Slav Affair

Slobodan Milosevic was a really bad dude, but don’t let that stop you from checking out the Serbfest Food and Cultural Festival. No mortar fire — promise. Rather, there’ll be authenic Slavic music and cuisine, a bazaar, and tours of the Byzantine-style church. Sat., Nov. 3, 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Sun.,…

Non-Native Son

Mark Grey, a sound sculptor and award-winning composer originally from San Francisco, is living for and in his art. Literally. The Phoenix Symphony composer-in-residence for the 2007-’08 season — who has presented works in big-time venues like Carnegie Hall, the Sydney Opera House in Australia, and London’s Barbican Centre –…

East Village People

Want to become part of the highest echelon of hipster culture? Then you’ve got to take something considered “uncool” and make it trendy. Just look at recent successes such as the mullet and the fanny pack, which have helped pave the way for various new “so lame it’s cool” trends…

Restless Spirits

There’s definitely a double-edged sword component to First Friday. Walk into one gallery and you’re struck by work that’s more powerful than the Holy Trinity. (Well, only if you’re into that Jesus stuff.) Stroll into another space and the art may suck so hard that you’ll wanna kick it with…

Dusk of the Dead

So you weren’t down for celebrating the poor man’s Dia de los Muertos known as Halloween and you’re wanting to give it up to the deceased the authentic way, yes? Then hit up The Spanish Place for the Day of the Dead Celebration, part of the space’s First Friday Fiesta…

The Boys of Fall

The Diamondbacks got smoked in Denver, and who gave a hang about a World Series featuring the Colorado Rockies? Blaaaah. Long story short, Major League Baseball’s over. But is it? Not with Arizona Fall League Baseball kicking up dust at five stadiums around the Valley. The six-team AFL features promising…

Freaking Portland

The hipster center of the universe in Oregon loves stealing some of our favorite creative peeps. Justin Cory from the brutal musical duo Bodhisattva. Marla Thayer, bowl percussionist in Tent/City. The latest defector, as of December, will be supercool artist Lisa Albinger, who creates fantastical works on canvas by painting…

Stew or False?

Any transplanted Louisianan will tell you that authentic jambalaya and gumbo are hard to come by here in the land of arroz con frijoles negros. But 20-odd amateur chefs will give it their best shots at the Great Cajun Cook-Off. Proceeds go to the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity…

Counter Couture

If Shakespeare had had a fashionable gay brother, gay Will might have reworked the soliloquy from As You Like It to read, “All the world’s a runway.” At least this week, all of Scottsdale will be one during the second annual Scottsdale Fashion Week, a less-ostentatious-by-design take on the Big…

Sun Angels

The game pitting the Arizona State Sun Devil b-ballers against the (Christian) Grand Canyon University Antelopes might be an exhibition match, but if you think of it as Satan versus God, you’ve got yourself a real ballgame. While the ´lopes continue their rise to respectability under offensive-minded third-year coach Scott…

Turnin’ Tricks

When Dr. Dre proclaimed, “Bitches ain’t shit,” he probably wasn’t talking about all of those darling pooches that will leap and bound to our heart’s delight during the U.S. Dog Agility Cynosport Games. Because, let’s face it, we’d rather hang with Fido and Phoebe than some slobbering hounds at the…

Raggedy Annie

During a 1975 interview with Annie Mae Pictou Aquash, a prime mover and shaker in the American Indian Movement (AIM), the outspoken activist said, “The whole country changed with only a handful of raggedy-ass Pilgrims that came over here in the 1500s. And it can take a handful of raggedy-ass…

From Rag to Riches

Bad news first. Ingrid Michaelson’s indie-pop songs have been featured in an Old Navy sweater commercial and on the soundtracks to Grey’s Anatomy and One Tree Hill. This is a slippery slope for any musician with a desire to be taken seriously. Now the good. The Staten Island native’s got…

Oedipus Wrecks

Ever dreamed of running an offending ass off the road? It’s street legal at the Arizona State Fair Demolition Derby — a red-state birthright that’s been handed down from yahoo father to yahoo son since the invention of the auto graveyard. The slam-bang spectacle’s kinda like a car wreck. You…

Theater Scene

Dracula: The Musical?: The question mark in this Scottsdale Desert Stages productions title screams Careful! Hyper-clever campiness awaits you! But who can resist any show that includes a song called The Tippy, Tippy Tap of Love? Playwright Rick Abbot is taking pokes at Bram Stokers classic monster story in this…

Mike Traylor

He loves his baby sister and the Marx Brothers, but actor-director Mike Traylor — who’s appearing this week in iTheatre Collaborative’s Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad — isn’t above admitting when he’s blown an audition or copping to his similarities…

Fear and Fun in Phoenix

With Halloween just around the corner, time is running out for urbanites of the PHX to conjure up a killer costume for the annual celebration of everything thrilling and chilling. So whatcha gonna be? Better come up with something good, ace, and not just because you’re running out of bedsheets…

Dan in Reel Life

Dan in Real Life has this much going for it: It is not the worst Steve Carell film of 2007. That honor, of course, goes to Evan Almighty, which even the Lord walked out of during the second reel. Fact is, Dan in Real Life isn’t really much of a…

Better Home and Garden

Before he snagged the lead in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1972 screen version of Anthony Shaffer’s 1970 stage play Sleuth, Laurence Olivier had, with his customary diplomatic finesse, dismissed the source material as “a piece of piss.” Two movie adaptations later, I’m inclined to agree with that assessment. Still, it’s not…

Emotional Wreck

I gave up after about 100 pages of John Burnham Schwartz’s 1998 novel Reservation Road, a typically overwritten and contrived slice of mass-market literary pabulum that hopscotches between the points-of-view of three people — the grieving mom, the grieving dad, and the perpetrator — involved in the hit-and-run death of…

Well Hung

One takes a mighty risk when one attempts Arthur Kopit’s Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, a frantic farce that mocks the Theater of the Absurd even as it honors that form’s peculiar rhythms and deeply weird possibilities. Fortunately for local…

Bang Bang for Your Buck

Whether it’s $600 PlayStation 3s, $50 a year for the option to play your Xbox 360 online, or the five bucks Nintendo shamelessly charges for 20-year-old NES games on the Wii’s Virtual Console, devoted gamers have gotten used to assuming the position when it comes to the costs attached to…