The most crucial piece of equipment in Hollywood is obviously not the movie camera. It’s not the casting couch. Not even the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud or the personal trainer. It’s the Xerox machine — which was preceded by carbon paper. That’s why, over the years, we have had three Mrs…
Rocky Horror, eat your heart out. Or just leave it to the cult followers and cutups behind Broadway Bound and Gagged’s shadowcast production of Cannibal! The Musical, set for Saturday, September 11, at Spectrum Mall. “If it’s up to my doing,” says Cannibal casting director Justin Reed, “it will be…
Sandra Conaty Brace was an active woman. She mastered the 55-word short story, had several published, cared for her 25 cats, and worked as an administrative assistant for Risk Insurance Solutions. On September 10, 2001, Brace took the day off to do chores and watch Judge Judy. When her husband…
9/9-10-15 Wanna show your boss who’s boss? Take a lunchtime excursion to the Arizona State University Computing Commons Gallery, on Palm Walk and Orange Mall on the main campus in Tempe, beginning Thursday, September 9, when the interactive installation “AlphaWolf” opens. Sure, howling, growling and whining into a microphone while…
Sat 9/11 The Arizona Caliente have much to prove on Saturday, September 11, when the Women’s Professional Football League team takes on its nemesis from last year’s Western Conference title game, the Long Beach Aftershock, in a match-up of division leaders at Washington High School, 2217 West Glendale Avenue in…
Sat 9/11 Avast ye landlubbers, just a week in advance of “International Talk Like a Pirate Day,” those bilge-sucking sons-of-biscuit-eaters at the Paper Heart, 750 Grand Avenue, will be busting out like Blackbeard at “Mermaids and Martinis” on Saturday, September 11. This “undersea fantasy fund raiser” for iTheatre Collaborative is…
9/10-9/24 There’s arguably nothing inherently funny about being a Latino immigrant struggling in America. So forgive us if a one-man show of monologues chronicling immigration hassles and low self-esteem under a post-September 11 backdrop doesn’t immediately lighten our mood. Unless that comedic romp happens to be the follow-up to the…
“The Landmine Prints” at Burton Barr Central Library: ASU professor John Risseeuw’s unique approach to printmaking includes what he calls “content-specific paper” — handmade paper composed of materials that relate to the topic of the artwork itself. Risseeuw brings together more than a dozen such works in “The Landmine Prints”…
THU 2 We have a right to be crabby. We were born on the last day of Cancer, as was David Spade, and he got all the looks, all the talent and all the good scripts. Thank the heavens we hold no responsibility for our own success. So says “professional…
Last fall, at a banquet held at a private country club in north Scottsdale, Arizona State University President Michael Crow stood before a gathering of A-plus middle school students enrolled in the prestigious Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth and did his darnedest to convince the gifted kids and their…
With some notable exceptions, you won’t find the folk art now appearing in “Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art” at Phoenix Art Museum popping up in your average Mexican mercado. Having beaten the bushes in backwaters all over Mexico for various forms of folk art for 25 years, I feel…
She might have been a Midwestern orphan named Mildred Davenport. She may have been the great-granddaughter of the illegitimate son of the King of England. She even could have been a Native American, invited by President Franklin Roosevelt to act as America’s goodwill ambassador to Mexico. The only thing we…
In Victorian England, 40,000 novels were published every year. Of the few that have endured, perhaps none is more worthy of a film adaptation than William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, if for no other reason than this: It’s a chore to read. Clocking in at 850 pages, with frequent excursions into…
It’s a real credit to Intimate Strangers director Patrice Leconte that even though his film features a couple of ridiculous contrivances to get the plot going, the overall film still feels very true. Leconte has a gift for depicting the quirks of odd relationships; his last film, Man on the…
In We Don’t Live Here Anymore, an overwrought domestic drama about a pair of entangled couples, Peter Krause plays philandering writer Hank Evans, struggling to produce as he propositions female students at the college where he teaches. Blithely pretentious, fretful only over his writing, Hank observes from a distance as…
Oh, Janis. Oh, gorgeous, outrageous, soul-ripping, rockin’ bluesy mama Janis Joplin. She’s a volcano. She’s a tsunami. She’s a fearless, reckless, raging American beauty. Watch her tear open her chest to reveal her hot, pulsing wounds. Watch her rage with burning, glorious light. Watch her smile that sweet Janis smile…
Whatever is worthwhile about The Hunting of the President — a new documentary on the right-wing attack dogs that conspired to bring down Bill Clinton throughout his presidency — the film is plagued by a single, damning problem: It was made by Harry Thomason. Thomason is an über-F.O.B., a very…
In artist John Risseeuw’s works, the subject matter isn’t difficult to decipher. Rather than searching for abstract thought, the viewer needs only to examine the paper on which Risseeuw’s art is printed. In his latest collection, “The Landmine Prints” which shows at downtown’s Burton Barr Central Library beginning Thursday, September…
9/4-9/5 Danny Ochoa has a secret identity he wants to keep on the down low. As a judge for Lowrider Magazine, the 37-year-old isn’t worried about any potential diss he may have dealt at any of the 16 events he visits every year, but he’s been on the receiving end…
Sat 9/4 Leave it to the dog fanciers to try to pooch a good time. Those purebred purists often take a dim view of wiener dog racing, fearing the sport is harmful to the delicate animals. But NASCAR-style crashes are unlikely at the Wiener Dog Nationals on Saturday, September 4,…
Sat 9/4 Despite their supernatural gifts, the prognosticators and fortunetellers gathering at the Psychic Fair on Saturday, September 4, at Two Hawks Leather & Gifts, 8273 West Washington in Peoria, won’t disclose the winning PowerBall numbers or — more important — when the Grim Reaper will visit. “If I ever…
Thu 9/2 At first glance, we assumed that ASU’s Evelyn Smith Music Theatre, 40 East Gammage Parkway in Tempe, was hosting some sort of organic Asian buffet. Turns out that the rice bowls, chopsticks, pods, gourds and chiles on hand will whet our appetites for new music, not chicken teriyaki…
