You can’t chuck a Grand Canyon snow globe in the Southwest without hitting a Luis Jimenez sculpture. His biliously colored, Pop Art-goes-Chicano depictions of cowboys, horses, Indians and other iconic figures of the West are a fixture of university concourses and art museum sculpture gardens from Phoenix to Houston. Jimenez…
At first glance, Stella Lai’s paintings look like benign decorations, all delicate flowers, bright colors and pretty Chinese calligraphy. Look closer, and you’ll see her Asian-influenced pieces are actually about how rotten it is being a woman or an animal in her native Hong Kong, where the culture is apparently…
Robots (Fox) The story of a small-town ‘bot (voiced by Ewan McGregor) who bolts for the big city, Robots is the first non-Pixar film to compete with that studio’s razzle and dazzle; the thing’s stunning to look at. (And, frankly, it’s better to stare at than listen to, since listening…
Jim Pederson is a consummate politician: He’s rich, well-connected, and not above pointing fingers at the opposition. He’s also quite dull — or, to be fair, at least unwilling to bite when he’s baited with stupid questions from newspaper reporters. All these skills will come in handy should the former…
Any thing can be anything to anybody, particularly in the case of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. If you want to believe that his new film, a loose adaptation of a little-known graphic novel, is a work of damning criticism aimed at the hypocrisy of Americans who believe violence…
Thomas Seyr, the central figure in director Jacques Audiard’s kinetically charged new film The Beat That My Heart Skipped, is a young Frenchman torn between a life of crime and a career as a concert pianist. It’s hardly your usual dilemma — and hardly the usual French film, come to…
Oliver Twist It’s almost impossible to watch Roman Polanski’s rendition of Oliver Twist without drawing parallels between the deprivations endured by the book’s young protagonist and the director’s own brutal boyhood. A Jew raised in Nazi-occupied Poland, Polanski first tackled the Holocaust head-on in his 2002 film The Pianist, but…
Anyone vaguely familiar with the rules of golf knows that you may not improve your lie, ground your club in a sand trap, or — most grievous of all — subtract strokes from your score. This last one apparently never occurred to the makers of a new movie with the…
In 2001, Jonathan Safran Foer made an astounding literary debut. “A Very Rigid Search,” published by The New Yorker, was his hilarious, heartbreaking account of an attempt by a young American man (named, cheekily, Jonathan Safran Foer) to find a Ukrainian woman who had saved his grandfather from the Nazis…
Into the Blue offers precisely what one would expect from the director of Blue Crush and the writer of Torque: beautiful stupidity. Its every frame dripping from a noxious recipe of suntan oil, summertime sweat and salt water, this heist movie (or whatever it is, which isn’t much) delivers a…
Serenity, Joss Whedon’s big-screen spinoff of the 2002 TV show Firefly, which didn’t even last a dozen episodes, is already a cult phenom well before its opening. The show’s DVD boxed set lines the shelf of every fanboy who dreamed of gunslinging in space alongside preachers and prostitutes, and already…
Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs includes an infamous slice of cinematic history that’s been forever burned into our collective pop-cultural consciousness: the giddily psychotic thug Mr. Blonde hacking off the ear of a bound and gagged LAPD cop to the lighthearted strains of Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You.”…
Navajo artist Will Wilson knows about the pain of surviving cultural apocalypse, and how difficult it is to keep one’s traditions relevant in a strange new world. Native Americans have been struggling with this since Columbus dropped anchor in the Caribbean. Forcible removable from tribal lands, devastating epidemics, lost wars,…
TUE 10/4From Alice Cooper’s onstage beheadings to Iggy Pop’s broken-glass surfing to the robotic samplings of those Venetian-blinds-headed dudes in Devo, rock has seemingly exhausted its conceptual toy box. Or has it? You might change your mind after experiencing Quem Quaeritis and Weirdo Begeirdo, two bands from Riverside, California’s “freak-pop”…
SAT 10/1As kids, we watched hamsters running in their wheels, pedaling their li’l legs for hours, yet going nowhere. As adults, we became human hamsters on StairMaster machines, climbing countless flights of stairs, but never moving off the ground floor. Break away from the “virtual” stair climb on Saturday, October…
10/1-11/6You’ll have butterflies in your stomach as you stroll amid the myriad monarchs flitting and flapping about in Desert Botanical Garden’s Marshall Butterfly Pavilion — a lush, 2,400-square-foot closed environment built especially to house ‘flies. The interactive display is part of DBG’s second annual “Mariposa Monarca” exhibit, which is designed…
10/4-10/16First, a word about Googlewhacking for the uninitiated. Googlewhack! is an online game, the goal of which is to enter two or more unrelated words (“Googlefactors”) on Google’s Web site in an effort to turn up a single URL hit. It’s not as easy as it sounds, especially because the…
Carlito’s Way: Rise to Power (Universal) American Pie: 3 Movie Pie Pack (Universal) Beethoven: The Pooch Pack (Universal) Billy Jack: The Ultimate Collection (Ventura) Blind Melon: Live at the Metro (EMI) Bouncing Souls: Live at the Glasshouse (Fontana) Britney & Kevin: Chaotic . . . the DVD & More (Jive)…
THU 29Say amen, everybody, as Black Theatre Troupe opens its 36th season with the rousing gospel musical Amen Corner. Adapted from James Baldwin’s 1955 play The Amen Corner, the work is simultaneously serious and uplifting. It’s centered on the internal struggle of Sister Margaret Alexander, a spiritual shepherd who loses…
Thomas Keller, 24, is flat-out the best poker player in the Valley. The Stanford grad (economics, natch) has won two major poker titles, including a $5,000 buy-in tournament at the 2004 World Series of Poker, where he took home a $384,000 first prize. He’s got a book “in the works”…
Sculptor Melissa Martinez, 29, combines materials like cactus needles and concrete into stark, elegiac pieces about the natural world vanishing beneath the pavement of our eternally expanding city. The Chicago native came to the Valley a dozen years ago to get a degree in sculpture from Arizona State University. She…
Phoenix has been very, very good for 28-year-old JX3. The Power 92.3 DJ moved from Denver to Phoenix to study meteorology at Arizona State University. Eventually, this gregarious young gent began MCing local club events, where he was spotted by Power program director Bruce St. James. Four years later, the…
