Think of the conventional rock ‘n’ roll ne’er-do-well of recent generations: the angry greaser, the macho rocker, the sneering punk. Mix their DNAs and saddle the results with a guitar. You’ll get something that looks a lot like Keith Jackson. That’s him leaning against a wall in the parking lot…
Forget about all that trendy “cocktail nation” stuff, the music of Esquivel is in a category of its own. The man made a slew of dynamic instrumental records in the Fifties and Sixties that utilized space-age stereo in a way no one ever had. Of course, you can find all…
Stop your average person on the street, pin him to the ground, hog-tie him and threaten to extinguish a cigar on a pink body part, and it’s still a pretty safe bet that he would not be able to tell you who Steve Ferguson is. If, however, Jimi Hendrix had…
On March 31, 55 years ago, the golden age of the American musical was born. It is easy to imagine the shiver the audience must have experienced on that opening night, when the houselights went down and, without an overture, the curtain rose on a farmhouse and a windmill etched…
Steve Krafft, a reporter with Channel 10, asked last Friday if I’d print the Unabomber’s lengthy manuscript. This is the sort of question that’s supposed to stump journalists. There will be convention panels on this weighty matter all year long. Earlier in the week, the Unabomber had threatened to blow…
High and Mighty: That’s the impression I get from Top of the Rock, the fine-dining restaurant at the Buttes resort, at 2000 Westcourt Way in Tempe. This place continues to deliver one of the best food/setting/view combinations in town. It has a circular room, perched on top of a butte…
Smoke is set in a cigar shop, and the title also makes reference to that which many of the characters blow for much of the film. Written by novelist Paul Auster and directed by Wayne Wang, the film interweaves several story lines around a linking device, as in Twenty Bucks…
One of the production entities claiming responsibility in the opening titles for writer-director Hal Hartley’s film Amateur calls itself “True Fiction Pictures.” Probably this is meant as a slap at the current rage for Pulp Fiction. Indeed, if Quentin Tarantino’s film is the movie equivalent of the hard-boiled crime books,…
Well-Bread: In the old days, you’d walk into a sandwich shop at lunchtime and order a BLT on white toast or a ham and cheese on rye. Not anymore. These days, your sandwich bread is much more likely to come directly out of the oven than out of a Wonder…
Not too long ago, Tempe angst-rock quartet Brick Chair bought a van from an old guy in a Glendale trailer park. Big deal, you say. But wait a second, for you are about to find out how the grizzled gent became a metaphor for the Chair’s from-the-heart approach to music…
“Man Collapses in Struggle With Police” was the headline of a recent Associated Press story that appeared in the Arizona Republic’s obituaries section. “Man” was one Kurt Mayberry, 39, who had stopped breathing at Maricopa Medical Center on June 13 after an apparent cocaine overdose. The article gave the gory…
The worst thing we could’ve done to Michael Jackson was to buy 40 million copies of Thriller. Up until that record-breaking point, Jackson was an entertainer celebrated solely for his artistry, not for his bizarre behavior or his rapidly deteriorating face. Before 1982, if you spotted him in a tabloid,…
“The time has come to speak of love,” the Narrator solemnly tells us. “The lover and the beloved come from different countries. The curt truth is that in a deep, secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many; for the lover craves any possible relation with the…
Forget Las Vegas! Fly over to Gammage Auditorium instead. You’ll lose your frequent-flier miles, but you’ll catch the most scintillating flash of flesh the law will allow. I’m speaking, of course, of that simple children’s Bible tale, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. If, like most of us, you’d love…
“When you photograph me, I feel everything leave me. The blood drains from my face, my eyelids droop, my thoughts disappear. I can feel my facial muscles go limp. All you have to do is to give me that one cue, ‘Don’t smile,’ and zap. Nothing. That’s what you get…
Yellow Journalism E.J. Montini’s writing style can be trying. You know what we mean. Or perhaps you don’t. In any case, Montini and Steve Benson are the only Arizona Republic commentators whose names should appear in the same sentence with the words courage and imagination. (Memo to management: While you’re…
MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN NEEDS GAINFUL EMPLOYMENT Convict groupie Donna Hamm was arrested for obstruction June 12 outside Tucson during a staged media event. Hamm had bellowed into a bullhorn for an hour in a clumsy attempt to incite a chain gang of 20 men from the Arizona State Prison complex. Not…
Vernon Foster, of the American Indian Movement of Arizona, stood before a drum and looked straight at five weary Croatian human-rights activists. “We are all warriors,” he said. Foster, wearing a beret with a feather, jeans, cowboy boots, a leather vest and a belt with a bright red AIM buckle,…
To get an idea of just how very on-the-verge CNN sportscaster Daryn Kagan has become, consider this: She is more current, more suitable for framing, than Armando. Armando is Armando Alvarez, who from his home in Miami has phoned Calling All Sports, the CNN late-night sports talk show hosted by…
Lorne Shantz looks like a cop, even out of uniform. He’s so fresh-scrubbed he could have walked a beat in Mayberry, but instead he got a job as a patrol officer for the Arizona Department of Public Safety. In his 14 years with DPS, his worst offense was waiting a…
Camille Kimball has a brand-new dog named Clara. She got it about a week ago to keep her company and to watch the central Phoenix home she bought a few months back. It is her first pet. She wants to teach it some tricks, and worries about whether she’ll be…
George and Dragon, 4240 North Central, Phoenix, 241-0018. Lunch and Dinner, 11 a.m. to 1 a.m., seven days a week. If there’s any institution that indisputably proves that humans are social animals, it’s the pub. After all, if the only thing drinkers looked forward to was an alcohol buzz, they…
