On September 13, at 11:30 a.m., Bryce Zabel was to have met with USA Network executives about a miniseries he was pitching to the cable outlet. Zabel, creator of such television shows as Dark Skies and The Crow: Stairway to Heaven, had the conference on his calendar for weeks. But,…
Okay, kids, pop quiz. Fill in the blanks in these sentences:1) In Phoenix, the __________ have “a virtual monopoly of the gardening trade . . . perform most of the household work, and all of the laundry business.” 2) “The _________ have a faculty of locating in the most favored…
Ellie Black, who is Navajo, and Isabella Mannone-Bertuccio, who is Italian, cook for the same reasons that Mary Kay Pallo and B.J. Hernandez, who are artists, also cook: because there is something wonderful and rewarding about preparing food that is good to eat. More than anything, it is this shared…
Best Kids’ Free Fun Spot Kiwanis Park Recreation Center 6111 South All-America Way, Tempe 480-350-5201 Best Kids’ Fun-at-a-price Spot Castles-n-Coasters 9445 North Metro Parkway East 602-997-7575 Best Kids’ Restaurant McDonald’s several Valley locations…
Turf-building ranks second only to body-building as an American obsession. Our lawns have grown into a 25 million acre habit, costing roughly $7 billion a year in grass-care materials and machinery alone — and that’s not counting the chunks of lava rock strewn all over Sun City.They guzzle immeasurable gallons…
Nothing, not even the threat of world war, can discourage Phoenix Theatre’s annual tradition of kicking off the season with a big, tacky musical. This year, it’s Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s perfectly terrible Applause, which won the 1970 Tony Award for Best Musical entirely on the strength of its…
The cold-bloodedness of some entertainment journalists is a thing to be admired; they’ve balls for brains, which gets you far in this profession. The Hollywood press corps’ cynicism is the source of its strength, and God bless the famous fool who plays along, answering every crooked question with the straightest…
It’ll be 10 years this fall since the Smithsonian Institution turned down the lights on one of the most infamous art shows of the 1990s — “The West As America,” a cynical six-month exhibit that marked the art world’s first awkward introduction to the notion of political correctness. The show’s…
The silence from experimental theater lately has been deafening. Since the dissolution of oddball Planet Earth Theatre last year, there’s been almost nothing out of the ordinary — save the occasional offbeat translation by teeny Nearly Naked Theatre — happening on local stages. But there’s hope for those who want…
After the next few apocalypses, hundreds of thousands of years from the moment we clever humans smugly call “now,” the great philosopher-scientists will gather to assemble the remaining traces of our present time and species. In particular, these evolved beings will find fascination in the structure of our crania, which…
Faced with yet another sports movie in which lovably troubled kids triumph over adversity, it’s easier to scoff and grumble than to feel even partially uplifted. So let’s do it — let’s scoff and grumble. At least for a moment. In Brian Robbins’ Hardball, a degenerate gambler who owes bent-nosed,…
A year after Cameron Crowe climbed back aboard the tour bus for one last spin through rock’s golden days of giddy hedonism and phony heroism comes a film set a decade later, in the mid-1980s, when the parties got harder, the music louder and the musicians prettier. The world of…
Film fans, rejoice! The Orpheum Theatre is kicking off its third season of Silent Sundays.The series is a clever idea, well-executed. Old silent films are screened every few months on Sunday afternoons. Rudolph Valentino, Lon Chaney Jr., Clara Bow, Bessie Love, Errol Flynn, Jackie Coogan — these and other great…
You celebrated Cinco de Mayo and probably thought you were participating in Mexico’s equivalent to the Fourth of July. But Cinco de Mayo celebrates Mexico’s fight against the French — which, as the Germans will tell you, is no big deal. The real Mexican Independence Day is September 16, the…
The indie Let It Snow was originally titled Snow Days. Both titles are terrible — they suggest either a schmaltzy ’40s-era holiday musical or else a kiddy comedy from Nickelodeon. The movie is, rather, a derivative but likable romantic comedy, sort of a bus-and-truck When Harry Met Sally . …
Ralphie May, who is white, calls black men “niggers.” In his standup act, he uses the word repeatedly; he also riffs on Mexicans, who “see the Virgin Mary in everything,” and whose names are easy to remember “because they’re on their necklaces.” He was raised in the deep South, in…
There is a trick to making shofars — the hollowed-out rams’ horns blown on Rosh Hashanah — and also a trick to blowing them. Generally, though, rams’ horns are more easily mastered than French horns, and it is possible that you will walk away from the Shofar Factory, a shofar-making…
Judd Apatow tries not to think of what became of Sam and Lindsay Weir, Neal Schweiber, Bill Haverchuck, Daniel Desario, Nick Andopolis and the other freaks and geeks Apatow knew back at McKinley High School. Those kids were his family, the children born when Apatow and writer Paul Feig created…
In Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour, a little girl destroys her teacher’s life with accusations that the teacher is gay. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, mere mortals are tried and convicted as witches by their peers. In the best theatrical tradition, recent behind-the-scenes shenanigans at local companies have combined…
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Seldom are the advantages of a home-based art space so obvious as in the case of “A Good Way to Learn, Lesson 4: Chores (Content Clean)”; it’s performance art in the guise of mundane household chores, or mundane household chores in the guise of art. Either way, the piece comes…
God works in mysterious ways. How else to explain the sudden appearance of a press release about Elvis on the office bulletin board? Well, maybe the “PLEASE POST THIS ON YOUR BULLETIN BOARD” it requested in polite italics, pulsing with the gentle insistence of ALL CAPS, had something to do…
