Remember back in high school when you saved your tips from waiting tables to buy your mom some lousy refrigerated bouquet thinking, “This is way classier than a macaroni necklace?” You’re a big kid now, so make those pitiful childhood gifts up to her by splurging $75-$80 on a classy…
The late Elizabeth Taylor once said of Tennessee Williams’ heroines, “They’re all on the brink of disaster.” Taylor earned an Oscar nod for her turn as Maggie in the film version of Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The timing of the famed actress’ recent passing is not lost…
Life really is a cabaret, old chum – at least, according to Scottsdale Community College adjunct faculty members Polly Chapman and Beth Livingston-Hakes. Four years ago, they brought musical theater to the campus via a cabaret show that’s now a yearly tradition. This spring’s performance, For Better or For Worse:…
This time of year, Phoenicians are all about orange blossoms and junior proms. It’s the season when puppy love is in the air and overdressed teens grind on the dance floor of some cheesy hotel ballroom. The over-21 crowd, thankfully, has other options — for example, the monthly independent arts…
The official web site of the Lenin Mausoleum is pretty trippy. “The spruces have grown up. There is no red banner under the Kremlin. But the Mausoleum still exists,” it proclaims. If you hurry, you can vote online to ensure the tomb’s continued existence. Or, you can do your part…
Remember a couple of years ago when the Obamas took heat for their diplomatic gift-giving? A box set of classic American films presented to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his wife, discs that wouldn’t even work in across-the-pond DVD players? The Browns’ gift to the Obamas, an ornamental pen…
You’ll probably like Utah painter Brian Kershisnik’s work. His paintings, many of them mattress-size, aren’t the kind that provoke controversy. There is no dark torture coming through in this work. If anything, there are peace and conviction here. And if you don’t like his work, exactly, you probably won’t dislike…
When author Sherman Alexie read from his latest novel, War Dances, to a sold-out crowd at the Heard Museum last fall, he ranted about technology, specifically Amazon’s Kindle and some trouble his outspokenness about the gadget had caused him recently. Alexie, who presents more as a stand-up comic than as…
Here’s a cool challenge: When the Poisoned Pen presents its 2010 literary conference “I Came Late To … _____, ” the mystery and sci-fi bookstore is offering a $75 gift certificate to anyone that can fill in that blank with a clever idea. Got anything? If not, no worries, because…
Here’s a cool challenge: When the Poisoned Pen presents its 2010 literary conference “I Came Late To … _____, ” the mystery and sci-fi bookstore is offering a $75 gift certificate to anyone that can fill in that blank with a clever idea. The talent on Friday, June 25, features…
Here’s a cool challenge: When the Poisoned Pen presents its 2010 literary conference “I Came Late To … _____, ” the mystery and sci-fi bookstore is offering a $75 gift certificate to anyone that can fill in that blank with a clever idea. On Saturday, June 26, the good times…
Beautiful bodies fueled by Wild Cherry Pepsi and tall cans of Arizona Iced Tea crowd into a tiny North Central studio on a hot Sunday afternoon. The myth that dancers are celery-nibbling ethereal beings is just that. Adrian Mendle, sporting bright orange high-tops, cargo pants, and a stocking cap, leads…
Anyone who’s ever wriggled into or out of pink tights and a black leotard while somebody’s mother draped a beach towel as an imaginary changing room knows there’s something magical about a dance recital. Two hundred Ballet Centre dancers take the stage at Chandler Center for the Arts for Be…
Although George Balanchine was accepted into the ballet program at the St. Petersburg Imperial Theater School at age nine, he began playing piano even earlier (at the ripe age of five). As a teen, he was dancing, studying piano, and learning music theory at the Petrograd Conservatory of Music. To…
In his epic “The People, Yes,” American workingman’s poet Carl Sandburg wrote, “The fireborn are at home in fire.” Sandburg was probably not talking about astrology, in which fire signs — Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius — are said to be the action-oriented among us. Zonies, whatever your sign, we are…
Angela Cazel-Jahn’s work is diverse. She creates installations, sculptures, murals, and mixes media like nobody’s business. It’s really no wonder she’s consumed with visual representations of idea-generating processes. Throw in ideas about her own artistic processes and you’ve got real data-driven meta-art. Recently, Cazel-Jahn wondered how she might sidestep a…
You see a minimalist painting that is 5 feet by 4 feet of blank, white canvas and you decide to blow bank on it. Yeah, your friends are gonna have an opinion. Such is the case in ART, a play about three good pals who engage in heated debates about…
Painter Carol Francine Swagel used to spend a lot of time at Lake Pleasant water-skiing with her family. She’s not sure what the lake looks like now, but nature, loss, and memory have propelled her to create the works in “Metamorphosis: New Paintings by Carol Francine Swagel” at Vault Gallery…
Popular images like Uncle Sam (with his bushy eyebrows and emphatic index finger) or the desperate cockroach screaming “Raid?!” have been burned into our collective American psyche. It’s funny to think that these images as well as album and book covers, comics, postage stamps, and billboards were once drawn or…
A picture is now worth 500 words. At least, that’s the going rate in the heart of downtown Phoenix, a heart represented by ghostwriter Joey Robert Parks’ brainchild, “26 Blocks.” The show, which opens Friday, May 7, pairs photographers and writers, assigns the pairs a specific city block, then sets…
Popular images like Uncle Sam (with his bushy eyebrows and emphatic index finger) or the desperate cockroach screaming “Raid?!” have been burned into our collective American psyche. It’s funny to think that these images as well as album and book covers, comics, postage stamps, and billboards were once drawn or…
In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck wrote, “Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.” In that chapter Steinbeck pits the technology that has driven farmers from their land against…
