Last summer, one of the coolest (and indeed, hottest) places to be seen was at the Hotel San Carlos for the weekly Star Swim pool party. An absolute throng of hundreds of hepcats and kittens crowded the tiny swimming area at the vintage auberge in downtown Phoenix for several weekends…
Lucinda Williams can get very personal on her recordings, for better or for worse. Last year’s West was a melancholy collection about the loss of her mother. It was also a rather downtrodden buzzkill if you weren’t in the mood for it. With Little Honey, Williams lightens up a bit,…
Phoenix doesn’t really suck. It’s just sometimes difficult to find things to be prideful about in this relatively new desert abode some one million people call home. One of best things about the PHX, aside from The Wallace and Ladmo Show and rattlesnake on the barbie, is Arizona Highways. It’s…
Robert “GQ” Gallo’s wrestling career has taken him to some interesting places. Over the past decade, he’s fought in front of thousands of rowdy Japanese fans at Tokyo’s Korakuen Hall, toured Korea with the USO, and even body-slammed bullying bruisers on pay-per-view. Now the 30-year-old member of the Valley’s Impact…
First of all, Up is not a movie about a cranky old coot who, with the help of a roly-poly Boy Scout, finds his inner child during a series of magical adventures experienced from the front porch of a dilapidated manse held aloft by hundreds of helium-filled balloons. Such, of…
I’ve been working on a list of people or things that Katie McFadzen possibly can’t play. Here’s what I have so far: a pencil sharpener; Stalin; a venereal disease. But don’t quote me on any of these, because it’s likely that next month she’ll show up on a local stage…
Sam Raimi wants to go home again. Often a drifting virtuoso in the years before finding his Spider-Man gig, with Drag Me to Hell Raimi defaults to the horror romps that made his name (namely, the Evil Dead trilogy), bringing the old barreling camera and viscous ickiness back and serving…
At 73, the Memphis-born actor, stuntman, former U.S. Marine, and Golden Gloves boxer Red West has the stoic, leathery repose of a barfly on a John Ford or Howard Hawks saloon wall. He doesn’t talk much, and when he does, reveals even less, but there’s an abyss of longing and…
CANNES, France — Memorable for its in-your-face sensationalism, the 62nd Cannes Film Festival opened with the 3-D computer animation Up, saving the “Yours” for the final minutes of the competition’s penultimate movie, Gaspar Noé’s “psychedelic melodrama” Enter the Void. The sad, tawdry, monstrously inflated tale of two traumatized club kids…
In keeping with our postmodern or post postmodern (depending on your preference) world in which one must surrender to the idea of constantly referencing, well, everything that has already existed, it’s only inevitable that I, Arty Girl, would come full circle and blog about preexisting blogs.First up, remember this? It’s…
Okay, so the economy took a great big dump and we’re all shakin’ in our boots, right?I suppose the good news is, there’s always someone worse off than you. Just think of the artists. They were “starving” even during the roaring 90’s.Without our artists and the organizations that support their…
Oh, these crazy contemporary English playwrights, always messing with us one way or another and making us feel like wet-behind-the-ears Colonial idiots. Prime example Howard Barker, who created a movement called Theater of Catastrophe, plunks his nasty, alienating scenarios into historical settings the U.S. public schools tend not to touch on (so for…
When I was a kid, I couldn’t survive a summer here without discovering some kind of new craft to get my hands tangled in. There was the summer of watercolors, origami, Fimo clay, puffy paint…name any craft for kids that got popular in the early 90’s and you can bet…
Former Phoenix resident Ron Babcock, who often performed with friend and comedy sidekick and one-time Phoencian Ryan McKee, will ditch LA and return to Phoenix Saturday, June. 6 with a slew of LA comedians for the Modest Proposal comedy show at Modified Arts. Babcock and McKee founded the now-defunct Modest…
The waterpark, unique when it first opened its gates in the summer of 1969, celebrates with a turn-back-the-clock clothing promotion, DJ spins, and a $4 Retro Meal. Mon., May 25, 11 a.m.-6 p.m., 2009…
The Valley’s Rana Singh Sodhi revisits the story about how his brother Balbir was gunned down in a Mesa hate crime after 9/11 because of his religion (Sikh) and dress. Sodhi, who went on to star in the 2007 Sundance Film Festival documentary A Dream in Doubt, relates how his…
The festival salutes the pioneering Disney auteur of the 1930s with screenings of a 70th-anniversary reissue of the 1939 full-length features Gulliver’s Travels and early Betty Boop, Popeye, and Superman toons. Fri., May 22, 1, 3, 5, 7 & 9 p.m.; Sun., May 24, 1, 3, 5, 7 & 9…
It’s not enough with the vortices, already? Apparently not. The night-vision-goggles-wearing folks behind this event promise “UFOs darting about in the nighttime sky” and “huge motherships launch[ing] smaller craft” during nighttime viewings. During the day, various UFO experts (including Ed Grimsley and Aurora Light) will speak, vigorously debate one another,…
“Avant-garde” isn’t the most appropriate label to place on eco new music percussionist Jeph Jerman and his approach to producing sound. Sure, his uniquely captured artistry — which doesn’t rely upon popular time signatures, written notations, and detectable meter — can be placed in the, ahem, “acquired taste” category. But…
If you ever were to start a fight with someone, make sure it’s not with Jay Dobyns. In 1987, Dobyns – a former UofA football standout, law enforcement agent, and one of the baddest mofos around – took a burning slug to the chest while on duty as an ATF…
We’re beginning to feel like downtown old-timers. Perihelion Arts is nearing seven years of existence, Trunk Space recently turned five, and now The Lost Leaf – the super-awesome art gallery and bar at 914 North Fifth Street that we swear just opened – is turning two on Monday, May 25…
Having cool, liberal parents isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. Just look at Gwyneth Paltrow’s poor baby, Apple, who will undoubtedly grow up traumatized because she’s named after a high-fiber fruit and her mommy is the literal queen of shit (see www.goop.com). But songstress Rain Perry says her…
