Phoenix: Slightly less dumber than last year?
Last year, the Daily Beast had Phoenix at number 49 of the 50 smartest metropolitan areas. Quelle embarrassment!
This year the Valley improved, slightly, to number 45.
The first page is here.
Phoenix’s, five later, is here.
Here’s the methodology:
This year’s methodology is similar to last year’s inaugural list, with a couple weighting refinements, and one major change: as our civic engagement quotient—a proxy of a city’s willingness, and ability, to invest in intellectual culture—we dropped voter turnout in favor of libraries per capita. Overall, we divided the criteria into two parts: Half for education, and half for intellectual environment. The education half encompassed the percentage of residents over age 25 that had bachelor’s degrees (25 percent weighting) and graduate degrees (25 percent), compared to the overall population over age 25. The intellectual environmental half had three subparts. First, we looked at year-to-date nonfiction book sales (16.7 percent), as tracked by Nielsen BookScan, the nation’s leading provider of accurate point-of-sale data, which tracks roughly 300,000 titles each week. We also measured the ratio of institutions of higher education (16.7 percent), as defined by the federal government—different than just measuring college degrees, this acknowledges that universities as driver of intellectual vigor of cities and rewards cities with college populations. Finally, libraries per capita (16.7 percent) measures how willing and able a city is to educate the general public, as well as the no-cost opportunities for the public to educate itself.
6:48 AM
Liz Cohen debuts the Trambantamino at Salon 94 NYC
The longtime Phoenix artist, now based at Cranbrook outside of Detroit, unveiled her years-in-the-making installation at a New York gallery.
7:36 AM
New Times on Angela Ellsworth
New Times does one of its perceptive profiles on local artists, this one on Angela Ellsworth, whose discomfiting examinations of the psychic baggage she carries as a descendent of one of the prophets of the Mormon church has drawn her worldwide interest.
Writes Kathleen Vanesian:
Ellsworth’s most recent body of work […] directly confronts issues of the lives of Mormon women pioneers, polygamy, forced communal domesticity, and a look at sister wives through a homo-social lens. Ellsworth went international with her latest creations at the 17th Biennale of Sydney, a by-invitation-only art exhibition held in Australia’s capital city every two years. Now an entire world has come under the sway of solemn sister wives doing the Electric Slide in pastel prairie dresses, hairdos with frontal poufs, and strap-on braids.
Ellsworth is a lot more provocative than you might expect. Here’s something to make you think:
Turning her attention momentarily from fat, cancer, and bodily fluids, Angela Ellsworth has, in recent years, thematically mined the mother lode of her Mormon heritage and how it relates to issues raised by her acknowledged homosexuality. She likens recent polygamy prosecutions of FLDS members [that’s the Warren Jeffs-led breakaway sect] to the continuing stigmatization of same-sex marriages, which at present are, not unlike polygamy, still prohibited by law in most of the United States.
“I’m interested in the non-hetero-normative relationships in both queer culture and in polygamy,” Ellsworth told her rapt ASUAM audience. “And I want to talk about it. These are very contemporary issues, all complicated by a general fear of anything that’s outside of a hetero-normative frame. For me, that’s underneath all of it.”
7:22 AM
UPDATED: Did the Gin Blossoms really sell 30 million records?
From Fox 10:
It’s been nearly 20 years since the Gin Blossoms burst onto the local music scene in Tempe. With hits like Hey Jealously[sic], Found Out About You, and Till I Hear It From You, the Blossoms have sold 30 million records worldwide.
Off the top of my head I say pish posh.
The band went multi-platinum in the early 1990s, and I was a fan even before they were big.
But 30 million? I could be wrong; will research the issue and report back.
FIRST UPDATE:
Two commenters more or less agree with me:
Mark:
I was thinking the same thing recently. Especially since a few years back NME was at about 4 million, and I think CIS was getting on to 1 million. Even if those figures are US only (not sure, but don’t think so) 30 million seems way over inflated.
Thanks for researching, I’d be interested to see how much weight is really behind this number, or if the marketing team just thought it sounded like an impressive number – which to me seems more feasible.
We were happy to see one of Martin Cizmar’s most ardent defenders get in on the discussion as well:
Dan Gibson:
A crazy idea, I realize, but why not check the information BEFORE posting about it? It only took me two minutes to use the search on the RIAA’s site, after all.
Anyhow, it’s not (likely) true. The RIAA has certified “New Miserable Experience” four times platinum and “Congratulations, I’m Sorry” one time platinum. Unless they’re killing it overseas sales-wise, FOX 10 might want to dial down the hyperbole.
Dear Dan: You understand, don’t you, that I did say in the piece they had gone multiplatinum, right?
That information was provided for you!
RIAA information is iffy—quadruple platinum might mean only 3,500,000 sold.
And in any case, we’re talking about worldwide record sales, which are calculated nowhere reliably.
PHXated, fortunately, has a crack team of researchers working on this issue, even as we speak.
We will report back soonest!
12:18 PM
Radiate PHX's three-year anniversary is Tuesday
Catrina Knoebl’s monthly get-togethers bring downtown builders, business owners, activists, writers and thinkers to talk about the area’s future.
Tomorrow night marks the group’s third anniversary. The site is Cibo, at 5th Avenue and Fillmore, which among other things has great pizza. A note about the meeting on the Rail Life blog is here.
8:15 AM
Liz Cohen's "Trabantimino" to be unveiled in New York Oct. 7
The Phoenix native, now teaching outside of Detroit, has been working on the project for eight years.
The centerpiece is an East German car, a Trabant, which she has rebuilt to expand, transformer-like, into a Chevy El Camino, the ‘70s-era car-pickup.
The work also includes extensive photography showing Cohen as a bikini-clad car model brandishing various power tools.
The work in progress was shown occasionally in town, where she lived until 2008.
A recent New York Times blog item on Cohen is here. A 2006 New Times cover feature on her is here.
Full announcement from New York’s Salon 94 Bowery gallery is below.
Liz Cohen
Trabantimino
7 October – 11 November 2010
Salon 94 Bowery
243 Bowery
Opening Reception
Thursday, 7 October, 6-8
For Immediate Release
Salon 94 Bowery is pleased to open our renovated doors with an exhibition of Detroit-based artist Liz Cohen. Trabantimino takes center stage after eight years of body work and an unlikely journey from the former East Germany to Oakland, Scottsdale, and Detroit. Trabantimino is a hybridized car and kinetic sculpture that combines a former East German Trabant with a Chevrolet El Camino.
The Trabantimino is an amalgam of two different now-defunct Cold War era types: the East German “people’s car-” humble, anonymous, and functional, and the all-American, large-bodied, low-rider cowboy car. The sculpture contains roughly equal parts of both cars; its main frame a modest Trabant beige, yet then extends out into the full length of the El Camino- showing off its newly chromed American parts.
Cohen purchased the Trabant in 2002 in Berlin, and in the intervening years has become a master mechanic, doing most of the physical work herself. With the help of her mechanic mentors, including Dave Ornellas of World Wide Customs in Oakland; Don Barselloti of Elwood Bodyworks in Scottsdale; and Harvey Ledesma, Don Roberts, and Tom Mello at Kustom Creations in Detroit, Cohen learned the tools of the trade. In the process she hybridized herself, taking on the seemingly disparate roles of journeyman mechanic and bikini-clad car show model, mimicking the pinups found on body shop walls.
Originally a photographer, Cohen began the Trabantimino as a way to break down the barriers between her models and herself, literally becoming what she documented. Alongside the car, the gallery will be showing a series of photographs called the 5 P’s (Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance) from 2005. Cohen documented every tool amassed by her original mentor, Bill Cherry, throughout his thirty-plus years as a mechanic. The tools are photographed starkly, in black and white on a cement ground, and are reminiscent of Walker Evans’ 1955 project “The Beauty of the Common Tool.” In addition, we will include the ephemera and various publications featuring the Trabantimino, from inception to display.
Liz Cohen lives and works in Detroit. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including exhibitions at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, Galerie Laurent Godin, Fargfabriken, David Klein Gallery (Detroit), The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco). She has received awards and fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation and Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue, the MacDowell Colony, and Akademie Schoss Solitude. She is the Artist-in-Residence/Head of Photography at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Salon 94 would like to extend our thanks to the garages and mechanics who have helped Liz along the way, and to Creative Capital who awarded Liz the seed money to realize this project. The Trabantimino would not have been possible without the generous support of the following people and organizations: Akademie Schloss Solitude . Fine Arts Unternehman . Creative Capital Foundation . Fargfabriken . Don Barselloti/ Elwood Bodyworks . Harvey Ledesma/ Kustom Creations . Al Sharp/ Experi-Metal Inc . Scott Myles/ JE Myles Inc
Additional thanks: Scott Barsellotti, Michael Brammer, Beatriz Cohen, Emily Cohen, Roseann Cohen, Chico, Brian Foltyn, Natasha Garcia-Lomas, Kit Golsarry, Toni Heineman, Emily Hurley, Jordan Long, Nick Olson, Melissa McGorty, Dan Miller, Felicia Molnar, Imre Molnar, Adrienne Peters, Tom Peters, Erin Sweeny, Youngster and Alan Ziegler
Salon 94 Bowery is located at 243 Bowery in New York, NY. The gallery is open on Wednesdays through Sundays from 11AM-6PM. For further information please call (212)529-7400 or email info@salon94.com.
9:37 AM
Tania Katan: "Who said I was gay? Who said I'm grown up?"
PHXated is talking with local performance artist Tania Katan, whose one-woman show, Saving Tania’s Privates, open at the Littel Theater at Phoenix Theater tomorrow night.
You can get tickets here.
Katan’s website is here.
And you can see the entirety of the PHXated team’s strange infatuation with Katan here.
Yesterday, in part 1,Katan discussed her writing technique and her intimate involvement with Mormons.
Today she discusses growing up gay and coming back to Arizona, and makes an obscure reference to hair-care products.
PHXated: What brought you back to Arizona?
Tania Katan: Jan Brewer, running into people I went to high school with at Trader Joe’s, hot car-door handles, housing market. What was the question? Oh, um, because my partner got a really great job.
[Katan’s significant other, artist Angela Ellsworth, teaches at ASU.]
PHXated: What was it like growing up gay here?
Tania Katan: Who said I was gay? Who said I’m grown up? What kind of scandal are you looking for, Bill? Why are you so PHXated on my sexuality? Is it because you have a not-so-secret crush on me? Look, I’ll share hair product information with you, but that’s where it stops, buddy!
PHXated: What’s your favorite album of all time? What was your first concert?
Tania Katan: I do have a picture disc of Culture Club’s Colour by Numbers, which would have to be my favorite album of the early 80’s—I mean, “Church of the Poison Mind,” with Helen Terry belting out her deep vocal moans and then “Karma Chameleon,” “Miss Me Blind”… come on, this album is genius!!! But my FIRST favorite album, without a doubt, Harry Chapin’s Verities & Balderdash, I was 3 years old when it came out and listened to it over and over again and loved ALL the songs, not just “Cat’s [in the Cradle].” I also loved Don McClean’s American Pie! I remember both of the album covers sitting on stacks of albums in the small living room of my parent’s more-than-modest New York apartment. Thinking about both of these albums now, these storytellers set to music, and remembering the covers of the albums; both men are looking at you/me/their audience and holding up a finger, with Harry it’s his index finger, like he’s implicating you, like he’s asking you to be an active listener or participant in the stories he’s telling and with Don, it’s his thumb with the American flag painted on it, like maybe everything in the country will be alright or maybe it’s the irony that if the flag of America is painted on a relaxed hippie’s thumb, well, we might be in more trouble than we thought or probably some combination of the two and some other innovative ideas too.
First concert, like very first, Harry Chapin at Gammage. After the show, my mother knew how much I loved him, so we waited around to say hello, he was sitting on a stool casually signing autographs, I was about 9 years old and when we finally got to say hello to him, my mother told him how much I loved him, so he leaned down from his stool and gave me a kiss on the cheek, which I promptly and dramatically wiped off, letting out an audible, “Yuk!” He and my mother laughed. Shortly there after he died. When I was an adult, my mom used to joke with me, saying that maybe it was because I wiped off his kiss that he died.
Katan’s show run through Oct. 10.
Part 1 of the interview is here.
5:29 PM
The unbearable rightness of Tania Katan
(Tania Katan [right] with Angela Ellsworth)
At the recent edition of the Southwest Arts Conference at the Chandler arts center, PHXated was sitting with an old friend from high school.
Now, you don’t get to choose your oldest friends.
As it happens, she’s a Mormon, and once or twice we’ve exchanged some words given her active opposition to gay marriage.
She thinks it’s a threat to what she calls traditional marriage, and that Mormons are being persecuted for their beliefs on the subject.
I’m a bit more reality based; I know that both of her contentions are ludicrous, and that history will rule that she, and her church, were bigots.
Call PHXated a radical, but he finds it hard to understand religious groups that go around persecuting minorities.
You’d think that members of these ostentatious religions would for appearance’s sake if nothing else institutionally be on the side of the opppressed, the despised, and the vulnerable.
But no.
Still, as I said, friends are friends.
Anyway, we were chatting at the conference waiting for the lunchtime entertainment, which was going to be a monologue from the local performer Tania Katan.
Katan manifested, suddenly, on stage and began speaking in rapid-fire fashion. She’s short, and almost wiry; but her tousled hair, outsized glasses and manic energy create a compulsively watchable presence on stage.
She immediately started talking about Proposition 8, the Mormon-funded, anti-gay-marriage ballot initiative in California.
The setting, again, was Chandler, close to heart of the Valley’s Mormon center.
I’m paraphrasing here, but Katan said something to the effect that after Prop 8 passed she felt like going to the nearest Mormon temple, flipping it off and yelling fuck you.
But then she decided that such an approach was counterproductive.
“So I married a Mormon girl.”
I’ll always be thankful to Katan for that perfect moment.
As it happens, she did, in effect, marry a Mormon girl; her partner is Angela Ellsworth, the noted local artist.
Katan’s one-woman show, Saving Tania’s Privates, opens at the Little Theater at the Phoenix Theater on Thursday. It’s the first time the show has been staged in Phoenix; previously, she’s taken it to Edinburgh, Seattle and Philadelphia.
It’s a memoir about a lot of things, but mostly about her two battles with breast cancer, the first at the unfathomably early age of 21.
PHXated has been carrying on an email exchange with Katan. Part one is below; the second will be posted tomorrow.
You can see Katan’s web site here.
I’m including a video preview of her show at the bottom of this page.
Figuring out how to buy tickets on the Phoenix Theater’s site is a chore and a half. Here’s where you need to go.
PHXAted: Can we talk about writing for a bit? What were your earliest favorite writers? Was there a point at which you decided that’s for me? What’s the first thing you wrote?
Tania Katan: My academic career started at [Scottsdale’s] Tonto Elementary School. And when you attend a school named after the stereotypical sidekick of a masked white man, well, just surviving is rigorous enough, but reading, no, I didn’t do any of that.
I spent most of K-4th grade in Learning Disability classes, where reading wasn’t encouraged as much as shutting up. So instead of losing myself in the world of Huck Finn or Little Women, my connection to text and escapism was found through television and films. Woody Allen, Gilda Radner, Joan Rivers, and Tracey Ullman were some of my favorite writer/performers growing up.
I think it’s when I saw Gilda Radner jumping around on a couch as the spastic Girl Scout from London, England, with no shame, like she was proud to be in Learning Disability class, like her being different was what granted her total freedom; that’s when I realized that I desired to have that kind of freedom, that I wanted to express myself like that.
My first large, comprehensive piece of writing was a book, a novel, based loosely on my own story entitled 16, Dateless and Jewish. I wrote it when I was 16, dateless and Jewish. I just found the entire manuscript, in a folder that has BOOK written in fading blue ink with doodles that I made and quotes written all over it.
The manuscript has beautiful misspellings, white-out smudges, fading typewritten letters. For some chapters I used an even older method of writing—that’s right a feather and ink. When I’m super famous I’ll have the whole thing published as is.
PHXated: What’s your writing process? What was it like originally? Has it changed? Particularly in your current genre, the memoir, it’s an intensely personal effort, isn’t it? Do you work with someone to shape ideas and improve the theatricality?
Tania Katan: The initial process of writing memoir involves vomiting up as many memories/ideas/ themes as I can, then picking through the vomit to find chunks of clarity, stories, and threads that start to connect the pieces, make them part of a larger whole. Yeah, puking, that’s the biggest part of the process, good thing I get motion sickness.
I have a posse of friends who are authors, screenwriters and visionaries, that graciously read my work and offer honest and clear feedback.
PHXated: You are so mean to Mormons.
Tania Katan: Um, I think you’re projecting. I’m the one who married a Mormon. I love Mormons!
Seriously, I have two types of women that I go crazy for: Mormons and Jews. Any woman who plans her next meal before finishing the meal she’s eating, is, well, sexy. Whether she has a one-year supply or just eager to eat her next meal; I like my ladies hungry and prepared.
(Part two is tomorrow.)
Here’s the trailer for her show:
2:23 PM
Not to be missed this Friday at the ASU Art Museum: Brent Green
Brent Green is an artist, filmmaker and musician whose newest installation, Gravity was Everywhere Back Then, opens at the ASU Museum on Friday.
It’s a complicated work: Green discovered the story of a Pennsylvania store clerk who, in some sort of obsessive, pained way, began building an extravagantly large house after his wife was diagnosed with cancer.
Green made a group of short movies about the man, his house and the couple’s love affair; for his installation at ASU, he’s also rebuilding as much of the house as will fit in the venue’s galleries.
The films are an odd amalgam of documentary, narrative, and stop-motion animation. It’s gotten some poignant reviews:
There are tons of bad movies in this world that you can’t wait for them to be over…. Brent Green’s debut animated feature film, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then -— which is a magnificent movie —- contains a scene of such devastating heartbreak and sadness that I was practically praying that the film would end before I would have to witness it.
He’s been working on the installation as an artist-in-residence for the past three weeks; on Friday you can see the construction and various of Green’s films, with Green accompanying the showing on guitar.
The event runs from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Friday at the museum, at Tenth Street and Mill in Tempe on the ASU campus.
Details from the museum here.
Green’s web site is here.
The video above shows Green talking about the project.
Full press release below.
From the museum:
Gravity was Everywhere Back Then, A New Installation by Brent Green
Sep 4, 2010 – Dec 31, 2010 Location: ASU Art Museum Cost: Free Curator: Heather Sealy Lineberry
This fall, the ASU Art Museum will host a new exhibition by well-known artist and filmmaker Brent Green titled, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. The project is inspired by the true story of an idiosyncratic house in Louisville, owned by hardware store clerk Leonard Wood. When his wife Mary was diagnosed with cancer, Leonard started building the house room by room, with the tragic hope that his labor would save his wife. Even after Mary’s death, Wood continued to build the house. Over the next 20 years, he strove to bring something as tangible and powerful as his love for Mary into the world.
Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then will feature Green’s version of Wood’s house, transplanted and reconstructed from the artist’s studio in rural Pennsylvania. The house, along with sculptural elements and structures, will be installed in one of the ASU Art Museum’s galleries, where it will appear to be both constricted by and bursting out of the space. Video and sound pieces will be shown inside and around the house to create an immersive environment.
Green will be in residence for three weeks at the ASU Art Museum, Aug. 16 – Sept. 3, installing the exhibition and interacting with students and school groups. Students from MetroArts High School in Phoenix, guided by Sue Chenoweth, and ASU Intermedia students, guided by Angela Ellsworth and Gregory Sale, will work closely with Green in the gallery as he installs his house, sculpture and films.
Green lives and works in a barn in Cressona, PA. His work is a regular feature at Sundance and he has performed at The Hammer Museum, The Wexner Center and The Getty Museum of Art. In 2007, Green screened three works and performed a live soundtrack at the 11th Annual ASU Art Museum Short Film and Video Festival. Recent solo shows include Site Santa Fe (2009) and the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (2008). Upcoming exhibitions and performances include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Berkeley Museum of Art, CA; Site Santa Fe Biennial; the American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore; and Diverse Works, Houston. As part of MoMA’s exhibition of Creative Capital artists (Green is a 2005 Creative Capital Grant recipient), the Museum will host a screening of several of Green’s short films followed by a live performance with members of the music group Califone and indie rock legends Fugazi.
3:41 PM
EaterAZ is looking for a few good taco judges
The people behind the local food blog EaterAZ did a barbecue fest last year, and then looked around for new challenges.
They noticed that the taco field was wide open; the first Arizona Taco Festival is scheduled for October. Now they need judges:
As you know, we are producing the first taco festival in the history of the world. (No, really, it’s never been done. Isn’t that freakin’ crazy?!) Because we wanted to keep the judging fair and balanced (meaning blind and qualified), we launched an organization called the National Taco Association. Consider it the Kansas City Barbecue Society (KCBS) of tacos. After attending a brief class on taco judging and score keeping, you will hold one of the most important positions at the Arizona Taco Festival on October 9. A judges duties are grueling–-you will hang out in a tent from 10AM to 4PM, eating free tacos and marking scores and having fun.
Interested? Send a note to info@aztacofestival.com.
Details here.
8:59 AM
2011 Scottsdale Arts Fest call for artists
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Aug. 28, 2010
2011 SCOTTSDALE ARTS FESTIVAL – CALL FOR ARTISTS
(SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.) – Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts is seeking artists working in all media to exhibit at the 41st annual Scottsdale Arts Festival on March 11–13, 2011. A jury of arts professionals will select the artists to participate in the Festival and will award prizes in numerous categories, including ceramic, furniture, glass, jewelry, mixed media, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, textiles and woodworking. All artists must apply online at www.ZAPPlication.org before Oct. 12, 2010. The application fee is $30.
Long recognized for its high-quality arts and crafts and beautiful setting, the award-winning Scottsdale Arts Festival features some 200 artists from throughout North America who display their work among the gardens and fountains of the Scottsdale Civic Center. Works of art are available for purchase directly from the artists and from the Festival’s online art auction. The event attracts tens of thousands of Scottsdale-area residents and visitors, who also enjoy live music, entertainment, fine food and wine and activities for children.
The Scottsdale Arts Festival is produced by Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, a division of the nonprofit Scottsdale Cultural Council. Proceeds benefit the Center’s arts and youth-education programs.
For additional information about the Scottsdale Arts Festival visit www.ScottsdaleArtsFestival.org or e-mail festival@sccarts.org.
# # #
5:09 PM
"The Tillman Story": The reviews
For whatever reason, The Tillman Story, Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary on the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan and the by all accounts tragically, perhaps criminally, mishandled aftermath, hasn’t opened in Arizona yet.
It’s screened for critics once, and at least once for the ASU football team, but as yet I haven’t heard of any local special screenings before its scheduled opening Sept. 3.
It’s showing in New York, however. The reviews have been exceedingly positive—though note the one exception below, from the New York Post.
You can see the trailer here. The full Metacritic page is here.
Here are some of the first reviews:
Mr. Bar-Lev’s clearsighted, emotionally steady documentary examines the family members’ deepening inquiry into the circumstances of Tillman’s death and chronicles their mounting rage at the military’s misappropriation of his story. The film visits the canyon where he died and the soldiers who were with him and heard his final words, in which he tried to alert the unidentified troops only 40 yards away that he was on their side.
The family’s outrage over the exploitation of their son boiled over in a letter that Tillman’s father, Pat Sr., wrote accusing the military of fraud. The letter led to an internal investigation and a Congressional hearing at which military leaders were grilled on what they knew about what the family asserted was a cover-up; their memories were vague.
“The Tillman Story” is a story that won’t go away, won’t leave you alone, won’t let you feel at ease. Intensely dramatic, filled with elevated heroism, crass self-interest and blatant stupidity, it’s a paradigmatic narrative of our tendentious, turbulent times.
It’s a fascinating film, full of drama, intrigue, tragedy and righteous indignation, but maybe its greatest accomplishment is to make you feel the death of one young man — a truly independent thinker who hewed his own way through the world, in the finest American tradition — as a great loss.
‘The Tillman Story" purports to be an exposé of the cover-up of the death by friendly fire of the Army Ranger and one time NFL star Pat Tillman. But, provocative and colorful as the film is, it does the very thing it denounces — massaging the facts to seize Tillman for a political agenda.
[…]
The film dances around this point, but Tillman’s mother, who is still unsatisfied after being given 3,000 pages of documents from the Army investigation, is a George W. Bush hater. Like many before her (such as Cindy Sheehan, who said her soldier son “was murdered … to benefit Israel”), she found sorrow curdling into something more dynamic and satisfying: political rage. A military organizational chart that is topped by a photo of the then-commander in chief (cue scary music) is as close as the movie gets to painting a picture of an evil cabal headed by Bush. But fratricide, when you clear away the fog of war, is simply a gruesome accident.
7:56 AM
Another academic group debates holding a conference in Arizona, using terms like "self-fornicate"
From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
A national organization devoted to medieval studies is facing a backlash from some of its members over its decision to go ahead with a conference next April in Arizona, where a controversial immigration law enacted this year has drawn sharp criticism from many academics.
Some members of the Medieval Academy of America wrote an open letter this month to the organization assailing its decision to keep the conference in Tempe, Ariz., despite previous complaints in May.
The latest group, whose number isn’t specified in the story, is leaving the organization in protest.
The best part of the story are the comments, in which an anti-immigrant guy not too up on the actual issues crosses swords with one of the academics, resulting in remarks like:
A couple of suggestions to you, genius. 1. A not so leisurely survey of the supremacy clause of the US Constitution 2. Self-fornicate.
To which the right-wing guys says:
Now go start another doctorate in something equally as relevant like…“Chicano studies”.
Later on in the discussion, a different commenter makes this hard-to-argue-with point:
Medieval Studies (if the convention includes papers on Medieval Thought) seems like an appropriate convention for Arizona. Where else would you find such backward thought?
And later on, one poster corrects another’s German grammar.
7:09 AM
Regency House recall: High rise trouble!
The Regency House is the residential high-rise on Central just north of the Heard Museum.
The building, a condominium, is facing an unpleasant situation: More than five million dollars (!) of long-deferred maintenance.
After months, if not years, of discussion, the building’s board finally figured out a plan, and announced assessments to pay for it.
They ranged from $40,000 to $70,000 for each unit, depending on size.
Said one resident: “The only thing I fear more than their setting the assessments was not setting the assessments”—i.e., avoiding the problem further.
One of the stereotypes about condo owners in town, which may or may not be justified, is that they lean toward the senior citizen side, demographically, and these folks, being on fixed incomes, vociferously oppose increases in the homeowner fees.
Over years and then many decades, as the fees stay low and maintenance is deferred, the buildings become vulnerable—and the residents become even more opposed to taking on the job, given the large expenditures involved.
All that said, you can still imagine the fix folks there are in, particularly in this housing market.
It’s particularly a nightmare for people who just can’t afford the assessment, even with a loan … they’d have to sell their units, taking a huge financial loss both by having to sell in this climate and still having to eat the assessment.
So what happened at the Regency House after the board came up with a plan to, finally, face reality and make the needed repairs?
Then residents announced a recall campaign against the board.
And Tuesday night, they recalled three members of it.
9:10 PM
"The Arizona Taliban"
One of the commenters on the Talton post I just mentioned, “azrebel,” deserves special mention for an observation he or she made:
I have a theory. I’ll call it the Arizona Taliban.
For those of you who have not spent time in rural Arizona, let me tell you, you have no idea how much rural Arizona hates “The state of Maricopa”. They hate eveything about the valley and they hate all the millions of “ants” who live in the valley. Over the years, some of the craziest legislative measures have come from rural legislators. When you group the rural kooks along with the east Valley Mormon kooks and the west valley ultra-conservative kooks, you have a majority which can by design or ineptitude do immense damage to the state.
The Afghan Taliban regularly do things which shout out to the world – we are ignorant, we are uneducated, we are mindless religious, fanatical robots, we have guns and we will kill you all.
The Arizona Taliban, don’t use guns, they use votes.
8:33 AM
PHXations—Friday, August 20, 2010
The Hoover Dam bypass is almost done. The most noted part of the new route, which means that the trip from Phoenix to Las Vegas will not include the crawl over the two-lane Hoover Dam, is a gynormous, 900-foot-high bridge.
Reports the Republic:
The Federal Highway Administration has not picked an exact opening date for the $114 million span, officially named the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge. At a sneak preview Thursday to showcase the completion of the bridge deck, officials announced an opening gala on Oct. 16. A federal spokeswoman said the bridge will open in early November.
Workers are finishing the last details on the bridge as well as the highway connections and access paths for walkers, gawkers and bicyclists. The work includes installing a pedestrian railing, building a parking lot for visitors, and adding lighting, striping and crash barriers to the approach roads.
The story says that the Arizona approach to Hoover Dam will be closed, so you’ll have to get to Nevada if you want to see the dam proper.
The dam’s official name is the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge.
Tillman, of course, is the Arizona football star was was killed in friendly fire in Afghanistan. O'Callaghan is a former governor of Nevada.
Nick Martin is the Valley’s best blogger, Phoenix magazine says.
The mag’s Best of the Valley issue salutes Martin’s blog, Heat City, calling it “a true marvel of D-I-Y journalism”:
Competing against entire newsrooms at The Arizona Republic and other newspapers, Martin took first place in breaking news at the most recent Arizona Press Club Awards for getting the scoop on a series of arrests related to the 2004 bombing of the Scottsdale diversity office
IN other media awards, the Republic’s E.J. Montini is given best columnist and Buildproof.com, which helps folks remodel their kitchens, is deemed best local web site.
The Arizona Department of Commerce says that unemployment in the state held steady at its already high rate of 9.6 percent.
From the PBJ:
The Phoenix metro area’s unemployment rate moved from 8.7 percent in June to 8.8 percent in July
From July 2009 to July 2010 Arizona lost 6,800 jobs, or 0.3 percent of its total workforce.
6:40 AM
The NYT blogs about quondam Phoenix artist Liz Cohen
Cohen grew up in Phoenix and until recently worked on her longterm Bodywork project in town. Two years ago, she left to teach photography at Cranbrook.
The centerpiece of the endeavor is a car—an East German Trabant that, improbably, morphs itself into a Chevy El Camino, those car-cum-pickups popular back in the 1970s. The contraption is also outfitted with low rider-style hydraulics. The resulting melange represents the cross-cultural meshings that mark our society—east and west, north and south, suburban and urban—as well as Cohen herself, whose father was a Jew from the Middle East and whose mother is Colombian.
Here’s the pic by the writer, Tamara Warren, illustrating a Times post about Cohen’s work today in the paper’s Wheels blog:
From the post:
In 2002 [Cohen] began building a lowrider out of a 1987 Trabant and a 1973 Chevrolet El Camino. Since then the Trabantimino, as she calls it, has been an ongoing work of art, part sculptural installation and part functional custom-build — an eight-year immersion into the heart of American car culture in which Ms. Cohen’s own self-transformation has played a significant role.
“I wanted to design a project in which I could participate in the culture,” she said.
The project pairs the massive mechanical and fabrication project that is the car with a large photography component that chronicles both the car’s construction and Photoshopped photos of Cohen herself. She’s near completion of the years-long project in anticipation of a show in New York’s Salon 94 gallery, currently scheduled for this fall.
Full post with video here.
A New Times cover story on Cohen from a few years ago here.
8:42 AM
New construction at the Heard Museum
From the PBJ:
The Heard Museum is undergoing renovations and is using a recent Piper grant to help pay for the work.
The $300,000 project will include a coffee bar, shop and bookstore with a $150,000 from the Virginia G. Piper Trust helping to finance the renovation, said Heard spokeswoman Deb Krol.
The project will relocate and expand the museum’s bookstore and create a coffee bar and cantina, which will offer up drinks and food in a casual atmosphere. The Heard Museum Cafe will continue its operations as a full-service sit-down venue.
Full story here.
7:33 AM
PHXations—Monday, August 9, 2010
Gangplank, the Chandler idea incubator cum social space, got feature treatment in the Sunday EVT, complete with cute pix:
It’s the lede story on the site this a.m.
The AP is reporting that the anti SB 1070 protests helped boost hotel occupancy in Phoenix. Alas it was a small drop in the bucket compared with the impacts of the SB 1070 inspired boycotts:
The days leading up to Senate Bill 1070 were good for the hotel industry.
Arizona Hotel and Lodging Association spokeswoman Kristin Jarnagin says most downtown Phoenix hotels and a lot of other nearby hotels were filled with media, protesters and supporters.
Jarnagin says 2009 was the worst year on record with the hotel and convention industry losing 30,000 tourism jobs.
Jarnagin says boycotts cost the state at least $15 million and 40 conventions.
She fears those numbers will get worse given that conventions are booked years in advance and those groups may go elsewhere.
5:28 PM
How much money does film production bring to the Valley each year?
About $25 million a year, according to a report by the Phoenix Film Office.
There’s a Republic story on the report here.
A Will Ferrell movie called Everything Must Go was filmed here this spring.
In typically irritating Republic fashion, the newsworthy angle of the story—and, no doubt, the whole reason the film office did the report— isn’t divulged until literally the last two paragraphs:
The future for films in the Valley could decline, the report noted. The Motion Picture Incentive Program administered by the Arizona Department of Commerce offers incentives to production companies in the form of tax credits equaling up to 30 percent of their dollars spent in Arizona, with a cap of $9 million per project.
The incentive program is scheduled to end Dec. 31. Senate Bill 1409, which would have extended the program, was not passed by the Legislature.
7:31 AM
In which we discover that the Exotic East isn't much different from the unexotic East Valley
When you read the hedline on this EVT story out of Mesa (“Parents sue to stop suspension for drinking on China band trip”), you probably think the same thing we do:
Jesus, aren’t these conservative Mesa types all about personal responsibility and strict rules?
Their high schoolers get caught drinking on a fields trip—to China, no less—get a lenient three days os suspension… and they sue the district to protect their little ones from having to take responsibility?
Read the story and … it’s true: These grimy parental units are suing the district after their kids got a measly three-day suspension for drinking on a band trip, to China no less.
But there’s a twist: The parents do have a case on a different aspect of what turns out to be an story with a twist or two.
The kids were drinking in China, according to the suit, but the circumstances were a little … rococo:
A Chinese tour guide provided beer while spending hours in a hotel room with the teens. The suit says the tour guide took his shirt off because he was hot, then watched the students play drinking games until they were wearing nothing but boxers.
Now that’s something the kids could have experienced back home in the good old U.S. of A., and in church, to boot.
The district’s side:
The district contends the parents threatened to generate bad publicity if administrators kept the suspensions in place. The parents' suit includes other allegations of sexual conduct and a Chinese sex worker groping a boy in the hotel.
“In any event, Plantiffs' arguments are baseless and meant to do nothing more than embarrass and discredit the school and its staff in an effort to win a tactical advantage,” the suit states.
7:55 AM
The ruling on California's gay marriage ban is coming today
This is the case to overturn Proposition 8, the Mormon-backed initiative that wiped out the ability of gays and lesbians to marry in California.
Most analysts say the U.S. District Court judge will void the proposition, but you never know.
The case against to overturn Prop. 8—and make gay marriage legal again—was led by David Boies and Ted Olsen. The pair got a lot of notice because they were on opposite sides of Bush v. Gore, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that handed the 2000 election to George W. Bush.
From the SF Chronicle:
Walker’s ruling, due sometime between 1 and 3 p.m., is certain to be appealed to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The case could reach the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011 or 2012.
Meanwhile, a new study shows that the millions the Mormons spent spreading misinformation to California families worked.
From the LAT:
The numbers are staggering. In the last six weeks, when both sides saturated the airwaves with television ads, more than 687,000 voters changed their minds and decided to oppose same-sex marriage. More than 500,000 of those, the data suggest, were parents with children under 18 living at home. Because the proposition passed by 600,000 votes, this shift alone more than handed victory to proponents.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise. The Yes on 8 campaign targeted parents in its TV ads. “Mom! Guess what I learned in school today!” were the cheery-frightening first words of the supporters' most-broadcast ad. They emerged from the mouth of a young girl who had supposedly just learned that she could marry a female when she grew up.
Among the array of untrue ideas that parents could easily take away: that impressionable kids would be indoctrinated; that they would learn about gay sex; that they would be more likely to become gay; and that they might choose to be gay. California voters, depending on where they lived in the state, were exposed to the Yes on 8 ads 20 to 40 times.
If you haven’t seen it, Netflix 8: The Mormon Proposition, a fairly rigorous documentary that examines the national campaign the Mormons waged against the proposition.
It’s nice—a supposed church collecting money from its flock under the guise of doing good works, and then using it to spread hate and intolerance.
Churches get a pass in our political debate—everyone’s scared to criticize groups that run around with the idea of morality draped about them.
But why can’t we call bigots bigots?
Why don’t they build tolerance rather than spread intolerance?
7:43 AM
A bicyclist hurt in Mesa; police need witnesses
The EVT says a bicyclist was found seriously injured on a Mesa street last night.
The accident happened near the intersection of N. Country Club Drive and Brown Road in west Mesa.
The man, who was not wearing a helmet, suffered serious head injuries and a broken back, according to police.
Police are continuing to investigate the incident because it is not known at this time how the man fell off his bicycle, and are seeking the public’s assistance in locating any witnesses.
Anyone with information on this incident can call police at (480) 644-2211.
6:44 AM
Memories of the Sombrero Playhouse: The Complete Saga
Here’s PHXated’s chat with Gary Gohring, the manager of Phoenix’s ‘70s-era art-movie mecca, the Sombrero Playhouse, in its complete form.
I’m fascinated by the work that’s been done to chronicle the work on the Vanishing Phoenix front; you can read Yuri’s thoughts on it here and here.
Today I’m beginning a four-part interview with Gary Gohring, who longtime Phoenicians will remember was an early film critic of New Times, waaay back in the 1970s.
Gohring was also the manager of the Sombrero Playhouse, a former live theater that became, in the late 1970s, the city’s most vibrant movie theater.
There’s not much about the Sombrero in the archives of the local papers, thought I did find this bit of comments on it on a site called Cinema Treasures.
I recently contacted Gohring, who now lives in San Diego; he was kind enough to agree to the following interview, which I’ll post in chunks over the next few days.
As I note in the chat below, the Sombrero was a key part of the Valley’s cultural life in the barren 1970s, and deserves a more prominent place in our cultural memory.
-- Bill Wyman
PHXated: Gary, thanks much for answering a few questions about the Sombrero Playhouse.
Gary Gohring: You’re welcome.
PHXated: Can you tell me something about the Sombrero during your time there? When did it turn into a movie theater? What was the sort of mission statement? Am I right in remembering it was really the only place to see art films like that in Phoenix proper? (Leaving aside the Valley Art and occasional movies at the museums.)
G.G.: I think the Sombrero Playhouse became a movie theater sometime in 1977. I am not really sure about the exact date as I became involved after it was already established. Morey Levine was the owner of the theater, and he could probably provide the exact date. (I do not know how to get in touch with him.) I don’t recall a particular mission statement, but he may be able to provide that as well. We were the only repertory movie theater in the Phoenix area (outside of the Valley Art) from when it opened to when we finally shut down in 1981.
PHXated: The owner was Richard Charelton, right? Didn’t he have something to do with the Woolworth family? Do you know where he is now?
G.G.: Richard Charelton owned the property on which the theater was located. I have no knowledge of either his connection to the Woolworth family or where he is now.
PHXated: What were the logistics of the place? What did it cost to rent a Fellini movie for a couple of showings? How did you get the films… were they flown in or mailed in? Any showings that were notable or that you were particularly proud of? Did you ever book films no one was interested in? Besides Rocky Horror, what were the most popular things you showed?
G.G.: I cannot recall the exact logistics of the place. I want to say we could seat 350 or so maximum for a showing, but that is just a poor remembrance. We used a booker out of Los Angeles to get our films, but I did most of the programming through him when I started working at the theater, first as assistant manager, then as manager, in 1977-78. (Morey and our booker deserve all the credit, though, for bringing in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which was already playing before I started.) We received the majority of our films just as other theaters did; they were flown in (often the night before). Occasionally, a non-major distributor like New Yorker Films would mail a 16mm title to us. Costs varied, depending on the popularity or availability of the film itself.
We tried to bring a diverse lineup of movies to the Phoenix area, most notably those American, cult, and foreign films that had been popular or overlooked in previous limited runs n the Valley. We also occasionally brought in a few premieres, and we would have festivals around a particular actor, director, or theme. In fact, I basically became the programmer because I suggested they do a Woody Allen film festival, which proved a big success for the theater. My own particular tastes ran (and still run) towards the more obscure, out of the mainstream foreign films, and (not too surprisingly) these generally proved to be the movies not too many people were interested in. Off the top of my hear, our biggest successes, outside of the Friday and Saturday midnight showings of Rocky Horror Picture Show, were the double-bills of King of Hearts/Harold and Maude and Emmanuelle 2: Joys of A Woman/Story of O.
PHXated: It was a long time ago, but I have a sense that a certain amount of care was taken with presentation and projection at the Sombrero—-particularly in contrast to that of other theaters in town. Is that a fair impression? Did you have decent equipment? What kind of projectors were they?
G.G.: The theater had a great, dedicated staff, and it was blessed with about four projectionists during my tenure there who did wonders with the prints we received, many of which were in pretty bad shape. We had standard 35mm projectors for the day.
PHXated: Going through some old boxes a while back, I found a frequent film-goer card from the Sombrero, with dates marked by hand—something like “5/14 …. 5/17 … 5/18 … 5/23.” That shows you how often we went! To me, the theater was a major cultural institution in town at the time, and I have memories of seeing so many classic, foreign, cult and (not least) rock movies there. Is this an overinflated impression of its role in the valley’s cultural life at the time?
G.G.: The discount card you referenced was indeed marked by hand. Ten admissions for $20, I believe it was. (The discount card I now get has 5 admissions for $40.) As I mentioned, we did attempt to bring a diverse collection of films to the Phoenix market, trying to accommodate a wide variety of tastes. In many cases, we were successful, and in some cases, we were not. I know for sure we did not appease the customer who kept requesting more Oliver Reed films. "He made other films besides Women in Love, Tommy, and The Devils,“ one of the person’s notes lifted from the suggestion box stated. As for leaving a cultural legacy, I think that other than being known as the place where The Rocky Horror Picture Show first played and as the movie theater that had no parking, we probably did not leave much of a cultural legacy. At least not the cultural legacy I would have liked. However, it is good to hear that there are those like yourself who not only remember but do so with fondness.
PHXated: Specifically, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a big deal for my high-school friends; in such a culturally conservative and homogeneous city, as a bunch of misfits in a high school drama club, I felt it was a place where we could meet similar quote-unquote creative kids our age. What was your impression of RHPS at the time? Was it fun or a nightmare to oversee?
Gary Gohring: I am not really the person to ask about The Rocky Horror Picture Show as I was neither a fan of it or all the attendant fan involvement with it, but I certainly recognize that for many, many people in their teens and 20s in the mid-to late ‘70s it was the cult film and an important social bonding experience.
Additionally, its financial success helped the Sombrero prosper and ultimately stay in business as long as it did. It certainly allowed me to indulge my aforementioned tastes and book films such as [Bresson’s] Diary of a Country Priest and [Ozu’s] Tokyo Story, which hardly drew the same crowd, enthusiasm, or grosses.
The assistant managers usually ran the theater on Friday and Saturday evenings; I only worked those RHPS showings they missed. The theater was a nightmare to clean up on the mornings after, and we lost more than one cleaning crew in large part because of it.
PHXated: I remember the Valley Art, of course—particularly the afternoon showing of The Graduate where they accidentally showed an X-rated preview of Screw on Screen before it. (Sheer chaos resulted.) As I drive around town, I also think of the (literally) underground screens at Los Altos mall, the big Bethany theater, the Kachina in Scottsdale, the Cine Capri …
I’m not nostalgic that much about it (there are so many more movies available these days through so many sources), but there was something larger than life about seeing Star Wars, or Alien, at the Cine Capri, or Annie Hall at the Bethany. Any theaters you remember fondly from the time?
G.G.: What I remember most about moviegoing in Phoenix during the ‘70s was not so much the theaters themselves but the evolution of the moviegoing experience itself, disintegrating from the big movie houses such as Cine Capri, the Kachina, etc. into the multiplexes. And in some cases, this was done extremely poorly, with a single cinema being butchered into an awkward five or six screen theater. Mann’s Christown, I am looking at you.
The ‘70s also became the decade that ushered in the financial mega-blockbusters, where success has become measured more in terms of stratospheric box-office receipts on the opening weekend rather than solid financial gain and/or quality.
I enjoyed (still do) going to foreign movies and off-beat films, so I generally most liked going to NEEB Hall at ASU, the Valley Art, and Dan Harkins' Camelview Cinemas, and as I lived in Tempe at the time, I did not mind driving to the other side of town to the Bethany Cinemas to see the likes of [Peckinpah’s] Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia or to the UA 6 Cinemas to see [Monte Hellman’s] The Cockfighter in their exclusive Valley runs.
PHXated: How did you come to work for New Times? What did you do after that? What do you do now?
Gary Gohring: I sent three sample movie reviews to the New Times in the Fall of 1973 in the hope of writing movie reviews for them. The editors at the time were kind enough to ignore their mediocrity and asked me to write a small column listing all the films currently in town.
Being an ASU undergraduate at the time, I jumped at the chance to earn a whopping $15 a column. I eventually ended up writing movie reviews for the New Times on a sporadic basis from 1973 through early 1977, and then on a regular basis from April 1978 to April 1982. I really appreciate the opportunity Jim Larkin and Mike Lacey gave me when they took back control of the paper in 1978.
I tried to write reviews that would get readers to look at a movie and its creators in a new and original way. For me, the best movie reviewers do this. Unfortunately, most readers of movie reviews (sadly, an ever shrinking number) and advertisers want reviews that reflect their taste and universal opinion. I was not successful in accomplishing what I wanted, and I never did fit the other model.
I was fortunate, though, during my tenure there to work with a great staff and some terrific writers, most notably Bart Bull, Bob Boze Bell, Sandy Lovejoy, and Dewey Webb.
I have quietly faded into oblivion since then, having moved from Phoenix in 1992. However, I still go to movies and enjoy viewing and discussing them as much as ever.
PHXated: I moved away in the late ‘70s, came back soon after to visit and … the Sombrero was just gone, with nothing there but a vacant lot. What lead to its closing?
G.G. Disagreements between Richard Charleton, the property owner, and Morey Levine, our owner, most notably concerning our showing of soft-core fare such as Emmanuelle 2, came to a peak in the summer of 1978. The most immediate result was that we lost our parking and had to lease a not-too-convenient lot nearby.
These conflicts, inconveniences, and subsequent costs to deal with them escalated, driving away patrons and affecting both programming and the bottom line.
Then we lost our exclusivity to show The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Also, there were only so many times we could show King of Hearts. The theater closed in early 1981.
Even had we not encountered the problems we did, we would probably have been buried by the coming video revolution. I believe the property was subsequently sold, but to whom I do not remember. I know the building was subsequently torn down, but I do not recall when or by whom.
PHXated: Gary, thanks again for responding!
G.G.: Hope this incomplete recollection helps in some way.
4:18 PM
The state of the state . . .
… in one simple paragraph:
“Arizona doesn’t aspire to compete in the new economy in an organized, nonpartisan, strategic way. We lack ambition. We lack aspiration. We’re satisfied with the mix we have, leading the nation in call centers. There’s no urgency about that.”
The speaker is Fred DuVal, vice president of the state Board of Regents.
The story is about how the state provides a trivial amount of financial aid for students.
6:46 AM
ESPN rates the food at Arizona's sports stadiums. Result: Not very appetizing
The sports network has a major story and a full interactive map of the country’s sports stadiums and their food inspections reports.
The Arizona entries are Chase Field, US Airways Center, the Jobing.com Arena, and the University of Phoenix Stadium.
All have the distinction of having had between a quarter and a half of the different food concessions at each venue “cited for at least one ‘critical’ or ‘major’ health violation.”
[ESPN] submitted its findings to Dr. Robert Buchanan, director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Food Safety and Security Systems. His background includes 10 years overseeing food safety research at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which sets the guidelines by which most U.S. health departments conduct inspections.
[He said:] “Certainly, if you have a high rate of facilities within a stadium coming up with critical deficiencies, that to me strikes of systemic errors in either management of the stadium or in the infrastructure of the stadium, and both of them need to be corrected.”
For the record, what do “systemic errors” cause?
One of the most worrisome violations to health inspectors is food not being cooked, reheated or held at safe temperatures, because that’s when dangerous bacteria – such as E. coli, salmonella, and staphylococcus aureus – can grow and, if consumed, can trigger nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting.
The full story here
11:50 AM
Is a CVS drugstore downtown a big deal or not?
The store’s opening in the downtown development known as CityScape occasioned a big ceremony and something approaching a crowd yesterday, the RailLife blog reports](http://raillife.com/blog/2010/07/27/selling-drugs-on-light-rail/):
So, the big grand opening at the new CityScape CVS Pharmacy was this week and a whole slew of paparazzi, politicians and local folk gathered to celebrate the occasion. It was interesting to talk with some of the people that came to the opening. For the politicians and super-cool movers and shakers it seemed to have the air of “look what we are doing” down here.
The writer, Nick Bastian, goes on to say that he wasn’t impressed (yet), for reasons you can read on his post.
The CVS drug stores out here are, I"ve noticed, oddly clean, spacious, well-lit and friendly. My experience with them in the past has been on the east coast, where they are none of those things, and widely hated as a result.
That said, a place to buy a half-gallon of milk downtown has to be seen as a major landmark—and remember, this is a full half mile south of the Public Market.
7:03 AM
Memories of the Sombrero Playhouse, Part 4: The Final Chapter!
PHXated has been speaking with Gary Gohring, who in the late 1970s, managed the Sombrero Playhouse, at the time the only place in Phoenix and one of the few places in the entire Valley one could see art-house movie fare.
In the final segment, Gohring talks about his career at New Times, where he was film critic, and the end of the Sombrero.
Part one is here.
Part two is here.
Part three is here.
PHXated would love to hear your memories of movie-going in Phoenix at the time, or see any old Sombrero schedules you have!
PHXated: How did you come to work for New Times? What did you do after that? What do you do now?
Gary Gohring: I sent three sample movie reviews to the New Times in the Fall of 1973 in the hope of writing movie reviews for them. The editors at the time were kind enough to ignore their mediocrity and asked me to write a small column listing all the films currently in town.
Being an ASU undergraduate at the time, I jumped at the chance to earn a whopping $15 a column. I eventually ended up writing movie reviews for the New Times on a sporadic basis from 1973 through early 1977, and then on a regular basis from April 1978 to April 1982. I really appreciate the opportunity Jim Larkin and Mike Lacey gave me when they took back control of the paper in 1978.
I tried to write reviews that would get readers to look at a movie and its creators in a new and original way. For me, the best movie reviewers do this. Unfortunately, most readers of movie reviews (sadly, an ever shrinking number) and advertisers want reviews that reflect their taste and universal opinion. I was not successful in accomplishing what I wanted, and I never did fit the other model.
I was fortunate, though, during my tenure there to work with a great staff and some terrific writers, most notably Bart Bull, Bob Boze Bell, Sandy Lovejoy, and Dewey Webb.
I have quietly faded into oblivion since then, having moved from Phoenix in 1992. However, I still go to movies and enjoy viewing and discussing them as much as ever.
PHXated: I moved away in the late ‘70s, came back soon after to visit and … the Sombrero was just gone, with nothing there but a vacant lot. What lead to its closing?
G.G. Disagreements between Richard Charleton, the property owner, and Morey Levine, our owner, most notably concerning our showing of soft-core fare such as Emmanuelle 2, came to a peak in the summer of 1978. The most immediate result was that we lost our parking and had to lease a not-too-convenient lot nearby.
These conflicts, inconveniences, and subsequent costs to deal with them escalated, driving away patrons and affecting both programming and the bottom line.
Then we lost our exclusivity to show The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Also, there were only so many times we could show King of Hearts. The theater closed in early 1981.
Even had we not encountered the problems we did, we would probably have been buried by the coming video revolution. I believe the property was subsequently sold, but to whom I do not remember. I know the building was subsequently torn down, but I do not recall when or by whom.
PHXated: Gary, thanks again for responding!
G.G.: Hope this incomplete recollection helps in some way.
9:31 AM
A Soleri amphitheater facing demolition in Santa Fe
Even as Paolo Soleri’s new bridge in Scottsdale nears completion, another of his works is facing destruction in Santa Fe.
The architect built an amphitheater on the campus of the Santa Fe Indian School in the 1950s; according to this Santa Fe TV news story, the school is planning on demolishing it:
It costs them about $100,000 a year to maintain,“ Indian School Spokesperson Ed Calabaza said.
Calabaza said there are few concerts each year at the amphitheater and the money for the Paolo could better spent on students.
“Whether they be new facilities, giving out scholarships, getting better computers,” he said.
Calabaza said concerts at the Paolo Soleri have also attracted drug use and fights in the past, something the school wants nothing to do with on campus.
The school is on Indian land, so there’s no legal recourse defenders of the structure have.
9:05 AM
Sombrero Playhouse Memories, Part 3: The Rocky Horror kids strike back!
Last week, we began a conversation about a bit of Phoenix cultural arcana that gets forgotten: The Sombrero Playhouse, the city’s vibrant 1970s-era art house, one of the few places in town film fans could see foreign fare, art films, cult classics and rock movies.
Gary Gohring, who was the theater’s manager as well as the New Times' film critic at the time, now lives in San Diego; he agreed to participate in the following email chat about the theater and cinematic life in the Valley of the time generally, including the late, magnificent Cine-Capri, seen above.
The photo is by George Aurelius, and comes courtesy of CineCapriTheater.com.
Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here
PHXated: Specifically, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a big deal for my high-school friends; in such a culturally conservative and homogeneous city, as a bunch of misfits in a high school drama club, I felt it was a place where we could meet similar quote-unquote creative kids our age. What was your impression of RHPS at the time? Was it fun or a nightmare to oversee?
Gary Gohring: I am not really the person to ask about The Rocky Horror Picture Show as I was neither a fan of it or all the attendant fan involvement with it, but I certainly recognize that for many, many people in their teens and 20s in the mid-to late ‘70s it was the cult film and an important social bonding experience.
Additionally, its financial success helped the Sombrero prosper and ultimately stay in business as long as it did. It certainly allowed me to indulge my aforementioned tastes and book films such as [Bresson’s] Diary of a Country Priest and [Ozu’s] Tokyo Story, which hardly drew the same crowd, enthusiasm, or grosses.
The assistant managers usually ran the theater on Friday and Saturday evenings; I only worked those RHPS showings they missed. The theater was a nightmare to clean up on the mornings after, and we lost more than one cleaning crew in large part because of it.
PHXated: I remember the Valley Art, of course—particularly the afternoon showing of The Graduate where they accidentally showed an X-rated preview of Screw on Screen before it. (Sheer chaos resulted.) As I drive around town, I also think of the (literally) underground screens at Los Altos mall, the big Bethany theater, the Kachina in Scottsdale, the Cine Capri …
I’m not nostalgic that much about it (there are so many more movies available these days through so many sources), but there was something larger than life about seeing Star Wars, or Alien, at the Cine Capri, or Annie Hall at the Bethany. Any theaters you remember fondly from the time?
G.G.: What I remember most about moviegoing in Phoenix during the ‘70s was not so much the theaters themselves but the evolution of the moviegoing experience itself, disintegrating from the big movie houses such as Cine Capri, the Kachina, etc. into the multiplexes. And in some cases, this was done extremely poorly, with a single cinema being butchered into an awkward five or six screen theater. Mann’s Christown, I am looking at you.
The ‘70s also became the decade that ushered in the financial mega-blockbusters, where success has become measured more in terms of stratospheric box-office receipts on the opening weekend rather than solid financial gain and/or quality.
I enjoyed (still do) going to foreign movies and off-beat films, so I generally most liked going to NEEB Hall at ASU, the Valley Art, and Dan Harkins' Camelview Cinemas, and as I lived in Tempe at the time, I did not mind driving to the other side of town to the Bethany Cinemas to see the likes of [Peckinpah’s] Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia or to the UA 6 Cinemas to see [Monte Hellman’s] The Cockfighter in their exclusive Valley runs.
Tomorrow: The end of the Sombrero.
2:19 PM
A new radio station in the East Valley
The EVT reports that a long-awaited community FM proposal by the East Valley Institute of Technology as been granted by the FCC:
Twelve years after putting in the original FCC application, students in the radio broadcasting program at Mesa’s East Valley Institute for Technology are on the verge of really being heard.
Late last month, Steve Grosz, EVIT radio broadcast instructor, learned the FCC awarded the school a preliminary construction permit for a full-powered community FM radio transmitter and tower. Grosz expects the full permit to be awarded by the end of the July.
“I thought this would never happen,” Grosz said.
The news came via e-mail and Grosz said, “I screamed.”
The new station’s frequency is 90.7.
The story doesn’t say so, but I assume it will be operating under the FCC’s low power rules, which generally mean less than 100 watts, so the listening area will be limited to west Mesa and east Tempe.
The class does a radio show now, which you can get to off a button on the lower left-hand corner of the school’s web site. (The easiest way is to click on the yellow “Listen to Goldmine Radio” bar, which will bring it up through iTunes.)
8:12 AM
Cronkite School building wins an architecture prize
The Chicago Athenaeum, an architecture and design museum in Chicago, gives out international design awards each year. The Cronkite School, designed by Southern California’s Steven Erlich and opened in 2007, is one of 100 or so buildings cited for best new global design.
Full list of winners here.
A release from the Cronkite school below.
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY News
Cronkite School Wins International Architecture Award
PHOENIX (July 21, 2010) – The Cronkite School building has been awarded an International Architecture Award, Arizona State University announced.
The International Architecture Awards are conferred on the world’s most significant new buildings and urban or landscape developments by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design in conjunction with The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
The Cronkite building was one of 95 buildings and urban planning projects from 38 nations, and one of three buildings affiliated with U.S. institutions of higher education, to be recognized in the 2010 awards. The building houses the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and Eight/KAET, the ASU-operated PBS station.
The contest honored a range of building types, including corporate offices, cultural sites, universities, industrial facilities and private homes.
Building architect Steven Ehrlich of Ehrlich Architects said it was an honor for the Cronkite building to be among those recognized.
“This is a very prestigious awards program because it’s really global,” Ehrlich said. “It’s always nice to see how a group of international jurors perceives our building.”
Ehrlich said the building fits into the urban fabric of downtown Phoenix.
“It’s not an isolated building on a campus that is sort of its own enclave,” Ehrlich said. “The building actually has a global viewpoint itself.”
Ehrlich said the contemporary, LEED-silver-certified Cronkite School building was designed to reinforce how communication is celebrated, in all its forms.
Inside, the space’s flexible, three-dimensional spatial environment allows connectivity in multiple forms, both through its technology capabilities and in the interpersonal space created by the First Amendment Forum at the building’s core.
“I think that becomes in a way the heart of the building, and it’s where, although there’s all this technological connectivity, there’s still the connectivity of people with each other,” Ehrlich said.
Christopher Callahan, dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said the school was proud to be housed in an exemplar of contemporary urban design and planning.
“Steven Ehrlich is known globally for bold designs that are striking and compelling, but also amazingly functional,” Callahan said. “This is yet another recognition of the magnificent design gifts of Steven, his colleague Mathew Chaney and the entire Ehrlich team. We were so fortunate to have Ehrlich Architects bring our vision of the 21st century digital media complex to life.”
A jury of Mexican architects affiliated with the Colegio de Arquitectos de la Ciudad de Mexico, Sociedad de Arquitectos Mexicanos chose the winners from hundreds of entries.
The awards will be presented and exhibited at The City and The World conference to be held in Spain, Nov. 4-7, 2010. Following that, the awards exhibition will tour Europe and the United States.
Related Links
The International Architecture Awards http://www.chi-athenaeum.org/intarch/index.html The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design http://www.chi-athenaeum.org/ The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies http://www.europeanarch.eu/ Cronkite Building Fact Sheet http://cronkite.asu.edu/news/newBuilding-022107.php Downtown Phoenix Campus http://cronkite.asu.edu/about/downtown.php Cronkite Building Slideshow http://cronkite.asu.edu/about/building.php
12:58 PM
Memories of the Sombrero Playhouse, Part Deux!
Yesterday, we began a conversation with Gary Gohring, who back in the 1970s was the thoughtful film critic for the Phoenix New Times … and the manager of the city’s best art house, the Sombrero Playhouse.
The Sombrero doesn’t get its due when people talk about the cultural scene of the period, so we tracked down Gohring, now living contentedly in San Diego.
He graciously agreed to share his memories of the time, the second installment of which follows.
Part I is here.
PHXated: It was a long time ago, but I have a sense that a certain amount of care was taken with presentation and projection at the Sombrero—-particularly in contrast to that of other theaters in town. Is that a fair impression? Did you have decent equipment? What kind of projectors were they?
G.G.: The theater had a great, dedicated staff, and it was blessed with about four projectionists during my tenure there who did wonders with the prints we received, many of which were in pretty bad shape. We had standard 35mm projectors for the day.
PHXated: Going through some old boxes a while back, I found a frequent film-goer card from the Sombrero, with dates marked by hand—something like “5/14 …. 5/17 … 5/18 … 5/23.” That shows you how often we went! To me, the theater was a major cultural institution in town at the time, and I have memories of seeing so many classic, foreign, cult and (not least) rock movies there. Is this an overinflated impression of its role in the valley’s cultural life at the time?
G.G.: The discount card you referenced was indeed marked by hand. Ten admissions for $20, I believe it was. (The discount card I now get has 5 admissions for $40.) As I mentioned, we did attempt to bring a diverse collection of films to the Phoenix market, trying to accommodate a wide variety of tastes. In many cases, we were successful, and in some cases, we were not. I know for sure we did not appease the customer who kept requesting more Oliver Reed films. "He made other films besides Women in Love, Tommy, and The Devils,“ one of the person’s notes lifted from the suggestion box stated. As for leaving a cultural legacy, I think that other than being known as the place where The Rocky Horror Picture Show first played and as the movie theater that had no parking, we probably did not leave much of a cultural legacy. At least not the cultural legacy I would have liked. However, it is good to hear that there are those like yourself who not only remember but do so with fondness.
10:43 AM
Is the Tucson music scene better than Phoenix's?
Young Martin Cizmar™ says, “Yes!” in a post we’re just catching up on.
He identifies five numbered issues that make the Tucson scene better, a list even more impressive in that Cizmar himself had apparently originally envisioned a lesser total. (“I’ve identified three factors behind The Tucson Problem….”)
Among them: Better venues (“Anyone who has been blessed with the chance to see a show at Rialto or Club Congress … can vouch for their greatness”) and the town’s college-town culture (“There are tons of indie-rock types — smart, cool and geeky — down there, whereas Mill Avenue can remind me of the Jersey Shore on a bad night”).
He also tips his hat to Electric Mustache blogger Shawn Anderson.
I don’t think he makes his case about the media in the respective towns, but all in all it’s worth reading.
Everything about Young Martin Cizmar here.
8:08 AM
The art mecca of .... El Mirage?!?
The PBJ reports that the town of El Mirage—population 25,000 or so, tucked in on US 60 between Sun City and, um, Sun City West—wants to be an “urban arts hub”:
The city of El Mirage has a very “un-Phoenix” vision for its future — cut more from the cloth of Santa Fe, N.M., and Portland than the Valley’s sprawling suburbia.
El Mirage voters in November will consider a long-term plan to transform the West Valley city into a transit-oriented, environmentally friendly arts hub. Officials also want to cut the city’s carbon footprint by half over the next several decades and create parcels for organic and urban gardens.
The El Mirage City Council approved the plan earlier this month.
The plan is a very long term one; one key part is the establishment of a commuter railway rail station at Grand Avenue and Thunderbird, envisioned as part of a decade-distant commuter line running to Wickenberg.
The arts part?
El Mirage already is doing some things outlined in the plan, such as trying to attract artists and creative businesses via zoning changes that allow for live-work studios, and hooking them up with federal stimulus help such as weatherization grants and energy-efficiency tax breaks.
7:36 AM
PHXated's contribution to "Vanishing Phoenix": The Sombrero Playhouse
I’m fascinated by the work that’s been done to chronicle the work on the Vanishing Phoenix front; you can read Yuri’s thoughts on it here and here.
Today I’m beginning a four-part interview with Gary Gohring, who longtime Phoenicians will remember was an early film critic of New Times, waaay back in the 1970s.
Gohring was also the manager of the Sombrero Playhouse, a former live theater that became, in the late 1970s, the city’s most vibrant movie theater.
There’s not much about the Sombrero in the archives of the local papers, thought I did find this bit of comments on it on a site called Cinema Treasures.
I recently contacted Gohring, who now lives in San Diego; he was kind enough to agree to the following interview, which I’ll post in chunks over the next few days.
As I note in the chat below, the Sombrero was a key part of the Valley’s cultural life in the barren 1970s, and deserves a more prominent place in our cultural memory.
*-- Bill Wyman*
PHXated: Gary, thanks much for answering a few questions about the Sombrero Playhouse.
Gary Gohring: You’re welcome.
PHXated: Can you tell me something about the Sombrero during your time there? When did it turn into a movie theater? What was the sort of mission statement? Am I right in remembering it was really the only place to see art films like that in Phoenix proper? (Leaving aside the Valley Art and occasional movies at the museums.)
G.G.: I think the Sombrero Playhouse became a movie theater sometime in 1977. I am not really sure about the exact date as I became involved after it was already established. Morey Levine was the owner of the theater, and he could probably provide the exact date. (I do not know how to get in touch with him.) I don’t recall a particular mission statement, but he may be able to provide that as well. We were the only repertory movie theater in the Phoenix area (outside of the Valley Art) from when it opened to when we finally shut down in 1981.
PHXated: The owner was Richard Charelton, right? Didn’t he have something to do with the Woolworth family? Do you know where he is now?
G.G.: Richard Charelton owned the property on which the theater was located. I have no knowledge of either his connection to the Woolworth family or where he is now.
PHXated: What were the logistics of the place? What did it cost to rent a Fellini movie for a couple of showings? How did you get the films… were they flown in or mailed in? Any showings that were notable or that you were particularly proud of? Did you ever book films no one was interested in? Besides Rocky Horror, what were the most popular things you showed?
G.G.: I cannot recall the exact logistics of the place. I want to say we could seat 350 or so maximum for a showing, but that is just a poor remembrance. We used a booker out of Los Angeles to get our films, but I did most of the programming through him when I started working at the theater, first as assistant manager, then as manager, in 1977-78. (Morey and our booker deserve all the credit, though, for bringing in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which was already playing before I started.) We received the majority of our films just as other theaters did; they were flown in (often the night before). Occasionally, a non-major distributor like New Yorker Films would mail a 16mm title to us. Costs varied, depending on the popularity or availability of the film itself.
We tried to bring a diverse lineup of movies to the Phoenix area, most notably those American, cult, and foreign films that had been popular or overlooked in previous limited runs n the Valley. We also occasionally brought in a few premieres, and we would have festivals around a particular actor, director, or theme. In fact, I basically became the programmer because I suggested they do a Woody Allen film festival, which proved a big success for the theater. My own particular tastes ran (and still run) towards the more obscure, out of the mainstream foreign films, and (not too surprisingly) these generally proved to be the movies not too many people were interested in. Off the top of my hear, our biggest successes, outside of the Friday and Saturday midnight showings of Rocky Horror Picture Show, were the double-bills of King of Hearts/Harold and Maude and Emmanuelle 2: Joys of A Woman/Story of O.
More tomorrow ….
1:13 PM
Cox is jacking up cable rates again
From the Republic:
Many of the company’s most-popular cable plans, cable tiers of service and cable-bundled plans are affected. Cox executives attributed the increase to rising costs for programming.
Customers who subscribe to its Expanded Service, Cox’s most popular, with more than 100 channels, will see the price go from $26 to $31 a month.
Cox could save $5 a month just by stopping sending me four mail solicitations a week. The company is privately held, so you don’t know how much money it’s making.
FWIW, while it raises rates as well, DirecTV has better programming and better service, if you have the opportunity to use a satellite dish where you live.
6:43 AM
When it comes to wasting taxpayer dollars on sports teams . . .
… Arizona is the winner.
That’s the verdict of a fact-laden analysis and history of the phenomenon by the business of sports expert Evan Weiner on the site NewJerseyNewsroom.com.
After a lengthy history of the practice, Wiener writes:
You can go virtually to every state in the union, including Alaska and Hawaii and find public dollars invested in sports. But who are the dumbest politicians in the country when it comes to sports spending? That is an easy question to answer.
Arizona.
Had the Phoenix city council been smart, which they were not, they would have approved a multi-purpose arena back in the late 1980s that would have accommodated the NBA’s Phoenix Suns and an NHL team. Instead lawmakers approved a $90 million expenditure that was designed to appease Suns owner Jerry Colangelo.
The arena was built in such a way that the building was only good for basketball and not hockey or Arena Football or indoor soccer and that severely limited the potential revenues that could be generated in the place.
Making sure they further satisfied Colangelo, the terms of the lease between the city and the NBA team required that the franchise pay the bulk of lease payments in years 36-40 of the 40-year lease agreement.
The real rent is supposed to kick in around 2028 but given the lifespan of facilities (the Miami Arena was viable for about 11 years, the Charlotte Coliseum for about 13), it is doubtful that the team will even be playing in the arena in 2028 or 2029.
He then does a case studies on all the other Valley sports facilities.
It’s not a pretty tale.
7:25 AM
Censorship dustup at the Cave Creek Film & Arts Fest
The Republic reports this a.m. that Suzanne Johnson has resigned from the board of the organization she founded after the fest removed a film called Sex and Violence from the lineup.
In fairness, the censorship involved was circumstantial rather than deliberate.
The fest was showing films in a local high school; that got it hung up on its lease for the space, which stated it wouldn’t be showing things inappropriate for a school environment.
That’s obviously not the ideal agreement to have for a film festival directed at adults.
Johnson herself acknowledged the spot the board was in:
She said the festival has gone on record as not censoring material, and that the omission compromised the festival.
She had been one of the festival’s chairs and oversaw the films being shown. She also was vice president of the board of directors.
“I don’t believe there’s room for censorship in society, and the fact that I had to censor this film … I just couldn’t be on a board that says it doesn’t censor,” Johnson said.
The real culprit?
An anonymous Arizona goon:
Johnson said the film was singled out by a member of the community who was upset that it was going to be in the lineup. She asked school officials to screen the movie, and they decided it was not appropriate to be shown on campus.
The fest runs through this weekend. Its web site is here.
A full schedule is here.
Info on the film Sex and Violence, directed by a Scottsdale native named Charles Petersen, is here.
6:33 AM
Speed cameras depart, a few more Arizona brain cells disappear
Speed cameras are a brilliant tool.
They keep the roads safer. They allow cops to spend time pursuing violent criminals. And they raise money for the government.
They aren’t taxes. No one’s forcing you to speed! And if you find the yoke of speed-camera oppression on a particular route onerous, why then you can roar up or down another street!
The argument against speed cameras make no sense.
“I want to drive recklessly and don’t want the state to use technological means to catch me.”
So the opponents created a new one: “The state is using the cameras to raise money.”
This became a rallying cry, and actually found traction in this surprisingly dumb state.
That’s a good aspect of the cameras. Dopes who drive fast—they have to pay!
It’s a disincentive to control dangerous behavior. What’s wrong with that?
Nothing. All that’s really happened is that the state is a little less safe. And a little poorer.
Anyway, the cameras the state has placed around Arizona go dark at midnight tonight.
Of the stories in the local press about the occasion, the EVT’s is by far the best.
It notes that the cameras will remain in Tempe, Mesa and Chandler. Those cities will continue to reap their budget benefits.
And the safer streets:
During the first year, there were nearly 5,000 fewer collisions along the state’s highways than the previous year, according to Shoba Vaitheeswaran, a Redflex spokeswoman
7:14 AM
How many empty "box box" stores are there in the Valley right now?
The EVT has the sobering statistics.
The paper says the East Valley has a vacany rate significantly higher than the rest of the area—almost 15 percent, versus just over 12 percent vacancy overall.
And about those “big box” stores:
The Valley has 305 empty big-box stores, defined as spaces with at least 10,000 square feet. That’s up from 299 at the end of March, according to CB Richard Ellis. Vacancies have been on the rise for 13 quarters in a row.
The shakeout will be permanent, according to the analysts the paper talked to:
Shoppers shouldn’t expect to see stores in those old buildings again, said Bill Jabjiniak, Mesa’s economic development director.
“I think that there’s a significant amount that has to be changed,” he said. “It’s not just the recession. We were seeing empty big boxes before that.”
Some places will have non-traditional uses like churches, charter schools or medical malls in existing buildings. Others will have to be razed for another use.
7:29 AM
"Sedona: The Motion Picture" now filming
The film once envisioned a budget of $2 million, a friend of PHXated tells us; now it’s down to a small percentage of that figure, with a lot of even that planned to be barter.
But production has finally begun in Sedona. The producers' aim, our friend says, is to capture the kooky quality of the environment in hopes of creating a “Northern Exposure”-like TV spinoff.
The creators are Tommy Stovall and Marc Sterling; their previous effort was a film called Hate Crime.
The plot of Sedona: The Motion Picture? These things always change, of course, but here’s an early précis:
Imagine the plight of Tammy Johnson, a 50-year old type-A businesswoman who takes a wrong turn en route to Phoenix and winds up in Sedona, where a tour plane barrels down West State Route 89A in an emergency crash landing maneuvering that forces her car off the road. Her car’s a wreck, she’s running terribly late, and she winds up suffering an agonizing wait at the repair shop, where she discovers that she can’t even rent a car to get out of town. As she’s stuck in Sedona, the no-nonsense advertising exec encounters a series of quirky New Age locals, including a “holistic pedicurist whose services include psychic readings.
7:26 AM
Arizona men are fat, deluded and mentally disturbed. But you knew that already!
Just noticed this study from the Center for Disease Control about the health of Arizonans
According to the CDC, 73 percent of men in Arizona are overweight or obese, and compared to the U.S. average, 12 percent more men in Arizona have high cholesterol. Almost half of Arizona men skip regular exercise and three out of four don?t eat enough fruits and vegetables.
More than one in five men in Arizona report that their activities are limited because of physical, mental, or emotional problems, and men in Arizona rank worse than the national average in stroke, overweight and obesity, high blood pressure, heavy drinking, and getting the recommended levels of exercise.
Now, that’s not even the hedline.
The hedline is this, according to a survey from the center:
Eighty-six percent of Arizona?s men say their general health is good, very good or excellent, according to the 2009 Behavioral Risk Factor Survey
7:37 AM
So ... how's the new concert venue at the Talking Stick casino?
Pretty sucky, Jay Bennett of New Times says:
I was hoping for an actual theater at the new resort/casino on Indian Bend and Loop 101, but it was little more than a giant carpeted ballroom (as you read this, Honeywell is probably having its annual shareholders meeting in that room) with banquet chairs set up in rows and a makeshift bars set up on the each end of the huge, nearly sold-out room.
So, here’s the bottom line: I don’t recommend seeing a show at Talking Stick. The sound in the room was average, at best (the mix was all vocals and drums; and the guitars were muddy); the stage setup in the rectangular room allowed awful sight lines for anyone not directly in front of the performers; the drink lines moved way too slowly for a rock concert; and the legion of security folks constantly patrolled the room with seating charts making sure those of us with general admission tickets stayed in our designated area, a place where you could barely see the band.
Bennet was seeing Cheap Trick, who played the casino Saturday night.
6:37 AM
EaterAZ gives Verde a thumbs-up
Verde is a new casual Mexican restaurant on 1st Street just south of Roosevelt. PHXated loves it.
So does EaterAZ:
The Verde menu is simple: most meals are served in a three-compartment plate with a protein, sides of rice and beans, and a couple fresh-made tortillas. Verde Joe’s dad made all the tables and chairs with leftover wood from a warehouse, the table bases come from a farm Verde Joe once worked on, and the ladies making the tortillas are family members using grandma’s age-old recipe. The tortillas are cooked in a pecan wood-fired oven and made with a generous portion of lard, meaning they’re not all that healthy and friggin’ delicious.
Some other things you need to know: our favorite item is the green chile pork; you order at the counter and they’ll bring your food; almost everything in the place is recycled or recyclable; and it’s affordable—truly.
8:09 AM
Dan Harkins—pet safety activist
Harkins, the owner of the Harkins movie theater chain, will be doing pet-safety public service announcements that will run in all his theaters, the Republic’s Krystal Klei reports.
The newfound enthusiasm for the subject came after Harkins got cited last week while leaving his dog in his car in 100-degree heat while he watched a movie in a Scottsdale theater.
The Republic story seem a bit overly Harkins-friendly:
According to police records, Harkins checked on his dog multiple times, providing her with water and taking her on walks. Records also say he said he never left the dog in the car for longer than 45 minutes, and parked in a shady space with the windows cracked.
Although Harkins made efforts to ensure his pet’s safety, police cited Harkins because temperatures outside exceeded 100 degrees, police said.
“He never left his dog in the car more than 45 minutes” is not exculpatory.
Earlier stories established that the dog had been in the car for nearly four hours during the hottest time of the day—and that Harkins had been parking in a handicapped spot to boot.
12:03 PM
PHXations—Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Looks like the race to become Phoenix’s next mayor has (unofficially) begun:
Phoenix City Councilman Claude Mattox has yet to formally enter the 2011 Phoenix mayoral race, though he’s already claiming enough support from local political and business leaders to support a campaign.
Mattox… has raised $300,000 in contributions, according to a Tuesday press release paid for by the councilman’s exploratory committee.
His supporters include former Phoenix mayors Paul Johnson and John Nelson, in addition to Jerry Colangelo, former Arizona Rep. Matt Salmon, and Salt River Project President David Rousseau, according to his camp.
Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon’s term expires in 2012. The city’s election for mayor is scheduled in August 2011, with filing deadline in June.
Maddox is the second prospective candidate to succeed Gordon, who can’t run again due to term limits. Peggy Neely, another current Phoenix City Council member, announced her intent to run for mayor in May.
The head of Fender is retiring.
After more than 30 years at the company, Chairman and CEO Bill Mendello announced Tuesday he will retire from Scottsdale’s Fender Musical Instruments Corp. later this year.
The company says a successor to the position of CEO was recently appointed by the board, but Fender is not yet announcing who that is. Mendello will remain on the company’s board.
12:16 PM
The Republic has it wrong: There is a First Friday this week
Despite this AZ Central front page this a.m., there's still a First Friday on Friday, just no shutdown of Roosevelt Street with the accompanying street vendors for the July and August events.
Besides the front-page graphic, the accompanying story muddles the issue too, particularly with the hedline, “Gathering won’t be held July, August as First Friday evolves.”
ArtLink page here:
7:24 AM
Wells Fargo raises fees on poor people
The PBJ reports that Walls Fargo is raising its checking fees.
Basically, you have to have $1500 in the bank and have a $250 a month direct deposit in place, or your fees go up.
The PBJ:
Wells Fargo is the second largest bank in Maricopa County with deposits of $16.8 billion, representing a 20.4 percent market share, according to the Phoenix Business Journal Book of Lists.
Many observers have expected Wells and other major banks to aggressively raise fees following passage of new laws limiting revenue from credit cards, checking account overdrafts and other banking services.
What can you do?
Move your accounts over to a credit union. They aren’t perfect, but they’re nonprofit, and oriented more to customer service and less to, um, helping destroy the nation’s economy. They keep their fees and costs lower overall.
6:31 AM
PHXations—Friday, June 18, 2010
The AP is reporting that White House staffers will meet with Governor Brewer in Arizona on June 28th
The White House set a June 28 date for staffers to meet with Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer on her turf and provide more detail on sending National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border.
When Brewer met with Obama at the White House two weeks ago, promises were made for the follow-up meeting. The White House announced Friday it was keeping its promised date. Obama is not planning to attend.
CBS News confirms that the federal government will challenge SB 1070:
It was unclear yesterday whether Clinton’s comments were simply a prediction or mistake or whether instead she was getting ahead of a planned announcement by the administration.
Now a senior administration official tells CBS News that the federal government will indeed formally challenge the law when Justice Department lawyers are finished building the case. The official said Justice is still working on building the case.
Whodathunkit? GOP hiding facts about immigration law
It’s typical of Brewer and her Republican friends who consistently have failed to crack down on the violent and criminal acts that accompany illegal immigration. Their patchwork policies do nothing to solve the real problem that Arizonans experience every day.
They failed to point out that the new law will do nothing to stop the coyotes, human traffickers and dangerous drug and arms dealers who cross our border every day.
They don’t mention that the new law is an unfunded mandate and gives police no resources or money to implement the new law. Brewer and Republicans took police officers off the streets when they massively cut public-safety funding this year.
Read the whole thing at Arizona Capitol Times
While Arizona’s politicians have spent time persecuting gays and Mexicans and letting the state’s finances go into the toilet, more industrious folks in town have been working to put us on the map in an important national ranking, the Republic reports:
Arizona now ranks fourth for mortgage fraud nationally. It’s the first time the state has cracked the top five for the problem, according to data released this week from the Mortgage Asset Research Institute.
Florida, New York and California (in that order) rank ahead of Arizona in 2009 mortgage-fraud cases. The most prevalent type of home-loan fraud is application misrepresentation, which includes borrowers lying about income. Overall, U.S. mortgage fraud climbed 7 percent last year.
Officials on the state and federal level are (finally) going after mortgage fraud, the paper says in a related story:
A federal and state law-enforcement task force has accelerated arrests and prosecutions of Arizona residents accused of participating in mortgage-fraud schemes involving kickbacks, inflated property appraisals, phony buyers and other tactics.
There have been 51 Arizona indictments and 13 convictions since the task force was assembled March 1, all of them involving allegations of fraud against lenders, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
2:23 PM
The gay marriage trial in SF comes to a close
According to the NYT story on the closing arguments, the judge hearing the case seemed skeptical of the bland claims made by opponents of gay marriage:
Vaughn R. Walker, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, repeatedly questioned lawyers defending the measure — Proposition 8, passed by California voters in 2008 — over their position that marriage is, simply put, for making babies.
“The marital relationship is fundamental to the existence and survival of the race,” said the defense’s leading lawyer, Charles J. Cooper. “Without the marital relationship, your honor, society would come to an end.”
But Judge Walker, who will decide the case, dogged Mr. Cooper for hard evidence of that claim, noting that there are no rules prohibiting marriage between people who cannot have children.
Over the course of several hours, Judge Walker also sharply questioned the qualifications of one of Mr. Cooper’s witnesses and his assertion that marriage “serves a societal purpose that is equally ubiquitous.”
10:31 PM
PHXations—Tuesday, June 15, 2010
The Yuma Sun is reporting that mayor Al Krieger has attempted to apologize for the comments he made about gays in the military during a Memorial Day speech:
In a phone interview with the Yuma Sun Friday afternoon, Krieger apologized to the gay community.
As mayor I must respect the lifestyle choices of others, no matter how disagreeable they are with my personal beliefs or my personal moral standards.
I apologize for my comments at the Memorial Day service at Desert Lawn cemetery on Memorial Day.
It’s a pretty ‘limp’ apology, if you ask me. Hopefully, the personal beliefs and moral standards of the citizens of Yuma are enough to thrown Krieger out of office next election.
A majority of US mayors have come out against SB 1070:
The U.S. Conference of Mayors has approved resolutions condemning Arizona’s new immigration law and asking Congress for an overhaul of federal immigration policies.
Conference spokeswoman Elena Temple-Webb says both resolutions were approved on a voice vote, with some opposition.
Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon sponsored the first resolution opposing the Arizona law that makes crossing the border illegally a state crime and requires police to verify people’s immigration status. The law goes into effect July 29.
A second resolution by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa calls for the repeal of the Arizona law and for Congress to pass comprehensive changes to immigration law.
An estimated 200 mayors attended the conference Monday in Oklahoma City.
Starbucks announced it will roll out free wifi in its stores July 1. Wired story on the announcement here.
What can *you do? Continue to patronize the local stores who have been offering wifi as a service to customers for years.
There’s Lux, the Lolas, Fair Trade, Hob Nobs, Unlimited, Copper Star …
The Starbucks method:
Each customer must log in to Wi-Fi and the Starbucks Digital Network with a unique identifier, so Starbucks won’t only know where you are, but who you are, potentially allowing for targeted messaging to offset cost further.
9:13 AM
Coming to Phoenix: "Vintage Bunnies"!
We are uncharacteristically indebted to the Espresso Pundit for catching an Arizona Republic story promoting an club event in town this weekend marking the 50th anniversary of the Playboy Club.
The story says it’s one of fifty around the world. Greg Patterson, who writes the blog, pointed out rightly that the photos of bygone revelry in the clubs have all the appeal of a “whites only” sign above a drinking fountain.
And then there’s the Republic’s promotion of the event…
The iconic symbol of the Playboy bunny represents a history that now spans 50 years.
On Friday night, pretty young things from across the Valley will have a chance to become a part of that legacy …
“Pretty young things”? How about “Women with artificial boobs, attenuated ambitions, and low self-esteem”?
7:43 AM
Walter Salas-Humara update
A few months ago PHXated bumped into singer-songwriter Walter Salas-Humara at the Sail Inn in Tempe. He was the frontman of the acclaimed early Amerindie band the Silos back in the day and has since been recording solid solo albums, and was in Tempe with the Bloodshot Records roadshow.
Bloodshot is out of Chicago, but the gig wasn’t a long trip for him; Salas-Humara lives in Flagstaff now, where he still writes songs and paints. Indeed, his art—you can see a sample of it above or on his web site—has garnered a strong following, and can even be seen in Elisabeth Moss’s apartment in the new movie, Get Him to the Greek
Fans of his music can see him July 24 at Club Congress in Tucson. Details here.
1:40 PM
PHXations—Tuesday, June 8, 2010
An ABC News/Washington Post poll suggests that support for the Tea Party movement is weakening:
“Do you have a favorable or unfavorable impression of the political movement known as the Tea Party?” the survey asked.
Thirty-six percent gave thumbs-up to the Tea Party, while 50 percent had a “Somewhat” or “Strongly” unfavorable view. Fourteen percent had no opinion.
Support for the right-wing populist movement was down from 41 percent in March.
Via GOOD)
/yaa
Buying local has big impacts:
A study released today found that SCF Arizona, the state’s largest workers’ compensation insurer, had a $528.3 million economic impact in Arizona in 2009.
The Phoenix company sourced 82 percent of its goods and services from other Arizona companies, according to the study released by Local First Arizona, a nonprofit that encourages Arizona businesses to buy locally.
Kimber Lanning, executive director of Local First, said the purpose of the study was to demonstrate how one major employer can have a significant impact on Arizona’s economy when buying from other Arizona-based companies. She said this is the first fully scientific study that measures the economic impact of a single employer.
SCF is in the process of becoming a private company. Gov. Jan Brewer signed Senate Bill 1045 into law in May, directing SCF to become a mutual insurance company, which means it would be owned by its policyholders. Created in 1925 as a state agency, SCF Arizona covers more than 35,000 businesses and has about a 40 percent market share in the state.
/yaa
The Republic reports on one benefit of SB 1070:
In the seven weeks since Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed Arizona’s tough new immigration law, there has been a sharp increase in the number of Latinos registering to vote as Democrats, party officials say, jumping from about 100 a week before to 500 now.
Many of those registering are young Latino citizens whose parents may be undocumented.
“Before, it used to be hard,” said Luis Heredia, executive director of the Arizona Democratic Party. “Now, they are just saying, ‘Can you give me a form?’ or, ‘I am already registered, but I know someone who isn’t.’”
Regardless of their political affiliation, ethnicity or reason, it is promising to see a new generation of citizens getting involved in politics.
/yaa
In the Arizona Capitol Times, Jeremy Duda reports on the Supreme Court’s administrative decision that effectively blocks matching funds for this election cycle:
The U.S. Supreme Court blocked Arizona’s Clean Elections system from distributing matching funds, throwing a number of high profile campaigns into disarray just weeks before candidates were to start receiving money.
The court on June 8 granted a request by the Goldwater Institute to halt a recent ruling of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that declared matching funds constitutional. The justices ordered that the distribution of matching funds be put on hold until it can hear a full appeal of the matching funds system.
Goldwater Institute attorney Nick Dranias said he doesn’t expect the court to hear the appeal in McComish v. Bennett until around October, meaning matching funds are essentially finished for 2010.
The primary election is Aug. 24. The general election is Nov. 2.
/yaa
Hall & Oates have joined the list of artists boycotting Arizona. From the PBJ:
“Private Eyes” won’t be watching Phoenix next month.
1980s rock duo Daryl Hall and John Oates have canceled their July 2 concert at Chase Field because of Arizona’s contentious immigration law. They had been scheduled to perform after the Arizona Diamondbacks’ game with the Los Angeles Dodgers.
6:51 PM
Another high-speed train proposed to link Phoenix, LA and Las Vegas
The Republic has posted an AP story about a new high-speed train proposal:
Genesis High Speed Rail America LLC is proposing the “Desert Lightning” – a high-speed route between Las Vegas and Southern California. Unlike other routes, Genesis' plan also calls for an intersecting line from Phoenix, linking the three major southwest metropolitan areas with one high-speed rail line.
The proposal calls for a T-shaped route. It would run south from Las Vegas parallel to the Colorado River and U.S. 95, just east of Mojave National Preserve. It would then intersect with an east-west line near Interstate 10, the freeway between Los Angeles and Phoenix.
The group said it would be a $35 to $40 billion project; it wants federal money to study the route and competing high-speed technologies.
10:04 AM
The Rokerij is named one of the best bars in America by Esquire
Says the mag in the new issue, with its slightly unorthodox use of the comma intact:
Step through the large wood door and down the stone steps. It’s calm and cool down here, like being in a cellar. There is a glowing fireplace, bottles of wine stacked up on the walls, a long, polished wood bar that stretches the width of the room. The bartenders are well dressed, they ask just enough questions, not too many.
Esquire’s also odd in that you can’t find the snippet online. On its web site it mentions two places in southern Arizona: The Hotel Congress and, rather fancifully, some place in Arivaca, which is close to the Mexican border in south west part of the state.
Last year, if we remember correctly, the only Arizona bar listed in the magazine proper was the Buffet in Tucson.
5:22 PM
First Friday recommendations
Local ad agency E.B. Lane is using a new social media tool called Sticky Bits to promote the First Friday event and local merchants.
Sticky Bits allows iPhone and Android users to scan any barcode and instantly view, tag and upload photos, videos and information about a particular place or topic.
In partnership with Local First Arizona, E.B. Lane put stickers with Sticky Bits barcodes all over downtown for April’s First Friday event. Since then, people from all over the world have scanned and uploaded pictures, videos and comments to the barcode more than 140 times.
Our friend Jane Redden, owner of Practical Art, is featuring the show “Inside Outside” by Karrin Taylor:
Karrin’s paintings “come from within.” Which means she paints what she feels, as opposed to what she sees. Her paintings are comprised of layers— personal memorabilia, newspaper articles, obituaries of relatives, and found textures.
While the final images tend toward botanical images, she thinks of her final product as metaphors. She works on panels she constructs herself, and on found remnants such as old pallets. The artist says “the organic rawness of wood adds another layer of complexity” to her work.
The free artist reception is tonight, starting at 7p.m., and open to the public.
Beverages and snacks will be served.
For more information on what’s going on downtown tonight, check out Jackalope Ranch’s Field Guide to Downtown’s First Friday. It includes a snazzy pdf map to help you make sense of it all.
For Light Rail fans, Tony Arranaga, aka the Light Rail Blogger has some good First Friday suggestions. Mr. RailLife, Nick Bastien, offers his suggestions here.
Shooze, Booze Schmooze at Blueberry Deluxe
Come enjoy some “wining, dancing and shopping” at the Melrose Curve’s newest boutique.
- All shoes 50% off
- Play Dance Dance Revolution and get 10% of your entire purchase
- Free wine inside the shop (21+ only)
6=10 pm, 702 W Montecito Ave (in the Wagon Wheel building, next door to Melrose Pharmacy)
Live Music @ Royal at the Market
Royal Coffee Bar at the Downtown Phoenix Public Market will be featuring LIVE music with Laila Hirtz. Enjoy some freshly roasted coffee and delicious pastries as you hear the lovely sounds of some talented musicians! The show will start at 7 p.m. and go til around 10-10:30.
At After Hours Gallery, on McDowell just west of Central, the “Fridge-A-Thon Show.”
The gallery says it will have fifteen uniquely painted recycled refrigerators.
It’s part of an SRP project to get energy-inefficient refrigerators out of homes; the company will come pick up old refrigerators and give you $30. Details here.
After Hours site here.
9:32 PM
What's the "race" of the folks who go to Phase 54 in Chandler?
Nothing more irritating than reading a news story that raises more questions than it answers.
Phase 54 is some sort of dancing and concert venue in Chandler, at I-10 and Ray Road. It’s having a legal dispute with its landlord and some of the other businesses in its little suburban strip-mall enclave, and this has evidently turned into an actual trial.
East Valley Tribune story here.
The legal issue is apparently whether the place is a concert venue or a night club; its operations have apparently overwhelmed the mall’s available parking, which has turned the businesses nearby, including an Outback Steakhouse, against it.
The property owners, according to the story, says the lease doesn’t allow a “night club,” though it’s apparently allowed to be a “concert venue” and a plain old club club.
None of these distinctions are explained, so the story’s irritating to read.
But even that’s the the big question raised. That comes in this passage:
On Tuesday, Gama found that a transcript of a taped conversation from an Outback [Steakhouse] manager complaining about the race of club patrons will not be allowed in the case. He said it would create confusion for the jury.
Jon Harris, Phase 54’s owner, said that the real reason the restaurants don’t want the club to stay open is because they’re concerned by the racial background of club patrons.
Shouldn’t the paper tell us what race we’re talking about here?
Asians?
Hispanics?
My god, perhaps even … whites?!
The story says the club plays Top 40 music, which isn’t a specific enough clue.
The Phase 54 web site is here.
One thing the owners of Phase 54 are definitely guilty of is recycling Studio 54’s logo:
6:53 AM
PHXations—Friday, June 4
Is ASU too big for it’s own good?
> ASU is too big and wields too much power in politics and development. The Empire must be broken to give Arizonans more choices and greater access. Arizona could increase college graduation rates (rather than mere enrollment rates) and Arizona could easily strengthen its university system.
Read the whole post at Voices of Arizona.
/yaa
KEZ has set up a tribute page for Bill Austin. From Phoenix Business Journal:
Austin co-hosted KEZ’s morning show with Beth McDonald from 1990 until February 2010. He retired in February at age 55. McDonald continues to host the soft-rock station’s highly rated morning drive show.
KEZ’s website offers a venue for fans, radio station staff and other to talk about Austin’s positive impact on the business and the Valley. It also links to news stories about his passing and includes pictures of the longtime Phoenix radio duo.
Austin never talked about his illness on the air and did not mention his failing health as a reason for his retirement. Before joining the “Beth and Bill” show, he was a weatherman at KPNX-TV Channel 12 in Phoenix.
/yaa
RIP Lola Tapas
Chef Eric Gitenstein tells me he just found out about owner Felicia Ruiz’s decision — but he doesn’t seem very surprised.
“Slowly, sales have dropped over time. We tried lunch, but people would always go to Culver’s to get a burger instead of coming here,” he says. “We were busy on the weekends, but the weekends alone can’t support a restaurant.”
This was Lola’s fifth year in business. Ruiz opened the business back in 2005 with her now-ex-husband, Daniel Wayne, who owns Lola Coffee.
[…]
This, more than ever is an era where saying ‘I’ve been meaning to go there’ is not enough. Intent does not save local businesses, action does. If you find a local gem, support it by being a patron, otherwise we will be just a city of chains and mediocre food.
/yaa (bolding added)
Looks like Russell Pearce has some still competition for most zany state senator in the US:
The story said that although Haley has “gone out of her way to make sure people know she is a Christian,” she was raised in the Sikh faith and placed more emphasis on that tradition when she ran for the state legislature in 2004.
This evening in an interview with Pub Politics, state Sen. Jake Knotts (R-SC) — who is supporting a different candidate — slammed Haley by using a racial slur:
We already got one raghead in the White House, we don’t need a raghead in the governor’s mansion.
Ouch!
Addendum. Turns out that Senator Knotts wasn’t done:
Knotts says he believes Haley’s father has been sending letters to India saying that Haley is the first Sikh running for high office in America. He says her father walks around Lexington wearing a turban.
“We’re at war over there,” Knotts said.
Asked to clarify, he said he did not mean the United States was at war with India, but was at war with “foreign countries.”
Well that’s something, I guess.
Addendum 2. Senator Knotts Just can’t keep his foot out of his mouth. Here is a transcript of his ‘apology’:
“Unfortunately, the show was not recorded as was intended. If it had been recorded, the public would be able to hear firsthand that my “raghead” comments about Obama and Haley were intended in jest. Bear in mind that this is a freewheeling, anything-goes Internet radio show that is broadcast from a pub. It’s like local political version of Saturday Night Live, which is actually where the joke came from.
Since my intended humorous context was lost in translation, I apologize.
I still believe Ms. Haley is pretending to be someone she is not, much as Obama did, but I apologize to both for an unintended slur.”
/yaa
ASU and the Mayo Clinic are in talks about … something, the Phoenix Business Journal reports:
ASU spokesman Virgil Renzulli said the university and Mayo are in an intense planning phase to further develop their relationship and are discussing about 50 topics, including expanding collaborative research and creating curriculum. He did not provide further details.
But the story quotes Phil Gordon saying something bigger might be up:
Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon said he hopes to see ASU and Mayo develop a medical school in the next decade.
“I’m confident in the future (ASU President) Michael Crow, working in partnership with Mayo Hospital and Councilwoman Peggy Neely, will figure out a way when the time is right to have a medical school there,” he said. “It’s not a pie-in-the-sky dream. It’s a matter of when, not if.”
11:22 PM
About all that immigrant-fueled crime ...
Latest FBI figures, 2008 and 2009 crime:
Bottom line: Overall violent crime in Phoenix dropped more than 15 percent—and that’s 15 percent lower than the already low rates prevailing last year.
For example, in 2003 Phoenix had 247 murders. Two years ago, it had 167, and last year had 122.
And note that those are hard numbers, not murder rates, meaning that the numbers are going down even in the face of steady population growth, not to mention all those crime-crazed immigrants.
(Fortunately, however, the bureau’s stats don’t includes kidnappings …)
9:31 AM
A perhaps more productive way to deal with the fallout from SB 1070
Pro AZ is a site that is encouraging people to shop at businesses that support equal rights for all Arizonans.
Here’s their mantra:
Pro AZ loves the United States of America and we love AZ.
Pro AZ believes to have a healthy Arizona, we must have an equal Arizona.
Pro AZ encourages residents to support local businesses that publicly display their respect for all Arizona communities.
The group says businesses can print out the logo above to show their support. You can order the postcards here.
2:45 PM
PHXations—Friday, May 28
He would know: Sheriff Joe calls troops at the border election year gimmick
ORO VALLEY (KOLD) – Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio says when the Obama Administration talks about 1,200 troops along the border, they really mean 400.
According to Arpaio’s math, if each soldier works 8 hours a day, there can be no more than 400 of them on the border at once.
“What took so long to do it now?” Arpaio asks, during a campaign event for republican congressional candidate Jesse Kelly. “Is it an election year? You think 400 troops are going to solve that problem.”
“You solve the problem like I’m solving it,” he adds. “You go after all aspects of illegal immigration. You arrest anybody that violates the law.”
Arpaio says he supports Kelly, because the two think alike on border and immigration issues.
Kelly is running against State Senator Jonathan Paton. The winner of the republican primary faces Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the November general election.
RIP Gary Coleman.
Child actor Gary Coleman died at approximately 12:05 p.m. Mountain. Standard Time at Utah Valley Regional Medical Center. Family members and close friends were at his side when life support was terminated.
Mr. Coleman suffered an intracranial hemorrhage at his home in Utah on the evening of May 26, 2010. As of mid morning on May 27, Mr. Coleman was conscious and lucid, but by early afternoon that same day, Mr. Coleman was slipping in and out of consciousness and his condition worsened.
Family members express their appreciation and gratitude for the support and prayers that have been expressed for Gary and for them.
—-Information from: Utah Valley Hospital.
The NYT has an overview article today on the reactions of Hispanics in Arizona to SB 1070, which delves into the problems that already existed between Hispanics and some police:
Judge Jose Padilla of Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix, says that twice since he became a judge in 2006, the police have pulled him over, alleging minor traffic infractions. Even though Judge Padilla, 60, did not disclose his occupation, he ended up not receiving a ticket. He said his complaints to the police department led to sensitivity training for the officers.
Judge Padilla believes the stops were based on his Hispanic ancestry and the fact that his 1988 pickup truck has large wheels and resembles a low rider, a customized car popular in Mexican-American culture but also favored by some street gangs.
“This has been lifelong, these stops,” he said, “and it is not just me.”
There’s a sidebar as well, detailing a campaign by some musicians against the state since the law’s passage:
The campaign, called the Sound Strike, has been organized by Zack de la Rocha, the lead singer of the rap metal band Rage Against the Machine, and is endorsed by English-language rock and rap performers like Massive Attack, Kanye West, Conor Oberst, Sonic Youth and Joe Satriani. But the signatories also include Spanish-speaking reggaetón artists and Los Tigres del Norte, perhaps the most popular and influential exponent of Mexican regional music in the United States.
An article in Slate argues that the constitutional approach to looking for illegal immigrants is checkpoints:
If Arizona truly wants to identify undocumented aliens in a way that does not undermine legitimacy, it should try randomized checkpoints. Checkpoints are widely used by police to enforce drunk-driving laws and other routine safety checks—such as seat belt laws—that save lives. Police can do a good job finding offenders without having to play their hunches. Policing agencies are required to have a good reason to set up a checkpoint, of course. But once a checkpoint is set up, individual officers don’t need to exercise their discretion. In fact, they can’t under constitutional law.
The Arizona Republic says that schools are reporting anecdotally but consistently that immigrant families are leaving in the wake of the passage of SB 1070:
Teachers and principals at Alhambra elementary schools in west Phoenix, for example, are saying goodbye to core volunteer parents, who tell them that the new migration law threatens their family stability and that they must leave. The district expects the new law to drive out an extra 200 to 300 students over the summer.
Balsz Elementary District in east Phoenix lost 70 families in the past 30 days, an unprecedented number, officials said.
12:18 PM
PHXations—Wednesday, May 26
A blogger who calls himself “AZ Writing Coach” offers a critique of a recent Arizona Republic story here.
I don’t agree with everything he says, but I like the granular analysis.
Apropos of nothing, PHXated would like to note that Marcellino, the Italian restaurant on Northern and 12th Street, has moved to downtown Scottsdale, in the Southbridge development in the space once occupied by Digestif.
PHXated is no dining expert, but based on three visits to the Northern location, twice with New Yorkers who know a bit about the field, feels that it’s probably the most under-appreciated great restaurant in town, and wishes proprietors Marcellino and Sima Verzino well.
The news restaurant is at 7114 E. Stetson Dr. in Scottsdale. A short piece on the re-opening from the New Times' Chow Bella blog here.
4:14 PM
Bishop Thomas "The Turtle" Olmsted: Candidate for Worst Arizonan!
It’s a tough competition in a state with Joe Arpaio, John McCain and Russell Pearce. But the head of the local Catholic diocese, Bishop Thomas “The Turtle” Olmsted, is right up there as one of the most despicable figures in the state.
E.J. Montini in the Republic noted this last month: That while the local Episcopal Bishop, Kirk Stevan Smith, has come out against SB 1070, Olmsted hasn’t said a word.
Olmsted’s counterpart in Los Angeles, Roger Mahony, has condemned the law in the most forthright terms, saying it used “German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques.”
From Olmsted? Nothing.
Olmsted’s also the guy who presumably orchestrated the diocese’s $50,000 donation to an anti-gay marriage campaign in Maine in 2008…
… and he’s also made it clear to administrators at St. Joseph’s hospital that he’ll scuttle their careers if they even think about approving an abortion—even to save the life of the mother.
Religious people are supposed to be compassionate and righteous, the enemies of cruelty and hypocrisy. Olmsted is more like Tony Soprano, overseeing a many-fingered operation that lacks morality and enforces its dictats brutally.
He deserves an appropriate street name; given his testudinal visage, as seen above, it seems “The Turtle” is most appropriate.
8:29 AM
NPR reports on the debacle at St. Joseph's
(updated to include Bishop Olmsted’s testudinal visage, above)
Earlier this week it was revealed that a local bishop, Thomas J. Olmsted, had cashiered an administrator at St. Joseph’s hospital after she permitted an abortion to save the life of its mother.
(The bishop also excommunicated the mother, which hardly seemed sporting. I mean, having been in a position essentially to murder her had he been in the operating room that night, Bishop Olmsted with the parting shot of an excommunication leaves himself open to the charge of just being petty.)
NPR reports tonight and makes the obvious point:
It’s funny how the Catholic Church administers punishment with swiftness and surety when the victim is an 11-week-old fetus and the supposed criminal is a woman.
But it has never seemed to act with the same assurance when the victims are hundreds if not thousands of children and the criminals are scores if not hundreds of predatory male priests:
“In the case of priests who are credibly accused and known to be guilty of sexually abusing children, they are in a sense let off the hook,” canon lawyer Rev. Thomas] Doyle says.
Doyle says no pedophile priests have been excommunicated. When priests have been caught, he says, their bishops have protected them, and it has taken years or decades to defrock them, if ever.
“Yet in this instance we have a sister who was trying to save the life of a woman, and what happens to her? The bishop swoops down [and] declares her excommunicated before he even looks at all the facts of the case,” Doyle says.
10:32 AM
Creepy bishop punishes a hospital administrator for allowing an abortion--to save a woman's life
A Catholic nun and longtime administrator of St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix was reassigned in the wake of a decision to allow a pregnancy to be ended in order to save the life of a critically ill patient.
The decision also drew a sharp rebuke from Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, head of the Phoenix Diocese, who indicated the woman was “automatically excommunicated” because of the action.
Bishop Olmsted is apparently also the guy who cashiered the nun. St. Joseph’s is the hospital on Thomas and Third Avenue.
The story explains:
The actions involving the administrator, mostly taken within the past couple of weeks, followed a last-minute, life-or-death drama in late 2009. The patient had a rare and often fatal condition in which a pregnancy can cause the death of the mother.
Sister Margaret McBride, who had been vice president of mission integration at the hospital, was on call as a member of the hospital’s ethics committee when the surgery took place, hospital officials said. She was part of a group of people, including the patient and doctors, who decided upon the course of action.
The patient was not identified, and details of her case cannot be revealed under federal privacy laws.
This decidedly un-compassionate act comes after another one the local diocese is known for—donating $50,000 to an anti-gay marriage political campaign in Maine in 2008.
So people who are donating to local Catholic churches are having their money go to hate campaigns in other states … and to prop up local abortion fetishists who persecute hospital administrators put in the position of having to make a horrible decisions — not to mention the sick patients whose life hung in the balance.
(Though we have to note that excommunication strikes us as a pretty positive development for the woman. I mean, it’s obvious the bishop wasn’t looking out for her best interests.)
And for the rest of us, who wants to patronize a hospital that will let its patient’s die because of the radical religious views of a crazy bishop?
1:10 PM
PHXations—Wednesday, May 5, 2010
There’s a terrific new restaurant downtown, just south of Roosevelt Row on 1st Street. Verde is a deceptively barebones affair—nothing much more than an order window, polished concrete floor, open kitchen and tortilla-making station.
Your proprietors are Joseph Aguayo and Matt Avilla. Preparations for the place took a year—"the city doesn’t make it easy,“ Aguayo sighed to us. They were originally in partnership with high-profile local chef Patrick Boll, but that fell apart last month.
There are about a half-dozen simple dishes; we had the oregano lime chicken and potatoes estofadas … both were generous and delicious, and served with simple and fresh beans and rice, and a stack of tortillas. Verde is at 825 N. 1st St., just a block below Roosevelt. The phone is 254-4400.?
More food news! Jess Harter, until recently the East Valley Trib’s food writer, has a new blog—Mouth by Southwest.
I am indebted to Harter for his intelligent and clear writing, impressive perspective on the Valley’s food scene. (“10 best Valley restaurants that never opened”) … and this item, which features a rare photo of the reclusive Young Martin Cizmar, Portending Rhetorical Journalist™.
4:36 AM
US Airways — the "ugly girl"?
After United’s dalliance with Phoenix’s US Airways over the past few months, the Chicago airline suddenly dropped US Airways and proposed to Continental, in a deal that could create the country’s largest airline.
Continental capo Jeff Smisek made this comment at a news conference:
“I didn’t want (United CEO Glenn Tilton) to marry the ugly girl. I wanted him to marry the pretty one.”
PBJ story—with a press release from a stung US Airways CEO Doug Parker—here.
8:16 AM
More on the Sydney Biennale
As Scott Andrews noted on PHXated the other day, a contingent of Arizonans will be at the biennale in Sydney beginning this weekend, including artists Angela Ellsworth and Claudio Dicochea. Also there will be their gallery owner, Lisa Sette; her husband, designer Peter Shikany; Dicochea’s wife, Adriana Gallego; writer and performer Tania Katan, and journalist Deborah Sussman Susser.
One of Dicochea’s works in the show grace one of the event publicity posters up around Sydney:
Dicochea and Gallego’s work can be seen here; Ellsworth’s here.
11:13 AM
Arizona doesn't just have bigots and crazy folks ...
… we got randy seniors as well.
The New York Times has a front-page profile today of the cast of Sunset Daze, a heretofore obscure show on the WE network that focuses on the antics of a bunch of older people living in a Sun City offshoot in Surprise:
SURPRISE, Ariz. — “Pedal to the metal, baby!” shouted Joanne Hauncher, 63, as she swerved wildly through traffic on a busy street in this Phoenix suburb. A truck driver slammed on his brakes and stared — she was driving a golf cart, after all — as Ms. Hauncher completed an illegal U-turn
“Rules are made to be broken,” she muttered, arching a painted-on eyebrow. “I’m too old to be spanked. Wait. Scratch that!”
Ms. Hauncher, along with eight other retirees who live here, star in a new reality show on the WE tv network called “Sunset Daze.” How did the producers find her? “I was out with the Ho’s” — her term for her female posse — “and I guess we looked like fun,” she said. Her only stipulation for signing on? “I didn’t want to come off as a lunatic senior.”
“Sunset Daze,” which makes its debut on Wednesday night, pushes just that button as it tries to hold its own in the boozy, oversexed reality TV genre. The first episode has commentary on vibrators and going “commando,” slang for not wearing underpants. WE positions the series as “The Golden Girls” meets “Jersey Shore,” the ribald MTV series that spawned Snooki.
11:55 AM
PHXations—Tuesday, April 27, 2010
The sixth Ignite PHoenix is tonight down at ASU. The subject is “collaboration” in general, collaboration between ASU and its surrounding community in particular.
Details here. Sign up (and a cumbersome process it is) here.
Things get under way at 6 p.m. It at the ASU Education Lecture Hall, which is on 11th St. just east of Mill, between Gammage and the Tempe Art Museum.
The next Ignite, incidentally, is scheduled for Friday, June 11, at the Phoenix Art Museum.
7:43 AM
Updated: "9500 Liberty" to play the Valley Art this week
N.B.: Bill Goodykoontz review of the film here.
Arizona isn’t the first jurisdiction to try telling its local police force to go after potential illegal immigrants. A county in Virginia, just outside of Washington D.C., tried it first.
9500 Liberty is a documentary about the unexpected things that happened next. It seems to have gotten some good notices; according to a release I’m inserting below, a buyer for Harkins is bringing it to town on an expedited basis after Brewer signed the now-notorious SB 1070.
The film opens at the Valley Art on Friday.
The film’s official site is here.
Press release below. Here’s a trailer:
===========
Immigration Documentary Could Shake Up Arizona Tempe, Phoenix to host 9500 Liberty, filmmakers for “emergency” premiere
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(TEMPE, AZ) April 26, 2010 – This Friday, Harkins Theaters will host the theatrical premiere of 9500 LIBERTY, an award-winning film about a Virginia county’s short-lived police mandate requiring officers to question people they had cause to suspect were undocumented immigrants.
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed a similar measure into law on April 23, and Harkins made a deal to exhibit 9500 Liberty 24 hours later. The Prince William County mandate was repealed after two months due to negative economic, legal, and public safety impacts. Critics of HB 1070 predict the same fate in Arizona, citing 9500 Liberty as documentary evidence.
9500 LIBERTY STARTS FRIDAY April 30, 2010 Harkins Valley Art Theater 509 S Mill Ave • Tempe, AZ 85281 Special Premiere Event Friday at 7:00 PM Daily 2:00, 4:30, 7:00, 9:30
The film’s directors Annabel Park and Eric Byler are traveling to Arizona in coming days. Byler arrives tomorrow evening while Park will arrive next week. Recently Park and Byler have been more focused on Coffee Party USA, a grass-roots movement that began on Facebook and became a national phenomenon in a matter of weeks. Both said they will speak as independent filmmakers, not as Coffee Party founders in the context of the Arizona law.
“I’ve been to several film premieres in my life, but this will be the first emergency premiere,” Byler said.
Earlier this month, Byler accepted the Phoenix Film Festival’s Breakthrough Filmmaker Award on behalf of Park and producers Chris Rigopulos, Alex Rigopulos, and Jeff Man. The next day, Harkins Theaters Film Buyer Barry Bruno approached Byler to discuss a theatrical engagement later this year. But as the controversy in Arizona erupted, the two agreed to an unusually accelerated schedule.
“One week’s lead time is unheard of, but the situation warranted it,” Bruno said.
Harkins Theaters has venues throughout Arizona, as well as in Denver, Texas, and California. Bruno said that additional theaters may soon be added
#
8:10 AM
A new local organic coffee shop in Scottsdale
We don’t always appreciate the minutiae that goes into opening up a new business.
Steve Belt gives a good sense of this as he chronicles the opening of his new cafe—which, if all goes well this a.m., will come around noon today:
As a quick status update, we just missed getting our Certificate of Occupancy today. There were two very minor problems: the building’s fire monitoring had lapsed allowing 3 batteries to fall dead, which needed changing (you have to laugh at some of the types of things that can hold up such a huge, complicated project). That’s a landlord responsibility, which was quickly corrected, shortly after the fire marshal left. As well, the Men and Women signs were not hung by the bathrooms (they were inside the bathrooms on the counter), so we didn’t pass structural. Both problems were fixed in a few minutes, and we expect to get CofO at 8am Friday morning.
With CofO all but in hand, we’ve schedule the health department inspector for Friday morning at 11am. They were just at the shop last Friday, so the only significant differences will be that refrigerators are now plugged in, soap and towel dispensers are present, and water is hot. Although it’s certainly not a slam dunk that we will pass health inspection, we do believe we are ready.
This means that around noon on Friday, April 23, 2010, we will officially be allowed to open for business at Echo Coffee.
Echo Coffee is on the northwest corner of Thomas and 68th St. Details here.
(h/t: PhxREguy on Twitter.)
7:40 AM
Putting up Sidebar's new sign
PHXated’s been hanging out with Sidebar’s Josh Parry as he monitored the placement of a new eight-foot neon sign.
It was designed by Nick Zink, and is going up on Seventh Avenue just south of McDowell, right above the front door.
The new sign should be lit tonight.
4:32 PM
PHXations—Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Only two-thirds of Arizonans have sent in their census forms, the Republic reports. The state ranks 38th nationally in response levels, the story says:
[F]or states such as Arizona, participation that is lower than the nation’s also raises the chances of an undercount when the tally is finished later this year. A lackluster showing in the decennial census would mean Arizona could be shortchanged hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds over the next decade. It could also ensure the state gains no more than one seat when Congress and the Electoral College are apportioned by 2012.
Blogger Adam Lopez Falk is taking seriously Rep. Raul Grijalva’s suggestion that Arizona companies be boycotted if the governor signs that hateful immigration bill into law. His list:
- Circle K
- Fender Guitars
- CSK Auto-Checker, Schucks, Kragen Auto Parts, Murray’s Discount Auto Parts
- Allied Waste Industries-sanitation
- Avnet Technology-electronic components
- Kiewit Corporation-construction
- Best Western International
- Clear Channel Outdoor-billboards
- Knight Transportation-trucking
- P.F. Changs China Bistro
- PetSmart
- Shamrock Farms and Foods company
- SkyMall magazine
- Sprouts Grocery Stores
- U-Haul
- VIAD Corporation-exhibit services
- DIAL Corporation-soaps, hygiene products, and detergents
- Fry’s Food and Drug
- Bashas Grocery Stores
- Poore Brothers-chips
- Discount Tire Company
- Kahala-Cold Stone-Cold Stone Creamery, Great Steak Co.
- Giant Industries-Giant Gas Stations
- Go Daddy.com
- US Airways
In the comments he makes the obvious point, that if the company has come out against the legislation, there’s no reason to boycott them. (h/t Jose Gonzalez.)
7:26 AM
How the gay marriage movement is evolving in the U.S.
This absorbing interactive graphic from the LA Times stuck me as counter-intuitive at first.
We all know the country is moving toward marriage equality. When you click “play” on the graphic, you expect to see tolerance bloom.
Instead, you see the real story—the progress made toward gay marriage rights in the more civilized areas of the country, and a comparable calcifying (indeed, actual atavism) in the backward parts.
You’ll notice Arizona proudly takes its place not just among the most prejudiced parts of the country, but the ones that have most recently taken the most stringent measures against marriage equality.
7:01 AM
How did Arizona fare in US News' grad-school rankings?
As we know, the state fared mighty poorly in the undergraduate arena when U.S. News unveiled its undergraduate college rankings last August.
It’s slightly better news on the graduate level, but this is tempered by the fact that the reporting on the rankings locally were wrong or incomplete.
Not a good example to set for the kids!
Anyway, the Thunderbird business school retained its place as the best international business school—for the fifteenth year in a row.
The ASU Carey Business School came in 27th on the MBA list, and UofA’s Eller 55th.
But neither the Republic nor the PBJ noticed that both ASU and UofA’s law schools made the top fifty as well—38th and 42nd, respectively. I did some other selectively checking and also found:
In English both came in in the 50s; in history, ASU was 71st and UofA 42nd.
They came in 30th and 45th in fine arts, respectively, and 25th and 36th in public affairs. They tied for 39th in economics.
Now, given that there are fifty states, Arizona did not fare embarrassingly. Having two schools in the top fifty, in most cases, in those categories is a decent showing.
The papers should have noticed that.
That said, the state’s ranking in the undergraduate sphere — detailed here —remain shocking and a big problem for the state’s national image.
7:57 AM
The dark side of the solar industry!
The increase in the number of contractors shifting from the nearly dormant housing industry into solar to pay bills has accelerated, but many haven’t received the proper training to make that transition. While problems don’t appear to be major, the industry is trying to police itself to prevent a bad image, and regulators are trying to get inspectors up to speed as fast as they can.
“Anecdotally, yes, we’re seeing more complaints on solar,” said Tyler Palmer, a spokesman for the Arizona Registrar of Contractors.
AROC doesn’t have hard numbers on how many complaints it has received, but Palmer said given the industry’s growth as other sectors decline, those complaints draw more attention.
It’s a fairly substantive story, but it ends on a less-than-upbeat note. Palmer, the contractor spokesperson, says that making sure contractors are licensed correctly for solar will require some action by the state:
“It’ll be a process, and some of them will require rule changes,” he said, adding that likely would involve a change in policy by Gov. Jan Brewer, who has frozen new rules at state agencies.
7:20 AM
Q. How does Arizona teach sex education?
A. Badly.
From the Republic:
Arizona ranks third highest in teen-pregnancy rates, behind Nevada and New Mexico, for girls ages 15 to 19, according to 2005 statistics compiled by the National Campaign Pregnancy Report.
In 2008, 28,084 girls ages 19 and younger were pregnant, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services.
The context is a survey story about how sex ed is taught in the state.
The figure above is unsurprising, because, unsurprisingly, the state is incredibly backward when it comes to the subject.
Sex ed is held off until high school and then it’s straitjacketed by a parental permission “opt-in” policy, which effectively effectively allows lazy and timid parents to increase their kids’ chances of a ruined life by doing nothing.
States with right-wing governance like to act superior to the heathens in California or New York. So why are we near the top when it comes to teen boffing?
2:00 PM
Malcolm McLaren, 1946-2010
McLaren, whose death was reported today, thought that a rock band could tear down society.
His main experiment along these lines, with a group of young men whose most reputable members were burglars, was either societally dangerous (and a fantastic but portentous failure) or merely part of a centuries-spanning but relatively benign subversive order (and a complete, pointless success).
You be the judge.
This is an essay I wrote on him and the band, some years back, for Salon, the internet magazine.
-——
The revenge of the Sex Pistols
Blood, chaos, hatred and fear: The lads who changed rock history tell the story their way.
He deserv’d no such return
From me, whom he created …
All his good prov’d ill in me,
And wrought but malice— “Paradise Lost”
In the end, history — absurdist, implacable, amused — overwhelmed the Sex Pistols, the British punk band whose cacophonous two-year career, from late 1975 to the first weeks of 1978, captivated England and made them synonymous with the very idea of punk rock. The making of “The Filth and the Fury,” a new documentary on the band, was controlled by its surviving members and unapologetically tells its story from their point of view. But even so there are a couple of moments when we see in the band members’ eyes or hear in their voices that there were forces at work that dwarfed them.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see how England’s depressed social psyche at the time had the power to generate rebels like the four grimy members of the band and their provocateur of a manager, Malcolm McLaren — but it also catalyzed much stronger forces dedicated to keeping the peace, forces that harried the band incessantly.
You can see that the fierce intelligence and astonishing onstage charisma possessed by the band’s lead singer, Johnny Rotten, which would have dominated almost any other conceivable group of band mates, could not overcome the fact that he was from the start a pawn in a twisted, nihilistic version of the Monkees, and no match in sophistication or perspective for the manipulations of the history-minded McLaren. And even the band’s uncompromising, oddly selfless defiance, in the end, turned out to be the making merely of martyrs, not of heroes.
To this day Rotten and McLaren spar to take credit for the ensuing disaster. For much of the past 20-plus years, with Rotten’s dyspeptic personality an obstacle, the story has been essentially McLaren’s to tell. The two most important works to address the band, Greil Marcus’ “Lipstick Traces” and Jon Savage’s “England’s Dreaming,” are both enthralled with Rotten, but both also revel in the group’s connection to a history of mischievous social provocateuring over the previous decades by groups like the Lettrists and the Situationist International, of whom McLaren was first a student and then a willing and articulate agent. (What unites the groups and the Pistols is a commitment to denial — saying “no” to the established order.) At the time the books were written, this aspect of the story had not been appreciated; fairly or not it has changed forever our perspective on what it was exactly the Sex Pistols established.
Rotten, writing under his real name, John Lydon, offered a revision in an autobiography: “Rotten: No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish,” six years ago. Now “The Filth and the Fury” is his attempt to wrench back a bit of the honor of definition, with help from the existing filmic evidence that remains. This is the “truth,” he tells us repeatedly. (The same insistence marked his book.) It’s a personal battle, to be sure, but he imagines that he’s placing the band in history as well. Talk of the Situationists obscures the very real state of Britain in the mid-1970s, he feels: the desperation, the unemployment, the kids living in squats. To this end, he and director Julien Temple play the determinist, spawn-of-social-breakdown card heavily; we’re reminded of the band’s working-class origins and the unrest that marked Britain at the time. Rotten, in one of his typically incisive aperçus, tells us that to live in England at the time was to experience “a shabby, third-rate version of reality.”
But that was many years ago. Rotten and his former band mates, in the film, don’t allow us to see what they look like now; it’s unfortunate that Temple went along with the conceit. The faceless voice-overs put a cast of shame over the proceedings. Do they not like how they look? Does a Sex Pistol have shame? They were self-styled monsters — now they’re monsters with feelings. In “Paradise Lost,” a few lines past the ones quoted above, Satan, still seething, asks, “Which way shall I fly/Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?” In “The Filth and the Fury” Rotten lets wrath at his former manager cloud his judgment, and seems the weaker for it. But any creation will seem weak when it tries to diminish the god that animated it.
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McLaren spent the mid-1970s in the United States, managing the New York Dolls at the end of their career; one of his absurd innovations was putting the band in front of a huge Soviet flag. He also inhaled the beginnings of punk in the New York underground. He came back to England and with partner Vivienne Westwood began purveying strange fashion out of a now-celebrated Kings Road shop in London. (The store eventually was called Sex and specialized in leather bondage styles. Westwood went on to become a noted fashion designer.) You can overstate McLaren’s importance, of course; but if he wasn’t in uncharted waters he was certainly some way off from shore, watching carefully for the wave.
He was politically motivated, but also a fan of disruption for its own sake, and had the deeply held belief that pop music could do the deed. This notion seems quaint today — but watch what happened. He put together a potential band of social and musical nogoodnicks possessed neither of brains nor scruples; the band’s drummer, Paul Cook, and guitarist, Steve Jones, were essentially making their living as burglars. The bass player was a Sex store clerk, Glen Matlock. After some Pete Bestian shenanigans with a fellow named Wally Nightingale, a new lead singer was almost literally pulled in off the street: a sometime store habitui with a properly waspish personality and questionable hygiene to boot. (He earned the nickname under which he’d become famous because of his teeth.)
Again, Johnny Rotten’s searing intelligence and electric personality would have easily led any other band. But he had not formed this group and there is, truth be told, little in his personal history to suggest that he ever would have on his own. He was a late-comer, and the boys McLaren had assembled had the virtue (from McLaren’s point of view) of being dumb enough to be immune to the appeal of a smart aleck. In fact, they disliked him even before the first rehearsal, for which they simply declined to show up, and intraband relationships declined from there. Among other things, the three other band members were vociferously opposed to most of the sentiments articulated in Rotten’s lyrics.
McLaren’s p.r. smarts made the band a phenomenon in the underground scene almost from the day its lineup coalesced. He was helped by a new and aimless generation looking for a thrill and a spreading culture of violence and extremity. The most exciting part of Lydon’s autobiography, which includes a great deal of oral history from other denizens of the scene, is the testimony from those who watched a phenomenon create itself literally from appearance to appearance; audience members with long hair at one show would turn up at the next with punk hairstyles and safety pins.
McLaren was also assisted by Britain’s overheated and insular music press and the willingness of one of the country’s biggest labels, EMI, to stock up on some of the destructive snake oil he was purveying. The band’s first single, “Anarchy in the U.K.,” was released in November 1976, but most of England really didn’t know who or what the Sex Pistols were. But that was before Bill Grundy.
On Dec. 3, 1976, the four were offered a last-minute replacement appearance on a live, early-evening British TV show called “Today.” They were accompanied by four friends, one of them Siouxsie Sioux, later of Siouxsie and the Banshees. Goaded by a vacuous, possibly drunk host, Grundy (who among other things seemed to be hitting on Sioux), Rotten muttered the word “shit” under his breath. Catching it, Grundy bored in, and the show disintegrated in a hail of obscenity. The incident put the Sex Pistols on the cover of the nation’s tabloids for days. The new movie takes its name from the headline that filled the front page of the next day’s Daily Mirror. EMI pulled the “Anarchy” single. “From [then] on, they were a total spectacle,” writes Savage in “England’s Dreaming.”
Shortly after this came Rotten’s one management triumph, an amusingly Pyrrhic one. He hated Matlock, the bass player who’d composed the band’s key early songs but who Rotten contended wanted to turn the band into the Bay City Rollers. “If he looks like an asshole and talks like an asshole then he’s an asshole” is Rotten’s unrepentant epitaph for him in “The Filth and the Fury.” (Still, Matlock returned to play guitars on the band’s only studio album and eventually played in the Pistols’ 1996 reunion tour.) Rotten’s candidate to replace Matlock was his best friend, a lost child who lacked musical skills, any significant experience playing in a band and, in a touching footnote, apparently even a real name. (He told friends he didn’t know if it was Simon Ritchie or John Beverly.)
Sid Vicious was an aimless, violent figure on the scene. Cook and Jones didn’t like him, but Rotten’s insistence won out. In his autobiography, Rotten admits that he didn’t appreciate the Pandora’s box he was opening. His mother may have: “What kind of wicked reasons have you got behind that?” she sighed.
Their second single was “God Save the Queen,” released, after a short, scandal-filled and profitable weeklong contretemps with A&M Records, by Virgin. The band rented a boat to cruise up the Thames during Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee in July 1977. The single was banned from the radio but still became a bestseller. On the charts of the time, there is a blank where the song should be — an Orwellian image that a generation of British music fans would find indelible. In November, the only album to be released during the band’s career together, “Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols,” came out. Police literally tore down record-store displays across the country. One store owner was taken to court merely for displaying the album cover. (He was found not guilty — “reluctantly,” the judge said from the bench.) A concert tour was a debacle as dates were canceled as fast as McLaren could book them.
In retrospect these events may seem merely like planned outrages by McLaren, but the evidence suggests that these were extremes he hadn’t contemplated; he was by all accounts paralyzed after the Grundy affair. The chaos is part of rock legend now, but it created genuine pressures on a band of young men almost all of whom had grown up under unfortunate circumstances and none of whom, really, had the ambitions or strength of character most people who try to become rock stars have at their disposal. The press was insatiable; it was becoming dangerous for band members to venture out in public; and Rotten, at least, endured both a razor attack and a destructive police raid on his apartment.
Part of McLaren’s maniacal plan was to establish the lead singer as a poet of sorts, and isolated from the prole backing musicians. Rotten’s stories from the time are almost tearfully funny. He would be invited to swell parties, only to have McLaren turn him away from the door. At the same time, he was watching his best friend whirl into a vortex of trouble. Vicious’ girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, her mother later wrote, was developmentally disabled and in some sort of pain almost from the day she was born. By the time she met up with the Sex Pistols she was a nightmare of an American suburban expatriate turned prostitute and drug dealer. She was screechy and demanding; to those who would listen, and those who wouldn’t, she would take the unique aesthetic position that Vicious was the real talent in the band. At one point McLaren kidnapped her and tried to send her back to America with a one-way ticket. He got her as far as the airport; Vicious never forgave him.
The band capped its British performing career with a benefit for striking firemen on Christmas Day, 1977. In January they went to America and played shows in Atlanta; Baton Rouge, La.; Memphis, Tenn.; Dallas; San Antonio, Texas; Tulsa, Okla.; and San Francisco. Rotten and Vicious were eventually relegated to a bus, even as McLaren, Cook and Jones flew. The band’s final show, at San Francisco’s cavernous Winterland, ended with Rotten’s most famous line: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” The band broke up the next day without anyone really saying so. Rotten says he was left in San Francisco with $20 in his pocket. Cook and Jones went back into obscurity; Rotten to modern-rock hemidemistardom with his band, Public Image Ltd.; McLaren to another few decades of intermittently successful attention-getting.
Sid Vicious went to hell: He apparently stabbed Spungen during a druggy fight in their apartment at the Chelsea Hotel in New York on Oct. 11, 1978; she dragged herself to the bathroom and bled to death. Vicious spent the next few months in and out of jails and (after a suicide attempt) hospitals; his last stint was in Riker’s Island, a notoriously dangerous New York jail. It could not have presented hospitable surroundings for a scrawny and insolent British punk rocker going through heroin withdrawal. He died of an overdose the night he was let out on bail, Feb. 1, 1979.
Given this material, “The Filth and the Fury” is, not surprisingly, a kinetic and unstoppable ride. Temple met the band in London during one of its first rehearsals. On the way to becoming an established filmmaker (“Absolute Beginners” and “Earth Girls Are Easy,” among others"), he and McLaren put together “The Great Rock ’n Roll Swindle,” a by-turns compelling and unwatchable fake documentary on the Pistols. (One unappetizing scene has Cook and Jones, in Rio de Janiero, doing naked jumping jacks on a beach with a wanted British bank robber, Ronnie Biggs.) Rotten and the band now view that film as a piece of McLaren-esque propaganda, but have brought Temple back into the fold as a documentarian for hire. (Oddly, a major chunk of the new movie — perhaps as much as 20 percent — is recycled “Swindle” footage.)
“The Filth and the Fury” has essentially but one trick, but it’s a good one: Temple simply lets the England of the time — or at least what Temple wants us to believe was the England of the time — hang itself. The film begins with a few seconds of footage of an impossibly square, clumsy weatherman, and then launches directly into a swirling collage of street riots, chaos and various species of social collapse. Rotten and Vicious are introduced with shots of them spitting into the camera lens. The film is dotted with what’s apparently meant as hugely sardonic clips of lame comedians from British TV; most Americans will find them puzzling. There’s also this or that news footage of ranting British racists and various town councilors fighting to keep the band from playing in their community.
The news footage is most effective during an earsplitting “Anarchy in the U.K.” sequence, when, in the song’s climactic verse, in which Rotten reels off a list of terrorist group acronyms, Temple shockingly cuts in explosions that hit on the last letter of each groups’ name. (“Is this the MPLA [blast!]?/Is this the UDA [blast!]?”) There is a lot of home movie footage and film from smaller, early shows. (Most of this, irritatingly, has studio versions of Pistols’ songs played over them. “Swindle” used the live tracks.)
Otherwise, the film rips through a Pistols-centric version of history, Rotten at the core: Grundy, “God Save the Queen,” the last British show, the American tour, the death of Vicious. There are intermittent glimpses into the things that fueled Rotten’s seemingly unstoppable rage, like his description of the lumpen members of the band putting down his epochal opening lines to “Anarchy in the U.K.” — “I am an antichrist/I am an anarchist” — on the grounds that they didn’t rhyme. At moments like this you feel for him. In his autobiography, he captures his perspective on such indignities with perhaps the most deromanticized portrait of rock ‘n’ roll ever committed to paper: “I don’t care how big-headed the lead singer is, it all comes down to the fact that he must eat shit in the rehearsal room. The histrionics of the lead guitar, the excesses of the drummer and the stupidity of the bass player have to meet on equal footing.”
Though his face is hidden, it’s apparent at one point that Rotten is reduced to tears while remembering the grotesque end of his best friend. It’s undoubtedly sincere, but the uncharitable may well reflect that, had the young Rotten viewed Mick Jagger, say, similarly eulogizing Brian Jones, he would have spit at the screen. It’s a Barbara Walters moment. I’d always taken the title of one of Lydon’s Public Image albums, “The Flowers of Romance,” to be his unspoken tribute to Vicious — that had been the name of a band Vicious had been associated with before the Sex Pistols. In his autobiography, Lydon admits he hadn’t been the friend he should have been but treats Vicious’ life with lancing sarcasm as well: “He took it all too far, and boy, he couldn’t play guitar. David Bowie reference.” In the film he remains unforgiving — “He became the worst sort of rock ‘n’ roll idiot you could have had a nightmare about” — and delivers a shattering epitaph: “All I’m telling you is that I could take on England, but I could not take on one heroin addict.”
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – — – — – — – — – — -
While there is much to enjoy here for any music fan and particularly those for whom the Pistols represented a shocking cultural revelation in the late 1970s, the film fails on so many levels it’s difficult to take it seriously. A documentary controlled by the people it’s about is never entirely satisfying. (Temple has made it plain in interviews that he was a hired gun.) While to some extent its intent — presenting a coherent history of the band from the point of view of its members — is defensible, there is enough missing to make you wish a legitimate, independent documentarian had had access to the same material.
There is far too much wild-in-the-streets footage and a bit too much trumpeting about the band members’ working-class origins. (I was waiting for someone to claim to be depraved on account of being deprived.) Their sometimes violent antics are not glossed over — there’s priceless footage of Nick Kent, the then-reigning British rock journalist, telling of Vicious’ chain attack on him — but these are not quite portrayed on the sociopathic levels on which I suspect they existed. (Kent wasn’t the only person Vicious attacked with a chain.)
And to watch “The Filth and the Fury” you’d think that the band members had sprung full-blown in a burst of spontaneous social realism. I caught a split-second mention of the New York Dolls; if there was mention of the Stooges or the Ramones I missed it. McLaren is dismissed with derisive footage from “Swindle” of him in a leather bondage mask, generally saying stupid things. Why be a punk if you can’t settle some scores? Rotten might argue; he doesn’t see how the puerility of the device lessens his stature, not increases it.
You come away wishing McLaren had had a chance to speak for himself. One of the funnier moments in the film comes when Rotten talks about being relegated to a bus with Vicious during the American tour. The rest of the band stayed in nice hotels; “We had to stay” — here Rotten conjures up his most indignant drawl — “in MO-tels!” The moment is set up to make you feel sorry for poor neglected Johnny and Sid, but I’m on McLaren, Cook and Jones’ side on this one. By this point, traveling on a bus with Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious had crossed over the line of unpleasantness and into the realm of the physically dangerous.
The lack of an independent perspective will make certain parts of the story mystifying to the uninitiated. The single most salient point about that excruciating American tour, for example, is that McLaren deliberately booked it across the hinterland, refusing to kowtow to the media centers he and the band held in contempt. After some cancellations in the North, the tour devolved down to a series of literally blood-streaked shows across the Deep South. The suicidal result was surely one of the most astonishing marketing debacles in the history of popular entertainment, and it’s a curious artifact of the oddly romantic, slightly deranged philosophy that drove McLaren and the band.
And finally, the film misses two points that any tale of the Sex Pistols has to make. The first, ironically, is probably missing because of modesty. The nine vertiginous guitar down-strokes that open “Anarchy” speak for themselves. But Rotten was more than just a front person. He was also, strange to say, a poet, one of stark and ugly but undeniable gifts. He took the obvious, almost clichid language of denial or protest and repeatedly created moments that really did seem to threaten the “third-rate reality” he sensed around him. And he did it with such force that the songs still, as an onlooker at the time put it, raise “hundreds of questions.”
To this day, the standard vocabulary of pop culture can’t account for Rotten’s onstage presence. He was misshapen and up to no good, a sadistic, starved Rumpelstiltskin or Quasimodo; as he sang, his r’s, when he wanted them to, trilled like chainsaws. His manic eyes and rigid body suggested brittle, dangerous extremes. The recordings he made (and here the band was helped mightily by producer Chris Thomas) are so hard that they are grating and difficult to listen to casually to this day. Ramones and Clash songs are now practically classic-rock staples; Sex Pistols tracks are virtually never played on commercial radio.
Rotten was also a master of the multiplicity of meanings that has made the early days of the British punk moment catnip for social theoreticians in the years since. To cite just one obvious example: The fact that “antichrist” and “anarchist” didn’t rhyme is one of the points of “Anarchy in the U.K.” It isn’t a song about wanting to shoot passersby; it’s a song about offending people who’d be offended by a song about such a thing. The fractured rhyme is merely a lagniappe, a sign to the listeners that, among other things, the weapons in the debate have changed, that certain rules were no longer being observed. (Among other things, it says, “Fuck you, Paul McCartney.”)
“Anarchy” doesn’t rhyme; it’s incoherent; its lyrics violate many accepted rules of grammar. But its message is unmistakable. After a contemptuous belch buried in the “guitar solo” that precedes the last verse, Rotten launches into the nonsensical litany of armed groups and closes the song with his finest vocal moment, a heroic, raspy, strained pair of lines (“I thought it was the U.K./Or just another country”) that on the page seem anticlimactic but on record, addressed to a land that dearly wishes to think of itself as not just another country, are derisive, desperate, forlorn and defiant. Not one of rock’s love balladeers, not one of its jut-jawed protesters, has ever sounded so lost.
The songs speak for themselves, but they also deserve, in a film of this sort, some level of explication. “Holidays in the Sun,” illustrated here with footage of the band in Berlin, is really about something strange and terrifying. The singer, apparently a vacuous middle-class British tourist, begins, “I don’t want a holiday in the sun/I wanna see the new Belsen.”
It’s a brilliantly confrontational opening. Rotten manages to implicate an entire class in the diminution of the Holocaust even as he uses the name of a concentration camp as a punch line. He rolls on: “I want to see some history,” he howls delightedly, his character spouting wan Marxisms even as the singer somehow delivers a wicked trill on every syllable of the key word. He finds his history, and himself, at song’s end, staring over the Berlin Wall. (The wall was still a potent symbol of tyranny then, less than 15 years after it was built.) What he finds is unexpected: “I’m looking over the wall and they’re looking at me!” From there the singer, his voice, sound uncertain: He’s come, recklessly, for a merry glimpse of the ghosts of Nazism and fascism and, disconcertingly, finds them looking for the same thing in him. The resulting cognitive dissonance ends the song in a hail of incoherence.
Which brings us, finally, to the second thing the movie can’t bring itself to recognize — the great cosmic joke that was the Sex Pistols. What are the chances of a low-rent provocateur like McLaren finding in his store a grimy musician whose contribution to history would be those nine momentous chords? And given that, what are the odds that that same person could walk out on the street and almost randomly pick arguably the only person alive on Earth at that moment who could possibly have made his dream of a rock band that might destroy pop music a reality? And that together the group and the manager would indeed create not only, as he called it in “Swindle,” “the most notorious filthy disgusting dirtiest rock ‘n’ roll band in the whole bloody world,” but also, in “Never Mind the Bollocks,” a signal work of transgressive pop art whose force has not lessened over the passage of more than two decades?
This was history’s last laugh: Art erupts in the damnedest places. Lydon’s unapologetic activities in the years since — cloying dance music for suburban teens with the latter-day PiL, a gleefully remunerative reunion tour — were encoded in his original hauteur and contempt for propriety; he wasn’t doing anything we didn’t expect him to. What does catch us off guard is to see him display — nakedly, for once — a need for the future’s approbation. He ends up haranguing us about what “the truth” is, when the one thing we know for sure about the truth is that it rarely comes from the guy trying to sell it to us. For the first time in 25 years, we wonder: That cackle we hear; is it Rotten’s — or history’s?
5:10 PM
US Airways in another round of merger talks with United
Both the NY Times and now the WSJ are reporting that serious talks are underway.
The combined operations—including those of America West, which Phoenix-based US Airways merged with four years ago but still, like a snake trying to swallow a recalcitrant mongoose, can’t seem to digest it—would create the nation’s second-largest carrier, after Delta.
The Times:
The negotiations represent the latest efforts to consolidate the struggling airline industry, which lost $60 billion over the last decade as fuel costs soared and the number of travelers fell. Both companies have been vocal in calling for greater partnerships.
Of the major airlines, only the low-cost carrier Southwest Airlines turned a profit last year. And analysts have said that despite the steep cuts in capacity by all the airlines in the last couple of years, there are still too many airlines chasing too few travelers. A combination of United and US Airways could help both return to profit faster than they could going it alone.
Both stories note the talks are tentative and could fall through. The WSJ notes this fly in the ointment:
US Airways, itself the result of a 2005 merger of the old US Airways and America West Airlines, still hasn’t been able to combine its pilot and flight-attendant ranks because the unions won’t agree on seniority. And US Airways pilots have a stipulation in their contract that would raise their wages back to pre-bankruptcy levels if a merger occurs that would trigger a change of control—another aspect United and US Airways would have to confront.
The Arizona Republic … has a web post about the NYT story.
9:11 PM
How I got screwed by the Easter bunny
According to the Arizona Republic, Easter is losing its punch:
Today, Easter Sunday remains the holiest day of the year for Christians, but it is far less significant outside church doors.
Given that—and the fact that Apple is based in godless California—you’d think you could have gone down to the Apple store yesterday and help a friend get a new laptop.
(No, not the iPad—you’d have to be crazy to get the first iteration of a new Apple product.)
I’m not a complete idiot, so I checked the store’s website to see time it opened on Sunday. 11 a.m., it said.
But when we got there, the store was dark, and a security guard, oddly, sat in the darkened interior, reading a book. This was undoubtedly made more difficult by the fact he was wearing sunglasses.
To make matters worse, there was a sign on a stand inside the door, saying clearly that the store was open at 11 a.m. on Sunday.
So, we thought—fuck the Apple Store.
We’ll go to Best Buy, which has those odd little sequestered “Apple tables.”
You can see this coming: Best Buy was closed too.
“If I’m not getting a laptop,” announced my friend, “I want ice cream.”
A perfect day for the classic Phoenix ice cream parlor Mary Coyle, yes?
Nope: No answer when we called.
What was particularly galling, in all three cases, is that the stores didn’t even both to use a sign or an answering machine message to say, “Hey, it’s Easter, numbnuts—We’re closed.”
They just assumed that people would know they weren’t open for Easter.
As usual, the Arizona Republic was wrong.
What did we do?
We went to Gallo Blanco and ate flan and postre de chocolate—and cursed the Easter bunny.
9:31 AM
Martin Cizmar: "Dost thou portend to know what was notable?"
PHXated and the New Times’ Martin Cizmar have been billet-douxing back and forth about the latter’s review of a recent Paul McCartney show.
Much of this discussion has involved a nagging fixation on Cizmar’s part on a song called “Ob-La-Di Ob-la-da,” which is a tune from a long time ago originally done by Wings, or the Hollies, or something.
Anyway, the note below was originally placed here as a comment, but it deserves a higher profile. I had my say; It’s only fair that Cizmar have the last word
Even if that word is “portend” and he’s not 100 percent clear on its meaning.
My original post here. Our back and forth here.
--
Martin Cizmar said on Thursday, April 01, 2010:
Bill,
I think you might be confused about what was going on here… Wrestlemania and Paul McCartney were on the same day in the same complex. Jobing.com held it’s lots back and gave free parking to fans, as it always does. This is about the other lots, the ones owned by U of P, Glendale, Westgate and the tax payers (ahem). I wasn’t parking as a McCartney goer, I was parking as a wrestling goer. So all your bullshit about the hummers, etc. isn’t on point.
As for what the government could do to make things easier. Well, governments can do a lot of things to make things “easier,” to avoid ugly signs, to delegate police powers to non-sworn officers. Unfortunately for people like you, people like me keep pointing to this crusty old constitution which makes such things illegal. Sorry, dude, but even Joe Arpaio can’t just do whatever he wants for convenience state, though ignorant voters like you do their best to try and give him such powers.
I’m not sure if you are accusing me of literally pulling something from a press release, but I didn’t read any press releases on the tour. McCartney made that point from stage and it struck me. It still strikes me. That’s a song I, and a lot of other people, have been intimately in touch with for years and years. It’s a classic probably above anything in, say, U2’s catalog. As I stated, this wasn’t a “Monkberrien obscurity” it was Ob-La-Fucking-Da! Comparing that to the some B’side from the WAR album is either shamefully ignorant or intellectually dishonest.
Now, about your fuzzy math: The Beatles wrote, by my count, a total of 191 songs. 108 of those came out after Shea. So, no, he couldn’t have played 20 or 30 of those for the first time on every tour. Beyond that, I’m not talking about fucking “Sea of Holes” here, I’m talking about a very, very well known song!
And it had never been played live in the U.S. before. The reason, of course, is the fact that the Beatles stopped playing outside the studio after Shea Stadium, but it’s still telling to me. The fact that other people do a shoddy job of imitating that angle (this particular pair of pants, etc.) just reinforces for me how special McCartney is. What a class above he is.
I’ve seen McCartney twice in less than a year. You’ve seen him, what, a decade ago? Yet you portend to know what was notable?
11:06 AM
McCartney Mania! New Times' Martin Cizmar responds!
The New Times’ Martin Cizmar responded to PHXated’s recent pontifications on his coverage of the McCartney show.
It was too good a missive to leave down in the comments, so I’m reposting it here.
Along, uh, with my response to him below.
Original post here.
Martin Cizmar:
Bill,
Thanks for reading and thanks for keeping this blog – I truly appreciate anyone’s efforts to critique the pretty sad state of music journalism in this state, even if they’re going after me.
Regarding specific points:
1. I don’t think the lede is THAT boring. It’s not my best work but I don’t think it’s too long or wordy or anything.
2. Do you seriously not find anything offensive about people being stopped by private security guards on a public street? I think that’s pretty much illegal.
3. The end is intentionally hyperbolic and yuppyish. I’m fond of that voice.
4. It’s been years and years since I was accused of being too blowjobby in a review of anything. Seriously. If you look in the comments you’ll see people suggest it must have been PAINFUL for me to write such a glowing review. It really was an incredibly good show. Not to offend, but I think maybe as a rock writer of another generation you tend to skim a lot of what I write about people who aren’t legends. Even legends get bashed a lot. Heck, I hated McCartney at Coachella, but this was a special show.
5. “Just about every time anyone has toured, ever, in the history of the world, they do songs they haven’t done before.” That’s simply not true. Even a little bit true. Maybe the first night of any tour, but not after that. When’s the last time U2 played something totally new?
However, my broader point was that “Ob-La-Di,” (a song I played in seventh grade band for God sakes!) was being played for the first time in the U.S. The song is 30+ years old and very, very well known. Do you really not find that surprising?
6. You’re absolutely right about him still having stuff to make us tingly, and parceling it out bit by bit. Personally, I find that impressive. Most people cash it all in a lot sooner. Having an “Ob-La-Di” to pop on us? Sorry, that’s pretty cool. Perhaps you think I’m easily impressed, in which case you should read more of what I write.
PHXated responds:
Hey Martin:
Thanks for taking the time to write:
Still.
1) Being from another generation, I know that ledes that are a variant of “I’m the kinda guy who …” are seldom promising. Those that continue into the writer’s personal, uh, parking philosophy? I’m just thinking a guy like you has better things to write about.
2) Fine, let’s talk parking. I can’t believe I’m doing this. The issue is a large nearby concert venue bothering the neighbors. Or, to put it another way, rich folks shelling out hundreds of dollars to see someone who hasn’t recorded a good album in 25 or 35 years trying to save a few bucks on parking their Hummers on side streets and making life even more difficult for the—what was the word you used?—"rednecks" living nearby. The city could put up ugly permanent signs and so forth, or create a neighborhood parking district. Or they could make it easy on everyone, and hire a minimum-wage security guy to deal with the random asshole who still tried to park there.
3) Yeah.
4) Being someone from another generation, I’ve seen Paul McCartney a lot. I’ve even done my own (rather wordy) apologia for him. It’s right here!
It’s fine to like the show. Your angle—that stuff about him not playing certain songs before—was something out of a press release. (I doubt that you personally have been keeping track of the Beatles songs he’s been doing since Wings Over America. )
Being someone from another generation, I’ve seen so so many tours of heritage acts being touted with such tired “angles.” It’s not criticism. It’s not even hype. It’s just … something to fill space with. "This is the first time "Rod Stewart/David Bowie/U2/Neil Diamond/Page & Plant/Pink Floyd has played this particular song/with this particular person/in this particular town/wearing this particular pair of pants.”
5) Please tell me you don’t think that McCartney, U2, the Stones or just about anyone besides Bob Dylan plays a different set list each night. Shows on this scale are not seat-of-the pant affairs. The vast majority of the say two-dozen-song set list is written in stone for each tour. Even the racy optional spots are typically filled by one or two choices. That’s not to say a machine like the E Street band can’t play anything Springsteen wants on a given night. I’m not following McCartney’s career closely any more and maybe I’m wrong … maybe his tours in the 2000’s have been anything-goes affairs. But I doubt it. Paul McCartney isn’t calling audibles on stage.
I don’t know if it’s still true but at least up until recently fans of Bob Dylan, who has probably played more different songs at more different shows than any other major artist by a factor of four or five, had a list of songs he’d never played live.
From a cursory look at this U2 fan page …
… it seems that the band only has one album from which they’ve played all the songs in concert.
Now, off the top of my head (again, I’ll cop to it if I’m wrong) I’ll bet cash money McCartney could have played fifteen or twenty new different Beatles songs in each of his previous tours and still had a few ‘Ob-la-fucking-di’s to play.
In fact, I’ll bet money this would apply just to McCartney-written Beatles songs.
Note that that would mean no repeats of ‘Hey Jude,’ ‘Get Back,’ ‘Sgt. Pepper,’ ‘Yesterday,’ ‘Lady Madonna,’ ‘Fool on the Hill,’ ‘Eleanor Rigby,’ ‘Long and Winding Road,’ ‘Let It Be’ etc. etc. etc. And that there would be almost no room left for classic songs from his own solo oeuvre, much less the hot new tunes from his new album—so you would still be able to be amazed by the inclusion of ‘1985.’
He has dozens and dozens of albums (and in his case an incredible number of non-album hit singles) behind him. He’s toured five times in forty years. Paul McCartney doesn’t take requests from the stage of a stadium with a crew of hundreds trying to get the sound and video right for 60k people. Of course he hasn’t played everything he’s ever recorded live. Jesus.
6. I don’t think you’re easily impressed, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with liking a Paul McCartney show.
But I don’t know, maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with frothing about ‘Ob-la-di’ in the lede. It’s not like you went back to it and beat the issue into the ground in the last three grafs of your review as well.
Oh, wait …
2:46 PM
For world music fans only! The concert line-up at the Musical Instrument Museum
I haven’t seen this posted anywhere, and it’s hard to find on the new museum’s site.
The new theater is a cool 299-seat affair. The museum says tickets will range from $25 to $75; tix for King Sunny Ade, the biggest name here, are $48 and $58.
The venue is booked by Sunni Fass, who is billed as its managing and artistic director.
Tickets for all shows go on sale on Thursday, online at www.themim.org or by phone at 480-478-6001.
Here again is what the theater looks like:
Below is the venue’s first calendar. Commentary is by the museum:
Sunday, April 25, 2010 at 6:30 p.m.
Laurie Lewis with Tom Rozum
Recognized for her ability to incorporate traditional bluegrass instruments and vocals into an
exciting musical style all her own, Grammy award-winning fiddler, singer, and songwriter
Laurie Lewis provides a seamless mix of pure country and classic bluegrass.
Ticket Prices: $32-$36
Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 7:30 p.m.
Nation Beat
Nation Beat fuses music from the southern United States and northeast Brazil, producing an
adventurous and colorful new sound.
Ticket Prices: $25-$30
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 7:30 p.m.
Melody of China
San Francisco’s premier Chinese music ensemble, Melody of China promotes Chinese classical,
folk, and contemporary music, creating synergy between ancient traditions and American youth
culture.
Ticket Prices: $25-$30
Sunday, May 2, 2010 at 2:30 p.m.
Los Texmaniacs
2010 Grammy winners Los Texmaniacs create a unique Tex-Mex groove that blends Texas rock,
conjunto, well-cured blues, and R&B riffs.
Ticket Prices: $32-$36
Friday, May 7, 2010 at 7:30 p.m.
Boulder Acoustic Society
Old-school but never old, the indie-folk band Boulder Acoustic Society is the new wave of
American roots music, a diverse and modern mix of blues, folk, gospel, rock, and world music.
Ticket Prices: $25-$30
Saturday, May 8, 2010 at 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, May 9, 2010 at 2:30 p.m.
Sierra Leone’s Refugee All-Stars
Formed by a group of refugees displaced during the Sierra Leone Civil War, Sierra Leone’s
Refugee All-Stars is a reggae-influenced band with a humanitarian purpose.
Ticket Prices: $40-$45
Wednesday, May 12, 2010 at 7:30 p.m.
Pnina Becher
Israeli-American pianist Pnina Becher, now living in Arizona, has sold out concerts everywhere
from the prestigious Melbourne International Arts Festival to guest performances with orchestras
in the United States, Europe and Israel.
Ticket Prices: $32-$36
Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 7:30 p.m.
King Sunny Adé & His African Beats
A pioneer of modern world music, legendary Nigerian performer King Sunny Adé and his 13-
piece band will present his signature interpretations of Jùjú music rooted in the Yoruba tradition.
Ticket Prices: $48-$58
Saturday, May 15, 2010 at 7:30 p.m.
R. Carlos Nakai
R. Carlos Nakai is the world’s premier Native American flute virtuoso. An adventurous artist of
Navajo-Ute heritage, Nakai explores both traditional and cross-cultural uses of the flute,
including the genres of world, new age, jazz, and classical music.
Ticket Prices: $30-$38
Sunday, May 16, 2010 at 2:30 p.m.
Rani Arbo and daisy mayhem
Rani Arbo and daisy mayhem offer a jubilant mix of traditional, original, and contemporary
sounds. The group’s four-part harmonies meld with fiddle, guitar, bass, and a suitcase drum to
create a fusion of American roots music, contemporary pop, and jazz.
Ticket Prices: $25-$30
Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 7:30 p.m.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010 at 7:30 p.m.
Cimarrón
Cimarrón, a seven-piece ensemble of musicians and dancers led by harpist Carlos Rojas
Hernández, are masters of the joropo llanero tradition, the festive dance music of Colombia’s
cattle-rearing plains.
Ticket Prices: $25-$30
Friday, May 21, 2010 at 7:30 p.m.
William Eaton
William Eaton’s vibrant performances feature new and innovative takes on classical guitar and
showcase his handmade avant-garde stringed instruments.
Ticket Prices: $30-$38
William Eaton will also be presenting a matinee lecture/demonstration in the MIM Music
Theater on May 22nd. Details to be announced.
12:23 PM
How many museums does the East Valley need?
At least three, apparently. These are historical museums, which, the East Valley Tribune says, are undergoing some philosophical changes, though what those changes might be aren’t really spelled out:
Museums of history have suffered more than science or other kinds in recent years as technology and interactive experiences have transformed nearly every aspect of society and made history seem dull.
Museum operators say East Valley history museums will change significantly with more interactive displays and more traveling exhibits. A new museum planned in downtown Chandler signifies what most museums are trying to become. The city is planning a 25,000 square foot building downtown that is seen as the anchor of the arts and culture district. It would feature gathering places for speakers and performances amidst displays that would change frequently so visitors would have a reason to return frequently.
Turns out Mesa and Tempe already have their own local historical museums, though why they exist is a little unclear; even the Phoenix Museum of History at Heritage Square shut down last summer.
9:07 PM
A walk through the new Musical Instrument Museum
“Every time I come up, I see something new,” Alan di Perna is saying. We’re looking at an musical instruments, an accordion- or harmonium-related construction, made of some gorgeously crafted wood.
There is no explanation of what precisely the instrument is yet, because the setting, the city’s new Musical Instrument Museum, is still under construction, and this particular spot—the “Free Reeds” section of the European Gallery—hasn’t yet been finished. But workmen are everywhere and that’s why di Perna—who as a longtime editor and writer at Guitar World, among other places, is an expert in his own right—is seeing new things every day.
The museum is a big affair, a structure of nearly 200,000 square feet on a 20-acre site in North Phoenix, on Tatum just south of the 101. It’s largely funded by Robert Ulrich, the retired longtime CEO of Target, now a Paradise Valley resident. It’s scheduled to open at the end of April.
Besides eight main galleries it boasts a swanky 299-seat theater in which is already booked a fairly sophisticated lineup of world music acts, meaning that the museum is going to be the latest live concert venue in the Valley as well.
Di Perna, who besides being a longtime music journalist is the author of a couple of books on guitars, moved to the Valley 11 years ago and took a position with the new operation recently.
He was kind enough to give PHXated an early walk through.
The structure has two floors, each united by a grand arcing corridor:
On the top floor are the museum’s raison d‘etre: Five spacious galleries, each devoted to a region: North America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
Each gallery has a maze of regional or thematic enxhibits, most with instruments and a video screen. All visitors get headsets with the (somewhat steep) $15 admission; as you near each video screen, the sound automatically rises in your headsets and you can listen to the accompanying video, mostly of performances using the nearby instruments on display.
The North American gallery has a wide variety of elements, from displays devoted to (and funded by) instrument makers like Fender and Martin to various musical genres, everything from klezmer to hip hop.
The museum didn’t want photos of unfinished exhibits taken, but here are a couple of the completed ones I saw. This one, obviously, is the klezmer installation:
And here’s part of the polka one:
Downstairs are a few specialty galleries—one, of course, devoted to the guitar. That was undergoing heavy construction so we couldn’t see all of it, but di Perna pointed out a lyre dating back to the early 1800s hanging near a modern instrument to which it bore more than a passing resemblance, a 1958 Danelectro baritone guitar.
The other is a sort of celebrity room, for which the museum has collected a lot of instruments that were played on some famous recordings: Clapton’s Layla guitar, for example, and the plain brown upright John Lennon recorded “Imagine” on. (This is as opposed to the iconic white grand piano used in the early music video Lennon made with Yoko Ono.)
There’s also the first Steinway ever made, a 1836 piano Henry Steinway$$ made in his kitchen.
The museum’s inclusion philosophy is a broad one. Di Perna quotes one of the museum’s curators: “No high, no low; no art, no pop”—meaning that there are no restrictions along those lines. Everything is included, from indigenous African instruments to, well, to an ’80s-ea set of syn-drums from Belarus.
The museum will also do actual traveling exhibits; the first one, American Sabor, about Latin America’s influence on North American pop culture, will open later this year.
We concluded the tour with a look at the theater:
Details on the museum’s grand opening events on April 24 and 25 are here. Tickets for the first two “grand opening” days—and for any time after that—go on sale Thursday.
1:19 PM
How the new state budget will affect the arts
It’s a pretty grim picture, according to a release from Arizona Citizens Action for the Arts:
A reduction of $217,000 from the Arizona Commission on the Arts general appropriation budget for Fiscal Year 2011 and a smaller reduction in the Commission’s current-year funding. At this level, there remains barely enough to match NEA grants, which requires a state match.
A reduction of $115,000 from the Arts Trust Fund, which historically generates over $1 million each year for arts grants from Arizona Corporation Commission new business filing fees.
A sweep of the remaining funds in Arizona ArtShare, the statewide arts endowment fund, of nearly $10 million.
I just saw an Arizona Capitol Times tweet that said Brewer has signed the bill.
The ACAA web site is here.
8:02 PM
Why are Phoenicians so fat?
The new issue of Phoenix magazine says we’re “one of the fattest cities in the nation,” in a story that isn’t online. It’s a feature article with a lot of information about weight problems and how to overcome them, but the basis for its thesis is limited to a year-old Men’s Fitness survey.
There’s still a lot of grim info:
One in four Phoenicians is uninsured, according to the U.S. Census. Even for the insured, many policies have seemingly backward approaches toward obesity prevention. Insurance policies usually cover treatments for heart attacks, strokes or diabetes that may have been caused by obesity, but pockets clamp shut when paying for preventive servies such as nutritional counseling and education.
[…]
Almost 75 percent of Arizona high school students do not have a physical education class, and almost 60 percent do not receive physical education at all, according to Arizona’s Youth Risk Behavior Study.
The story touches on, but doesn’t explore, racial issues:
One reason for the city’s high rate of obesity is its cultural diversity. Due to a variety of factors such as genetics, cultural norms, lifestyle and socioeconomic conditions, certain ethnic and minority groups—especially the Hispanic, African American, and American INdian populations—tend to be the msot affected. That being said, obesity is happy to claim victims of an ehtnicty and age. The tragic increase of childhoo obesity is a case in point.
7:40 PM
PHXations—Wednesday, March 17
Coming up on Saturday: The Downtown Phoenix Festival of the Arts at Heritage Square. Fifteen dollars ($10 in advance) gets you something called a “painting duel” amongst Kyle Jordre, Ken Peloke, Taylor Swick, and Gabe Sandoval; some fashion shows; a flamenco dance performance by Lena and Chris Jacome; various bands; a film festival of some sort; and more.
It runs from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. at Heritage Square, which is on East Monroe between 6th and 7th streets. The presenters are Artlink (which oversees First Friday and Art Detour), the Volunteer Legal Assistance for Artists, First Fridays in Heritage Square, and the Rosson House Museum. There’s a blog on the fest here, but it doesn’t have much more information.
10:32 PM
The NYT on Phoenix's downtown commercial real estate market. Prognosis: Dim
Deep in the NYT biz section today is a bleak look at Phoenix’s downtown real estate market?:
Commercial brokers blame a confluence of factors for the worst downturn in memory: rampant overbuilding, a national economic crisis, spiking unemployment and a near halt in population growth. The result is visible all over the city in the form of empty storefronts and “for lease” signs affixed to office buildings.
The worst-off of these projects were built in marginal locations on the outskirts of the metropolitan area, and stand completely empty months and even years after completion.
Mentioned specifically is the Hotel Monroe …:
Started in 2006, its plans were extravagant even by the bloated standards of the bubble era. The 144-room boutique hotel was to be housed in a rehabilitated 12-story Art Deco office building from the 1930s and would include opulent “Rock Star” suites, a five-star restaurant, a rooftop nightclub and 24-hour room service.
Construction began in 2007 but ground to a halt a year later when the project’s banker, Mortgages Ltd. — for a short time, Arizona’s largest private lender — cut off financing, en route to its own bankruptcy. The hotel remains unfinished, with dark windows and a desolate mien; Grace Communities, its developer, was recently cited by the City of Phoenix for code violations including graffiti on exterior walls and trash and debris around the premises.
When or how the hotel will be finished is uncertain, as the building is in foreclosure and headed to a trustee’s sale in April. There, 13 investors will try to recoup $76.5 million in loans, though experts say the building is unlikely to fetch anywhere near that amount.
… and the Viad Corporate Center:
…a 24-story, 478,000-square-foot high-rise in midtown Phoenix, which was built in 1991 and bought for an estimated $105 million in 2006. Earlier this month, Bank of America filed a motion in court to appoint a receiver for the property, citing the failure of the building’s owner to stay current on a $65 million loan.
Bank of America’s move to foreclose on the tower is one prominent sign that lenders are losing patience with large commercial borrowers and are stepping up efforts to resolve problem loans behind big properties. Commercial mortgages in Phoenix are souring at their highest rate in years: according to Foresight Analytics, a banking analysis firm, 5.3 percent of commercial mortgages in the metro area were delinquent in the fourth quarter of 2009, up from 2.3 percent at the same period in 2008.
8:02 PM
The University of Phoenix makes another cameo in the NYT today
The long, front-page story is about the proliferation of for-profit trade schools. Many of them recruit students agressively with rosy promises of future employment — and leave them with crippling debt from student loans. At the same time, they get a huge portion of their income from the federal government.
If that reminds you of the University of Phoenix, it’s because that’s how it operates, too. From the Times:
The Apollo Group — which owns the for-profit University of Phoenix — derived 86 percent of its revenue from federal student aid last fiscal year […]. Two years earlier, it was 69 percent.
Emphasis added. The University of Phoenix has been the subject of a couple of exposés in the Times in the past. The company agreed to a settlement including attorney’s fees of nearly $80 million under a false claims act suit last year — on top of a total of more than $15 million in fines levied by the U.S. Department of Education in the last ten years.
A major Times story on the school’s scuzzy practices is here.
Reason, the libertarian magazine, did a more favorable look at the school’s operations in 2008. The article was written before the nation’s economic meltdown later that year; the writer’s aperçu that the U of P offers “offers the educational equivalent of a subprime mortgage” would be amusing if it weren’t so tragic. It’s available here.
7:51 PM
MPAC shutting down
The group tried to put the best face on Arizona’s image in an attempt to lure modern businesses to the state. A related post on the group’s messaging here. Here’s the press release:
NEWS RELEASE
For Immediate Release: Monday, March 8, 2010, 9 a.m. MST
[…]
MPAC board votes to ‘wind down’ organization in flagging economy
Foundations plan to redirect grant funds to arts and culture organizations
PHOENIX—Confronted with difficult economic times, for itself and the arts and culture organizations it was formed to support, the Metro Phoenix Partnership for Arts and Culture (MPAC) board of directors has voted to cease the nonprofit organization’s staffing and programmatic operations. MPAC will support the plan of its major funders to use remaining grants funds to directly assist arts and culture organizations.
For five years, MPAC has led the state in understanding the vital connection between the creative community and economic development. Formed in 2004 by grants from the Flinn Foundation and Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust, MPAC has worked to promote a vibrant creative community in Maricopa County and harness arts and culture as an economic driver. The foundations supported the nonprofit organization with the goal of it achieving self-sufficiency by the conclusion of the grants, scheduled for early 2011.
The recession challenged MPAC’s economic viability and fundraising efforts, as it has done to arts and culture organizations across the nation. It ultimately thwarted plans to place a revenue-generating initiative for arts and culture on the statewide ballot—a strategy that has been successful in other major metropolitan areas during better economic times.
“Rather than continue to consume valuable grant monies, the board made the decision to wind down the organization and support the foundations’ plans to use the remaining grant funds to support arts and culture organizations directly,” said Sandra Werthman, who chairs the MPAC board of directors.
“MPAC has made substantial progress in setting the framework for arts and culture to thrive from an economic perspective in the Phoenix area,” said Myra Millinger, MPAC president and CEO. “We just could not ignore the fiscal realities that jeopardize MPAC’s long-term existence.”
The Flinn Foundation and Piper Trust have agreed to work together in fashioning a one-time arts and culture initiative with the remaining grant funds. Plans will be announced once program details are decided in upcoming weeks.
“Like many businesses in our state, MPAC and its important work has been undermined by the perfect economic storm,” said Judy Mohraz, president and CEO of the Piper Trust. “We have worked with MPAC and have agreed that during these recessionary times, the remaining grant funds should be directed to arts and cultural organizations that are struggling to survive.”
Jack Jewett, Flinn Foundation president and CEO, agreed that redirecting the funds is an act of responsible stewardship and praised the MPAC board for its sacrificial decision. “In better economic times, MPAC would thrive and we believe would expand its mission to help to engineer a more prominent role for arts and culture in the local economy.”
MPAC was launched at the recommendation of the Maricopa Regional Arts and Culture Task Force, a panel of leaders from the corporate, arts, public, educational, and philanthropic sectors that in 2004 issued a blueprint for positioning arts and culture as a vital component of the region’s economic growth.
MPAC has had three primary goals: to position the creative sector as an integral component of the regional economy; to change perceptions of the region’s creative vitality by leveraging its creative assets; and to increase funding for arts and culture.
The final goal proved to be formidable. MPAC spun off an organization to launch a statewide ballot-initiative campaign to increase the state sales tax by one-tenth of a percent, generating up to $100 million annually for arts and culture. While initial polling showed strong voter support for the tax, the most recent polls reflected the recession impact on voters as support slipped significantly. As a result, the group decided to postpone initiative plans until 2012.
MPAC officials are exploring options with other organizations to continue development and execution of existing programs, such as CALA (Celebración Artistica de las Américas), which encourages cultural understanding between people of the Americas through the arts, and Metro Phoenix DNA, a branding initiative to elevate the region’s cultural assets and identity.
About MPAC (www.mpacarts.org): MPAC is a non-profit, regional organization founded in 2004 based on the conviction that a vibrant and sustainable creative sector is fundamental to the region’s ability to compete for talent and industry in a highly competitive global marketplace.
About Flinn (www.flinn.org): The Flinn Foundation is a Phoenix-based, private, nonprofit philanthropic endowment established by Dr. and Mrs. Robert S. Flinn in 1965 with the mission of improving the quality of life in Arizona. The nonprofit philanthropy supports the advancement of Arizona’s bioscience sector, the Flinn Scholars Program, and MPAC.
About Piper (www.pipertrust.org ): The Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust is a private independent foundation dedicated to honoring Virginia Galvin Piper’s philanthropic commitment to changing lives and strengthening community in Maricopa County. By investing in nonprofits and encouraging strategic planning for the future, Piper Trust strives to make Greater Phoenix a stronger, more nurturing and vibrant community. Piper Trust focuses on healthcare and medical research, children, older adults, arts and culture, education and religious organizations.
###
4:29 PM
Tempe: Ve vant das Googlefiber!
Tempe, at least, is aware of the potential of widespread ultrahighspeed fiber optic cable in town. Last month, the WSJ reported that Google was looking for a town to use as a test case to build out internet service with gigabyte-per-second download speed, or roughly 100 times faster than most folks currently have.
The company’s created a March 26 deadline for interested towns to apply.
Tempe’s idea, not a bad one, is to ask people to submit video ideas of what the town could do with such a service:
Tempe wants that fiber. We want it for our 175,000 residents, for our 175,000 workers, for our 4 million visitors who travel here annually for fun and business and for our 200,000 college students. Why do we want it? Tempe, Arizona is known for innovation. We think that the combined brain power of all these people, with this fiber, can change the world. We’ve already done so much.
You can help convince Google that Tempe is the best place to showcase their fiber. Tell us how you can change the world, or at least your corner of it, if you had access to the kind of speed that Google fiber promises.
That’s the spirit. PHXated would move to Tempe overnight if it pulled that off. But if it wants it it’s going to have to deal with Topeka first.
4:41 AM
PHXations—Thursday, March 4
Artist Claudio Dicochea’s long-awaited opening is tonight at Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale from 7 to 9. In previous work Dicochea puts a genre of formal Spanish portrait painting through a series of conceptual rethinkings. A set of six of his paintings were to me the highlight of the Phoenix Art Museum’s Locals Only show last year.
Here’s Hearsight’s Scott Andrews on his work:
His painting today continues in a hybrid mode, with Disney characters and Norteño balladeers cohabiting in a Pop-Abstract world of high-low art. Drawing and cartoon transfers are placed on the sheet like collectible toys on a shelf, but don’t confuse these tableaux with facile repetition. Encoded within the play of all- too-familiar stereotypes and candy colors are not only the artist’s childhood memories but a meditation on art’s culpability in the construction of racial classification, a process that ran in tandem with the mixing of peoples after 1492.
A selection of Dicochea’s work, and that of his wife, Adriana Gallega, can be seen here. Details on the show and how to get to it here.
9:53 PM
DMX performing for a church—what could possibly go wrong?
New Times has a story up saying that rapper DMX, the creepy serial animal abuser and petty crook, is going to be doing a gospel show to raise money for a Glendale Church. The celeb gossip site TMZ broke the story.
Both stories say he’s appearing at the church, but the poster says it’s actually at a Glendale high school.
It’s not clear to me that the words “DMZ,” “church” and “public high school” should be appearing in the same sentence:
• In 2007, the county raided his house and found a dozen abused dogs, many of them starving—and the bodies of three more buried in the yard.
• Sheriffs also found marijuana “packaged for sale” and other drug paraphernalia, local papers said.
• A year later, sheriffs raided the house again to serve an arrest warrant — and found five new pit bull pups.
• On the petty crook level, he ran up $3000 in traffic fines in Cave Creek and never bothered to show up in court.
• He was also charged with “theft of services” from the local Mayo Clinic. According to the Republic, which based the story on a search warrant police executed, police say he went to the hospital and was diagnosed with pneumonia, but gave a false name and skipped out on the bill.
• Stealing from the Mayo Clinic. Nice!
• He’s also been sued by American Express for non-payment of nearly $100,000 in bills.
• And I’m forgetting something …
• Oh, yeah: He already has been convicted once on thirteen counts of abusing animals — which is why he left New Jersey for Arizona in the first place.
From the Republic:
In the New Jersey case, police found 13 pit bull puppies held in cages or crates in the basement and garage of the rapper’s Teaneck, N.J. home.
“They were growing into their cages,” said Ray Koski , a former special prosecutor who represented the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which brought the charges.
The confinement deformed the puppies, Koski said, adding that a veterinarian had to cut them out of their cages.
“They looked like they had grill marks on them,” Koski said. Four survived. The others either died or were euthanized, Koski said. Published reports said the house reeked of dog urine and feces and was infested with flies, when police arrived.
1:58 PM
A new grocery store downtown, presumably an AJ's
UPDATE: PHXated was 100 percent wrong about the grocery store downtown; it’s not an AJ’s, but rather an outpost of a Northern California operation called Oakville Grocery.
Release below:
For Immediate Release:
February 22, 2010
CITYSCAPE GROCERY STORE BACK ON TRACKOakville Grocery Co. to become city’s signature downtown grocery
PHOENIX – The long awaited grocery store for downtown Phoenix is back on track. CityScape project developer, RED Development, announced today that the operator of the Oakville Grocery in Scottsdale has signed a lease and will move into space at the corner of Jefferson and Central Avenue in September of 2010. Oakville replaces AJ’s Fine Foods, whose plans to be at the project were derailed by bankruptcy court proceeding involving Bashas’ Supermarkets Inc.
“Having a grocery store component in CityScape has always been a top priority,” said Mike Ebert, managing partner for RED Development. “Oakville is a first-rate grocery store that provides the city with an exciting new resource that fills a fundamental need for people who live and work downtown. Oakville is a strong addition to our project and we are very happy to have them. It’s time for a downtown grocery and we think people are going to be just as excited as we are when they see what Oakville is all about.”
Oakville, which originated in California’s Napa Valley, will occupy space CityScape on the western-most block of the project as a part of the 750,000 square feet being developed in Phase I. The store will open this September.“We are pretty selective about where we go” said Janell Freeman of Oakville. “CityScape is bringing new life to downtown Phoenix and we are thrilled to be a part of it. The project has world-class design and amenities and it is located at the center of downtown in the nation’s fifth-largest city. It’s the kind of place we want to be and we will do our part to make CityScape a destination for downtown and the center of the neighborhood for people who live and work in downtown Phoenix.”
Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon complimented CityScape’s team for its “patient tenacity” in securing an urban grocery.
“It’s no secret that a 24/7 lifestyle in downtown Phoenix requires basic amenities like a grocery store,” said Mayor Gordon. “This is a tremendous accomplishment and what makes it even more exciting is the high quality product that Oakville will bring to the city. Everyone who lives, works, or visits downtown will benefit.”
CityScape is a 1.8 million square foot mixed use urban project located at the very center of Downtown Phoenix, between Washington and Jefferson from 2nd Street to 1st Avenue. In its first phase, opening on two blocks this Spring. CityScape will include more than 620,000 square feet of Class A office, approximately 180,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space and nearly 2,700 below-grade parking spaces.
- # #
About RED Development, LLC
RED Development, formed in 1995, develops, leases, manages and owns real estate developments in rapidly growing communities throughout the Midwestand Southwest. RED has 30 centers open, in development, or under construction, totaling nearly 19 million square feet. Within the industry, RED has earned a reputation for delivering as promised and creating strong relationships with its tenants, communities and business partners. RED has nearly 200 employees and is co-headquartered in Scottsdale, Ariz., and Kansas City, Mo.To learn more, visit www.reddevelpment.com.
About Oakville
For over 120 years the original Oakville Grocery has been the “little country store” in the heart of Napa Valley, attracting visitors from near and far with its special charm. The Phoenix store will feature wonderful, handmade local products from our neighbors in Arizona as well as in Napa and Sonoma. Along with delicious made-to-order sandwiches, gourmet cheeses and charcuterie, we offer a wide array of prepared foods for your party or picnic needs. You will also find our shelves lined with specialty items which include local olive oils and vinegars, unique mustards, marinades and handmade preserves. To learn more, visit us at: http://www.oakvillegroceryarizona.com
Mayor Gordon is going to be at a noon press conference today to announce a grocery store in the big CityScape development at Central and Washington. I assume its a*n AJ’s:
MEDIA ADVISORY
[…]
WHAT: News conference to announce opening of new grocery store at CityScapeRepresentatives from CityScape and RED Development will join Mayor Phil Gordon to announce a new and much anticipated tenant that will become the city’s signature downtown grocery. It will move into the space at the southeast corner of Patriot’s Square block.
WHO: Mayor Phil Gordon
Mike Ebert, Managing Partner, RED Development
WHEN: 12 p.m. Monday, Feb. 22
WHERE: CityScape – Office Tower, third floor, Central Avenue and Washington Street
30About RED Development, LLC
RED Development, formed in 1995, develops leases, manages and owns real estate developments in rapidly growing communities throughout the Midwest and Southwest. RED has 30 centers open, in development, or under construction, totaling nearly 19 million square feet. Within the industry, RED has earned a reputation for delivering as promised and creating strong relationships with its tenants, communities and business partners. RED has nearly 200 employees and is co-headquartered in Scottsdale, Ariz., and Kansas City, Mo. To learn more, visit www.reddevelpment.com. [sic: it’s actually www.reddevelopment.com]
5:23 PM
Dan Harkins getting a "visionary award" at Phoenix Film Fest in April
From the Phoenix Film Festival:
DAN HARKINS TO RECEIVE VISIONARY AWARD AT OPENING NIGHT OF 2010 PHOENIX FILM FESTIVAL
PHOENIX (April 8, 2010) – When the Phoenix Film Festival begins its Tenth Anniversary event on April 8, 2010 with an Opening Night Gala, Dan Harkins will be on hand to accept the Festival’s first ever Visionary Award. This award, which will be presented annually, will be given to individuals who provide leadership and a commitment to their industry and to the community.
According to Festival Director Chris Lamont, Dan Harkins, owner of Harkins Theatres, seems the obvious choice to be the first recipient of the Visionary Award. “One of the great champions of independent film, Dan Harkins exemplifies the importance of giving people a chance to experience the cultural wonder that is motion pictures,” he said. In addition to receiving this award, The Phoenix Film Festival has worked with Dan Harkins to create the Dan Harkins Breakthrough Filmmaker Award. Dan Harkins himself will present this award at the Opening Night Gala to a director whose film is screening in the 2010 Phoenix Film Festival.
The Phoenix Film Festival, which will be celebrating its tenth anniversary, takes place from April 8-April 15, 2010, at Harkins Scottsdale 101 Theaters located at 7000 E. Mayo Blvd. Phoenix, AZ 85054.
If you are a movie lover, this is an event that shouldn’t be missed. Tickets and passes are on sale now and available through the Phoenix Film Festival Website www.phoenixfilmfestival.com. Tickets may also be purchased in person at the Phoenix Film Festival office at 1700 N. 7th Ave. #250 in Phoenix. Tickets will also be available the day of the event at the Phoenix Film Festival Welcome Center next to the Harkins Scottsdale 101 Theater located at 7000 E. Mayo Blvd. Phoenix, AZ 85054. Tickets range in price from $10 for a single screening to $350 for the Platinum Pass. For more information call 602-955-6444 or go to www.phoenixfilmfestival.com.
###
6:12 PM
An interesting photography-about-Warhol show in Tucson
Scott Andrews at Hearsight has a preview of a large upcoming photography show in Tucson featuring a wide variety of shots of Warhol and his world by a lot of different people. The potential for a voyeuristic hall of mirrors is lost on neither Andrews nor the organizer.
The curator, Eric Kroll, tells a story of one photo shoot at which his daughter was playing nearby. Warhol began taking pitures of her, and then …:
As was the norm for Warhol, a crowd had gathered around rows deep, and people in the crowd pulled out their own cameras, too. Soon one row of paparazzi was taking pictures of Andy taking pictures, and behind them the next row was taking pictures of people taking pictures of Andy taking pictures, and the next row took pictures of people taking pictures of people taking pictures of Andy taking pictures…
The show, titled “Warhol: From Dylan to Duchamp,” is up from Feb. 27 to April 11. Details here.
11:13 PM
Three suggestions for Third Friday
1) The ASU Art Museum spring reception notes the opening of three exhibits: “Altered States: Paintings by Gordon Cheung”;“Wanxin Zhang: A Ten Year Survey”; and “Forged Power: Ferran Mendoza, Alvaro Sau and William Wylie.” It starts at seven and it’s free. Details here.
2) SMOCA has a spring reception as well, centering around “Rewind Remix Replay: Design, Music & Everyday Experience,” an industrial design show of sound technology devices, like turntables and boomboxes. There’s also “Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaborations.” There are gallery talks on the shows at 7:30 and 8 p.m., respectively. The whole event runs from 7 to 9 p.m., with an early 6 p.m. reception for members.
3) At the Icehouse, Adria Pecora’s “Exchanges,” two installations, each an aetherial sculpture, dramatically lit, that hangs in one of the gallery’s cavernous rooms. It’s open from 7:30 to 9 p.m. tis evening. Details here.
3:24 AM
Yelp's coming to town—big time!
The online city guide Yelp is moving into the Valley, saying it will be employing as many as 200 people, the PBJ reports:
The center will employ sales agents and account managers.
CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said the Scottsdale office will be Yelp’s third to go along with its San Francisco base and an office in Manhattan.
The Phoenix Yelp site is here.
Yelp has its uses, and it also has its detractors: A story from last year from the East Bay Express, an alternative weekly in Berkeley, detailed some of the outfit’s dicey leveraging of its reviews and its advertising. It began this way:
The phone calls came almost daily. It started to get creepy.
“Hi, this is Mike from Yelp,” the voice would say. “You’ve had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You’ve had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those.”
The story had a half-dozen local businesspeople testifying to calls like that—and the unconfirmable but nagging sense that negative reviews of their places of business cropped up high on their Yelp page just before the sales folks started calling.
The Express story got criticized by Yelp, mostly for the fact that all of the people quoted in it didn’t want their names used.
The reporter, Kathleen Richards, defended the practice, noting that the businesspeople understandably didn’t want to get on Yelp’s bad side.
… but just to make the point, she turned around and wrote an even longer piece, this one with a slew of on-the-record complaints about the same practices or worse. That story’s here.
6:36 PM
Movies in AZ generate $38 million in 2009
The PBJ reports that Arizona made $38 million from in-state moviemaking last year, per the state’s film office:
Overall in 2009, the film industry in Phoenix employed 4,795 technicians and actors who worked on 362 projects accounting for 1,290 shooting days and 2,080 hotel nights, the film office reported.
“Maneater,” which aired last May, employed hundreds of local crew members and actors during its three-month shooting schedule. Although the story was set in Los Angeles, producers selected Phoenix because of the visual similarities LA and the Motion Picture Tax Incentive Program administered by the Arizona Department of Commerce, according to the Phoenix Film Office.
Maneater was a Lifetime movie. It sounds like quite a tale:
Beautiful, fashionable and fun, Clarissa Alpert (Sarah Chalke) is a shallow socialite whose speed dial is a veritable Rolodex of Hollywood power players. Staring her 32nd birthday directly in the eyes — though she will admit only to being 28 — the spoiled daddy’s girl is in a panic because she is still single. Clarissa, though, always gets what she wants — even if he’s Aaron Mason (Philip Winchester), the hottest new producer in town. With the help of her family and friends, Clarissa sets into motion an elaborate plan to lasso the dashing filmmaker.
Other prestige projects included “Supernanny,” “America’s Most Wanted,” and “Wife Swap.”
2:19 PM
Google ultrahighspeed internets! Something Phoenix should be bidding on
Breaking news, from the Wall Street Journal:
Google Inc. plans to build and test broadband networks than could deliver speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans use.
[…]
The Internet giant, which plans to offer the service to at least 50,000 customers and potentially up to 500,000, said it aims to foster the development of new “killer apps” as well as experiment with new ways to deploy fiber networks.
Key graf:
The company is collecting responses from interested communities until March 26 and will reveal the ones it has selected later this year.
5:36 PM
SMOCA shakeup!
One of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s senior curators, Claire Schneider, has been laid off. It’s a fairly significant loss for the museum, brought on by the continuing budget cuts that have already severely lowered the organization’s exhibition fund.
Sources in the museum say its new director, Tim Rodgers, was presented with the fait accompli of having to lose a senior position in the organization when he took the job late last year. (Director is the museum’s top position; Rodgers came from the Santa Fe Museum of Art.)
Schneider was for ten years a curator at the Albright-Knox, a contemporary art museum in Buffalo. She was brought to SMOCA in 2008 by longtime director Susan Krane, who a few months later left for San Jose. The museum had been without a director for a year, ending with the appointment of Rodgers in November.
Schneider, like many museum leaders, had been frustrated with the ever-contracting attention museums were getting from the mainstream press. She’d lately organized a periodic meeting between local curators and local writers and editors, PHXated among them, to discuss how local art institutions should attack that problem head on.
An Arizona Republic story on Schneider’s arrival in town here.
Her departure comes at a time of no little chaos in the Scottsdale city arts infrastructure of which SMOCA is a part. The museum, the performing arts center and a public art organization all exist under the umbrella of the city’s cultural council. The cultural center’s artistic director left after being on the job less than a year last month; a few weeks later, four of the cultural council’s board of trustees resigned en masse.
11:54 PM
What's the worst hotel in Phoenix?
A story by the NYT’s business traveler columnist, Joe Sharkey, today, got me thinking. It was about TripAdvisor.com’s lists of the world’s dirtiest hotels.
The NYT story is here. The list of dirtiest U.S. hotels is here.
I checked to make sure Phoenix didn’t have an entry, which it doesn’t.
But it did get me curious. Poking around on the TripAdvisor site, I actually couldn’t find the worst of the worst in Phoenix. The lowest ranking I could pull up was a list that began with “157 out of 175 hotels in Phoenix,” but then went up in ranking [i.e., in quality] from there. (It could be the site requires a minimum number of reviews.)
The worst hotels in town—according to the site’s users—are:
The Ramada Limited Airport North (“I see that many of these reviews are a few years old. Let me advise – this hotel is still awful.”)
Extended StayAmerica Phoenix Deer Valley (“If you’re looking for a hotel with a warm, friendly atmosphere, do not stay here.”).
and …
Traveler’s Inn on Latham on the west side (“On walking into my ‘non-smoking’ room, I was nearly blown back by the stink of smoke.”)
It should be noted that the prices on these places are correspondingly low, and that the ratings are the product in one case of as few as a half-dozen reviews. (I took out one of the lowest ones because the reviews were several years old.)
There were few venues downtown. One I noticed, the Artisan Hotel, but it had been taken over by an established chain. Embarrassingly, the San Carlos comes in at no. 114. Some of the reviews aren’t nice:
“The furniture looked like early pioneer meets the ’70’s and the bathroom was more than hideous”
“This place should be condemned!”
“The shower’s water pressure was equivalent to holding a small bottle of water and gently pouring it onto your head”
6:22 PM
The Pat Tillman movie
Variety says the Weinstein brothers have bought the distribution rights at Sundance to The Tillman Story, a documentary on the life, death and aftermath of the former Cardinals quarterback safety:
Distrib’s [sic] snagged North American, U.K., Australia and New Zealand rights on docu “The Tillman Story,” the military death exposé about NFL player Pat Tillman, helmed by Amir Bar-Lev and written by Mark Monroe (“The Cove”). “Tillman” is produced by John Battsek of Passion Pictures.
The Weinstein Company, run by the brothers Bob and Harvey, is the organization the pair formed after leaving Miramax behind at Disney. The story says it will hit theaters later this year.
Says IndieWire:
“What they said happened, didn’t happen,” Pat Tillman’s mother, Mary, says early on in “The Tillman Story,” “They made up a story, so you have to set the record straight.”
Mystery surrounded the passing of Tillman after he was killed in Afghanistan in 2004, sparking a Congressional investigation into the cause of the pro football player’s death. He was awarded the U.S. military’s Silver Star for dying in the line of enemy fire, but facts later revealed that he was killed by friendly fire. The film takes a broader look at Tillman’s life and the often conflicting accounts of his death, including a tug-of-war between the U.S. military and his own family as the facts surrounding the incident are revealed.
11:10 PM
A George Kuchar documentary's Phoenix premiere ...
… is screening at ASU West on Saturday. Kuchar has been an underground filmmaker for nearly 40 years from his perch at the SF Art Institute; It Came From Kuchar is a profile of the director and his twin brother, a sometime collaborator, by director Jennifer Kroot.
Here’s a bit of Variety’s review of it:
“It Came From Kuchar” gleefully piles on everything anyone could want in a docu on the fabulous Kuchar brothers, whose deliriously campy zero-budget mellers — with titles like “Hold Me While I’m Naked” or “Sins of the Fleshapoids” — enlivened many otherwise somber evenings of ‘60s underground cinema. Critics and aficionados seek to distill the essence of the twins’ work, while clips from the films in question unspool in a fever dream of compelling non sequiturs. Meanwhile, George and Mike Kuchar themselves hold forth unstoppably. A must-see for filmmakers of all persuasions …
(A “meller” is a melodrama in Varietyspeak.)
No Festival Required, the local independent film group, has Kuchar himself on hand after, to screen some of his work and answer questions.
And it’s free!
The “George Kuchar Film Symposium” is on Saturday February 6, 2010, at 5 p.m. in the Kiva Lecture Room of the Sands Building at ASU West.
ASU West is south of Thunderbird and west of 43rd Ave. A campus map is here. The Sands building is in the middle of the campus.
Details from NFR here.
4:49 AM
More on the Marquee-Hoodlums ticket-fee war
The Republic and the New Times are catching up on the stand Tempe’s Hoodlums record store has taken against Lucky Man Productions, which operates the Marquee rock club. The store, which collected a reasonable $1 for each ticket it sold for Marquee shows, balked when Lucky Man tried to add on an additional $3.
The store’s blistering original statement post here. PHXated’s December story on it here.
The Republic story is here, with a consistent statement from Hoodlum’s co-owner Steve Wiley:
Wiley […] stresses he’s not on an anti-Marquee crusade.
“It’s not a personal thing,” he says. “We’ve had a great relationship with those guys at the Marquee for many years. I’m not against service fees. We charge a one-dollar service fee for carrying the tickets at our store, and everyone is fine with that. But if the Marquee or whoever needs to charge $28 in order to make ends meet, then I’m a businessperson, I don’t have a problem with that. Just make it $28 dollars. But don’t put $25 on the tickets and the Web site and then expect me to collect an extra $3 for you.”
New Times blog post on the issue by Martin Cizmar is here. Besides being late and misinformed, it’s about a tenth as good as the Republic story, which is a little embarrassing.
PHXated’s previous posts on the outlandish ticket fees charged by the Marquee are here.
8:00 PM
Where the jobs aren't
A front-page story in the Republic today takes one paragraph from a depressing account of the state’s jobs prospects from yesterday and turns it into an even-more-depressing account.
A very long piece in yesterday’s Republic detailed why Arizona’s economy is so anemic. A long part of the article explored how North Carolina built its Durham-Raleigh-Chapel Hill research triangle:
Once nothing more than an idea envisioned for empty acreage in one of the poorest areas of the Southeast, the “science park” is now an economic-development engine. It has churned out innovations such as Astroturf, bar-code technology and 3-D ultrasounds and employs tens of thousands of workers.
This month the park turns 51.
In other words, that state began to lay a foundation for its future a half-decade ago. Arizona?
A current flash point is the state Department of Commerce. The department’s mission is to recruit businesses and jobs and to link the state, businesses and the economic-development community around the state.
But experts who work with the department say it has not had strong legislative support, is understaffed, is too political and lacks sufficient business advisers. It has had seven directors in the past decade. Its current budget is about $1.86 million. By comparison, the current budget of North Carolina’s Department of Commerce is $45 million.
The story today goes into more depth on the collapse of the department. Quote from a Yuma development director:
“That’s why the state has only done well in economic growth periods,” she said. “We don’t attract industries that have that base, longevity, long-stay. You can’t build an economy on construction, and that’s pretty much what our legislators backed us into because there’s never been any support for economic development.”
3:33 PM
Sedona Film Fest sched is out
Full schedule here, as a PDF.
The closing night films haven’t been released yet, but should be early this week.
The festival boasts some 150 screenings over seven days in eight screening rooms, most of them at the Sedona Harkins. It runs from Feb. 21 to Feb. 28.
Here’s some other tidbits from the fest:
• Appearances by Oscar-winning documentary director Michael Moore and screening of three of his films;
• Turner Classic Movies’ host Robert Osborne returns with three classic films: “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938) with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland; “A Place in the Sun” (1951) with Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters; and “Leave Her to Heaven” (1945) with Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde and Vincent Price.
• Aiden Quinn’s “A Shine of Rainbows” as the opening-night film.
• New films by Susan Sarandon and Pierce Brosnan (“The Greatest”) and Barry Levinson (“PolliWood”).
• “Another Harvest Moon,” featuring an all-star cast of Ernest Borgnine, Richard Schiff, Piper Laurie, Doris Roberts, Cybill Shepherd and Anne Meara.
• “Waking Sleeping Beauty,” a documentary about the inner workings and conflicts at Disney during the Michael Eisner years with an appearance in Sedona by director/producer Don Hahn.
While the fest says The Greatest is “by” Brosnan and Saradon, they just appear in it. The film is a reputed heart-tugger about the death of the couple’s son; it played at Sundance last year but apparently hasn’t yet had an American release. The Levinson film, which is called PoliWood, not Polliwood, is a documentary about celebs and the 2008 presidential campaign.
2:06 AM
What are the most active arts venues in town?
The PBJ has a list this week of the area’s arts centers, ranked by the number of people who walk through their doors annually. Here’s the top five:
1) Symphony Hall, with 350,000 attendees at 250 performances
2) Mesa Arts Center, with 300,000 attendees at more than 1000 events. (The venue has four theaters and other event spaces.)
3) US Airways Center: 300,000 attendees. (No events total is given.)
4) Chandler Center for the Arts: 286,000 attendees at 250 events
5) Grady Gammage Auditorium: 284,000 at 43 events
Cricket (260,000) and the Dodge (200,000) are right behind. A note at the bottom says that Jobing.com Arena didn’t participate in the survey, which seems a bit churlish. Unmentioned is the Celebrity Theatre.
11:58 PM
A Scottsdale handcuff manufacturer is getting some naughty ideas
The Phoenix Business Journal reports that a new company, Scottsdale Inventions, is marketing a next-generation set of handcuffs: One that wou;d allow cops to give prisoners a shock if they had to. (You can read part of the story here.
The paper says the company thinks the idea might work in the bedroom, too:
The idea for a consumer version of the cuffs came from Colone getting swamped with ads for adult-oriented products during Web searches. He said it dawned on him that the proliferation of those ads might lead the company to another product — one that would allow consumers to play out their own version of “good cop, bad cop” behind closed doors.
The company plans to make and market a less powerful product, dubbed Funcuffs, to consumers, keeping stock on hand to ship through distributors or sell online.
11:29 PM
What's up with Hollywood Video?
I had an account at Hollywood Video for emergencies, at least until they started robocalling me at home to try to get me to enroll in a monthly subscription program.
The parent company, which calls itself Movie Gallery, had already been in bankruptcy once, so I wasn’t surprised to see various stores around town closing, though many remain open. Now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that it’s probably going back into bankruptcy, possibly next week:
As part of the restructuring, Movie Gallery could attempt to close about two-thirds of its outlets—about 1,800 stores, these people said. That could create a significant number of layoffs, given the company currently employs 21,000.
In an initial wave, Movie Gallery plans to shutter just over 800 stores, these people said, and then make plans for further closures.
The story notes that Netflix, vending machines like Redbox, and even iTunes is eating into the video-rental business—but read on and you can see the real culprit:
Movie Gallery’s troubles began after it took on too much debt to acquire Hollywood Entertainment Corp. in 2005 for more than $800 million. The company, which no longer reports financial results, has aggressively tried to cut costs, closing about 500 stores last year. It carries about $600 million in debt today.
11:15 PM
PHXations—Saturday, January 30
For an appearance by Anvil, the heavy metal band, at the Marquee Tuesday, the club will screen the documentary Anvil: The Story of Anvil before the show. Details here.
Hard to recommend the show, however—it’s another one of those Marquee service-fee-ripoff specials where a $19 advertised ticket magicks its way up to $27.75 after three separate exorbitant service fees—a 46 percent tariff.
Matthew Moore has an installation at Sundance. It’s set in a Park City grocery store, and consists of time-lapse films of vegetables growing—with free food besides. Details from the festival here.
Moore is a sculptor, filmmaker and I guess you’d call it conceptual artist, who uses his farm west of Phoenix, now in its fourth generation of family ownership, as a fulcrum for his interests.
PHXated liked this Moore apercu: “Instead of pointing fingers I started pointing thumbs, and start to dissect how we distribute food.” His website is here.
8:18 PM
PHXations—Wednesday, January 27
How the Arizona Republic sucks, no. 434 in a series:
In the Northeast Phoenix zoned section, a story—stretched out, astonishingly, over two pages—about a Starbucks inside the Camelback Inn. A hotel that sells coffee. Stop the presses. It’s not fair to ridicule the reporter who wrote the thing. The real culprit is the craven editor who assigned it, and the other who published it.
AT&T says it’s upgrading its 3G network in Phoenix, PV, and Carefree and Cave Creek, Beth Duckett of the the Republic reports. The story details the new areas, one of which covers a major chunk of downtown—good news for iPhone users.
Readers may have noticed the PHXated’s redesign and reconstruction, these done by Steven Southard. The process disrupted the old RSS feed, but it works fine if you resubscribe.
At the RadiatePHX get-together at Hula’s Modern Tiki on Central last night, representatives of CityScape, the massive, nearly $1 billion mixed-use development at Central and Washington downtown, gave an upbeat overview of the project. You can read about it on the site’s site, here. The representative confirmed there would be a CVS pharmacy on the site. He said there would be a grocery, but couldn’t name the replacement for AJ’s yet. Finally, he did give this tantalizing hint, of a “surprise” “entertainment venue” overseen by a “local person.”
6:14 PM
A few notes about the Arizona Republic
Q: Who’s writing the paper’s Arizona Living section?
A: Not Republic reporters. Two days into the week, a total of nine feature stories. One was written by a Republic staffer. The rest were all wire stories, and lame ones at that. (“Facebook buds make workouts a bit easier.”)
On Sunday, there was a big page of things to do this week. Top item: John Mayer doing a VH1 Storytellers show. (I can’t link to it because it doesn’t sem to appear on the web.) It’s hard to be optimistic about the future of the paper when it seems like virtually no one working at the place cares about the substance of what they are publishing. A city the size of Phoenix and the best thing they can suggest doing over the course of the week is sitting on your butt and watching a routine basic cable show?
Our favorite story this week, however, was a strong Richard Ruelas feature Saturday about the frontier-day newspaper wars between the Republic and the Phoenix Gazette.
In a history of the Republic Ruelas noticed a funny story, dating from 1912, about how the Gazette was caught stealing news from the Republic, then called the Republican, which planted a fake story that the Gazette duly lifted. Wrote the Republic:
Lacking the enterprise which it boastfully claims and being utterly devoid of the commonest ethics belonging to the newspaper business, [the Gazette] has been brazenly and methodically stealing the news which The Republican has paid to have gathered and to publish.
Ruelas is one of the few people at the paper who does actual reported features. A week or so ago he did a long and fairly interesting reconstruction of an ineresting bit of rock ‘n’ roll arcana: Was Bono targeted for a shooting at a Tempe show back in 1987?
The year Arizona was consumed with controversy over Gov. Evan Mecham’s decision to cancel a state holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. was also the year that the Irish band U2 played four concerts here.
And dealt with death threats, according to the band. According to the oft-told tale, lead singer Bono would be shot while performing the group’s ode to King, “Pride (In the Name of Love).”
The band’s memory of this 1987 incident has appeared in various books, in magazines and in Bono’s induction speech when the band entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Ruelas skeptically pieces together various recollections to figure out how much of the story was true.
2:55 PM
ImprovAZ's latest prank
… involved dressing up in “Coroner” shirts and schlepping a dead body around town:
7:14 PM
A few words with the Phoenix Art Museum's Sara Cochran
One of the more interesting local museum exhibitions in town recently has been “Locals Only,” a selection of works by a dozen Valley Chicano and Latino artists, now in its last days at the Phoenix Art Museum.
Besides being a tour de force display of local talent, the show was significant just for what it isóthe first major PAM exhibit of local artists.
When the museum agree to host a local viewing of “Phantom Sightings,” a raucous sampling of work from Latino artists originating at the LA County Museum of Art, PAM’s point person for the project, Sara Cochran, decided that the local scene had talent enough to hold its own in conjunction with it.
So she rounded up a slew of local works from artists like Annie Lopez; Hector Ruiz; the grafitti artist who goes by the name DOSE; and Claudio Dicochea, and created a companion show. It was dubbed ìLocals Only,î and given a distinctive logo that included the various Valley area codes.
She is the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary artóa newly prominent role at the museum after the opening of a lavish new contemporary wing four years ago.
The works ranged from the grafitti-flecked collaborations of Ruiz and DOSE to a very pointed series of small works by Lopez that mocked what she saw as the Valley art establishmentís historical condescension to local artists.
“Phantom Sightings” packed up and left some time ago, but ìLocals Onlyî continues to draw interest. As the show finally draws to a close, PHXated checked in with Cochran to reflect on it. Cochran is Scots by birth and grew up in Sweden; she got her Ph.D from the Courtauld Institute in London. After years of postgrad work at the Sorbonne she did time at the Guggenheim, the Getty and, most recently, LACMA before coming to Phoenix last year.
PHXated: The Locals Only show leaves the museum October 26. From this perspective, how do you feel about it? Was it a success? What’s changed?
*Sara Cochran: *I’m incredibly sad to see the works leave. It really feels like the end of the summer holidays when you have to say goodbye to new friends and go back to school and the everyday. They were a fresh and joyous intervention within the permanent collection galleries and the museum. I very deliberately installed the pieces through-out different spaces in the museum because I wanted the visitors to have a sense of discovery. I think it allowed them to see things they may not have seen before and also to see works they know well in a new context.
There were just so many interesting conversations going on. Fausto Fernandez’s painting Demographic Fabric of America was a compelling juxtaposition to the abstract composition of Al Heldís Pisa II, which is part the Phoenix Art Museumís permanent collection. Hector Ruizís bronze tire Super Swamper was a great foil to Margarita Cabrera soft Volkswagen Vocho from the summer temporary exhibition Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement.
Even within Locals Only, it was fascinating to look at all of the works and see the different styles and personal preoccupations that it encompassed. This was especially true in the work of Martin Moreno and Luis Gutierrez — two generations of Chicano painters whose work confronts social issues and older and newer traditions of painting but in very different ways.
Over and over one hears how novel the show was for the museum. Indeed, some of the works made direct reference to that. What do you see happening going forward?
As someone who has worked on the bad-boy of modernism Francis Picabia, I am very aware of the fact that art history is an ever changing dialogue that is greatly influenced by newer generations of artists who are search out new figures and works to serve them as different models and examples. Nothing is set in stone. It is all a negotiation of ideas and forms. I hope the exhibition went some way to opening up the discourse about art in the Valley and allowed visitors to see the museum in a new light. It was tremendously important to have Annie Lopez’s cyanotypes series The Almost Real History of Art in Phoenix here. I want the museum to be at the centre of a vibrant conversation within the arts community. I want to bring more of this excitement into the museum.
Installers on the third day of preparing Wegner’s “Guillotine of the Sunrise”
12:47 PM