Before you even say anything, we already know: It’s probably the most boring name for a fashion show ever, and it also makes us think of homeless people. And that’s a shame, because The Volunteers of America Holiday Fashion Show is just as haute and sleek as any show with…
There’s hardly any denying that MTV’s 16 and Pregnant is one of the most crassly exploitative shows ever made. Just the inherent nature of its subjects — pregnant sixteen-year-old girls — lends itself to portraying those subjects as frivolous, vindictive tards completely unprepared for the monumental task they are about…
It’s never too early to plant the seeds of life-long sexual neurosis; in this day and age of growing tolerance toward the scourge homosexuality, we’ve really got to step up our efforts to instill deep self-hatred in our children at an early age. That’s where Chased by an Elephant, the…
Though secular standbys like “Jingle Bells” will probably get more conventional radio play this season, when it comes to Christmas music, Handel’s Messiah is still the undisputed king. As usual, that soaring Jesus-jam will serve as the centerpiece for the Lakewood Cultural Center’s Come One & All, Rejoice sing-in, an…
In many ways, you could consider the Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt the Woody Allen of indie rock, a distinctly Big Apple auteur with a wry sense of humor and a neurotic outlook on love. In stark opposition to Allen’s garish personal life, however, the tabloid headlines on Merritt are pretty…
There are many types of sweaters – the cardigan, the sweater vest, the Cosby sweater – but none nearly as hideous as the Christmas sweater. Really, the fact that there might be any excuse at all to wear anything as garishly awful as, say, a Rudolph-adorned red-and-green pullover with rhinestones…
If there was a machine whose job it was to churn out Christmas stories — and it’s possible that there is — A Christmas Carol would be the default setting. Told and retold and told again for the past 150 years, its plot points are so ingrained in the collective…
Theater can provoke a lot of reactions, but apprehensive nail-biting is not typically one of them. “You rarely see thrillers on stage that have a lot of suspense,” observes Meridith Friedman, the Curious Theatre Company’s playwright-in-residence for the company’s world premiere of Robert Lewis Vaughan’s Astronomical Sunset. Not so, she…
Laura Goldhamer’s artistic output is eclectic — the banjo-picking songstress brings her considerable talent to several instruments, art projects and bands — but tonight’s performance, after a hiatus from touring with the Boulder-based Dovekins on the Tour de Fat, will be particularly diverse. Aside from the video installations she regularly…
Dear Denver International Airport, You stress me out. It’s not you — it’s just that airports in general stress me out. You’re too crowded, parking is a hassle, TSA makes me take off half my clothing and then feels me up inappropriately, and then when I finally get to the…
Cats and the internets have a lot in common: Fickle, indifferent and utterly shameless, they both exist in a tenuous state of domestication, serving no real purpose other than to amuse, and even then, only if they feel like it. Perhaps that’s why there’s no end to the random ways…
At most performances, a front row seat is the most desirable spot to be — aside from marking your status as the best person to shank and rob after the show, it’s also the best way to see the action. At a comedy show, though, it’s a little different. Much…
The internets are alive with the sound of music today. Specifically, they are alive with the music of Giga Pudding, some sort of obscure Japanese gelatin product that sports one of the most bizarre, irritating ad jingles of all time; the two-minute ad appeared embedded at the top of every…
If you’ve ever wanted to have some sort of educated-sounding title but didn’t want to go through the rigamarole of academia, then consider the time-honored baccalaureate of hipsters, prisoners and the unemployed everywhere: mixology, the only degree besides communications that directly involves booze. Of course, degrees require money, and you…
Technology can be confounding. I mean, it’s like you’ve gotta be a rocket scientist just to program your VCR, amiright? In all seriousness, though, when it requires five remote controls with some twenty buttons apiece to operate the television, when half the things you own somehow serve the function of…
It’s a common complaint about art: “I don’t get it.” The French theorist Nicolas Bourriaud explored that idea back in 1996 — how art can often be so removed from the everyday human experience, cordoned off in museums and behind velvet ropes, that it becomes something obscure, something elite and,…
At the leftover Yam Jam on Friday, skiers and snowboarders alike gathered to face it off freestyle in a casual post-Thanksgiving competition. They were facing off against each other — the skier and snowboarder events were separate — but the real rivalry was, of course, between those who favor riding…
Every once in a while in these vast United States, you come across an area so remote, so isolated, that the people of that area maintain a culture that is completely removed from the mainstream. The San Luis Valley in Colorado, where people still speak an archaic form of Spanish…
Thanksgiving has passed, which means that we’re now in the midst of what’s unofficially known as “holiday month,” the month where we’re relentlessly barraged with red and green strobelights and the not-so-subtle message to buy, buy, buy. But there’s more to holidays than just buying stuff, and it can be…
On what basically amounts to a national holiday dedicated to crass commercialism — Black Friday — at least a few people were gathered to do something at a mall that did not involve hemorrhaging money: It was the Black Friday Flash Mob and Silent Dance Party, where folks converged in…
The custom of watching The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, as Kiernan Maletsky pointed out the other day, is one of our more bizarre holiday traditions: There is almost no cultural event more boring than a parade in real life, but watching one on TV? Coma-inducing. Still, for lack of much…
There’s nothing Hollywood loves more than taking a universally beloved story or concept and remaking it — after all, what’s a more surefire moneymaking bet than something that’s already proven to be universally beloved? In that remake process, these five steps are generally observed: 1. Strip the story or concept…
