William Makuet is lost no longer. A member of southern Sudan’s Nuer tribe, Makuet was forced from his thatched hut, at age 11, by men wielding machine guns. Permanently separated from his family, he became one of Sudan’s “Lost Boys.” In the mid-1980s, war forced an estimated 20,000 Sudanese boys,…
8/12-8/31 Jen and Scott Sanders, owners of the Paper Heart, 750 Grand Avenue, pride themselves on providing something for everyone. So any pop-cultural pimp worth his or her weight in Hot Topic gear will find something of interest at the joint, be it Argentinean tango lessons or alt-rock shows. Similar…
Scheduling the Phoenix Mercury’s annual clinic to coincide with the Summer Olympics is a slam-dunk way of cashing in on all the, uh, hoopla surrounding USA Basketball’s expected march to the medal stand. True, a chunk of the WNBA’s roster is already in Athens. But c’mon, is there a better…
Saturdays When the bar scene is too hot and the club scene is too cold, DJs Natasha Diggs and Mosha know just what to mix to make the night feel just right at Tempe’s State Side Grill (formerly Zoom Room) on College and Fifth Street. The fluidity of the featured…
Sat 8/14 Things get pretty dead around these parts during the dog days of summer, especially when it comes to nationalistic celebrations. After getting hammered by the one-two punch of July 4 and Bastille Day, patriots and expatriates alike have to wait until the Labor Day weekend for frenetic flag-waving…
“Imagine That!” at the West Valley Art Museum: The current selection at this oft-forgotten spot includes an exhibition organized by the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum titled “Imagine That! A Whimsical Take on Nature.” The idea was to challenge traditional wildlife artists to create images of fictional animals — merging species, switching…
THU 5 If your multi-tasking tendencies extend toward culture, you’re in luck. Get a two-fer at 7 p.m. Thursday, August 5, when members of the Phoenix Symphony set up shop at the Phoenix Art Museum to perform works by Bach and Mozart — heavy on the cello, clarinet and strings…
Mike Maas has more than a few skeletons in his closet. The budding artist who spent his childhood watching Creature Feature boasts a house full of monsters, goblins, freaks and bunnies. Yes, bunnies — both real and ceramic — the signature touch of sweetness that wife Jodi lends to Mike’s…
As a reviewer, it can be very tempting to want in on the ground floor of a phenomenon, to say you were there first when some low-budget feature with a nifty premise made its festival debut, only to be picked up by a big studio and become a national phenomenon…
Sat 8/7 When Jim Seagrave, along with his wife Karen, bought Fat Cats — a rough and tumble bar home to hot-rodders, hot chicks and hotheads — two and a half years ago, he didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye with the clientele. “There were some pretty thick rednecks when I first…
You can tell that PALican is a star because he arrives with an entourage. I’d arranged to interview PALican himself, who I assumed was a guy in a bird suit, but the star of KAZ-TV’s unbelievably schlocky PALican and Friends (who turned out to be a girl in a bird…
Sheathed in a custom-tailored gray suit and sporting expensively barbered silver hair, Tom Cruise looks like an older, harder version of the self-absorbed L.A. sharpie he played 16 years ago in Rain Man. But in Collateral, a frenetic Michael Mann thriller that runs up a Baghdad-level body count, Cruise’s character…
Deep in the dangerous wasteland of America, far removed from civilization, there exists a community driven by fear, sworn to isolationism. They loathe outsiders, whom they regard as terrifying monsters. They make up strange rituals to guard themselves against the vast world beyond their borders. And while they may feast…
Little Black Book, with its Carly Simon soundtrack all but daring you to tune it out before it begins, is being marketed as a daffy romantic comedy in which a woman plows through her boyfriend’s Palm to uncover his past relationships. In truth, the movie’s anything but light and frothy;…
You may have already heard the stories about A Home at the End of the World. In what many viewers have deemed a big loss, Colin Farrell’s penis no longer appears in the film. The official line is that test audiences found it too distracting, though that seems unlikely, given…
Perhaps the most unlikely thing to capture on film is the creative process — the spinning of gears, the tripping of wires, the breaking of hearts, and the snapping of tempers that goes into the making of art. Movies about writers and painters and musicians seldom collapse the barrier between…
Hey, good-lookin’, put on your game face — the ladies of LabelHorde, the local fashion directory and resource guide, are on the prowl. “Spotlight: The Search for LabelHorde’s Top Model” hits the runway Wednesday, August 11 — in downtown Scottsdale, natch — and though the competition may not be pretty,…
Nothing says rock ‘n’ roll less than a lawsuit. Paul Green knows that, which makes him Rock Teacher of the Year in our book. > Nonetheless, Green — a 32-year-old rock god to several dozen prepubescent rockers-in-training — has a legitimate beef with a certain Hollywood film studio that’s raked…
8/6-8/31 If Lee Hazel has to be stuck in medieval times, she’s bringing some friends with her. In her latest exhibition, which opens at Modified Arts, 407 East Roosevelt, on Friday, August 6, Hazel presents more than a dozen portraits of downtown artists in 15th-century settings, beckoning Botticelli, Jerome and…
ONGOING For children, tubing the Salt River is a learning experience. We learned that saguaros are native only to this part of the world, that the bald eagle is an endangered species in the Sonoran Desert and, most important, to keep our butts from sinking all the way down in…
Fri 8/6 This is not your typical shake-ya-ass music: “Open your eyes, see eye to eye with me/Righteous lives, that’s how we try to be/No disguise, this isn’t Halloween . . .” And with that, Oddio Audwell isn’t trying to make mamasitas move in slow motion this Friday, August 6,…
THU 29 Do the South Beach Diet, Scottsdale-style — martinis and menthol cigarettes (low-carb, low-fat, high-maintenance) — as Sonik magazine and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society present “South Beach,” Thursday, July 29, at Devil’s Martini North Scottsdale, 10825 North Scottsdale Road. Giveaways, gift bags, charity raffles and a balloon pop…
