The Spring edition of Club Crawl, which brings thousands of people who enjoy music, drinking while standing on city streets and fun to Downtown Tucson is less than a month away, so we're starting to get more information about the venues involved and the featured acts. Sure, you were probably going anyway, but I will admit that I let out a little yelp of glee when I saw that Jurassic 5 and Ozomatli's Charlie 2na will be performing (with a live band!).

The press release:

Wristbands on now on sale for the Tucson Weekly’s Spring Club Crawl taking place on Saturday April 21st. It’s Tucson’s largest music festival with over 25 stages of live music covering over 8 blocks of the entertainment district. There will be six outdoor stages and numerous venues downtown off Congress Street and on 4th Avenue. Venues include Rialto Theatre, Hotel Congress, Vaudeville, The District, O’Malley’s, The Hut, Sky Bar, Mr. Heads, Screening Room, Sharks, Sacred Machine Museum, The Hub, Play Ground, Enoteca, La Cocina, Iguana Café, Cushing Street, Casa Vicente, Café Passe, Delectables, Chocolate Iquana, Magpies, La Cocina, and Martin’s. Club Crawl gates open at 7pm.

Headlining this year’s Club Crawl will be MC, painter, musician, actor and Renaissance man, Chali 2na. As one of the founding members of both Ozomatli and Jurassic 5, he will be bringing his four-piece Soul, Funk and Hip Hop band to play at the Rialto Stage. From Phoenix will be the alternative rock of Ladylike. Elmo Kirkwood, son of one of the seminal Phoenix rock bands the Meat Puppets, will perform at Hotel Congress. Also returning to Tucson from Atlanta Georgia to play Club Crawl will be former U of A Football and NFL star Steve McLaughlin. Some of the confirmed local acts are, Cosmic Slop, 8 Minutes To Burn, Crosscut Saw, Al Perry, Planet Jam, Early Black, Broken Romeo, Sugar Stains and Flagrante Delicto. A complete list of acts, times and maps will be available at www.clubcrawl.net.

Wristbands for the Tucson Weekly's Fall Club Crawl will be available at both Zia Records locations. Advance price is only $8 and it will go up to $10 the night of Club Crawl at all the entrances. Club Crawl is sponsored by The Tucson Weekly, Ch. 11, My 92.9, KRQ, Tejano and La Preciosa, Budweiser, Cuervo Silver and Captain Morgan.

Violinist Miray Rhoads and guitarist Joshua Rhoads, a husband and wife musical duo performing as the dubiously capitalized dUO VibrAtO, bring their take on Django Reinhardt style gypsy jazz, Spanish guitar and tango music outdoors to the Hotel Congress Friday at 7 p.m for a free show on the patio. If you think the group's name might sound familiar, but you can't quite place from where, according to the group's website, the couple plays at weddings, receptions, dinners and concerts around Arizona, so it's possible you've enjoyed their easy listening sounds while toasting the bride somewhere.

The romantic duo will seemingly provide a nice soundtrack to drinks with friends after a rough work week. Forget about the spreadsheets and group emails and feel swept away to a Mediterranean beach without even renewing your passport.

Vist the Hotel Congress website for more information.

The incoming storm has led to the postponement of Sunday's scheduled spring training game at Kino Stadium.

The news release:

TUCSON — With severe weather and cold temperatures expected Sunday, the game between the Colorado Rockies and San Diego Padres has been rescheduled for Thursday, March 22 at 1:05 pm at Kino Stadium. Gates will open at 11:30 am Thursday.

All tickets purchased for Sunday’s game can be used for the rescheduled date on Thursday, March 22. Seat locations will remain the same and fans do not have to exchange their tickets.

Refunds are available for fans that cannot make the rescheduled game Thursday. Fans who want a refund must contact the Tucson Padres before Thursday by calling (520) 434-1367, emailing [email protected] or by visiting the box office in person. The box office is open from 10:00 am — 1:00 pm Sunday and 10:00 am — 5:00 pm on weekdays.

Additionally, fans may exchange tickets for Sunday’s game for Tucson Padres regular season vouchers if they notify the Tucson Padres before Thursday. For every $20 spent on Rockies vs. Padres tickets, fans can receive $30 worth of Tucson Padres box seat vouchers, good for any game except July 3. Again, for refunds or ticket voucher exchanges, fans must notify the Tucson Padres before Thursday’s game.

“We would like to thank the San Diego Padres and Colorado Rockies for making a quick decision to reschedule this game. Both teams were tremendous,” said Mike Feder, Tucson Padres Vice President and General Manager.

The big storm that's supposed to arrive later today and cause lots of rain tomorrow, with snow (!) possible on Monday, has claimed Solar Rock (which was scheduled for tomorrow, aka Sunday) as its first victim.

Here's the news release from Cpley Ward at the Food Conspiracy Co-op:

Dear liberal media,

Rock bands can’t perform in the rain, and that’s why we’ve decided to cancel this year’s Solar Rock event. Also, we were worried the strong winds (45 mph gusts are predicted) would present a safety hazard with all the tents our vendors would set up in the park.

Cyclovia and the Water Festival will still go on as planned.

We know some folks will be bummed to miss a chance to learn about the many benefits of solar power. I’d suggest those folks consider attending the Solar Potluck organized by Citizens for Solar in April. More on that event here: http://citizensforsolar.org

There are currently no plans to reschedule Solar Rock, but if that changes we’ll let you know. Thanks for helping to get the word out.

Local film company Authentic Productions presents their best 2001 short films tonight at 9 p.m. at the Crossroads 6 Grand Cinemas, 4811 E. Grant Road. $7.

Film descriptions from a press release:

“Lionhearted” tells the story of a young boy and his journey to becoming a young man following a nuclear attack on his hometown. Directed and written by Tim Marin.

“The Elevator,” is a comedy of a young man who keeps bumping into a beautiful woman in an elevator and tries to muster the courage to talk to her, directed and written by Zacharia Lorenz.

The "Is Blake A Douche?" a mockumentary/comedy that was written and directed by Daniel Geffre, who also stars in the short. The mockumentary follows a journalist who goes around town interviewing friends and family members of a man by the name of Blake Bradford, to find out if he’s a douche.

The main feature of the night is “S.O.L.” directed and co-written by Yuri Machado. “S.O.L.” is a comedy about the relationships between four male friends and the way they interact with the opposite sex, starring Nathan O. Miller and Fernando Aguilar.

Following each film there will be a Q and A for each filmmaker and the cast and crew involved. There will also be a raffle for a signed DVD and poster of “S.O.L.” For ages 16 and up, due to language, drug use and sexual content featured in some of the films.

As the Range noted earlier today, I'll be moderating a panel of political writers—Rick Perlstein, Chris Mooney and Tom Zoellner—on Saturday at the Tucson Festival of Books. (You can get details here, but it's from 2:30 to 3:30 in Gallagher Theater and will be carried live on C-SPAN's Book TV.)

Zoellner has recently written A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in America. A former newspaper reporter who worked on Gabby's congressional campaigns, Zoellner wrote a piece for TW on the anniversary of the shootings in January. Here's an excerpt:

First, there's the mystery of what caused Jared Lee Loughner to buy a Glock from the Sportsman's Warehouse off of Thornydale Road and use it to try to kill his congresswoman. He may never be able to explain it himself. Paranoid schizophrenia is a disease that makes fantasy inseparable from reality, and Loughner had been suffering from it—in an agonizingly public way—for at least four years. He had been kicked out of Pima Community College for making nonsensical and semi-violent statements. All of his friends had deserted him. There was no job for him, no life, no hope, and the neurological equivalent of a tornado spinning in his mind.

We do know this, however: His choice for a target was inherently political. This was not a random selection. Nobody who lived through the 2010 congressional election will forget the way in which Gabrielle Giffords was publicly vilified. Her face had been cast in sinister shades in negative television advertisements and outdoor ads. Her opponent encouraged his donors to help him beat her by shooting an M16 rifle at a fundraiser. In Tucson that fall, she had become the embodiment of a federal government seen as wanting to raise taxes, open the border and kill jobs. You would have had to have been hiding under a rock not to have seen Giffords' distorted face peering out from everywhere like Big Brother. (Disclosure: Gabrielle has been a friend for many years, and I volunteered on her campaigns. Gabe Zimmerman, who lost his life at the Safeway, was also a friend.)

Jared Loughner was horribly sick, but he was certainly not hiding under a rock. This is a crucial point about schizophrenia that is not widely understood. Numerous studies show that the delusions of schizophrenic patients are powerfully influenced by the real-world stimulus that surrounds them. In China, for example, the delusions of paranoid-schizophrenia patients tend to center on themes of noble ancestry or the Communist party. In South Korean patients, there was a high degree of paranoia about secret agents sent by Kim Jong Il. In Taipei, it was the presence of gangsters. "Delusions regarding political themes were thus highly sensitive to the local political situation," wrote Dr. Kwangiel Kim, the lead researcher of one study.

Of course, there is nothing unique about angry politics, gun imagery and negative campaigning that is unique to Arizona. But to ignore the context of what was happening in the final days of his sickness is to miss one of the most-important lessons of the Safeway shootings, which is the way in which we failed to take even basic care of one of our neighbors. Tucson is an easier-than-usual place to get lost and forgotten. Our far-flung instant mega-barrios and our extremely rapid turnover of residents ("Three move in, two move out" has been the mantra for years among city planners) make it harder to form the lasting, informal social connections that make people take notice of fellow citizens in trouble.

A Gallup Poll two years ago showed that just 12 percent of Arizonans strongly agreed with the idea that "neighbors here care for one another." That this is the kind of state we've created for our children should give us all pause.

Earlier today, The Range noted that I'll be moderating a panel of political writers—Rick Perlstein, Chris Mooney and Tom Zoellner—on Saturday at the Tucson Festival of Books. (You can get details here, but it's from 2:30 to 3:30 in Gallagher Theater and will be carried live on C-SPAN's Book TV.)

Mooney, the author of The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming The Republican Brain, writes about the intersection of politics and science—and how many scientific policy decisions are decided on the basis of politics and not science.

The Republican Brain explores how the way our minds work have a lot to do with how we approach politics. An excerpt from a recent Salon article that Mooney wrote about the book:

The idealistic, liberal, Enlightenment notion that knowledge will save us, or unite us, was even put to a scientific test last year—and it failed badly.

Yale researcher Dan Kahan and his colleagues set out to study the relationship between political views, scientific knowledge or reasoning abilities, and opinions on contested scientific issues like global warming. In their study, more than 1,500 randomly selected Americans were asked about their political worldviews and their opinions about how dangerous global warming and nuclear power are. But that’s not all: They were also asked standard questions to determine their degree of scientific literacy (e.g, “Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria—true or false?”) as well as their numeracy or capacity for mathematical reasoning (e.g., “If Person A’s chance of getting a disease is 1 in 100 in 10 years, and person B’s risk is double that of A, what is B’s risk?”).

The result was stunning and alarming. The standard view that knowing more science, or being better at mathematical reasoning, ought to make you more accepting of mainstream climate science simply crashed and burned.

Instead, here was the result. If you were already part of a cultural group predisposed to distrust climate science—e.g., a political conservative or “hierarchical-individualist”—then more science knowledge and more skill in mathematical reasoning tended to make you even more dismissive. Precisely the opposite happened with the other group—“egalitarian-communitarians” or liberals—who tended to worry more as they knew more science and math. The result was that, overall, more scientific literacy and mathematical ability led to greater political polarization over climate change—which, of course, is precisely what we see in the polls.

So much for education serving as an antidote to politically biased reasoning.

What accounts for the “smart idiot” effect?

As we mention in this week's print edition, I'll be moderating a panel of political writers—Rick Perlstein, Chris Mooney and Tom Zoellner—on Saturday at the Tucson Festival of Books. (You can get details here, but it's from 2:30 to 3:30 in Gallagher Theater and will be carried live on C-SPAN's Book TV.)

Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. My friend Rodd McLeod, a Democratic strategist who often appears on the Political Roundtable with me on Fridays, says the two books serve as a history of the conservative movement in America and reveal how the current GOP political playbook was written.

Perlstein is also a columnist at Rolling Stone, where he recently penned a fascinating column about how conservative politics works these days. An excerpt:

This pattern is widely misunderstood by analysts. Republicans striking conservative positions are interpreted as "pleasing the base." But this isn't the main thing they're trying to do. Much more so, such moves are aimed at shifting the way even those who don't pay attention to politics — actually, especially those who don't pay attention to politics: "independents," "swing voters," etc. — understand the world. William Rusher, the National Review publisher and conservative movement activist who died last year, once said that the greatest power in politics is "the power to define reality." Obama never attempts that. Instead, he ratifies his opponent's reality, by folding it into his original negotiating position. And since the opponent's preferred position is always further out than his own, even a "successful" compromise ends up with the reality looking more like the one the Republicans prefer. A compromise serves to legitimize.

The recent contraception fight is a perfect example. The Obama administration announces that religious employers can't claim exemption from paying for their female employees' contraception. Catholic bishops go berserk: it's a violation, they say, of their church's "religious liberty." Two weeks later, Obama offers his compromise: these employees will still get their contraception, only now insurance companies would pay for it, which they would be glad to do, because contraception (as opposed to childbirth) saves them money.

Many progressives counted the outcome as a victory — and, by the logic Andrew Sullivan proposes, it was precisely that. Obama had "punked" the GOP on contraception, delivered a “knockout punch,” according to the outstanding and tough-minded feminist commentator Amanda Marcotte: "[Obama] drew this out for two weeks," she wrote, "letting Republicans work themselves into a frenzy of anti-contraception rhetoric, all thinly disguised as concern for religious liberty, and then created a compromise that addressed their purported concern but without actually reducing women's access to contraception .... With the fig leaf of religious liberty removed, Republicans are in a bad situation. They can either drop this and slink away, knowing they've been punked, or they can double down. But in order to do so, they'll have to be more blatantly anti-contraception, a politically toxic move in a country where [according to this study] 99% of women have used contraception."

But that's not what's happening. Instead, given an inch, conservatives are taking a mile.

I haven't been to the film and interactive conference that's going on this week, but Austin's SXSW music festival is just a relentless rock ’n’ roll firehouse. With 2,000 bands roaming the clubs, theaters and streets, it's impossible to sort through it all, but as long you don't somehow break a leg and end up stuck in your hotel room, you'll end hearing plenty of great stuff. (And rumor has it that even if you do break a leg, you can get rent what you need to still get around, at least a little bit.)

NPR is doing its part to help me sort through what's gonna be available next week with The Austin 100: A SXSW Mix, which includes 100 songs by artists who will in Austin next week. I'm particularly digging the Heartless Bastards (who will be at Club Congress on Friday, March 30, with Tucson's own Brian Lopez), Nada Surf, Spoek Mathambo, Shimmering Stars, Caveman, Girl in a Coma and the Alabama Shakes, but almost all of it is worth downloading (especially when you consider that it's free).

I spoke to Daily Show contributor (and person you might recognize from standing next to Justin Long on television) John Hodgman on Tuesday, and I started the conversation seeking his expertise as a deranged millionaire on why fellow rich person Mitt Romney seems to be having trouble grabbing the Republican nomination, before moving on to end of humanity, soccer, and the perils of zeppelin ownership.

John Hodgman will perform at the Rialto Theatre with John Roderick (of the excellent band The Long Winters) and live muralist Joe Pagac on Saturday night.

JH: Why are all these citizens intent on keeping this simple deranged billionaire from winning this nomination? As a deranged millionaire, I’m offended.

DG: Are you sympathetic to his plight?

JH: Yes! Of course I am. He has the money to buy this thing. It has been said to you people time and time again, but yet he keeps getting thwarted. Why? Because of your preference? Since when have national elections been about your preference?

DG: Not recently, at least.

JH: I think it says something something very sad about America, when a billionaire has the financial and structural advantage and the friends who own NASCAR teams can’t even get a lousy presidential nomination. What does that say about our country?

DG: That we don’t regard wealth the way we should, I suppose.

JH: It’s just another symptom that something has gone horribly wrong.