Would it trouble you terribly if I told you that I’m guilty of murder? The murder of a strapping, dark-haired chap, whom I’d only just met in Chandler? The homicide would cause me more grief had it not been so much bloody fun. Oh, I know I’ll suffer in the…
“Damn, Kreme, peep all the chicas calientes and fly papis in line to get into Coach & Willie’s,” spits the still-switch-hittin’ Shakira of the PHX, a.k.a. the Jettster. “I’m goin’ home with something fine tonight, for real.” “Yeah, Pan Dulce pulls in more brown-skinned eye candy than a Daddy Yankee…
By the Great Seal of Solomon, they were the most treacherous 18 holes I’ve ever encountered in all my years as a golf enthusiast. I don’t know what made me want to hit the links in Mesa recently. Perhaps it was seeing Bill Murray at the FBR Open. Or catching…
Last call at Jonny Noir’s Filthy/Gorgeous Friday at The Biz: The Chloë Sevigny of P-town is off in a grimy nook with her tongue buried deep betwixt the lips of some effed-up same-sex siren, and I’m trying to score one last vodka-Red Bull for the road. I know, I know…
How’s this for synchronicity, Carl Jung fans: I’m driving down Broadway in SoPo (a.k.a. South Phoenix), my windows open and my system blasting the title song of Damian Marley’s brilliant CD Welcome to Jamrock. My head’s in the clouds, and I’m lost. Lost in some daydream based on the end…
So I’m kickin’ it like a 300-pound Charles Bukowski in the butt-end of the gloriously sleazy Ky’s Place, situated in a shabby strip mall on the northwest corner of 32nd Street and Indian School Road, when One-Eyed Josh decides to pull a Sammy Davis Jr. and show me how he…
Did you know that the German fashion house Hugo Boss outfitted the Nazi SS during WWII? That many of the clocks in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction are set to 4:20, a.k.a. international tokers’ time? Or that actor Kevin Spacey’s dad was supposedly such an impassioned admirer of Adolf Hitler that…
“Too bad you’ve switched sides yet again, Jett,” I needle the PHX’s now stud-muffin-exclusive Vanessa Minnillo as we watch a fine, female-filled pair of Apple Bottom jeans sashay past us. “Your home team has the advantage here tonight.” Jett eyeballs the hiney like an alkie at a bottle of Johnny…
The classic rock jams filtering through the stereo system at the Yard House in Desert Ridge are hand-picked at the corp’s Irvine HQ by none other than The Founder himself, Steele Platt, whom I imagine as a dead ringer for The Architect in The Matrix Reloaded. Dressed in white, with…
I was home alone, meditating in the buff after a particularly sweaty yoga workout, when he appeared to me in a blaze of glory: the four-armed, elephant-headed Hindu deity Lord Ganesha, that potbellied avatar of wisdom, success and prosperity, revered on the Subcontinent and elsewhere as “the remover of obstacles.”…
To celebrate the B-day of Albert Hofmann, the Swiss cat who discovered LSD back in the day and who hit the century mark last Wednesday, your humble Crunkalicious King of Kreme was planning to kick it at home, drop the latest disc from MF Doom, and get trippy off lickin’…
Like Scottsdale really needs another Ho, one more glamour gal about town who lives to slink sexily through Valley nightlife, turning heads, breakin’ hearts and bleeding wallets dry. And yet, the newly revamped Hotel Valley Ho, with its recently completed $80 million face-lift and its George Jetson-Googie-Mid-Century swankiness, is really…
Selective amnesia and creative revisionism run rampant this time of year, like social diseases in a pre-penicillin bordello. I can’t frown too much upon my comrades in criticism for wanting to repress the negatives and stack up the positives in their year-end catchalls like a pack of lily-livered Panglosses. I’ve…
Anyone remember Uptown 713, that ghastly excuse for a grub-ateria that once occupied a little shoebox-size space behind Apollo’s Lounge, near Seventh Street and Bethany Home Road? Believe me, it’s not worth remembering. The only reason I haven’t completely erased it from the memory banks is that after I wrote…
It’s as if jolly ol’ Saint Nick himself laid a massive Yule log right in front of my Xmas fir with a missive ordering me to burn, baby, burn. Sure, this time of year, most good little boys and girls are having sugarplum dreams of iPods and Xboxes, but I’d…
There’s an open bottle of Veuve Clicquot next to us as we sip champs to the tune of the Shakira and Alejandro Sanz duet “La Tortura,” deep in the bowels of Phase 54 (www.phase54.com), this dope spot out near I-10 and Elliot Road that’s blowin’ up like George Clooney’s waistline…
George Miller keeps the good stuff in a jug behind the counter of his small, nine-month-old Carolina-style ‘cue joint, Restaurant 28, in a Glendale strip mall on the southeast corner of 51st Avenue and Olive. If you tell him you hail from the Old North State, he’ll let you sniff…
The Thandie Newton of P-town and I plan to stay fly ’til we die just like the Dirty South’s Three 6 Mafia, but we also wanna keep it trill, y’all. That’s the combo of “true” and “real.” And I can’t think of a spot truer or realer at the moment…
When it comes to dining, or any other aspect of existence worth writing about, I consider myself simpatico with Ray Milland’s quip in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, where he riffs off a line from Thoreau, stating, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation: I can’t take quiet desperation!” Transcendence…
What am I to do with a restaurant so studiously unambitious as the still-neonatal Fenix Eatery and Bar, ensconced in the small, dowdy “Arcadia Village” shopping center at 40th Street and Camelback Road? I hear the rabble crying to me like they did to Pontius Pilate millennia ago, urging that…
“Ready to wrap your lips around a hookah, Kreme?” asks the J-Unit as we worm our way through the party people toward the bar at Mythos, this fly Mediterranean joint in Scottsdale that looks like it’s right out of Jabba the Hutt’s throne room in Return of the Jedi, with…
The ghost of Bob Crane led me to Bobby-Q, though the star of the ’60s sitcom Hogan’s Heroes didn’t stick around to help me eat my ribs. I should explain that Crane’s brutal, 1978 homicide in a Scottsdale apartment complex has always been a subject of fascination for me, long…
