Seven Nights of DJs and Dancing

Thursday 24Acme 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) Axis/Radius: Ladies’ Night with Josh Royal (all genres) AZ 88: DJ P-Body (jazz fusion, funk) Club Dwntwn: DJs Kirby and Chris Shannon…

Black Lips

While other kids in the dawn of their 20s wax artistic, Atlanta’s Black Lips are stalwart in their scuzzy retro glory. Let It Bloom, their third album as the favorite little brothers of Sonics freaks everywhere, may sound like it was recorded on tin in 1968 — with wisps of…

Tristeza

Picture this: It’s three in the morning, long past last call. The parties have wound down, and the only place to go is the 24-hour Quick Mart. Still awake, you need a soundtrack to a dream, something soothing, yet not boring: music to lull you off to another world. The…

Fear Factory

The marriage of death metal muscle to industrial smarts might not be one you’d care to throw rice at, but you can’t deny these two crazy kids make a handsomely bleak couple. Fear Factory is credited as being one of the first to witness this unholy union, with Soul of…

Critical Fatwa

All hail Chuck D! Oh, how the uptight and old white pundits parsed his every word. From the days of “jungle rhythms” to the French riots today, the frightened, white and withered have shat themselves over black music. But some musicians deserve protection from the beshitted more than others do…

Art Scene

Ruben Maqueda at Museo Chicano: Ruben Maqueda brings contemporary kick to some of the work in this show of photography and folk art. His glitter-bedecked, candy-colored photos of descansos are digital age-meets-dollar store, a knowing wink at the anti-intellectualism that runs beneath much folk art. And his Day of the…

Star Struck

Hector Ruiz is one of the most talented artists in the city. His visceral woodblock prints, woodcarvings and papier-mâch&ecute; installations show what life in America in 2005 is like for anyone who isn’t a white male. He also runs a gallery in an old auto repair shop on Grand Avenue,…

Letters From the Issue of Thursday, November 24, 2005

Polygamyland On the run: I fully expect to see a cartoon in New Times soon of staff writer John Dougherty — white mane flowing and tape recorder in outstretched hand — chasing tall, skinny polygamist leader Warren Steed Jeffs down that long driveway leading to the polygamists’ new temple in…

New Times‘ top DVD picks for the week of November 22

AVP: Alien Vs. Predator — Unrated Collector’s Edition (Fox) Cheaper by the Dozen: Baker’s Dozen Edition (Fox) 8MM 2 (Columbia/Tristar) Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (Buena Vista) The Honeymooners (Paramount) Keane: Strangers (Interscope) King Kong (1976) (Paramount) King Kong: Collector’s Edition (1933) (Warner Bros.) King of the Hill: Season 5 (Fox)…

Reel to Real

11/25-11/27Monica Long Ross admits she’s a voyeur. The playwright has been collecting other people’s home movies for years and watching them in her basement. “I remember thinking, “These are beautiful images. Someone should see these,'” says Ross. So she used the films of one particular family that she purchased at…

Pony Up

11/26-11/27For the average American, polo is a head-scratcher — along the lines of what people in Yemen must think of pro football. But polo is arguably the most popular sport in the world after soccer. It’s also one of the oldest, and the North Scottsdale Polo Club plays the game…

Bible Humpers

SAT 11/26Jumpin’ Jesus, thought Aaron Burkey, I’m a friggin’ genius! The 35-year-old vocalist/guitarist was searching for the perfect name for his latest band, but the possibilities weren’t catchy or distasteful enough. He was considering Kiddiesnuff when he was struck by a revelation: Why not pair the Son of God with…

Got Mole?

The ’80s is the decade you hate to love. Poufy-hair bands. Parachute pants. Pegged jeans. Moon boots. Jelly shoes. Linn drums. Madonna’s mysteriously vanishing mole. All that yecchy stuff you thought you’d left behind. Like, whew, glad that’s over. But in our secret hearts, we kinda dug it, didn’t we?…

Big Pricks

At first glance, Mando Rascon could easily be dismissed as just another tattoo artist. His arms are awash with numerous inked designs, half-covered by the nondescript black tee shirt he usually wears while slinging ink at No Regrets Tattoo Parlor in Tempe. But what most people wouldn’t suspect is that…

A Family Adrift

Writer and director Noah Baumbach has made three light films — one so slight (1997’s party-hopping Highball), it didn’t see release ’til five years after its completion, and even then it snuck onto video-store shelves credited to a pseudonymous writer and director. There was nothing on his filmography — not…

All Yours

Most movies intend to entertain or inform us, or maybe take our minds momentarily off personal problems — that bullet-riddled body in the trunk, say, or Aunt Edna’s arrest for shoplifting doughnuts. Presumably, no picture really means to make an airtight case against children. But after sitting through the witless,…

Common Cold

A few weeks ago, Harold Ramis was sitting in a hotel conference room discussing the subtext of The Ice Harvest, his new film based on the novel by Scott Phillips and adapted by Robert Benton and Richard Russo. Ramis explained he took the project, which Benton (Nobody’s Fool, The Human…

Spent

Ever since its Broadway debut in 1996, Rent has generated a loyal, almost cultlike following. Showered with praise, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical touched a nerve among the young, artistic, gay, urban, and alternatively dressed people who identified as outsiders and wondered how they would make their way in the world…

Weighting . . .

For those of us who dug Rob McKittrick’s recent comedy Waiting . . . , Just Friends offers up some good news: Ryan Reynolds and Anna Faris are together again as a dysfunctional couple. He’s a slick music executive named Chris Brander, still traumatized at having gotten the “Let’s just…

The Darkness

Anyone confused by 2003’s worldwide Darkness phenomenon — How does a band this goofy compete with U2 on the charts? — shall remain so. The Darkness has nothing up its spandex sleeve but exuberant hard rock and satire. Nevertheless, One Way Ticket to Hell . . . and Back does…

System of a Down

One of the most original bands ever to gain a bankable following is beginning to sound a little too comfortable in its own self-invented genre. Not that any other band has duplicated the formula: metalcore mosh with auctioneer-gone-mad vocals, followed by incantational harmonies and exotic-stringed acoustic breaks. And few other…

The Earlies

While The Earlies’ . . . uh, earliest collaborations (1998) didn’t necessarily constitute a band, their first EP in 2002 did. What began as a file-sharing project between two Texans (JM Lapham and Brandon Carr) and two chaps in northern England (Christian Madden and Giles Hatton) who all loved prog,…