Scott Tompkins isn’t the pretentious and flamboyant chef one might expect to find at a culinary festival filled with wine tastings, cooking demonstrations and black-tie galas. But that’s what’s so appealing about the Scottsdale Culinary Festival, Tompkins says. The six-day event gets cooking — and celebrates its 26th anniversary –…
Ben Funke’s the overachieving, gifted kid you’ve always hated and wished you were. At 18, he’s the driving force behind the electro synth-pop trio XOXOXO, touring the West Coast in style, and getting paid to play gigs he’s booking himself. His band tours in a shiny new 2004 Honda Element,…
Phil Root is sitting among the peanut shells and hot dog wrappers strewn across the aisle at Arizona State University’s Packard Stadium in Tempe on a recent Sunday. He has his “Bible” at his side — a black, three-ring binder full of opposing player biographies and some of the more…
4/8-4/11 “When you watch anything in performing arts,” explains Ballet Arizona’s artistic director Ib Andersen, “or you go and see a painting, it’s all about you as an individual.” His baritone voice reaches an even lower pitch as he lingers on the last “you.” Andersen can describe the abstract sets…
Oubai Shahbandar loves America. The only thing he loves more than his adopted homeland, people often say, is the sound of his own voice. On a winter day, Shahbandar sits at a blinding, metallic table outside the Memorial Union at Arizona State University in Tempe, reminiscing over his college career…
Fri 4/2 First Friday visitors will schlep about longer than usual this week, thanks to the debut of the Gold Spot Transitional Bar & Gallery, where the spirit of “carpe diem” holds court. Fancy an oil-on-canvas by one of the seven or eight featured artists? Buy it while you’re there…
4/3-4/4 The Valley’s first public skatepark needs some love — and not from the loyal skateboarders who’ve grinded the edges off the steel coping for seven years. Desert West Skateboard Plaza needs some TLC from the City of Phoenix, says one of the park’s founders, Laura Martin, who — through…
When Chris Normandin steps in the ring Saturday night at Dodge Theatre, the gloves are coming off — figuratively, of course. The SuperCop Boxing Exhibition might be a charity event, but once the bell sounds the first bout, Normandin, a 28-year-old Phoenix police officer who works out of the Squaw…
4/1-4/2 East and West, past and future . . . Desert Dance Theatre and New York’s H.T. Chen & Dancers prance across cultural and spatial divides in Looking Back, Dancing Forward. The bridge has largely been one of incorporation. Think modern dance peppered with hints of classical Chinese dance and…
3/26–4/11 There’s nothing a contemptuous incumbent politician fears more than a huddled mass eager to learn from Brutus’ mistakes after seeing a modern interpretation of Julius Caesar. Whether it’s timely election-year fodder, or merely a lesson in how not to execute a coup d’état, the Shakespeare Theatre’s production of Julius…
3/26-3/28 One night of agave-fueled tequila or two days of refreshing suds? Hell, why choose just one when you can satisfy your thirsty liver with both? A true champion of the people would head to the Desert Botanical Garden, 1201 North Galvin Parkway, on Friday, March 26, for the second…
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3/26-3/28 The Fifth Dimension said it best in its 1967 hit “Up, Up and Away”: “The world is a better place” . . . from a beautiful hot air balloon. Nearly 40 years later, that magnificently cheesy tune (resist humming the melody within striking distance of anyone with a bat)…
3/12-3/13 It took Joye Sass four months to write her play. But she’s spent half her life coping with the rape that inspired Demons, written and directed by Sass, which opens at the Paper Heart Gallery on Friday, March 12. Sass, 37, wrote Demons four years ago. “But I wasn’t…
Ongoing Those seeking Sanctuary in Scottsdale’s nightlife are most certainly a saddened bunch these days, now that the 3-year-old nightclub is no more. But Diane Corieri, co-owner of the former glitter hot spot, promises that its reincarnation, Myst — which recently staged its grand opening — will dry those crocodile…
Loyal conceptual artist that he is, former Valley resident Casey McKee refuses to hog-tie his latest work with his own interpretations of it, instead leaving the art itself open for consumption. But whether or not he admits it (or simply doesn’t realize it), McKee’s “Berlin Series” — a body of…
1/30-2/1 Drop into the weekend’s wildest wing ding: the Arizona Powered Paraglider National Fly-In, starting Friday, January 30, at Maricopa’s Phoenix Regional Airport. Hosted by Arizona Powered Paragliding — a “cactus-roots” group of PPG flying enthusiasts — the three-day event provides an action-packed introduction to the high life, with performance…
For Wen Chyi Chiu and the nearly 100,000 Chinese immigrants spread out across the Valley, Phoenix’s annual celebration of the Chinese New Year brings a small taste of the party halfway around the world. And if it weren’t for the efforts of Chiu, a 28-year-old native of Taiwan who has…
1/24-2/15 Normally, kids need words strung together to make sense of a story. But if you throw a mad scientist on a giant video screen, with an onstage trio of clowns hoping to save the world, the kids might just sing its praises as “an achievement in theatrical concept, Mommy.”…
1/26-2/1 Sell out? It’s impossible at the Phoenix — ahem — FBR Open golf tournament at the Tournament Players Club of Scottsdale, where, every Super Bowl weekend, massive hordes of golf junkies crowd the galleries and booze it up for seven days straight. But when FBR — a Washington, D.C.,…
For every industry, there is a pace setter — the event that sets the bar for the year ahead. Consider the Valley the pace car of the collector car market, as this week’s barrage of shows and auctions stretching out from Phoenix International Raceway to the Biltmore will dictate just…
Increasingly these days, you’ll find that first-time visitors to New York feel compelled to prove they were actually on the island of Manhattan — you know, where that terrorist attack happened and all those people were, like, heroes. Yeah, she was so there! Your well-traveled friend will spout off the…
