Royal Taj, 1845 East Broadway, Tempe, 967-5234. Hours: Lunch, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., seven days a week; Dinner, 5 to 10 p.m., seven days a week. Five questions I get all the time: 1. “Do restaurants know who you are?” (No.) 2. “Where can I find a good vegetarian…
Morrissey World of Morrissey (Sire/Reprise) Back in the Sixties, patchwork albums like Magic Bus: The Who on Tour or the Rolling Stones’ December’s Children and Flowers were the norm. Part rip-off, these collections of B sides and unreleased-in-the-U.S. tracks were often padded with selections already available on other albums without…
The homemade silver cross hanging from the dash-mounted compass swings back and forth as America’s Polka King barely keeps his Olds Cutlass within the white-lane lines of a road in Mesa. Frank Yankovic, 80 years old this July, is weaving tales from his 65-year reign (well, he wasn’t officially crowned…
The Beat Angels at Long Wong’s? Unthinkable? Impossible? Perhaps, considering the bile that the Angels’ fey, puckish singer Brian Smith has spewed on the Mill Avenue “scene” in these very pages. But apparently, Smith and the boys’ insatiable need to simply “entertain” won out; last Saturday, “bile” turned to “smile”…
The normally sleepy Deer Valley Village Planning Committee has become a whirlwind of political intrigue that pits current and former members of the advisory panel against Phoenix City Councilmember Thelda Williams. The antagonism centers on the land-use plan for 87 acres west of Deer Valley Airport. The village committee wants…
After the dust cleared from the November election, it was widely assumed that school vouchers were a done deal. After all, Fife Symington was still governor, aided by the recently converted former state schools chief, C. Diane Bishop. Lisa Graham, who formerly led the voucher charge in the legislature, was…
It was October 1994, and Peter Galvin, a conservation biologist, was studying trees slated for logging in Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. The trees were part of the Hay Timber Sale, which had been contracted to Precision Pine and Timber in Heber. The project involved cutting about eight million board feet on…
Sex, Lies and Apparatchiks U.S. Senator John McCain must have a soft spot for known liars. Shortly after New Times revealed that reporter David Schwartz had been fired by the Arizona Republic for impersonating a prominent Phoenix attorney, McCain himself called Schwartz and offered to help find him a job…
Very few moviegoers today, even those who would consider themselves film buffs, have had more than passing exposure to the films of the silent era. Yet it is in this period that the vast majority of the art’s fundamental techniques were invented and refined, often to levels of great accomplishment…
Stark type against a black background, actors’ names listed alphabetically, Louis Armstrong singing “Just One of Those Things”–Miami Rhapsody’s titles let us know at once that we’re in Woody Allen Land. The letters are in purple, however, not in Allen’s traditional white, presumably to suggest the flashier colors appropriate to…
The Scottish film Shallow Grave is an imaginative little noir thriller with a lively, grisly wit. Like Miami Rhapsody, the film is full of more or less open references to other movies in its genre–Brian DePalma’s Body Double and Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas, most notably. But unlike director David Frankel’s act…
Whale and Ale, 1401 East Bell Road, Phoenix, 942-0644. Hours: Lunch, Monday through Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Dinner, 5 to 10 p.m., seven days a week; Sunday brunch, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Even though our ancestors crawled out of the primordial ooze eons ago, a lust for…
Steak-Out: One of the Valley’s hottest restaurant rumors concerns Morton’s, the upscale Chicago steak house that has been opening branches all over the country the past few years. Phoenix is on the new site list, so I thought I’d get a preview by checking out the fare at Morton’s Las…
As churchgoers around the Valley return home from services this Sunday afternoon, a former deacon named Dave will be hosting a special nondenominational “fellowship meeting” for a select few of his own followers. Nothing particularly unusual about that, except for one thing. Dave has never actually laid eyes on any…
The handwritten birthday card seemed so sincere. “My music is an expression of my inner self,” it started. “It was a true honor and delight to share it with these incredible musicians. ‘Somewhere Along the Way’ was written as an expression of searching along the path, the Way–as my studies…
The notion of an exquisite young woman becoming emotionally and/or sexually fixated on a paunchy, balding, poorly dressed older man is one that has a certain special appeal for the average movie critic. This may have more than a little to do with why Red, the third film in Krzysztof…
Yanqui, Come Here: What’s pressure for a restaurant critic? It’s having to choose a dinner spot for fussy out-of-town friends. One of my group, having gone through Weight Watchers’ assertiveness training, is notoriously hard to please. Watching her calories on a trip, she once pulled into McDonald’s and ordered a…
Dag, and Mother May I Neeb Hall, Arizona State University campus, Tempe February 22, 1995 If you ever thought that being signed to a major label was the ticket to Easy Street, you should have made it to this show, a double helping of rising acts recently inked to majors…
Throwing Muses University (Sire) Throwing Muses used to be an easy band to loathe. Chief Muse Kristin Hersh wrote wildly inconsistent songs and sang them with the vocal equivalent of buckshot on broken glass. Rock critics from the indie underground drooled ecstatically over the Muses in part because the noise…
It is a strange breed of rock ‘n’ roll band, this Coctails. The six-year-old quartet’s ethos does not include anything to do with sex, drugs or even booze. The members don’t care about getting famous, and they’re not in it for the money. “When we started, we were all visual…
I hate musicals. And I will continue to feel contempt for the genre until the audience stops clapping after every damned song. It’s an infuriating habit. It means that most of us consider a musical a mere collection of tunes–at best, a happy diversion, a pleasant spectacle. We don’t expect…
It was Billy Joel who wrote the immortal line “Only the good die young,” but I’ll bet even B.J., as wise and talented as he is, would have a hard time fitting Bob Stinson into that equation. Bob, late of the Replacements, late of planet Earth (he died of an…
