Alas, the G&D doesn’t have black pudding on its menu anymore. Like haggis, this is one ethnic meat dish that nobody in Phoenix seems to serve. So after perusing the “traditional fare” section of George & Dragon’s menu, we went with the Steak & Kidney Pie.
This techno trio will make you want to dance, even when singer Chris Donathen isn’t shouting stuff like “Get down girl, shake it, shake it!” over bumping beats and synthesized programming on songs like “Fscene8,” which sounds like the sonic stepchild of Cher’s “Believe.” The crux of every Medic Droid…
The horde of amateur music critics at Pitchfork Media has just crapped out a tome titled The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present (Fireside). The book purports to present “edifying essays” about the greatest 500 songs of the past thirty years and “all-new reviews” of songs by artists like Nirvana, Sonic Youth, U2, Metallica, Bruce Springsteen, and dozens of other stuff people have already heard and already have their own opinions about.
I just received a book titled Time Flies When You’re In a Coma: The Wisdom of the Metal Gods (A Plume Book), a funny little tome filled with lyrical adages from the world of heavy metal music. Edited by Mike Daly (formerly of alt. country band Whiskeytown), the book is divided into four sections: Meditations, Zen Questions, Daily Affirmations, and Words of Wisdom. The glossy, full-color format of the book is slick, but after reading through it, I was still lacking enlightenment, so I turned to the gurus of another genre: hip-hop.
One-woman show Tania Katan speaks with enthusiasm on her voice mail — she speaks with enthusiasm about most things. The 37 year-old author, playwright, performer, and writing instructor manages to take a creative and humorous approach to real-life tough topics like surviving cancer and gay rights, and she’s become a brand unto herself over the past two years.
The first time I ever made coffee in my life, I almost killed somebody. It was my sophomore year in high school, and I was the “singer” in a punk/metal band called Legion of the Dead. The guitarist asked me to make coffee at practice one day, and, never having made coffee and with no frame of reference, I filled the coffee filter to the hilt with coffee grounds. The guitarist took one sip of the black brew and gasped. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”
Director Darren Bousman described Repo! The Genetic Opera to the sold-out crowd at Chandler Cinemas on Thursday night, with all the passion of a director who’s made an instant cult classic.
When I heard about Schreiner’s Fine Sausage — a family-owned business that’s provided Phoenix with fine meats since 1955 — I was ecstatic. As I approached the unassuming red-and-white building with retro-looking signs on Seventh Street, I felt like I was on a school field trip. Once inside, I gazed with salivating wonder at all the homemade meats in the deli case and fired off questions with carnivorous enthusiasm: “Is the Cajun Boudin sausage beef and pork?”; “Do you make your own veal loaf?”; “How spicy is the Jalapeno cheese sausage?” (The answers: No, yes, and not very).
Glendale resident and American Idol winner Jordin Sparks has received a Grammy nomination for her song “No Air.” The song, nominated for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals, is a duet with R&B singer Chris Brown. It’s also the first of two (thus far) top 10 Billboard hits for Sparks — the other being “Tattoo.” Both songs are from her self-titled debut album, released this year on Jive Records.
Black metal beast Abigail Williams came screeching out of the Arizona desert a few years ago to much acclaim with its 2007 EP, Legend. Metalunderground.com and Hardcoresounds.net gave the band props, and Kerrang! wrote that they “have taken fresh-faced metal down the left hand path” and “the result is obscenely…
Certainly the best-known Van Halen cover band in its home state of California (and possibly the nation), Atomic Punks are the Heidi Fleiss of tribute bands. They’re glam-trash pretty (how could they not be, doing only Roth-era Van Halen?), and they’ve got a list of exclusive “clientele” that includes Roth…
I’ve never been a huge fan of Sobe’s juice drinks, but the Sobe Adrenaline Rush energy drink is by far my favorite of all energy drinks (and I’ve tried tons). It’s delicious and loaded with caffeine, and a 16 oz. can of AR contains less sugar than a 12 oz. can of Mountain Dew.
one can only handle turkey served so many ways, and one can only stay awake for so long after ingesting so much tryptophan (the amino acid in turkey that makes ya sleepy). So I decided to mix up the excess poultry with some tasty pork – namely, the “Pratt’s” Pulled Pork BBQ Sandwich from Alice Cooper’stown, the “rock and jock” restaurant on 1st street and Jackson owned by namesake shock rocker Alice Cooper.
Popular sports Web site Yardbarker.com hosts a slew of superstar bloggers from the world of sports — Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, tennis pro Rafael Nadal, Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, Dallas Mavericks owner Marc Cuban, golf legend Tiger Woods, and NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon are just a handful of the 80 or so notables who’ve signed up to write blogs on the site. Most of the guest bloggers are dedicated to maintaining a presence on Yarbarker, but the three athletes from Phoenix who have blogs there — Phoenix Mercury guard Diana Taurasi, Phoenix Suns shooting guard Leandro Barbosa, and Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald — have been slipping.
Sometimes, we do things we don’t want to do because the people we love want to do them. Such was the case with me attending the Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert last night at Jobing.com Arena in Glendale. I hadn’t planned to attend the show, but I couldn’t refuse in the face of my girlfriend’s unbridled enthusiasm.
My caffeine addiction has lead me to try all manner of caffeinated drinks, and I’ll be reviewing many of them for you here in “Caffiend” every week. And as fate would have it, the first drink I’m reviewing is a real ass-kicker that I’d never tried before: the Starbucks Venti Double Shot on ice (with added energy pack).
Last night’s episode of the popular animated show South Park, titled “The Ungroundable,” riffed on the popularity of local author Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books, while simultaneously taking a jab at Scottsdale.
Yesterday, we reported that Phoenix Suns center Shaquille O’Neal had an account on Twitter, a social networking site where users post updates about their activities. Now Shaq, along with Phoenix Suns Digital Media & Research Director A. Jo. Martin are giving away Suns tickets via Twitter, and Shaq has actually requested to meet certain Twitter users in person.
A benefit show featuring some of the Valley’s brightest music stars is always an event worth attending, but in the case of the “Purpose” benefit show on Sunday, November 23, the cause hits close to home for us at New Times.
“Meaty Girl” is going to be all about meat — some weeks, I’ll be reviewing a particular meat dish from a Valley restaurant or deli. Other weeks, I might be sharing beef jerky recipes or attending barbecue contests. I’m open to any and all suggestions, so if you know of some meaty goodness I might be missing, by all means, hit me up and tell me about it. I’m currently looking for a deli that has haggis, so if you know where to find this Scottish specialty, please drop me a line
Twitter is a social networking site where people send updates from their computers and cell phones about what they’re doing and where they are at any given moment. There have been plenty of faux accounts where people have posed as celebrities (there was a guy pretending to be Stephen Colbert early this year), so when I heard that basketball superstar Shaquille O’Neal had an account as “The Real Shaq,” I was skeptical.
President-Elect Barack Obama is showing his social savvy in the Digital Age. As reported in The Washington Post last week, Obama not only put his weekly Democratic address on YouTube last Saturday, but plans to regularly post online Q&A videos and interviews both at his Web site, change.gov, and on the popular video Web site, YouTube. The next step, say political observers and YouTube head of news and politics, Steve Grove, is an Internet video version of the “fireside chats” first popularized on radio by President Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1944.
