Of the modernists, Ernest Hemingway was by far the most man-friendly: A robust outdoorsman with a spartan style, Hemingway personified his best characters and in fact eclipsed them in legend. And though, like them, he had a brooding dark streak that eventually led to his demise, the portrait of him…
Everyone knows The Nutcracker, but few people know the story — and that’s for a good reason: It’s is so slight, it’s almost incoherent. Yeah, there’s a pseudo-plot in the first act about a battle with a Rat King or something, but that’s all wrapped up by the second act,…
Superman provides the basic template: publicly mild-mannered and lame, but secretly able to jump tall buildings and dominate everything. The potential for variations on that superhero theme is basically endless — and particularly so coming from kids, whose superheroes, unencumbered by the conventions of the genre, don’t really have to…
People read novels for two major reasons: for a good yarn, first and foremost, but also to be immersed in a world that’s different from the one they occupy — not just to learn about how it works, but to feel it, to experience its dramas and to know the…
Ah, the social justice film. We know this trick: They lure you in with their compelling story line and gorgeous cinematography, only to depress you with their social problem for which you are at least indirectly complicit. Today, we learn about the horrors of the fishing industry in The End…
When you strip away the jingles, the barrage of products and the unrelenting shopping blitz, the holidays are basically about nostalgia — our memories of childhood and our need to recapture that more innocent time. And that’s really one of the only reasons we endure what the holidays actually are,…
If you’re looking for Greg Warren while he’s in town for a five-night stand at the Comedy Works downtown, there’s an excellent chance you’ll find him at the Cheesecake Factory on the 16th Street Mall. “I talk a lot about restaurants because I eat two or three meals a day…
“Flamenco is not folk art,” argues Natalia Perez Vel Villar. “It’s an art. I always try to make the point of how difficult it is.” She’d know. Having begun her training as a flamenco dancer in her teens (she started in ballet, but switched), Perez Vel Villar has spent most…
Revolution and art have always gone hand in hand, from the Bolshevik-era propaganda of the Soviets to the freak-out frescoes of the psychedelic ’60s. That’s why, for Zach Alexander, the best way to bring a bunch of disparate social-change groups together is under one big artistic umbrella. “The thing we…
Of all the great female jazz singers of the mid-twentieth century, Nina Simone was perhaps the most distinctive, enigmatic, occasionally bewildering. And so it makes sense that An Evening With Nina, Shadow Theatre Company’s new musical about her life, would be similarly hard to describe. It’s a sort-of-musical about a…
One way to think of monkeys is as extremely ugly children — at least, that’s how we like to think of monkeys, because if you think of them that way, then everything they do is hilarious, even when they’re sad. So because Wednesday is by most estimates the most depressing…
If you think about it, the concept of money in general is pretty weird: Basically, we assign a value to a random object and, as a society, agree upon its representative worth — there’s nothing intrinsically valuable about a $20 bill, for example, but neither is there anything intrinsically valuable…
When we kicked off Show and Tell back in late July or whenever that was, we had an idea for a kind of a catch-all section, a place to put arts- and culture-related stuff that didn’t quite fit into our food, music and news blogs — comedy, fine arts, films,…
It was a classic case of giving back: Chris Mburu, once sponsored by an American named Hilde Beck to attend school in his native Kenya, went on to graduate from Harvard, become a human rights lawyer and start a Kenyan school of his own for students in the situation he…
Everyone knows mascots are creepy. Like clowns, they hide behind a mask of anonymity, which, in addition to their bizarre appearance, allows them a license to act in ways that are human-like, but just far enough outside of the realm of normal human behavior that the combination is more than…
No matter how you slice it, wolverines are badasses. They live in the northernmost regions of the world, remote, forbidding climates that test even the most rugged of humans. They will summit a sheer mountain slope for no discernible reason, and, with a size clocking in at about three feet…
Pamela Mencher has spent eleven years working on her play — but in some ways, she’s been working on it her whole life. Born on a Lakota/Sioux reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Mencher spent her formative years there and on a Blackfeet reservation in Montana during the civil rights…
For about the next two weeks, the daylight hours will continue to get shorter, leaving little to do but contemplate the existential despair that comes with the gathering darkness, and maybe try to get some Christmas shopping done. Unless you’re Jewish, in which case it’s day six of Hanukkah, which…
Some 400,000 years ago, the earliest ancestors of man as we know him migrated out of Africa and into the land that would later become the snootiest place on earth: Western Europe. But that area was not so fancy then; in fact, it was rugged and cruel, and an ice…
People like to make their voices heard — and here at Westword, our poor editorial assistant is often an unwilling outlet for that: We get a lot of random people leaving messages on our general line. They complain about our coverage, leave us bizarre, incoherent “tips,” or, in the case…
Considering it’s an activity wherein people look on while other people walk down a street and do things at the same time, it’s unsurprising that the least boring thing about a parade is usually the floats. Actually, a lot of the time, the floats are pretty awesome — like the…
The upside is, every so often, a work of art comes along that is so innovative it changes the whole paradigm of its media, bearing a tangible influence on everything that follows. The downside is, most of what follows is a pale imitator — like how every movie with an…
