Friends and fans of the late and greatly lamented MARS Artspace — one of the pioneers of Phoenix alt-art and a precursor of today’s downtown scene — will witness MARS’ last gasp at “Wasteland Circus: The Final Curtain” on Saturday, August 27, at the Paper Heart — appropriate given that…
Think women in the United States are under a lot of pressure to be thin, young and pretty? Try being a girl in Asia, says Hong Kong-born artist Stella Lai (pronounced “Lie”). “There’s a commercial in China where a woman says, ‘I’d rather be dead than fat,'” Lai says by…
SAT 8/27Club Freedom’s been closed for more than a year now, but that doesn’t mean there’s nowhere in Phoenix for renowned DJs to drop their stacks of wax. On Saturday, August 27, several local organizations, including IONAZ magazine and dance station Energy 92.3, prove the beat goes on with “Splash…
8/26-8/27Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few years, you know full well the juggernaut that is extreme sports. But a rock probably won’t be enough to keep you in the dark for long, not with the sport of extreme rock crawling claiming its place as the…
SAT 8/27Quickly, we must flee! Ginormous mutated creatures are preparing to annihilate The Sets, 93 East Southern in Tempe, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, August 27. These death-bringers will include the demonic simian Hell Monkey and the soup-can-clad martial artist Kung-Fu Chicken Noodle. Surely, we are doomed! Oh, wait, it’s only…
SUN 8/28The Indian ballet troupe Mamata Shankar does not perform a subcontinental Swan Lake, nor does it include Native Americans en pointe. Rather, the group fuses classical Indian dance with modern dance steps, says Sarbari Chowdhury of the Bengali Cultural Association of Arizona, the organization sponsoring the troupe’s local performance…
Fans are forever hassling Judy Rollings, director of the Herberger Theater Center’s Performance Outreach department as well as its Lunch Time Theater program, about when in the world she plans to return to the stage. She’s finally caved, with a one-woman show, Starring Judy From Chicago, that’s a witty recitation…
Art photography doesn’t get its due. Because everyone has a camera, most people figure taking art photos is as easy as pointing the lens at something, uh, arty, and pushing the shutter button. We’re a bit skeptical of art photographers because we think they aren’t as skilled as someone who…
Carlos Batts is a big-deal Los Angeles-based photographer who, since the mid-1990s, has shot models for fashion spreads, rock and rap bands for CD covers, and hot gals for sex magazines. Hustler, NBC and Skechers have all used his work to inject a dash of edgy alterna-cool to their image…
Attention, shoppers: You can forget about parking in the shade, at least when you’re headed for Metrocenter. Despite Karen Bauernschmidt’s best efforts, the west-side mall recently axed more than 300 trees (most of them eucalyptus) growing in its expansive parking lot, a move that Bauernschmidt, a radical environmentalist, tried to…
Red Eye may not seem to be your typical Wes Craven movie. It’s not really horror, there are no marketable monsters, and unlike Cursed, Scream 3, and other recent Craven offerings, it’s actually an enjoyable time at the movies. But heroine Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) is very much in the…
Some art-house programmer would be wise to schedule a double bill of The Aristocrats, Paul Provenza’s talkumentary about the dirtiest joke ever told, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, writer-director Judd Apatow’s near-brilliant movie about a grown-up geek who simply lost interest in trying to get laid. Both offer countless giddy variations…
Even today, British kids grow up listening to stories about life during the London Blitz and the hardships their parents and grandparents endured during the Second World War. American children, by comparison, would be hard-pressed to tell you what nations fought on which side. It’s one of the many weaknesses…
Ain’t nothing in this world more tedious than highbrow erotica, which works itself into a lather and then wipes off the sweat before anyone notices how awfully and inappropriately worked up it got. Asylum, adapted by Closer’s Patrick Marber and Chrysanthy Balis from the novel by Patrick McGrath, is just…
Matthew Parkhill’s Dot the I is the kind of tricked-up mental exercise that may intrigue the most impressionable film school students and a philosophy major here and there. But anyone who’s gotten through sophomore year without declaring him the next great thinker of the Western Hemisphere is more likely to…
The British indie filmmaker Sally Potter, a former dancer, lyricist and performance artist, clearly has a taste for adventure. In 1992, that led her to Orlando, a screen adaptation of the experimental Virginia Woolf novel about an Elizabethan nobleman who hangs around for 400 years, eventually morphing into a hip…
Surfers, skateboarders and desert racers have all had their moment at the movies recently. Now the motocross crowd gets its turn. Supercross: The Movie, which provides a glimpse at what its makers call “the second-fastest-growing motor sport in the U.S., behind only NASCAR,” is anything but a dramatic masterpiece. But…
“Feel-good lesbian movie” sounds like an oxymoron when you consider that most big “lesbian” movies end with people getting shot (Boys Don’t Cry), dragged off by the Gestapo (Aimée & Jaguar), or watching their businesses burn to the ground (Better Than Chocolate). But Girl Play, which has its Valley première…
A couple of months ago, Matt Brown bashed the heck out of a bunch of old computers to create what he calls “robotic sculpture.” This time around, he and several cohorts are constructing a humongous papier-mâché squid. This is the sort of creative otherness you’ll experience at Brown’s event The…
8/19-9/14The Trunk Space’s new exhibition “Old/New/Traditional/Radical” showcases “artists with classic training and a modern aesthetic,” says the gallery’s JRC. Alan Jones, Susan G. White, and Marc Liao — all from Arizona — take well-trod styles (ceramics, quilts, vessels) and mod ’em up for the new millennium. Jones, well-known for his…
THU 8/18Whether you’re a historic preservationist, a developer with a wrecking ball or somewhere in between, you’ll dig Phoenix: Then and Now. The book is a collaborative effort between two native Phoenicians, Paul Scharbach (a professional photographer) and John H. Akers (a writer/historian), who discuss and sign copies at 7…
SAT 8/20Runs. That’s what bikers do. They hop on their hogs, crotch rockets or whatever slang they use to describe their favorite hunk of motorized steel and go on runs. Sometimes they even do it in a good cause. That’s the case on Saturday, August 20, when the Salt River…
