Walking through “Emilio Pucci,” the fashion exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum, is like going back in time. The bikinis, gowns and mini-dresses covered in the Italian designer’s singular geometric patterns and acid-bright colors are relics of an age when it was okay to call a flight attendant a stewardess, when…
There are two things Amy Milliron wants you to know: First of all, she did not expose herself while breast-feeding her baby in public recently. And secondly, the media have completely invented the part about public outcry against public nursing. According to Milliron, a 29-year-old Tempe mother who’s lately become…
Cindy Iverson, 43, makes mixed-media collages and artist books, exquisitely crafted ruminations about anxiety, historical injustices and the secrets people keep. But first, Iverson makes her own paper. She collects everything from dead saguaros to old blue jeans, boils it, pulps it, and transforms it into paper, one sheet at…
At the opening of The Constant Gardener, Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles’ adaptation of the novel by John le Carr, we hear a conversation before we see it. The screen remains black, still running credits, as a man and a woman negotiate a departure. Slowly, the scene dawns, revealing the couple…
Viewers of those VH1 nostalgia countdown shows are familiar with the term “awesomely bad,” denoting a song that one hates to love because it’s unintentionally tacky and awful, yet there’s something about it that won’t let you dismiss it entirely. It’s also a fine way to describe The Cave, but…
Remember Nick Cannon? For a while there, he seemed to be the next big young heartthrob, right after starring in the marching-band movie Drumline and the remake of the ’80s comedy Love Don’t Co$t a Thing. When Dave Chappelle joked that his son was leaving him for Nick Cannon, people…
Many of those who saw the Disney superhero spoof Sky High were impressed by the debut of Steven Strait. Playing the brooding school bully Warren Peace, who hurls fireballs at our heroes before showing his more sensitive and heroic side, Strait displayed a moody rock-star charisma and an impressive range…
The questing hero of Hans Petter Moland’s The Beautiful Country is a slender, big-eyed young man named Binh (California-educated Damien Nguyen), who has little going for him but his obsession. Ostracized in his homeland because he’s the offspring of a Vietnamese mother and an American G.I. father — bui doi,…
Somehow, there’s nothing offensive about, say, Barry Manilow’s oeuvre being transformed into a big, shiny musical. In fact, it just plain made sense when one of Manilow’s nelly pop songs became a musical comedy called Barry Manilow’s Copacabana — starring The Phantom of the Opera’s Frank D’Ambrosio and The Love…
Tommy Nuñez knows that if you put 600 players in an amateur basketball tournament, there’s going to be some major machismo in the air — especially if all of the players are Hispanic. “There’s a lot of pride,” says Nuñez, who runs the Phoenix-based National Hispanic Basketball Classic. “They’re intense…
9/2-9/30Looking at Gidget Gein’s art is like recognizing an old friend in a crowd and joyfully running up to greet him, only to be appalled by the huge new tumor sticking out of his side. The former bassist for shock-rocker Marilyn Manson, Gein will unveil his new artwork in an…
SAT 9/3Wieners go great with mustard. Or ketchup. Or . . . racing stripes? Proud owners of pintsize pups pounded the pavement over the past few months, digging up donations for Arizona Adopt-A-Greyhound. The 32 top fund-raising dogs face off in the 2005 Wiener Dog Nationals on Saturday, September 3,…
9/3-12/31Designer Michael Graves (of Target teakettle fame) cemented his household-word status in 1979, when he participated in the “Tea and Coffee Piazza” project sponsored by Italian design house Alessi. The next wave, “Tea and Coffee Towers,” visits the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art beginning Saturday, September 3. Architects from 11…
SAT 9/3In the ’60s, if you caught people leaving a rock concert and asked how the show was, they might have answered with something like, “Man, that three-hour version of ‘White Rabbit’ was totally groovy!” But in the “here today, gone today” world of modern rock and short attention spans,…
“Hector Ruiz: La Realidad (Reality)” at the Heard Museum: Phoenix artist Hector Ruiz fires a shot between the eyes of American values with wood carvings, block prints, and mixed-media assemblages that address racism, border issues and capitalism. A King Kong-size blonde crushes a hapless businessman in her manicured hands in…
THU 1Phoenix’s flirtation with the Surreal World continues with the opening of the Paper Heart’s “Surreal September” exhibit on Friday, September 2, and Phoenix Art Museum’s ongoing “Surrealism USA” installation. “Surrealism USA” Live: Poetry Reading, held in conjunction with the latter exhibition, features readings by “surrealist poets” Dean Young and…
THU 25When those “I Want You” propaganda posters of Uncle Sam first came out, Will Stockdale must have thought ol’ Sam was pointing at the grits on the porch behind him, because when the country bumpkin joins the U.S. Air Force in No Time for Sergeants, he’s clearly clueless. After…
Freethinkers and activists across the Valley have been wringing their hands ever since the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona announced earlier this month that its executive director, Eleanor Eisenberg, will retire. Eisenberg, who is 65 and has been with the local ACLU chapter for eight years, left her post…
It will take the average reader about three minutes to read this newspaper column in which I, a person who is paid to share my opinion, will reveal the ways in which Black, White and Read All Over is a play totally lacking in substance and utterly devoid of entertainment…
Pity the daily newspaper critic who must review The Aristocrats without using such phrases as “a longshoreman’s arm up a little girl’s ass,” “then my wife goes down on my son while the dog’s licking his balls,” “my grandmother’s covered in my come,” and “is it shit before piss, or…
Terry Gilliam’s last film featured the former Monty Python troupe member as an eccentric, demanding and difficult director prone to destroying his ambitious projects before a single frame of footage was ever shot. “If it’s easy,” he says in the movie, “I don’t do it.” Alas, this was not a…
“I always cannot understand why girls don’t wanna be with me for a long time,” says Timothy Treadwell, subject of the documentary Grizzly Man. “I have really a nice personality — I’m fun, I’m very, very good in the . . . umm, well, you’re not supposed to say that…
