El Marques. El Chucky. Hijo de Hurracan Ramirez. Aquaman. Fishman. All ages. Children welcome. Ooooo-kaaaay. It’s safe to say that the abyssal fiends who’ll be grappling at the Superstars of Lucha Libre of Mexico bash won’t be staging a south-of-the-border High School Musical. Rather, they’ll be trying to rip off…
Getting home some nights can be challenging. Waking from an amnesiac stupor in an alleyway, you stumble forth like an inebriated puppet. You search desperately for clues of your cardinal bearings in the constellations, but your vision fails you. Finally, you track down your very own Mother Teresa, who kindly…
It’s fair to say that last year’s inaugural Phoenix Idiotarod was a success. No bodies were impaled or skulls busted open during the human-powered, urban shopping-cart race. But who knows what’ll happen when the dumb-a-thon returns to the pothole-heavy downtown streets? Is this a measure of success? Well, that’s up…
New Year’s didn’t work out like you’d hoped? Get jack-stomped in the parking lot? Breathalyzed and tossed in the stir? Well, Buddha bless the Chinese, who offer us losers a second shot at the thing with their New Year celebration. Thank the Rotund One personally while you’re pounding trail at…
Signs, signs, everywhere signs. Unfortunately, most are advertisements, shrill carnival barkers that are constantly forced upon us. Ron English doesn’t take this sitting down. The film POPaganda: The Art and Crimes of Ron English follows the contemporary pop artist as he liberates billboards from their fate as the tentacles of…
A while back, we were chatting up Robert Earl Keen — the best songwriter no one outside of Texas has heard of — and we dropped the “country” bomb. Now, Keen’s a pretty mellow dude, but he got all worked up, saying, “I’ve never written a country song in my…
You don’t know bass improv until you’ve heard the sweet stylings of David Friesen. In the past two years, he’s been named one of the top 20 most influential jazz bass players of all time and inducted into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame. Friesen performs a duo concert with…
You don’t know bass improv until you’ve heard the sweet stylings of David Friesen. In the past two years, he’s been named one of the top 20 most influential jazz bass players of all time and inducted into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame. Friesen performs a duo concert with…
You’d think that since we plow through novels and nonfiction reads like nobody’s business, we would be wise to the best strategy for scoring big at the VNSA Book Sale. But no, even we can learn something at the annual festival for superduper literature nerds. For years, we’ve heard that…
Come check out the hottest water accessories — from fishing boats to scuba gear — at the 37th Arizona National Boat and Watersports Expo. Wed., Feb. 6, 3-9 p.m.; Thu., Feb. 7, 12-9 p.m.; Fri., Feb. 8, 12-9 p.m.; Sat., Feb. 9, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sun., Feb. 10, 10 a.m.-6…
The Chinese culture is a lot older than ours, so they must know what they’re doing when they salute the beastly Rattus rattus during the Chinese New Year Cultural and Cuisine Festival. The event, scheduled features ethnic cuisine, live entertainment, and a Year of the Rat ceremony at noon Friday…
More than a billion people watched world-class guitarist Tommy Emmanuel perform at the closing ceremony of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. One of the finest finger-picking guitarists alive, the 52-year-old Emmanuel was selected to represent his native Australia, where he’s pretty much a national hero. But here, he enjoys…
The Phoenix Suns seem to roll over whenever they take on the cupcakes of the NBA. The Atlanta Hawks on the road. The Miami Heat at freaking home. Two losses in Minneapolis to the bloody Timberwolves. All we can say is we hope the Suns don’t play possum when the…
David Wilson’s curmudgeonly showcase for the freakishly brilliant in Culver City, CA, is about as far as you can get get from, say, MoMA on this plane of existence. This is a good thing. Past exhibitions have included dogs of the Soviet space program, flowers created from the scales of…
I used to know a crazy lady who looked exactly like Cloris Leachman. Ella was the kind of crazy that can never be cured; the kind of crazy that struck fear in the hearts of her friends and family, that caused former employees to change their telephone numbers after she…
I hate it when people fly into Phoenix Sky Harbor for the first time. They always emerge from the plane to say, “Wow, the city is not exactly what I imagined, it’s just so . . . just so . . . (And I think: Come on, bitch, spit it…
Fiddler on the Roof: It is, of course, too much to ask that we should make it through a single theater season without this kosher chestnut getting dusted off for our perusal. God forbid we should have to not hear “If I Were a Rich Man” or “Sunrise, Sunset” for…
Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Sugar, which premièred in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival (and was inexplicably shut out at the awards right about baseball as any movie I’ve ever seen. It gets the hum of the lights in the ozone-heavy summer air and the…
Perhaps the most oft-quoted line from Zack Snyder’s cinematic adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novel 300 is, “Tonight we dine in hell!” Chowing down on a box of Butterfinger Minis during a screening of Meet the Spartans, you will truly understand what that means. You remember 300, right? A…
A fourth Rambo? The question isn’t why; it’s what took him so long. Was America’s avenging angel of meat just planning to sit out Fallujah and what we’re cooking up for Iran and Syria? (Oops. Pretend that last part was redacted.) Okay, sure, last time we saw John Rambo, 20…
Here’s a one-word review of Nearly Naked Theatre’s production of As Bees in Honey Drown: Phew! And here’s a 601-word one: What a relief it was to attend a show at Nearly Naked, one of my favorite theater companies, that I enjoyed nearly as much as I’ve enjoyed so many…
Aqua Teen Hunger Force: 5 (Warner Bros.) Barn of the Naked Dead (Legend House) Bordertown (THINKFilm) Canvas (Universal) Chancer: Series 2 (Acorn Media) The Comebacks (Fox) Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete Sixth Season (HBO) Daddy Day Camp (Sony) Damages: The Complete First Season (Sony) Drumline: Special Edition (Fox) El Cid:…
