Posted inNews

Moving on

Now, it’s a key element of the annual city budget debate, competing with other high-level interests such as public safety, trails and parks and better streets, and it has been included in the popular MAPS initiatives. “It’s strange because people didn’t even know we had a transit system 12 to 15 years ago. Now, we’re […]

Posted inNews

Million-dollar members

This year, each of the city’s eight council members will receive a $1 million allocation to spend on projects that were not previously funded. The discretionary spending program comes from the city’s reserve fund, typically 8-15 percent of the total municipal budget. In six of the last 11 years, excess money from the reserve fund […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Olympus Has Fallen

I’m talking about Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, just to be clear. In Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen, Aaron Eckhart grows angry and Morgan Freeman pulls strings from the sidelines, while a possibly crazy but altogether decent man dishes out some superheroic justice to save the city, yet the result is a terrible movie, arguably […]

Posted inMusic

Kanye West — Yeezus

Ego alone isn’t what makes Mr. West such a fascinating figure; any other schmo with a head his size would be scoffed and discarded as parody. There’s actually a certain degree of legitimacy that keeps his maniacal sense of self-importance from devolving into full-scale megalomania: that Kanye’s vision and production chops are currently unmatched in […]

Posted inArts & Culture

‘Land’ ho!

Rick Sinnett Photo: Shannon Cornman Unless you’re up close and in person with Sinnett, you won’t see the globs of light blue paint in his hair and flecks covering his clothes and sunglasses, but you will see that same color covering the exterior of the onetime grain silo at 200 S.E. Fourth. Aqua is the […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Lisztomania

Almost a year after his death, Warner Archive brings one of his wildest — and that’s saying something — to a long-overdue American DVD release with 1975’s Lisztomania. Based loosely — in every sense of the word — on the life of Franz Liszt, it’s a musical comedy horror sex fantasy unlike any you’ve ever seen. […]

Posted inArts & Culture

‘Nerd’ humor

It’s hard to say whether the title of “The Nerd,” by Larry Shue, now being presented by Pollard Theatre, is supposed to endear us to the eponymous character or turn us off right from the beginning. I guess it depends on your opinion of nerds, generally. In this tepid 1981 comedy, Willum Cubbert is a […]

Gift this article