It’s a warm Tuesday evening in May, and Aaron Rosen is chilling on the outdoor patio at Three Roots Coffee House in Tempe, demonstrating his digital deftness to anyone who’s interested. While the air is clogged with the sound of Mill Avenue traffic zipping by, the lanky 24-year-old uses his…
It’s a dark time for the Phoenix Fan Force. Although the local cadre of sci-fi superfreaks is hyperspaced for the impending release of Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith, the final chapter in George Lucas’ six-part space opera, the PFF geeks are also morose that the über-director…
It’s do-or-die time for Seth Riveras, as the 14-year-old plummets down one of Phoenix Skate Park’s six-foot bankramps on his skateboard, blasting blindly toward a thigh-high obstacle known as a pyramid. Seconds before colliding with the trapezoid, Riveras pops his ride skyward, flying over any danger while the board spins…
Dear Chad Gilbert, It’s with a heavy heart that we request you cease all involvement with your side project, Hazen Street, because of contractual obligations to your main gravy train, the popular outfit New Found Glory. We know you were juiced to play guitar with such hardcore rockers as Toby…
It’s a good thing Aaron Coleman is thick-skinned. After all, the 32-year-old tattoo artist’s pugnacious pelt has not only been punished by plenty of pigment, covering his arms, legs and back. But his durable dermis has even withstood all the disdainful dissing both the general public and the art world…
4/22-4/23 Some things are worth the wait — like, for instance, the Mesa Arts Center. After nearly five decades of false starts, failed bond elections, tax hikes and tumult, the suburb’s sleepy downtown finally gets a one-megaton wake-up call as Arizona’s largest cultural complex, located at 1 East Main Street,…
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…
4/8-4/29 It’s not easy being a queen; just ask Doug Loynd. “There’s pain involved in being in drag,” says the 41-year-old actor. “Makeup takes two hours, breasts are heavy, earrings pinch, and heels hurt.” The transvestite toil is worth it, however, as Loynd has a shot at fame as one…
4/9-5/11 When 17-year-old Mountain Pointe High School student Erika Vogt-Nilsen entered a graphically designed image of an evil-looking puppeteer dangling a crucified Christ in her school’s winter art show in January, she learned an important lesson on the provocative nature of art. A small group of viewers, including a particular…
If you find the haughty high jinks of British pop bands — Pulp, Oasis, Blur, et al. — overly bothersome, it stands to reason you’d be annoyed by the pomposity of Brandon Flowers, front man for the Las Vegas-based indie outfit The Killers. But somehow, it’s possible to look past…
FRI 4/1 Get your ears spanked when the thick whip of verbal science comes crashing down Friday, April 1, at the PHiX gallery, 1113 Grand Avenue. A group of 15 Valley poets congregate to stir your minds and souls while laying down their collective abilities of articulation for the first…
Backstage at some nameless arena, the freakishly masked thrash-metal terrorists of Slipknot conduct their traditional pre-concert confab: “We really rocked the hizzle last night,” says frontman Corey Taylor (a.k.a. No. 8). “Although y’all are bummed that the crowds aren’t what they used to be, the single Duality from our newest…
SAT 3/26 How do you make a guy think about horses while watching nude cabaret? “Well, that’s not really the point,” says Janie Wiseman, a manager at Christie’s Cabaret, 44 North 32nd Street, which is hosting “Girls! Girls! Girls!”, a benefit for Wildhorse Ranch Rescue, on Saturday, March 26, starting…
Call it the naked truth. Although depictions of the bare-assed male form throughout history have always had more than a hint of homosexuality — from Grecian urns to the works of Michelangelo and Raphael — Wim Griffith rebukes the stigma that only the swishy set is interested in peeping paintings…
SAT 3/19 Grandpa’s been acting kookier than normal lately, whistling “Pennsylvania 6-5000” to himself, and doing a solo Charleston in the mirror. But don’t up his dosage of Xanax just yet, as the old coot’s probably just aching to skedaddle to “A Night in the 40’s” Big Band Dance and…
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…
SUN 3/6 The revolution will be televised — if, that is, you happen to be at Thought Crime, 1019 North Central, on Sunday, March 6, for the Anarchist Library’s screening of the documentary The Fourth World War. Organizer Phil Freedom describes the 78-minute video as “riot porn,” since it features…
Long before they entrenched themselves in a spat rivaling the East Coast/West Coast rivalry of Biggie and Tupac, former Smiths front man Morrissey and fellow sad sot Robert Smith of The Cure somehow produced an offspring, a sullen young’un named Jamie Stewart. Details are sketchy as to how said progeny…
The rumors about ska’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Rude Boys have kept reinventing it again and again, and ska’s last incarnation, “the third wave,” saw its horns and tempo mixed with punk’s sound and drive, as exemplified by bands like the Voodoo Glow Skulls and MU330. Purists often deride…
It’s probably been terribly tough getting ahold of your artist friends lately. Don’t worry, that monolithic mixed-media piece of theirs hasn’t toppled over and pinned them helplessly. Chances are, your pals’ve been furiously focused with putting final flourishes on their contributions to this year’s Art Detour. After all, they’ve gotta…
SAT 2/26 It seems that KTAR personality Gayle Bass really knows how to shake it. And by “it,” we mean a martini — which also, it just so happens, serves as her moneymaker, when Bass and more than a dozen other local luminaries serve as wanna-be mixologists during the Celebrity…
FRI 2/25 So many people still shudder at the “F” word: Feminism, that is. The Guerrilla Girls don’t understand that — after all, they’ve been trying to reinvent the word since 1985, adopting the names of dead women artists as pseudonyms, donning gorilla masks, and using “facts, humor and fake…
