You may not have heard much about Oak Flat, and that's no surprise. After all, this patch of natural beauty sprawls across federal forest land, out in a rural corner of Arizona. It's way off the radar for most major newspapers, and far from the hum of metropolitan life.

But Oak Flat hits close to home for the San Carlos Apache Tribe and the Yavapai-Apache Nation. Both consider the spot, in the high desert outside the former mining town of Superior, to be holy ground. They have conducted sacred ceremonies there since forever.

And since early February, a group called Apache Stronghold has also staged a gritty, ongoing occupation at the site.

As it happens, the Apaches aren't the only ones who care about Oak Flat. Multi-national mining companies likewise harbor deep affection for this place, since it's perched atop a huge copper deposit. Arizona Sen. John McCain cares, too. For years, legislation that would trade away Oak Flat to the mining companies felt flat from lack of support. So in 2014, McCain finally slipped it into an unrelated military spending bill. Subsequently, Oak Flat now belongs to the Resolution Copper Co., which is jointly owned by international mining companies Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton.

Some people go out to unwind on Friday nights. They dance to '90s hip hop with drink in hand and let loose. That's all fine and good, but if you're looking to stand in a wind tunnel of black ambient sound, you should most definitely head to Tiny Town Gallery on April 17 for a collection of local and national industrial noise artists.

While it's hard to say fully what to expect—especially with the antics opener Marshstepper is known for, it's safe to say the show will be as much about the art of sound as it is about the visual experience. So get ready to fall deep into a shadowy trance, zone out and listen.

Tucson's Dead Techno will kick off the show at 8 p.m. with Phoenix's Marshstepper and New York's Inferior Passions following. Hive Mind and Kiran Arora, both of LA, will cap the show off with a sinister wall of noise that should take you away to the dark corners of your mind.

The show, presented by Unseen Force and Tucson Community Printshop, is $5 and will take place at Tiny Town Gallery, located at 174 E. Toole Ave.

If you're still not sure what to expect, here's Kiran Arora performing in LA:

Workers from Tucson and  around the country joined voices today to demand for dignified and livable wages. More specifically: for every state to raise minimum wage to $15 an hour, because it is impossible to stay afloat with some of the salaries we gotta deal with.

The Fight for $15 protest in the Old Pueblo gathered about 100 people. It got larger once the march—which started out in the corner of Campbell Avenue and Speedway Boulevard, near the McDonald's—arrived to the University of Arizona. Today's rally was a fusion of fast-food workers and adjunct and non-tenure faculty from both the UA and Pima Community College.

Focusing on the fast-food stats, their average salary (in Tucson) is $8.68/hour and, for the most part, they have a 24 hours a week limit to work, which means they make about $10,800 a year. 

Low wages also mean more expenses for the state—getting food stamps costs lots of money, so why not just give people a significant raise?

A new exhibit is set to show at the Mayor's Gallery on Thursday, April 16. The show, which is the fifth in the gallery's existence, will feature pieces from eight different Native American and Mexican American artists.

Tucson Pima Arts Council and Mayor Jonathan Rothschild have joined forces on the exhibit, which explores different media like acrylic on canvas, relief printmaking, sculpture and more. Featured artists include David Contreras, Glory Tacheenie-Campoy, John Salgado, Lester Aguirre, Lydia Maldonado, Michael Contreras and Neda Contreras and Ceci Garcia.

UA senior David Contreras is featured in the show and said in a statement that his work comes with a sense of history and the artists that came before him.

“Part of my process before I begin making art is to research as much as possible on the topic or idea I am pursuing,” Contreras said. “I try with every finished work to breathe life into long forgotten ideas and styles that the masters left for me to follow.”

In general, the works explore topics like family, struggle, land and community.

The show will be open for the public to view on Thursday, April 16 from 4:30 until 6:30 p.m. Proper will be providing the refreshments at the event. The pieces will hang from then until September at the Mayor's Gallery, located on the 10th floor at 225 W. Alameda St.

For more information, including purchasing information, call TPAC at 624-0595.

Mezcal lovers crowded Pasco Kitchen & Lounge's dining room and patio last night for a special four-course dinner. Each dish in the prix-fixe meal was paired with a different Del Maguey mezcal, showcasing its region of origin and displaying the range of flavors in the agave distillate. 

Starting off, Phoenix-area bartender Jason Asher served up a mezcal punch aptly named Stigibeu—the traditional toast for mezcal coming from the Zapotec expression of gratitude for a life connected to ancestry and the life forces around you. The cocktail was a fruity introduction to the sometimes intense spirit, mellowed out and balanced nicely as a stepping stone into straight up tasting. 

The first course paired a beautifully simple caldo de piedra, or stone soup, with one of Del Maguey's most well-known (likely because its reasonable price point) mezcal varietals: Vida. The smoky, earthy notes from the spirit paired well with the very rustic soup, which had thinly sliced red snapper, shrimp, half a potato, fennel and coriander. The clean broth, which was poured over the other components tableside, successfully used its river stone boiled seafood base to provide a very subtle, but intentional palette by which to compare flavors.

Next up was a fideo with pulled roasted pork sholder and seared barbecue pork belly. The lightly sweet barbecue flavor on the vermicelli matched the citrusy notes of the mezcal Chichicapa. Although of all the dishes served this one suffered the most from temperature issues, the balance of sweet and spicy/smoky elements redeemed that issue. Plus, getting all of those portions out simultaneously is no easy task and most of the coursed dinners I've been to have also had that issue.

Course three was the dinner's main event. Roasted lamb was covered in a complexly spiced Oaxacan mole, rich in flavor and thick in texture. The dish came with a lamb tamal with incredibly smooth masa and a simple salad of thinly shaved squash and cucumber marinated in lime and cilantro to brighten up the more hearty elements of the plate.

This dish, paired with Del Maguey's Minero mezcal, which hails from Santa Catarina Minas, was my favorite combination of the night. Both the dish and Minero had a lot to think about. Distilled in clay pots, the Minero did have a distinct earthiness to it on the back end, complimenting the mole. The initial fruitiness of the mezcal contrasted the tart and herbaceous salad and the overall robustness of the plate's components went well with the roasted agave notes.

To finish, the dessert served up a bread-pudding like corn cake that tasted distinctly of its namesake. The accompanying spiced hot cocoa had a hint of orange flavor and a thick, but not completely smoothed texture. Served with the crema de mezcal—a blend of mezcal and agave syrup—the cake was equally sweet as the spirit. Made to to be an apertif or digestif, the crema de mezcal is a lot sweeter than your typical mezcal, which makes it more palatable for the beginning mezcal enthusiast. While it wasn't necessarily my favorite of the four spirit tastings because it took away from the mezcal itself, it did make sense in the context of a post-dinner drink.

Overall, the $30 four-course meal was an insane bargain, showing off both what chef Ramiro Scavo of Pasco can do in the kitchen and what the single village mezcaleros from whom Del Maguey source can do, which is to paint a broad spectrum of flavor with indigenous ingredients. The dinner was a brilliant look into the flavor of Oaxaca. 

We're less than a week into Best of Tucson® balloting and there are already a few categories that seem pretty much decided.

However, some sections are still very much up for debate. For example, Tucson's best ice cream. You guys just cannot seem to agree. So far, 52 of you have voted in that particular category and there are 13 businesses very much in the running. This race is tight.

So, go make your opinion heard. Or maybe declare this weekend Ice Cream Weekend and cruise around town until you feel like you can make an informed opinion. 

And, of course, spread the word. The more opinions we get, the more likely we are to truly find the best ice cream. I'd argue that's extra important in Tucson—we have ice cream weather 12 months a year.

Tucson's Santa Pachita is looking for fans to send in votes in a national contest that melds independent artists with mobile technology. April 15 and April 16 are the final days to submit votes to the Música Unsigned contest, so you better get on it now.

Sponsored by Verizon Wireless, the contest gives participants a "toolkit," which includes an HD camera, a tablet, Verizon Jetpack hotspot and promotion guidelines. Bands then record promotional videos to rally for support from fans through the contest website and social media.


The local Latin fusion band is one of 30 acts vying for votes in the contest. The goal here is to push Santa Pachita in a top five slot by tomorrow so their video will go to the final round where a panel of judges will decide the grand prize winner. Right now, the band is in 17th place, which means it's time to get to voting on the Música Unsigned website.

Música Unsigned winners will receive a two-day recording session at ZapBoomBang studios in Houston, produced by an award-winning producer. Winners will be notified on April 20.

Whether the band takes home the grand prize, they'll be performing along with La Santa Cecilia at Club Congress on Monday, April 20. Doors are at 7 p.m. and the show starts at 8 p.m. Tickets, which are $18, can be found on the Club Congress website along with more information. It is a 21 and over event.

From Entertainment Weekly:

Peter Gallagher has filed suit against Joss Whedon and Lionsgate, claiming the Avengers: Age of Ultron writer took the idea for 2012’s The Cabin in the Woods from his novel.

Gallagher (not the Peter Gallagher who played Seth Cohen’s dad on The O.C.) filed suit in California federal court Monday, saying he believes Whedon, who produced and co-wrote the Cabin in the Woods script, took inspiration from his 2006 book The Little White Trip: A Night in the Pines. The film’s director Drew Goddard and Whedon’s production company Mutant Enemy are also named in the suit.

In the court papers, Gallagher explains what he believes are “striking” similarities between the book and the film, including the names of the lead characters and the cabin, the plot, mood, pace and sequence of events. The suit also points out specific scenes that closely resemble one another.

Gallagher claims he has “lost, and will continue to lose, substantial revenues from the production and sale of the Film,” and is seeking $10 million in damages.

A fundraiser for Nicoll Hernández-Polanco—a Guatemalan transgender woman who's been in an all-male immigration detention center in Florence for about six months—kick started earlier this month to have some cash handy in case a judge sets a price to Nicoll's freedom in upcoming days.

Nicoll's bond hearing is now scheduled for April 22, according to Mariposas Sin Fronteras—a Tucson LGBT/immigrants rights advocacy group. Her attorneys, Heather Hamel and Vidula Patki, say her asylum hearing might take place that same day, but they are waiting for confirmation on everything that'll be happening this and next week related to Nicoll's case.

Advocates have been fighting for Nicoll's release, or least her transfer to an all-female detention facility, since the end of last year but Immigration Customs Enforcement has repeatedly refused. Nicoll has two previous deportations, which is the reason she had to wait six months to get a bond hearing.

Hamel and Patki hoped ICE would grant her humanitarian parole (since Nicoll is an asylum seeker), especially after Nicoll reported she had been sexually abused by another detainee. While in detention, the abuse has been constant—physical and emotional from both other detainees and detention center guards. The first month she was in detention, Nicoll was patted down at least six times a day by the male guards and she has had to shower with the other detainees. 

Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas doesn't like that the state's education code, known as A.R.S. Title 15, is 1,000-plus pages long. She's announced that she'll establish an annual committee to review the code's regulations and get rid of everything that is outdated, unnecessary or "detrimental to the work of school district and charter schools."

“The first education statutes enacted for the area now known as Arizona was under the Revised Statues & Laws of the Territory of New Mexico dated January 27, 1860. At that time Arizona was still part of the New Mexico Territory. Those statutes consisted of only ONE page,” Douglas said in a statement.  “Now, Title 15, the current 2014-2015 edition of the code, contains more than 1,000 pages. No one can reasonably claim that education has become one thousand times better as a result.”

If it hasn't had a positive effect on education, then Douglas wants it out of the code. 

She also touches on Gov. Doug Ducey's request for deregulation "to unburden the private sector to stimulate economic growth."

In the case of education, that would be the removal of allegedly useless regulations in Title 15. 

“Arizona’s education code and its associated bureaucracy has grown, although not commensurate with student achievement or student success. It’s time to make Arizona’s education code shorter, not longer," she said. “I strongly support the effort to free up more funding for classrooms, and one way to do that is to remove unnecessary burdens which force local education agencies to use vital funding for administrative costs."

The committee would be made up of school superintendents, human resources and food service workers, business managers and others "impacted by the statutes."

She's asking for applications, by the way.

From the press release:

Professionals in those areas and who are interested in participating on the committee should submit their C.V. or resume either electronically via email to the [email protected] or by U.S. Postal Service to Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1535 W. Jefferson, Phoenix, Arizona, 85007. The deadline to apply is May 15, 2015, with the first meeting planned for June. Please include in the email title, or on the envelope, “Application for Title 15 review committee.”

The committee will present its findings by Dec. 1, 2015. The report will be presented to the state Legislature in the 2016 session.