Rumor(s): The Gin Blossoms have broken up; the Gin Blossoms have decided to release one more album and then break up; the Gin Blossoms will never play in public again. True or false: Tough call. Several Tempe sources close to the band say consistently that the Gin Blossoms are together...
Che Bella Tuscan Grill & Bakery, Biltmore Fashion Park, 24th Street and Camelback, Phoenix, 956-5705. Hours: Lunch and Dinner, Sunday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to midnight. What comes to mind when you think about improving the Valley's quality of life? Reliable mass...
During the opening day of the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Texas, where Kim Fowley is still revered and everyone gets a backstage pass for a weekend, Randy Newman sat uncomfortably on a stage in the Austin Convention Center's ballroom. He was there ostensibly to promote...
If Pee-wee Herman ever participates in a bicycle rodeo on Mars, it's a cinch his entry won't hold a candle to the unidentified non-flying object that's been keeping Valley motorists guessing for the past several years. A souped-up cardboard cabin attached to a bicycle frame, the winged craft is hard...
thursday july 18 Kim Abeles: The work of this talented Californian gives new meaning to the term "environmental art." Best known for her "smog" series--which utilizes man's pollutants to comment on mankind's folly--Abeles is also adept at assemblage, drawing and welding, and her creations are generally knockouts whether they're bite-size...
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: "When the gods wish to punish us, they grant our prayers." For the past two seasons, I have been thumping a drum, decrying the decreased relevance of theatre to contemporary culture. Now, In Mixed Company has taken me at my word and is presenting a play...
Like Dead Man Walking, Last Dance is about a bond that forms between a death-row inmate and a concerned outsider. This time around, however, the genders are switched: The prisoner (Sharon Stone) is a woman and her visitor is a man (Rob Morrow). Proximity to the release of Dead Man...
Darlene and Jerry Span have suffered so, I am reluctant to write optimistically about them. I fear that if I mention the one uncontestably good thing that has happened to the Spans in the past few years, I will anger the gods of legal minutia, who might then rain dozens...
A recreational-drug user since the late Sixties, my friend Skippy is a man who likes his pills. So I wasn't exactly surprised when, grinning from ear to ear, he triumphantly whipped out a bottle of the prescription muscle relaxer Soma. What did surprise me was his explanation of how he...
Attorney General Grant Woods and County Attorney Richard Romley collided at opposing press conferences last Wednesday, slamming together like a pair of sumo wrestlers with microphones sandwiched between their sweaty haunches. The sound from the slap of angry flesh inspired alarmed stories in the daily press and endless argument on...
thursday may 2 Saguaro Film Festival 3: Arizona Film Society's annual showcase of independent works opens with a reception for the filmmakers at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 2, at Planet Hollywood, located at Biltmore Fashion Park, 24th Street and Camelback. A screening of director Carmen Santa Maria's farce I Crave...
Safely ensconced in its comfortable new home in a strip mall at 99th Avenue and Peoria Avenue, Theater Works is presenting Robert Bolt's turgid, talky historical pageant A Man for All Seasons. In its new location, the theatre has painstakingly reproduced the exact layout of the bucolic barn it previously...
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde began life when Robert Louis Stevenson, living in Edinburgh and broke, wrote the story as a potboiler. It's said that the original draft so horrified his wife that he burned it and then--in a fit of commercial savvy--rewrote it. He structured the story as a...
It's an hour after serial knockout artist Julio Cesar Chavez has made Mesa's Scott "Pink Cat" Walker his latest victim. Walker is wandering around Caesars Palace in Las Vegas with his girlfriend, looking little the worse for wear. He tries his hand at a $1 slot, but his luck with...
thursday march 21 Cactus League Baseball: They struck out in 1995, but the real boys of spring are back for this year's slate of preseason games, which continues daily, through Friday, March 29, at venues in the Valley and Tucson. For the schedule and other information, see the "Cactus League"...
Silly Rabbit Dust (Orphan Boy) The experimental rockers in Silly Rabbit make it one of the most danceable groups to emerge from Seattle's postgrunge wasteland. This eight-piece urban groove machine consists of guitars, sequencers, an unstoppable rhythm section and something called a psychedelic illuminator (an elaborate, lighting-video rig designed to...
thursday march 14 Cactus League Baseball: They struck out in 1995, but the real boys of spring are back for this year's slate of preseason games, which continues daily, through Friday, March 29, at venues in the Valley and Tucson. For the schedule and other information, see the "Cactus League"...
Marsell Ector just wanted to buy a pair of Timberland boots at Dillard's in Mesa. But according to Ector and several witnesses, a security guard at Dillard's Fiesta Mall location gave him a boot of a different kind--right out of the store. Ector, 24, says he was hounded, harassed and...
Le Sans Souci, 7030 East Bella Vista Drive, Cave Creek, 488-2856. Hours: Lunch, Tuesday through Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Dinner, Tuesday through Sunday, 5to 10 p.m. Guys have a hard time dealing with Valentine's Day. A simple, sincere "I love you," uttered...
Halvor Elvik wants balloons. The Norwegian foreign correspondent has jetted to Phoenix after covering President Clinton's State of the Union address, and he's been instructed to submit an article about the building excitement for the city's first Super Bowl. It will be Elvik's first Super Bowl, as well. And he...
Writer-director Tim Robbins' Dead Man Walking is about a man awaiting execution, and the suffering and hope and reconciliation connected to his crime. The heroine, Sister Helen Prejean (Susan Sarandon), is a New Orleans nun who counsels Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn), a death-row inmate at Angola State Prison. Despite a...
An Interstate 17 rest stop under cloudy February skies. Tourists get out of cars to stretch their legs and buy snacks from vending machines. Others let their dogs out to squat near a scenic overlook. Nobody pays much attention to the ten militia members conferring at one of the circular...
