For 35 days this summer, Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Hillary Hall made Colorado history when her office issued more than 200 same-sex marriage licenses. In doing so, she defied Colorado Attorney General John Suthers’s threats of legal action. Late last month, after the Colorado Supreme Court issued a stay…
Basketball is “the sport that best defines the 21st-century American experience,” argues Brett Kashmere, talking about the subject of his documentary From Deep, which will screen at the Sidewinder Tavern on Saturday, August 16. The cinematic essay explores basketball, hip-hop, and the way the progressive narrative of race relations in…
The do-it-yourself ethic is one of the great legacies of the punk movement. For over forty years, people have been creating their own zines — self-published magazines, a subject Djake Carroll explores in his short documentary, Zinester: The Art of Individualism in the Era of Mass Media, which will have…
Twenty-five years ago, the entire population of the United States was obsessing over a question posed by David Lynch and Mark Frost in their cult-classic television series Twin Peaks: “Who killed Laura Palmer?” The show’s pilot will play at the Alamo Drafthouse tonight, and from noon Saturday through noon Sunday,…
Even in his last year, at the bottom of the ninth, with two outs and the Rockies down, when Todd Helton came to bat, hope would vibrate through Coors Field. Fans would roar, and everybody knew the team had a fighting chance, because this brawny beast with country swagger cared…
The Denver Zine Library, which has changed spaces seven times in its eleven-year history, has packed up its 15,000-plus zines and moved yet again. For the uninitiated, “zines are hard to define,” says library co-founder Kelly Shortandqueer. “They’re typically photo-copied, self-published magazines of sorts. Some people just do them in…
This summer, the Boulder County Clerk Hillary Hall issued more than 200 marriage licenses to same-sex couples before the Colorado Supreme Court agreed to consider Colorado Attorney General John Suthers’s arguments against it this fall — and ordered Hall to stop. But this wasn’t the first time a Boulder clerk…
Somewhere between the first time a cave man chiseled an idea into stone and an early adopter tweeted a phrase in 140 characters, the zine was born. Zines are self-published magazines, often hand-drawn, collaged, typed on old-fashioned typewriters or scrawled in Sharpie, pen and pencil. The contents vary: Some are…
On June 25, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Utah’s gay-marriage ban, setting a precedent for states in its jurisdiction, including Colorado, where voters had adopted a ban on same-sex marriages in 2006. Hours later, Boulder County Clerk Hillary Hall began issuing same-sex marriage licenses. For weeks, Colorado…
Today and tomorrow, artists working at the intersection of social justice and the art world will gather at Anderson Ranch outside Aspen to discuss their projects as a part of Making the Change They Want to See. The artists are as varied as Steve McQueen, director of 12 Years a…
The Polish landscape is cold, cloudy and bleak, and serves as a perfect backdrop for films that mine the existential frustrations of the human experience, including the 21 recently restored films in Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema, a series that begins tonight at the Sie FilmCenter. Many of…
“How do you move forward when you’ve lost everything?” That’s what many people asked after last September’s floods in Boulder, recalls Emily K. Harrison of Square Product Theatre. The ensemble’s new production, SLAB, explores the same question but in a different context: the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. The play,…
Quentin Tarantino’s movies have incurred the wrath of many. In Newsweek, Daniel Mendelsohn accused Inglorious Basterds of turning Jews into Nazis, arguing that the film was cashing in on the fragile nature of historical memory. Spike Lee has criticized Tarantino for nearly two decades. He went so far as to…
With summer fading away, the studios are releasing the last blockbusters and many moviegoers are dreading the pre-Oscar lull. Fear not, cinephiles. Denver’s movie scene is vibrant. This month you can huddle up and catch a doc at Sports Authority Field, drink a beer and watch a horror flick at…
Urban farmer and entrepreneur Beverly Grant grew up in northeast Park Hill in the 1970s. She saw Denver’s eastside go from being a thriving, middle-class black neighborhood to a food desert — a community without a grocery store. And more recently, she’s watched as longtime residents of Five Points, one…
Colorado’s independent film scene is booming, says filmmaker and photographer Ralph-Michael Giordano, whose exhibition A Colorado Tribute to Classic Hollywood will be featured at Tenn Street Coffee and Books on First Friday, as part of the Tennyson Street Artwalk. Giordano has spent the last six months rebooting classic photographs of…
Who was the first African American to play Major League Baseball? Jackie Robinson, of course. Larry Doby and Hank Thompson, two other black ball players who joined the majors in 1947, aren’t remembered as well, although they experienced the same brutal racism that Robinson did. And although Robinson is often…
Quentin Tarantino’s movies push the limits of cinematic violence and remix cult genre films into works of artistic rigor. Female characters lead many of his stories, and his depiction of women suggests a shift in the cultural fantasies of our era, says Denver Post film critic Lisa Kennedy, who will…
Catherine Opie began shooting photographs at the height of the AIDS crisis. Her portraits of LGBTQ people were born from the urgency of the moment: She was watching her friends die. Over the years, her work has evolved from documentary portraiture and landscapes toward greater abstraction and a study of…
For decades, feminists have challenged the art world to open up galleries and museums to women artists. While nominal progress has been made, many major institutions still show a disproportionate amount of work by male artists. This disparity is one of many reasons critics Eleanor Heartney and Nancy Princenthal and…
Too hot to hike? Escaping into a movie theater to glut on popcorn and blockbuster films is one of the tried and true ways to beat the blazing summer sun. Sure, these $200 million Hollywood titans sometimes crash — but even if they let you down, you can bank on…
The city’s $3.25 million settlement with Jamal Hunter is just the latest hit the Denver Sheriff’s Department has sustained in recent weeks. Between charges that complaints of abuse have been ignored and accusations that guards have been drinking on the job, smuggling in drugs and porn and instructing inmates to…
