The wave of nostalgia for ’70s culture that’s overtaken us in the last few years has significantly rebuilt disco’s reputation. Those of us who wish that it would do the same for that decade’s slick soul music are the target audience for the ’70s Soul Jam, an extravaganza of a…
Jill Cohn isn’t what I expected, on the basis of several years of listening to her music on CD. Demonstrating the same sort of naiveté that leads housewives to believe that the guy on their soap opera really is a cad, or Charlton Heston to believe that Ice-T really kills…
On the day after Memorial Day, Phoenix Public Library hosts a discussion of a forgotten chapter from the Great War saga. Journalist and filmmaker Frank Abe will be present at a screening of his documentary Conscience and the Constitution on Tuesday, May 29, at Burton Barr Central Library. Abe’s subject…
Among the venerable Valley traditions of the Memorial Day weekend is getting out of town, usually to the cooler climes up north. Phoenix Symphony has contrived to do this — the outfit has a weekendlong stand, playing three concerts at Sedona Cultural Park. This also provides the rest of us…
It takes about an hour to braid most horses, including their tails, Angelica Romero tells me. And that’s if a SWAT team doesn’t barge in looking for escaped convicts, which has happened to her. “Two years in a row at Tucson, early in my career, there was me and maybe…
To say that no actor creates a perfect Hamlet is no more than saying that no person leads a perfect life. It’s the richest part in English-language drama, maybe in Western drama, and every actor lucky enough to get a crack at it can hope only to grab an aspect…
In honor of Mother’s Day, here’s lunch with the ultimate TV Mom. It’s not June Cleaver, not Carol Brady, not the tortured alpha female from Malcolm in the Middle — no, the honor has to go to the hip, bus-driving, back-up-singing, ostensibly keyboard-tickling matriarch of The Partridge Family.Not that this…
She leaves her name on my voice mail, but she doesn’t have to. Even by phone from her home in Florida, you’d never mistake Victoria Jackson’s mischievous-little-girl tones for those of any other human being — not, at least, if you watched Saturday Night Live between the mid-’80s and the…
If you think today’s kids are dumber than yesterday’s, try getting anything past some precocious little dinosaur geek. Try to tell him or her that a Mamenchisaurus is a plain old Brontosaurus, or an Albertosaurus is a good old-fashioned Tyrannosaurus rex, and you’ll see rolled eyes and weary head-shaking.The reason…
So what does Deedee Wood do all day in Cave Creek — when she’s not having lunch, that is? “My friends in L.A. ask me that,” says Wood as we wait for sandwiches. “They say, ‘What do you do out there?'” The answer isn’t complex. “I have a big house…
So which is correct — “more leathery” or “leatherier”? What the heck, let’s try them both: Paul Hogan, who was leathery in “Crocodile” Dundee, and leatherier in “Crocodile” Dundee II, is more leathery still in the dreary Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles.Leathery or not, the Australian, now around 60, looks…
Several people say the same thing when I tell them I’m having lunch with Jim Rose: “I’d be afraid to have lunch with him. I’d be afraid he’d . . . do something.” Something, they mean, like eating one of his drinking glasses, or sticking one of his utensils through…
Did you know that Australia had titled nobility? Neither did I.”Neither did they,” says Dame Edna, by phone from Chicago. “It’s a very egalitarian society. But the ‘Dame’ title is something conferred by the Queen on remarkable women.” Dame Edna notes the company she keeps — the likes of Judith…
At the moment, Gordon Jump really does look like the Maytag Repairman. It isn’t just that he’s wearing the outfit — the blue jacket, the cap, the bow tie. He’s also sitting, all by his lonesome, surrounded by Maytag appliances, with nothing much to do.He’s been embodying this particular icon…
Arizona Opera’s last offering, Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment, was slim and frothy to the point of forgettability. No one is likely to have the same complaints about the season finale, Don Carlo, whatever else may be said about it. This work by Giuseppe Verdi — or, as generations…
“This is Mark Moorhead from New Times, right?” A publicist asked me this a few weeks ago, when I called to inquire about a screening. Sure it is, I told her, puzzled. I had often talked to her; I was pretty sure she knew which publication I wrote for by…
If the feature-length stuff isn’t doing it for you these days — and who could blame you if it wasn’t? — here are three pieces of short-form cinema you can take in easily this week.The short with the major Valley connection is The Steamer Cleaner, a mordant little comedy about…
NBC can take heart. Even as the network gets steamrollered this season by Survivor over on CBS, it’s building up some fine karma for itself after midnight. Having finally put the woeful Later out of its misery, the Peacock has filled its 1 to 1:30 a.m. time slot, Monday through…
Jaime Bergman is telling me her life story. “I’m from Salt Lake City, grew up there,” she says. “Normal kid. Did ballet, did jazz, cheerleading, soccer, baseball. And then I moved to Los Angeles about three years ago.”There’s a small silence, and she smiles at me, as if to indicate…
Emily Dickinson, the great spinster-bard of Amherst, Massachusetts, died young. She was just 56 when Death, in her phrase, “kindly stopped” for her in 1886. Death has been much kinder still to lovers of American acting: Julie Harris has outlived Dickinson’s age by two decades, and is still going strong.Of…
Some reserved, polite reading at Borders or Barnes & Noble or Changing Hands this ain’t. The term “penny dreadful” used to refer to potboiler fictions of earlier centuries which focused on the lurid, the sensational, the violent, the debauched. It’s a badge that the five scribblers featured in “Penny Dreadfuls:…
The current state of American teen romantic comedy can be tough to bring into focus. It may not even really be a genre, but rather one big über-movie, a pulsating — listlessly pulsating — mass of Freddie Prinze Jr. and Julia Stiles and Kirsten Dunst and Jody Lyn O’Keefe and…
