Damn

This one had the look of a mini-classic. The Arizona State Sun Devils at 7-0. The Cal Golden Bears potentially ranked No. 1. Not to be, as Cal’s golden aura turned to pyrite with back-to-back losses. These are going to be some vewwy, vewwy gwumpy Bears, so hang on, Team…

Cel Yourself

Every once in a while, no matter how good life is, you just want to get the hell out. Sadly, many of us resort to booze and drugs for our mental vacations. But if you’re wanting to put the bottle on the shelf, good art can provide an excellent means…

Reviews of current exhibits, shows and installations

Paintings by Xiao Shunzhi at Calvin Charles Gallery: After a few hours of viewing art, I sometimes feel as if I’ve rubbed my eyeballs with sandpaper. The visual wear makes everything blurry, and the only thing that brings focus back is seeing something truly excellent. Such was the case when…

New Times‘ top DVD picks scheduled for release this week

AC/DC: Plug Me In (Sony) Bob the Builder: Ultimate Adventure Collection (Hit Entertainment) Bully 911: Stop Being a Victim (Bayview) Believers (Warner Bros.) Best Picture Collection (MGM) The Hoax (Miramax) Hollow Man: Director’s Cut (Sony) The Invisible (Disney) Ironside: Season 2 (Shout) The Jazz Singer: Three-Disc Deluxe Edition (Warner Bros.)…

Beantown Boys Make Good

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,” Raymond Chandler wrote in 1950’s The Simple Art of Murder, smacking the ascot off the drawing-room mystery and all its crime-solving dilettante dandies. “He must be . . . a man…

Working-Class Heroes — and Zeros

Scene by scene, This Is England gets the job done. Drawing on memories of a specific place and time — England in the early ’80s — writer-director Shane Meadows sketches with a keen eye for detail and the contours of experience. He nails the look and feel of a shabby…

Ordinary Rendition

Late in Rendition, in case you’ve been blind and deaf enough not to have cottoned to the drift, a tense Washington exchange on the legitimacy of bundling dark-skinned Americans off to secret prisons abroad takes place. On one side is a driven young senatorial aide (Peter Sarsgaard), on the other…

Clients of Industry

Killer timing! Manda Bala (Send a Bullet), Jason Kohn’s vivid, lean, and hungry documentary about São Paulo’s fatalistic food chain of extreme poverty, violence, unmitigated corruption, and overwhelming wealth arrived last month just as Vanity Fair’s “Viva Brazil!” issue hit the stands. Can’t we find a new country to fetishize?…

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…

Scenes From a Mall

After more than a year of scouring my wee brain to come up with a reason not to hate the never-gonna-get-here light rail, I’ve finally come up with something: This looming transit system may very well bring about the resurrection of Christown Mall, a once-important destination for those of us…

Playing Dumb

Love him or despise him, head Jackass Johnny Knoxville has made millions from getting kicked in the yambag. Had YouTube arrived before Jackass, Knoxville, Steve-O, and the show’s other gutterpunk masochists might still be slinging French fries, getting burnt by hot grease in a strictly non-recreational way. But with a…

Genuine Fake Robots

Transformers (DreamWorks) No doubt, Michael Bay’s slam-bang action-figure commercial doesn’t play nearly as well on TV, no matter how high-def your screen; this demands to be seen on a screen the size of a skyscraper and heard on speakers as large as jet engines. As such, the first half-hour plays…

State of Grace

We should give credit to our cowboy spirit, because it’s taught us Zonies how to get down and party. We’ve all been boozing since we were 12, and we’ve gotten really good at it. But unlike those who settled this dirt field with night after night of getting thrashed at…

Let’s Do Launch

Watch the Valley’s best oarsmen and women row row row their boats at a prime marina spot during the Hot Head Regatta. The men’s, women’s, and mixed rowing event of the year features competitors treading water on a three-mile course at Town Lake. Sat., Oct. 20, 7 a.m.-noon, 2007…

Hmm, What Rhymes With Pervert?

Knowing the pervs who read Night & Day, we betcha you’ll keep reading when we tell you that we’ve found something that serves up “mental foreplay and verbal intercourse.” If you’ve made it this far, told you so. Now, we should tell you about this unique spot, huh? Well, it’s…

Rock Rocks

In a culture where kiddy games like kickball and dodgeball have infiltrated the adult leisure sect — what would Jung say about the parallel between low IQs and our collective unconscious, hmm? — we’re surprised that the Rock Paper Scissors Tournament is just now making its debut into our conscious…

Southwestern Comfort

One thing that doesn’t make sense to us is why bands choose to perform in our nuclear town during the summer. So we bow before the folks running the SoCo (Southern Comfort) Music Experience, who must know what’s up (or maybe they’re just hopped up on the fine whiskey brew),…

Monster Mash-up

Next Lounge is hopping the fright game, so grab some Night Train, release your snake brain, and make for the dope lane around Professa Dank’s fame. Well, it’s clumsy, but since our rap lessons come from a one-legged pirate, who can you blame? No blundering zombies working the tables up…

ABBA’s Greatest Hits

Some believe that creating books is a talent of the elite, others that the printed word is a manipulation of the masses. As fireman Montag asserts in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, “Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave.” The collective named ABBA (A Buncha Book Artists)…

Mural Retro

Seems most folks around here still haven’t wrapped their heads around the notion of graffiti as art. In a land where the sand-colored wall is the signature contribution to design, graf’s considered little more than blight. So props to the Phoenix Art Museum for seeing the writing on the wall…

Chairmen of the Board

Okay, so Phoenix isn’t a cultural mecca. Big whoopin’ deal, ’cause we got pop culture, baby, and one of our societal claims to fame — skateboarding — permeates everything from music and fashion to film and art. Watch these elements coalesce during the opening of the “DECK” invitational skateboard exhibition…

Tee and Sympathy

Old golfing joke: Fred got home from his Sunday round of golf later than normal and very tired. “Bad day at the course?” his wife asked. “Everything was going fine,” he said. “Then Harry had a heart attack and died on the 10th tee.” “Oh, that’s awful!” she cried. “You’re…