Cover Story
Censored!
Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored for 13 years, says he’s finished with reform. It’s impossible, he said in a recent interview, to try to get major news media outlets to deliver relevant news stories that serve to strengthen democracy. “I really think we’re beyond reforming corporate media,” said Phillips, a professor of sociology at…
Yet Another Stupid Argument in Favor of Prop 200
Generally, I avoid the comments on StarNet stories because most of them are made by morons who have no idea what they’re talking about. Here’s an example: I was looking at some of the recent stories about Prop 200 and came across this gem by “James O. (oienjmo),” who suggested a long list of cuts…
Cronkite-8 Poll: Public Split on Brewer/Public Option
A new Cronkite/Eight Poll shows that the electorate is split on Gov. Jan Brewer, with 39 percent approving of her performance and 39 percent disapproving of her performance. Even more splitting: 40 percent of Republicans disapprove of the job she’s done, while 40 percent of Democrats approve of the job she’s done. Brewer still trails…
A Closer Race Than Conventional Wisdom Would Have Us Think?
We’ve noted that early ballots are going the Democrats’ direction in this year’s city election. But that doesn’t mean the incumbents—Nina Trasoff and Karin Uhlich—are safe. We’ve heard some rumblings that the races are tightening up in the final week of the campaign. One problem for Trasoff and Uhlich: A general anti-incumbent wave sweeping the…
A Green Perspective: Candidate Mary DeCamp’s Reform Plan
Another proposal from Green Party candidate Mary DeCamp, who is running in Ward 3 City Council race: Sticking with my proclivity to offer pro-active and constructive input instead of negative reaction, I would propose we move to proportional representation and instant runoff voting in our elections. Right now people stick with the two major parties…
Tucson Association of Realtors President on Gila Courier: “Those Are Not My Words”
Well, that was quick. After we directed Tucson Association of Realtors President Lisa Suarez to a post on the Gila Courier that purported to be her unedited op-ed that the Arizona Daily Star didn’t have the guts to print, Suarez wrote to let us know: “Not only did I not authorize that version, those are…
Realtor Says She Does Not Stand Behind Op-Ed Published Under Her Name At Gila Courier
The folks at local blog Gila Courier published an op-ed defending Prop 200 this morning that carried the byline of Lisa Suarez, the president of the Tucson Association of Realtors, which has contributed the largest funding to the Public Safety First Initiative. Gila Courier claimed to be publishing an op-ed that had been rejected by…
Latest Early Ballot Numbers
Early voting in the city election continues to climb, but almost two-thirds of those citizens with early ballots have yet to make up their minds. Here’s the latest, with numbers as of today: A total of 68,102 ballots had been mailed to city voters. Of those, 24,802 ballots had been returned, which comes out to…
More Opposition to Public Safety First Initiative: Arizona Tax Research Association Says Prop 200 “Will Certainly Force a Tax Increase At Some Future Date”
So all those Prop 200 supporters who said I was taking Nick Dranias’ words out of context last week when I reported that the Goldwater Institute was sending out an op-ed critical of the Public Safety First Initiative can now take a look at his full piece, which is running today in the Arizona Daily…
A Green Perspective: Candidate Mary DeCamp Talks About The Grafitti Problem
Mary DeCamp, the Green Party candidate in Ward 3, asked us to post some of her thoughts on the problems facing Tucson. This one is about grafitti. Walking my dog this morning, I saw graffiti behind the AZ Opera Company building (“Merk” is said). A little further, and I saw the Casa de Los Ninos…
Downtown Master Plans Show Closes Saturday
Artists and designer Rachelle Díaz and architect Bill Mackey talked up the Pop Up Spaces’ show “±92: Downtown Master Plans, 1932-2009,” on Arizona Illustrated last night. See interview after jump. If you haven’t had a chance to see the exhibit at the McLellen Building, 63 E. Congress St. (northwest corner of Scott Avenue and Congress…
Latest Early Ballot Numbers
Early voting in the city election is picking up, with about three of every 10 ballots that were mailed to voters having been cast. Here’s the latest, with numbers as of last night: A total of 66,908 ballots had been mailed to city voters. Of those, 20,315 ballots had been returned, which comes out to…
Sleeping Frog Farms
A sample of produce from Sleeping Frog Farm. The Yum! section comes out next week and in it there’ll be all sorts of food stories, including one on Sleeping Frog Farms, a small organic operation not far from the Foothills Mall. You’ll find the whole story in Yum!, but what I’m here to rant about…
More Opposition to Public Safety First Initiative: Goldwater Institute Says Prop 200 “Won’t Put Public Safety First, It Will Just Bloat City Government”
The conservative/libertarians at Goldwater Institute aren’t fond of the Public Safety First Initiative, which will require the city to spend an additional $63 million annually on cops and firefighters once it’s fully implemented in five years. Nick Dranias warns: Proposition 200 would mandate hiring scores of new government employees without requiring spending be reduced elsewhere…
The Vision Thing: Independent Campaign Donors Revealed
Everyone complains that Tucson lacks the vision thing. This much is true: There are not a lot of people contributing to the Tucson Vision Committee, an independent political committee that is targeting Democratic candidates in the City Council election. The committee had raised $39,000 from fewer than 10 contributors as of Oct. 14. Roughly three-fourths…
Low-Budget Campaign: Prop 200 Opponents Raise $58K
The supporters of Prop 200 have raised six times as much money as opponents. Don’t Handcuff Tucson, the political committee that is urging voters to reject the Public Safety First Initiative on the Nov. 3 ballot, had raised $58,137 as of Oct. 14, according to a campaign finance report filed today. As we noted earlier…
Hey, Big Spender: Public Safety First Campaign Raises More Than $360K
The Public Safety First committee has spent more than $354,000 on the push to persuade voters to force the city to hire more cops and firefighters, at an estimated cost of $63 million a year once the program is fully implemented in five years. The campaign had raised more than $360,000 as of Oct. 14,…
Beowulf Alley Late Night Theatre Cancels Show
Due to an illness, Beowulf Alley Late Night Theatre group has cancelled performances of Athene. They were to take place on Friday, Oct. 23 through Sunday, Oct. 25. Call 882-0555 or visit www.beowulfalley.org for more information.
Antigone Hosts Benefit For Owl and Panther
Antigone Books hosts a benefit for Owl and Panther on Friday, Oct. 23, 7 p.m. Five authors of young adult works will read at one of our favorite independent book shops at 411 N. 4th Avenue: Robin Brande will read from Fat Cat (Knopf, $16.99), a funny, thoughtful novel that explores how girls feel about…
Critics!
Regular readers know that our longtime theater critic, James Reel, recently “retired” from the Tucson Weekly (although he’s still stepping in to help out when I am on vacation, and for that, I thank him). The theater-reviewing duties have been taken up by two people: Sherilyn Forrester and Nathan Christensen. I asked each of them…
Messina
Glance at most Tucson travel literature and you are sure to see St. Augustine Cathedral and “The White Dove of the Desert”—San Xavier del Bac. Both are featured prominently in Tucson: A Pictorial Guide. Absent from the glossy pages is another place of worship worthy of mention. The Benedictine Monastery on Country Club Road—referred to…
High Dining
Tickets for skybox seats in any sports arena admit you to lofty spots with great views, upscale atmosphere and hefty price tags. Food served in these posh seats is plentiful and usually of four-star quality. Dining at the Skybox restaurant in the Catalina foothills will get you those great views, some of that upscale atmosphere…
Guest Opinion: VOICES
After returning from a college semester in the San Francisco bay area, I found myself researching Tucson’s nightlife and culture, eager to see what my hometown had to offer. As I obsessively combed coffee shop poster boards, fliers for Boys R Us, a gender performance troupe, caught my eye. The fliers were intriguing, featuring women…
Noshing Around
Zombies and Wine Hotel Congress (311 E. Congress St.) hosts a wine tasting from 5 to 8 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 24, to coincide with the Zombie Walk. Expect wines from the recently expanded wine list at the Cup Café and light appetizers. Those who come in zombie garb get $2 off the $10 admission. Visit…
Chana’s World
Leonard F. Chana, who chronicled transitional and postmodern Tohono O’odham culture in bright-colored acrylic paintings and stippled pen-and-ink drawings, must have inherited his independent streak from his father, a hard-working reservation entrepreneur during a time when commercial foods, clothing and other items were becoming more popular among the O’odham. In the affecting, beautifully illustrated oral…
Police Dispatch
HUFFING, PUFFING AND CUSSING THE HOUSE DOWN East Benson Highway Sept. 26, 3:28 p.m. A man loudly tearing apart his trailer with his bare hands was arrested in the process, a Pima County Sheriff’s Department report stated. A resident of the Palm Court Mobile Home Park told the Sheriff’s Department that a young Caucasian male…
Mental Case
Stories that go nowhere are generally not good entertainment. But stories about stories that go nowhere, as Joel and Ethan Coen have shown with A Serious Man, can be incredible. The 14th feature from the Coen brothers, Serious Man starts with a message from the medieval Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki: Receive with simplicity everything that happens…
Top Ten in Books
Antigone Books best-sellers for the week
Mailbag
Hey ‘Weekly,’ Why Was There No Green on the Cover? Your cover picture (Oct. 15) was missing a city council candidate. Could it be that Mary DeCamp, the Green Party candidate in Ward 3, is so far ahead in her thinking there was no room to stylistically represent her position on the two-party money-laden scale…
Wild Wonderful
There’s a genuine feeling of being transported to another world when the beasts of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are show up in Spike Jonze’s adaptation of the beloved children’s book. After four years of filming and all kinds of delays, the gifted director has managed to put something on screen that resembles nothing…
Nine Questions
Nicole Laurenne
Now Showing at Home
Land of the Lost (Blu-ray); Battlestar Galactica: The Plan (Blu-ray); Natural Born Killers (Unrated Director’s Cut)
Shaken Not Stirred
The Cabaret Theater at the Temple of Music and Art is the perfect venue for a play about Dorothy Parker. Seats have been arranged around three sides of the “stage,” making the space even more intimate than it already is. The front row of seats is tucked behind small café tables lit with tiny candles,…
Top Ten in Movies
Casa Video’s top rentals for the week
Top Ten in Music
Zia Records top sales for the week
Cold Times
The weird world of Why?—more specifically, the world evoked in the peculiar lyrics of frontman Yoni Wolf—continues to get stranger. On the Oakland-by-way-of-Cincinnati band’s unusual, engrossing Eskimo Snow (Anticon), scary figures, comical failures and sad premonitions inhabit a world both self-enclosed and all-encompassing with religion (Jesus, Maccabees, Book of Numbers, God), geography (Ohio, Cleveland, Jersey…
Live
Junior Boys, Circlesquare, … music video?
Nonprofit Blues
Sunlight spills through the front door of Hope Animal Shelter, and across a pair of cats wrestling among a scattering of toys. One of them, a tabby named Calvin, suddenly leaps atop a carpeted cat stand and pivots like a dancer, while jet-black Carly nearly knocks over his food dish. Just then, a volunteer grabs…
Soundbites
PREPARE TO TAKE COVER Calling all local bands: The 12th Annual Great Cover-Up is a couple months away, and submissions are being considered from bands and performers who would like to participate. This year’s event will take place at its traditional home, Club Congress, from Thursday, Dec. 17, through Saturday, Dec. 19. The gist of…
Tough Times
When Jim Wymore moved to Tucson 11 years ago, he was looking for a fresh start after watching most of his friends in San Francisco die from the destruction of AIDS. When he arrived in Tucson, Wymore, who was diagnosed with HIV in 1985, was emotionally grieving and in bad shape physically, the results of…
Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions: Through the Devil Softly (Nettwerk)
It’s been eight long years since Sandoval’s first solo album, Bavarian Fruit Bread. So fans of the former Mazzy Star vocalist, she of the warm, quiet voice that brings to mind heavy-lidded whispers in the deep of night, likely will rejoice to learn she has a new disc out, and that it is perhaps a…
Bunch of Dicks
You could hardly squeeze more GOP anxieties into one swollen story: Deadbeat local artists defiling the local fire station! An obscene painting of penises funded by local tax dollars! Homeland Security denied the office space needed to fight terrorism! The only problem with this political wet dream: Not one of the claims is true. Rumblings…
The Mountain Goats: The Life of the World to Come (4AD)
If you’ll pardon the colloquialism, the new Mountain Goats album is super-duper good. Like, so good it makes me giggle and squirm and play it over and over again. I would strongly encourage all of you to give it a spin, especially those of you who might have been turned off by the nasal atonality…
Pixels and Steel
If ancient Incan weavers had computers, what would their textiles have looked like? Probably a lot like Lucia Grossberger Morales’ mixed-media paintings at Contreras Gallery. Her “Tocapus” paintings are brightly colored geometrics, in traditional Incan mixes of squares and rectangles, with paint liberally brushed on top of digital patterns. And the patterns were created on…
Star & Micey: Star & Micey (Ardent)
Memphis, Tenn., is so infused with the history of American music—rock, soul, blues, country and jazz for starters—that the two are virtually synonymous. The Bluff City’s newest export is Star & Micey, a young three-piece that arrives full-born with its self-titled debut CD. Star & Micey sets the template for the 10 tracks with the…
Noisy Neighbor?
The U.S. Air Force is in the process of selecting bases to handle the training and operational needs of the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. These decisions should be announced in the next several months and there’s a chance that Davis-Monthan (DM) Air Force Base—having trained jet pilots for decades—will be considered. Despite that, serious…
A Refined Barrage
What is a violinist? A refined musician who sits tall in a chair and plays classical music? Sometimes. What about a refined musician who plays classical music while singing and dancing … and also playing a combination of jazz, rock, fiddle and other cultural sounds? If you envisioned the latter definition, you’re familiar with Barrage.…
The Skinny
THAT DIAMOND TOUCH When new campaign finance reports get turned in at the end of this week, we hear that there will be some interesting names from the business community handing out contributions to Don’t Handcuff Tucson, the political committee battling against the Public Safety First Initiative. Among the expected contributors: legendary land speculator Don…
T Q&A
Howard E. Peterson
City Week
Love Thy Neighbor Second Annual Neighborfest 1 to 4:30 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 25 Fourth Avenue and University Boulevard 623-2579; www.downtowntucson.org When it comes to reppin’ the ‘hood, Tucsonans aren’t the best. But if so many rappers sing about the ‘hood, then it must be important. Get to know your neighborhood and the people who live…
Media Watch
Bud Foster awaits induction to Arizona Broadcasters Hall of Fame
Ask a Mexican!
Dear Mexican: As teachers, we’ve been exhorted to expand our efforts in closing the achievement gap between majority and minority students (read: Anglos and Mexicans). I teach all of my students in the best ways that I can determine for each individual student, within the constraints of a classroom of 20 or more. In my…
Danehy
If you’ve lived in Tucson for any reasonable amount of time and are not a complete hermit, the chances are good that you’ve heard Dale Lopez’s voice at one time or another. How’s this for a partial résumé? He’s been the public-address announcer for the various Tucson minor-league baseball teams for the past 25 years;…
Is This a Daily Show Audition? KGUN’s Comedic Coverage of “Big Dick No. 1”
This week’s piece “Bunch of Dicks” had its genesis after I saw this KGUN-9 News report last week that was so riddled with phony statements, mistakes and moments of unintentional humor that I almost thought it was an audition for The Daily Show. Anne-Marie Russell should consider running it as a performance-art hit piece during…
Here It Is: “Big Dick No. 1”
For those of you who are wondering what all the fuss is about regarding “Big Dick No. 1,” here’s a full-color look at the piece in question, courtesy of artist Jaime Scholnick.
More Opposition to Public Safety First Initiative: TEP Says Vote No on Prop 200
In a long-rumored power play, Tucson Electric Power has formally announced that it is opposing the Public Safety First Initiative that city voters will decide on Nov. 3. “We have all the support in the world for local first responders,” says TEP spokesman Joe Salkowski. “But this proposition amounts to an unfunded mandate that would…
If Only In Arizona…
If you have a medical marijuana card in Denver, you could get a job working for the city’s alternative weekly, Westword, reviewing the different offerings in the city’s growing number of medical MJ dispensaries. According to an article in today’s Telegraph, the paper had been running reviews by a staff writer using the pseudonym Mae…
