Students Pop and Lock

"Breakin'" is the title of the laughable '80s film about the burgeoning dance craze known as break dancing. (Its ever so sweet tagline: "For the break of your life! Push it to pop it! Rock it to lock it! Break it to make it!") Despite frequently being a silly and exploitative look at break dancing, "Breakin'" was the first commercial look into the increasingly popular form of dance that was coming from the streets. [Read article]

Today

Nick Luca - 9:30 p.m. Plush. 340 E. Sixth St. After doing production work for Calexico, Nick Luca has finally put his aartistic talent to the test with a solo career. Expect to hear atmospheric dreamscapes of sound with jazz, psychedelic pop and a little folk mixed in. No Cover. (21+)

The Tucson Gem Show - Roadway Inn. Grant Road at Interstate 10. Holiday Inn. South Palo Verde Boulevard. Check out this yearly Tucson gem. Get it? Gem? But be careful and stay away from those tacky new age crystals and animal charms that your second-grade music teacher used to wear. Not to be confused with the world renowned Tucson Gem and Mineral Show in the spring.10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Free [Read article]

The Deathray Davies is all that's right with indie music. The band members are lifers dedicated to their art, and the results can be seen in their tremendous output. Officially a band since 1999, The Davies has released five albums (most recently The Kick and the Snare) - if you're counting at home that's nearly an album a year, or more albums than Tool has released in their 15-year career - toured the country repeatedly (often as a supporting act for bands like Superchunk and The Breeders) and the members have maintained their day jobs. [Read article]

Most musicians are stuck in a local music scene that is often cutthroat and vicious. New York, Los Angeles and Boston are examples of great music scenes that are marred by frequently flaring tempers and rocky relationships between bands and musicians.

Local musician Nick Luca knows it all too well and is just thankful to be part of the Tucson scene, where bands are far more likely to share members and record together than get into a fistfight. [Read article]

Take a walk around campus and you're bound to see a building named after someone important, someone long dead or a combination of the two.

Yet for most of us, these names are nothing more than just a name, and the lives of these men and women are unknown.

Tomorrow, however, presents a rare opportunity to learn more about one these people and know that there is a story behind the name.

César E. Chávez, the name that now adorns the former Economics building, was one of the nation's most important leaders in terms of civil rights, labor issues and environmental awareness. His humble beginnings as the son of migrant workers and his formal education that ended at the eighth-grade level belied his future work as the most prominent leader of the migrant-worker movement to rub shoulders with notables like Robert F. Kennedy and Jesse Jackson. [Read article]

Fernando Meirelles is two for two.

The "City of God" director earned an Oscar nomination for his first major feature film, and, if the academy can remember him six months from now, pencil him in for another.

"The Constant Gardener" is the best film to be released so far this year, and although it's a thriller on the surface, it goes as deep into politics and love as you would expect from Meirelles. [Read article]

A collection of views, gripes and nonsense

Random Review

So I bought this Axe body spray because it will totally get you laid. I sprayed it all over myself and waited for something to happen. Nothing. In fact, I told my girlfriend what I was doing, and she wouldn't even have sex with me. Maybe it's just that Tsunami isn't their best scent.

Gripe of the week

Have you seen this Andy Milonakis character on MTV? I'm sure you have, because his show is on every MTV station all day long. He looks like a 14-year-old kid who got his own show, right? I mean, that would be pretty cool, to have your own sketch comedy show at 14. And I should let the show slide because even though it's not that funny, I couldn't have done better at 14. But Andy Milonakis is 30. And so his show is not funny. Take it from Gary Coleman, you can't pretend forever. [Read article]

If you like your action films with laughable fighting props, send-off lines like "think again" and plot holes so glaring you wonder if there were pages lost from the script, then I have a movie for you.

Jason Statham stars as Frank Martin in this sequel about a professional driver who is hired to transport items that are bound to come with trouble. Of course, he never transports anything in the film. Frank is temporarily working as a chauffer for the U.S. drug czar (Matthew Modine), picking his young son Jack (Hunter Clary) up from school and taking him to the doctor. [Read article]

"Curb Your Enthusiasm" is one of those rare shows in which the hero is also the village idiot.

Watching Larry David interacting with other human beings is like watching someone trying to get out of quicksand. He gets himself into awkward, racial, religious, social and sexual debacles, and the process through which he extricates himself is the meat of the show. It is not easy comedy to pull off, but David and his team of writers manage to do it consistently. [Read article]

To say that The Beatles have influenced Jeff DeVito, principal songwriter of the group Particle Zoo, is like saying that at one point in time Picasso thought squares were really cool.

Loneliness and Strangers, this New Jersey band's first full-length album, with its keyboard work, poppy riffs and light sound will seem like a throwback to the original Fab Four, complete with a strange reference to a walrus on track five appropriately called "Blue Walrus." The first part of the album feels like a trip back to the good old '60s in the days when weed was called grass and the flower children reigned supreme. [Read article]

There will never be a band that could ever command the same stage presence in the way that Led Zeppelin or Queen did in their time. Yet there's always some upstart band that thinks it's the next big-arena rock god.

For a death squad they seem markedly short staffed, but Mike Brewer and Colin Frazier, the duo that makes up The Kola Koca Death Squad, aspire to be one of the bands that succeed where others have failed. But judging by the work on this album, they're just not ready to take on that responsibility as the successors to Jimmy Paige and crew. [Read article]

Call me slow, but it took a long time for me to realize what people meant when they referred to Tucson as a "college town." I guess I just assumed they meant that we lived in a city that housed a university. I didn't understand that our economy is dependant on the crowds drawn to town every August until I spent a few summers hopping from empty bar to even emptier bar and reorganizing my schedule to accommodate the fact that almost every business within a 25-mile radius of campus switches to "summer hours" as soon as the dorms empty. [Read article]