Cover Story
Cocktail Time!
Hold on to your swizzle sticks everyone, because we’re going cocktailing. Bur first, some ground rules: We will not be going to Kon Tiki for the fishbowl-sized drinks that have long dominated local cocktail consciousness. There will be no visits to the World Famous Golden Nugget for near-lethal vodka tonics, nor will we go to…
Artistic Range: Lynn Taber at the Etherton Gallery
Lynn Taber Time Stood Still “Time Stood Still,” by Lynn Taber, is part of A Radiant Land, continuing through May 29 at Etherton Gallery, 135 S. Sixth Ave. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Farley Report: “GOP Budget Places Our Emergency Rooms in Mortal Danger”
The latest dispatch from state Rep. Steve Farley: Howdy, Friends O’Farley… What a day for America! After a hundred years of trying, we finally enacted real health care reform. It’s not perfect, and the main features do not go into effect for another four years, but it remains a huge accomplishment given the cynical campaign…
Giffords/Mitchell/Grijalva/Pastor: “The Suggestion That Somehow This Bill Is Responsible for Arizona’s Budget Crisis Is Absurd”
There’s a lot of confusion about the impact of the health-care reform package that Democrats managed to make into law this week. One question is the impact of the legislation on the state of Arizona, which recently eliminated KidsCare and made plans to dump more than 300,000 people below the federal poverty line from state-subsidized…
Playboy Coming To UA!
Hey, girls of the Pac-10! Here’s your chance to show some school spirit. Playboy is coming to Tucson for a photo shoot. Here’s the e-mail we’ve just received: You may be interested to know that Playboy magazine is coming to town in search of beautiful college women to be featured in their “Girls of the…
Palin Targets Giffords For Defeat
Fox News commentator Sarah Palin has put Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords on notice! Politico reports: Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin rolled out a list of Democratic members of Congress she intends to target for defeat this year, announcing that she’ll go after lawmakers who voted for health care reform and hail from districts she and Arizona…
The Making of a Mind: Mind and Brain Lecture Series Continues Tonight
The UA College of Science “Mind and Brain” lecture series that’s been filling up Centennial Hall continues this evening with “The Making of a Mind,” presented by LouAnn Gerken, a professor of psychology. Here’s a brief description: We’re all born with a brain, but when does our brain begin to construct a model of the…
Tucson Originals Gift Certificate Sale
Tucson Originals holds its popular quarterly gift-certificate sale on Wednesday, March 24. You can save between 20 and 40 percent on meals at more than 40 independent, locally owned eateries by getting up early tomorrow and clicking here. An official with InstaGift.com, the company handling the sale, says the gift certificates will go on sale…
Rasmussen: Goddard Trails Martin & Mills, But Leads Over Brewer
Rasmussen has a new poll showing close races in this year’s race for governor, as well as numbers on the sales tax election. The survey shows that 53 percent of voters support the sales tax, while 36 percent oppose it and 11 percent are undecided. That’s a lower level of support than a poll released…
WXSW Continues Tonight!
Tucson’s WXSW festival continues with Surfer Blood (above), Think About Life, and Turbo Fruits at Club Congress tonight. Details here. For the WXSW lineup at Plush, click here.
The Problem With McCain’s Health-Care Tantrum
Jonathan Chait of The New Republic notes that Sen. John McCain’s promise to disrupt any kind of work in the Senate is an odd threat: A couple points. First of all, the baseline of cooperation is already zero. McCain is presumably upset that Democrats are using budget reconciliation to amend some of the tax-and-budget features…
Paton: Health Care Bill “Is A Disaster For America”
Republican Jonathan Paton, one of four GOP candidates vying to defeat Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Congressional District 8, releases this statement on the health-care vote: It’s unfortunate that Gabrielle Giffords has decided to put loyalty to Nancy Pelosi before loyalty to her constituents with her scheduled vote today for the costly health care bill.…
Giffords: GOP Lawmakers May Have Cost State Nearly $7 Billion In Health Care Funding
While Republicans are attacking her for voting in favor of the health-care reform legislation yesterday, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is going on the offensive against GOP lawmakers and Gov. Jan Brewer, who enacted deep cuts to health-care programs earlier this month, including stripping health-care coverage from an estimated 310,000 adults on AHCCCS and eliminating the KidsCare…
Jesse Kelly: “I Will Do Everything in My Power to Reverse Obamacare”
Echoing Sen. John McCain, Republican Jesse Kelly, who is one of four Republicans seeking to knock out Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona’s Eighth Congressional District, vowed to fight to repeal the health-care legislation approved by Congress yesterday. Kelly’s statement: “I am deeply disappointed that Representative Giffords has so blatantly voted against the majority of…
McCain: “We Are Going to Try to Repeal This”
U.S. Sen. John McCain says that Republicans will work to reverse yesterday’s health-care vote.
Let’s Go Nuclear USA!
Thanks, Captain Al “Chop-o-Matic” Melvin. In a recent interview in The Explorer, the senator continues to push for nuclear power to pay for education, but also offers up what will soon by our biggest resource in the Grand Canyon state: prisoners: “We would have to convince the citizens of Arizona that it’s as safe a…
Ch- Ch- Ch- Chainsaw Carver?
So what if it’s been described as an “exceptionally dirty-mouthed after-school special?” I miss those after-school specials. Much more interesting than a story about a bad-girl-turned chainsaw carver, the other Cherie Currie story.
Tomorrow Night At Solar Culture…
World-class throat singers Chirgilchin, from the Russian province of Tuva, return to the Old Pueblo! Check out their 2008 performance above, and click here for event details.
Salty Martian Highlands
NASA/JPL/University of Arizona This week’s batch of HiRISE images includes this salty spot that might one day be make for a home for a future Mars mission. HiRISE honcho Alfred McEwen tells us: There is an intriguing surface unit in parts of the ancient Martian highlands that may consist of chloride salts (like NaCl—table salt)…
Writer’s Block: Marvin Von Holten
Oro Valley resident Marvin Von Holten has written an inspirational poetry book:Choices, Tate Publishing and Enterprises, 88 pages, $9.99 Summary: Can one wrong choice drastically change a life? People in every walk of life question their choices, and some have even devoted their lives to searching for redemption from wrong choices they’ve made. Arizona author…
Long Lines on the Border
The Nogales International (which, like the Weekly, is owned by Wick Communications) reports that officials, business owners and residents on both sides of the border are fuming because of long lines at border checkpoints: The line, more than 200 people deep, stretched back from the Dennis DeConcini pedestrian border crossing, winding through an open-air corridor…
Understanding the Young Trial
The morning daily reports that a “newspaper article” examining the car-bomb killing of real-estate hustler Gary Triano had Pamela Phillips, who is accusing of hiring Ronald Young to kill her ex-husband, ready to kill herself. The article in question: The late Chris Limberis’ examination of the Triano killing, five years after the bomb went off:…
Sierra Club: Lawmakers “Moved Foward A Long List of Bad Ideas”
The latest dispatch from Sandy Bahr, legislative lobbyist for the Sierra Club: Hi everyone! You would think that after all of the havoc they wreaked last week, the Legislature might give us a small break, but no. They moved forward a long list of bad ideas — from providing more exemptions for large mining conglomerates,…
Democrat Nan Walden vs. John McCain?
There have been persistent rumors that the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee is trying to recruit somebody other than City Councilman Rodney Glassman to run for Sen. John McCain’s Senate seat, especially with McCain facing a hard challenge from the right in the form of former congressman J.D. Hayworth. Now Politico names Democrat Nan Walden as…
Rasmussen: Hayworth Closing Gap With McCain
Rasmussen’s latest poll shows Hayworth just seven points behind McCain: Longtime incumbent John McCain now leads conservative challenger J.D. Hayworth by just seven points in Arizona’s hotly contested Republican Senate Primary race. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely Arizona GOP Primary voters shows McCain ahead 48% to 41%. Three percent (3%) favor another…
SXSW: Broken Bells at Stubb’s Bar-B-Q
So I don’t really have time here to tell you about the awesomeness of last night’s SXSW festival; it’s my first visit to the musical madhouse and there’s a whole day out there to experience. But, luckily, NPR is here to save the day with lots of coverage, including recordings of the spectacular performances by…
Artistic Range: Ted DeGrazia
“Market,” by Ted DeGrazia, is among the works on display in DeGrazia Paintings from Diego Rivera Studio, continuing through April 30 at the DeGrazia Gallery in the Sun, 6300 N. Swan. The gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily.
Making All Those HiRISE Images Even Cooler
We’ve regularly featured images of Mars from the HiRISE camera on The Range, but now here’s video of what some guy did with all those pictures: He created a fly-by using the topographical data taken by the camera. The video (showing the Candor Chasma region) is being billed the most accurate video of the surface…
Alisah’s Story
I am a meat-and-potatoes kind of girl. My dad made roast beef and mashed potatoes every Sunday when I was growing up, and in my freshman English class, I wrote 15 pages about the unifying qualities of a big bowl of mashed potatoes and gravy. Well, chef Ahmet Alisah is providing new ways to nourish…
Life With a Neurotic Twist
After nearly 40 years of honing a profoundly neurotic stand-up act, Richard Lewis could write a textbook on twisted, self-depreciating improvisation. “Nothing is off limits about me. I take great pride in destroying myself,” he said. “I’ve been told by a lot of people that’s why I am sticking around.” And destroying himself is precisely…
Top Ten in Movies
Casa Video’s top rentals for the week
Fields of Arizona Gold
Italy has been making some of the world’s best dried pasta for centuries; perhaps that’s why so many pasta shapes bear Italian names (fusilli, lasagne, spaghetti, ravioli, etc.). But perhaps the pasta world should throw a few Sonoran Desert-style names in, since some of the most well-known pasta-makers in Italy use durum wheat grown right…
Barbed Words
Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can rip you to pieces if you don’t use them carefully. That might, in fact, be the most palatable lesson to be learned from Oleanna, now onstage as part of Live Theatre Workshop’s Etcetera series. This is not a play for the faint of heart. There’s…
Top Ten in Music
Toxic Ranch Records top sales for the week
Bike-Up Service
Tucson has an active bicycle community, and Jaime Arrieta caters to that crowd with his mobile, bike-up café, Peddler on the Path. Peddler on the Path Mobile Café sets up shop almost every Saturday and Sunday morning behind the Windmill Inn at St. Philip’s Plaza, and also shows up at some special events, Rialto Theatre…
Scarred Landscapes
After a fierce late-winter rain drenched Tucson recently, I happened to be driving north over the Palo Verde overpass. I got a front-seat view of the whole Catalina range and of the valley spread out below. A brilliant sun had chased away the rain, and the snow on the mountains gleamed in the light. Great…
Weekly Wide Web
Like most of literate Tucson, I was at the Tucson Festival of Books last weekend, which, in its second year, drew hundreds of authors and thousands of people. I’m not sure of the final crowd count, but there was word going around that it is now the seventh-largest book festival in the country. (I heard…
Culture of Risk
Undocumented immigration—posing real economic and security concerns for the United States—is a legitimate subject for reasoned debate. However, there are lots of people who become enflamed over the topic, exploding like hand grenades at the thought of anyone from Mexico placing even one unsanctioned toe on American soil. What makes their reactions so extreme? Some…
Sacred and Profane
Picture this: A foreign mining company, its finger on the pulse of rising copper prices, announces plans to open a vast new operation on the fringes of an Arizona city. The company and its political water-carriers are pushing the employment angle, though the quantity and quality of jobs any mine might produce are questionable. To…
City Week
Wild West Days; Works by Maja Nostrant; Dirt! The Movie; Treasures of the Queen: The Amazing Minerals and Mystery of Bisbee, Arizona
More Trash Talk
A Pima County valuation study regarding a proposed landfill in Marana has confirmed what nearby residents say they’ve known all along: A 40-foot-deep landfill—with refuse allowed to go up to 200 feet high—could drastically harm the value of their homes and community. Pam Ruppelius, who lives in a subdivision near the proposed landfill site, says…
Guest Opinion: VOICES
My friend Laura and I bonded over condoms. Together, we helped assemble contraceptive packets at the Walk-In Wednesday volunteer night at the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation (SAAF). In the SAAF common room with us, there were different groups of people: girls there for their sorority; people putting in court-ordered community-service hours; and so on. We…
The Ax Man Cometh
In an effort to avoid raising taxes in the face of a budget deficit of more than $2 billion, Republicans in the Arizona Legislature cut more than a billion dollars in state spending last week. Allowing only one day for testimony regarding the budget bills in both the House and the Senate appropriation committees, GOP…
The Other Station
For almost a century, the Classical Revival design of downtown’s El Paso and Southwestern Railroad Depot has been architecturally distinctive. “(It’s) considered the prettiest in the U.S.,” commented Viola Pyle Freeman shortly after the building opened in 1913. At the time, she was a new resident in Tucson. Despite its splendid appearance, the building on…
Soundbites
The year’s biggest music week?; just Bröötal; Spain meets the Sonoran Desert; on the bandwagon
Changing Their Tune
The Low Anthem’s music is rooted in its members’ long friendships, and the deep love they share for history’s oldest instrument, the human voice, and its most instinctual arrangement technique, vocal harmonies. The hauntingly gorgeous ballads for which they are best known—”Charlie Darwin,” “To Ohio”—feature acoustic instruments from another era, including clarinet, pump organ and…
The Modeens: Take a Ride With the Modeens (Self-released)
Here’s a pleasant surprise: a surf-garage-R&B band playing rambunctious rave-ups that don’t blindly parrot 1960s-style music. Instead, The Modeens take a familiar sound, borrow its tropes and motifs, and rework it, throwing in a modern spin. Listeners may find themselves itching to do the pony, the frug or the watusi after the first couple of…
The Skinny
The earmark shuffle; an early wrap?; continued Access; Goddard’s in; no more R-cubed
Efterklang: Magic Chairs (4AD)
If Denmark exists primarily in the imagination of Hamlet’s “unweeded garden” of “things rank and gross in nature,” or as the backdrop for Lars von Trier’s faux-disabled orgies, then Efterklang is here to put a shiny veneer over those dark currents. Their latest—and first for 4AD Records—Magic Chairs mixes the expansive orchestrations of their earlier…
Danehy
My father, may he rest in peace, was an industrial-strength Irishman. I don’t know if he ever kissed the Blarney Stone, but he definitely had the gift of gab. He was a smooth talker, a teller of tales, and passionate about many things, including his strong union ties and his homeland. (How he spawned such…
Broken Bells: Broken Bells (Columbia)
It’s hard not to come into a project like Broken Bells without high expectations. Hype has been building for months regarding the project between Shins singer/guitarist James Mercer and hip-hop/electronic producer Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton, of Gnarls Barkley and mash-up The Grey Album fame). You may not anticipate The Shins and Gnarls Barkley on…
Live
The Cave Singers, The Dutchess and the Duke, The Moondoggies
Police Dispatch
If you give a drunk a cookie; brother’s keeper
Nine Questions
Hugh Cornwell
Now Showing at Home
Up in the Air (Blu-ray); Tenspeed and Brown Shoe; The Kids Are Alright (Blu-ray)
In the Kitchen
In an industry with an exorbitantly high failure rate, Kingfisher has defied the odds. Kingfisher, which opened in 1993, still attracts crowds nightly. Employee turnover is low, an anomaly in the restaurant business. And at a time when food trends change on a whim, Kingfisher continually serves the best seafood in town, at least according…
Lacking Intelligence
It’s admirable when a director tries to go beyond just blowing things up in a war movie (as Kathryn Bigelow did successfully with The Hurt Locker)—but good intentions are never enough. Witness the thrown-together optical assault that is Green Zone. Watching this film creates the sensation that your eyes are little soccer balls being kicked…
Ask a Mexican!
Dear Mexican: I’m sure you’re aware of all the hate crimes against Hispanics in the last few years. By now, I’m sure you’re thinking that this is ¡Ask a Mexican!, not ¡Ask a Hispanic! But all the hate crimes against Hispanics have been because the victims have been thought to be Mexican, and at least…
Hot Stuff!
Oscar Segura let me know that because he was at the doctor with his grandson, he might be a little late for our meeting. This was not a surprise; after all, to Segura, family always comes first. His family owns Poblano Hot Sauce Inc., at 3250 S. Dodge Blvd.—and the Segura family has a long…
One Good Scene
Every so often in a bad movie, there’s one good scene just dying to get out. Clearly, it’s the aberration, because there’s nothing else to recommend the film—but for a fleeting moment, everything just goes right. Our Family Wedding can claim such a scene, evidence of that old adage about a stopped clock being right…
T Q&A
Susan Alexander
Comfort Foods
Sandwiched between a railroad track and Interstate 10, Barrio Anita is not the first place one would think to look when suffering from an empty stomach. The neighborhood is dotted with vacant lots and ramshackle houses. Dogs yowl relentlessly, and trains roar by on an all-too-frequent basis. However, happiness can often be found off the…
Media Watch
New KVOA GM brings national experience to Tucson
Mailbag
Hey, Danehy: ‘Littlefeather’ Was Not a ‘Fake-Ass’ Indian Tom Danehy makes a mistake when he calls Marie Cruz a “fake-ass” Indian (March 4). Actually, Cruz is descendant from tribes in our area; her paternal father is from the White Mountain Apache Reservation. The name “Sacheen Littlefeather” was falsified, but the “Indian woman” was authentic. Cruz…
Good, Really Bad, Good
First, the good news: The spring edition of our Yum! dining guide is here, in this very issue. I challenge you to read the thing without getting seriously hungry and/or thirsty. Check it out in print and/or at Yum.TucsonWeekly.com. And while you’re at TucsonWeekly.com, I encourage you to chip in and do some reader reviews…
Serraglio
Perhaps you’ve noticed Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce’s jihad against undocumented immigrants. The perpetually cranky Maricopa County crusader introduces a raft of retributive legislation in the Arizona Legislature each year in an attempt to drive out, or at least harass and demonize, undocumented immigrants. This year, his shotgun approach includes a bill targeting the children…
Top Ten in Books
Mostly Books best-sellers for the week
Our 16th President Hated Vampires. Who Knew?
Yesterday we featured a trailer from the forthcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls, the sequel to the book that spawned a cottage industry of fusing classic literature with classic horror-film creatures. Now, Seth Grahame-Smith, the author of the first Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, is out with a new book this…
Writer’s Block: George Hathaway Gardiner
We’re introducing a new feature on The Range called Writer’s Block. We will highlight local authors and their publications. On the Winds of Time by George Hathaway Gardiner PublishAmerica, 113 pages, $19.95 Summary:On the Winds of Time is a collection of poems and stories from George Hathaway Gardiner’s life. The stories are a combination of…
From the Secret Files of Jim Blackwood: Calexico Live at the Rialto Theatre, Dec. 2, 2006
Just Press Play: Calexico performs at the Rialto Theatre on Dec. 2, 2006.I was talking to KUAT/KUAZ senior production engineer Jim Blackwood the other day and mentioned that I really loved Ancienne Belgique: Live In Brussels (2008), the live set that Calexico released last year. But I confessed that I was disappointed that it didn’t…
