On the first Friday night of every month, the art galleries in downtown Phoenix, big and small, as well as many artists’ studios and temporary art spaces, open their doors to the now thousands of people who come through on self-guided tours. Since the mid-’90s, nonprofit volunteer organization Artlink has…
Tammie Hanson-Ferguson doesn’t cry until after I turn off my tape recorder. For more than an hour, she sits with me at Christopher’s Fermier and talks about her brother, Wade Jess Jordan, who was gunned down by Mesa police last December. Hanson-Ferguson never sheds a tear while she describes her…
After garnering a bushel of positive critical notices less than two months ago for his work in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, Adam Sandler now squanders his newfound respectability with another one of his cookie-cutter “lovable loser” vehicles, Adam Sandler’s Eight Crazy Nights. Only two elements set this apart from…
The terror is real — that of Miramax executives, anyway, as their Dimension division refused to screen its new creature feature Wes Craven Presents: They for critics, lest we go all crazy and tell you about it. But just to show a sporting attitude, let’s offer up some potentially useful…
For the past 16 years, artists have been getting together to discuss the capitalist feeding frenzy that happens every December, and wondering aloud about the meaning of it all. Behold The 17th Annual Bad X-mas Pageant, an event that is becoming a downtown tradition. Jeff Falk, one of the founders…
At the center of many good hard-boiled novels is an elusive object of pursuit, à la The Maltese Falcon. But in the case of Plainclothes Naked — wherein author Jerry Stahl blends gruesome but slapstick violence, bizarre scenarios and perversely witty writing, then sprinkles it liberally with crack — the…
You can talk to Taggart Barron about sex, just don’t show him — or his kids — any photographs of it. Barron has become a tireless anti-porn advocate ever since Castle Megastore opened in his Deer Valley neighborhood two months ago. Although the sex boutique is protected by city zoning…
With Blue, playwright Charles Randolph-Wright set out to tell a story about African-Americans that isn’t about race relations; a black family drama that’s not about oppression but about good old American dysfunction. Randolph-Wright succeeded — not wisely, but too well. Blue is a ceaselessly pleasant shaggy dog story dotted with…
The smart sci-fi fan knows that, technically speaking, Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris is not a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film at all, but rather a newly filmed interpretation of a Polish novel penned by Stanislaw Lem. Nonetheless, the new film stands in a mighty big shadow. If someone attempted to make…
It’s doubtful Robert Louis Stevenson imagined his Treasure Island populated by cyborgs and scored to Goo Goo Dolls outtakes; and one has to wonder what the author would have made of his characters being turned into talking and walking dogs and cats who, gulp, copulate and reproduce mangy hybrids. Far…
The tragedy is that even those who should have known better didn’t know at all; how could they? The names they sought weren’t listed, their contributions weren’t cited, their influences weren’t credited, so even those who spent hours and days and forevers wearing out the grooves in search of holy-mother-of-God…
Hip-hop thespians Wu-Tang Clan might want to put their litigation counsel on retainer; the real monks of Shaolin Temple, from whom Wu-Tang borrows extensive imagery, have been on the swarm this year fighting the appropriation of their sacred Shaolin name. Across the globe, companies have used the Shaolin tag as…
You knew it was on its way even before Halloween merchandise hit the clearance shelves: Christmas. You noticed the sudden transformation from orange-and-black to red-and-green color schemes in stores, the subtle but inescapable sounds of carols and sleigh bells, the tinsel at every turn. And you wondered if someone forgot…
If you were going to categorize the work of Adam Chodzko, whose first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. is now on view at Arizona State University, you’d have to resort to something like “participatory conceptual performance art,” a clumsy mouthful that doesn’t begin to convey the magic and humor…
Equus was first produced in the early ’70s and quickly became a modern classic. Peter Shaffer’s morality play just as quickly became passé, its postmodern approach to religiosity and sex nullified by the go-go ’80s, when money was power and religion was usurped by “spirituality.” Which isn’t to say that…
The wine list at Chili’s Grill & Bar is pretty lame, but my subject is too young to appreciate a good Pinot Grigio anyway. Fourteen-year-old Chris Cottrell is the author of the just-passed Proposition 103, also known as Chris’ Law, a constitutional amendment that will prevent accused sexual predators from…
Christ is sexy. There, got your attention. But honestly, think about it: nice guy, pretty hair, carpentry skills, puts loaves (and fishes) on the table. Plus all that doing miracles and rising from the dead and being the son of God business. Heck, he’d be a prime catch for any…
The advantage to making a Christmas movie is that, no matter how mediocre your final product is, it’s all but guaranteed to show up on at least one TV station, at least once a year, in perpetuity; even such woeful losers as the Nicolas Cage-Dana Carvey comedy Trapped in Paradise,…
Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Hello, Mr. Hundert. If we can judge by the new Kevin Kline vehicle The Emperor’s Club, the notions remain alive (if not particularly well) that a self-sacrificing boarding-school teacher can enrich the lives of his students while subsisting in relative emotional misery himself — and that the…
From Fear’s “I Love Livin’ in the City” to “In the City” by The Jam, the history of punk rock is chock-full of tributes to urban life and all the struggle and glamour that it entails. But aspiring rockers growing up in Middle America, aching to escape suburban ennui or…
