It’s been an anxious year for the Latin music industry, as it has for the industry in general. The good news in a time of crisis: The acts that survive are fired up by personal vision. While some of the year’s best albums also enjoyed commercial success, notably Molotov’s Dance…
1. Forget 50 Cent and Beyoncé. OutKast is really running the show. Okay, everyone probably has the album by now, and Speakerboxx/The Love Below will end up on a lot of critics’ Top 10 lists. So why is it on my list? First off, I love the album. Secondly, it’s…
While electronic-music fans in America stopped, dropped and fell in love with the cocaine- and leg-warmer-fueled nostalgia of the electroclash scene in 2003, the homeboy tribal techno revolution raged globally; a pair of Brits created a Latin Project that inexplicably made my deep-house-hating ears perk up; a Scumfrog hopped to…
Fundamentalist Mormon prophet Warren Jeffs came close to getting arrested over the last year because the Utah Attorney General’s Office believed he wanted disobedient teenager Vanessa Rohbock sacrificed to the Lord in a religious ritual called Blood Atonement. Based upon the teachings of Mormon Church patriarch Brigham Young, Jeffs professed…
I’ve been here too many times before to muster much outrage or amazement. Watching Joe Arpaio’s guys dismantle a little guy through gross abuse of police power has become a routine event in this county. The banality of evil, played out methodically over never-ending seasons, does that to a human…
Wheels of Progress Waste not: Thank you for your article (“Big Scam Theory,” Michael Lacey, December 18). Extremely interesting and insightful. As a native son, I am often appalled at what passes for progress in this city. Interesting that what is professed to be such an economic boon to Phoenix…
In mid-November, more than 200 FBI agents and insurance industry investigators packed into a banquet room at Tampa’s Marriott Waterside Hotel. They came to hear what an FBI supervisory agent and a prominent insurance investigator had to say about a stunningly successful health-insurance scam centered inside Southern California outpatient surgery…
Picture the Jerry Lewis telethon. See that guy in the wheelchair with the crooked arm? Now imagine him trying to juggle a dozen raw eggs. This conjures up a mixture of revulsion and fear, doesn’t it? Which is precisely what I feel when confronted by a microphone. Except the eggs…
The town of Gilbert is known nationwide as one of the fastest-growing communities. And locally, as one of the most homogenous. Recently, the town’s leaders solidified their white-bread image by eliminating Gilbert’s fledgling public arts program. Funding for public art in Gilbert has gone from $420,900 to zero. As a…
The Coolness Factor Chains of cool: When did chains become cool? I was shocked to see on the map in the article “What’s Cool” (Amy Silverman, December 4) you included IHOP as a “cool place” in downtown Phoenix. What exactly makes a restaurant that is part of a chain “cool”?…
As soon as the Suns game wraps up, they come busting out of the north doors of the America West Arena like a pack of hungry wolves. “The party’s in there,” declares a young black woman in micro-braids and a form-fitting blue dress, checking out the long line that has…
A Valley man has pleaded guilty to charges of second-degree murder and kidnapping in connection with the brutal murder of another man. On December 9, Jeremy Johnson, one of four Valley skinheads who was facing capital murder charges, agreed to pleas on the lesser crimes in exchange for his testimony…
Looks like another Tempe institution is a goner. A couple of months back, a pair of Arizona State University grads who own a couple of tony Scottsdale bars snagged Bandersnatch — a lowbrow mainstay of downtown Tempe’s quickly disappearing bar scene. At the time, longtime customers and employees of the…
Frank Nickman, formerly Farzin Nikmanesh, knew he would be your devil the moment he stepped back into the terminal in Farmington, New Mexico, the morning of September 11, 2001. He looked at the televisions; he looked at the drained white faces beneath them. Ah, this is why we were ordered…
All Around Downtown Chilly reception: I just got finished reading your “Cool Index” (“What’s Cool,” Amy Silverman, December 4) and I want to let you know how utterly disgusted I am by it. It is this sort of fawning, shoddy “journalism” that makes the downtown community look like a joke…
Sara Abbott Artist and co-owner, 3CarPileUp Bob Adams Artist Glen Allen Artist Christopher Alt Architect, Studio Ma Scott Andrews Director, Cakewalk Projects, and co-founder, Open Venue Griselda Avalos Fashion designer Janet Baker Curator of Asian Art, Phoenix Art Museum Joe Baker Curator of Fine Arts, Heard Museum, and co-founder, Open…
Craig and Kris DeMarco preside over one of the coolest corners in town. First they opened Postino, a beautifully appointed wine bar in an old post office. They took advantage of the cavernous space and put in an enormous sliding door that takes one side off the place in nice…
It’s a strange sort of subculture, this communion of men working the streets for money in an athletic endeavor they say is both exhausting and exhilarating. The money can be good, especially as it’s all tips, untouched by and invisible to government tax collectors, but it’s not all that brings…
Boxing His Ears The Spike was thrilled to run into none other than former heavyweight champion (and convicted rapist) Iron Mike Tyson last week at, of all places, the Circle K on Seventh Avenue and Bethany Home Road. The Spike was in need of a pack of smokes (hey, it…
Bloom Town The Bloom is off the rose: My show, The Rick Bloom Show, was reviewed by your journalist Robrt L. Pela, who invited me to his home for an interview in early September of this year. The article that resulted from that interview was published in late November, nearly…
A few years back, Sloane McFarland did something a lot of creative young people from Phoenix do. He left. And then he did something unusual. He came back. McFarland is an artist. You can see his video work on display at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, in a one-man…
Say you want to break into the urban clothing market. It probably won’t occur to you to slap stickers on garbage cans, call it “Trashcan Advertising” and invent your very own marketing campaign. But that’s exactly how a 25-year-old from north Phoenix has taken his clothing label, Soldierleisure, from the…
