore proof to the notion that cool things can happen when you use the force and let go…”

The title The Less I Needed The Better I Felt speaks to the minimalist approach to the proceedings. It’s apparent that the very short (often two minutes or less) tracks clearly started with Brown’s piano and

guitar. Convertino, Was and CARM take her lead, delivering performances that fall in the free spaces or adorn the melody. For many of the songs Convertino brings deconstructed bits of percussion—not driving the song but providing improvised punctuation. On songs like the opener “Sun Rain” Convertino’s vibes and drum fills wash over Brown’s long-delay electric guitar.

Taken in whole, the album presents a contrast of movement and stillness. Most of the songs are short sketches lifting the bits of melody Brown started with, but a few of them have more structure and present a different story. If there is anything I’d compare the songs on The Less I Needed The Better I Felt to, it would be the atmospheric soundtracks that Ry Cooder has made over the years, specifically the soundtrack to Paris, Texas. Many of these songs carry a similar kind of abstract moodiness.

“Redistortionate” is one of my favorite tracks on the album. The band locks in and the song moves with a more structured beat over a shimmering and melodic guitar line. The listener can almost fill in a vocal part by Brown; it sounds like an outtake from one of her albums. Clocking in at a minute and 44 seconds, it’s not nearly long enough, and every time I listen to it, I restart it to get another loop.

Another track that has movement is “Distillery” which sounds like New Orleans jazz. Brown delivers a piano line reminiscent of an old time gospel song, Convertino drops in a march beat and CARM layers over bell-muted trumpets. A vibe and sound that we’ve never heard before on her records!

In recent years, Pieta Brown has expanded the scope of her music beyond the guitar-slinging singer-songwriter we’ve come to know and love, and redefined herself as a performer. Her sonic experimentation will surely inform her future work, proving that she is larger than the genre she is typically put in.

—Michael Roeder

SeTH aVeTT

Seth Avett Sings Greg Brown RAMSEUR RECORDS

which frequently featured him as a musical guest. After moving to Minneapolis, where that long-running radio show was produced, his gravely baritone voice and homespun guitar playing could be heard coast to coast on the air. (Fittingly for an Iowa boy, the word broadcast ing is rooted in an agricultural metaphor: i.e., casting sonic seeds across the land.)

“I met a guy named Bob Feldman who had promoted a show for me in Minneapolis, and I was moving up there to work on Prairie Home I said to Bob, ‘Hey, how would you like to be Red House Records?’ And he said, ‘Sure.’ So, we put a couple of boxes of records in his backseat and he became Red House Records, and that’s that. He’s the guy who really got the whole thing going, and I think it did turn into a fairly im portant little label.”

In the 1980s, Brown began working with producer and sideman Bo Ramsey, a rail-thin guitarist perpetually clad in a straw cowboy hat who played on a number of his albums, including One Big Town There, Slant 6 Mind and Freak Flag. Meanwhile, Brown’s unassuming legend quietly spread throughout the land.

The year 2002 saw the release of Going Driftless: An Artist’s Tribute to Greg Brown, which featured roots music luminaries Iris DeMent, Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch and others, along with a cover of “Ella Mae” by his daughters Pieta, Zoe and Constie Brown. Around this time, Brown fell for DeMent, who was born in Arkansas into a Pentecostal family that shared similar cultural and musical touchstones. He still re members the moment that sealed the deal, when they were both playing at the Rocky Mountain Festival in Lyons, Colorado and DeMent was about to go onstage to sing with boho country-folk artist John

“Iris was standing there with a paper plate having her supper, and she looked at me and said, ‘Here, you finish this,’ and she just handed me her plate,” Brown said. “Well, you just don’t do that, really, unless you’re gonna marry somebody. Even I—who’s pretty thick about those sorts of things—understood exactly what was going on. I took that paper plate, and within a few months we were married.”

The couple’s musical and familial roots have entwined in many ways since then, such as when Pieta Brown co-produced Iris DeMent’s brandnew release, Workin’ On a World, which includes a couple songs they co-wrote. The album’s infectious title track is a hopeful anthem for our troubled times, with a chorus that goes: “I’m joinin’ forces with the war riors of love / Who came before and will follow you and me / I get up in the mornin’ knowing I’m privileged just to be / Workin’ on a world I may never see.”

Whenever our collective problems might feel insurmountable, this song stands as a reminder that we are part of an unbroken circle of folks who have fought (and will keep fighting) to make the world a better place. This long-view sensibility also resonates with the way that Pieta views her own life and family.

“I do see myself as part of a very rooted musical lineage—I am just one little variation, a continuation,” she said. “Hearing my dad singing and playing is one of my favorite sounds on earth. It’s somehow so root ed, and gigantic. When he’s singing and playing, I feel such an unfil tered connection to something that is so much bigger than I am or he is. He can make me laugh and cry in just one song! His body of work is multi-directional, and fun, and beautiful, and I’m just getting to know it even still.”

Kembrew McLeod spent the winter holidays working on an interpretive dance adaptation of “Yummy Yummy Yummy” by the Ohio Express.

owa is beautiful: a land of verdant cornfields, ball diamonds, quaint small towns and Shire-like rolling hills. But the realities of life are grim: the mask of “Iowa nice” all too often hides a deep core of red-state intolerance. Those acres of corn are nurtured by chemicals that seep into the rapidly eroding soil, owned by faceless agricultural conglomerates; desperation, addiction and hopelessness are endemic in a poisoned, culturally barren landscape.

From this land of contradictions springs the Bubblegum Necropolis EP, the newest collaboration between Sam Locke Ward and Bob Bucko Jr. It’s a rapid shift from the long-form sorrow of Discount Sacrifice at the Altar of Bargains, their 2021 full-length—not least for its format, a collection of 40 songs packed into the wildest, most chaotic nine minutes that any musician has put to tape in the last year.

SLW and BBJR experimented with drastic minimalism in 2021 on their two collaborations with Mike Real Manic Time and Let’s Build a Logjam). “I actually started the experiment on [Logjam] and just kept going,” says Ward. The approach ties in with the suitably absurd title: “It’s a field of songs that are all broken down to their essential components.” Broken down, as in crushed up like allergy meds and combined with caustic sonic backing to make a mixture as volatile as

shake-and-bake meth cooked in an abandoned farmhouse.

The songs aren’t just blasts of noise; each tells a story or carries a message with the barest economy of words. Sometimes sung, often shouted, the tracks are layered with sheets of saxophone and guitar racket, evoking everything from lurching free-jazz, hardcore punk gang vocals, ‘60s spy-flick soundtracks and abstract Saturday morning cartoons scored by King Crimson, plus a little Irish reel toward the end.

“I told Bob I was ‘gonna play hard pitch,’” Ward explained. “It’s fun to throw hard stuff at Bob because he’ll do it.”

Bubblegum Necropolis is a deeply Iowan album, from “Church Going Choir Girl” to “Sports Bar” to “Rail Road Town” to the most Iowa track of all, “Pig Shit Delight”: “It’s a pig shit swim in a pig shit lagoon / an Iowa treat from me to you!” What better way to make sense of a place where highly explosive pockets of unstable, near-molten pig feces are commonplace?

Elsewhere, Ward (the comic artist behind Little Village’s Futile Wrath) and Bucko take on alienation, corporate culture, boredom, despair and nonsense situations. All this may sound rightly unpleasant, but here’s the thing—it’s hilarious. They process their angst with a warped sense of humor, crooning such chestnuts as, “Listen to your heart and follow your dreams / listen to your heart beat true.”

Bubblegum Necropolis is the finest release of 2022, a catchy, clamorous summation of what it’s like to live in these absurd times. On first listen, I laughed so hard I had to constantly stop and repeat songs. Buying the digital version of the album may be preferable—the songs fly by so quickly that repetition of tracks becomes necessary. But if you buy the tape, you can stand on the lawn outside Kim Reynolds’ office with a boombox and play it for her, an experience worth the cost of bail.

—Loren Thacher

raMIN rOSHaNDeL & JeaN-FraNÇOIS CHarLeS Jamshid Jam

NEWFLOREMUSIC.BANDCAMP.COM

Since the 1960s, it seems the University of Iowa School of Music has loosened up about what is allowed and appropriate music for which one can get a Phd Composition—in a good way. There’s always been a raffish, crusty side to the department going back to Peter Lewis’ Scorpio Concerts from the 1970s. But this less traditional ferment happened alongside the work of more traditionally oriented composition professors. Now, what was experimental 40 years ago becomes mainstream practice, without entirely losing its wild edginess.

Jamshid Jam is a very modern stretching of music composition. Ramin Roshandel’s performance on the album is improvised, combining his live playing of the Persian setār with digital electronic processing by Iowa professor Jean-François Charles. There is no score, only the performance. The digital processing patches they use incorporate randomness. But they clearly take their time tuning these systems to have musically useful outcomes.

There are no “sharp stick in the ear” freakouts to the way the digital effects vary randomly, and in fact change becomes, paradoxically, a constancy. Nothing repeats, exactly, but as Marvin Bell would say, it repeats “inexactly.” Summed with Roshandel’s free interpretation of the Persian improvisational style, they make music that is never the same twice, yet satisfies in a “same but different” way as through-composed, written composition.

It is experimental in process, but not in performance. Iowa City musician Gabby Vanek (another Iowa alum) recently said of her improvisations “...if I didn’t practice it I don’t know if it’s going to work.” Roshandel & Charles rehearsed these pieces before recording official versions of them. Each piece reflects a well-worked out musical aesthetic, with distinctive tonality and timbre. But it’s exciting that other performances also exist, giving live audiences something new and unique.

The novel improvisational vocabulary is rooted in Persian classical and traditional music. Charles samples and plays back the setār in real time, sometimes shifted in pitch, or played back in sections. While Charles is remixing, Roshandel is listening, playing into the digital effects, accompanying them and imitating the digital stuttering.

On “Chāhārgāh” the electronics are radically transformed fluttering sounds, so divorced from their original sonic context that one can’t tell if they began with the setār, or some other found sound. “Bayāt-e Tork” uses frozen granules of the setār sound as drones, similar to the Indian tambura, a drone instrument.

The digital sound processing may be off-putting to listeners more in tune with traditional “classical” music—but this particular music wouldn’t exist without modern computers and software like Cycling 74’s Max/MSP, which is the digital tool of choice in the UI’s electronic music program.

Jamshid Jam is both novel and accessible to an adventurous listener. In fact, given the importance of improvisation in those musical traditions, using computers is a natural progression. When anyone can download a setār app on their phone, there’s no going back to the strictly analog world for this music. To extend and transmute something traditional in new ways continues the tradition without upsetting it.

—Kent Williams

Bubblegum Necropolis EP SAMUELLOCKEWARD.BANDCAMP.COM

Sam Locke Ward ‘Happy Hearts’ release Party Gabe’s, Friday, Feb. 17, 9 p.m., $10

>> Cont. from pg. 21

I walk into a familiar tableau, step through the relative darkness and choose a velvet chair against the back wall. It’s Outer Limits without the bar (BYOB), everything turned toward the stage.

Unlike Outer Limits, or even Minx, I’m the only person there. I take the opportunity to scan every part of the room, and see what is sort of like a fivestar hotel’s conference room, equipped with theater lights and disco balls on the ceiling, a couple yardlong champagne bottle balloons, and a DJ booth above and beside the stage, pumping out Justin Bieber’s “Boyfriend” and a remix of “Toxic” by Britney Spears. Yet again, I can’t help but commend the performer’s skill as she entertained myself and the two guys, who had just arrived.

By the time I left, two more performers had taken the stage, each of them energetic and dedicated. But still I head out for the final destination of the night: Beach Girls.

Beach Girls

The crème de la crème

The past four establishments are all within, like, two miles of each other, whereas Beach Girls is a 20-minute drive over to West Des Moines. I get there around 10:15 p.m., and right inside the front door, I’m gently confronted by a walking giant in a black SECURITY polo. He asked for my ID, patted me down and sent me off to pay the $15 cover.

The inside is Google’s top search result for “gentleman’s club”: A sea of lounge chairs on wheels. A long, bone-shaped stage with a litany of poles. Eight TVs playing the local news. Billiards. A fish tank. There’s a disco ball and a couple lights, but nothing too spectacular. The playlist led with Bruno Mars and almost perfectly combined the stylings and sounds of the last four clubs. It was apt, since Beach Girls had as many patrons as the previous four places combined.

Half of the guys are Kubrick staring at the stage, and it doesn’t take long to understand why. Every performer I’ve seen has been fantastic, and these women are no different. Their ability to maneuver the stage and offer individual attention to each and every person at their feet is awe-inspiring. Every move is choreographed in the moment, and it flows effortlessly, like the mighty Des Moines River.

Undeniably, there was no better place to close out the night. I believe Beach Girls is the quintessential club of Des Moines.

Born in Nebraska and raised between there and Iowa Falls, Max Adams is now a postgraduate student living in Des Moines. His writing interests include politics, people and culture.

TeNDING IOWa’S

Cornelia F. Mutel,

includes chapters written by recognized experts in their field; between each chapter are perceptive personal essays written by Iowa farmers or environmentalists.

While contemplating Tending Iowa’s Land, a poignant story returned to mind. A good friend of mine and his wife, several years ago, lived very near the Iowa River. During a hot, dry spell, he decided to put a pump into the river and use river water instead of well water to resuscitate their parched garden. The plan worked perfectly—the moistened plants promptly returned to vegetal lushness. By late afternoon on the third day, however, the leaves curled, the stems sagged, and the plants drooped earthward. Within a week every vegetable in the garden was brown and dying.

On one hand, this dead-garden story invokes a folksy humor characteristic of good storytelling. Beneath that humor is the tragic reality that the Iowa River, in that circumstance, was toxic. How could river water kill a garden in the middle of one of the most agriculturally productive states in our country? The answer is, most probably, the profound ecological alteration that, since about 1830, has been degrading our Iowa landscape.

Tending Iowa’s Land: Pathways to a Sustainable Future (edited by Constance Mutel) explores the history and status of, and possible solutions to, this relentless phenomenon. Each section in the book (titled Soil, Water, Air and Life)

In addition to the book’s structure and content, Mutel made another key decision: all contributors would write in a first-person storytelling form. As a result, the wide-ranging content is rendered stylistically and tonally unified, approachable and amicable—literary features that are so important when addressing potentially controversial subjects like land usage and agricultural practices. Plus, all the chapters and essays effectively serve a central goal: to provide the scientific foundation for a back-to-the-basics sourcebook that explores the human-caused alterations in the soils, hydrology, climate and ecosystem that have degraded Iowa’s environment.

Tending Iowa’s Land offers a rich educational experience, exploring concepts such as biochar, neonicotinoids, roller crimping and detritovores. Perhaps more importantly, the book develops two broad, critical concepts. First, our soil, water, air and native biodiversity are all inextricably interdependent in the ecosystem that is Iowa. The improvement or degradation of one influences each of the others. Second, Iowa’s history is showing us that our present land management practices are unsustainable. Fortunately, those practices are being slowly supplanted by regenerative agriculture and the restoration of native biodiversity. The success of this evolution is dependent upon a collective of farmers, other agricultural interests, concerned citizens and environmentalists pursuing political, legislative, technological and educational solutions. Further, Mutel suggests that our success will require the cultural transformation of our personal values; herein lies the opportunity for Iowans to literally lead the world away from monocultural wastelands toward a future of sustainable, biodiverse ecosystems.

—William Blair

LeWIS-CarrOLL What’s Left

What’s Left (Finishing Line Press, February 2023) builds its atmosphere immediately— the cover and epigraph synching an ambiance by opening with a formally stylized Nirvana quote followed by a transcription of a sparse voice message from the author’s father (the cover is a cardboard box with the top folded shut, it’s labeled in permanent marker with the title). The foundation indicates elegy—and the book is an elegy—but the scaffolding suggests renaissance, too.

I have been around death a lot and often find art surrounding it either flatly grim or trite. Tate LewisCarroll’s poems are neither. They stick to your ribs and wind around your ankles, weighty and precise. While the speaker grieves their father’s death, they take the reader’s hand and offer us the room to grieve, too. We watch the father from a child’s point-of-view, awestruck, in the opening poem, “Shell Collecting,” a father and child digging for shells: “like the right word for a poem: precious wentletrap, / lettered olive, moon snail. He’d recall their names / as if he were the one who’d lost them.”

The first poem introduces the cancer the father will eventually die from, but slowly, after we witness the relationship between father and child change and strain. Interspersed between poems that indulge difficult memories are six poems titled “At My Father’s Wake,” each with a parenthetical subtitle that could be funny, but

mostly hit close to home (I feel confident anyone who has ever been family of the deceased knows this experience) including: “An Exhibit Where Strangers Stick Their Fingers in My Cage to Feed Me Their Opinions Disguised as Pieties” and “A Causeway Toll for which Passersby must Scrounge for Spare Remarks In Order to Leave the Island” and “An Arcade With Only Whac-A-Mole Machines.”

This exploration of death and grief is, like all explorations of death, also an investigation into what it means to be alive—and to live with death. This painful duality is expressed in “Another Cherry Tree,” with a line that resonated with me enough to cause me pause, “Their bodies / will / sprout up / all around you like thistles / And like thistles / they will cling to your socks / and leave little splinters in your fingers, / which will linger all day / when you try to pull them off.”

There are many more excerpts I marked to quote here, dizzying concrete poems and clever uses of form (haiku and sestina!), but I would be remiss not to mention the bright color photos that act as section dividers. Given the attention they deserve, they are another powerful illustration of life in stages.

This collection provided me with great catharsis, a feeling of being seen. After many times bereaved and having no language to express it, this book is a gift. It conjures words from our most vulnerable moments—“And what a jealous god / it is, always taking, taking. / With a jealous god come commands, / come severed limbs, come rivers / of blood, comes seeing the devil’s hand (from “The Anatomical Man”)”—and gives us something to do with them. There’s an annoying stereotype that says that pain is a catalyst for art. I have found that untrue, but with this book came a reprieve. This book made me want to create.

—Sarah Elgatian

LaND: PaTHWayS TO a SuSTaINabLe FuTure

editor UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS

Cornelia Mutel ‘Tending Iowa’s Land’ anthology reading Prairie Lights, Sunday, Feb. 5, 2 p.m.

TaTe

FINISHING LINE PRESS

FerIT eDGÜ, Tr. arON aJI

The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales

NYRB CLASSICS

aron aji. Prairie Lights, Iowa City, Tuesday, Feb. 7 at 7 p.m., Free

Born in 1936 in Istanbul (and approaching his 87th birthday on Feb. 24), Ferit Edgü has been writing beloved and award-winning work in his native Turkish since 1959. He’s published novels, stories, essays, poetry and even a children’s book. He’s been adapted to film, awarded the Sait Faik Literature Prize and the Sedat Simavi Prize for Literature and been translated into French, Italian, Japanese and more. But little to none of his writing was available in English. Until now.

Aron Aji, director of the University of Iowa translation programs and president of the American Literary Translators Association. And he has built a career deftly translating Turkish authors. It may be vanity to review a translation of work that I could not read in its original language, but this is important enough a volume to try. The nuance of translation lies in the ability to disappear. Like an editor, a translator is a partner, responsible for standing in for the reader and ensuring that the author’s intent is conveyed. A translator doesn’t merely convey meaning, but atmosphere, tone and style.

This is especially true of poetry. And The Wounded Age, the first in this two-story volume, is an intricate journey that walks the line

between poetry and prose. Aji’s sparse translation packs a poet’s layers of meaning into each word, hanging thinly on each page in an echo of the sensation of breathing in the mountains, where the tale is set: Much of the story is dialogue, the narrator (a reporter) relying almost entirely on his interpreter, Vahap, to offer him a window into the world of the people he’s trying to better understand.

It’s filled with the agony of someone who longs to tangibly help those he meets, but knows he is relegated only to tell their story. It is a must-read for reporters in today’s media landscape, anxious to convey humanity as well as knowledge, and for anyone obsessed with the history of war poetry and the ways that words are asked to intercede between us and darkness.

The second in the volume, Eastern Tales, reads like a book of fables or parables, each vignette heavy with meaning and weighty as poetry. Although first published a dozen years earlier (The Wounded Age in 2007, Eastern Tales in 1995), it carries through the themes of the first: communication, understanding, neglect and loneliness. It, too, is set in the mountains, and speaks of them as of a lover.

“As I said my thank-yous to the man I wouldn’t see again, he said ‘Don’t you worry, Teacher, you’ll come again. Sooner or later, these mountains call you back.’”

Where The Wounded Age emphasizes and embodies the experience of being in the mountains— the starkness, the thin air—Eastern Tales carries the heaviness that the idea of a mountain conveys. It’s an elegant parallel to place them in this proximity, almost a primer to the region they describe. Here, as in the first, Aji’s translation emphasizes the sensation invoked, building a world of deep meaning, lovingly realized.

—Genevieve Trainor

DK NNurO

What Napoleon Could Not Do

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

DK Nnuro in conversation with Tameka Cage Conley Prairie Lights, Iowa City, Wednesday, Feb. 8 at 7 p.m., Free

Stanley reads book Club: ‘What Napoleon Could Not Do’ UI Stanley Museum of art, Iowa City, Saturdays, Feb. 25, March 25 and april 29, 2 p.m., Free

Early in DK Nnuro’s debut novel, a Ghanaian father presiding over his son’s divorce ritual is introduced by his well-read brother to the concept of schadenfreude. “Delighting in [someone else’s] misery,” it’s defined. Again and again, the characters in What Napoleon Could Not Do (out Feb. 7) dance around this concept, and again and again, find it lacking. This is not presented as an excess of humanity, though, so much as an inability to connect to emotion.

It is mirrored by their similar inability to delight in the joy of others. When confronted with joy, the novel’s central characters pick at it, examine it, search for surreptitious intent. Doubt is given a place of privilege over credence, to the extent that there is an anxiety hovering over each scene—an expectation of disappointment, an atmospheric Chekhov’s gun. Nnuro lays his characters bare before the reader with a Dostoyevskian interiority, expertly enmeshing the experience of reading with the anxiety and uncertainty that the characters themselves feel.

What Napoleon Could Not Do examines the lives of siblings Jacob Nti and Belinda Thomas. Belinda

is the academic success, whose skills and contacts got her accepted to boarding school in the U.S., then university and law school. The lack of a green card made employment difficult, leading to an early marriage to a man nearly twice her age. Jacob is back in Ghana, with few prospects and a dwindling sense of hope that he will ever make it to the states. His divorce, from a Ghanaian woman living in the U.S., after five years of long-distance marriage and many failed emigration attempts, launches the novel.

Belinda, whose husband is a Black American, is aware that the U.S. is not the promised land that some of her family back home still envision. Her perspective is described as “... her fury over America’s singular skill at simultaneously engendering and dashing hopes.” This thread positions the U.S. in opposition to its immigrants, Blacks and Africans in opposition to white Americans and wealth in opposition to poverty in ways that consistently deny the reader any sense of schadenfreude. All are victims, in a sense, not of America, but of the American dream: an almost Buddhist assertion that wanting itself is what destroys us.

The novel is anchored by Nnuro’s keen visual sensibilities. It should come as no surprise to any reader that he currently serves as curator of special projects at the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art. Every angle into this story is a visual one, from the flowers in the Nti family’s garden to the lushness of kente fabric to the darkness of a road in a blackout.

What Napoleon Could Not Do is a deeply engaging examination of what it means to emigrate, what defines home for an immigrant and what defines family for people who have not seen each other in decades. Nnuro spins moments into landscapes and memories into tapestries, inviting the reader into the hearts of a family that struggles to understand the differences between the world they hoped for and the world that is.

—Genevieve Trainor

A FOODIE PARADISE

While we celebrate terrific foodie options all year round, dining locally takes center stage during Foodie February

ACROSS

1. Oodles

5. Type of exfoliant

10. Exile isle

14. Drink brand with snow in its logo

15. Type of exfoliant

16. Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina is often in one

17. Proctologist?

19. Level in a loyalty program

20. Home of the WNBA’s Aces

21. Bygone Animaniacs programming service

23. Jokey prefix with “webs”

24. Make a commitment of sorts

25. Rooms by the (Edward Hopper painting)

26. “Chandelier” chanteuse

27. Clover Stout and Honeysuckle IPA?

32. 47-stringed instrument

34. Joint

35. Cofounder of 51-Across

36. Treaties that aren’t what they seem?

39. They have shingles

42. ___ facto

43. Cornhole attempt

47. Place to buy ritual oil?

50. Sartorial concern

51. “Straight Outta Compton” group

52. One of the JASON months: Abbr.

53. Scandinavian-American counterpart to “oy vey”

55. 2008 John Cusack/ Hilary Duff film that satirizes the military-industrial complex

57. Car that “drives a little slower,” in a 1975 hit

60. “Indeed”

61. HVAC passage built into Memorial Stadium in

Lincoln, Nebraska?

63. Headey of Game of Thrones

64. Word with body or mirror

65. Series shortener

66. Emulate Yayoi Kusama, sometimes

67. Prevent legally

68. 7-stringed instrument

DOWN

1. Not quite ladylike?

2. 1984 setting

3. Have your name atop marquees, say

4. First shot of a volley

5. Tedious task

6. Chewed stimulant

7. Turns

8. Strange thing to find in Double Stuf Oreos?

9. Hellraiser writer/director Clive

10. Abbr. in front of a year

11. ___-faire

12. Source of suds

13. Flight home?

18. Laura of Jurassic World Dominion

22. “My money says ...”

24. River to the Ohio

28. URL ending for adjuncts

29. Steering a shell

30. Company that introduced Garbage

Pail Kids cards as

NFTs in 2020

31. With 37-Down, like more than one out of every five people on Earth

33. Deflating sound

37. See 31-Down

38. This is what it sounds like when doves cry

39. Rampage

40. How fishing spiders can walk

41. Wind instrument with a solo (surprisingly) in the Troggs’ “Wild Thing”

44. Not working

45. Brandy cocktail often served with a sugar rim

46. Alarm

48. Fauci ___ (Covid vaccination)

49. Contented sound for a cat (or a kangaroo, it turns out)

54. Che chum

56. Caesarian section?

57. Hurdle for future public defenders: Abbr.

58. “Now it’s your turn”

59. Blubber

62. Audible pauses

Django 1420 Locust St. 515.288.0268 djangodesmoines.com

Malo 900 Mulberry St. 515.244.5000 malodesmoines.com