SAT 8/6If cheering on 60 bowling teams raising money for animal welfare charities sounds like a tame way to spend a day, you haven’t been to the Pets911 Bowl-A-Rama, staging its third annual event Saturday, August 6, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the AMF Shea Village Lanes, 10870…
WED 8/10As an artist who’s been kicking around the Phoenix art scene for more than 20 years, Stephen Michael Barnes has had his fill of noisy Art Detours. “I’ve been to art exhibitions where there’s a lot of wine and cheese and crowds, but you really can’t see the art,”…
Even if all you know about lowrider culture is limited to that Burger King drive-through commercial featuring a pair of young white employees pogo-ing to pass off a bag of burgers to a hydraulics-pumping Chevy, and that song by War from 1975, Johnny Lozoya wants you. “A lot of Anglos…
“I was Batman for a week!” says Roland Sarria, barreling down Broadway Road in his two-tone black and gray Honda Element, covered with bright red and black decals advertising the sporting event he’s been promoting for the past seven and a half years: “Rage in the Cage: Extreme Fighting Championship.”…
Sure, Starbucks’ in-store music — which has begat its own record label, Hear Music, and, since last August, “Media Bars” listening stations in selected coffee houses — gets all the buzz. But what about all the other “third places” we go to between home and work, where we’re treated to…
At their CD release party scheduled for the Old Brickhouse Grill this Friday night, The Society of Invisibles plan to perform a song so across-the-board offensive, even their staunchest fans have been advising the crew against it. “We’re gonna be doing a song we’ve never performed before, called ‘Down,’ that’s…
“You want road stories?” says Alfie Lucero, lead singer and bass player in the six-year-old Phoenix rock band Redfield, sharing some after-work drinks with the rest of the quartet at the George & Dragon pub on South 48th Street. “Oh, man! Where do we begin?” Mike Sandoval, the big, hulking…
Somehow, the night just doesnt feel complete until the hot blonde in the “I ♥ Dick” tee shirt bends over, peels down the back of her jeans and asks the tuxedoed Richard Cheese, “Sign my ass?” It’s 10 o’clock on a Friday night in Las Vegas — actually, in nearby…
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has made a practice of doling out awards like Sting has sex: a little at a time, prolonging the act of honoring rock ‘n’ roll’s legacy artists for (as of last March) an amazing 20 years — and counting. The Arizona Music &…
Most of the songs The Reflection plays end in the same raucous fashion: with the howl of two overamped guitars, loudly reverberating on the same chord, holding the tone like a musical staring contest between the players until one of them blinks and the pitch veers off in unpredictable and…
To get up and running with what the best vloggers and podcasters are putting out — without putting yourself out — it’s best to start by installing a pair of free programs that do all the work of searching and downloading for you. Start with a “podcatching” client, like iPodder…
It’s 11 a.m. on a Wednesday, and Christian Brower steps over the doggy gate into his office, adjusts the shutters on the window facing the front yard of his home on a quiet residential street in Gilbert, and gets to work. Sitting down in front of his computer, Brower pulls…
For Cheryl Olson, a registered nurse who also chairs meetings for Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, the only thing worse than having her chatterbox, musical know-it-all husband hanging around the house all day, running his quirky little Internet radio station from the den, is having to listen to all the…
“No foolin’, he got Jay-Z?” Jarrett Maupin II is hollering into his cell phone, pacing the hallway of the downtown office suite where the St. Mary’s senior spends most of his time after school. “Lord have mercy! That Rev is something else!” It’s the day before Maupin’s big trip to…
There’s light pop music piped in through the ceiling speakers at Paradise Valley Mall, but Donny Lang never really hears it. “This particular mall has no music — or it’s so quiet and the ceiling’s so high that I can never hear it,” says Lang, 25, a part-time musician and…
On the eve of his album’s release — 10 hours, 45 minutes and counting until the unveiling of SMiLE, the fabled lost Beach Boys album a worldwide cult of fans has been waiting some 37 years to hear completed — Brian Wilson is on the phone, calling up journalists to…
The two hottest job perks that come along with being a member of the Minibosses can be summed up by a pair of photos posted on a friend’s Web site. In the first shot, taken on the occasion of the Tempe band’s performance at the Atomix Gamers’ Choice Awards in…
“JSB is here! Jason just saw him in the parking lot!” In the toy-castle-styled arcade building just east of the water park at Mesa’s sprawling Golfland-Sunsplash amusement center, the news is passed above the din of blaring video games and hollering teens as if the words themselves were a stage-diving…
Last fall, at a banquet held at a private country club in north Scottsdale, Arizona State University President Michael Crow stood before a gathering of A-plus middle school students enrolled in the prestigious Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth and did his darnedest to convince the gifted kids and their…
Blair Sato edges his white ’95 Nissan 240SX up to the front of the line, out in front of about a dozen other cars waiting their turn to race around the wide oval of a racetrack, and grins. “We’re next,” he says, tightening his grip around the steering wheel and…
The Metrocenter security guard slows down his white Honda CRV to eye what looks like an episode of MTV’s twisted stunt show Viva La Bam going on in the mall’s east parking lot. One after another, along a ramped walkway, 19-year-old Matt Stewart and his three new friends grab a…
D.R. Wilke, with gray hair, wire-rimmed glasses and an ASU alumni tee shirt, and Paul Taylor, with short curly locks and a white Izod polo, grab a balcony table at the Gordon Biersch brewery nestled atop the Mill Avenue Starbucks and are quickly greeted by a young waiter clutching four…
