New year, new you — new hobbies. In the 2016 edition of Project PHX, our annual how-to guide, we’re here to help with DIY projects that range from doable to dreamy. Learn how to build a tiny house and make your own chocolate. Become an embroidery artist, publish your first…
New year, new you — new hobbies. In the 2016 edition of Project PHX, our annual how-to guide, we’re here to help with DIY projects that range from doable to dreamy. Learn how to build a tiny house and make your own chocolate. Become an embroidery artist, publish your first…
Any minute now, I just know it, we’ll start hearing about adult hop-scotch competitions. It won’t be long before middle-aged people will begin gathering over Kool-Aid shooters for rousing Chutes and Ladders marathons. And who will be surprised to learn that jacks are making a comeback among 40-somethings? Not I…
New year, new you — new hobbies. In the 2016 edition of Project PHX, our annual how-to guide, we’re here to help with DIY projects that range from doable to dreamy. Learn how to build a tiny house and make your own chocolate. Become an embroidery artist, publish your first…
In an era when our telephones can tell us, in a charming British accent, how to navigate city streets we’ve never driven before, and one can purchase bacon-wrapped Jack Daniel’s and a seat on the next shuttle to the moon, there simply is no reason why we should have our…
Recent lottery winners who can’t live without an architecturally significant desert home are in luck: The very last residence designed by Frank Lloyd Wright has gone on the market. Priced at $3.6 million, the Norman Lykes house is based on sketches by the great architect, who died in April of…
Last month, I met an actress who told me I’d once compared her performance in a play to “a dank flatulence.” I don’t remember this, but it sounds like something I might have written, so I believed her. She may be relieved to know I found her neither humid nor…
Sesame Street has relocated to an alternate universe. Everything there is the same, but also slightly different. Blame gentrification, or the show’s new network, or the hostile scheming of that old meany, Oscar the Grouch. Whatever the reason, every child’s favorite inner city suburb has changed. The venerable kiddie show…
Jack Durant was a small-town gambler with loose ties to Vegas racketeers. He had a big, obstreperous personality; owned our city’s most successful restaurant; and was listed among the FBI’s most dangerous men in Phoenix. Jack liked women, eavesdropping on patrons of his restaurant bar, and golf. He might have seen…
For the first time since late-’60s urban renewal chased Phoenicians from the city’s core and into the suburbs, sales of condominiums are passing those of single-family dwellings here. The Valley is home now to a record number of townhome, condominium, and loft developments. In 1997, Phoenix topped the nation’s list…
The Winnie Ruth Judd “murder house” is safe. Locals assumed the notorious house, where Winnie Ruth Judd murdered her two best friends in October of 1931, was about to be demolished after it was recently surrounded by chain link fencing. Purchased last year by Phoenix attorney Robert Warnicke, the duplex…
As the year winds down, I find myself wanting a lot—especially from the local creatives, and their audiences, in our fair city. A higher level of sophistication about the local arts scene Pretty much everyone who lives in Arizona knows that the Cardinals are not a baseball team, so why…
The week after Christmas offers a welcome respite from Frosty and Rudolph and those other sing-along carols. For a real break from musical tradition, though, locals have the benefit of performer Ian Christiansen’s holiday cabaret. Part holiday jamboree, part post-celebration celebration, Wreck the Halls is the latest in Christiansen’s “Lil…
Sentimentalists and fans of really great ice cream are about to receive an impossibly happy holiday gift: Mary Coyle Ol’ Fashion Ice Cream is almost ready to reopen. The venerable 64-year-old Phoenix favorite shut down last year in October, not long after local businessman Mike Stoffey purchased the ice cream…
I very much wanted to love Heathers: The Musical, which you will find screaming its head off at the Tempe Performing Arts Center for the next couple of weeks. I’ve counted Daniel Waters’ 1988 film about murderous high schoolers among my all-time favorite movies since its release, and was looking…
I am not sleeping with actor/director Ron May. I am a happily married man who’s a sucker for a well-crafted theater performance. I mention these simple facts because, in reviewing the best theatrical events I saw in 2015, I find that I have as usual favored productions in which May…
My friend Leslie is a lousy tipper. In her defense—I guess—she’s from England, where tipping is more of a nod than a commentary on the level of service. In the UK, as in many foreign countries, one leaves a pittance, and not, say, twenty percent of what one has spent…
One day in 1964, while 5-year-old Neil Logan was home alone watching The Wallace and Ladmo Show, Ladmo held up a drawing Logan had done. “They used to ask kids to send in drawings all the time,” recalls the 66-year-old artist, known today for his bronze figurative sculptures. “This time,…
I worry that Jon Talton’s new book will be mistaken for one of those sometimes pleasant Images of America photo books about Arizona, and therefore overlooked. At first glance, A Brief History of Phoenix looks like another installment in the Arcadia Publishing series; its trim size is the same, its…
Last week, the Oxford English Dictionaries announced its annual selection for Word of the Year. It was not “fleek,” or “Brexit” or “lumbersexual,” though all three of these were runners-up. The phrases “sharing economy” and “ad blocker” also made the short list, but didn’t make the Number One spot. No…
Many of the better publishing deals today go to actors, which means a steady stream of ghostwritten books about the lives of newly rich people on a predictable trajectory: poverty, fame, substance abuse and a very public divorce followed by a splashy comeback and, inevitably, a book deal. Actress Mary-Louise…
The horror of Nearly Naked Theatre’s Monster has nothing to do with the macabre action of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the story on which this play is based. It hasn’t anything to do with the inferior production, the sluggish acting, the slow and dull-witted direction. The real nightmare here is how…
