“Automotivated” at the Phoenix Art Museum, Fashion Design Gallery: If the cars in PAMs Curves of Steel show were enough to get you revved up, check out the fashion gallery for more aerodynamic designs. The dresses on display are sleek, shimmering silks and satins from the 1930s — fabrics that…
Bat Boy: The Musical: Although Nearly Naked Theatres production benefits from Damon Derings darkly comic, crafty direction and from a pair of performances that help elevate it from high camp to something closer to art, Bat Boy is ultimately a musical in need of a first act. Keythe Farley and…
Animaniacs: Volume 3 (Warner Bros.) Bridge to Terabithia (Buena Vista) Gray Matters (Fox) Harrison’s Flowers (Lionsgate) If . . .: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) The Life and Hard Times of Guy Terrifico (THINKfilm) Lucille Ball Film Collection (Warner Bros.) The Manhattan Project: Special Edition (Lionsgate) The Many Adventures of Winnie…
Props to Eric Dahl, owner of The Lost Leaf, for persevering after taking it in the backside not once, but twice, from the white-collar pen-pushers downtown. In 2004, the space, which then hosted underground art and music, became a casualty — along with the Emerald Lounge — of the Starbucks/Pei…
Meet and mingle with professional jocks, lyrical poets, musical types, bangin’ ladies, and debonair dudes when In the Scene Entertainment presents Sexy.Women.and.Gentlemen (S.W.A.G.) Bryce Breezee hosts the kick-back shindig featuring two-for-one drink specials until 11 p.m. and beats by DJs Essence and Astonish. There’s no cover before 10:30 if you…
Some guy must have muttered a prayer — “Gee, St. Peter, a free pool day would be cool” — as he shoved the quarters into the slot, because the heavens have parted and the late owner of J-Heads, Sid Copeland, is looking down from that big punk bar in the…
Growing up in South Dakota, Brian Boner remembers being surrounded by hummingbirds. “They were everywhere,” he says, “and if you stood very still, they’d come right up to you and buzz around your face like you were a giant sunflower.” It’s a memory that the 32-year-old painter has memorialized in…
“Automotivated” at the Phoenix Art Museum, Fashion Design Gallery: If the cars in PAMs Curves of Steel show were enough to get you revved up, check out the fashion gallery for more aerodynamic designs. The dresses on display are sleek, shimmering silks and satins from the 1930s — fabrics that…
Little, pink weasel-cats making sweet love atop bulbous greenery. Such is the kinky world I entered at “Renegade Clay: 5 Views from the West,” at ASU Art Museum’s Ceramics Research Center. The title’s a little overdramatic and silly (Renegade? Can clay really be that badass?), but I was pleased to…
Night Watch, you may recall, told of an ancient feud waged between the forces of Light and Dark. In the interest of maintaining a fragile détente, they organized themselves, as Russian super-combatants are wont to do, into complex bureaucracies, with the Night Watch heroes monitoring the vampiric shenanigans of the…
So lame it’s . . . cool? Nancy Drew, writer-director Andrew Fleming’s attempt to jump-start a new Warner Bros. franchise, is a movie flaunting a most obvious demographic strategy — a teen flick with a sensibility, or at least sense of humor, that’s most definitely parental. Invented in 1930 by…
I was driving home from work the other day when it occurred to me that, despite being college-educated and reasonably intelligent, I have no idea how my car works. I know the gas goes in, because I do that part. But after that it gets fuzzy. When the mechanic’s telling…
Glastonbury (THINKFilm) Only a Julien Temple concert doc would get the R rating — for nudity (male, mostly, and not terribly flattering at that), drug use (weed, mostly — yawn), language, and sexual content. Also dig the overwrought BBC narration, in which Glastonbury is described as a former refuge for…
Blood & Chocolate (Sony) Breach (Universal) The Cecil B. DeMille Classics Collection (Passport) Deadwood: The Complete Third Season (HBO) 52 Pick-Up (MGM) Ghost Rider (Sony) The Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries: Season Two (Universal) Hellboy: Blood & Iron (Anchor Bay) James Stewart: Screen Legend Collection (Universal) Jesse Stone: Night Passage…
Renaissance artists painted them, Howard Stern worships them, spring breakers flash them, Scottsdale doctors pump them up, Jonathan Adler makes vases out of them, and every teenage boy longs for a pair of his own. Now Club Vibe has named its new Friday-night shindig after them. That’s right, bazoombas. The…
In the scientific world, the endoplasmic reticulum is a microscopic membrane located inside our cells, helping us to live and thrive. In the musical world, however, Endoplasmic Reticulum is helping the nightlife scene in the sleepy East Valley city of Mesa to live and thrive. Host Kevin Gordon (a former…
Patriots Square Park will soon be demolished for an AJ’s Fine Foods (“a glorified Circle K,” according to a close pal), and the Taylor Street Bungalows and neighboring Pete’s News Room recently became a pile of rubbish. As if die-hard downtowners needed any more reasons to scoff at the yuppiefication…
Local nightcrawlers who’ve grown tired of the tepid Tranzylvania but still wanna let their freak flags fly are in luck, as the twisted turntablists of debaucherous DJ collective Sadisco descend upon Homme’s Upstairs Bar for S_. The wicked weekly club night won’t feature the same surreal and salacious themes as…
Mail artists are fond of telling their fans that the mail-art movement began with Cleopatra, who had herself delivered in a rolled-up carpet to Julius Caesar thousands of years ago. Whatever its beginnings, the medium (which some say is among the longest-lasting art movements in history) has lately been enjoying…
Lowest Common Denominator-ism writ large and engraved in stone like the Ten Commandments according to Cecil B. DeMille, the Hollywood blockbuster is often an allegory for itself. Walt Disney, the notoriously litigious studio that successfully changed the nation’s copyright laws to protect its trademark Mickey Mouse but more recently declared,…
Mystery man of the long-ago Australian new wave, Ray Lawrence evidently has grown less finicky. Lawrence, now 59, made his feature debut with the phantasmagoric Bliss, the famous flop of the 1985 Cannes Film Festival. He then licked his wounds and directed TV commercials for 16 years before reappearing with…
The idea of “getting axed” is exploited for maximum double-entendre value in Severance, a grisly horror-comedy from the U.K. that has its tongue planted so firmly in its cheek that you half expect it to pop out the other side. Yes, heads (and, in one indelible bit, a severed foot)…
