She’s big, she’s scary, and she’s pissed. The mutha of all muthas — Gaia — is a force to be reckoned with, and she’s sending shock waves, floods and monster storms to settle the score. The exhibition “Separation Anxiety” explores the growing tension between Mother Nature and mankind. “We’ve always…
WED 11/16If you’re looking for an alternative to Hollywood’s seasonal onslaught of high-concept blockbusters, you’ll find it at “Video Slam!” — a digital offshoot of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s popular “Slide Slam” series. “Video Slam!” features experimental offerings by Tony Ash and Steve Gompf and a screening of…
SAT 11/5Pound puppies can compete on equal footing with their purebred cousins at the Skyhoundz Hyperflite Canine Disc Championships on Saturday, November 5, at Encanto Park, 15th Avenue and Encanto Boulevard. Though the Phoenix event is a stand-alone meet from which winners don’t advance, “we average around 500 spectators,” says…
MON 11/7If you value your privacy, don’t drop a love letter anywhere near Davy Rothbart. The founder of FOUND magazine has been scooping up people’s discarded letters, journals and postcards for years and publishing them in the magazine or posting them on his Web site, www.foundmagazine.com. And it’s not just…
10/28-11/5Bram Stoker’s famed and fanged beast has sure turned into a sexy sucker within the past 50 years. The vampire has gone from the gaunt and pallid look of Bela Lugosi to the sleek, smooth-skinned suavity of Brad Pitt, and now everybody wants to be a bloodsucker. And why not?…
MON 10/31Tracy + the Plastics is not a real band. Or is it? The beauty is that it’s so hard to tell. The brain child of “lesbian feminist video artist” Wynne Greenwood, Tracy + the Plastics is a three-piece solo act. Yep, you read that right. Here’s the setup: Greenwood…
10/20-11/6Broken pipelines, rolling blackouts and real estate fraud — ah, life in corrupt paradise. GUV TV, the long-awaited sequel to GUV: The Musical, picks up where the original cult classic left off, making light of our most notorious politicos, as well as polygamous cults in Colorado City and the recent…
SAT 10/15There you are, surrounded by models from Maxim, FHM, and Playboy, all wearing butt-floss bikini bottoms. The smell of burning rubber permeates the air and, out of a fog of custom-car exhaust, Maxim “Top 10 Hottie” Martina Andrews materializes. She leans over your table with her firm, perfectly symmetrical…
SUN 10/16″Poetry readings are boring. This is a rock show compared to poetry readings,” says Mary “Bone Mama” McCann, who will perform her high-octane sound poems at the Noisy by Nature book-release party on Sunday, October 16, at Modified Arts, 407 East Roosevelt Street. This definitely ain’t your ordinary “I…
The Arizona State Fair is known for rodeos, midway rides, music, and . . . spreadable art? Yep, you heard it right. This year’s fair features “The Lost Cow” butter sculpture by California artist Sarah Nep. Nep’s specialty is cheese sculpture, and she made her first foray into fromage after…
10/6-10/31The three bone-chilling extraterrestrial attractions at Alien Extreme, 4011 South Power Road in Mesa, are like an episode of The X-Files come to life. Wanna-be Mulders and Scullys can poke around inside a government research outpost, a mysterious UFO, and a crash site, looking for ginormous creatures of extraterrestrial origin…
10/7-10/31Teresa Widmer loves trash. The local mixed-media artist has collected garbage off the streets for the past 12 years, documenting her finds and recycling them into artistic assemblages that comment on America’s disposable culture. Among her finds: the People magazine cover featuring Liz Taylor’s 1989 wedding to “that construction worker,”…
Showcase nudity or violence at an art exhibit and you’ll pack a large gallery, but mention “contemporary art” and you’re relegated to a tiny, one-room studio in the basement. But contemporary art has climbed out of the aesthetic cellar in recent years, thanks in part to the PBS documentary series…
10/1-11/6You’ll have butterflies in your stomach as you stroll amid the myriad monarchs flitting and flapping about in Desert Botanical Garden’s Marshall Butterfly Pavilion — a lush, 2,400-square-foot closed environment built especially to house ‘flies. The interactive display is part of DBG’s second annual “Mariposa Monarca” exhibit, which is designed…
SAT 10/1As kids, we watched hamsters running in their wheels, pedaling their li’l legs for hours, yet going nowhere. As adults, we became human hamsters on StairMaster machines, climbing countless flights of stairs, but never moving off the ground floor. Break away from the “virtual” stair climb on Saturday, October…
FRI 9/23The first person to shout “Play ‘Free Bird'” at the BlackMoods show on Friday, September 23, might get a microphone up the moo-moo. The local rockers built a reputation for cover songs under their previous moniker, Chalmers Green, but for the BlackMoods, it’s more about their own blistering brainchildren…
9/22-9/25There probably isn’t a musician in town who can command the weekly live audience that Bobby Freeman can — during the summer, at least. You’ve heard him yourself if you’ve ever been to an Arizona Diamondbacks home game, pounding out the Mexican Hat Dance, the Hungarian czardas, or the opening…
SAT 9/17In the ’60s, there were love beads and hippies. Today, the “make love, not war” mentality lives on through Kandee Kids — ravers with beaded bracelets and positive vibes. On Saturday, September 17, the Gaia of all raves, Earthdance 2005, heads to a Tucson desert locale so secret you…
What do cockroaches and ’50s kitsch have in common? They just keep coming back. At first glance, Paul Wilson’s hand-cut prints appear to be family photos from the era of Hula-Hoops and sock hops. Doting housewife Dottie Kimble serves a pitcher of fresh lemonade to a gaggle of teenage boys…
MON 9/12When psychobilly-punk band the Tombstones was signed to Relativity Records in the late ’80s, front man Stevie Tombstone bought a headstone for blues legend Robert Johnson and personally delivered the slab to Mississippi. The press labeled his gesture “disrespectful behavior.” Punk was crass and uncool in those days, and…
TUE 9/13DJ Seduce is trying very hard to be humble. When he started the weekly “P.A.I.N.T.: Music* Art* Spoken Expression” nights at the Paper Heart, he was struggling to get a dozen people through the door. Thanks largely to word of mouth, his conglomeration of underground audio mixes, live painting…
SAT 9/3In the ’60s, if you caught people leaving a rock concert and asked how the show was, they might have answered with something like, “Man, that three-hour version of ‘White Rabbit’ was totally groovy!” But in the “here today, gone today” world of modern rock and short attention spans,…
