Last Friday, Jan. 29, Coldplay released a new music video for their song, "Hymn for the Weekend." In more important news, said video features Beyoncé. Beyhive members everywhere rejoice.



As a long-time Beyoncé fan myself, I too rejoiced. I was elated to learn Bey would make her first video appearance since "Feeling Myself" with Nicki Minaj. But when I realized a sari, henna tattoos and traditional Indian jewelry made up her "Hymn" look, my excitement quickly dwindled. Vanity Fair described her costuming that of "a Bollywood princess," but I couldn't help but wonder: 

Could Beyoncé, a self-proclaimed feminist and social justice advocate, be appropriating Indian culture? 

I'm not one to say yes or no, obviously—I'm a white girl from Scottsdale. I know it's not my place to speak for other cultures. But Indian and non-Indian people alike have voiced their opinions regarding Beyoncé's getup on Twitter.

Traveling alone can be tough. When all of my snooty friends couldn’t join me because they had families or careers they couldn’t walk away from, I had to get creative in my search for a companion.

I left Tucson in June of 2014, traveling with a group of 500 soccer fanatics to watch the World Cup in Brasil. We were hundreds of strangers from across the US and everyone seemed to bond almost immediately

Then, after two weeks, they were gone.

I next stayed with a friend from Brasil, though she usually had school and I spoke no Portuguese at the time.

Then, after two weeks, I was on my own again.

I worked in Bahia for a month, then left and never saw my coworkers again. I repeated the experience in Salvador. And Ecuador. And Peru. You see the pattern. I was surrounded by people who wouldn't stay in my life. I was alone in a crowd. I wanted a permanent travel companion, flexible and adventurous.

So I made my own.

First came the pattern. I found this nifty guide, printed out a PDF of the design, bought some fleece, and got to work.




I started with the arms and legs. They were the easiest pattern, and as I had never sewn before, the least noticeable if/when something went wrong.

Just two weeks after chief curator Josh Chuang’s resignation became effective on Jan. 15, the Center for Creative Photography’s director, Dr. Katharine Martinez, announced her retirement.

Her last official day is this Saturday, Jan. 30.

Dr. Kimberly Andrews Espy, UA senior vice president for research and discovery, announced the unexpected retirement Tuesday in a terse memo to CCP staff.

A search for a new director will not begin until later this year, Espy wrote. Meantime, Dr. James Burns, director of the University of Arizona Museum of Art, will be acting administrative director.

Curator Rebecca Senf has been promoted to chief curator, taking Chuang’s empty seat while doing double duty as the CCP curator at the Phoenix Art Museum. Senf will also serve on a newly created “senior management council,” along with conservator Jae Gutierrez, archivist Leslie Squyres, and associate director Denise Gose.

The world-renowned CCP is a treasure trove of some 90,000 photos and the archives of eminent photographers from Ansel Adams to W. Eugene Smith. Yet since the early 2000s, the center has cycled through a procession of directors and curators, enduring years at a time with both positions left open.

When Martinez took the job as director on July 12, 2010, the center had gone without a leader for a year. There was no chief curator either. Even so, Martinez, a veteran of 11 years as librarian of Harvard College’s Fine Arts Library, did not move immediately to fill the chief curatorial post. By the time she hired Chuang in 2014, the position had been vacant for five years.

Espy gave praise to Martinez’s five-and-a-half-year tenure, noting that under her watch the “Center’s archives have grown, the research fellowship program was expanded, two gatherings of the photographic community known as ‘Conversations’ were presented, and a full-time conservator was hired to establish a conservation department.”

Martinez counted Chuang’s hire in April 2014 as a feather in her cap. She lured him away from a post as associate curator of photography and digital media at the Yale University Art Gallery, where he had established a reputation for savvy exhibitions that traveled the U.S. and even Europe.

Local bigwigs are working to revive an influential part of Tucson history with the upcoming Tucson Forum events.

The Fox Theater, 17 W. Congress, will be hosting Mr. Dennis Edwards, lead singer from The Temptations, on Sunday, Jan. 31 for a free armchair discussion.

The discussion, focusing on Edwards’ experiences in the music business during the Civil Rights movement, is free and open to the public. Tickets will be offered in advance at the Fox Theater box office but once doors open, it will be first-come, first-seated. Doors open at 4 p.m., the Forum begins at 5 p.m., and a Temptations Review in Concert will begin at 8 p.m. Tickets for the concert range from $25 to $50 and can be purchased here.

Operating from 1946 to 1984, the Sunday Evening Forum brought prominent and influential people to Tucson. These guests included John F. Kennedy,  Ronald Reagan, Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr., according to the Tucson Forum website. At the Forum’s height, one meeting broke the record for the nation’s largest community forum, with 55,000 people in attendance. The board is hoping to return the forum to it’s former glory, with your help.

For more information, visit sundayeveningforum.com.

Sometimes people call Tucson the foot of Arizona because it's boring, because it's barren, because it's "no Phoenix," etc.

Locals, you know that's not true. If you need a reminder, the Tucson community offers up a LOT of cool, recurring weekly and monthly events. Not only are the events on this cool, though—they’re also free. I can’t think a better-sounding combination.

Tucsonans, don't let yourself waste away in this culturally vibrant, diverse town. Get out and explore with Tucson’s 15 coolest, free-est attractions, separated into categories for your ease of use.

MUSIC

The more I’ve lived here, the more I’ve realized that Tucson is kind of a small-scale Austin, Texas—and, yes, I’ve been to Austin. Its music scene is, from a non-local standpoint, actually pretty popping. Any given week, many downtown / 4th Ave. venues host shows ranging in genres from jazz to EDM.

1. 2nd Saturdays: 2nd Saturday is the Tucson equivalent of what is elsewhere known as First Friday. It’s one of Tucson’s many cultural affairs, mixing art, food, and music to create what 2nd Saturday organizer Sandy Mellor calls an urban block party. Though the art and food sometimes cost attendees, the music is always free, entertaining and oftentimes from local artists.
   
   

2. Hotel Congress: You can expect Congress to host a live show from a menagerie of touring artists at least a couple times a week. The historic hotel offers a pretty diverse range of shows, too—they’ve hosted groups including chillwave Hippie Sabotage, pop-punk Modern Baseball and new-wave Martha Davis and The Motels. Every week, though, catch DJ Sid the Kid’s ‘80s/’90s-themed Monday House Party, cumbia-inspired DJ DirtyVerbs Friday nights on the Plaza, and a bunch of local DJs at Saturdaze Dance Party every Saturday night, among many other weekly Congress events.
   
   

3. Cushing Street Cool Jazz: Every Saturday night from 7 to 10 p.m., Cushing Street Bar and Restaurant hosts a “cool” jazz showcase featuring the music of Jeff Lewis and pals. Jazzy.
   
   

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It's that time again, ballet fans! In the fall, Ballet Tucson gave us tickets to a few of their shows for the 2015-16 season.

It's time to give away a few pairs of tickets to the winter concert, Rhythms of the Americas. There are shows Feb. 5-7, and winners will be able to select which performance they attend. 

We'll get in touch with the winners at the end of the week (those not lucky enough to win can pick tickets up here). Then, stay tuned! We've got one more giveaway coming up in about a month.

To enter our Ballet Tucson giveaway, fill out the form here: 

Congratulations Tucson, you are among the top 10 most active cities in the country. 

When it comes to exercising and roaming the outdoors, the Old Pueblo ranks 7th among 100 of the U.S.'s most populated metro areas, according to a report by the website Wallethub.

The site looked at things like monthly gym fees, number of swimming pools and public parks that are available to the public, how many fitness clubs there are, and other "incentives" that make it easier for people to be active. The report says that it's not entirely up to us—our cities and counties have to ensure everyone has access to playgrounds, tracks, and other places where we can exercise for free or for an affordable price. It's about investing in health.

Maintaining an active lifestyle not only improves the overall quality of life, but it’s also a much cheaper alternative to fighting and preventing illness. Promoting healthy choices, however, requires a collaborative effort among city officials and residents.

In Tucson, we also get lucky with Tumamoc, Sentinel Peak, Sabino Canyon and so on. It's definitely not torture to be active in our desert. 

Fellow Arizonan city Scottsdale is the most active city, and Laredo, Texas is the least.

Check out the entire report here.

The Tucson Museum of Art is adding another piece of Southwestern art history to their collection in the way of a gift from two out-of-state donors.

The oil painting "Haying Time in Taos" is from artist Oscar E. Berninghaus, who is most known for his work as one of the "Taos Six." Berninghaus founded the Taos Society of Artists in 1915 and became one of the most prominent and defining voices in Southwestern painting, establishing Taos as an internationally-recognized art colony, along with those he worked with. 

The painting, which measures 24 5/16 x 29 7/8 in., made its way to Tucson after Linda D. Taplick and James W. Miller of Madison, Wis. gifted the work to the museum. Christine Brindza, Glasser Curator of Art of the American West, said in a release from the museum that this painting is exemplary of his work, which is known for its ability to showcase the region's landscapes and his penchant for capturing the simplicity and beauty of everyday life. 

“'Alfalfa Time/ Mountains in Taos' captures an everyday, peaceful moment,” Brindza said. “Berninghaus conveys the fresh alfalfa harvest piled high on a horse-drawn wagon, using the purple-hued Sangre de Cristo Mountains as an expansive backdrop.”

Berninghaus' "Haying Time in Taos" will be on view in the museum's John K. Goodman Pavilion of Western Art some time next year, though the official date is yet to be announced. For more information on this and other works on view, visit the museum's website.

Etherton Gallery's current exhibition, Danny Lyon: Conversations with the Dead, highlights a collection of photographs that Lyon took of the grim realities that inmates in Texas prisons faced back in the late 1960s.

I'm moderating a panel discussion at the gallery tomorrow night on the increase in inmates in Arizona prisons, the rise in private prisons and the challenges that inmates face when reentering society after their release. Panelists will include:

• Longtime Tucson Weekly contributor Margaret Regan, who's newest book, Detained and Deported: Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fire, digs into what happens when undocumented immigrants end up behind bars—and often in private prisons. Detained and Deported was named one of the Pima County Public Library's Southwest Books of the Year; it has also received high praise from Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly and Booklist, which noted that "with other horrifying case studies, Regan provides discomfiting statistics to document the rise of the detention-industrial complex."

• State Sen. Steve Farley, who has long been a critic of privatized prisons.

• Lisette Flores, who serves as general counsel and policy advisor the Senate Democratic Caucus. Flores has also served as a prosecutor for the city of Phoenix and as the director of the Immigration and Legal Services Department of Friendly House, a Phoenix nonprofit that provides social and legal services.

• Grace Gámez of the American Friends Service Committee, who specializes in helping mothers readjust to society after being released from prison.

The panel is at 7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 18 at Etherton, 135 S. Sixth Ave.

“Can you bear with me for 30 seconds?” Oisín Mac Diarmada, Irish fiddler and storyteller par excellence, says by phone from freezing Columbus, Ohio. “I’m after ordering a cup of tea.”

Mac Diarmada and his team of Irish musicians—and one California step dancer—are on the “Irish Christmas in America” tour this month, bringing their seasonal music, song and dance to venues across the nation. They alight in the Old Pueblo on Tuesday, Dec. 15, for a single show at Berger Center for the Performing Arts. The tour started out in northern climes and will end in the sunnier south.

“We can’t wait to get to Tucson,” Mac Diarmada says.

Now 11 years in the making, the loveable Irish Christmas show first stopped in Tucson way back in 2005. The concert is an evening of stories, songs in Irish and English and photo slides conjuring up the joys of an Irish Christmas.

“We don’t feature standard Christmas carols,” Mac Diarmada says. “One of our lovely Irish Christmas songs is `The Candles of Baby Jesus’–sung in Irish. And we do ‘Silent Night’ [Oiche Chiuin] in Irish.”

The performers will recount at least one old Irish Christmas custom that survives: So-called Wren Boys venture out in costumes on Dec. 26, “going round from house to house, singing, maybe playing instruments,” Mac Diarmada says. “It’s a big social day of getting out of the house, after the family day of Christmas.”

Mac Diarmada, himself a prizewinning fiddler from Sligo, has enlisted an all-star pickup band. This year’s five musicians play the full array of traditional instruments, including fiddle, flute, harp, whistles, concertina and uilleann pipes.

Singer Séamus Begley, who has been on the Christmas tour for the last five years, is a native Irish speaker from Kerry in the West of Ireland. Awarded a TG4 Traditional Singer of the Year award in 2013, Begley specializes in songs in the island’s native tongue and also plays accordion. At 66, “he represents an era of Irish music,” Mac Diarmada says. “He’s a real character, a charming, funny person and a natural performer.”

Singer Teresa Horgan, a soprano raised in Cork, has performed in Tucson a number of times, with the band FullSet and last February with Outside Track.

Samantha Harvey, a champion Irish step dancer from Ventura, California, will dance with the band, accompanied on some numbers by local kids from Tucson’s Maguire Academy of Irish Dance. Descended from Italians, she grew up studying at the Claddagh School of Irish Dance. Now on her third year on the tour, Harvey and Mac Diarmada were married at the start of the year after touring in Asia together. When the band returns to Ireland on Dec. 22, joining the thousands of Irish emigrants who return each year, Harvey will go with them, Mac Diarmada says. “We’ll be going back home to Sligo for Christmas.”

Irish Christmas in America is at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, Dec. 15, at Berger Performing Arts Center (1200 W. Speedway Blvd.). Advance tickets are for $27 general admission with senior, student and member discounts available. You can buy yours at Antigone Books (411 N. Fourth Ave.), The Folk Shop (525 N. Campbell Ave.) or online with a $3 fee.