Top 5 Things to Do in Phoenix This Weekend

Here they are, weekend warrior, your best bets for a good time out and about over the next few days. Ballet Arizona Presents Director’s Choice @ Orpheum Theatre From comedic timing to sentence construction and artwork, the rule of three/thirds makes works more satisfying to audiences, readers, and viewers. (See…

The 10 Funniest Tumblrs Across the Web (Right Now)

Oh, Tumblr, you do so much for us. You make us laugh, you make us smile, and most importantly you get us through the work day. Honestly, procrastination just wouldn’t be the same without you, which is why we’re giving a shout-out to the 10 funniest Tumblrs right now (because…

Steve Wiley: Five Reasons Not to Have Kids

Steve Wiley is Jackalope Ranch’s Parent Hood. He’s a slightly unorthodox father of five who weighs in weekly with his mildly rebellious views and observations. If you’d like to see how he came to write this column, watch the intro video. This week he attempts to talk you out of…

The Delicious Absurdity of Wrong

If real life were like Wrong, Quentin Dupieux’s sweetly unnerving experiment in ambient fucked-uppedness, your phone would ring before you’ve finished this sentence, and the words you haven’t gotten to yet would be read aloud to you by a voice you’ve never heard before. Then, while you’re at lunch someplace,…

56 Up Reveals Life in Stasis

Life goes inexorably, chillingly on. The Up series, Michael Apted’s famous calendrical march, presses on now into its eighth episode, with the same dozen or so Brits from across the class spectrum once again interviewed about their lives after the usual seven-year interval. Suddenly, all these pitiable souls, subjected for…

Musical of Musicals (The Musical) Proves Everything Old Can Be New Again

Musical of Musicals (The Musical) has a beard a mile long. This send-up of Broadway tuners should, at this point in the let’s-spoof-musical-theater game, play like a post-peak retread, an afterthought of irony, a late-to-the-party lesser-than Forbidden Broadway. But, in its Theater Works production, there is the joy of watching…

Whodunit in the Thriller John Dies at the End? The ’90s.

Kids born in 1992 can buy beer now, and according to the usual timeline of nostalgia, this means that the fetishization of all things ’90s is already well under way. And though John Dies at the End is assuredly a product of today’s online world, it feels remarkably like the…

f You Must See The Host, Please Bring a Young Man with You

Across America this weekend, wives and girlfriends will accompany their fellas to G.I. Joe: Retaliation, as boys-shooting-boys movies are considered movies for everyone, their violent heroism the default American fantasy. How many of those fellas do you think will reciprocate with a trip to The Host, a post–alien-invasion survivalist tale…

In Bloom

Looks like fall’s big fashion trend will be 1990s rocker duds — flannel, Doc Marten-esque boots, Courtney Love levels of manicured dishevelment, and all. While the looks presented at Phoenix Fashion Week’s fourth annual MIM Rocks Fashion show will be more spring-friendly than Cobain-centric, the event will spotlight how music…

Ironic Demonic

It’s been a long time since mainstream music has been dangerous. Take a look at Billboard. The only thing that today’s hit music is liable to influence is the degree and frequency of your twerking. If you want to relive the golden age of hiding cassettes from parents and riled-up…

Pigment Pen

For Tim Bavington, Ali Smith, Daniel Brice, Oliver Arms, Jill Moser, and Feodor Voronov, it’s all about color. The six artists took over the walls at Bentley Gallery with the exhibition “Neo Chroma,” showing, with a variety of styles and approaches, a shared focus on and homage to the cerebral…

New Order

The downtown Phoenix art scene owes a big thanks to Five15, one of Roosevelt Row’s oldest galleries. It has served as a training ground, collaborative space, and launch pad for a number of the community’s staple artists.As members graduate from the collective, the gallery introduces new classes of artists and…

Built to Last

It’s hard to think of Phoenix as historic. While there has been a community of some sort in the Valley since the late 1800s, older structures were routinely demolished to make way for “progress.” Given the endless suburban sprawl and copycat strip malls on every other corner, what historic structures…

Ready Or Not

We know you’ve seen the signs: rising global temperatures, frequent and devastating hurricanes, the continued popularity of The Big Bang Theory. The apocalypse is nigh, dear friends. Better get to preppin’.The Arizona Survivalist/Prepper Expo is a must-visit for anyone worried about the coming doomsday. With hundreds of vendors giving seminars,…

Theoretical Speaking

There are countless questions relating to our existence and the scope of truth and reality. It can be all too easy to gloss over those tough questions when there are so many Kardashian spinoffs and seemingly endless installments of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo in the DVR queue. But, for…

Toying Around

There comes a time in every nerd’s life when it’s time to declutter. That means finding a good home for action figures (still sealed in original packaging, of course) and comic books that have been gathering dust. You can complete your collections by digging through other geeks’ tossed-off treasures at…

Biggest Losers

To prepare for a summer spent feeling as though you’re wasting your life, there’s nothing like seeing a play about people who spend the summer feeling as though they’re wasting their lives: Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. If you’ve always thought of it as a feel-good romp — who doesn’t like…