THU 7 Got a gamer roommate who’s hijacked your TV? Don’t fret. Our advice: Feed his compulsion for escapism with a ticket to the Arizona State Fair, where your Mountain Dew-chugging, Cheetos-eating, entranced-by-the-incomparable-graphics-of-“Soul Calibur II” roomie will be in Xbox ecstasy as GameRiot, “the world’s largest traveling video games festival…
Essayist. Playwright. Radio personality. Librettist. Actor. Novelist. Now, with Bright Young Things, the inimitable British wit Stephen Fry debuts as feature screenwriter and director. Best known here in the colonies either as Jeeves (opposite Hugh Laurie) in Jeeves and Wooster, or as Peter in Peter’s Friends, or possibly as Oscar…
Imagine it’s a weekday morning, and you’re at a trade conference in Finland. You’re sleepy, maybe a little jet-lagged, as you prepare for the next speaker. He’s a representative from the World Trade Organization, and he has come to talk to you about “The Future of Textiles.” First, he presents…
10/7-10/31 By now, we’ve been inundated by so much rigmarole surrounding “Decision 2004,” we’re more likely to pull a trigger come November than a voting-booth lever. Since we’re facing (at least) another month of political Bushwhacking, we’ll Kerry on to “Word on the Street: Politics Unusual,” a collective exhibition by…
Thu 10/7 Naysayers might’ve dismissed kickball as an elementary sport meant for sports washouts like yourself. But it was your only shot at playground immortality back in the day. Remember how your awesome 6-4-3 double play helped turn the tide in the epic Shirts vs. Skins war? You never worried…
Thu 10/7 As long as U2 continues to churn out rock anthems, the guys in tribute band Elevation have a bright future ahead. So bright, in fact, that Elevation front man Dan Burrow — a.k.a. “Danno,” a.k.a. Bono onstage — has invested a few thousand dollars in Bulgari shades, à…
When the presidential debate rolls into Tempe next week, Yaser Alamoodi, a 27-year-old political science major from Saudi Arabia, almost certainly won’t be in attendance. And not just because Arizona State University, which is hosting the event, is limiting the number of seats available to ASU students. Apparently, because he’s…
The nice folks at the Shakespeare Theatre have had the courage and temerity to attempt playwright Peter Weiss’ The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. It is, as you might imagine from…
There are at least three movies contained within the covers of H.G. Bissinger’s best-selling 1990 nonfiction book Friday Night Lights. One is concerned with the socioeconomic life of a small west Texas town built on the wobbly foundations of oil and racism and the out-of-whack worship of a high school…
Maybe it’s the mark of a great film that it can affect an audience member even when he sleeps through the entire thing. Such was the case with my father at a recent preview of David O. Russell’s I ♥ Huckabees, a philosophy lecture masquerading as a comedy in which…
Tweener fave Hilary Duff effortlessly maintains her wholesome image in Raise Your Voice, a coming-of-age drama (what else would you expect when the star is all of 16?) that is being marketed as a kind of updated Fame. Whereas director Alan Parker’s popular 1980 musical was set at Manhattan’s prestigious…
Prescott artist Paula Burr couldn’t help but to gawk at her own breasts. “Yeah, I stared at them for a long time,” the 26-year-old photographer admits. “I was just like, ‘Wow, those are my boobs.'” There they were, in a plaster cast mold, just waiting for some attention after Burr…
It’d be easy to paint L.A.’s Bob Bellerue and Adam Overton into a corner as members of the bohemian art set, clad in smocks and berets and a palette in hand. But you won’t see paintbrushes in their hands. In fact, you’ll never see their art, period. Bellerue and Overton…
Sat 10/9 If all that vanilla’s drying out your taste buds, try a taste of the Icehouse’s Fetish Ball II on Saturday, October 9, which promises a salacious exhibition of fire dancers, whipping demos, fetish fashion shows, exotic dancers, and full-body suspension. Erotica wear is required, and vendors such as…
“Harvest” at eye lounge: Fall has arrived, and with it comes a fresh exhibition at eye lounge. “Harvest,” according to curators Carrie Bloomston and Greg Esser, is focused on both the “literal reaping of botanical and horticultural bounty as well as the harvesting of the collective energies of the group.”…
THU 30 Reasons to panic? We keep a monthly schedule: Mom’s visit, our D&D mixer, paying our Live Links bill. . . . One more to pencil in: Come September 30, panic! resumes its monthly status — the last Thursday of the month at Anderson’s Fifth Estate, 6820 East Fifth…
At 5:30 on a Thursday afternoon, photographer Kristen Wright’s Tempe home looks like it could belong to any college student. Clothes pile up on a pool table in one room, the TV blares in another, and a tiny pug with a black, spiked collar just took a dump on someone’s…
Sit down with a couple of anti-Bush artist/activists and a pro-Bush children’s book author, and you get what you play for: lots of debate about politics, war, and the election, and not so much about artistic motivation or choice of medium. At least Emma Kratz, whose new single, “You’re Going…
Fri 10/1 You can get yourself clean and enjoy a good meal, but art at the YMCA? Sure enough, on Friday, October 1, the Lincoln Family Downtown YMCA, 350 North First Avenue, hosts its own First Friday event. Its Teen Center Art Gallery showcases paintings and murals by inner-city teenagers…
9/30-10/3 With everything Irish happening on campus this week, you’d think ASU president Michael Crow is tryin’ to get lucky. The ASU Herberger Mainstage Theatre production of Dancing at Lughnasa wraps up at the Paul V. Galvin Playhouse, 51 East 10th Street in Tempe, Thursday, September 30, through Sunday, October…
Shark Tale is an animated film, though after you see it you might wonder whether the term is intended as oxymoronic. Put simply, it has no life in it at all. Not even the kids roped into an afternoon preview screening seemed terribly interested. Perhaps they’ve grown tired of computer-made…
Revolutionary idolatry is an odd business. Just ask unruly pop singer Stew, of the unruly pop group the Negro Problem. On his Naked Dutch Painter album, the melodic rebel dares to challenge a very sacred image. “Don’t you wish there was, like, another picture of Che Guevara?” he inquires. “Like,…
