THU 9 We might finally see that “Dancing Queen” pop-up we never knew we always wanted when ABBA showcases its homemade books at . . . oh, wait, wrong ABBA. This ABBA acronym stands for “A Buncha Book Artists,” an Arizona State University student book-builder collective that creates original handmade…
Mercifully, the work in “Water, Water Everywhere” stays clear of the obvious themes you would expect to see in an exhibition in the desert about water. There isn’t a single piece in this group exhibition of artists from around the world that settles for the simple “water equals life” concept…
Local jazz favorite Jazzola plays on Friday nights. Saturday night features The Cueball Hamilton Duo. On balmy nights, you can enjoy the outside terrace or escape the heat inside the Bistro. Sample Kokopelli’s large selection of Arizona-grown wines – great with a “nosh” plate of cheese, nuts, fruit, chocolate, olives,…
Arizona Biltmore Resort and Spa 2400 East Missouri Avenue, 602-381-7632 www.arizonabiltmore.com/spa Centre for Well-Being at the Phoenician 6000 East Camelback Road, 480-423-2582 www.centreforwellbeing.com CopperWynd Resort & Club 13225 North Eagle Ridge Drive, Fountain Hills, 480-333-1900 www.slh.com Four Seasons Spa 10600 East Crescent Moon Drive, Scottsdale, 480-513-5145 www.fourseasons.com/scottsdale Golden Door Spa…
THU 2 If you can get past Devil Doll’s (a.k.a. Cleveland-born Colleen Duffy’s) Sherilynn Fenn/”A Songstress Named Desire”/sell-your-soul-for-a-night-with-her good looks, you’ll have time to take a picture, too! But you’ll also hear a voice and a sound so smooth — smoother than Blue Velvet, in fact, the cinematic dreamscape one…
I’d like to meet the jerk-off who decided that founding a city in the middle of the desert was a good idea. I’ve been gunning for this guy (because it has to have been a man — no woman would be stupid enough to set up housekeeping inside a kiln)…
Short of submerging yourself in a vat of ice, home remedies for keeping body heat at bay are sparse. So let the experts soothe your scorched skin this summer. Swanky spa treatments, while a bit more pricey than a pound of crushed cubes, are the perfect solution for cooling every…
Talk about the heat of the night. The prevailing wisdom here in the Valley has long been that come 2 a.m., when bartenders turn off the taps and drop-kick drunks out the door, our banging burg transforms into a ghost town. It’s doubly so in summertime, as even the most…
When I migrated here from New York, I hadn’t counted on how near impossible it would be to put a band together and keep it focused during the hot summer months. Even the lamest justifications for missing rehearsals, from the persistent “Uhh, I spaced it, man” to the truly wretched…
One does not have to be relegated to an indoor air-conditioned environment to escape the sweltering summer heat. Here are some cold and dark out-of-the-box activities that will get you outdoors and away from that thermostat-controlled milieu. Ice Ice Blocking Need a method for turning the summer into a winter…
No matter how many summer vacations you plan or how well you plan them, a moment comes when you realize that you will never sword-fight with Lord of the Rings fans in Kazakhstan or reach that tiny island off the north coast of Australia where the school shuts down for…
By our count, there are but two sequels waiting to have oil rubbed on their backs this summer — one featuring an evil lord named Vader, the other featuring an evil lord named Schneider — so the season has that going for it, which is nice. But in lieu of…
Sometimes, a drippy blue-raspberry Otter Pop just isn’t enough. Instead of inciting brain freeze from a pathetic Popsicle this summer, refine your palate. From simple shaved ice to gourmet gelato, there’s something to satisfy every type of sweet tooth and stave off the sweats. If you’re bored with Baskin-Robbins, and…
This summer will be my first in Phoenix, a simple statement that seems to come with a built-in drum roll. Say it to anyone in the Valley, and you’ll get a suitably dramatic response: The heat is like sticking your head in an oven. Or living in a blow-dryer. Or,…
Last Wednesday night, while the rest of America was watching Bo and Carrie duke it out in the final hour of American Idol, I was watching a room full of singers on a different stage. And thinking that maybe I’ve been watching too much television lately, because Phoenix Theatre’s production…
There was no reason to expect much from Cinderella Man, Ron Howard’s biography of boxer James Braddock, who in the summer of 1935 became the most unlikely heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. After all, it’s a true tale whose outcome has been predetermined; surely there could be no…
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is a flawed movie born of a flawed novel, but let this be clear: Girls will eat it up with a spoon. It features three young stars, indulges in rampant romantic fantasy, drips with teary-eyed sentimentality, and pays a heapload of lip service to…
Lords of Dogtown is an odd, disorienting commodity — a fictional version of a documentary (Dogtown and Z-Boys) about the birth of skateboarding in 1970s Venice, California, that was written by the man who directed said doc, in which he was a central figure. Stacy Peralta, whose Dogtown and Z-Boys…
Layer Cake, the new British crime drama from first-time director Matthew Vaughn, is a block of granite struggling to liberate the statue inside it. Vaughn (producer of Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) has plenty of dark threat and compelling visual style, but his ambitious trip into the…
Ten is a magical age, when kids are old enough to make articulate statements about their experience and young enough to express their feelings without shame. In a couple of years, excitement will go the way of the bag lunch and become uncool, and acceptable poses will shrink to a…
Jerry Springer wishes he could get into the Arizona Fetish Prom. After all, there’s going to be enough subculture action going on that he’d have material for his show for the next 10 years. But unless Springer springs for a leather g-string, he’d look really out of place. “We’re going…
She jokes about giving blowjobs to rescue workers after 9/11. She jokes about the myth of the vaunted G-spot. She even jokes about being fisted. But it isn’t comedienne Margaret Cho’s brash sexual jokes that have conservative groups protesting. Cho, a self-professed liberal, will be flying in to fill Dodge…
