Fifteen years ago, a strange-looking child suffering from severe physical maladies and acute retardation was brought into the office of Dr. Theodore Tarby. The pediatric neurologist regularly deals with a wide range of serious childhood diseases as a doctor with the state-funded Children’s Rehabilitative Services in Phoenix. Tarby says he…
Hear that squawking? It’s not The Bird. It’s that group we’ve come to know as “downtown artists.” This time they’re not shrieking about city fathers trying to police the lawlessness of their monthly First Friday gatherings (one of which is coming up just next week) along that stretch of galleries…
Thursday 29 Acme Roadhouse: College Night with DJ J. Alan (Top 40) Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness: DJ Suzy (hip-hop, dance) Anderson’s Fifth Estate: Area 51 with DJ Jeremy (goth, industrial) AZ 88: DJ P-Body (jazz fusion, funk) Club Dwntwn: DJs Kirby and Chris Shannon (dance) Draft House: DJ ToeKnee (hip-hop, reggaeton,…
Eric Finzi at Perihelion Arts: It’s a pop culture tenet that Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, was a perv whose fascination with little girls appears, to contemporary eyes, to be very Michael Jackson. Maryland painter Eric Finzi explores Carroll’s oddness in a series of epoxy resin paintings based…
Start a band, post music on MySpace, and get a record deal. Isn’t that how it works? Not quite, but that’s what happened when Earache Records grindcore mogul Lee Barrett discovered Abigail Williams’ fan-bloated MySpace page. The result: Barrett quickly ushered the local death metal hellions (named after the McCarthy-like…
It’s that time of year again, when all our sins come back to bite us in the ass, and right around midnight on New Year’s Eve, we resolve to fix all the things we keep doing wrong. Here are a few resolutions from musical artists to help you remember it’s…
A Tough Break Arms and The Man: This is an issue that a lot of people keep talking about, and it’s getting blown far out of proportion with the main issue completely overlooked: DJ Donnie Burbank (a.k.a. Dr. Father, now a.k.a. Dr. Fracture) had his arm broken by a bouncer…
Ab-Normal Beauty (Tartan) Art of the Devil (Tokyo Shock) Bram Stoker’s Dracula/Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Sony) Caged Heat (Buena Vista) Dark Water (Buena Vista) Diary of a Mad Black Woman: The Play (Lions Gate) Empire of the Wolves (Sony) 15 Things You’re Not Supposed to See (Xtreme) Happy Here and Now…
Buck Henry walks into a studio boss’s office and pitches him a movie. Says it’s gonna be a sequel to a movie he wrote called The Graduate, the beloved Mike Nichols film that starred Dustin Hoffman as 21-year-old Benjamin Braddock, and Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross as the mother and…
The notion that Wolf Creek is opening nationwide on Christmas Day brings to mind the scene from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, in which a young boy opens up his holiday gift and finds a severed head. The movie is about as diametrically opposed to the concept of “goodwill…
For your Heath Ledger holiday-movie options, you have a) a cowboy in love with another man, and b) history’s most infamous womanizer. Since the name Casanova is synonymous with an unquenchable thirst for straight sex with women (or at least boasting about it), the role might seem to be a…
In 1968 it was a movie. In 2001 it became a musical. Now it’s a movie again? Yep, and there’s actually pretty good reason to return The Producers to the screen. The original film, though intermittently inspired, was slow and often boring, and its homophobic, misogynistic humor no longer plays…
Anyone remember Uptown 713, that ghastly excuse for a grub-ateria that once occupied a little shoebox-size space behind Apollo’s Lounge, near Seventh Street and Bethany Home Road? Believe me, it’s not worth remembering. The only reason I haven’t completely erased it from the memory banks is that after I wrote…
You’ve got to wait until the new year to buy the new Strokes record, First Impressions of Earth, in stores, but this Thursday, December 29, if you’re truly a Casablancas and Co. fanatic, you’ll want to be down at the latest installment of Panic! at Anderson’s Fifth Estate in Scottsdale,…
Shooter Jennings had a country Outlaw for a father (Waylon), grew up on tour with country rebels the Highwaymen, and is now breaking a few country rules himself by embracing the Southern rock side of the biz that Nashville’s been ignoring for too long. To make this point, consider a…
Years ago, I was scheduled to do a phone interview with this living legend, but Mr. 200-Plus-Shows-a-Year slept through my call. It left this fan with a lot of unasked questions: Since most blues consists of I-IV-V progressions, how many chords would it take, and in what fucked-up order would…
Atllas has spent years trying to follow in the footsteps of his hip-hop heroes — Jay-Z and Master P, among others — but now he’s becoming a role model himself. The 25-year-old Phoenix MC stars in the next installment of MTV’s Made, coaching a high school girl from Sedona on…
It’s rare to find anybody over 20 inside the noisy arcade castle at Mesa’s Golfland during the Saturday morning $8 Video Game Blowout. Never mind anybody over 60. That’s why the gray-haired dude on the Guitar Freaks V machine sticks out like a sore joystick-jamming thumb. Eyes squinted Clint Eastwood-like,…
When did DJs stop being tastemakers? I’m not talking about scenesters who play songs for nightclub crowds, or vinyl junkies who juggle beats on a couple of turntables. Those are the newer notions of what a DJ is. Instead, I’m thinking of the faceless folks who deliver music over the…
You cannot slug a cop. It’s that simple. And the police cannot assault prisoners. This simple bargain between law enforcement and the rest of us is one of the things that separates Americans from the denizens of Iraq and every other dusky pest hole. Keeping the scales even on this…
Polygamist leader Warren Jeffs continued to elude a nationwide manhunt at the end of 2005 as the fundamentalist Mormon municipalities he controls along the Arizona-Utah border headed toward financial disaster. Jeffs, 50, was named to the FBI’s most wanted list last August after he fled the largest polygamist community in…
Nowhere Man (Image Entertainment) There’s good reason why you’ve never heard of this UPN show from the mid-’90s, which lasted 25 episodes before getting shuttled off to, well, nowhere. It’s a convoluted mind-fuck that owes its existence as much to The Prisoner as The Fugitive, and if you missed one…
