Fast Forward: Cults, August 1 at The Speakeasy

By Jeff Ignatius - 7/28/2010
When the band Cults plays a Daytrotter.com show at The Speakeasy on Sunday, guitarist/songwriter Brian Oblivion promises plenty of fresh material. "Well, obviously," he said in a phone interview last week. "That's kind of the running gag of the tour. 'This is a new song. We wrote it a month ago.'
To put it mildly, things have moved quickly for the duo of Oblivion and Madeline Follin -- which adds four members for live performance. As Oblivion said, "We've had to kind of put everything you do normally in a band on fast forward." After unexpectedly finding a national audience earlier this year, Cults is now touring with Maps & Atlases (through mid-August), and the pair is working on songs for a full-length that it hopes to release around the end of the year. Click here to read more.


Love & Warbucks: “Annie,” at North Scott High School
Through August 1st

By Thom White - 7/27/2010
On Saturday night, I had the distinct pleasure of taking two very special young ladies - eleven-year-old Hannah and six-year-old Madison - to the theatre, since Countryside Community Theatre's Annie seemed the perfect choice to foster their love for live performance. And love it they did, calling the production "awesome" and "really good." As for me, I... didn't exactly love it, but liked it well enough. Click here to read more.

Novel Spy: “Salt” and “Ramona & Beezus”

By Mike Schulz - 7/25/10
Leaving a recent screening of Cyrus, my friends and I noted how refreshing it was to see a movie in which, right up until its final seconds, you had no idea where events were going to lead; the creepy indie comedy could've ended with either a Happily Ever After or a vicious display of bloodletting, and neither finale would've seemed unjustified. (No spoilers here. You've still got a few days to catch it locally.) And the best I can say about director Phillip Noyce's Salt - and it's a considerable compliment - is that it, too, is totally unpredictable, a gripping, over-the-top action flick that makes you gasp and then giggle, and then giggle at yourself for gasping.  Click here to read more.


Political-Party Platforms Don’t Matter, the Media Say, but ...

By Herb Strentz - 7/25/2010
Two things you should know about the 2010 platform of the Iowa Republican Party:
1) The document of some 12,000 words and almost 370 planks is a fascinating and provocative read. The work is a great candidate for any time capsule so people 100 or more years from now can see how their ancestors approached issues of public policy.
2) The news media in general, and The Des Moines Register in particular, continue to ignore party platforms as irrelevant to the 2010 election.
The state convention of the Iowa GOP came and went with news coverage given to the nominations of Terry Branstad and Kim Reynolds for governor and lieutenant governor. Little or no news coverage was given to the GOP platform.
There seldom is. Click here to read more.

Quinn’s Governing Comes a Little Too Close to Campaigning

By Rich Miller - 7/25/2010
I was looking through Governor Pat Quinn's campaign-finance reports the other day and saw that he went way out of his way to list even the tiniest in-kind contributions.
"In-kind donations" means that instead of giving cash, somebody contributed goods or services to a campaign.
Reading through the report, I saw the $8.28 spent by a retired Chicago woman for food at Treasure Island. The $17.67 that a Springfield homemaker paid for Mel-O-Cream doughnuts. The $5.56 shelled out by a DuQuoin High School teacher for food at Kroger.
So it's quite remarkable that the governor will not admit that he ought to reimburse taxpayers for at least part of the state plane flight he took to southern Illinois the other day. Quinn flew down from Chicago to tour a facility with Southern Illinois University honchos. He also took a group of parents who had lost sons or daughters in Iraq and Afghanistan to a minor-league baseball game.
But during the same trip, Quinn sat down with Williamson County Democratic officials to talk about his fundraising efforts, according to the Bloomington Pantagraph. He also dropped by the local Democratic Party headquarters to give a short speech. Click here to read more.