This month Gumbo dips into the mailbox and answers those cosmic questions regarding jazz and blues. But first, a little press for those jazzers whose lives reached the expiration date. From the label that reissued the entire Monkees catalogue comes two remastered John Coltrane albums, Coltrane Plays the Blues and...
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...
I am Vlad the Impaler, Joe Eszterhas' penis. You know Joe, right? Bigfoot-looking son of a bitch, like Jerry Garcia after he swallowed Brian Wilson on an Acapulco Gold high? The guy who wrote Basic Instinct and Showgirls and Flashdance and a whole lotta crap for which he was paid...
Members of the Liar's Club sit and stare plaintively into their drinks. You'd think they were contemplating some recent run of emotional trauma and bad luck, the death of a loved one, the witnessing of a car crash. Or you'd guess, perhaps, that they are stoned. Couldn't they say something?...
Larry Pohorily thought mortician Mark Eisenhour was playing some sort of sick joke. What Eisenhour told him on the phone couldn't be true. Pohorily drove to the funeral home, wanting to see the corpse for himself. Eisenhour met Pohorily at the door, then led him back into the embalming room...
Peering over the lid of a burbling Crockpot inside the Maricopa County Medical Examiner's Office, Dr. Laura Fulginiti appears for a moment as the housewife she never was, despite the skeleton earrings hanging from each of her lobes. Clutching a pair of metal tongs, Fulginiti tenderly fishes out a human...
The lights are dim, and shadows hide the speaker's face. The voice is thin and strained. The tape is rolling and the confession begins. This isn't a Frosted Flakes commercial, and it isn't Oprah. This is someone who eats for sex, a seeker of aphrodisiacs. Some people will eat anything...
As I swing open the heavy, carved wooden door to the West Valley Art Museum in Surprise, the odd juxtaposition of the serene paintings of Phoenix's own 92-year-old Philip Curtis with the in-your-face artwork of 78-year-old Leonard Baskin throws me completely off guard. I've come to see "Leonard Baskin: The...
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...
Garry Shandling does not have a face for the big screen. He has a mug that seems to spread to the edges of the theater; it's like an approaching storm front, a sky full of billowing clouds roaring in from the north. And it's a face built for two emotions:...
"You know, the negative stuff we're not really talking about," says an MCA Records PR flack prior to connecting me with Tommy Lee. "We are primarily focusing on Methods of Mayhem; the shows, the new record, Tommy and what he's worked for this record and what he's been through as...
The driver at the Burbank International Airport opens the rear door to his cab and I hop in. He slides into the front seat, puts it into gear and pulls out. Moving toward the airport exit, I tell him the name of my hotel. We turn north and roll toward...
At three in the morning, I saw her drunk, writhing around on this fat guy. I looked through the window and there they were, starting to go at it on the chair in her living room. My head suddenly became small and roared as its capillaries swelled like red balloons...
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...
By somehow sidestepping cheap Wendy O. Williams connect-the-dot punk-rock jive, the black electrical tape over the shouter's nipples worked. The trashy and busted-up way in which she carried herself across the stage, too, lurking, at once stiff and sinuous, was equal parts Iggy, peepshow barker and Nazi femme dom. Her...
Am I a traitor to my gender because I didn't find this unabashed film about female sexuality erotic, brave, or even -- can I say it -- interesting? The ironically titled Romance, directed by the audacious French filmmaker Catherine Breillat (36 Fillette), has become something of a cause célèbre wherever...
Since the last time our vainglorious vanguards of verbiage joined forces, each was cooling his head at home, listening to trusted old favorites in an effort to drive any lingering trace of the Puff Daddy/Christopher Cross merger out of his mind. Bill Blake was busily extricating the pristine jewel cases...
In the early Sixties, long before words like radical and counterculture would become bland marketing doublespeak for rap groups and chain stores, a handful of beat college and FM stations around the country started freeform radio programming. The radio stations employed self-ruling DJs who eschewed starch-shirted formats and championed sounds...
Kevin Bacon is talking about his penis. It's not his fault -- not exactly, anyway. Bacon didn't bring it up, so to speak. He never does, at least not in public. He's just trying to promote his latest film, the small, supernatural thriller Stir of Echoes. But here he is...
So what would it be like to cab around the city with a record-company weasel, a couple of writers, a punk-rock singer, a porn-PR pro and an adult-film star wielding a large bong in a box? An irony-rich ride more fun than a pop-up Popsicle, Daddy-O. A cab ride that...
I know the scarcity of local summer stock has gotten to me when I find myself driving to Peoria to watch one of our most amateurish amateur companies take a stab at a sophisticated British farce. Not having seen any theater at all in several weeks, I risked Theater Works'...
