I was watching CNN on the evening of June 1. The news hit me hard. “It was the beginning of the Sabbath weekend,” anchor Bill Hemmer said, “and countless young Israelis were out to enjoy a Friday night. The mood shattered, though, when a suicide bomber wandered into the crowd…
Marion Blake is stuck between a rock garden and a hard place.An art history major at New York University, Blake was visiting Phoenix when someone took her to see the Grover Cleveland Thompson rock garden in 1979. “I couldn’t believe such a place existed,” gasps Blake, who bought the house…
The body count of culture is on the rise. In the past half year alone, more than 200,000 people passed through the Norman Rockwell exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum. Another 19,000 took in the James Turrell show at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. Last year, ASU’s performing arts…
Donna Van Dyke never imagined accusing her boyfriend of beating her baby.She never conceived of having to seek a court order to remove him from the Mesa apartment they shared. And she never thought that the last place she should turn for help would be the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office…
Bear Essence Cheap shot: So, Tony Fabriger sees this magnificent bear, and realized it was going to just walk right by him, still a little “dazed” from being in hibernation (“Kodiak Moment,” Patti Epler, June 7). Did the “Great Hunter” need food or was he under attack? No, he just…
It goes without saying — but you know I’m gonna say it anyway, right? — that music provides much of life’s soundtrack, and the privately shared experience, between listener and creator, forges a deep bond. Such has been the case for your humble writer and Tucson’s Calexico. One of those…
A slab of tiling from a long-gone Valley supermarket. A 1958 Edsel station wagon with a bum transmission and four flat tires. A forest of fake Christmas trees, inhabited by a plastic deer. If the Smithsonian is the Nation’s Attic, the grounds surrounding Gus Brethauer’s north Phoenix home are the…
The charges sounded more fitting for a mob kingpin than an alleged eco-arsonist. U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton solemnly drove home the severity of the 22 federal counts being levied against Mark Warren Sands, the Phoenix marketing consultant accused of being the Phoenix Mountains Preserve arsonist. Seven counts of extortion affecting…
The rumbling engine of a crop duster’s airplane jolted Frances Sebring awake. The cooler in her mobile home was sucking in the vapor of chemicals that were supposed to have landed on a nearby cotton field. The cloud of insecticides swept across the mobile homes of Sebring and her two…
Three pictures and a poem, published more than a year ago in a Glendale Community College literary magazine, have more than a dozen conservative Republican legislators demanding more than the right to determine what type art is acceptable.Some now want the president of the college fired, along with the faculty…
The financial controller got the phone call just before lunch on March 1. Eight officials from the Arizona Department of Revenue had stormed Norman’s Arizona at 40th Street and Campbell. They wanted access to all of the restaurant’s files. But Norman Fierros, the eatery’s owner, didn’t know where anything was…
Jane Dee Hull turned around and smiled at the two widows who were standing behind her.”I’m happy to have this bill in front of me — at last,” the governor said, moments before she signed into law House Bill 2393. “I know how important this is to you and everyone…
Suspension of Disbelief Cover story: On June 2, I entered my place of work, a local grocery store. I passed right by the New Times stand to see an attractive young lady with a pleasant grin on her face looking back at me. I had to look again to realize…
The bear appeared suddenly. Tony Fabriger had spent five cold and wet days on Kodiak Island, home to the world’s largest bears, with no sign of the fabled browns, not even a giant paw print in the spring snow. The unpredictable Alaska weather, sunny when the float plane dropped him…
Ramon Gomez isn’t used to being on the defensive. Gomez, Chandler’s most strident Latino activist and the self-appointed president of an organization called the National Civil Rights Movement, has spent the last four years in a perpetual pit-bull snarl. Along the way, he’s annoyed and embarrassed local officials with a…
The Arizona Museum for Youth has a reputation for innovative offerings. Yet in the coming months, it will be giving families access to something they won’t find at many other major American children’s museums.Gun lockers. The lockers aren’t part of some new museum campaign to entice the pistol-packing crowd toward…
A great egret flies over the eroding Salt River bottom near Central Avenue, but apparently has no reason to stop. The river that might have been its habitat decades ago is now just a human dumping ground.But with money from the Arizona Water Protection Fund, the degrading river will be…
How’s It Hanging?Bod squad: So, is there really no such thing as “bad” press (“Hook, Line & Sinner,” James Hibberd, May 31)? Quite a few things within the story were left a little open-ended. Life Suspended is a performance group, it is not a part of the church. Not all…
Word was, after last year’s gizmo-heavy and hype-fueled Kid A, the next Radiohead album would be a return to more melodic, mainstream music. But Amnesiac, recorded during the Kid A sessions, is just as fucked up as its predecessor. And we mean that in a good way. Kid A, released…
Jennifer Kindelspire is 20 years old. Petite and pale. Big brown eyes. Kinda quiet. The other Church members fear her. They call her a monster. They say Kindelspire can outpull anybody. Nobody wants to go up against Kindelspire. She’s like a bull. She once pulled an armored truck across a…
Gladys Nuvangyaoma didn’t plan to buy a car when she and her son dropped by Joe Florek Volkswagen Audi in Flagstaff last September.But Nuvangyaoma, who lives nearly two hours from Flagstaff on the Hopi Reservation, instantly fell in love with a 1998 red Ford pickup she saw on the lot,…
Souse ArrestFuzz busters: It’s a part of the policemen’s job to “serve and protect” the citizens they work for (“Cop Out,” Amanda Scioscia, May 17). This was a blatant abuse of the power that policemen have. I think they need to be reprimanded. I am a retired Navy petty officer…
