Despite insistence from some commentators that it was worthy of an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, Hoop Dreams failed even to cinch a nod in the Best Documentary category. Veteran Oscar buffs won’t be too surprised at this. Again and again, those rare documentaries that demonstrate anything resembling wide popular…
In 1981, I attended the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, where a new writer made a stunning debut with a series of monologues grouped together under the title Talking With. The festival was abuzz. Who was this mysterious writer whom no one had…
Robert Anderson had just finished his first year of art school at St. Francis College in Fort Wayne, Indiana. “I had won just about everything I entered in the Midwest,” he recalls. “My teachers were entering the same art contests, and I was winning. I expected them to congratulate me,…
Ollie, Ollie Oxen Free After Posting Bond Oliver Miller had a dubious homecoming when the Detroit Pistons flew in recently to play the Suns. A court hearing in his divorce had been scheduled to coincide with the visit: During that hearing, somebody pointed out that Ollie had an outstanding warrant…
In recent months, government officials have challenged Arizona prison inmates’ rights to receive magazines like Playboy in the mail. The courts have upheld the prisoners’ rights. But it’s apparently a hollow victory for inmates at one state prison. According to inmates who say they witnessed the crime, employees at the…
The state Attorney General’s Office is investigating the Maricopa Community College District’s purchasing department for possibly violating state procurement and antitrust laws. Rich Brydle told New Times that he was fired by the college last August after recommending that a computer buyer be terminated for manipulating the bidding process on…
James “Rocky” Tang grew up in a South Phoenix neighborhood where nearby dairies provided fodder for the games he and his childhood friends used to play with cardboard milk caps. But the retired restaurateur was just as surprised as anyone else when the game made a comeback in the form…
From a bare frame, he created this bike. In his mind, he saw it come together. He looked to others for the freshest ideas. Out of patience and skill came beauty. But what, he wondered, does it take to win? The boy from the projects is scoping out his competition…
Santos Jaco, a small man barely five feet, four inches tall, stands on his toes and peeks over the shoulder of a bearded norteamericano wearing a Maya-style woven pullover. Jaco is trying to see a detailed charcoal drawing hanging on the gallery wall. The drawing depicts corpses, men and women,…
Bill Dougan started off the broadcast by opining that state Senate President John Greene is a “tin-plated, swaggering, obnoxious, power-hungry thug.” Then Dougan got nasty. The usual targets of his bombast–other politicians, local power brokers, the Arizona Republic–took their share of abuse. In one particularly vitriolic five minutes, he called…
Eire Apparent: Almost 1,600 years ago, Saint Patrick converted Irish heathens to Christianity and drove all the snakes out of Ireland. On Friday, we celebrate that happy event by dressing in green and consuming enormous quantities of alcohol. It doesn’t exactly make sense, but it’s fun. Now, the words “Irish”…
Quick–who did more for rock ‘n’ roll, Martha and the Vandellas or Peter, Paul and Mary? Your first instinct is to go with the girls from Detroit. Martha and the Vandellas’ biggest hits–“Heat Wave,” “Dancing in the Street” and “Nowhere to Run”–were driven by heart-pounding rhythms and what sounded like…
If they gave out Grammys for ingenuous songwriting, dazzling lyrical word play, supreme originality and courteous telephone manners, Robyn Hitchcock would need a moving van to haul home his trophies. The Grammys being what they are, though, Hitchcock needn’t be reserving shelf space. But that shouldn’t stop you from rushing…
If 1994 was the Summer of Punk, what gives for 1995? The Spring of Spunk? The Fall of Funk? John Brannon would go for something like the Year of Junk. Brannon’s the lead howler for Detroit’s Laughing Hyenas, a band that incorporates the kind of junky, blues-based mayhem that inspired…
Most political thrillers, even the well-made and exciting ones, are cop-outs in the end. Of dozens of titles one could name, from The Manchurian Candidate to The China Syndrome to Capricorn One to The Pelican Brief to Clear and Present Danger, all, good and bad, start by dramatizing some valid…
Brian Friel writes buckets of language that we are invited to smear over our faces as we greedily savor the taste of words, like blueberries plucked from the bush of memory. If this is an obscure image, you will appreciate it more after seeing Dancing at Lughnasa, presented at Herberger…
The considerable charm of the new historical epic Queen Margot is that, when all is said and done, it’s really about how a nice, sexy, slightly wild Catholic girl manages to break free of her dysfunctional family. The historical Margot of the title was a political bargaining chip in 16th-century…
How ‘Bout Dem DiamondBanks? This just in: The Flash has reason to believe that the new baseball stadium will be named Bank One Stadium or something similar. The Flash has reason to believe that Bank One will pay the team–not the county, mind you–$2 million the first year, with that…
Art Amarillas peered into the spectators’ gallery of a Cochise County courtroom earlier this month. “I’ve been very sad about this since it happened,” he said to three of Ismael “Miley” Teran’s surviving relatives. “He never did anything to me. I was a very weak-minded individual, and my paranoia caused…
It’s no journalistic earthshaker that “dog bites man”–unlike the flip side of that equation–is not considered news. But what about the intrinsic newsworthiness of “dog nips horse”? That’s bad news–just ask the Valley horseback rider who found himself in the saddle when a vicious dog attacked the horse he was…
No one is likely to forget for a long time what happened that day. That it was a hot, miserable July seemed only appropriate. The eviction of Helen Whitney had taken months, and this, the final step, was beginning to seem like it might go on nearly as long. Helen…
Months before a lucrative state contract was offered for public bid, Governor Fife Symington and former top aide George Leckie conspired with an official from the governor’s personal accounting firm, Coopers & Lybrand, to steer millions of dollars of work to the firm, an internal Coopers & Lybrand memo obtained…
