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Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash

It seems everyone wants a piece of the Johnny Cash legacy these days. In 2005, Walk the Line chronicled the country music legend's life, scoring Reese Witherspoon an Oscar for her role as June Carter Cash and Joaquin Phoenix a Best Actor nod for his portrayal of the Man in...
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Teatro Bravo’s Little Queen Proves Katie McFadzen Can Play

I've been working on a list of people or things that Katie McFadzen possibly can't play. Here's what I have so far: a pencil sharpener; Stalin; a venereal disease. But don't quote me on any of these, because it's likely that next month she'll show up on a local stage...
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Roots Seller

A few years back, Dane Cook was damned near unstoppable. His 2005 album Retaliation debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard Top 200 chart, eventually going double platinum to become the most successful comedy album since Steve Martin’s 1978 juggernaut A Wild and Crazy Guy. Then the backlash began, along...
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Seven Nights of DJs & Dancing

THURSDAY 9 AZ/88: Mark V (rare groove, trip-hop) Bikini Lounge: INTOXICA! with DJ HFE (blues, R&B, rock, rarities, vintage) Bobby Q's: All-Star Thursdays (hip-hop) Bunkhouse: DJ Doom (dance) Cherry Lounge: Scandalous Thursday with DJ Juan Rocha (house, electronica) Club Red: The Blunt Club with DJ Element, Pickster Uno, & more...
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Loretta Lynn Plays the Classics at Celebrity

It's been five years since Loretta Lynn's Grammy-winning collaboration with Jack White but it seemed even longer at last night's Celebrity Theatre show, where the Van Lear Rose era seemed long forgotten. Sure, a few curious hipsters made their way down to the show, but, for the most part it...
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Loretta Lynn Is a Legend, but She’s Also Just Plain Kind

Put simply, Loretta Lynn is the "Queen of Country Music." The just-turned-74 singer occupies rarefied air in the pantheon of country musicians, and deservedly so. She's enjoyed a slew of chart-topping hits since the early '60s, including "Don't Come Home A- Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)," "One's on the...
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Dumpster Dining: For Freegans, Eating Garbage Is Getting Downright Trendy

On a Wednesday night, four people are gathering boxes of vegetables from a dumpster behind an organic foods market near Scottsdale. The scavengers — four 20-somethings known as John Greentree, Ghost, Dee Dee, and Mr. Pink — have dumpster-dived here numerous times before. They've already put several boxes in the...
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Away We Go: Dave Eggers Makes His Screenwriting Debut

Midway through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers' solipsistic, terminally-apologetic-for-being-solipsistic portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-slacker-messiah, the author, upon interviewing to become a cast member of MTV's The Real World, makes the following observation about his generation of self-obsessed, media-savvy technobrats: "These are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially irrational,...
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The River Wild

Okkervil River's new release, The Stage Names (Jagjaguwar), was created with an eye to fun and frivolity (per notes from songwriting frontman Will Sheff). Lucky us! 'Cause the lyrics — featuring suicidal poets and porn stars, burned-out man-children and their shut-down lovers — could really harsh one's mellow otherwise. Musically,...
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Peter Pans Head for the Strip in Todd Phillips’ The Hangover

What Fletch was to plaid-checked water-cooler wits in the '80s, what National Lampoon's Van Wilder was to college-bound douches at the dawn of Dubya, that's what 2003's Old School is to Gen-X frat rats — a secret-handshake movie. A shaggy, intermittently hilarious wish-fulfillment nightmare about sorta dissatisfied, sorta middle-aged dudesters...
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Notes on a Scandal

Considering its high profile as both play and film, it wouldn’t be unfair to assume that everyone knows that Frost/Nixon is about the series of televised interviews between former President Richard Nixon and talk-show personality David Frost. Even people too young to recall the interviews, which aired in this country...
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‘Idol’ Keeps it Classy With Rat Pack Week

Think she's got one more week left in her?So before we review last night's episode, can we please discuss the guest judges or the celebrity mentors or whatever they're calling them this season? They started out making sense, with Randy Travis and Smokey Robinson. But for the past couple of...
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Green Party

Joe Biden was installed as Vice President. Danny Boyle won the Academy Award for Best Director. Mickey Rourke wrestled his demons to the mat, and almost snatched an Oscar himself. Conan O’Brien is about to take over The Tonight Show. Amid all the other high-profile racial and ethnic gains in...
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Phoenix Fires It Up, Yo

A couple of years ago, my friends and I attempted to start a Dilettante Society, where each week one of us would pick an activity of topics we had some talent in or some knowledge about and teach the other members of the group. It never took off because, well,...