Being in an acclaimed indie-pop band might seem very different from being a desk jockey, but for Office, the order and structure of the working world is one of the keys to success. The Chicago band started as a freewheeling solo performance-art and songwriting project for Scott Masson, but its…
I’ve noticed recently that people on the street sometimes look at me strangely,” says Alison Sudol. “You know, kinda stare at me for a while, and then they smile, but then they don’t say anything, and I’m like ‘Okaaaay…?’ It’s these funny looks that I’ve never — ” On the…
I love hardcore. I love the intensity, directness and simplicity of the music. Although the sound has evolved stylistically over the years, the groups that rule today aren’t that far removed from the bands I loved growing up. While so much of the music industry is influenced by trends and…
When people talk about Steuben’s, they usually talk about the place rather than the food. Sure, the kitchen does some dishes well (big plates of hand-cut fries drowning in gravy and topped with perfectly browned and melted white cheese) and some dishes wrong (fried chicken that, every time I try…
No best out of three. No deliberation about what number we’re going to count to before throwing. No time to over-think things. This is drunken Rock Paper Scissors, and the loser has to pee in the sink. But it’s no big deal. In fact, it’s my idea. As fourth in…
What would Britney do? At one time, she was the biggest pop star on the planet; now her name is just another term for vagina (when used in a sentence: “Her skirt was so short, when she bent over I saw her Britney”). One day, in a silent protest of…
Brian Sifferman has had a rough couple of years. Brought in for the opening of Corridor 44 (see review), he’s the last member of the original team left, the one who’s survived every cull, every shift in direction, every bad night, week and month. Now he’s not only the manager,…
I drink champagne when I’m happy and when I’m sad. Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I’m not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it — unless I’m thirsty. — Lilly…
When Pumpkin King Jack Skellington stumbles from Halloween Town to Christmas Land, no one — except, perhaps, his perceptive little friend Sally — can foresee the impending disaster that will arrive when Jack attempts to take over Christmas for a year. He gets the Halloween Townspeople to help create toys…
Artisans & Kings. For its first extravaganza of the season, the Denver Art Museum has unveiled a sprawling blockbuster in the Frederic C. Hamilton Building that focuses on the royal collections from the Louvre. You don’t have to know much about art to have heard of the Louvre, so Artisans…
Last weekend, during the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) convention in Denver, the Denver Art Museum announced the hiring of Darrin Alfred (pictured) to the newly created post of AIGA assistant curator of graphic design. He was introduced by DAM director Lewis Sharp and AIGA executive director Richard Grefé…
The idea of creating contemporary art that refers back to traditional art while still breaking new ground is called conceptual realism. Though the movement embraces a range of expressions, what connects it all is recognizable imagery used to some kind of conceptual end, and often with a sarcastic, sardonic or…
Defiance. The second play in a projected trilogy (the first is Doubt, which took the Pulitzer Prize and will be staged at the Denver Center in spring), Defiance examines the state of the U.S. Marine Corps in 1971, when the Vietnam War had lost all vestige of legitimacy for most…
My Old Lady begins like a clash-of-cultures comedy of manners, as Mathias Gold, a penniless, middle-aged American, enters the stylish Paris apartment he’s inherited from his father and discovers the apartment’s one drawback: Under a typically French agreement called a viager, the place comes with its previous owner, who is…
As I was going up the stairI met a man who wasn’t there.He wasn’t there again today.I wish, I wish he’d go away. Thom Pain (based on nothing) is a strange, hour-and-some-long monologue. It contains passages about both a sad little boy and a failed love affair, and some viewers…
AC/DC: Plug Me In (Sony) Bob the Builder: Ultimate Adventure Collection (Hit Entertainment) Bully 911: Stop Being a Victim (Bayview) Believers (Warner Bros.) Best Picture Collection (MGM)The Hoax (Miramax) Hollow Man: Director’s Cut (Sony) The Invisible (Disney) Ironside: Season 2 (Shout) The Jazz Singer: Three-Disc Deluxe Edition (Warner Bros.) The…
Transformers(DreamWorks)No doubt, Michael Bay’s slam-bang action-figure commercial doesn’t play nearly as well on TV, no matter how high or high-def your screen; this demands to be seen on a screen the size of a skyscraper and heard on speakers as large as jet engines. So the first half-hour plays flat,…
Love him or despise him, head Jackass Johnny Knoxville has made millions from getting kicked in the yambag. Had YouTube arrived before Jackass, Knoxville, Steve-O, and the show’s other gutterpunk masochists might still be slinging French fries, getting burned by hot grease in a strictly nonrecreational way. But with a…
“Beautiful” and “cruel” — that’s how director Ang Lee describes Eileen Chang’s 1979 short story about obsessive love and effortless betrayal in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, a tale upon which Lee has based his epic-length Lust, Caution. Writing in the afterword to a recently republished version of the 54-page story, which took…
Late in Rendition, in case you’ve been blind and deaf enough not to have cottoned to the drift, a tense Washington exchange on the legitimacy of bundling dark-skinned Americans off to secret prisons abroad takes place. On one side is a driven young senatorial aide (Peter Sarsgaard), on the other…
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,” Raymond Chandler wrote in 1950’s “The Simple Art of Murder,” smacking the ascot off the drawing-room mystery and all its crime-solving dilettante dandies. “He must be…a man of honor, by instinct,…
Denise and Alan Fields have encountered a lot of ludicrous baby gear while writing and updating Baby Bargains, the number-one baby-product book in the country. So when they say a particular product is one of the most outrageous they’ve discovered, you know they mean business. Here are a few of…
