9/3-12/31Designer Michael Graves (of Target teakettle fame) cemented his household-word status in 1979, when he participated in the “Tea and Coffee Piazza” project sponsored by Italian design house Alessi. The next wave, “Tea and Coffee Towers,” visits the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art beginning Saturday, September 3. Architects from 11…
SAT 9/3In the ’60s, if you caught people leaving a rock concert and asked how the show was, they might have answered with something like, “Man, that three-hour version of ‘White Rabbit’ was totally groovy!” But in the “here today, gone today” world of modern rock and short attention spans,…
“Hector Ruiz: La Realidad (Reality)” at the Heard Museum: Phoenix artist Hector Ruiz fires a shot between the eyes of American values with wood carvings, block prints, and mixed-media assemblages that address racism, border issues and capitalism. A King Kong-size blonde crushes a hapless businessman in her manicured hands in…
THU 1Phoenix’s flirtation with the Surreal World continues with the opening of the Paper Heart’s “Surreal September” exhibit on Friday, September 2, and Phoenix Art Museum’s ongoing “Surrealism USA” installation. “Surrealism USA” Live: Poetry Reading, held in conjunction with the latter exhibition, features readings by “surrealist poets” Dean Young and…
THU 25When those “I Want You” propaganda posters of Uncle Sam first came out, Will Stockdale must have thought ol’ Sam was pointing at the grits on the porch behind him, because when the country bumpkin joins the U.S. Air Force in No Time for Sergeants, he’s clearly clueless. After…
Freethinkers and activists across the Valley have been wringing their hands ever since the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona announced earlier this month that its executive director, Eleanor Eisenberg, will retire. Eisenberg, who is 65 and has been with the local ACLU chapter for eight years, left her post…
It will take the average reader about three minutes to read this newspaper column in which I, a person who is paid to share my opinion, will reveal the ways in which Black, White and Read All Over is a play totally lacking in substance and utterly devoid of entertainment…
Pity the daily newspaper critic who must review The Aristocrats without using such phrases as “a longshoreman’s arm up a little girl’s ass,” “then my wife goes down on my son while the dog’s licking his balls,” “my grandmother’s covered in my come,” and “is it shit before piss, or…
Terry Gilliam’s last film featured the former Monty Python troupe member as an eccentric, demanding and difficult director prone to destroying his ambitious projects before a single frame of footage was ever shot. “If it’s easy,” he says in the movie, “I don’t do it.” Alas, this was not a…
“I always cannot understand why girls don’t wanna be with me for a long time,” says Timothy Treadwell, subject of the documentary Grizzly Man. “I have really a nice personality — I’m fun, I’m very, very good in the . . . umm, well, you’re not supposed to say that…
Friends and fans of the late and greatly lamented MARS Artspace — one of the pioneers of Phoenix alt-art and a precursor of today’s downtown scene — will witness MARS’ last gasp at “Wasteland Circus: The Final Curtain” on Saturday, August 27, at the Paper Heart — appropriate given that…
Think women in the United States are under a lot of pressure to be thin, young and pretty? Try being a girl in Asia, says Hong Kong-born artist Stella Lai (pronounced “Lie”). “There’s a commercial in China where a woman says, ‘I’d rather be dead than fat,'” Lai says by…
SAT 8/27Club Freedom’s been closed for more than a year now, but that doesn’t mean there’s nowhere in Phoenix for renowned DJs to drop their stacks of wax. On Saturday, August 27, several local organizations, including IONAZ magazine and dance station Energy 92.3, prove the beat goes on with “Splash…
8/26-8/27Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few years, you know full well the juggernaut that is extreme sports. But a rock probably won’t be enough to keep you in the dark for long, not with the sport of extreme rock crawling claiming its place as the…
SAT 8/27Quickly, we must flee! Ginormous mutated creatures are preparing to annihilate The Sets, 93 East Southern in Tempe, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, August 27. These death-bringers will include the demonic simian Hell Monkey and the soup-can-clad martial artist Kung-Fu Chicken Noodle. Surely, we are doomed! Oh, wait, it’s only…
SUN 8/28The Indian ballet troupe Mamata Shankar does not perform a subcontinental Swan Lake, nor does it include Native Americans en pointe. Rather, the group fuses classical Indian dance with modern dance steps, says Sarbari Chowdhury of the Bengali Cultural Association of Arizona, the organization sponsoring the troupe’s local performance…
Fans are forever hassling Judy Rollings, director of the Herberger Theater Center’s Performance Outreach department as well as its Lunch Time Theater program, about when in the world she plans to return to the stage. She’s finally caved, with a one-woman show, Starring Judy From Chicago, that’s a witty recitation…
Art photography doesn’t get its due. Because everyone has a camera, most people figure taking art photos is as easy as pointing the lens at something, uh, arty, and pushing the shutter button. We’re a bit skeptical of art photographers because we think they aren’t as skilled as someone who…
Carlos Batts is a big-deal Los Angeles-based photographer who, since the mid-1990s, has shot models for fashion spreads, rock and rap bands for CD covers, and hot gals for sex magazines. Hustler, NBC and Skechers have all used his work to inject a dash of edgy alterna-cool to their image…
Attention, shoppers: You can forget about parking in the shade, at least when you’re headed for Metrocenter. Despite Karen Bauernschmidt’s best efforts, the west-side mall recently axed more than 300 trees (most of them eucalyptus) growing in its expansive parking lot, a move that Bauernschmidt, a radical environmentalist, tried to…
Red Eye may not seem to be your typical Wes Craven movie. It’s not really horror, there are no marketable monsters, and unlike Cursed, Scream 3, and other recent Craven offerings, it’s actually an enjoyable time at the movies. But heroine Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) is very much in the…
Some art-house programmer would be wise to schedule a double bill of The Aristocrats, Paul Provenza’s talkumentary about the dirtiest joke ever told, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, writer-director Judd Apatow’s near-brilliant movie about a grown-up geek who simply lost interest in trying to get laid. Both offer countless giddy variations…
