My original New Year’s Eve plan was to be in Redondo Beach, California, to see a rare solo performance by Beach Boy legend Brian Wilson. In my naiveté, I thought that ringing in the new millennium with a concert by a man whose music has been a symbol of all…
St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, the pyramids of Giza and the breathy night glow of Sydney, Australia, all flashed in brilliant kaleidoscopic glory on CNN’s millennial report. In my brother’s pint-inspired phone report from the River Thames, he describes Queen Elizabeth II floating past, resembling “a cardboard prop-up of the…
Can there be another city in the state, or even the country, that would organize a massive public New Year’s party, invest in it heavily, and then scare the citizens out of attending? It is New Year’s Eve, and people are frightened. In the afternoon, the Albertsons at 16th Street…
MAR Attacks The Flash has digested the first few issues of the fresh, new and improved, repurposed, redesigned, revised, glorified, fortified, sportified, mortified, metamorphed Millennial Arizona Republic. The MAR reminds me of something Pete Townshend said: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” The lyric is uniquely apropos…
If He Only Had a Brain Called onstage to accept the “Key to Munchkinland” during a June performance of The Wizard of Oz starring Mickey Rooney and Jo Anne Worley, Phoenix Mayor Skip Rimsza told a Grady Gammage Auditorium audience: “Politicians and actors do have something in common — we…
“Fear is your greatest salesman” was once the rallying cry of insurance vendors the world over. But in the case of this anti-cataclysmic New Year’s, fear seemed more like a broken promise. Fear wasn’t the reason ticket sales for everything from Phoenix Celebration 2000 to the Judds reunion concert to…
Carr Crash The Arizona Democratic party’s downward spiral continues. While party chairman Mark Fleisher was making national headlines with the news that Arizona will be the first state to use Internet voting in March’s presidential primary — a terrible idea, in my opinion, given that the party can hardly get…
In the past three years, the rate of gang homicides in Phoenix has skyrocketed by nearly 90 percent. In 1996, street gang members killed nine people. In 1997, 11 people were murdered by gangs. In 1998, the last year for which statistics are available, 17 people died at the hands…
He is a gangbanger, a drug dealer and a devoted father, and when he goes to buy coke from the Sinaloans, he always leaves his gun in the car. He says one .45 would do little good against the men on the other side of the duplex door. This door…
Lambert Ormsby is graduating with the Mesa High School class of 2000. He’ll be only one of about 800 students donning the cap and gown next spring, and, at 21, he’ll be at least three years older than most of the other graduates. But if it’s taken him longer than…
Editor’s note: In October, New Times published the first in a series of stories about gang problems in the neighborhood known as Las Cuatro Milpas (The Four Fields), which is situated southeast of downtown Phoenix. Many residents believed the stories — which focused on a ruthless faction of the Eastside…
More than 20 years ago, in an unparalleled community effort, Mesa residents built the Little Adobe Schoolhouse, an authentic reproduction of Mesa’s original one-room school. It was a labor of love that served as a grassroots bicentennial project. Some 28,000 schoolchildren donated pennies and other change to fund the project…
Eighty-year-old William Armstrong sat still as a rock at the Baptist Foundation of Arizona creditors hearing in the grand ballroom of the downtown Hyatt on December 21. Armstrong and about 1,200 other mostly elderly BFA investors attended the routine bankruptcy court proceeding to learn when, and if, they’d ever recover…
Adapting Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park for the screen was never a life’s ambition for filmmaker Patricia Rozema. “It would never have crossed my mind,” she says. The project came her way as a commission, in the midst of the Austen fever that still held Hollywood in its grip a couple…
The young man at the end of the pew is a professional car thief. Law enforcement also recognizes him as a cocaine user and a drug peddler. Yet here he sits in church, a child of God as much as you or your neighbor. He accepted Jesus while locked up…
On September 30, 1998, Perry Mitchell’s supervisors at Maricopa County Superior Court evaluated him: “Perry is well positioned to lead the further expansion of Pretrial Services, planned for the next few years, and his future with the court is very bright!” One year later, however, things changed drastically for Mitchell,…
Here’s why you should be skeptical about what Graham Berry and Robert Cipriano say about the Church of Scientology: Berry’s been after the church for years, and he makes no secret of his desire to litigate the 45-year-old organization to its knees. An eloquent, New Zealand-born attorney who lives in…
Steven took his first punch on the playground at Mitchell Elementary School in west Phoenix. He was five. He didn’t defend himself, because his assailant was a sixth-grade girl, and Steven was taught never to hit girls. So he lay bleeding while his older sister walloped the girl. Growing up,…
It was a bad idea, poorly executed, and north Phoenix was the perfect setting. Land of franchised illusions, where on Saturday, December 4, Phoenix Studio 54 celebrated its grand opening in a strip mall on Bell Road. It’s an epoch away from the west side of Manhattan — 254 West…
Russell Hamblin’s black 1998 Honda Civic was still dripping with suds and water when the other car rolled up to the near-deserted Chandler car wash late on the evening of September 7. The clean and shiny late-model sedan may have seemed the perfect score for members of a roaming street…
Dozens of Valley residents have been killed or injured in the past decade as gang violence has spread beyond fights between gang members. A New Times review of reports of such incidents shows at least 62 innocent bystanders have been hurt or killed as the result of gang crimes. There…
Marriage on the Boulders When police were called in to squelch that boozy domestic battle between C.C. Goldwater-Hedley (that’s Barry’s granddaughter to you) and husband Anthony Hedley late last month, local gossip-mongers couldn’t get enough of the juicy details. According to newspaper accounts of the torrid tiff, trouble started when…
