@body:After seeing the work in “South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination” at Phoenix Art Museum, if I knew nothing about Mexican art history, I would have to conclude that all American artists who traveled to Mexico between 1914 and 1947 were required to undergo frontal lobotomies before…
@body:After seeing the work in “South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination” at Phoenix Art Museum, if I knew nothing about Mexican art history, I would have to conclude that all American artists who traveled to Mexico between 1914 and 1947 were required to undergo frontal lobotomies before…
Abel Ferrara’s movies combine self-conscious tawdriness with unconscious tawdriness. He’s fascinated by self-destructive excess, by obsessive, addictive behavior, by characters who willfully wreck themselves with drugs and booze and sexual degradation. Like many filmmakers with an attraction to this subject matter–the early Scorsese, for instance–Ferrara insists that such behavior has…
Daniel Day-Lewis is one of those rare actors who might be called consummate, yet he is not visibly self-congratulatory while working. He’s created a gallery of characters–the crippled, cosmically outraged Christy Brown in My Left Foot, the tuxedoed waxwork Cyril in A Room With a View, the fairy-tale hero Hawkeye…
Abel Ferrara’s movies combine self-conscious tawdriness with unconscious tawdriness. He’s fascinated by self-destructive excess, by obsessive, addictive behavior, by characters who willfully wreck themselves with drugs and booze and sexual degradation. Like many filmmakers with an attraction to this subject matter–the early Scorsese, for instance–Ferrara insists that such behavior has…
Abel Ferrara’s movies combine self-conscious tawdriness with unconscious tawdriness. He’s fascinated by self-destructive excess, by obsessive, addictive behavior, by characters who willfully wreck themselves with drugs and booze and sexual degradation. Like many filmmakers with an attraction to this subject matter–the early Scorsese, for instance–Ferrara insists that such behavior has…
Daniel Day-Lewis is one of those rare actors who might be called consummate, yet he is not visibly self-congratulatory while working. He’s created a gallery of characters–the crippled, cosmically outraged Christy Brown in My Left Foot, the tuxedoed waxwork Cyril in A Room With a View, the fairy-tale hero Hawkeye…
Daniel Day-Lewis is one of those rare actors who might be called consummate, yet he is not visibly self-congratulatory while working. He’s created a gallery of characters–the crippled, cosmically outraged Christy Brown in My Left Foot, the tuxedoed waxwork Cyril in A Room With a View, the fairy-tale hero Hawkeye…
Blink is a thriller of that minigenre of disabled-women-in-peril, to which belong Wait Until Dark and last year’s lame Hear No Evil and Richard Fleischer’s hair-raising See No Evil. This time the differently abled damsel in distress is Madeleine Stowe as a Chicago woman, blind since childhood, who receives a…
Blink is a thriller of that minigenre of disabled-women-in-peril, to which belong Wait Until Dark and last year’s lame Hear No Evil and Richard Fleischer’s hair-raising See No Evil. This time the differently abled damsel in distress is Madeleine Stowe as a Chicago woman, blind since childhood, who receives a…
Blink is a thriller of that minigenre of disabled-women-in-peril, to which belong Wait Until Dark and last year’s lame Hear No Evil and Richard Fleischer’s hair-raising See No Evil. This time the differently abled damsel in distress is Madeleine Stowe as a Chicago woman, blind since childhood, who receives a…
Recently, the Tucson Police Department’s child-abuse detail confiscated artwork by local artist-photographer Robyn Stoutenburg from the city’s downtown Gallery Six & 13–without a validly executed search warrant. Twelve of the artist’s photographs were seized after the principal of an adjacent middle school complained of the propriety and accessibility of the…
I’ll be honest. “Too Late for Goya,” the multimedia exhibition of Spain-born artist Francesc Torres currently showing at ASU Art Museum, is not for the politically or philosophically impaired. If the only thing you know about Hegel is that it rhymes with “bagel,” if the only Marx you’re familiar with…
If artist Frances Whitehead had lived in 16th-century Europe, she probably would have been burned at the stake for being a witch. Whitehead’s sculptural installations, which can be seen at Scottsdale’s Lisa Sette Gallery in an exhibition titled “The Dream,” use unorthodox botanical materials classically associated with ancient divination and…
You can’t miss the funky, Thirties motor court next to Shep’s Liquor on Main Street in downtown Cottonwood. Hallucinogenic folk art on its front porch makes your head swirl and throb, like a recurrent acid flashback. Someone has turned the first four units into an artist’s studio, but often, there’s…
Governor Fife Symington’s much-ballyhooed Forestry Summit, which begins today, has taken on the trappings of a true blue-blood affair. Billed as an “excellent opportunity” for Arizona’s citizens to learn about and contribute to the continuing debate on management of the state’s sprawling national forests, the three-day conference at El Zaribah…
Zane Johnston gestures toward the .38-caliber pistol he carries in a worn leather holster on his hip and says, “The Bureau of Rec thinks I carry this for them. But I don’t. I carry it for varmints.” In Johnston’s book, a varmint is only a small notch above the U.S…
On first hearing, the tale sounds like a standard-issue urban legend. Guy goes to Vegas. Guy meets hooker. Guy gets fleeced. But there are elements to this particular version of the old story that saved it from Jan Brunvand’s heap of mythological scraps. (Brunvand, a professor at the University of…
If a part-time Maricopa County judge has his way, chronic shoplifter Rhonda Mecham will have a much harder time satisfying her confessed “habit” in the future. That’s because of an unusual sentencing provision that pro tem Superior Court Judge Joel Thompson says he designed to notify area retailers about Mecham’s…
“It looks like no man’s land here,” says Alisa Gray as she peers through the razor-wire fence at 21st Avenue south of McDowell Road. On one side of the street, storage tanks for an asphalt plant drip and percolate; I-10 whizzes overhead, held up by giant pillars. Beneath the expressway:…
The man in the Mazda RX-7 pulled over to the side of the road and waited. For almost 14 years, John Carpenter had prayed this day wouldn’t come. It was about 6 a.m. on June 1, 1992, in the south Los Angeles suburb of Carson. Carpenter, then 63, had been…
Always borrowing, American artists are the greatest cultural debtors on Earth. And few among them owe the world more than potters do. Over the years, potters have rummaged the cupboards of virtually every mud-baking civilization–often extending their slippery reaches overseas and into the grave–to come up with what we like…
