You don’t need a thermometer to tell it’s summertime. Just look at the kids. They’ve got dry, crackling skin dusted with funky chlorine residue, green hair, bloodshot eyes, and hooves for feet from walking barefoot. This can only mean one thing: It’s time for another season of wet fun in…
You don’t need a thermometer to tell it’s summertime. Just look at the kids. They’ve got dry, crackling skin dusted with funky chlorine residue, green hair, bloodshot eyes, and hooves for feet from walking barefoot. This can only mean one thing: It’s time for another season of wet fun in…
To quote James D. Rolfe, a.k.a. the Angry Video Game Nerd, “You know what’s bullshit?” Here’s what: registering for the Pokémon Video Game Regional Championships and not being one of the 128 randomly chosen gamers. Or spending long hours training your Flareon, but losing in the first round to your…
The adjective in the title Bad Bugs Bunny, a program of golden-age Warner Bros. cartoons playing at Chandler Cinemas, bears clarification. Purely on the level of cinematic craft, these shorts aren’t remotely bad. They display the same brilliant wit, peerless comic timing, visual imagination, graphic ingenuity, and musical accomplishment as…
Let’s say you’re a gay teenager, and you’re growing up in the barrio in Hollywood. You can count on being picked on for being queer, and maybe you’ll develop a fondness for original cast recordings and reruns of Bewitched. Chances are, you’ll have a small-minded, ethnocentric uncle who wants to…
Arizona State University professor and intermedia star Muriel Magenta has drawn on a career’s worth of creativity to develop CLUB M, an immersive “video environment” that’s likely to rule festivals, galleries, and the Internet with its fusion of dance, music, and tech, including footage of human dancers from ASU and…
Though the claim is tongue-in-cheek, P. Diddy’s album title We Invented the Remix still smells of methane. The barest notion of the remix, the manipulation of source material to create a significantly altered or wholly different work, goes way back — even the Bible didn’t drop from the heavens in…
We know. We know. We’re only a quarter of the way through this seemingly interminable season, and there seems to be precious little reason to keep watching. Here’s one: the Diamondbacks Live Postgame Show, a newish misery-loves-company experience centered on the District Stage at Tempe Marketplace. The fan-friendly affair features…
We know. We know. We’re only a quarter of the way through this seemingly interminable season, and there seems to be precious little reason to keep watching. Here’s one: the Diamondbacks Live Postgame Show, a newish misery-loves-company experience centered on the District Stage at Tempe Marketplace. The fan-friendly affair features…
The fan-friendly affair features a televised breakdown of the night’s Diamondbacks road game against the Florida Marlins, along with giveaways, drink specials at nearby bars like Cadillac Ranch and Dave & Buster’s, and more. Thu., May 21, 7 p.m., 2009…
Joel Hodgson is a geek god. As the creator and original host of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, the one-time stand-up spent a half-decade giving nerds and couch potatoes fits of laughter by making fun of bad movies. For those unfamiliar with MST3K, the bygone Comedy Central show involved Hodgson and…
Singer-songwriter Shelley Short comes on like a lo-fi Neko Case – perhaps more intimate and delicate than her fellow Pacific Northwesterner – but with no less pathos in her pretty voice. When she sings, “By the time I go to pieces/You’ll be gone,” in the song “Like Anything, It’s Small,”…
This furious five-piece came kicking out of Denton, Texas, eight years ago as a rock-’em-sock-’em reaction to their burg’s then-burgeoning prog-emo scene (see At the Drive-In). Despite some Fugazi guitar chops similar to their Denton peers, the Gamblers’ preference was to rock out like the MC5. Endless touring and label-hopping…
Are you “down with the clown?” Which is to say, are you the slightest bit interested in watching five sugar-crazed Midwesterners don face-paint and rap about axe murder? If so, there’s a really strong chance that this Insane Clown Posse-fronted horrorcore supergroup is already figuring prominently in your busy weekend…
Modern dance? Many would rather submit to a combo IRS audit/alien rectal probe. Combine that aesthetic ambivalence with the body blows the economy’s been raining down on the arts, and it’s kinda surprising the form’s still breathing. For Lisa Starry and Scorpius Dance Theatre, life is good. Why? Because Starry…
New paintings and drawings by the fab Phoenician. Thursdays-Sundays. Starts: May 2. Continues through May 31, 2009…
It’s easy to find a “sausage fest” in America — just head to a cheesy nightclub, gun show, or the state of Alaska. But what if a small town lost all of its men? That’s the premise of American Book Award winner Luis Alberto Urrea’s new novel, Into the Beautiful…
It’s rare that we get the chance to watch an artist craft a masterpiece. Especially when the finished work is rejected by the company that funded it and is subsequently leaked onto the Internet, then is purchased by a subsidiary of the company that originally lost interest in the project…
The Adam Sandler flick transcends its summer-movie construct and high-concept setup (cute chick — played by Drew Barrymore — has a disease that makes her keep forgetting she’s in love with Sandler) to become one of those rare high-concept summer movies that actually works. Perfect for a warm summer night…
Rachel Nagy is a strong, sexy frontwoman. Her vocals canter, strut, and shimmy with the knowing look of the much-adored — half coquettish tease, half jaded indifference. She coos to the rocked-up Latin swing of “My Delight,” swings her hips with rockabilly swagger on “If You Don’t Think,” and dives…
Ho-hum. Another week, another militant vegan band comes to town. If you didn’t get your fill (pun absolutely intended) at last week’s Earth Crisis show, the lovable “veganarchists” in Propagandhi are stopping in Tempe this weekend to spread the gospel of iodine deficiency to the masses. For a band that…
So lovely. So talented. So appallingly young. Can there be any doubt that Taylor Swift was sent to Earth to make the planet’s collective over-20 population feel like a bunch of aging fuck-ups? Though more than a year shy of her first legal white-wine spritzer, the ethereal pop goddess has…
