Terrace Dining Room, Phoenician resort, 6000 East Camelback, Phoenix, 941-8200. Hours: Lunch, Monday through Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Dinner, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday, 6 to 10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 6 to 11 p.m. Guys, let me tell you what your sweetie doesn’t want for Valentine’s Day…
Be My Valentine: If your sweetie requires high-end, high-up dining, you’ve got lots of choices. Among the best: Top of the Rock (the Buttes, 2000 Westcourt Way, Tempe, 225-9000): Dark enough to take the other woman–or man–this circular room furnishes a beautiful, 360-degree view of the Valley. But the food…
Richard Linklater’s films, so far, have shown a unity of time so disciplined that it would gladden Aristotle’s heart. The young writer/director’s first feature, Slacker, took place in a day and a night on the streets of Austin, Texas. His second, the ’70s period piece Dazed and Confused, took a…
Oh, dear, I’m not supposed to go mad ’til 1800! –Graham Chapman as King George III on Monty Python’s Flying Circus Most Americans know King George III of Britain, if at all, as the guy who taxed our butt-kicking forebears into revolt, and whom they eventually beat. Some may remember…
“Seftel,” barked my editor, “are you interested in doing some foreign travel and eating?” You bet I was. Visions of wandering about France, Michelin Guide in one hand and thousands of expense-account francs in the other, danced through my head. Or maybe the boss had something more exotic in mind,…
Nogales Nibbles: You can stay north of the border and get in some pretty entertaining noshing and sloshing, too. The sloshing takes place at Arizona Vineyards, a real hoot. The wine masters here eschew noble grapes like Cabernet, Merlot or Pinot Noir–“too expensive,” they say. Instead, they buy table grapes…
Texas singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston’s either a nut or a genius. Singer Kathy McCarty says he’s both, and she should know; McCarty’s seen Johnston battle terrifying cycles of manic depression, replete with periodic stays in mental hospitals. She’s also seen Johnston write and perform some of the most honest and aching…
Of the 43 bands from the Valley that applied for the South by Southwest music conference this year, guess how many were accepted? I’ll give you a hint: No, I won’t. I’ll just tell you. Other than the Refreshments (who are attending under a business arrangement between New Times and…
“Should I get into the fact that producers and rockers really love Arizona because of the tit bars?” asks Jon Harris, owner of Phase Four Studios, a 24-track Phoenix recording facility. “And golf, too. I haven’t met a musician who doesn’t play golf. All these cats into heavy metal saying,…
At the university, Polonius boasts in Hamlet, he once was accounted a good actor. Hamlet cannot resist asking: “What did you enact?” Polonius brags: “I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed in the Capitol; Brutus killed me.” Hamlet teases him: “It was a brute part of him to kill…
When art depicts the pornographic, does it cease to be art? If pornography achieves artistic expression, does it cease to be pornography? What about W.H. Auden’s rapturous paeans to buggery, or D.H. Lawrence’s celebration of coitus, or that bawdy unknown ancient poet who wrote Satyricon, in which no perversion was…
After months of bickering, backbiting and finger-pointing in the Phoenix art community, it appears that there will be an Art Detour this year–but it may not look much like the ones the city is accustomed to. Every year since 1989, the Valley artists’ association Artlink has put together the Detour,…
The guy everyone calls Bing is bantering with the pizza man. “You get that Italian beef sandwich on your menu, you’ll have them lining up,” Bing tells Chris Bianco of Pizzeria Bianco, a fabulous little eatery at Phoenix’s Town & Country Shopping Center. “Okay, okay, you got it,” Bianco bellows…
When it comes to bedside manner, “suicide doctor” Jack Kevorkian really missed the boat. At least that’s the opinion of a rival assisted-suicide advocate who claims to operate secret “euthanasia cruises”–suicide voyages for which terminally ill passengers from around the country pay $500 for the privilege of being wined, dined,…
The two-lane asphalt road stretches southward across the desert, eerily blending at the horizon with three steam plumes that surge 2,000 feet above the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station. Four miles ahead lies the nation’s largest nuclear power plant; during the past two months, more than 800 migratory ducks have…
Jan Brooks was bustling about her new Mesa apartment, preparing for her daughter Ashley to come home from the hospital. It was June 9, 1993, and in a few days, Ashley would be 18 months old. Happy days like this one had been rare for Brooks, who had moved from…
Talk about showmanship! One of the distinctions co-directors Chris LaMont and Steve Bencich are claiming, probably accurately, for their comedy The Best Movie Ever Made is “the largest mime scene in motion-picture history.” Indeed, the all-mime parody of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is one of the highlights of this mlange…
In the surprisingly crowded genre of documentaries about filmmakers, director Ray Mller’s The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl is most likely the best I’ve ever seen, because it deals directly with subjects far more important than filmmaking. That grandly contradictory title is not wasted on Riefenstahl–her life really has…
Except for Roman Polanski’s 1971 adaptation of Macbeth, the new film Death and the Maiden is his only film version of a play. Shakespeare to Ariel Dorfman–what a comedown. Still, Polanski did his best–he gave Dorfman’s dreary, annoyingly earnest revenge melodrama about political torture a smooth, elegant rendering onscreen. The…
Food for Thought: I’ve spent a few days digesting a thoughtful new book about Americans’ attitudes about eating. It’s titled Consumed: Why Americans Love, Hate and Fear Food, by Michelle Stacey (Simon & Schuster, $22). Her conclusion: When it comes to mealtime, most of our notions about what’s on the…
You do not want to be Dick Dale’s guitar. The Undisputed King of Surf Guitar does not merely play his instrument, he punishes it. Forget about the word “nuance.” He breaks heavy-gauge strings like they were bands of saliva, wrenching a nonstop, high-speed onslaught of reverbed, staccato licks that shred…
It’s a Saturday night in 1980 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in Los Angeles. Chelsea, the Dead Kennedys and X have all come and gone, disgorging an awesome load of punk rawk to the dripping crowd that packs the hall. These are three groups at the height of their…
