Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner, four of 12 children of a Polish-Jewish cobbler who immigrated to Baltimore with his wife in the 1880s, grew up poor and tough in Youngstown, Ohio. Around the turn of the century, after failing bitterly at a variety of family businesses, they scraped together…
thursday may 7 One of the state’s largest amateur sporting events, the 1998 Arizona Special Olympics Summer Games showcases the athletic prowess of some 2,000 developmentally disabled adults and children in a variety of Olympic-style competitions, held on Arizona State University campus in Tempe, mostly in and around Sun Angel…
Wanna see something really scary? You’re sure to find creep-outs aplenty at the 1998 World Horror Convention. It may be a toss-up, however, whether they’re among the panel discussions, celebrity appearances, and artwork, jewelry, books and videos for sale, or among the drooly grue-fans who turn out for the festivities…
. . . but when worlds collide, said George Pal to his bride, I’m gonna give you some terrible thrills . . . –The Rocky Horror Picture Show Nowhere in the press materials for Deep Impact can I find any reference to Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer’s novel When Worlds…
Fugazi End Hits (Dischord Records) Being punk rock’s king of rhetoric and idealism, it’s often forgotten that Fugazi is also an incredibly talented band. Not many people notice anymore. The band’s name either conjures memories of shows stopped so that front man Ian MacKaye could bitch out overzealous moshers or…
It’s film-festival season in the Valley. Last week was the outdoor short-film blowout at Arizona State University, and coming up mid-May, the awe-inspiring 75th-anniversary celebration tour of Warner Bros. classics comes to town. This week, it’s Arizona Film Society’s shoestring Saguaro Film Festival. Now celebrating its fifth year, the plucky…
Many bibliophiles regard chains like Bookstar, Borders and Barnes & Noble as the Great Satan. They are put off by the supermarketlike layout, the uninspired service and the rows and rows given over to romance and self-help dreck–and even more, one suspects, to the lack of quaint atmosphere. If you…
thursday april 30 The title character of The Tale of Teeka is a goose–Maurice, the narrator of Michel Marc Bouchard’s children’s play, presented by the French-Canadian troupe Les Deux Mondes, tells the tragic story of his relationship with the bird. The play, presented in association with the Governor’s Call to…
The drive-in may have become as rare a bird as the whooping crane in our home-entertainment era, but, provided your tastes run to the artsy or academic, it’s still possible to enjoy movies outside, at least for one night. Arizona State University’s second annual Short Film and Video Festival–which kicks…
Look up the term “orphan train” in five encyclopedias, and you can draw five blanks. It’s one of the great, little-told stories of American history: the vast westward diaspora, from 1854 to 1929, of homeless children from the big cities of the Northeast, most of them the offspring of poor…
thursday april 23 Food and music–Ida Guillory has mastered both, which means she’s mastered at least two of the best things in this life. Better known as Queen Ida of Queen Ida and the Zydeco Band, the Grammy Award-winning accordionist holds a Creole cooking demonstration and buffet dinner at 6…
“I’m a true dirtball,” says David Spade, and visiting his home state of Arizona allows him “to get back to my dirtball roots.” As if to prove his assertion, he does “an impression of me on a date: ‘Come on, chug it!'” That was Spade in high school; he’s only…
We wrote the book to be almost like a tuneup on your car–you’d do it, and a year later, it’d be like, that was great, let’s do it again. The “we” is Janet Lever, a.k.a. “Dr. J,” who’s speaking, and her partner Pepper Schwartz, both Ph.D.’s, and the sex and…
thursday april 16 “You guys got baseball now!” says Tom Paxton, by phone, of the Valley. “I’ll have to remember to do some baseball songs. I’ve got one called ‘My Favorite Spring’ that I’ll have to do.” Paxton, the legendary Pete Seeger protege best known, perhaps, for “Goin’ to the…
Getting it on with a heavenly being must be just about the ultimate New Age sexual fantasy–so City of Angels is like soft-core for New Agers. That, and the current taste for schmaltz in the Titanic vein, could make City of Angels a hit, just as the sentimentality of modern-day…
You’re not likely to come out of the bone-chilling documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement with the belief that David Koresh was angelic, or that he had no hand in the deaths of his Branch Davidian followers in Waco, Texas, in April of 1993. But, if you assumed that the…
There can be remarkably few Americans born between 1960 and 1980 for whom phrases like “Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, get your adverbs here” or “Conjunction Junction, what’s your function?” won’t evoke instant sense-memories of Saturday-morning cold cereal. Ask a kid from the same demographic to recite the Preamble to the Constitution,…
Thursday April 9 Cross-dressing, gender ambiguity, unrequited sexual longings–in case anyone supposed that these were new concerns of the theater, proof to the contrary is offered by Twelfth Night; or What You Will (the only subtitle Shakespeare ever provided for one of his plays). Southwest Shakespeare Company concludes its season…
Two chocolate croissants and a mixed bowl of Raisin Bran and Frosted Flakes–with skim milk. The first thing anyone wants to know when he hears you had breakfast with Michael Moore, director of Roger & Me and now The Big One, is what the Falstaffian filmmaker put away. To be…
Danger, Will Robinson! Sensors detect boomer-TV redux once again. This time the victim is Lost in Space, Irwin Allen’s enjoyably absurd sci-fi TV fantasy which ran from 1965 to 1968 on CBS, before ABC’s Batman trounced it in the ratings. Grown-ups are likely to cringe at the prospect of sitting…
Thursday April 2 If, for you, the phrase “Ukrainian music” conjures up endless refrains of “Ring Christmas bells/Ring Christmas bells/Ring Christmas bells . . . ,” you can get your horizons broadened when the 39-member Ukrainian Boys Choir of Kiev comes to the Valley for a show at 7:30 p.m…
“A very interesting person!” observes the title character of the film Orlando, speaking of Queen Elizabeth. But the exclamation would fit just as well for the man who was playing her: Quentin Crisp. Crisp, who visits the Valley this weekend, was born Denis Pratt–“My name before I dyed it”–into middle-class…
