Sat 8/14 Things get pretty dead around these parts during the dog days of summer, especially when it comes to nationalistic celebrations. After getting hammered by the one-two punch of July 4 and Bastille Day, patriots and expatriates alike have to wait until the Labor Day weekend for frenetic flag-waving…
“Imagine That!” at the West Valley Art Museum: The current selection at this oft-forgotten spot includes an exhibition organized by the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum titled “Imagine That! A Whimsical Take on Nature.” The idea was to challenge traditional wildlife artists to create images of fictional animals — merging species, switching…
THU 5 If your multi-tasking tendencies extend toward culture, you’re in luck. Get a two-fer at 7 p.m. Thursday, August 5, when members of the Phoenix Symphony set up shop at the Phoenix Art Museum to perform works by Bach and Mozart — heavy on the cello, clarinet and strings…
Mike Maas has more than a few skeletons in his closet. The budding artist who spent his childhood watching Creature Feature boasts a house full of monsters, goblins, freaks and bunnies. Yes, bunnies — both real and ceramic — the signature touch of sweetness that wife Jodi lends to Mike’s…
As a reviewer, it can be very tempting to want in on the ground floor of a phenomenon, to say you were there first when some low-budget feature with a nifty premise made its festival debut, only to be picked up by a big studio and become a national phenomenon…
Sat 8/7 When Jim Seagrave, along with his wife Karen, bought Fat Cats — a rough and tumble bar home to hot-rodders, hot chicks and hotheads — two and a half years ago, he didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye with the clientele. “There were some pretty thick rednecks when I first…
You can tell that PALican is a star because he arrives with an entourage. I’d arranged to interview PALican himself, who I assumed was a guy in a bird suit, but the star of KAZ-TV’s unbelievably schlocky PALican and Friends (who turned out to be a girl in a bird…
Sheathed in a custom-tailored gray suit and sporting expensively barbered silver hair, Tom Cruise looks like an older, harder version of the self-absorbed L.A. sharpie he played 16 years ago in Rain Man. But in Collateral, a frenetic Michael Mann thriller that runs up a Baghdad-level body count, Cruise’s character…
Deep in the dangerous wasteland of America, far removed from civilization, there exists a community driven by fear, sworn to isolationism. They loathe outsiders, whom they regard as terrifying monsters. They make up strange rituals to guard themselves against the vast world beyond their borders. And while they may feast…
Little Black Book, with its Carly Simon soundtrack all but daring you to tune it out before it begins, is being marketed as a daffy romantic comedy in which a woman plows through her boyfriend’s Palm to uncover his past relationships. In truth, the movie’s anything but light and frothy;…
You may have already heard the stories about A Home at the End of the World. In what many viewers have deemed a big loss, Colin Farrell’s penis no longer appears in the film. The official line is that test audiences found it too distracting, though that seems unlikely, given…
Perhaps the most unlikely thing to capture on film is the creative process — the spinning of gears, the tripping of wires, the breaking of hearts, and the snapping of tempers that goes into the making of art. Movies about writers and painters and musicians seldom collapse the barrier between…
Hey, good-lookin’, put on your game face — the ladies of LabelHorde, the local fashion directory and resource guide, are on the prowl. “Spotlight: The Search for LabelHorde’s Top Model” hits the runway Wednesday, August 11 — in downtown Scottsdale, natch — and though the competition may not be pretty,…
Nothing says rock ‘n’ roll less than a lawsuit. Paul Green knows that, which makes him Rock Teacher of the Year in our book. > Nonetheless, Green — a 32-year-old rock god to several dozen prepubescent rockers-in-training — has a legitimate beef with a certain Hollywood film studio that’s raked…
8/6-8/31 If Lee Hazel has to be stuck in medieval times, she’s bringing some friends with her. In her latest exhibition, which opens at Modified Arts, 407 East Roosevelt, on Friday, August 6, Hazel presents more than a dozen portraits of downtown artists in 15th-century settings, beckoning Botticelli, Jerome and…
ONGOING For children, tubing the Salt River is a learning experience. We learned that saguaros are native only to this part of the world, that the bald eagle is an endangered species in the Sonoran Desert and, most important, to keep our butts from sinking all the way down in…
Fri 8/6 This is not your typical shake-ya-ass music: “Open your eyes, see eye to eye with me/Righteous lives, that’s how we try to be/No disguise, this isn’t Halloween . . .” And with that, Oddio Audwell isn’t trying to make mamasitas move in slow motion this Friday, August 6,…
THU 29 Do the South Beach Diet, Scottsdale-style — martinis and menthol cigarettes (low-carb, low-fat, high-maintenance) — as Sonik magazine and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society present “South Beach,” Thursday, July 29, at Devil’s Martini North Scottsdale, 10825 North Scottsdale Road. Giveaways, gift bags, charity raffles and a balloon pop…
Ongoing “Rising to unimaginable heights” doesn’t just describe summer’s sweat-extracting temperatures. Mere mortals have the opportunity to make like degrees Fahrenheit — and rise — thanks to the certified pilots at Gila Air, who offer introductory flights and lessons to anybody interested in putting 1,000 feet between themselves and the…
John Miranda is not a racist. The 68-year-old former Marine insists he posted a sign reading “For Sale to Whites Only” in front of his Waddell home because he wants to protect future owners of the property from racism. Miranda is leaving his Clearwater Farms neighborhood because he says the…
I admit that I ended up more interested in the audience that came to see The Pirates of Penzance than I was in the show itself. That’s not because there’s nothing to like about this latest Hale Centre Theatre production, which contains some beautiful singing and several nice performances. But…
Jonathan Demme’s gutsy The Manchurian Candidate, which dares to rear its head just after the Democratic National Convention in Boston, is the anti-Bush-administration movie for those who refuse to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 or Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed because, well, they just ain’t Right. It’s less a remake of director…
