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...
The Pink Cat slumps on a folding chair in a makeshift dressing room at Phoenix Civic Plaza. The small cuts beneath his eyes sting, his hands ache, his arms throb. But Scott Walker's pride hurts worse than his body. He heard the boos and the derisive meows from the small...
With the exception of the Western, the vampire movie may just be the most durable of all genres. It's produced everything from cinematic masterpieces like Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1932) and F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) to indelible pop-culture classics like Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) to lesser interpretations without number. Just...
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...
True or false? Reverend Oscar Tillman is a civil rights opportunist in the flamboyant tradition of New York's Al Sharpton. Yes or no? Phoenix Police Chief Ruben Ortega looks the other way when his officers abuse Valley blacks. A six-week investigation by Phoenix city manager Frank Fairbanks was supposed to...
We at New Times did not tell the truth. Was it deceptive? Of course it was deceptive. Was it unethical? Welllll . . . let's talk about that. Under my instruction, New Times writer David Koen called State Senator Jan Brewer, and during each of the three phone interviews Koen...
Second of a series You might say that Ambrose McCree is obsessed with the beating handed out to Rodney King by the Los Angeles police. A retired California truck driver, McCree spent March 14 at the Los Angeles City Council's open forum investigation of the videotaped assault. "I just, I...
After 1 in the morning on May 1, as the off-duty police officers moonlighting as security guards cleared the parking lot of the Roxy, as 100 or so mostly black youths filed out of the club, there was a fluttering of automatic gunfire and a squeal of tires. When the...
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...
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"...
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...
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...
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...
Even before she became very ill, Esther Perla was taking una de gato twice a day. Without it, she thinks, things would have gone downhill much faster. For this she thanks her mother, a part-time distributor and full-time believer in the curative powers of herbs and natural products like garlic...
Anna Ott was a youngster whose troubles nestled into the souls of friends and strangers alike. At the age of 2, her arms and legs were amputated that she might survive a rare and pernicious disease. In this precarious state, 5-year-old Anna did not even have the comfort of her...
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...
Sometimes a man's got to do what a man's got to do. Fifty weeks a year I suppress all the instincts that Freud warned us about. Instead, I sublimate them through dutiful rounds of household activities: shopping for groceries, cleaning the pool and chauffeuring the kids. But every six months...
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...
"Give me the luxuries," said Oscar Wilde, "and I will dispense with the necessities." We recently put Wilde's theory to the test at two of the Valley's poshest eateries. Each features an entrepreneurial young chef with a national reputation. And both will inflict a king-size beating on your wallet. At...
What price faded glory? Plenty. This summer, a recession-plagued public has shaken its collective head in disbelief over the jaw-dropping sums paid for a couple of well-publicized pop-culture artifacts. Several weeks ago, when 1946 Oscar winner Harold Russell put his statuette for The Best Years of Our Lives on the...
