Wow. A year ago, if you had told me that I would regard Canada’s Comeback Kid highly, and utter “best album I’ve heard in at least a year” about its disc, I would have laughed in your face. I was mostly against positive (“posi”) hardcore music, because I don’t enjoy…
“Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life”: Designers get stereotyped as unexciting pragmatists, but this exhibition of fashion, architecture and product design from around the world shows that sly social commentary can be slipped into ordinary objects. Works in the 45-piece show range from Constantin and Laurene Leon Boym’s Buildings of…
Punk rock, baby. It’s been one of those weeks where nothing seems to be getting my joystick hard. It’s probably because I’m still down from this surgery I had, but, well, I just can’t get my mojo working. As Elvis would say, “my stuff.” It’s just kinda flaccid. The biggest…
“Jeez, Jett, try not to pull a Dale Earnhardt on our ass!” I croak as the PHX’s sultry, bi-lovin’ speed-demoness skids around a corner toward the alt-music nightspot Modified Arts near Seventh Street and Roosevelt. “Plus there’s po-po all around, and I’ve got an open bottle of Stoli in my…
Chicago’s Sweep the Leg Johnny was always a great band. But that sax? Had to go. Amid all the group’s streamlined savagery, singer Steve Sostak’s ungodly squawking was about as welcome as a turd in a hot tub. So it’s with one hand on the doorknob and the other holding…
What Would Jesus Write? Bunch of martyrs: I just wanted to say that Charles Pyeatte’s rant in last week’s Letters column (“The Passion of the Priest,” March 10) was more of the same tired-ass Christian/Catholic/law enforcement rhetoric that we have all heard a million times. Quit milking the Jesus thing,…
Yikes, what hath the Darkness wrought? It was only a matter of time before you’d want hammy operatic shrieking delivered by a chick who could scale heights even gonads scrunched up in spandex never dreamed of visiting. The idea of bearing witness to the spectacle of head-splitting Stephonik X and…
3/10-3/26 You know how it is: Your lover is a gay porn star, you’re the owner of a gay porno film company, and your lover wants to break into the “mainstream,” so you contribute $100,000 to the California Repertory Theatre so your lover can get the leading role in Christopher…
SAT 3/12 Muscle cars and band geeks don’t typically mesh — unless the former is running over the latter. But the Cruisin’ to the Tunes Car Show at Deer Valley High School, 18424 North 51st Avenue in Glendale, turns the odd pairing into the perfect duo for a day. The…
3/14-3/20 We may be saucy spectators at the FBR Open, but LPGA golfer and Phoenix resident Carin Koch says she’s never had any hecklers here. If she did, she says she would “probably tell them to go away or stop it.” Well, that beats a golf club to the head…
3/10-1/1 In the late 19th century, the U.S. government implemented a policy of assimilation to deal with what it termed the country’s “Indian problem.” The goal was nothing less than erasing all outward traces of Indian culture, and the means was forcibly removing Native American children from their homes and…
Tongues are still wagging about the night in 1990 when Phoenix Theatre’s curtain came up to reveal a giant naked man, his ass rouged and spotlighted in the first moments of the company’s production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The derrière belonged to actor Christopher Wynn, and one of the gasps…
With the amount of breakables among the more than 185 booths at the Scottsdale Arts Festival this year — including jewelry, ceramic, drawing, glass, metal, mixed media, painting, photography, printmaking and sculpture — you’d be best off shopping with your eyes. But while you may not be able to touch…
When was the last time you lost yourself in a Shakespeare film? It’s a testament to the success of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the sharp and brooding new version directed by Michael Radford (Il Postino), that we leave the theater without concern for the production. Instead, the response…
If you’re looking for an escapist shoot-’em-up action adventure, and figure a Bruce Willis flick is a reliable option, think twice. Hostage certainly delivers violence and heroics, but not in a way everyone will enjoy. Children and dogs die brutally, and the villains are so thoroughly hateful that even the…
“From the creators of Ice Age,” boasts the poster for Robots, which is no ringing endorsement. That 2002 animated feature, a sort of Three Mammals and a Baby in a prehistoric setting, looked and felt every bit as frigid as its snowbound scenery; it was impossible to warm to a…
Toward the end of Born Into Brothels, a superb and piercing documentary by directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, a 12-year-old child examines a photograph. It’s beautiful, he says, because it shows us how its subjects live. Yes, they’re very poor, and the shot is hard to look at, because…
Ah, the smell of chocolate and meat! Two great tastes that taste great together. Okay, maybe not. Still, this is what my olfactory nerves deal with each time I enter Chandler’s 4-week-old Shabu Fondue, a hip, nightclubby eatery that looks like it belongs catty-cornered from Stingray Sushi in Scottsdale. Instead,…
Beat addicts, here’s your chance to see the ‘Nix’s next superstar DJs in their larva stages at our own New Times DJ Competition, Friday, March 11, at Myst (7340 East Shoeman Lane in Scottsdale). The finalists are DJs Matty, Sean Morley, Soloman, Sonique des Fleurs, and Tranzit, and after their…
Dave Insley arrived in Arizona straight off a Kansas wheat farm, initially playing guitar in honky-tonks around Wickenburg, Yarnell and Payson before settling in Tempe in 1979 — where he suddenly found himself playing traditional country for punks more accustomed to Jodie Foster’s Army and the Meat Puppets. To fit…
Hella is a two-piece that must be seen to be appreciated. It’s not an extensive visual display, just the breathtaking spectacle of two musicians tangling with their instruments with an intensity reserved for assailants in a back-alley knife fight. This shamanistic experimental rock duo is what jam bands would sound…
Since there’s only room for one indie rock savior at a time, Okkervil River leader Will Sheff currently gets to play Mark Lanegan to Conor Oberst’s Kurt Cobain. Sheff’s an equally gifted songwriter with moderately similar stylistic sensibilities, but sans Oberst’s magazine covers and prominent positioning on Wal-Mart CD racks…
