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Light Rail Beer is an awesome idea:http://www.lightrailbeer.com/
The list is lacking a TON of bars, though. At the bottom of the page is a link to a page that allows you to submit bars that have not been listed yet. Contribute to the delinquency of others and support the Light Rail at the same time — submit some bars, people! |
Archive for the ‘streetlife’
Chemin de Bière
Goooooooooooooooool!
Great last-second winner in the Mexico v Ecuador game last night. OK, it was only a friendly, but try telling that to Vicente Matías Vuoso. Muy bien! Now will MLS send Phoenix a team please?
For an hour, I’m the best actress in the world
Down to Neeb Hall last week to hear Jane Fonda speak on ‘Sex, Gender & the Journey to Wholeness’, ASU’s Women and Gender Studies ‘Women of the World’ lecture.
Always had a soft-spot for Jane, as her resume is a mass of all-too-human contradictions: daughter of an American icon yet counter-culture icon in her own right; advocate for media freedom yet (ex)-wife to one of the biggest media magnates in the world; self-confessed Christian that practices Buddhist yoga; supremely talented actor who arguably delivered one of the key cinematic performances of the 20th century (Klute) yet suffered for years from cripplingly low self-esteem and a need to seek the approval of others; anti-war activist, subject of FBI surveillance and victim of Nixonian COINTELPRO-like disinformation yet best selling 80’s video workout queen…
Jane Fonda speaks at the National Conference for Media Reform Jan 2007, and makes some great points on media ownership, bias and freedom
Add to that a supporter of environmental, human rights and female empowerment causes, ex-wife to one of the Chicago 7 and future Californian State Senator (Tom Hayden), successful author and movie producer… truly, a Curriculum Vitae that emphasizes the Vitae.
Back to Neeb. The audience was a real mixed bag - backpacking students with skateboards, faculty members wearing tie-dye tees, a couple of Scottsdale-type babes who had either wandered in to the wrong place or were making a profound post-modernist statement, and about twenty Vietnam Veterans, there to make their feelings known in regard to the ‘infamous’ picture of Ms. Fonda in Hanoi, 1972, sitting in an NVA gun emplacement - an incident over which she has, and continues to express her regret over.
The generous applause she was introduced to muted the few boos that drifted in from the back, but, audience seated, the Vets proceeded to try and make their point. They had, however, already alienated the audience through their appearance. They wore bandanas, sawn-off leather jackets and tees, and sported large tattooed biceps. Rather than play on the image of sharp, disciplined GI’s, medals and ribbons gleaming with respect for the uniform, God and country, they came off looking like a renegade bunch of bikers out for a few beers and someone to lay a beating on. This served only to intimidate the audience rather than get them on their side.
They threw a few insults - and then, strangely, just left. Ms. Fonda invited them to stay and discuss their grievances in the Q & A following the lecture, but they rather meekly filed out, rather like a group of naughty schoolboys. The last one disappeared to a perfectly-judged valedictory of “Thanks for coming!” from the stage; the ensuing audience laughter lightening a mood that had quickly grown tense and ugly.
Not sure whether it was the 12-hour airport layover and the lost baggage she had endured in making the lecture on time, or whether she is always this way, but the next 45 minutes saw a tired and emotional speaker talking with a suprising intimacy of detail.
She related the personal - how society’s role modelling led her father and various men she had known to separate head and heart - to the political: “we keep electing Presidents that are bifurcated!”. Less lecture than confessional, the audience were delivered an unguarded exposition of a troubled psyche’s path to some form of redemption or resolution.
In the Q & A she moved from Social Inoculation Theory to Reviving Ophelia to The Vagina Monologues (”the people that protest the Vagina Monologues are frightened of their vaginas”). Some idiot tried to veil a contemptous diatribe against (again) her appearance in the gun emplacement photo as a question, but all he could really manage to ask was whether she thought her actions had been naive.
How do you respond to that? Somebody asking if something you did nearly 40 years ago might have been naive? Hell, screw 40 years, how many of us can stand up and honestly say we have not been guilty of the same thing in the last 40 days? Or 40 minutes? Cheap words, so carelessly thrown. And, in a way, already pre-empted by an earlier segment of the lecture where she memorably referred to the name-calling and baiting of proponents of non-violent solutions as ‘a toxic masculinity governed by shame’. Winner.
And total National Treasure, contradictions very much included.
Classic radical Fonda from Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s “Tout Va Bien”
A fantastic ‘behind the scenes’ on Klute and early 70’s New York City. A great example of how location - particularly a city - becomes as important an actor in a film as the leads.
The Dignity of Labor
This city never ceases to surprise. Spotted recently on a recent sojourn along Broadway Road (but blink and you’ll miss it) - at Arizona Machine & Fabrication Inc., 1410 E. Broadway Road to be exact - a very nice mural in the Social Realist style by Randall Hedden.
Social Realism was partly a reaction to Abstract and Expressionist painting, which were viewed as bourgeois by SR artists like Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. They preferred figural representations of everyday life, often depicting the issues and social concerns of ordinary working people, which they felt were more appropriate given the desperate economic and social conditions of the times (1930’s). They also had a pretty strong Socialist agenda to express, which makes it all the wierder finding this ‘homage’ to that style on the side of an industrial facility here in good ol’ Phoenix.
For many artists, mural painting was also a reaction against the decadence of art displayed in galleries and private homes, which seemed gratuitous in an era of extreme poverty. Their work was often executed in places for public consumption, so avoiding the commodification usually associated with the art world elite: you can’t exactly buy these works and hang them on your wall.
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You can click these thumbnails of two key Rivera murals to view larger versions and check out the social, political and historical commentary on display, but I recommend listening to Captain Beefheart - Hard Workin’ Man, from the Blue Collar movie soundtrack as you do so: |
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His 1933 mural for the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan featured a portrait of Lenin, and the resulting uproar led to his dismissal and to the mural’s official destruction in 1934. Some of the artists that worked with Rivera on these pieces, such as Clifford Wright, also painted some of the Rivera-inspired murals in San Francisco’s Coit Tower, which thankfully have not been destroyed:
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Randall Hedden, for his part, is a self-taught artist who started in 1972 primarily working in portraiture and illustrations. He later moved on to murals, and many can apparently be seen on the exterior of large buildings in the midwest, particularly one of Red Skelton in Skelton’s home town of Vincennes, Indiana.
He currently has his own gallery in Scottsdale, the Heddenart Gallery, featuring traditional and contemporary Figurative paintings, sculpture and photography.