Hillary Rodham Clinton is pilloried regularly by dittoheads and the endlessly fulminating drones on Fox News, but the vast left-wing conspiracy has pretty much represented her with hand jobs and puff pieces. Until now. Carl Bernstein, the Pulitzer Prize winner and former Washington Post reporter who worked with Bob Woodward…

During a 1975 interview with Annie Mae Pictou Aquash, a prime mover and shaker in the American Indian Movement (AIM), the outspoken activist said, “The whole country changed with only a handful of raggedy-ass Pilgrims that came over here in the 1500s. And it can take a handful of raggedy-ass…

War isn’t only hell, it’s also layered with ironies. Take the tiny hunk of Japanese rock invaded by the U.S. during the 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima, where an iconic image of WWII in the Pacific emerged: Joe Rosenthal’s photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima. One of the clinchers…

The downside of being Vietnam, Southeast Asia’s Grand Central Station: centuries of Chinese, Portuguese, French, and American boot prints (and land mines) in your flowerbed. The upside: cultural and artistic variety and cross-fertilization out the yin yang, as displayed in the “Contemporary Vietnamese Paintings” exhibit. The show, featuring works running…

Light-rail construction, deteriorating inflatable rubber dams, and a vice mayor named Hut. Tempe can sometimes lean to the frightening side. Now Mill Avenue ratchets up the scare factor even more with the third annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival. This year’s bill of fare includes retro classics such as…

On the surface, printmaking is one of the less glamorous stepchildren of the visual arts. Sure, it’s a discipline combining technical craft and detailed vision, but the finer elements of the process are little known to the general public. A real artist struggles alone with intractable materials and personal demons,…

Think suburban high school cheerleaders and what comes to mind? Girls Gone Wild contestants. Competitive, Nancy Kerrigan-esque freaks in Bring It On. That bodacious blonde cheerleader playing hanky-panky with James Van Der Beek in Varsity Blues. Anything but a Jack Kerouac-type Dharma Bum searching for enlightenment. Annie Weisman’s new play,…

A friend calls the stereotypical Native American art peddled in the Southwest and around the world — normally a large canvas with pastels, a noble Indian on horseback, vast mesas and sands colored by the sun — “blowing hair and feathers.” This played-out label leads to two questions. First, “Why…

Free marathon training. A 3.5-mile run/walk. Olympic gold medalist Frank Shorter on hand (foot?) modeling peak-performance strategies. It ain’t nothin’ but a pavement-pounding party, y’all, during the SRP/P.F. Chang’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Arizona Marathon Training Kick-Off for January’s blowout run. Seasoned experts such as Shorter — winner of the 1972…

Boom! Madden NFL rules! Need proof? Follow the EA Sports Madden online forums — 563 pages and hundreds of thousands of posts strong. The hot topic? The EA Sports Madden NFL Challenge 2007, a 17-city game fest for PS2 and Xbox 360 players who kick ass on the startlingly realistic…

Young American Comedy Tour. Dull name, granted, but the sextet of comics tore up the Improv when they pulled a one-night stand there last April, and they’re back for another go. Host Mike Young (who has a sitcom in the works with ABC titled Forever Young) and his boy-wonder yukmeisters…

French novelist Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) was so overwhelmed by Florence, Italy, that he reported: “I felt a pulsating in my heart. Life was draining out of me, while I walked, fearing a fall.” A reaction to a tainted spinach-and-egg dish? Mais non! Stendhal’s near-swoon had to do with Florentine art…

Think Winnie-the-Pooh, The Velveteen Rabbit, and Alice Through the Looking Glass. What leaps into your warm-and-fuzzy memory instantly? The trippy art emblazoned on the mind’s eye of your inner child, of course. Yet wordsmiths A.A. Milne, Margery Williams, and Lewis Carroll are household names. Distant second in the legend department?…

Certain cities conjure thoughts of death, but at least, according to Ray Nagin, the big-mouth Big Easy mayor, “it keeps the brand out there.” Take the mysterious case of Ciudad Juárez, where more than 300 young females have been brutally murdered since 1993. Referred to as las muertas de Juárez…