Tucson Weekly: Cheap Thrills (July 10

Cheap Thrills KICKING ALIEN BUTT: Odd times they are. Now we have an Air Force muckety-muck blaming all the hullabaloo in Roswell, N.M., on dummies that tumbled from an atomic balloon. And we read about the time when then-President Richard Nixon joined pal Jackie Gleason in a visit to a military hangar that reportedly housed alien artifacts. Then there's the edgy northern Arizona guy who unwittingly hitched an extraterrestrial hell-ride.
And that's not to mention those mysterious "Lights of Phoenix," which some surmise may just be spontaneous combustion of collective gasses emanating from state government.
Strange days indeed, and ones simply crying out for the steadying hand of a bona-fide hero.
Enter The Screening Room and its presentation of Flash Gordon Conquers the Earth. Now there's a guy you can rely on to kick a little intergalactic butt.
Buster Crabbe stars as the intrepid space explorer who must rocket to the planet Mongo, throwing a sci-fi wrench in Ming the Merciless' plans to destroy our way of life. Seems his Mercilessness hopes to introduce a nasty little malady called the "Purple Plague of Death."
Of course, along the way Flash faces evil robots, highly unattractive monsters, outer-space battles and even a touch of gravity-free romance.
Flash Gordon Conquers the Earth shows in three installments at 2:30, 4 and 10:30 p.m. Saturday, July 12, at The Screening Room, 127 E. Congress St. A pass for all three is $8. For information, call 622-2262.
INSIDE VIEW: The UA's fantastic VideoTENSIONS summer series, Landscaping For the Year 2000, peeks at the world through a rarefied lens, seeing the landscape "as a slate upon which culture, habitation and labor is written and may be read."
Past installments have explored that concept with looks at relationships between women and technology, linear landscapes imposed on the human aesthetic, and clashes between African-American culture, and the physical form of modern American cities.
This week VideoTENSIONS turns the camera inward with Steve Seid's The Fantastic Voyage: Video Art and Medical Imaging.
The body as a landscape has hardly been overlooked. But Seid is concerned with its interior, or "inscape," which is increasingly the object of visual representation. Medical science takes much credit for this, with its stunning ability to reproduce images of internal functions and space through X-rays. Other technologies like magnetic resonance imaging, sonograms and computer modeling have pierced that once private space even further, making it akin to public images.
Now video makers such as Seid are transforming those complex internal machinations into art, incorporating interior scenery in their investigations of the social construct, often with mesmerizing results.
The Fantastic Voyage: Video Art and Medical Imaging screens at 7:30 p.m. in the UA Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Auditorium (AME 202), located on the northeast corner of Speedway and Mountain Avenue. Admission is free. Call 621-7352 for details.

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