Nashville singer-songwriter Madi Diaz is playing Solar Culture tomorrow night with Keegan DeWitt and we have a pair of last-minute-ish tickets to give away. If you like smart, melodic, female indie pop, Madi Diaz should be write up your alley, and since she and DeWitt are husband and wife are delightful people not married to each other, expect perhaps we can still hope for some charming duets between the two.

Enter here, and we'll contact you tomorrow morning if you're the winner. Good luck!

"Does It Rain (Where You Are)":

While semi-famous literary critic Dale Peck would disagree (he led his review of The Black Veil with "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation"), if you're going to criticize Rick Moody, calling him a "hack" probably isn't the way to go.

Still, if you're a Tucsonan, reading Moody's essay "reflect[ing]" on our city in Newsweek, it's a little difficult to understand what exactly he's trying to say. Oh, you saw a man playing banjo in the heat? People riding unicycles? Someone let you in on the secret of how we leave bodies in ravines, just for kicks? This guy has us pegged!

However, this is sort of Rick Moody's beat. I couldn't even try to describe the first section of his novel The Four Fingers of Death. It's oddly funny. It's definitely strange, but I wouldn't necessarily be able to tell you what it's "about". Moody is a style guy. He operates on a different plane than nearly every other writer out there. He spends quite a bit of time discussing different body fluids and zero gravity. I don't know why, but he does do it well.

I guess he's supposed to give the readers of Newsweek a sense of what Tucson is like, now that we're largely out of the unfortunate national spotlight brought on by Jared Loughner, and he does that in an artsy way, I guess, but it's a mistake to blame Moody for being Moody. Maybe it's a better question to wonder why they couldn't just find someone who lives here to talk about Tucson these days (and no, I don't mean me). Tina Brown probably found out Moody was coming to town and asked him to throw something together, and that's a spectacular idea on paper. It just might be a short sighted one. Moody mentions that we have great tacos still post-January 8th and paints a beautiful picture of the monsoon clouds rolling in, but he doesn't say really say anything, and that's a shame. Not because Moody isn't a great writer, but because someone else should have been given the opportunity to tell our city's story.

Although it would appear Boris Said hasn't had a stellar career in NASCAR, the guy has a great name, he won the 24 Hours of Daytona twice, his father was an Olympic bobsledder, and he turns a post-race interview in a professional wrestling promo. Someone with a camera should just follow this guy around. That would be a reality show I'd watch.

A chef recently told me he got bawled out by somebody who couldn’t believe his Thai restaurant didn’t offer take-out. “She was like, ‘You don’t deliver? You don’t do take-out?’ I told her that we didn’t even have take-out containers. It’s very ethnocentric,” he said.

What many Americans — myself included - are accustomed to when it comes to Asian food, Chinese cuisine especially, comes in cardboard boxes with wire handles. There's always sushi — which is typically made well and ornately arranged —but the finer side of Asian cuisine often gets overshadowed by that which comes with sauce packets and disposable chopsticks.

An upcoming series of meals at Harvest Moon Chinese Cuisine - which itself is an exception to fast Chinese food - will showcase the finer side of Chinese cuisine. It’s called the Man Han Imperial Feast and each meal is three-hours long with a total of 11 wine-paired courses crafted by master noodle chef YongDong "Tony" Wu. Wu is known for his knowledge of ancient hand-pulled noodle-making techniques.

The dinners aren’t cheap — $80 to $100 per person — but I did mention there are 11 wine-paired courses, right? They take place between Tuesday, Sept. 6, and Monday, Sept. 12. Reservations are required; 825-5351.

And if you really want to see some gourmet Chinese cooking, the restaurant is offering a $150-a-plate dinner by author and chef Martin Yan of the show Yan Can Cook on Saturday, Sept. 10. $100 is tax-deductible, and reservations are required; 292-6900.

Also, just in case you have like 10 minutes to waste watching a guy swing dough around, here's a video of Chef Wu doing his noodle magic. It gets pretty amazing around the eight-minute mark.

Chef Tony Wu's pulled noodles, with Chef Martin Yan from C J Phillips on Vimeo.

"Untitiled (Ascending Butterflies)" by Gerben Mulder is on display in The Tucson Work, through Sept. 18, at the Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art, 265 South Church Ave.

A list of stuff I don't understand (related to this video, partial):

a) The whole fraternity and sorority thing
b) Young people
c) Alabamans

[Daily What]

Wake up, drink some coffee, then head on down with the whole family to The Loft this Saturday, August 20 at 10 a.m. for a screening of Labyrinth! The flick is a part of The Loft's Saturday Morning Cinema. Plus, it's just a chance to see David Bowie in some funky, tight black pants. General admission is $6/$5 for Loft members.

For more information, call 795-0844, or visit the Loft's website.

Amos Lee, whose most recent album Mission Bell was produced by Joey Burns, will be recording an episode of the PBS series Live at the Artists Den here at the Fox Theatre with Calexico on August 23rd. The show is invite-only, but if you hurry (the deadline to enter is tomorrow has been extended until Friday), you can enter to win tickets from the show's website. Good luck!

There are three Jeff Buckley biopics filming in the near future (including one that doesn't have the rights to his music and stars a guy from Gossip Girl who doesn't appear to be able to sing, of all things), but the most prominent one found someone who looks a lot like Buckley, but might be cursed by believing that he can actually sound like him.

Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark star Reeve Carney has signed on to play Jeff Buckley in the untitled film about the late musician that Welcome to the Rileys helmer Jake Scott is putting together for a November shoot. Carney, who performed the Bono/The Edge-penned Spider-Man single Rise Above 1 at the American Idol finale, will do all the singing to bring to life the music of Buckley, who was just getting started as a solo artist when he drowned at age 30.

[...]

Carney will star in what Scott hopes will be a definitive film about Jeff Buckley's life, and WME is raising funding. They have exclusive rights to Buckley’s music and personal archives, including the nod from Sony to use Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, which is perhaps Buckley's best-known tune from his first album Grace. A second album, Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, was released after Buckley died. Buckley’s mother, Mary Guibert, has also thrown in with Scott’s project and is executive producer. The script by Ryan Jaffe (The Rocker) was informed by the David Browne book Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley.

Compare and contrast:

Arizona’s abortion opponents had a good day in court last week, when the Arizona Court of Appeals lifted an injunction that blocked a 2009 law from going into effect.

As a result, abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood will now have to follow the provisions of Abortion Consent Act, whose provisions had been placed on hold by a lower court.

Gov. Jan Brewer cheered the decision as “a great day for Arizona women and parents.”

“The 2009 Abortion Consent Act empowers women by giving them the objective information they need prior to deciding whether to have an abortion,” Brewer said in a statement. “Women deserve all the facts from their physician, in-person, before making such a critical decision. Today’s court decision will help guarantee that.”

Not surprisingly, Planned Parenthood Arizona CEO Bryan Howard disagrees.

“There’s no scenario that came out of last week that’s a good one in terms of real-life Arizona women,” Howard says. “We have to figure out what the implications are.”

Without getting too deeply into the details, the legal situation is complicated. We’ll try to explain in a future post, but here’s the nutshell: