Fri 9/26 The lure of wheel-to-wheel racing is reserved for a special kind of person, one for whom life truly begins when the rubber meets the road. Arizona has always been a fertile breeding ground for racing aficionados, a group about to be indoctrinated into the world of European-style kart…
9/25-11/6 Spread the words: The Valley’s top slam poets have a shot at the big time — the World Championship Poetry Crown. Slammers judged to be the best of the verse will represent Phoenix at the 2004 World Poetry Slam Championship, set for February in the world poetry capital –…
Sun 9/28 Author Eric Carle has illustrated more than 70 books with his hand-painted collage imagery. His whimsical tales of the animal world are read by millions of children worldwide. With the help of a black light and puppets based on Carle’s illustrations, Very Eric Carle brings three of these…
Sat 9/27 In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare wrote, “What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.” This weekend, that spirit of give-and-take becomes notably one-sided: What’s his really is ours — but it doesn’t cost us a thing — when ASU West’s Interdisciplinary Arts and Performance Department presents…
Secondhand Lions is cornier than the cornfields spread out in front of the dilapidated rural Texas manse inhabited by Robert Duvall and Michael Caine, playing grumpy old brothers with mismatched accents. (Caine, in fact, has accent enough for three actors — one English, another maybe Texan, another perhaps Australian.) There…
Never mind the trailers, which advertise Cold Creek Manor as some kind of horror-thriller, complete with the image of a hand emerging from the shadows to quiet (yes!) Sharon Stone. Mike Figgis, most recently a maker of unwatchable art-house fare shot on digital video (Timecode, Hotel) that suggests a fetish…
For all their amazing traits, there is a single-mindedness to dogs that is especially enviable. Their owners may lurch from one obsession to another in search of happiness and fulfillment, but something as simple as food, a toy or a morning walk can take members of the canine set to…
Thursday, September 18 You know the summer’s truly over when Scottsdale Center for the Arts launches its new season. Starting off the busy schedule is an appearance by writer John Edgar Wideman, whose lecture is part of the Solo Voices series, presented in conjunction with Arizona State University’s Center for…
There’s something queer happening at the happiest place on Earth. For the last several years, on a specifically designated day, more than 100,000 gays and lesbians have descended on Walt Disney World in Orlando, and, on a separate date, thousands more have gathered at Disneyland in Anaheim, for Gay Day…
9/18-9/20 It is fitting that September marks not only the opening of an inspiring exhibition in Scottsdale, but also the month that Frida Kahlo endured a horrific accident. In 1925, Kahlo woke up with a disabled body she hadn’t counted on and would have to live with for the rest…
Sat 9/20 You support them with every paycheck, but how well do you really know them? Public lands, we mean. This Saturday, September 20, is National Public Lands Day; from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., take the kids to meet your other legacy — the United States’ wide-open spaces –…
9/19-4/18 They may not be as fleet-footed as frogs or as flashy as, say, fireflies, but turtles — unhurried and self-contained — have charms all their own. Starting this Friday, September 19, a world-première exhibition at the Mesa Southwest Museum takes a long look under the shell. Through specimens living…
9/20-1/4 Artist Sloane McFarland has one foot in the art world and one foot in the real estate world. One must wonder what his closet looks like: equal parts smock and yellow blazer? Regardless, he is being talked about as one of the most exciting artists in Arizona. A third-generation…
9/19-10/5 In one play, a gay man is found tied to a fencepost after 18 blows from the butt of a handgun killed him. In the other, a young woman’s uncle teaches her to drive, and then sexually abuses her. Both plays — The Laramie Project and How I Learned…
Just when you thought it was safe to watch a reality TV show or two, television producers and former Phoenicians Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese have revamped the format of America’s favorite cheeseball genre. In the duo’s Joe Schmoe Show, which airs Tuesdays on cable’s Spike TV network, the gimmick…
If appearance counts for anything, the art scene in Phoenix is thriving. Literally thousands of people make their way from gallery to gallery the first Friday of each month, flooding Roosevelt Street and Grand Avenue. The interest of locals has been echoed nationally, even drawing notice in Art in America…
Phoenix Theatre’s excellent production of Chicago is both a pleasant entertainment and a shrewd example of this 83-year-old company’s talent for mounting crowd-pleasing retreads. Director/choreographer Michael Barnard has borrowed from Chicago’s original 1975 staging and from the recent film version, and jazzed it up with some swell tricks of his…
Tidy little Montecarlo, Georgia, which is the setting for Jonathan Lynn’s The Fighting Temptations, is a perfect movie fantasy town. At the picturesque train station, the ticket agent will call you a taxi or serve you a plate of Southern fried chicken. The house band at the local nightclub is…
If life is a shit sandwich, coach Devlyn Steele can teach you how to serve it on a silver platter. Steele has refined the art of life coaching, a pop-psych practice in which clients get props from a hyper-organized counselor who knows more about how to live than the rest…
Admit it. The moment you hear the name ABBA, or see it in print, a jangly bit of one of the band’s hit songs begins playing in your head. Maybe you hear the chugging intro to “Waterloo.” Or the a cappella choral bridge from “Super Trouper.” Probably it’s the piano…
When Nicolas Cage plays still and sullen — a man possessed by self-loathing and melancholy in Adaptation, say, or the landlocked angel in City of Angels — he comes off as drowsy. He disappears into those roles like a head plopped in a fluffy pillow, and it doesn’t quite suit…
God bless Johnny Depp. For the second time this year, the man has almost single-handedly redeemed an action movie that would otherwise be indistinguishable from the pack. Introduced right up front in Robert Rodriguez’s Once Upon a Time in Mexico, he’s first seen dressed up like Prince in purple glasses…
