Submitted for your consideration: the worst sushi I’ve had since I made the mistake of walking into a Todai many years back. Sushi that makes Trader Joe’s prepackaged California rolls seem like the food of the gods. Sushi so repulsive that it’d make Pope John Paul II sit up on…
4/14-4/17 It’s been a year since you were laughing your ass off at the quick-witted humor being bandied about at the last Phoenix Improv Fest. And here it is, time for what co-organizer Jose Gonzales calls “the biggest one ever.” And that, comedy hounds, is no jive. The 2005 Fest,…
SAT 4/16 The spirit of Pat Tillman marches on — and runs and walks — on Saturday, April 16, when the inaugural “Pat’s Run” makes its way through the streets of Tempe, starting at 8 a.m. Already, nearly 3,000 participants from almost three dozen states across the country have registered…
4/15-4/17 Pompous palates get pleased every year at the Scottsdale Culinary Festival, as foodies from all over gather to indulge in some of the best dishes in the Southwest. But the beauteous buffet isn’t just for epicures, as the Scottsdale Civic Center, 7375 East Second Street, plays host to a…
There’s not much room for innovation in music anymore. Rock’s been relegated to pop; punk is so not punk that it’s almost punk all over again; and “alternative” has become a generic catch-all for Top 40 genre hybrids. The real music alternative is noise. For the past 20 years, an…
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has made a practice of doling out awards like Sting has sex: a little at a time, prolonging the act of honoring rock ‘n’ roll’s legacy artists for (as of last March) an amazing 20 years — and counting. The Arizona Music &…
When the great playwright Arthur Miller died in February, many admirers took stock again of his most enduring creation, Willy Loman. A delusional idealist who finds himself failed and felled by the American dream, the tragic hero of Death of a Salesman has for half a century been the most…
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that your moviegoing family is absolutely up to date on every major release this year. Not a Friday goes by that you don’t go see something new. Then you look in the paper and see that the only major release coming up this…
If nothing else, give Dana Brown credit for enthusiasm. A documentary filmmaker in name only, he is really the camera- and microphone-equipped president of several booster clubs — among them what might be called the International Society of Beach Bums and, thanks to his latest exercise in hero worship, the…
The Groden family lives out in the middle of the New Mexico desert, far from main roads. They grow, harvest and/or kill all their own food, own their own home, and make what little money they need from crafts. They’ve got no phone or indoor plumbing, and they haven’t paid…
Sean Anders would like you to know this movie thing isn’t as easy as it looks. When he and a friend, Chuck LeVinus, decided to give filmmaking a go three years ago this June, the idea was to put together something loosely resembling a script, harass friends into becoming on-screen…
I confess: I didn’t want to see Never Been Thawed when it premièred here about a year ago. I went to the film’s screening as a favor to a friend, whose best friend’s daughter appears fleetingly in one scene, but I’m not a big fan of independent films — especially…
Da Nutz — Power 92’s afternoon disc jockey personalities Joey Boy (the right nut) and J. Philla (the left nut) — have become an airwave institution here in the ‘Nix, not only bumpin’ the hottest commercial hip-hop and R&B, but making legions of listeners piss their pants with laughter on…
Here’s something for a future episode of Behind the Music: the alt-scene diehards of Fishbone. The band’s certainly followed the show’s patented “career roller coaster”: At SoCal’s Hale Junior High in 1979, spastic saxophonist Angelo Moore joined five cohorts and began pumping out a concoction of funk, metal-laced punk, and…
When Dave Ramsey decided to start a local indie record label 10 years ago, he helped spawn the cult of Flathead. The beloved Tempe rig-rock trio released its debut seven-inch (“Alcohaulin’,” still a crowd favorite at the band’s shows) on Ramsey’s Truxton Records, and later cemented its stature as the…
As legions of local music geeks know already, Steven Reker and Eddy Crichton are the real deal. Their band Reindeer Tiger Team is based on a simple premise: Reker sings and plays guitar while Crichton pounds and clicks away on the drums. It’s a mix of heartfelt songwriting and post-punk…
For most of the last year, Mark Oliver Everett, a.k.a. E, the singular talent behind the Eels, has been in his basement studio working on Blinking Lights, a two-CD set crammed with 33 tracks — more than an hour and a half of music. A few high-profile names pop up…
In a town full of Mormons and mega-churches and one of the largest Christian hip-hop movements in the country, Cole Massey couldn’t find religion. “I went to a bunch of churches around town, asking them what they offered for a 29-year-old single guy looking for some hard-core theology,” Massey, co-founder…
U2 has gone from the band that mattered most to arguably the most irrelevant. There, I said it. But just because I threw myself on the proverbial cross and fessed up, I don’t expect you to go out and hawk your tickets to either of U2’s sold-out shows at Glendale…
Chris Simcox is not a racist. And he’s not a vigilante. He’s just a nice guy from Tombstone who’s tired of all those nasty Mexicans sneaking over the border looking for better lives here in our sovereign nation. By forming The Minuteman Project, a patrol group bent on “sealing the…
Now let me get this straight. It’s okay for a pharmacist to refuse to fill a medical doctor’s prescription for a morning-after pill on religious grounds. But there is no way the very same pharmacist should be required to put cold pills containing pseudoephedrine — the key ingredient for trailer-trash…
In February 1997, self-styled businessman Emmanuel Agyeman boarded a bus in Carson City, Nevada. His destination was the central Arizona town of Eloy, which sits between Phoenix and Tucson. It was Agyeman’s first visit to the Grand Canyon State, but it was hardly a vacation. Earlier, immigration authorities had picked…
