Arizona Daily Star from Tucson, Arizona • Page 23

3J)c Arizona Uatll! Star Tucson, Wednesday, April 29, 1998 Comics 4C TV5C Dear Abby 6C i Old city photos will serve as basis for huge tile murals on Broadway underpass walls lipQllrilJlblilDlJ cO It mmtwPf 4ft MmMmtm i i Wi fillilMpili I il iiCi a-. i 1 "Ji 1 By Ralna Wagner The Arizona Daily Star Artist Stephen Parley would love to see downtown become a bustling center of commerce, art and entertainment, a place filled with character and cliaracters. Just like it used to be. Parley will give us a peek into that thriving downtown with his new project the art component of the Barraza-Aviation Parkway interchange at East Broadway. Called "Windows to the Past, Gateway to the Future," the project encompasses four walls of the new Broadway underpass, just west of Euclid Avenue.

It will be the topic of the next Downtown Forum, set for tomorrow at the Tucson-Pima Main Library. "I really want to see downtown thrive again," says Parley, a graphic artist. Although he's only lived in Tucson for three years, Farley feels more at home here than any other place he's lived. "I feel like I'm doing something for Tucson," he says. In January, a TucsonPima Arts Council panel awarded Farley the $171,000 commission to create tile murals for each wall.

They will be embellished with black-and-white images derived from historical photos depicting downtown from the 1920s through the '60s. For three of the walls, Farley has already chosen his photos. One will be a street-scape, looking west on Congress Street, circa 1920. The base of Tumamoc Hill is visible in the distance, and the left side shows the building that would eventually become Chicago Store. Another photo mural will show George Roskruge, the city's first civil engineer, standing at the corner of Broadway and Stone, also circa 1920.

The third wall will have a later image, as a city bus moves out of the old and now-demolished Broadway underpass in 1969. Farley is most excited about the fourth and longest wall, which will be filled with 13 street pictures taken between 1930 and 1960. On his computer, Parley calls up an image of a sample street shot. Two young Hispanic men walk See DOWNTOWN, Page 3C Eduardo "Lalo" Guerrero, right, and an unidentified friend were snapped strolling downtown by a street photographer. IF YOU GO What: Downtown Forum on "Windows to the Past, Gateway to the Future," an art project at the Barraza-Aviation Parkway and Broadway interchange.

When: Tomorrow, noon to 1 p.m. Where: Tucson-Pima Main Library, 101 W. Stone in the lower-level meeting room. Cost: Free. Downtown forums are "brown bag," so bring your lunch.

Information: Details regarding the submission of street photos for Stephen Farley's project will be given at the forum. If you have a 1930-60 downtown "people on the street" photo, you can bring it to the forum. No advance registration necessary; call the TucsonPima Arts Council for more information, 624-' 0595. Bruce McClelland, The Arizona Daily Star Farley displays a tile enlargement of Guerrero's head as it would look in his mural Two other art projects scheduled 7 I IS rTf 0 WJr" 1 "EEl in 1 last mile to Interstate 10, now estimated at $100 million or more. "That means we can get a potential $1 million for art," using the city's "1 percent for art" policy, he explains.

The city will bear the cost of the last mile, but Barraza-Aviation Arizona 202 was a state project. The state has no percent-for-art policy. After failing to get funding for the underpass mural project from several sources, the city of Tucson secured the 1 7 1 ,000 through Highway User Revenue Funds, which is state money. "It's a tubular form and it will look like a diamondback rattlesnake," arching over the multiple lanes of Broadway, Johnson explains. The third project still in its initial planning stages will be the art component of "the last mile" of the Barraza-Aviation Parkway, a 20-year project.

Artists Melody Peters and Kevin Osborne have been brought in to work on Phase One, the segment from Broadway to Fourth Avenue. Johnson may be one of the few people excited about the astronomical cost of extending the parkway the Stephen Farley's project is just one of three transportation art projects in the works, says David Hoyt Johnson, the director of public art for the TucsonPima Arts Council. The second project may actually be completed before Farley's, which is approximately one year from its target dedication date. Artist Simon Donovan has been working with engineers on a bicycle and pedestrian path that will connect East Broadway Gust east of the new underpass) with North Fourth Avenue. Farley's digitized rendering of street scene with George Roskruge at Broadway and Stone, circa 1920 Taste of Cherry' a haunting tale of despair T7" (tojijjilbutiiolir (when yoiLoon't know what to do By Renee Downing The Arizona Daily Star In "A Taste of Cherry," a sad-eyed, middle-aged man, Mr.

Badii (Homayon Ershadi), drives around Tehran, Iran. He steers his dusty Range Rover through the city and around the barren hills outside the city. The only sounds are those of the engine, pf the tires on the pebbly dirt surface and ambient noise from the construction sites, dumps and playgrounds along the road. Mr. Badii drives and drives as the day draws to an 'St "A Taste of Cherry" Is sponsored by the University of Arizona's Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

On Friday evening, the center and the Iranian Association of Arizona present a special evening on campus, including a reception, a lecture on Iranian women in film and a showing of "A Taste of Cherry." Proceeds benefit the Persian Language Scholarship Fund. For Information, call 621-8079. The center's Web site is w3.arizona.edu7Ecmesua end, anxiously looking for men who are alone. Whenever he spots one in an out-of-the-way place, he pulls over REVIEW: "A Taste of Cherry," written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami, stars Homayon Ershadi. 95 min.

In Farsl, subtitled. Not rated. (Nothing offensive.) It's showing at the Gallagher (on the UA campus) through Sunday. Mr. Badii (Homayon Ershadi) seeks someone willing to bury him You itch for a peek at the ever about-to-open Kartchner Caverns near Benson.

Keep scratching. Arizona's second-most-famous hole in the ground won't be open for years. But this is good. See Congdon first. So as the sun scorches Speedway, hole up in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum's Congdon Earth Sciences Center.

This manwoman-made marvel is to fake caves what a Steven Spielberg T. rex is to one of the surly originals. A counterfeit, to be sure, but it'll set your pulse galloping. You enter a large, murky maw, which' exhales cool, subterranean breath. Inside, you get the whole cave thing: Stalactites, stalagmites, a hidden pool and a cramped crawl way.

You'll wonder, "How'd did the Desert Museum people pull this one off?" Well, they dug a hole, installed water pumps, built fake rocks and added props. Next to Nature's own, the best show in Arizona. The Desert Museum, 2021 N. Kinney Road, is open every day, during summer from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Admission is $8.75 adults, $1.75 children 6 through 12; under 6 admitted free. and offers him a ride. It gradually becomes clear that what Mr. Badii is looking for so But that plot summary leaves out almost everything: the film's uncanny, slowly gathering force; our sense of essential truths emerging from Mr. Badii' encounters along the way; our dawning realization that nothing can touch or explain a despair so settled.

Mr. Badii's bizarre quest would be difficult anywhere, but among devout Muslims it's especially problematic. Suicide is absolutely taboo and forbidden even as a subject of fiction: "A Taste of Cherry" has still not been released in Iran. In fact, Kiarostami had to add a superficially distancing, "life-affirming" conclusion to get the film past the censors and out to the European film In spite of perhaps because of the extraordinary restrictions within which they must work, Iranian directors such 'as Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi White and Mohsen Makhmalbaf have developed a stunningly concentrated style of filmmaking. Its hallmarks are exquisite visual composition, deceptive simplicity of plot and an uncanny knack for suggesting much more than is ever shown.

The haunting effect of "A Taste of Cherry" emerges as if by alchemy from cinematographer Homayon Payvar's gliding camera work, from the eerily immediate soundtrack and from the essential aloneness of each non-actor's confrontation with the camera. intently is a person willing to bury him. He plans to commit suicide that night, lying in a grave he's already prepared by the side of the road. This search for a man who'll throw "just 20 spadefuls of dirt" over his body, and the conversations he has with the men he approaches, constitute the entire action of "A Taste of Cherry" the Cannes Palme d'Or winner from Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami..