Losing His Religion Dressed down in orange corduroys, a stocking cap and ratty blue flannel, Michael Stipe looked less like a pop superstar than a Mill Avenue urchin during the R.E.M. singer’s appearance at a packed book signing at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe on January 29. The tome in…
Zamboni. You either know what it is or you don’t. If you do, then skip the next sentence. The Zamboni is the big machine that drives around an ice rink scraping up a thin layer of used ice and laying down a sheen of water that will soon turn into…
Editor’s note: The names of the victims, their parents and the assailant — a relative of A. Melvin McDonald’s — have been changed. Some details of the crimes are intentionally vague so as to protect those identities. Everyone else named in this story is accurately identified. In 1990, Janet Brooks…
It is May 1994. A standing-room-only crowd, mostly parents, filters into the auditorium of a library in north Scottsdale. They have come to hear a presentation about the state of their children’s education. The evening’s keynote speaker is Janet Martin, a former elementary school teacher and conservative educational activist. Martin,…
Republick My Boots At the Arizona Republic, the survivors may envy the executed. Publisher and CEO John Oppedahl remained comfortably invisible in the days after his cashiering of 60 journalists at a time of record profits for Central Newspapers, Inc., the Republic’s parent company. Oppedahl was no doubt at home…
Prostrate they display themselves in desperate attitudes of boredom . . . smoking cigarettes to kill time. –Baudelaire, Les Salons de 1848 Hey. Yeah, you. I know, you like girls, sure. Young, hot girls–no problem. Young, hot, elegantly dressed girls. Am I right? Okay, then! Give me another second here–what…
No News Is Now News I’ve long been convinced that the Arizona Republic is blatantly biased and skews its coverage of the news to suit its own agenda a la the old Communist newspaper Pravda (“Scenes From a Slaughter,” Amy Silverman, January 23). Now, with the demise of the Phoenix…
Richard Post spent only a few hours in Madison Street Jail, but in Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s penal colony, no stay is too short to avoid abuse. Especially for inmates like Post, who make demands on their captors. For those kinds of troublemakers, Arpaio’s jailers reserve a special form of treatment…
A financial time bomb sits ticking in a Maricopa County file drawer. Among thousands of mundane tax cases and routine lawsuits by county vendors, dozens of claims made by present and former inmates of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s jails threaten to explode. New Times repeatedly has asked the county to provide…
Think of illustrious cartoon teamings and a host of memorable characters springs to mind. Heckle and Jeckle! Fred and Barney! Beavis and Butt-head! Fife and Joe?! Yes, thanks to the magic of computer animation, yet another dynamic duo has entered the cartoon pantheon. And who better to jump out of…
For the last decade of the 116-year life of the Phoenix Gazette, staff–and, perhaps, readers–devoted far more time to conjecture on the newspaper’s impending death than to discussion of its contents. On Monday, January 13, around 9 a.m., Phoenix Newspapers, Inc., CEO and Publisher John Oppedahl announced the mercy killing:…
Still Reeling I didn’t think I would miss M. V. Moorhead’s film reviews, but at least he was concise and interesting. Bring back Moorhead or practice some editing on the wordy bunch New Times now has banging the keys. Carter Youngman via Internet Lost in the Translation In her pathetic…
I would never argue that macrame is the most exciting of art forms. Or that buckets of bleached seashells are something to get excited about. Or that slabs of driftwood should take your breath away. That is, I would never have argued in favor of twine, shells and wood until…
The muscles in Gail Passey-Reed’s back pulse and pop and ripple like a circuit board as she goes through her warm-up stretching routine, flexing her shoulders and arms and stretching her tortured calves on the barre, preparing for rehearsal of her last major dance role with Ballet Arizona. This is…
Self-Interest Can Get Complex The directors of the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission nearly passed stones in November when the Distilled Spirits Council of the U.S. (DISCUS) announced it wanted to end the voluntary ban on TV ads for hard liquor. But U.S. Senator John McCain, who…
1. Donna Hamm, a former Flagstaff justice of the peace, met James Hamm at one of his college classes in prison and subsequently married him. In 1983, the Hamms formed Middle Ground, an inmate-rights advocacy group. 2. In 1974, James Hamm, a former marijuana dealer, shot a Tucson man twice…
Sour Puss Have New Times funsters run out of politicos (past and present) to poke fun at? Can’t find anything funny about Joe or Fife this week? No schoolteachers or cops to pick on? Must be a real slow time of year; that’s got to be the reason Red Meat…
To be perfectly honest, I didn’t do it to uncover the long-hidden cache of rare coins that would send the children that I will probably never have to the finest colleges money can buy. Nor did I do it merely to have just another, hopefully interesting experience to write about…
Imagine a block of Soviet workers’ housing plopped down in central Phoenix, then cloaked in shades of hot pink and aqua. Le Corbusier meets Miami Vice. Imagine four hulking cinder-block-and-glass buildings whose residents live in strict compliance with covenants, codes and restrictions dictating everything from window coverings to doormat placement…
Oscar Fuchslocher first came to the United States from his native Chile in 1989, as an exchange student at Ironwood High School in Glendale. He liked Arizona so much he came back the next year, this time as a visitor on a six-month visa. The visa was renewed, but eventually…
Don’t Bogart That Law The federal government’s vow to crack down on Arizona doctors who dare prescribe cannabis leaves us with one burning question: Where is Governor J. Fife Symington III’s Constitutional Defense Council when you need it? The CDC, you’ll recall, was established a couple of years ago for…
Rock visionary Steve Miller once wrote that “Time keeps on slipping into the future.” He couldn’t have been more correct. Time is, in fact, barreling like a son of a gun toward the end of the millennium, a mere three years into the future. The countdown has begun, and Something…
