Sooner or later, with all of technology’s leaps and bounds, we’re bound to stare a dinosaur straight in the reptilian eye. Not in the Jurassic Park way, but in the sense that somebody, someday, will create a dino that seems so real it might as well be. The folks behind…

Many equate the ancient-Indian mandala with life itself, so it’s an interesting analogy that artist Jason Ripper’s working in his new “Mandala” exhibit at Step Gallery. Ripper’s metaphorical floor construct is crafted out of colored duct and gaffing tapes, and life held together by industrial adhesives is a pretty good…

Masked Mexican wrestling. Children welcome. Ooooo-kaaaay. It’s safe to say that the fiends who’ll be grappling at the Lucha Libre Mexicana bash won’t be staging a south-of-the-border High School Musical. Rather, they’ll be trying to rip off each other’s máscaras (masks), which is a pretty emasculating thing to a luchador…

If you’re a golfer, summer’s either the greatest thing since sliced bread or an involuntary exile from the links. If you’re poor, it’s probably the bread, ’cause you don’t have to spend as much of the doughy stuff to get in your 18. Many of the power resorts significantly lower…

But for being born white, San Francisco chanteuse Lavay Smith might be the latter-day Billie Holiday. Smith has Lady Day’s throaty purr, though it might be more appropriate to say that Smith has Holiday’s purr down. Smith, see, is a natural-born self-promoter whose business is channeling swing/bebop legends such as…

Every year, like clockwork, New Times bestows our Best of Phoenix Bookstore award on Tempe’s Changing Hands. There’s no collusion or favoritism; the long-lived indie’s indisputably the best. While the new Dog-Eared Pages Used Books is unlikely to dethrone Changing Hands, any biz that’s both indie and literate is a…

Brandon Wronski, frontman for the band Eye Alaska, characterizes his group’s sound as “genre-less.” It’s an appropriate description given that the foursome sounds very little like its stable-mates on Fearless Records or the majority of its peers from Orange County, California. However, nature and alt music abhor a vacuum, and…

The charming, anti-cynical storyline of Julie Taymor’s odd 2007 love story gets lost behind the film’s “device”: its characters move the story along, Moulin Rouge-style, by singing plot-appropriate Beatles songs, including “Girl,” “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?”, “Helter Skelter,” “If I Fell,” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Jim…

May 20 was a red-letter day for this year’s Arizona Diamondbacks team – red meaning scarlet. Up to that point, the young D-Backs were 27-16, the toast of the baseball world, and poised to lock up the National League West crown. In May. Then came 5/20, Miami, and that friggin’…

What if Lennon and McCartney had parted ways before Revolver? Smith and Wesson before the .357 Magnum? Gilbert and Sullivan before The Mikado? Wait. Gilbert and who? Before the what? So it goes for the great British comic-operatic team of W.S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan, who were once bigger…

Photojournalist Alison Wright nearly died in a grisly 2000 bus accident in Laos, but what didn’t kill her apparently made her stronger. Wright spent the next seven years exploring Asia and the tenets of Buddhism, performing feats of personal courage, and “learning to breathe,” a term that inspired the title…

Once upon a time, rock ’n’ roll was about bad dudes singing about bad shit, and it was very, very bad for you. One of my formative images was punk progenitor Iggy Pop stage-diving onto a field of shattered glass. The dude rose slowly, like a demon out of ooze,…

Somewhere between Middle Ages Germany and now, we managed to transform a simple word for flying through the air on a rope (swanken) into a bebop-and-scat subculture whose adherents strut around mouthing hepcat jive and snapping their fingers a lot. But hey, it’s cool. It’s swank, baby – especially on…

Excepting the Rocky series – blah! – we think underdog movies rule. Seabiscuit, Hoop Dreams, The Karate Kid, The Breakfast Club, The Bad News Bears, Dodgeball, The Shawshank Redemption . . . Obviously, then, our palates are primed for Bottle Shock, a fresh indie that sounds like a cross between…

There are thousands of idiotic ways to die, but drowning in the desert? Pretty dumb. As a corollary, there must be a million better names for a body of water situated in a sub-basement of hell than Lake Pleasant. But the nomenclature’s not as wacked as it seems, ’cause our…

It’s been one freaky-ass year in Major League Baseball’s Deep South. At press time, the Tampa Bay Rays were leading the Red Sox and Yankees in the AL East, and the Florida Marlins were shadowing the front-running Phillies in the NL East. Meanwhile, the Land of Cotton’s perennial 800-pound gorilla,…

Jesus Christ, what year is this? What dimension is it? Valient Thorr begs such questions. The band is a pleasing pastiche of Molly Hatchet and Iron Maiden from Venus by way of Valhalla. It harks back to the 1970s glory days of thundering conceptual rock, when music was stupid and…

If our local sports-media cadre was an athletic squad, it’d be toddler-league wiffle ball. What a bunch of cowering prisses! Read the Republic, listen to KTAR, it’s all one big Chamber of Commerce love-in between the “journalists” and the teams. This is especially true of the Arizona Cardinals, an organization…