Fermented beverages played a large roll in the shaping of society and civilization. The quest for beer caused nomads to settle down and cultivate needed ingredients, like wheat and barley, to make beer. Societies sprung up where ingredients could be raised. It was similar in Egypt, where traces of fermented…
It’d be pretty easy for sports fans to slouch into the doldrums of summer right about now. No NFL, no NBA, no NHL, and — as the Diamondbacks bleed out the remainder of a disappointing season — not much MLB either. Well, before spiraling into a sports fandom identity crisis,…
Summer school sucks. That is, except for the magical time when summer school actually means going to The Gladly on Sundays for the Cocktail Summer Camp. This week Joshua James of Clever Koi puts on the teacher’s hat for the afternoon.James has made a name for himself at his bar…
It’s pretty hard to overlook Brad Williams’ short stature and, in fact, it’s what drives his unique and hilarious point of view. Nonetheless, you’ll get to see that he’s kind of a big deal on Thursday, August 7. Comedy nerds dream of being plucked out of the audience by their…
Since his debut was released in 2010, author Tom Leveen has been busy. Five novels and one mention on Young Adult Library Services Association’s Best Fiction for Young Adults list (2013 for Zero) later, the Arizona native, who still calls the Grand Canyon State home, returns to Changing Hands Bookstore…
As heroic elders of the 1980s posicore genre, 7 Seconds replaced hardcore punk’s sheer bellicosity with tuneful melodies and a stalwart sense of hope. Beginning as skinheads forming a community in Reno, they soon became stalwarts of a West Coast second-wave insurrection as their tunes evolved from terse straight-edge pleas…
If you’ve ever seen Of Montreal live, you know that the band’s stage show is a lot like a live action acid trip with tons of costumes, prop monsters, live horses, nudity, and raw emotion. That’s why it’s no wonder that someone, namely director Jason Miller, wanted to go behind…
This summer, the Pueblo Grande Museum is on a mission to prove that it’s not impossible to grow plants in Arizona, though the obscene heat might suggest otherwise. For the month of August, the museum is hosting a brown bag lecture series “Mission Not-So Impossible: Sustainable Desert Gardening and Landscaping,”…
Did you know that the first North American ubran civilization pre-dated the Aztecs?Yeah, neither did we. Which is why all of us should head to Deer Valley Rock Art Center to bone up on our ancient history – particularly that of Teotihuacán, a city in central Mexico that’s home to…
Paul Wilson might have been the Phoenix art scene’s best-kept secret. Until recently, that is. The 50-year-old artist’s creative endeavors, centered on his obsession with 1950s and ’60s pop culture, have spanned both decades and media including photography, video, and performance, while he makes a living freelancing as a set…
Phoenix is brimming with creativity. And every other year, we put the spotlight on 100 of the city’s creative forces. Leading up to the release of this year’s Best of Phoenix issue, we’re profiling 100 more. Welcome to the 2014 edition of 100 Creatives. Up today: 35. Jesse Perry. Jesse…
When most people think of public art, the usual images of street festivals, sculptures, and decorative fountains come to mind. But for the minds behind Four Chambers Press, public art can be so much more. For its latest endeavor, the year-old literary journal continues reaching out into the community with…
Tony Klett has seen the growth of the tattoo culture firsthand. When Klett began his tattoo apprenticeship in 1999, there were only three tattoo shops around the portion of Ohio he lived in, now Klett says there are about 20. “Tattooing is mainstream now. It’s in everybody’s face,” Klett, 37,…
Show up, grab wine, learn a skill. That’s the premise of Katherine Thornhill, Teresa Wilson, and Misha West’s upscale educational events series Pith+Marrow, which launched earlier this year. After a quick summer break, the trio is back with a fall series of classes that’ll appeal to anyone with crafty aspirations…
Nearly a year after the August 31 resignation of Scottsdale Cultural Council president and CEO, William H. Banchs, the organization has announced it has found a new candidate to take the title. Succeeding the current interim president and CEO, Richard Hayslip, effective Monday, August 11, is Neale Perl, former president…
Filmmaker Mary Mazzio’s Underwater Dreams is timely, because it deals (perhaps too tangentially) with immigration reform. And the movie, which recently played for a week on various cable networks and now has opened nationwide in commercial theaters, is pleasant to watch for locals because it’s set here in Phoenix, specifically…
In Calvary, Brendan Gleeson plays a Catholic priest who plods through a rustic Irish village that’s more brutal than beautiful. The beach is gray, the waves are choppy, and the wind whips his ankle-length black cassock as though every step were a fight against nature. In some ways, it is…
Necrophilia and gross-out realism abound in James Franco’s Child of God. If director/co-writer James Franco had retitled his adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 1973 novel Child of God to A Man’s Love for a Corpse, he’d have a more honest film on his hands — not to mention a purposefully campy…
Culinary mash-up The Hundred-Foot Journey is tasty enough. Lasse Hallström has become an expert at making mom-jeans movies, nonthreatening pictures in which headstrong women find love just when they think it’s too late (Once Around), take the upper hand with their cheating husbands (Something to Talk About), and turn small,…
About Alex mines old anxiety with new 30-somethings. Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill had much to say about the angst of losing touch with your younger self and the noble folly of trying to reclaim it. Since its release in 1983, the dramatic tropes of Kasdan’s film — big, nostalgic…
Phoenix is brimming with creativity. And every other year, we put the spotlight on 100 of the city’s creative forces. Leading up to the release of this year’s Best of Phoenix issue, we’re profiling 100 more. Welcome to the 2014 edition of 100 Creatives. Up today: 36. Josh Kirby. “Illustration…
Didja happen to know that every dinosaur may have had feathers? What about the notion that the Tyrannosaurus Rex most likely had really bad breath, given that it ate nothing but meat and probably never brushed between meals? We boned up on these seemingly random factoids this past weekend while…
