THU 8Imagine your bath mat on acid — or you on your bath mat on acid. No, you’re not all wet; you’ve stepped into the Alice in Wonderland world of Brian Knep. The multimedia artist’s “Brian Knep: Healing Series” is a totally groovy collection of interactive floor pieces reminiscent of…
SAT 12/10If you want to act a fool this holiday season after consuming one too many eggnogs, feel free. Just don’t expect to rock the boat and poop on somebody’s parade during the APS Fantasy of Lights Holiday Boat Parade on Saturday, December 10. A fleet of more than 40…
12/11-3/12If the photographers whose work will be displayed at Phoenix Art Museum’s new exhibition “Keeping Shadows” were a baseball team, they’d be the 1927 Yankees. The all-star lineup includes Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, Imogen Cunningham, Man Ray, Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Timothy O’Sullivan, Lewis Carroll, Henri Le Secq, Julia Margaret…
THU 1It’s high time the Hooters girls did a little ogling of their own, and they’ll get an eyeful of topless man meat at the Arizona Bad Boys Single Elimination Boxing Tournament, which crowns Arizona’s toughest lightweight, middleweight and heavyweight hunks. The tourney features amateurs with no previous pro boxing…
12/2-12/3Filmmaker Warren Miller is to skiing what Bruce Brown is to surfing. Brown’s instant-classic flicks The Endless Summer (1966) and Endless Summer II: The Journey Continues (1994) follow two generations of surfers seeking the perfect wave. The prolific Miller averages a film a year, and all deal with winter-sports fanatics…
FRI 12/2The giant squid may have eluded scientists for decades, but Phoenix artist Pete Deise has been capturing them for years — in metal, that is. Deise creates steel sculptures (including one at the airport and another in front of My Florist Cafe) with characteristic tentacles. His latest exhibition, “Ascension,”…
12/2-12/16Jason Hill’s retro-futurism is so bright, he’s gotta wear shades. You will, too, when you view his blindingly vivid works, which seem to leap out of their frames and smack you right between the eyes. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to liken Hill to Ed Mell, another…
11/25-1/22When a woman calls her guy a “minute man,” it usually spells doom for the relationship — and his ego. But for artist George Palovich, it’s a sizable compliment. Palovich practices gesture drawing, a process in which an artist produces a sketch in 30 to 60 seconds. This method was…
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…
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…
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…
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?…
THU 17The iPod Nation has a seemingly insatiable craving for larger-than-life gaming. What’s The Amazing Race but a high-stakes Easter-egg hunt? What’s Fear Factor but an over-the-top game of chicken? The latest overgrown-kid craze is RoShamBo/Rock-Paper-Scissors, an extreme makeover of the kiddy contest that’s morphed into a fiercely competitive “sport.”…
11/17-12/4Bad dates blow chunks. Whether it’s the icky chick who talked about her colonoscopy over dinner or the gross guy who said he wanted to “feel your belly button from the inside out,” there’s always one meet-up that makes you want to throw up. In the comedy Bad Dates, opening…
SAT 11/19With an abundance of screenwriting requests, a plethora of awards, and multitudes of speaking engagements, it seems that everyone wants a piece of Suzan-Lori Parks. She was the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama with her dark comedy Topdog/Underdog, which is about two brothers, Lincoln…
11/19-4/9Last summer, public displays of lingerie were as plentiful as feral kittens and bad movies. Luckily, as temperatures plummet and sweaters appear, the Phoenix Art Museum is unveiling “Lingerie: Secrets of Elegance” — a sociohistorical perspective on frilly things from the 18th century onward. So what is it about the…
THU 10If spoken-wordsmith Adam Gnade was a gunfighter, you wouldn’t want to engage him in a stare-down at high noon. Though the slim wordslinger looks like he’d blow away in a gentle breeze, he’s made of pretty stern stuff. Gnade (pronounced “Gaw-na-dee”) speaks softly but packs a literary wallop with…
THU 11/10To hell with Niagara Falls, we’ve got an even better location lined up for our impending nuptials: Hades. Sure, the guests might have a devil of a time trying to find transportation, but think about all the gory details: Instead of champagne, we’ll sip blood from bone goblets and…
11/10-11/13Conventional wisdom holds that in sports, the four “majors” consist of football, baseball, basketball, and hockey, though hockey now toils on the Outdoor Life Network while NASCAR runs laps around the competition both on television and at the turnstiles. This weekend, more than 200,000 of the faithful, or roughly the…
WED 11/16If you’re looking for an alternative to Hollywood’s seasonal onslaught of high-concept blockbusters, you’ll find it at “Video Slam!” — a digital offshoot of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s popular “Slide Slam” series. “Video Slam!” features experimental offerings by Tony Ash and Steve Gompf and a screening of…
MON 11/14When Jethro Tull won the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance in 1989, beating out contenders like AC/DC and Metallica, a lot of people raised their eyebrows. But nobody was surprised by the controversy; Jethro Tull has been making people scratch their heads for years. Here’s a classic…
11/4-11/6Savion Glover has the world at his feet, literally. The 32-year-old tap-dance king is like a shoehorn in a shoehorn factory — hard to miss. He’s left his artistic footprints everywhere from Broadway (Bring In Da Noise, Bring In Da Funk) to the silver screen (Spike Lee’s Bamboozled) to TV…
