Vassiliy Jirov is on his own. Jirov, the International Boxing Federation cruiserweight champion of the world, is working without a trainer and without a sparring partner, shadowboxing in a makeshift boxing ring hidden in the back of the AZ Fitness gym in Mesa. For the past two years, Jirov's been...
String Being Name dropper: Thanks for Gilbert Garcia's exposé on the Valley's most famous guitarist ("The Tao of Estéban," September 21). I studied guitar in Spain for a couple of years back in the mid-1980s under one of Andrés Segovia's former students. I am aware of the respect and high...
When Michelle Bailey got pregnant two years ago, she was thrilled. Newly married, making good money at a company that had named her "Employee of the Year" just months before, she was living in a brand-new home in a family-friendly subdivision in Gilbert.But she was reluctant to tell her bosses...
When a show is billed so grandly as to be called a "revolutionary reincarnation" of a classic musical, it's wise to be skeptical. After all, Phoenix is the sort of theater town that every now and then plays host to bus and truck companies of huge Broadway shows like Titanic,...
Much has been made of the renaissance composer Burt Bacharach has been enjoying as of late. The Maestro's sudden resurgence is the result of a number of high-profile collaborations and media appearances, and a new retro craze that has put the work of classic '60s tunesmiths on a pedestal. But...
It was the best of years; it was the Durst of years. Of the latter, well, Jim Dandy once had his moment in the sun, too, and the critics were right all along: Black Oak Arkansas sucked, the stoned morons who were into the band eventually grew up (or died...
There are many, many productive paths a bright, ambitious young fellow can pursue in America. He can, for instance, start a mediocre rock band and try to make music for beer commercials. He can also design a Web site to advertise Web sites about Web sites. Or there's always the...
It's a pleasure to say that Clint Eastwood reverses his recent downward slide -- A Perfect World (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Absolute Power (1997), and True Crime (1999), each of which has seemed less satisfying than its predecessor -- with Space Cowboys, his latest. It isn't an...
Success is relative in Hollywood, like a third cousin twice-removed who doesn't recognize you at family reunions, and doesn't care to. Fame is so fleeting it has a month-by-month lease. Six years ago, Christopher McQuarrie was as famous as any screenwriter on the backlot known as Los Angeles. He had...
As you know, the Moon is in the Seventh House, and Jupiter aligns with Mars, which means you'll find, in the reviews below, synchronistic synergies and cosmic cross-wiring that reveal which music released during the astrological sign The Love Supreme you should love supremely. Meditate upon the cosmic connections, my...
Director Alison Maclean, from Canada by way of New Zealand, turns her camera on the American landscape -- or, more accurately, the underbelly of the American landscape -- in Jesus' Son, an uneven, but often effective, adaptation of Denis Johnson's autobiographical book. Billy Crudup stars as a thoroughly marginalized character...
She sank in 1912, but she keeps sailing on. The White Star Line's Titanic, either the last great tragedy of 19th-century imperial hubris or the first great tragedy of technological hubris, has sailed through innumerable books, at least three movies -- one of them the magnum chick flick of all...
So the New Times music editor calls up to inform me of a couple tribute bands playing at some horrible yuppie hellhole in Scottsdale. "Tributes" to Van Halen and Mötley Crüe called Atomic Punks and Shout at the Devil, respectively. Like I care. I hate tribute bands on principle. They...
When stars get popular enough (or win enough Oscars), they begin to get to call their own shots. Thus we have The Big Kahuna, the debut release of Kevin Spacey's production company. Kahuna also marks the film debut of stage director John Swanbeck and screenwriter Roger Rueff. And, boy, can...
I never imagined the day would come when I would cringe to see Ralph Fiennes on screen. Not only is he shamelessly good-looking, but, whether playing the brooding, remote figure doomed by love in The English Patient or the bloodless commandant of a Nazi death camp in Schindler's List, he...
It is difficult to reconcile American perceptions of Iran, a rigidly authoritarian Islamic fundamentalist society, with the captivating and compassionate films that emanate from the country. Most of these pictures, including the 1995 Cannes Film Festival Camera d'Or winner The White Balloon and the 1998 Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar nominee...
Nick Park speaks so softly that the tape recorder barely registers him at all. His is a whisper of a voice, the sound of a man who has spent years in isolation talking to no one but himself. Transcribing an interview with him is like trying to decipher a man's...
Boys Don't Cry hasn't garnered the kind of box-office returns you'd expect from an Oscar winner. That's understandable. No matter its brilliance, the film's pallor of rural white trash dysfunction was probably too unsettling for that cash-cow megaplex demographic. After all, it was, as the Sunday Herald in Scotland recently...
"There aren't many Mexican cowboys here tonight," says playwright Guillermo Reyes, with a hint of sardonic disappointment in his voice. A glance around the room affirms his observation. One lone cowboy sits at the bar, complete with 10-gallon hat and dusty boots. The rest of the cramped, humid dance floor...
In place of a bio, Elliott Smith's press kit features two documents: a time line of important events and a selection of his own sound bites from articles written about him. This much we know about Smith: He moved to Portland at age 14, made his first solo album in...
The idea that we are each separated by no more than six acquaintances has become more commonplace than the play, Six Degrees of Separation, which popularized the notion. John Guare's oft-produced one-act (which is, amazingly, making its local debut with this Phoenix Theatre production) is a masterwork of dark comedy...
Trunk Federation Lay the Hip (Plastique Recording Co.) That Trunk Federation even managed to get together and put out a third album after a year of dissolution, defections and personal problems is amazing enough. That Lay the Hip turns out to be their best effort to date is nothing short...
