Forgot your wallet? Can’t remember your PIN? No worries. While we can’t velcro your valuables to your pockets or remind you of your mother’s four-digit birthday, we can offer up a few ways the financially forgetful can see the town free of charge. From prom-like partying and rock climbing celebrations…
Happy New Year, Phoenix! What, you’ve already broken all your resolutions? Yeah, us too. But we’re bouncing back with some inspiration. Whether you’ve been considering a new hair style or a new kitchen project, we’re here to help with Project PHX, our annual “how to” guide. Step into Pane Bianco’s…
We caught muralist El Mac in the act of art-making at The Heavy Pedal, 1309 E. Van Buren last week, working on his latest Phoenix mural. It’s a collaboration between El Mac, Pablo Luna, and Mando Rascón that took a full week of steady work to execute. The results are…
Arizona Art Tank: East Get ready to jump in to the shark tank, Phoenix entrepreneurs. The Arizona Commission on the Arts is hosting its second Arizona Art Tank during which about 10 applicants from each region will take a crack at making their dreams come true by pitching their art-based…
When we first popped in to see the Mesa Urban Garden a couple of years ago, it was a relatively simple affair. Raised beds had just been filled with dark, moist soil. Kyllan Maney and Lauren Lee had painted the first of many murals to don garden walls. Community members…
With the UFC having made its first visit to Arizona last month, mixed martial arts is even more mainstream than ever before in the Valley. As it is, metro Phoenix is home to many of the nation’s top mixed martial artists and several local MMA promotions. Thanks largely in part…
Aziz Ansari Aziz Ansari doesn’t want pictures of your baby. Screw that, he already knows how to walk. He also doesn’t want to see the latest dick pic that you’ve received. He already knows there’s no message. He will, however, take your money and applause. The actor and comedian, best…
Jim Malloy started off collecting sneakers the same way most people do: his dad bought them for him when he was a kid. “I still get the same feeling, the same excitement, when I get a pair now as I did when I was 14,” Malloy says. These days, Malloy…
Figuring there’s at least a bit of artist in all of us, we went in search of some of the coolest beginning art classes and workshops for adults in metro Phoenix — and found a little something for everyone, from blacksmithing to printmaking. We appreciate the lure of affordable options,…
If you were one of those folks who wound up getting pairs of socks and underwear for Christmas, don’t be too bummed out about it. In fact, you can put some of ’em to good use this weekend. The latest No Pants Ride, which is organized by local branches of…
Charlie Levy has a simple philosophy when it comes to the Crescent Ballroom, his venue in downtown Phoenix. “We always try to do things at Crescent that are fun and different all the time,” he says. That’s why you’ll see such diverse events as comedy shows, movie screenings, spoken word…
We understand that you can’t pick whom you’re attracted to. And there are plenty of hot people out there who just happen to be parents. In the event you end up dating someone who has kids, there are more than a few obstacles you need to be prepared for.We know…
Paul Thomas Anderson was making serious movies long before he started making “serious” movies, ponderous works of certified art like There Will Be Blood and The Master. His earliest pictures, like Hard Eight and Boogie Nights, and even the later Magnolia, were wily, imperfect, vibrating with life like yeast springing…
If you’ve ever loved a terrible person, Mike Leigh’s quietly sensational Mr. Turner — a biopic, of sorts, covering the last 25 years of the life of the great 19th-century British painter J.M.W. Turner — is the movie for you. In his seascapes and landscapes, Turner found the perfect visual…
Without dropping spoilers right and left, how do I explain that I’m completely baffled by the Spierig Brothers’ retro-futuristic thriller Predestination? So the she that’s really a he is the earlier version of the he we meet later on, and the later version of the she who shows up near…
Ava DuVernay’s Urgent Selma Speaks to the Now
Describing Ava DuVernay’s quietly remarkable Selma to a friend, I caught myself referring to the Civil Rights Era as a historical event, a thing of the past, and then backtracked. The killing of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice at the hands of police officers — not to mention…
All you need to know about Taken 3 is that Liam Neeson survives an explosive car crash — twice. Director Olivier Megaton even rewinds the second blast to show us how his hero escaped. It still doesn’t make sense. But who cares. The Taken franchise is rooted in implausibilities, specifically…
Among many other things, Girls has always been great satire, lampooning with scolding empathy the callowness, narcissism, and insufferableness of early-to-mid-20-somethings who are privileged enough to spend their post-grad years making mistake after mistake with no serious consequences. But the HBO dramedy’s fourth season, in which Hannah (Lena Dunham) leaves…
Dinosaurs became extinct millions of years ago, but they don’t seem to have had any trouble retaining their popularity. In fact, our large Jurassic friends are the topic of this week’s PEP (Phoenix Educational Programming) Rally, a performance art series at Lawn Gnome Publishing, 905 North 5th Street. The PEP…
In Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) — an astoundingly talented marksman credited with over 160 confirmed kills in Iraq — runs into a fellow veteran at a mechanic’s shop between deployments. The soldier shows Kyle an artificial leg and thanks him for saving his life…
The world needs fewer tasteful movies about distasteful things. It definitely doesn’t need J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year, in which Oscar Isaac plays a nouveau-riche heating-oil baron in early-1980s New York, striving to maintain his principles amid industry corruption and generally scummy behavior. Isaac’s Abel Morales skulks through most…
Emerson argued that each flourish and tendril of a work of art has its exact corollary in the mind of the artist, that creative expression is always, in its way, a sort of autobiography: Want to know the person? Look at her works. But Ralph Waldo never lived to see…
