Someday, somebody is going to trace the origin of these debilitating computer viruses to some well-paid nerds working for Sony, EMI and BMG trying to put the kibosh on your Kazaa and tangle up your Limewire. I can go out and purchase a second home in the time it takes…
Famed producer Rick Rubin, the man responsible for signing the now über-successful System of a Down, recently told the L.A. Times that SOAD guitarist/songwriter/vocalist/mastermind Daron Malakian is “a true artist.” Malakian, said Rubin, “doesn’t really live in the world. He lives in a bubble and the bubble is filled with…
When I was fresh out of high school, I took off on a pilgrimage to Berkeley, California, the punk rock mecca of the early ’90s. While that was a hell of an adventure, my post-grad exploits ain’t shit compared to what the five Gilbert High School grads in the band…
Late last month, U.S. Immigration Judge John W. Richardson was expected to announce deportation dates for the Wilson Four, the former Wilson Charter High School clique detained in upstate New York while on a 2002 field trip with other classmates. Smarty-pants students Oscar Corona, Jaime Damian, Yuliana Huicochea and Luis…
“I was Batman for a week!” says Roland Sarria, barreling down Broadway Road in his two-tone black and gray Honda Element, covered with bright red and black decals advertising the sporting event he’s been promoting for the past seven and a half years: “Rage in the Cage: Extreme Fighting Championship.”…
Towering Fremont cottonwoods and Goodding willows provide welcome shade as I approach the banks of one of Arizona’s most threatened natural wonders — the San Pedro River. A hawk is perched on a branch overhead as I place my sandal-clad feet into the cool water that’s just a few inches…
Anita Watson was overwhelmed July 19, after a nine-person jury awarded her and her family $28 million, at the conclusion of a civil trial in downtown Phoenix. But it wasn’t like she was thinking about how to spend her share of the money. “I kept thinking about my mom and…
There’s no art show more egalitarian than a mail art show. Just make a drawing or painting or collage or mixed-media piece that can be mailed, and you’re in the exhibition. There’s no curator, no jury process, no commercial concerns, no snobbery. There are also no standards, which means there’s…
Once upon a time, creating an animated film meant drawing and painting each frame individually. Animation was a painstaking, time-consuming process. A few seconds of Bugs Bunny waggling a carrot required hundreds of drawings; a single feature-length film could take years to complete. Then along came computers and animation programs…
Thank you-know-who for Mormons, because we never would have had good ol’ blasphemous goth music otherwise. The blurry rear cover photo of element a440’s debut album makes the troubled trio of Halo, Trick and December look like Columbine trick-or-treaters (singer Halo looks especially spookish with his severely razored Nixon hairline),…
Well, someone had to play OMD in rock ‘n’ roll’s never-ending ’80s remake — why not Minotaur Shock? We mean that as a compliment; essentially the work of one man, David Edwards, Maritime’s chipper, chirpy electro recalls both the spartan arrangements and the casual elegance of its British forebears. Nothing’s…
Because indie rock has settled into a kind of polite earnestness best characterized by well-intentioned pasty-faces like Youth Group, and because electronica is slowly getting its corners sanded by the Postal Service, the next logical step was to combine the two. A number of bands have already fiddled with this…
Sure, Starbucks’ in-store music — which has begat its own record label, Hear Music, and, since last August, “Media Bars” listening stations in selected coffee houses — gets all the buzz. But what about all the other “third places” we go to between home and work, where we’re treated to…
No slight intended to that toddlin’ town of Mesa, but few are the delectations that would motivate me to drive down to that burg in 110-degree-plus heat, with the monsoon on my tail. Exceptional barbecue is one, and exceptional barbecue Mesa now has with the opening of a Big City…
THU 28Though he failed to cement his place in history as the first pop star in space, *NSYNC’s Lance Bass could always head down to the Challenger Space Center, 21170 North 83rd Avenue in Peoria, to see what he missed besides the Top 40 charts for the past three years…
Thursday 28Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness: DJ Suzy (hip-hop, dance) Anderson’s Fifth Estate: Area 51 with AKA (gothic, industrial) Axis/Radius: Axis Idol (dance) AZ 88: DJ P-Body (jazz fusion, funk) Barcelona: DJ Rob (dance) Dos Gringos — Scottsdale: DJ Sterling (all genres) Draft House: DJ Dave outta NYC (hip-hop) E-Lounge: DJ Domenica…
Because Los Angeles is a music-industry center, a lot of artists from the area devote themselves to conformity — yet for some strange, unexplained reason, SoCal’s underground hip-hop scene remains a bastion of originality. The Shape Shifters epitomize this contradiction. Featuring mouthpieces Akuma, AWOL One, Circus, Die, Existereo, Life Rexall,…
Glass Candy is a conundrum, something sweet surrounding something dangerous. Ida No is one of punk’s most captivating front women: ferocious, whispering, screeching and wailing herself into a barefoot tizzy. Taking cues from ’70s punk, glam and disco, Johnny Jewel keeps the music minimal, focusing on driving the songs forward…
The members of Ozomatli are a product of their environment. Like their Los Angeles home, their music’s a melting pot of foreign and indigenous sounds. Reggae, salsa, funk, hip-hop, jazz and Latin music all show up in the bustling gumbo of styles. With so many influences flowing in and out,…
While Jason Hill’s leering-stalker routine may be a truer reflection of male sexuality than the typical smooth playboy act, that doesn’t mean it makes for satisfying rock ‘n’ roll. Even the Louis XIV singer’s most obvious influence, T. Rex’s Marc Bolan, was not just some solitary rake, but the toastmaster…
In God We Trust? What Jesus would do: How could Serrano’s fire this good Christian woman? Even the federal government argued that what the restaurant chain did was wrong. Yet Terra Naeve finds herself in financial wrack and ruin (“The Last Supper,” Sarah Fenske, July 21). The argument doesn’t hold…
“Hey, where’s the buffet?!” cries the Mandy Moore of P-town, otherwise known as Her Regal Jettiness, as we saunter into the Scottsdale sports bar known as Buster McNutty’s. “You’re tellin’ me this is a big girls’ night and there’s no buffet?” I answer her query by stepping on her big…
