Biting the Big Apple: A trip back to New York always produces three effects: I’m civil to relatives I fled from 25 years ago, I hang out with old pals and relive my youth, and I spend an unconscionable amount of money eating out. I still don’t get along with…
For two decades, the small, unassuming watering hole nestled between an adult bookstore and a motorcycle repair shop on Rio Salado Parkway in Tempe has served as a place of solace and community for hardworking folks–somewhere to relax with an icy Bud when the dust is still caked on your…
Thank God for Deepak Chopra. If it wasn’t for that Svengali of self-help, I’d have the mental acuity of an ether addict right now. My tally for the weekend: 12 bands, one rave, and a nerve-jangling run-in with the cops. It’s a few hours ’til twilight on Monday morning, and…
Lord knows how many poor, unsuspecting fools are killed by hidden tracks every year. Think of it–the late-night lone driver, winding down a mountain highway, happily head-bobbing to the latest CD by his or her favorite band. The final chord of the last listed track fades, but he leaves the…
The Diviners came to my attention by winning the prestigious American College Theatre Festival Award at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. I brought author James Leonard Jr. to New York to participate in the Circle Repertory Company Plays-in-Progress series that spring. Based on the success of that staged reading,…
Grand Canyon University has launched a promising season of Shakespeare with a scintillating production of Tom Stoppard’s contemporary classical romp Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The sensation of the 1967 season on Broadway–it won the New York Drama Critics’ and Tony awards for Best Play–Stoppard’s witty deconstruction of Hamlet ran…
How to describe such men as these? Men of vast and deliberate muscle. Men of spartan, militaristic coifs, men of rigidly cascading hair anointed with mousses of the highest caliber of holding capability. Men of rugged, insouciant, determined countenance. Men with devastating powers of erotic enchantment, capable of deploying a…
Finally, an Accounting The Arizona Attorney General’s Office has slapped another major accounting firm with a large fine. Arthur Andersen & Co. joins fellow Big Six accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand on AG Grant Woods’ list of wayward accountants. Arthur Andersen has agreed to pay the Arizona State Board of…
One steamy morning in the summer of 1958–no one knows the exact date–a young man named Art Kane took on a daunting task. Weeks earlier, the editor of Esquire magazine had invited Kane to contribute a photograph to an upcoming issue devoted to jazz. Remarkably, Kane never had taken a…
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio likes to boast about all the attention he receives from the national media, mostly for the spartan life of jail inmates. Now his jails are the focus of a different kind of national spotlight–an investigation by the United States Department of Justice. New Times has…
Environmentalists fighting to restore a stretch of the lower Gila River to its historic biological splendor have found an unlikely ally in the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In a surprising policy shift, FEMA on August 18 notified a politically powerful irrigation district near Yuma that it will not fund a…
The Troon North golf course on the far north edge of Scottsdale is a sight to behold. An emerald grass carpet, smooth, even and weedless, snakes its way along saguaros, next to mesquite bushes and paloverde trees. The grass rises and falls, from tee to green, enveloping manmade lakes, skirting…
It starts with the big floating chickens rolling in from Tucson, legions of fat, fluffy formations that have the weather wonks salivating over their radars. Weather soldiers from around the Valley call the storm hot line for instructions: Be here at four, it says; there is activity to the south…
Chart House, 7255 McCormick Parkway, Scottsdale, 951-1733. Hours: Dinner, Sunday through Thursday, 5 to 10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 5 to 11 p.m. Remember this old Twilight Zone episode? The Earth has slipped out of its customary orbit, and is circling ever closer to the sun. We follow a family…
Teenage Lust is the name noted photographer Larry Clark gave to one of the collections of his work published in book form. The title has the ring of a drive-in exploitation picture of the ’60s. One can almost see the breathless ad copy on the poster: “SEE modern youth driven…
Probably the first risqu material worthy of the term “art” that many American males of my generation ever saw was the work of Robert Crumb, king of the underground comics movement of the ’60s. The obsessions and family psychology of this prolific cartoonist, most famous in the mainstream for the…
Mexican Compromise: Sometimes people want Mexican food with a little less south-of-the-border authenticity than La Guadalupana’s, but with a lot more zip than B.F.I.T.’s (see this week’s Cafe review). In fact, that’s what I was looking for a couple of weeks ago. Some German friends and their kids were visiting,…
It was January 1958, and newly married Myra Lewis, 13, was home alone in Memphis, watching a horror movie on TV. Her husband, a piano player, was out late, as he had been almost every night of their short life together. The movie was The Hand, the tale of a…
Every day is like Christmas when you’re a music editor–each morning brings a pile of packages with your name on them. Thirty-six parcels in one day is the standing record for my five-week tenure here. Of course, as with any Christmas, some of the presents always suck. I never know…
“There’s only been four of us,” Jerry Lee Lewis once said. “Al Jolson, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams and Jerry Lee Lewis. That’s your only four fuckin’ stylists that ever lived.” While you could write a book about the people who didn’t make Lewis’ list, there’s one–Charlie Rich–who seems especially relevant…
I fell for it. I believed, after glancing through the book Why Cats Paint, that the authors had really managed to document the unleashing of feline artistic finesse. And, indeed, at first blush, this slim volume, which outsold nearly everything last holiday season, seems to explain the little-known phenomenon of…
When Cathy England smiles–and life does amuse her–you see a black hole, a gap where her right incisor and the tooth next to it are missing. In fact, her mouth harbors two crescents of cracked, rotten teeth, enamel relics of a tough life and a trio of bitter men who…
