By Clay McNear I (gulp!) teeter on the brink of being a High School Musical fan. After enduring marathons of dreck like The Wiggles and the creepy Booba as the operating cost of being a dad, HSM seems like West Side Story, only, you know, not as good. The flick…
My friend Michelle and I were the only white people in the audience at last week’s performance of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, which made me all the more aware that I was a white man who doesn’t like poetry who’d come to watch…
Wendy Weston is one fierce chick. She’s loud, proud, and puro Native-American badass. I want to be her. More to the point, I want a space like hers. She’s the director of Indian American relations at the Heard Museum, and I’ve been hanging with Wendy a lot lately while we’ve…
As old Broadway shows are revived, new Broadway shows are spun from old movies so that new movies may be fashioned from ancient TV series. It’s an iron law of the culture industry that turns out to be a pleasant surprise in the case of Get Smart, the late-’60s sitcom…
You want a history lesson? Take a class. You want clanging swords, sneering villains, storybook romance, and bloody vengeance? Here’s a brawny old-school epic to make the CGI tumult of 300, Alexander, and Troy look like sissy-boy slap parties. Mongol, alias Genghis Khan: The Early Years, may compress, elide, and…
Just over a decade ago, Russian director Sergei Bodrov made his mark on the West with his Academy Award-nominated movie Prisoner of the Mountains, which transplanted a Tolstoy novella for children to Russia’s war with Chechnya. Though Prisoner seemed an unlikely calling card for Hollywood, its blend of commercial technique…
It’s probably a good thing Game On wasn’t around to review Ninja Gaiden when it hit Xbox in 2004 — we probably would’ve written An awesome, brutal, majestic action masterpiece, then filled the rest of the space with crude crayon drawings of ninjas. Because really, there’d be nothing else to…
He was a defining figure in American public life, and that rarest of people: a local politician of whom we could be proud rather than ashamed. Senator Barry Goldwater’s impressive legacy is particularly resonant in an era in which American conservatism has rather a bad name, and his story, as…
Why is it that no one dances to rock anymore? Today, most nightlife enthusiasts bump and grind to Top 40, hip-hop, and house, but in the swingin’ ’60s, there was enough rock ’n’ roll hip-shakin’ goin’ on to jolt the Richter scale. Though we can’t recapture that magic without a…
Beer o’clock at 2 a.m. At first, everyone went ape shit about that glorious extra hour to get hammered, but all that really happened was a collective reset of our partying clocks. Instead of showing up at 10 p.m., you now cruise in at 11. The next day, your lousy…
Last year, we cared a bunch when we heard that one of Van Buren’s last remaining vestiges of a nearly forgotten Phoenix, the circa-1939 Log Cabin Motel, had changed ownership and was in serious danger of being torn down. Then we read an impassioned four-page essay and photo/memorabilia piece in…
We’ll name three items and you say the first thing that comes to mind. Cowboy hat, the smell of manure, a clown. First traumatic birthday party? Uh, we were thinking “rodeo,” but we’ll accept it. How about fairy wings, body glitter, and ring pops? Successful educated guessers should check out…
Deviant sex just doesn’t shock like it used to. Madonna made the lesbian kiss passé, CSI episodes about necrophilia and “furry sex” raised the perversion bar — and who could forget Phoenix’s infamous Baby Man? Leave it to the Japanese to come up with something new. Yaoi (yah-oy), also called…
Rednecks like things that go pop! Just-opened beer cans. Guns. Fireworks. Funny cars jolting off the starter’s line with concussive force. Firebird International Raceway will transform such ’neck-friendly ear and eye candy, sans the guns, into one huge blowout during the Coors Light Summer Spectacular. Funny cars and jet cars…
Thanks to countless bumper stickers (and common sense), we know that skateboarding is not a crime. Between Tony Hawk video games and rappers Lupe Fiasco and Pharrell (a.k.a. Skateboard P), we dream of kick-pushing our days away. The national Go Skateboarding Day encourages just that, as the ’boarding industry hopes…
Live video shorts with no script, no real actors, and no plot. Sounds as palatable as Mike Myers in a thong, but according to Phoenix Neutrino Project director Mark Jordan, it’s pretty funny stuff. “The audience plays a role in the filming, like a home video where [they] live vicariously…
We try to throw good parties, but it’s always a last-minute dogshit-pickup and toilet-scrub thing, and the pizza rolls aren’t even thawed out. So don’t come to our parties. They bite. Somebody whose parties don’t suck is Raven Valdes, “the Valley’s leading social butterfly.” The professional party girl strikes again…
He was a defining figure in American public life, and that rarest of people: a local politician of whom we could be proud rather than ashamed. Senator Barry Goldwater’s impressive legacy is particularly resonant in an era in which American conservatism has rather a bad name, and his story, as…
Famed Valley architect Will Bruder — who designed the downtown library — will lecture about the building. There will also be music. Sat., June 21, 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m., 2008…
Did you know that Ansel Adams ruined landscape photography? What say you? That’s right. Because the legendary shutterbug was so freaking good at what he did, our top three associations with contemporary landscape imagery are “yawn,” “ugh,” and “bo-ring.” However, there are diamonds in the rough like Barbara Bosworth, whose…
The ignominious tenure of the Bush Administration is limping toward its finale. That means it’s tell-all time. Already this spring, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan has controversially dished in What Happened, and now former U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias gives us In Justice: Inside the Scandal…
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s SMoCA Night affairs are hot when it’s cool and cool when it’s hot. This torrid-season entry’s ches tre, featuring live music by Peachcake, spins by DJ d’strick, a fire performance by Mali, wearable art by Castaneda, and fashions by Devani Weaver and Jes Switaj (pictured)…
