Greekfest, 1940 East Camelback, Phoenix, 265-2990. Hours: Lunch, Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.; Dinner, Monday through Thursday, 5 to 10 p.m; Friday and Saturday, 5 to 11 p.m.; Sunday, 5 to 9 p.m. For individuals, biology is destiny. Gender, intelligence, height, musculature, temperament–each of us has to…
There is a certain kind of white-male face–leathery, long, hollow-cheeked and often mustachioed–that immediately suggests evil petty authority. Many such faces are in evidence among the actors who play the cops in The Glass Shield, a melodrama about police corruption from the unfortunately obscure writer-director Charles Burnett. The air in…
Sister My Sister is based on a celebrated criminal case from provincial France in the early ’30s–the same case on which Genet based his play The Maids. Scripted by Wendy Kesselman, adapting her play My Sister in This House, and directed by Nancy Meckler, the movie has plenty of lurid…
The Postman, a film by a Brit director, based on a Chilean novel and starring an Italian, is an example of a genre that’s become highly popular on the art-house circuit. It might be called the Paradisaical Film, or the Vicarious Vacation Picture–an easygoing romantic period piece set in a…
Dish Jockey: When you eat out as often as I do, a dish has got to be pretty good to make you sit up and notice. Here are some that have caught my attention over the past few months: Ahoi phannee at Malee’s on Main, 7131 East Main, Scottsdale–This addition…
His name is CoCo the Electronic Monkey Wizard. He says he came from outer space. He says he’s masquerading as a musician who plays in an instrumental surf-rock band based in Alabama. CoCo says his bandmates are all aliens, too. CoCo the Electronic Monkey Wizard is calling from a roadside…
The Jesus Lizard’s David Yow moans, yells, squeals and sweats his way through a concert, surfing the mosh pit in a violent effort to prove that, even if he can’t sing a lick, he’s still got more balls than anyone this side of Henry Rollins. In fact, for the price…
There have been many versions of Victor Hugo’s classic melodrama The Hunchback of Notre Dame, several of them captured on film. Most memorable is the 1923 silent film starring “the man of a thousand faces,” the legendary Lon Chaney as Quasimodo. The hunchback received a voice in the brilliant 1939…
I remember one night in college, my classmate Carol and I were cramming for Dr. Deleuze’s art history exam, smoking up a storm and bitching about the absence of women in our art history texts. One of the books was H.W. Janson’s History of Art. I remembered that night because…
Ramon Alvarez is Governor J. Fife Symington III’s longtime friend. He is also the father of Symington’s rumored love interest, Annette Alvarez. So it came as no surprise that Ramon Alvarez, a Douglas attorney, was the governor’s recent choice for the Cochise County Superior Court bench. The appointment has angered…
I came home one night last week and there were two German girls in my house. One was sleeping on the living-room couch. The other was in the backyard drinking one of my Rolling Rocks. And when I say German girls, I mean as in “from Germany.” Monika and Katrin,…
A Big Day for Tree-Hugging Squirrels The University of Arizona has absorbed another blow to its ten-year effort to build the world’s largest optical telescope on Mount Graham in southeastern Arizona. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected the university’s appeal of an April ruling requiring UofA to…
The mad scientist of scooterdom is a little guy in shorts by the name of Bob Darnell. In truth, he is not so little–maybe five feet nine or ten, possibly five feet eight, he’s not exactly sure–but he seems small in the diminutive, oil-spattered world he’s created from an old…
Karen Higgins wants her daughter to start high school at New School for the Arts, which is one of Arizona’s new charter schools. The school welcomes her. But Higgins lives in the Phoenix Union High School District (PUHSD), which operates under a desegregation order and an agreement with the federal…
It was a new moon, so the desert was dark and shadowless on that warm mid-August night two years ago. A little after 3:15 a.m., a Ford diesel pickup truck turned down a remote dirt road that leads to an isolated desert hot springs about 20 miles south of Safford,…
The Restaurant, the Ritz-Carlton, 2401 East Camelback, Phoenix, 468-0700. Hours: Lunch, Monday through Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Most of us nine-to-fivers look forward to the lunch break, but not because it’s the day’s culinary high point. Rather, it’s our only chance to get out of the office, an…
The French-Canadian Denys Arcand has been directing films since the early ’60s, but he first attracted the attention of this country in the mid-’80s with The Decline of the American Empire and Jesus of Montreal. Both were gab fests set among Canadian intelligentsia–academics in the former, avant-garde actors in the…
Even without the indignity of having his mug shot taken wearing that wretched JC Penney shirt–which his fashion-model girlfriend probably regards as his most grievous transgression–there would be reason enough to feel badly for Hugh Grant these days. His new movie, Nine Months, though it appears to be chugging along…
As Little Odessa has a topnotch cast and promising subject matter, there probably will be a few art-house masochists willing to convince themselves that it’s good. But it’s about as boring a movie as I’ve seen all year. It’s set among the Russian-Jewish gangsters in the title community in Brooklyn’s…
Oyster Grill, 455 North Third Street (Arizona Center), Phoenix, 252-6767. Hours: Lunch and Dinner, 11 a.m. to 1 a.m., seven days a week. Most people in the Valley have moved here from someplace else. And sometimes they have a hard time letting go of the past. Why else would they…
Sea Fever: Today’s review of Il Pescatore got me thinking about ethnic seafood. If you’re looking to go beyond grilled salmon or sauted scallops for more provocatively prepared ocean fare, check out these places: * C-Fu Gourmet, 6438 South McClintock, Tempe, 831-8899. Perhaps the Queen of Valley ethnic seafood. Most…
With “alternative” music festivals proliferating like intestinal bacteria, Saturday’s “KUKQ Fest 1995” is trying to be something different: “A duel in the fucking desert.” At least, that’s how “antifest” evil genius and KUKQ program director Jonathan L. describes his latest brain child, which features dual headliners Circle Jerks and Skankin’…
