Arts & Entertainment

That St. Mark’s Coffeehouse is a great place to stop for a cup of joe should not come as a surprise to anyone. This offshoot of the original LoDo spot has drawn the hiptelligentsia since first opening its enormous sliding garage door in 1997. They come for the coffee, bagels, panini and sweets, but stay for the company: cool teachers grading papers, the students who wrote them, artists and journalers, businessmen and housewives, and, of course, those insufferable coffee-shop rats, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and reveling in their own asinine chatter. St. Mark’s has always been a good coffeehouse, but it’s gotten even better over the past year. It ditched the fee for wireless and opened up the Ubisububi Room, a performance area that shares basement space with the Thin Man next door and offers everything from free movies to standup comedy to live acoustic music. The Thin Man and St. Mark’s share ownership as well, and a swinging-door relationship allows 21-and-up patrons to enjoy a cocktail on either side of the common wall. So grab a mocha or a mojito, and settle in to enjoy the Paris of the Plains version of cafe culture.

There isn’t a big market for cheese fries and softcore porn, but Tom’s Diner has it cornered. A nightly 3 a.m. destination for hopped-up club-goers and insomniacs, the friendly restaurant is outfitted with a number of Touch Maxx games, heaven-sent by the touch-screen mini-arcade bar gods. The black idiot boxes rest on the edge of yellow-upholstered booths and provide at least five to ten minutes of greasy-fingered fun between coffee refills. There’s music trivia and word scramble, but the erotic photo hunt is by far the best T&A that 25 cents can buy. You choose babes or hunks, and Touch Maxx will give you a Highlights-like X-rated game of “Can you find the differences between these two nearly identical pornographic photos?” The winner is rewarded with a priceless flash animation of jiggling body parts.

One patron can sip espresso and study for a trig midterm on a couch in the back while another talks loudly, sipping a glass of vino at the bar in the front, and never the two shall meet. That’s because Leela European Cafe — open 24 hours a day — is as panoptic as the European continent itself, with lofty ceilings and a wall of windows facing the street. Serving a full menu, with free WiFi and a large stage and dance floor, Leela wants to be everything to everyone — including that indecorous creature of the night, the chain-smoking teenager. There’s a vending machine that sells cigs and a ventilation system that sucks smoke like the lungs of a Sicilian. At Leela, teens can assimilate into the cafe culture and learn to be buzzed all night, just like adults.

In the land of Starbucks, seeking out the small independent coffee shops can feel like an archaeological mission. Thank God for blogs like milehighbuzz.com, started by a self-described “coffee shop junkie” with the initials DCB, to provide locations and info about some of his favorite hangouts. The website provides photos, maps and hours of such Denver mainstays as the Tattered Cover and Common Grounds, and also provides a peek at hidden neighborhood jewels like the Shooting Star Cafe and Stella’s Coffeehaus. Log on and smell the coffee.

Lesbian-couple owners and operators Jody Bouffard and Kathleen McDowell launched tHERe last summer in the old Oh My Goddess! Space on Colfax. In addition to serving LaVazza coffee and Tazo and loose teas from Wild Oats, the barista babes’ cozy Capitol Hill cafe hosts weekly “stitch & bitch” knitting sessions, a pagan discussion group, lesbian speed-dating and musical events. It’s also Denver dykes’ place of choice to view the must-see-TV sapphic soap, The L Word, during which, rumor has it, the riveted audience is so silent you can hear a thong drop. McDowell and Bouffard may soon be able to add booze to their list of offerings: The shop is up for its liquor license hearing, scheduled for March 31. We’ll drink to that!

Jack and Ennis? What about Jacqui and Eunice? They’re here, they’re queer, and if you think gay cowboys can rope ’em and ride ’em, try gay cowgirls. It’s hard to say who dances purtier, cowboys or cowgirls, but at C’s, ya don’t hafta dance with the one what brung ya. In fact, you don’t have to be able to dance at all — they’ll teach you for free with dance lessons every Saturday night. You can also shoot pool, throw darts, cheer on the Broncos or sit under the stars on the covered patio and serenade your sugar ’til the cows come home. Git along, little dykies.

For the past 25 years, Charlie’s is where all the real gay cowboys (and ranch hands, sheepherders and rodeo riders) have met, two-stepped and tried to quit each other. But it’s hard to quit watching them twirling each other gracefully across the floor every night in their ten-gallon hats, boots and skintight Wranglers. If line-dancing isn’t your thing, Charlie’s offers other choices: non-C&W dancing, pool, darts, trivia, karaoke, Broncos parties, food, the bar’s infamous annual Valentine bachelor/bachelorette auction and many other events throughout the year that benefit the LBGT community. So slap on your spurs, come on down and cowboy up.

If Grenade were to put a help-wanted ad in the newspaper for a doorman to join his coalition of hotties, it would read: “Looking for an Adonis, six-foot-plus, with chiseled features, washboard abs and an affinity for tight jeans and fitted T-shirts.” And we thought the bouncer mold was football-player rotund, with a double chin, buzzed hair and an affinity for Twinkies. But at a place as West Coast-wannabe as Grenade, a Euro-hawk-sporting pretty boy will suffice. Actually, it’s preferred.

A weekday fixture on the seven-to-five shift, 52-year-old Terry Sullivan has been tending the 72 feet of mahogany at Duffy’s Shamrock for more than 23 years, dispensing a quip as he whips up an Irish coffee, exchanging notes on the latest Broncos win (he’s held north end-zone season tickets since 1967) while drawing a Guinness, wondering aloud about the Rockies’ woes (on homestands, that’s Terry up in section 328, row 1) while pouring a cup of black joe for a stockbroker en route to work. “Night bartending is tough,” the balding, bespectacled master of his domain explains. “You get a different crowd. Working days has allowed me to keep regular hours, raise a family and have a pretty good time.” Truth be known, he’s following in his father’s footsteps. Dad Danny was the longtime proprietor of Sullivan’s, just around the corner at 14th and Court Place, which fell to the wrecking ball in 1982 — the same year Terry took up at Duffy’s.

During Friday night’s Lipgloss festivities, the men’s room at La Rumba is backed up worse than DIA on Thanksgiving weekend. Luckily, controlling all that human traffic is one Brooks Miller, wise-ass, punk-rock bathroom attendant. With a barely perceptible smirk that nonetheless screams, “Dude, are you for real?,” he squirts soap, administers cologne and keeps the paper towels coming. With the Buddha-like patience of a junior-high janitor, he seems almost paternalistically fond of his drunken, dick-in-hand wards. Don’t forget to tip, my friends. You are in the presence of a master.

If you can maneuver the maze of striped shirts that line the bar five-deep and survive repeated offers to take Jagermeister shots with complete strangers, you will have the opportunity to immortalize yourself in the TP-littered graffiti gallery that is LoDo’s bathroom. Better than freshly laid cement, LoDo’s stalls are a canvas waiting to be decorated with your wit, poetry, declarations of love and, even better, testaments of hate. Nowhere is the First Amendment so righteously put into practice. Tell Jessica she is a slut. Let everyone know that Matt slept with Veronica. Leave your number (for a good time), and know that people will read your profound thoughts while they are peeing for years to come.

Several months after opening, the Meadowlark Lounge still has that new-bar smell, thanks to its decision to 86 smoking. Everything in the underground tavern is pristine and clean, from the shiny bar to the bathrooms, a dichotomy to gritty Larimer Street just outside its heavy, wooden door. But the place is laid-back and unassuming, a perfect spot for a chill beer, a conversation and even some mind expansion, thanks to Pyroclastic, a new experimental electronic-music night that makes its nest at the ‘Lark every other Thursday. Pretty soon, the subterranean spot will feel worn in, like it belongs in the hood, but it won’t ever smell like an ashtray.

When Eagle County and Pueblo have passed smoking bans, you know the writing is on the wall. Whether or not the Colorado Clean Indoor Act passes the legislature and is signed by the governor is almost moot. If they don’t, the Denver Regional Council of Governments will step in and almost-assuredly push one through for the entire Denver Metro area. Before lighting up becomes a crime, head over to Charlie Brown’s. Sure the smoke is thick and heavy there, but that’s part of the bar’s charm, along with the piano and Paul Lopez tinkling its ivories. It brings back images of older days when Denver was young and brash. There’s also the cheap surf and turf that is surprisingly good, and the patio is one of the best in the city for early evening people watching.

It’s not really the Fillmore’s fault. The venue hosts a wide range of musicians and holds a couple thousand people, so it’s bound to attract some contradictory characters. Being right across Clarkson from Sancho’s Broken Arrow probably doesn’t help. And after all, Colorado is a red state. Whatever the reason, when the jam bands come out and play, the Fillmore is probably the only place on the planet where you can find dreadlocked, patchouli-smelling, pot-smokin’, patchwork-wearing ‘Heads who sincerely believe in the power of capitalism and who would have voted for Bush — but they totally spaced that whole democratic-voice thing on election day. Look for a Republican hippie the next time the Fillmore opens its doors for a jam band; when you find one, enjoy the sheer absurdity of it all.

The Ramada Inn Downtown Denver is like a rock-and-roll RV park on weekend nights, when tour buses crowd the parking lot and bleary-eyed musicians trickle through the lobby at all hours. The crash pad for artists and crews in town for shows at the Fillmore, Ogden and Bluebird theaters — as well as an actual hotel for normal people in town for things like vacations and conventions — the Ramada is a totally entertaining culture clash. On a single floor, you might find a cluster of cattlemen, a sweet family of four from Omaha, the Insane Clown Posse and a bunch of college kids tripping on acid after a killer String Cheese Incident show. This human mishmash creates some amusingly weird scenes inside the elevator, and the Ramada’s rock-star element also makes for fun rounds of Who’s Who in the Lobby: Is that Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, or just a Capitol Hill hipster look-alike? Only the front-desk clerk knows for sure.

If you can squeeze in between the former and current thespians bellied up to the piano at Charlie Brown’s Bar, lovable Paul Lopez will play nearly any song you can name, as long as it was written before 1980. But Paulie will also occasionally astound the truly lucky patron with telepathic feats both impressive and mundane. He may recount details of a stunned piano-side couple’s recent trip to Leadville, or tell how many siblings they have. He will most certainly pinpoint the radio station they listened to growing up. Lopez wowed the Sunday cafeteria crowd for years down at Furr’s, but his true calling is in knowing the extraordinarily ordinary.

Martini Ranch’s entire bar is a dance floor, and after a few drinks, everyone in the place believes they possess mad dance skills. Whether it’s a packed Saturday or a sparse Tuesday night, once the beat gets thumping, you start to see a shoulder drop here, a booty shake there. In no time, it’s like MTV’s Grind circa 1997. The music is old-school, and the moves aren’t much better: There’s always a guy in hiking boots and an intramural softball jacket trying to get down and dirty with every female leg in range. Still, for every Joe lacking rhythm, there’s one who can really let loose, and at Martini Ranch, you’ll find him sandwiched between two blondes singing Bon Jovi at a deafening decibel level. And after a couple of the Ranch’s vodka-saturated drinks, the whole crowd is more than halfway there. Oh, oh, living on a prayer.

Ladies’ night at Stampede is like nothing you’ve ever seen — a cross between Urban Cowboy and a crowded frat party. The massive warehouse of a bar fills a Wal-Mart-sized parking lot with thirsty, sometimes desperate women and the men who’ve come to claim them. Once inside, there’s no limit to the free booze on offer to the ladies — which means their male companions rarely have a problem scoring freebies, either. When the country music starts to play, about every other song, the couples fly around the dance floor; other times, groups of girls grind to hip-hop. The spectacle is occasionally boosted by the sight of a gorgeous dame riding atop a mechanical bull; every now and then, the same bull will whip some lanky lad into the air and onto his ass. That’s entertainment.

If ever there was a needed combination, it’s martinis and manicures. And at five dollars for each, it’s a pairing that can’t be beat. Manicure Mondays at Club Evolution are the perfect down note for a hard-partying weekend: Come in, relax with an Absolut 007 martini, get floofed and put your feet up. You’ll be refreshed and perky for Tuesday.

Last fall, the Potcheen Folk Band shelled out for a 1983 MCI Crusader 2 coach bus. Talk about a great investment — not to mention a phenomenally brilliant marketing ploy. Several times a month, the magic bus — outfitted with several video monitors, plentiful seating and a fully stocked cooler full of brews — makes stops at numerous pre-determined locales across the Front Range like a gambling charter. The booze cruise then shuttles fans to whatever venue the Irish-centric act happens to be playing that night for several hours of drunken whiskey songs, rebel songs and general pirate debauchery, then deposits them back at their cars with (hopefully) plenty of time to sober up.

The Front Porch has been hyped as a neighborhood bar downtown. And it kind of is — if your idea of a neighborhood bar is tables dressed up with odd wheatgrass displays and dressed-down LoDo glitterati packed in like sardines. Apparently in LoDo, not having a VIP room qualifies you as “neighborhood quaint.” But regardless of labels, or mis-labels, people flock to the Front Porch because it has two of the best drink specials in the city. In one, the bar assigns names to days of the month — sometimes as many as three per day — and if you’re there on the day that your name is featured, you drink for free. It’s kind of like a birthday except there are no assholes poisoning you with nasty shots. Drink what you want, all night, free. And on Wednesdays, the Front Porch really gets moving with the brilliant-in-its-simplicity Flip Night. Order some drinks, the bartender flips a coin, you call heads or tails, and if you call correctly, your drinks are free. This parlor trick holds as true for one drink as it does for fifteen. If you’re lucky, you’ll get hammered without paying a thing. Just remember to tip your flippin’ bartender.

There’s a venue in Denver to cover just about any taste, price range or neighborhood prejudice. But the stalwart Old Curtis Street Bar has its own vibe entirely. Sitting precisely between Monkey Mania and the Carioca Cafe in a little no-man’s-land that yuppies rarely touch, Old Curtis is a downtown oasis. Cheap beer, a great jukebox, cool DJs and hipster trivia nights (Simpsons! Sci-fi!) are all pluses. What you might not expect, though, is how much fun the live shows are. You won’t catch too many world-class acts at Old Curtis Street, but it’s got great acoustics and an, um, egalitarian booking policy that makes for crazy, eclectic bills, the kind you just won’t find at Denver’s more decorated rock clubs. Oh, yes, and the green chile will kick your ass.

Soda Jerk, Denver’s premier promoter of punk and hardcore, had been dwelling comfortably in Rock Island for two years. At least it seemed like a cozy fit — until February, when Soda Jerk’s Mike Barsch abruptly yanked up roots and replanted his operation in the newly refurbished Marquis Theatre. His timing couldn’t have been better; as Brendan’s Pub and an earlier incarnation of the Marquis, the LoDo locale had its share of struggles over the years. But now, after massive reconstructive surgery and Barsch’s aggressively adventurous calendar of events, the Marquis is well on its way to regaining its glory.

First it was Zu Denver, then 60 South, then the South Park Tavern, then the Cherry Pit. Then it was a vacant, smoldering hole. But in January this year, months after a fire demolished the insides of the Pit, the 3 Kings Tavern rose, phoenix-like, from the…well, you get the picture. What no one really expected, though, was for someone to pump some real life and character back into the room. But co-owners Jim Norris, Jeff Campbell and Martin Kilorin, along with promoter and soundman Ross McAfee, have done exactly that. With a punk/rock/metal bent that perfectly complements the rest of SoBo’s varied hipster establishments, 3 Kings offers enough great sound, cheap drinks and cool DJs (like Monday night’s Tim Cook and Mr. Fil) to carve something special out of Denver’s crowded club scene.

Denver’s club scene gets more crowded by the month, with new venues sprouting up like spring blossoms (or weeds, depending on how you look at them). Regardless, the hi-dive towers head and shoulders over the field. Into its third year, the club’s booking of local and national acts only gets better — but the bands are only part of the equation. The stage and sound are ideal. The all-ages shows are run smoothly and humanely. Sputnik, the hi-dive’s next-door satellite bar, is a great place to chill out before, during or after the rock. Strelka, its kitchen, serves awesome food that caters to carnivores and vegans alike. The whole room is the perfect mix of respectable and seedy, and the owners aren’t afraid to host multimedia dance parties one night and noise operas the next. And the location, smack in the middle of one of Denver’s coolest neighborhoods, can’t be beat. Above all, the hi-dive excels at being intimately, passionately involved with the scene that sustains it. It’s not just a place to watch a band, chug a beer and take a piss on your way out. Instead, it feels like home.

Since 1997, Donald Rossa’s comfortable, forward-looking club, Dazzle, has been bringing Denverites the best local jazz talent (bassist Ken Walker, trumpeter Greg Gisbert, et al.) and a broad array of internationally recognized musicians. Last October, Rossa coaxed legendary New York pianist Stanley Cowell into playing a rare club date at the Capitol Hill venue, and in May, piano titan Monty Alexander will drop by for a gig. Meanwhile, Dazzle’s justly famous Sunday jazz brunch (featuring Denver-born singer Julie Monley and her French husband, pianist Fredric Des Moulins) has grown into a reservations-required event. Dazzle features music in two rooms — the hip, sleek bar up front and the more commodious dining room in back. The food is pretty good, too. Recently, the jazz-lovers’ bible, Down Beat, named Dazzle one of the world’s 100 best jazz clubs, and rightly so. These days, it even has its own big band, the periodically convened 9th and Lincoln Orchestra.

Bolstered by great sight lines, a sizable elevated stage and impeccable sound, the Walnut Room has quickly become one of the finest rooms in town. An intimate performance space on the edge of the Ballpark neighborhood, the Walnut has filled the void left by the Soiled Dove (which recently shifted the focus of its LoDo locale and moved to a brand-new facility in Lowry, slated to open later this year). But although the newer venue is similar to its Market Street forebear, both in ambience and the type of acts it presents (the Dove’s former talent coordinator, Mark Sundermeier, is handling booking duties), the Walnut Room has carved out its own identity. The staging area, for instance, is completely separate from the main bar, which has the look and feel of a quaint neighborhood pub; it’s the ideal place to escape the music for a few minutes. The club also has free, lighted parking and a decent-sized outdoor patio — not to mention some of the best pizza around.

There’s a reason the Fray chose to film parts of its first video at Boulder’s Fox Theatre. Aside from being among the country’s best-regarded venues, the Fox continues to offer the Front Range’s pinnacle concert experience. Unrestricted sight lines and flawless sound abound, and the calendar is consistently excellent and diverse, with the best and brightest locals, indie hip-hop and rock, mainstream acts on the verge, and everything in between. Factor in a friendly bar staff and reasonable drink prices, and you have a room that is simply the most intimate and enthralling place to see a show.

It must have been like that line from The Blues Brothers when the immortal Baldo Rex got back together for one night in January at the Lair: “We’re putting the band back together. We’re on a mission from God.” And though another recent notable reunion — of Babihed — was inevitable, will last longer and will probably overshadow what was just a one-off for the immortal Baldo Rex, to see Baldo’s Ted Thacker waxing his ax again was a dream come true for those who recall the noisetastic band, which called it quits in the late ’90s. Churning out smart punk Weirdos style, Phil Wronski might have still had a stuffed animal stuck in his zipper when he belted out, “We have to cling together/ Like family/ Like lovers/ We are the rupture.” If only the dirtheads had never taken over 7 South.

It was a seemingly normal night when all hell broke loose at the Climax Lounge. A few notes into the third or fourth song of their set, the members of No Plot Kill, a Northglenn-based hardcore trio, inexplicably stopped playing, threw down their instruments and tore off outside the building — with the entire bar in tow. Then the Plot thickened. Apparently the band’s ire had been spiked by the opening act — a group of indignant, prefab, suburban Hot Topic punks called Crack Whore — who spit on No Plot Kill’s frontman David Bartz while he was on stage. In the end, though, the Whores narrowly avoided getting punked: Bartz and company gave the liberty-spiked crumb-snatchers a reprieve when they realized the kids were barely old enough to shave.

The King lives…at the Goosetown Tavern. Elvis may be best known locally for putting head to pillow at the old Regency Hotel or shopping at the now-closed Kortz Jewelers on the 16th Street Mall, but it wasn’t those venerable locations that his spirit chose to inhabit in perpetuity; it was along East Colfax Avenue, at the Goosetown. Hanging above the bar is what appears to be your standard, run-of-the-mill velvet Elvis painting, but if you watch closely, you can see him get all shook up. Some say his shimmy is just the wind from the front door as it opens and closes, but we know when we’re in the presence of royalty. Thank you, thank you very much.

When Polytoxic re-created the Band’s Last Waltz in its entirety on the night before Thanksgiving last year, it pulled out all the stops. An epic production that came uncannily close to replicating the real thing, Polytoxic and more than two dozen of its closest musician friends transported the capacity crowd back 25 years, to that legendary night at Winterland in San Francisco. Although Tori Pater and company had previously taken on other classic albums — one a month, to be specific, including Terrapin Station, Zenyatta Mondatta, Fiyo on the Bayou, The Joshua Tree, Hoist, In the Jungle Groove, Houses of the Holy, Exile on Main Street and Appetite for Destruction — their performance on this November night was nothing less than stunning.

There’s no single formula for a memorable concert, but the odds of greatness are significantly improved when a show takes place in a modest-sized venue and features an excellent group at its creative peak. System’s Ogden gig fit all of these criteria and more. The date was part of a brief tour intended to amplify interest in Mezmerize and Hypnotize, a pair of instant classics that had not yet been released, and it more than succeeded. Daron Malakian, Serj Tankian, Shavo Odadjian and John Dolmayan tore through their newest material with humor, fierce pride and a sense of discovery that instantly translated to the fortunate few who managed to score tickets for this up-close-and-personal showcase.

John Killup, aka Big John, is one scary motherfucker. He’s big, very big, covered in tattoos and usually wearing a scowl that could freeze lava. Get a little out of control at Three Dogs Tavern, and he’s going to keep law and order on your ass. But Killup has a softer side, too: The ladies’ man models for Suavecito’s, the local zoot-suit shop, and when he decides to let down, he has a killer smile. But don’t tell anyone.

Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? The Comedy Works may be celebrating its 25th birthday this year by bringing in one big name after another, but the club stays fresh by giving amateurs a chance, too. And there are no hours more amateur than Tuesday’s New Talent Night, when comedy guru Deacon Gray shepherds about fifteen newbies through brief sets. Not only does New Talent Night give untried comics a chance to perform before a real audience and develop skills, but Gray gives each performer written feedback after the show. Why did the chicken comedian cross the road? To test his wings at the Comedy Club.

There are 6,000 songs in the QuickSand Karaoke catalogue, and every single one of them leads to trouble. Nowhere is this more apparent than on Thursday nights at Bender’s, when the place transforms from a cool Capitol Hill music venue into a frantic den of karaoke insanity. Show up early if you want to sing, because by 10 p.m., the competition for stage time is fierce: Everyone in Cap Hill, it seems, has the same pressing need to sing — badly, drunkenly, obsessively — to scores of slushy strangers. QuickSand’s catalogue is vast, covering everything from Willie Nelson to Paul Weller, which means there’s something for every vocal range and pain threshold. Notice how the volume gets louder as the hour gets later; come closing time, you’ll be begging the DJ for just one…more…song.

Name any decade in recent memory, and it’s been raped by a million retro-frenzied DJs. But James Sharp — otherwise known as DJ Quid, host of the Skylark’s Wednesday-night party, Babydoll — has a knack for seeing culture in a non-linear fashion. Rather than stodgily rehashing pop’s ’50s and ’60s golden age, he’s tapped into its invisible corollary, one that extends from Buddy Holly to Morrissey, from the Ronettes to the Raveonettes. Most of this music, though, wasn’t built to dance to; predictably, Babydoll is more of a chill-out than a boogie fever. But Sharp’s picks are so infectious that, come midnight, there are always a few enraptured hipsters shakin’ it to Nancy Sinatra or the Cramps. That’s the mark of timeless music — and a great DJ.

Who is the man known as DJ Wesley Wayne? From practically out of nowhere, he’s stormed Denver’s indie club scene with guerrilla guest sets and oddball residencies like Sputnik’s What We Do Is Secret. But none of that prepared anyone for Night of the Living Shred, a Thursday-night blowout at Bender’s that Wayne helms alongside his Pirate Sound System partner, DJ Parris. Spinning everything from hair metal and vintage punk to electro and hip-hop — plus a few surprises that will leave your jaw under the table — the duo pulls off wired, schizophonic mixes that would make DJ Shadow proud. And maybe even a little scared.

To keep the momentum of monthly club night going, you have to have a strong identity, a tireless imagination and, of course, the love of the loyal. Rockstars Are Dead! is blessed with all three. But it’s not by the grace of God that founder Peter Black (aka DJ Aztec of the legendary So What!) sustained RAD!’s infrequent schedule and high energy level for over a year. Instead, he’s an indefatigable self-promoter who plays the industry game at least as well as he spins. And it’s paid off: After a promising start at the Walnut Room, Black and his cohorts the Polarity Twins packed up their crates and moved to the more simpatico clime of the hi-dive. There they’ve been able to expand their multimedia palate, bringing aboard more live bands, guest DJs, art and fashion to supplement the main reason the faithful keep coming back — to get their asses plastered to the dance floor.

Somewhere along the line, hip-hop became all about style over substance. People forgot about music and the culture. Thankfully, conscious hip-hop has slowly forced its way to the forefront, courtesy of acts like the Roots, Common and Talib Kweli, among others — artists you’d traditionally never hear in a club. Until Good Fridays, that is. The night does its best to subvert the status quo, as evidenced by its slogan: “No groupies. No bottle service. No bullshit.” Overseen by resident Radio Bum DJ Style N. Fashion and his young proteges, DJ Sounds Supreme and Massiv, Fridays celebrates real hip-hop. Thank God it’s Fridays.

In the restaurant world, you’re considered a success if you still have a standing wait after being in business for a certain amount of time. That said, Lipgloss is the club equivalent of the French Laundry. Founded in 2001 by the Denver 3 (now the Denver 2 since Tim Cook has parted ways with Lipgloss co-founders Michael Trundle and Tyler Jacobson), the ‘Gloss remains the hottest brand going. Five years in, there’s still a line down the block leading to La Rumba, Lipgloss’s home. Except now that line starts forming almost as soon as the doors open. Weekly listening parties and continually diverse playlists have made Lipgloss the choice destination for Denver’s hipsters and rock’s royalty; everyone from Franz Ferdinand to Peter Hook has stopped by. This kiss should be on your lips.

Capitol Hill’s beautiful boys (and a few straights) all come down to JR’s on Thursdays for High Energy Night, knowing that they’ll get hooked up — even if it’s only with fifty-cent Buds and half-price cocktails. Bears, femmes and twinks all happily co-habitate here, which makes for excellent people-watching and a pretty good shot at scoring, no matter your type. Sure beats the Donald and Must-See TV.

Overheard recently at Lipgloss: “Hey, bro, you gotta get down here, fast! Guess who’s on the dance floor right now? That hot chick!” Yes, that hot chick — plus about 300 of her best friends — are in attendance at La Rumba every Friday night. And the guys are just as dolled up as the gals, resulting in a veritable breeder feeding frenzy. Of course, resident DJs Michael Trundle and Tyler Jacobsen urge the whole orgy on with their patented mix of Brit pop, dance punk, garage rock, glam and soul. There’s absolutely nothing gay-unfriendly about Lipgloss. Just be prepared: The hetero hookup factor is off the meter.

Vinyl remains the answer to Denver’s Saturday-night blues. With three floors of music, from hip-hop to ’80s retro to the best in techno and house, most anybody can find something to like in the impressive SoCo club. As a stop on nearly every major electronic act’s tour, Vinyl plays host to the world’s biggest DJs on a weekly basis. Bad Boy Bill, Sasha, Dieselboy and Richie Hawtin are all regular faces in the main DJ booth; boosted by the club’s killer system, they’ve never sounded better. And the rooftop patio, with its city views, is one of the best spots in town.

Much more than just DJs, Friends in Stereo takes traditional deejaying a step further by incorporating live instrumentation, real-time effects and live vocals into a style that can be described as groovy performance art. Friends Colin Chapman, Reggie Lafaye and vocalist Orange Peel Moses have each played an integral part in the Denver dance-music scene’s development and maturation for more than a decade, and while it’s recently become fashionable to abandon pure electronic music in favor of dance rock like LCD Soundsystem, Friends in Stereo has remained true to its roots and to pure electronic music. With sharp breakbeats, electro riffs and Orange Peel’s vocals in the mix, the collective just may be the best thing to happen to Denver dance music since the advent of turntables.

One-upping Steve Albini ain’t easy. The world-famous sound engineer has recorded everyone from the Pixies and Nirvana to his own legendary bands Big Black and Shellac. In 2004, he also recorded Bright Channel’s eponymous debut at his Electrical Audio Studios in Chicago. The result, though, wasn’t as stellar as it could have been. While the songs and performances were brilliant, there seemed to be too much of a cold distance between the disc and its listener that blunted the impact of its droning, skyward-fixated sound. The trio’s sophomore effort, Self-Propelled, is a vast improvement, at once heavier, breathier, more celestial and more intimate than its predecessor. And the kicker? Singer/guitarist Jeff Suthers produced the whole thing in his basement studio, Flight Approved. Let’s hear it for do-it-yourself.

Typical CDs have an eighty-minute capacity, and Tha Revolushun fills nearly every second of that span with musical invention, ambition and achievement. The album’s introductory track declares that “hip-hop will revert back to its original essence. Purity, rawness, originality: That will be part of the equation.” Foundashun members Solpowa, Shunfist, Keo and Dent are clearly committed to this vision, and they spend the rest of the recording living up to it. Intricate production, conscious rhymes, excellent performances and memorable beats make this one Revolushun worth joining.

Back in 2004, veteran local bluesman Dan Treanor hooked up with R&B vocalist Frankie Lee for African Wind, a surprisingly effective hybrid of American blues and indigenous rhythms. Lee doesn’t participate this time around, and his absence is felt. Nevertheless, the current lineup is strong and sympathetic, and Treanor’s mastery of instruments ranging from the diddley bow and cane flute to the guitar and harmonica makes this a more-than-worthy sequel. Have Mercy.

Computers can be terrific musical tools, but only if artists use the technology to enhance their ideas rather than as a substitute for innovation. Justin Gitlin, who goes by CacheFlowe, strikes just the right balance. On Automate Everything, he refuses to limit himself to just one or two electronic styles, and his eclecticism pays dividends. Creatively speaking, CacheFlowe cashes in.

Some CD singles contain more musical data than does Be Mine, Valentine, which lasts a mere twelve minutes. Nevertheless, Drop Dead, Gorgeous makes every second count, spitting out six relentlessly energetic, emotionally intense songs whose impact is epitomized by the title “Knife Vs. Face: Round 1.” It’s music that leaves a mark.

In the past, detractors of Dressy Bessy vocalist Tammy Ealom have complained about the thick layer of sugar she spoons onto most of her songs. Fortunately, Electrified features a modified recipe. Ditties such as the title cut and “Second Place” are still sweet, but because they’re leavened with more substantial riffs, melodies and performances, they seem a lot more nutritious than their predecessors. Bring your appetite.

Blusom blooms thanks to the contrasting talents of partners Mike Behrenhausen and Jaime “Jme” White. Behrenhausen is a gifted singer-songwriter with a rare ability to translate his thoughts and emotions into relatable tunes, while White is an electronics expert blessed with endless curiosity and the skill to transform the mundane into the marvelous. Together they make The Metapolitan a great place to visit.

The music of pianist Bill Douglas and tabla-player Ty Burhoe is often quiet and reflective, like entries in the typically soporific new-age field. Those who listen closely, however, will discover that these tracks are more thoughtful and complex than their surfaces imply. Sky is a beautifully recorded, sensitively performed and lovingly crafted album whose mellowness is a state of mind, not a marketing technique.

Good luck pigeonholing vocalist Felisa Herrera. On Sacrificios, she sings in English and Spanish and handles pop, R&B, hip-hop and more with a relaxed confidence that’s downright inspiring. The only problem? This 2005 disc was supposed to serve as the introduction to a double-CD set that has yet to arrive. Enough with the teasing, Ms. Herrera. After all, waiting this long for more music is sacrifice enough.

Spanish Poets Invading Colorado Streets — the S.P.I.C.S. for short — are neither reggaeton-inspired bandwagon-jumpers nor mere mainstream-rap imitators. Rather, Joel-C and Cryme Dawg are proud local Latinos who use the template of gangsta rap to tell their own, unique story. On Mental Advisory, the chant of “Chicanos, Mexicanos” throughout “S.P.I.C.S.” echoes with the sort of pride that should inspire residents of any hood.

The Samples were once among the biggest bands in these parts, yet their music’s reggae accents generally had more in common with Sting than with the true giants of the genre. Not so Mr. Anonymous, in which former Sample Jeep MacNichol (always the wild card of the group) infuses his pop compositions with reggae authenticity thanks to an all-star crew. Bounty Killer, Black Uhuru’s Michael Rose and the riddim section of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare keep this Jeep running strong.

At first glance, it looks like Boulder-based Adventure Records made some pretty lazy choices for its Cuvee 3 compilation: DeVotchKa, Hot IQs, the Swayback, Monofog, the Omens, Bright Channel, Matson Jones. But between all of these heavy-hitters — none of which contributes exclusive songs — are more obscure local acts that sparkle like unearthed gems. Among the highlights are tracks by the Portishead-esque Cate Coslor; the moody, rootsy Kettle Black; the seizure-inducing Mannequin Makeout; the post-punky Nightmare Fighters; and the brutally honest and arresting Rachel Pollard, who gives Chan Marshall a run with “The Waiting Song.” Ultimately, Cuvee 3 is a real mixed bag, but that’s what makes it a great local comp: It draws you in with the obvious, then blows your mind with some left-field risks and pleasant surprises.

If there’s a single document that nails the most striking highlights of Denver’s burgeoning hip-hop scene, this is it. Despite its title, Low Budget Soul sounds like it cost a fortune to produce. It’s all the more stunning, then, to discover that it was birthed in a cramped bedroom studio in east Denver. Produced and assembled by the RRAAHH Foundashun’s Dent and Solpowa, the disc showcases some of the Front Range’s most talented MCs — Apostle, ManeRok, Brown Bombers, the Fly and Ground Zero Movement, among others — in an assorted yet surprisingly integrated fashion. It’s scary to think what this pair could produce with a larger budget.

Like a time-release capsule of clinical-grade dopamine, Ten Cent Redemption’s Worst Plan Ever gets infinitely better with each listen. Americana with tinges of Brit-pop texture, Ten Cent’s songs ache and twang with equal abandon and make you forget about the bandmembers’ past affiliations — a remarkable feat when you consider the act’s substantial collective DNA. Although “Somewhere in Between” — on which frontman Rhett Lee thoughtfully pays homage to his previous band, Carolyn’s Mother — is the album’s de facto centerpiece, there’s no shortage of other stellar cuts, among them “Set Closer,” “Bring Your Gun” and “Already Raining,” which Lee wrote as his wife was lying in a hospital bed. Redemption has never sounded so good.

Bryan Feuchtinger…Bryan Feuchtinger. Where have you heard that name before? Most likely in the same breath as Hot IQs, the band he plucks the bass guitar in. But there’s an even better chance you’ve run across his moniker in the liner notes of a local CD. Over the past couple of years, Uneven Studio — a cluster of equipment ensconced in Feuchtinger’s modest City Park West house — has exploded, resulting in stellar recordings from such varied Denver luminaries as the Photo Atlas, Signal to Noise, the Symptoms, d.biddle, Thank God for Astronauts, Ginkins and Hot IQs themselves. The secret? Uneven is inexpensive, hands-on and homey, and Feuchtinger has a natural way of steering bands toward that great sound they’ve got lurking inside of them. There are a million studios in town bigger and better-equipped — but none with as much heart or as impressive a recent track record.

Not Bad Records is getting old. Its logo of a fat guy chomping down on a vinyl record has been a stamp on the local scene for almost a decade. The label — run by Chuck Coffey and Don Bersell — has been home to some of the town’s favorite (but now defunct) punk wonders like Qualm, Pinhead Circus and the Gamits. Also housing many of Coffey and Bersell’s own musical projects, Not Bad is a family unit that treats its bands as more than just catalogue numbers. Coffey is the kind of guy who will not only press your record, but also pass out fliers for your show and help you book a tour; hell, he’d probably fill in for your drummer/guitarist if needed. In recent years, the label has branched out to include rock-and-roll cousins Red Cloud West and the recently broken-up Call Sign Cobra. With new releases from Machine Gun Blues and Big Timber already out this year, Not Bad is looking pretty not bad for its age.

Founded in the sweltering summer months of 2001, Ash From Sweat Records is a labor of love for brothers Dan and Dennis Phelps. The little label brought big-city DIY to Wheat Ridge, creating a post-hardcore insurrection hub in a most unlikely neighborhood. Since the first few releases were issued on vinyl and cassette, Ash From Sweat products have become punk-rock Martha Stewart masterpieces, characterized by elaborate handmade covers and inserts created by graphic designer/friend Ryan Nee. And although the label has moved to Denver, its growing roster of bands — including Bailer, Humble Ary, To Be Eaten and My Calculus Beats Your Algebra — is sure to keep things down-home and good.

Sure, it could be easily argued that all local indie labels are DIY. But the ethos of do-it-yourself are more than just an economic necessity for Still Soft Recordings — they’re its entire raison d’etre. Patterned after national imprints like K and States Rights, Still Soft is the brainchild of Nicholas Houde and Kara Jorge, whose respective bands, Transistor Radio Sound and teamAWESOME!, anchor the label’s roster. Also on board are outfits like Mannequin Makeout, Hunter Dragon, Naked Sound and Tetris Art Project, which combine various shades of shaky folk and slipshod electronics for a joyous noise that needs neither widespread attention nor hipster cred to justify itself. With handmade packages and a preference for small, all-ages venues, Still Soft and its constituents aren’t just keeping it real — they’re keeping it right.

Dan Rutherford has been one frenzied individual during the past year. On the heels of his successful debut release, Hot IQs’ An Argument Between the Brain and the Feet, he unleashed the Photo Atlas’s No, Not Me, Never — and proved that the excellence of his Morning After Records was no fluke. Both discs wound up charting on CMJ and led to national press and slots at South by Southwest for the bands this year. But Rutherford has more than marketing savvy. The young entrepreneur knows how to exhibit guts, passion and integrity in an industry prone to bring out the worst in businesspeople and artists alike. In essence, Morning After embodies many of the best qualities of the Denver indie scene today: hard work, honesty, and a down-to-earth yet infectious self-confidence. With new signee Born in the Flood joining the fold, Morning After might just wake up soon to find itself a national player.

Tom Murphy is everywhere. You can’t turn around without seeing him front and center at a local rock show, absorbing sounds and impressions — data that he relays to All Need Is Music. Founded in 2003, the thick, photocopied zine is nearly encyclopedic in scope, with comprehensive interviews of Denver bands that sometimes run to dozens of pages. Underpinning his knack for pure information, though, is a consuming passion for Colorado music; in fact, he’s currently working on a book that will document its history from 1976 to today. Where others skim the surface, Murphy digs deep — and in doing so, renders All Need Is Music the bible (or at least the Big Takeover) of the Denver rock scene.

Regardless of how much time we all spend on the Internet, e-zines are fighting an uphill battle. Music fans have been conditioned by generations of hard-copy periodicals, both local and national, and the relative ease of throwing up an online zine ensures a crowded playing field. Stephen, Jonathan and Matthew Till are well aware of this — which is why the siblings have poured so much sweat into making Japanimplosion! the most standout music website in town. Painstakingly designed, its vivid graphics and fun format (yup, you get to actually flip the pages) are a breath of fresh air. The writing is not what you’d call excessively pro, but that’s its strength; there are enough wannabe Pitchfork blowhards in the world. Japanimplosion! is the sound of the Denver scene reporting intimately on itself — and if we’re lucky, it will inspire many more Denverites to pick up pen (or mouse) and carry on the Tills’ tradition.

When CEO Jonas Tempel brought Beatport into the world two years ago, no one knew how a DJ-oriented, online music vendor would fly. Over a million downloads later, it’s clear that Beatport is more than a success story; it’s a paradigm. And it just keeps getting better. With an ever-expanding catalogue of tracks from hundreds of labels, not to mention scores of exclusive cuts and mixes, Beatport also has package deals on current charts and celebrity playlists. Most important, the service just started offering downloads in uncompressed WAV files in addition to the standard MP3s — a real boon for DJs who are feeding their hard drives through huge systems, where every bit counts. There are still improvements to be made, especially in light of recent price hikes. But Tempel and his team shouldn’t have any problem keeping up with the electronic music download industry. After all, they put it on the map.

What happens when you scale a glacier? Let’s see: You go blind from all the unfiltered sunlight glaring off the ice. Your patience and endurance are pushed to the precipice. Your muscles quiver and your blood runs cold. And then, as hypothermia sinks into your marrow, the eternal plane of whiteness all around you becomes disorienting, upending your sense of equilibrium until you wind up lost, prostrate and gushing crystal tears. All that’s missing is an ideal soundtrack. Enter Across Tundras. The group’s onslaught of Pleistocene pulverization is a polarizing experience. But love it or hate it, the trio sculpts one of the most singular and intense sounds Denver has ever heard. Recently picked up by the renowned avant-metal imprint Crucial Blast, Across Tundras is escalating its inexorable creep across the continent. Better retread those boots.

Whatever you do, don’t ask the members of your favorite group why they start side projects. The answer is always the same old cliche: “We have all these songs that don’t fit with our main band, blah blah blah.” The Wheel, however, means it. Nathaniel Rateliff, along with his Born in the Flood bandmate Joseph Pope, began the Wheel as an outlet for their slower and more somber material. Like a foot race against a fading pulse, the act’s sketchy folk holds the power to both exhilarate and exhaust — and within its rickety fencing, Rateliffe’s voice is given ample acreage to roam, soar, sigh and sob. In fact, at its sleepiest and weepiest, the Wheel is better than Born in the Flood. Now all we need from the band is a CD. Now.

Supergroups suck and should all die. Lucky for them, the members of Quadramess disown the “supergroup” tag, preferring the slightly more humble description “a bunch of has-beens.” But really, they’re being too hard on themselves. Featuring former players from Dressy Bessy, the Czars, Jux County and Hemi Cuda, among others (guitarist Devon Rogers alone has been in approximately 3,000 Denver bands), the band hasn’t let its high-profile ancestry get in the way of making some huge, beautiful noise. In fact, as groups go, Quadramess is positively super.

How short Denver’s collective memory can be. A mere decade ago, Painstake was the hardcore band in town to beat. But in 1998, the group (which counts Vaux guitarist Adam Tymn as an alum) went on hiatus — a break that everyone, the group included, eventually assumed was permanent. Earlier this year, though, four of its five members found themselves in the same town and on the same page once more, and resurrected Painstake with singer Jaime Van Lanen. With a new sound that’s even more progressive, complex and compelling, Painstake is set to strike fear — and fire — in the hearts of Denver’s hardcore scene all over again.

The band’s members themselves might deny it with their dying breaths, but (die) Pilot’s quirks are what make it so captivating. Unlike so many other bands trying to force vast Coldplay/Pink Floyd vistas through the tiny straw of indie rock, singer/guitarist Eugene Brown and crew allow just the right amount of creative tension and unfiltered soul to seep into their work. Radiation, Weather, Art, (die) Pilot’s 2004 debut, showed overwhelming promise. The group’s new lineup, which includes the odd yet otherworldly tones of full-time violinist Paul Jansen, is working on its sophomore disc. We’d bet on it being among the year’s best when the dust settles on 2006.

With so many recent shakeups, it’s surprising that Ghost Buffalo isn’t a ghost of itself. But despite that fact that founding guitarist Matt Bellinger left his main band, Planes Mistaken for Stars, right around the time that Planes drummer Mike Ricketts left Ghost Buffalo, GB landed on its feet — and put all its muscle behind its self-titled, full-length debut on Suburban Home. The disc proves what fans of the quintet’s live show have known all along: Ghost Buffalo is poised to become Denver’s next breakout indie band. The disc melts indie pop, moody country and even a sliver of vintage goth into the dulcet strums and sighs of leader Marie Litton. With new drummer Andy Thomas — not to mention a stunning video and yet another national tour on the horizon — Ghost Buffalo has a whole new lease on the afterlife.

Remember back when Mile High Stadium became officially known as Invesco Field at Mile High? All but on-air commentators stubbornly refused to refer to the facility as anything other than Mile High. That same sort of logic prevails here with the act originally dubbed Red Cloud (which counts Westword‘s own Jason Heller among its members). After discovering that a Christian MC had already co-opted the name, the band — whose emotionally charged sets have made it one of the most compelling live groups in the scene — simply slapped “West” at the end of its tag and called it good. Balderdash, we say: Whoever coined the phrase “Go west, young man” obviously didn’t know what he was talking about. As our man Clarence the barber noted in Coming to America, “Mama call him Clay, I call him Clay — Cassius Clay.” Stick to your guns, boys.

First came Nightingale. Good band. But that name? Not so much. Fortunately for the world at large — which surely would have assumed that Nightingale was some crappy goth-metal act and avoided it forever — the group was inspired to change its name by one of the dozens of outfits that already claim it. So Denver’s leading purveyor of psilocybin-spiked drone switched to a tag that had been a contender back when the group was formed: Moccasin. Of course, some might argue that Moccasin is just as bad, or maybe even worse, than Nightingale. Pshaw! Sure, moccasins are those dopey shoes appropriated by hippies and art teachers. But a moccasin is also a snake. A viper. A really cool water-type viper with heat-sensing organs and poison and fangs and stuff. Hiss.

Valiomierda has its priorities in order. Yes, the band delivers lyrics in Spanish and Portuguese as well as in English, but trilingualism is less important to cohorts Lance Julander, Val Landrum, Bart McCrorey and Igor Panasewicz than is rocking listeners to within an inch of their lives. Thanks to originals such as “Crucificados Pelo Sistema” (not to mention a crushing cover of Motorhead’s “Killed by Death”), Valiomierda is lethal in any language.

To say that Vaux has a combustible live show is like saying Ashton Kutcher is sort of telegenic. With six equally virtuosic members, it’s hard to decide what part of Vaux’s frenzied, retina-searing sets to focus on — the light canister wobbling back and forth on Ryder Robison’s bass cabinet in time with his rumbling bass lines, or drummer Joe McChan whirling about so violently it seems his head will snap right off at any minute? Or should you watch frontman Quentin Smith, who, with mike in hand and veins pushing to the surface, often resembles a pit bull tethered to a stake? Add to that homemade strobe towers that flash on and off in sync with the music, and you are in the presence of a veritable powder keg.

Go on: Just try to find a single soul who’s seen Angie Stevens live and not been completely entranced. Backed by a stellar cast of musicians, Stevens engages audiences in a way that makes every performance feel intimate, like she’s playing her songs just for you. The amiable chanteuse has shared the bill with a wide array of performers and had every audience riveted by the end of each set. Hell, she’s so compelling, we’re pretty sure that her earnest acoustic-based rock could win over a Cephalic Carnage crowd. Bolstered by songs that are often chillingly poignant (“Judy,” for example, a song about her mother), Stevens makes the icicles form on your spine the minute she takes the stage.

There’s nothing about Monofog that doesn’t rule. But the first thing that strikes you — and the last thing that lingers — is the voice of Hayley Helmericks. Part Patti Smith, part PJ Harvey and part Hurricane Katrina, Helmericks howls like a poetic force of nature, lending an almost asphyxiating atmosphere to the band’s saw-toothed post-punk. But it’s not all sound and fury. Her lyrics and melodies are at once cryptic, bruised, anthemic and complex, and they utterly humanize the mutant riffs slicing out of her bandmates’ amplifiers. And on stage? Let’s just say Helmericks makes Karen O look about as intense as Kelly Clarkson.

DeVotchKa deserves more awards — and cash and Grammys and groupie-filled hot tubs — than there are room or resources for here. It’s never seemed, however, that this group’s been in it strictly for the filthy lucre. After all, gypsy-tango-sousaphone rock hasn’t climbed very high on the Amazon charts lately. And yet DeVotchKa’s universal appeal is undeniable — as is the arcane charm and fluttering lilt of leader Nick Urata. He swigs wine from the bottle on stage. He clangs the tambourine with impeccable savoir vivre. He sings in tongues — four, at last count — and moves like a matador conducting an orchestra of trained Miuras. Long after Urata’s become rich and famous and embarked on a Sting-inspired world-jazz solo career, he’ll still know how to slay the crowd with a smirk and a warble.

If Nashville Pussy had been content to peddle its Nugent punk to the Southern-rock scene — or Antiseen, as it were — only burnouts still lamenting G.G. Allin’s death would take note. But the bandmembers have shaken things up recently. First they cut loose Amazon junkie Corey Parks, then absconded with one of Denver’s hardest-rocking bass players, Karen Exley of Hemi Cuda. The plan is for Hemi guitarist Anika Zappe to “focus on motherhood” while Exley does the trailer-park tour. Eighteen years from now, there’s going to be one kick-ass reunion.

Transplanted Yankee Vincent Comparetto has been making a name for himself in Denver for years as a stunning visual artist and graphic designer. But after directing a low-budget video for his friends in Vaux a few years back, his music-video workload began to snowball. Since then, he’s picked up a knack for marrying film to local rock in a way that bears his own quirky and imaginative stamp — and yet cannily channels the styles and souls of such varied local bands as the Gamits, the Maybellines and Planes Mistaken for Stars. But he really topped himself with his newest project, a video for Hot IQs’ “Firecracker.” With wit, flash and bang to spare, it’s a miniature masterpiece — and cements Comparetto’s status as Denver’s premier music-video auteur.

Jambands.com reports that at a late 2005 gig in these parts, Henry Butler told the audience, “I just moved to Boulder, and I’m freezing my ass off.” The temperature in Colorado was only one of the shocks Butler has lived through during the past year. The gifted blues/funk pianist has long been one of New Orleans’s musical treasures, and he’s made a slew of fine recordings, including vu-du menz, a disc that teamed him with Denver-bred bluesman Corey Harris. But after Hurricane Katrina flooded his Ninth Ward home, Butler was forced to pull up stakes. Since his arrival here, members of the area’s music community have embraced him, as well they should. Although his current digs are a long way from the Crescent City, Butler’s still keeping the town’s spirit alive.

Neil Keener is a busy dude. He moved here from Chicago over a year ago with his band Git Some and has since picked up permanent bass duties both in Planes Mistaken for Stars and Red Cloud West, all while beating the hell out of the drums for both Angerthrone and Country Doughnuts. Keener also mans several scarcely mentioned off-shoot (and often one-time) projects with names that ought to be hand-scrawled onto a Trapper Keeper binder: Weed Problem, the Exploding Eye of God and Headbutt the Darkness. Keener’s black-rimmed glasses have reflected the lightbulb glare of many a dimly lit basement practice pad, and his callused hands are ever ready to take on more. Looking for a bandmate whose influences include Eye Hate God, David Bowie and Neil Young? Call Keener — he’s got some free time.

A dime a dozen? Even adjusted for inflation, most solo singer-songwriters aren’t worth the grain of salt you’re forced to take them with. The one-man band, though, remains a rare and noble calling. Just ask Travis Egedy, who performs and releases music under the name Pictureplane. Whether he’s appearing at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art or some dude’s basement down the street, Egedy tweaks keyboards and fist-fucks samples into a thick puree of static, ambience, beats and beauty that flows between M83 and the edgier reaches of the Anticon roster. Yes, there’s even melody and emotion burbling beneath it all. Just don’t expect any sensitive-guy whimpering or Nick Drake covers.

There’s no dearth of Irish bands in this town, from the staunchly traditional to those just taking the piss. What sets Canned Haggis apart is the catgut mastery of Gina Lance. Like the middle Dixie Chick and Nickel Creek’s Sarah Watson rolled into one, Lance extends her talents well beyond Celtic and into country and folk traditions. Easing sorrowful, undulating strains, she draws the music out of her listeners rather than the stringed box resting on her shoulder. And on barn-burnin’ numbers, her bow throws sparks with jaw-dropping, foot-stomping intensity.

There’s no shame in following a trend if the craze in question is belly dancing. Local shimmiers Kaya and Sadie are the finest of Denver’s hip-undulating sirens; both are world-class belly dancers who’ve showcased their skills in instructional videos, in dance workshops and at a range of events around the metro area. And although the lovely ladies work impeccably as a team, each has her own unique style and can help you develop yours. Kaya and Sadie offer classes for novices and intermediate dancers alike — but if you’d rather watch the booty-shaking than join in, you can check their site for upcoming performances. Go ahead — belly up.

How many urban areas can claim a circus burlesque artist as a local? Thanks to Brandy Dew, Denver is one of the few. The bold beauty teaches classes at Broomfield’s Flashdance Studios and studies with the Boulder Academy of Circus Arts and CU-Boulder’s Theater and Dance program. If you’ve ever seen Miss Dew perform, she’s probably left you breathless, utilizing her training in tumbling, contortion, aerial tissue, belly dancing, go-go moves, pole technique, striptease and burlesque to put on an unbelievable show. Dew is dazzling on circus hoops hung from the ceiling, and she does things on a stripper’s pole that most exotic dancers wouldn’t dream of trying. She’s like the Flying Wallenda who got thrown out of the family act for being too sensual, and she performs without ever losing what might just be her sexiest attribute: an ear-to-ear grin that proves she loves what she does.

Okay, so Denver’s not Chicago, where every year artists, musicians, educators, activists and community leaders join forces for Estrojam, a concert/workshop/panel/discussion/film festival designed to promote and benefit pro-woman, non-profit organizations that support non-violent social change. But we’ve got the next-best things: regular Estrojam fundraising events in Boulder. Featuring both local and national talent, the fundraisers are sassy and unapologetically feminist — but that doesn’t mean boring. It does mean provocative dancing and burlesque performances that leave a little something to the imagination, as well as rump-shakin’ tunes and poetry. From the Avant-Punk show in December — which featured punk-rock burlesque artist Regan Drouin from New Orleans — to the recent Valentine’s Day event, Estrojam benefits combine a little romance, gentle teasing and a big dose of naughty for a hell of a good time. See www.myspace.com/estrojam_festival for info on the next local show, a Burlesque Carnival with live Brazilian samba. Go, Estro!

Never mind the cappuccino — how about a cup of Puccini for a nightcap? Romanian folk dances at three in the morning? Seven nights a week, from midnight until 7 a.m., insomniacs and culture-lovers can binge on Classic Arts Showcase, an unpredictable lineup of arias, dance numbers and concert performances, including classic clips from the likes of Maria Callas or Nelson Eddy — all courtesy of Denver’s municipal-access cable channel. The syndicated program is commercial-free and, like the wee hours, goes on and on.

Denver’s performance-poetry scene has exploded in recent years, with readings, happenings, open mikes and slams nearly every night of the week. And while the Mercury Cafe still hosts the hottest slam every Sunday, and Cafe Nuba is still so hip it keeps outgrowing its host venues, Cafe Cultura is the city’s freshest poetic form. The second Friday of every month, the cafeteria space of the alternative Denver Inner City Parish school in West Denver transforms into a makeshift performance space, with folding chairs, fluorescent lights and scores of talented young Chicano writers vying for a few minutes on the mike. The subject matter ranges from political to personal; somebody might sing their poem, or bring a guitar, or a drum, or a paintbrush. No matter the delivery, though, Cafe Cultura’s bold young bards have plenty to say, and now they have an artful, community-oriented space in which to say it.

The days when music lessons were a sign of wealth and privilege are over in Denver — or, at least, they’re on their way out, thanks to local jazz saxophonist Jason Justice. When Justice saw a need for better music education for children in poor urban communities, he formed Instrumentos de la Libertad, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing inner-city kids with free instruments and instruction by musician-volunteers. Not only does music enrich the soul, Justice figured, but studies have proven that it can actually add points to a child’s IQ. Instrumentos is still in its fledgling stages and always in need of donations; for more information on how to help, visit www.instrumentosdenver.org.

It’s hard to remember a time when the Ogden Theatre wasn’t a showcase for local and national acts. But it was just thirteen years ago that the old auditorium was bought by Doug Kauffman of Nobody in Particular Presents and turned into a music venue. Even though he brought the space up to code, the Ogden was known by musicians and fans for the dead sound quality, the bus-station bathrooms and generally gritty interior. That all changed this spring, when the Ogden finally got its much-needed facelift. The most noticeable improvement is the new wrap-around balcony and floor layout, which not only improves audience sight lines, but also the sound. And don’t forget to check out the bathrooms.

Taking over one of those old, defunct theaters and turning it into something grand is a common fantasy. It’s much less common that people actually do it. Why? Because many of these places are decaying pieces of crap that are fraught with dangers economic, psychological and physical. The contentious neighborhood-association meetings alone have sent many a wannabe theater owner to the nuthouse. When Scott LaBarbera and other partners began throwing shows in the Oriental Theatre last fall, it seemed like another well-intentioned escapade doomed to failure. But six months and a significant renovation later, the 78-year-old former movie house has emerged as one of the best new performance spaces in town, featuring a diverse slate of comedy, live music, community meetings, films and even a gong show. The Oriental demonstrates that west Denver can not only support such a venue, but desperately needed one all along.

The story of this theater, like much of Denver’s history, was shaped by tuberculosis. At the turn of the previous century, George Swartz, a tuberculosis patient and Shakespeare aficionado, moved to the area for its dry, sunny climate and bought a house. He built a theater into his basement and presented all of Shakespeare’s plays there. During its existence, the theater has gone through periods of use and periods of darkness. Paul Willet ran it from 1964 to shortly before his death in 1984, using the quaintly old-fashioned setting to present uncompromising plays. Wade and Lorraine Wood purchased the Victorian this year and are presenting an interesting and eclectic roster of plays. True to the gracious spirit of the place — and the ghost of Paul Willet — they serve tea, coffee and cookies during intermission.

On February 7, a group of people gathered at Germinal Stage Denver to remember Al Brooks and the theater that he and his wife, Maxine Munt, had run on Champa Street for more than thirty years. The group included actors, directors, dancers, writers, visual artists and Brooks’s nephew, playwright Michael Smith, along with Smith’s son, named Albert after his great-uncle. Some participants remembered Brooks as the man who had started their artistic careers; others commented on his commitment to a life in art; painter Charles Parsons spoke of first seeing the woman who would become his wife on the stage of the Changing Scene. Parsons also remembered Brooks attempting to parallel-park his brown Studebaker, smoking, hitting the car behind him, smoking, hitting the car in front of him, smoking, all the while talking non-stop. One of the most moving comments came from a playwright: “Everywhere, doors were slamming,” he remembered. “But Al Brooks said, ‘Come here. This is my space. Come here and work.'”

A CBS News poll revealed last fall that 51 percent of Americans believe that God created human beings in their present form. When Inherit the Wind was written, in 1955, religious attacks on evolution seemed safely in America’s past, but since then, the anti-Darwinists have regrouped full force. This made Modern Muse’s decision to stage this play — a fictionalized account of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial — particularly timely. John Scopes, a young teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, was put on trial for teaching evolution. The Baltimore Sun donated the money for his defense and sent its most famous reporter, H.L. Mencken, to cover the proceedings. In the courtroom, defense attorney Clarence Darrow faced three-time presidential contender William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution. The lively production was a trenchant examination of the beliefs and contradictions at the nation’s moral core.

The men on America’s death rows, their lingering, useless days, the terror of the hours until countdown: Most of us rarely think about them, but like the mad aunt in the attic, they are always there, haunting the fringes of consciousness. University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law, in conjunction with Alliance Stage, brought the issue into the daylight recently, staging Tim Robbins’s Dead Man Walking, based on the book by Sister Helen Prejean. The book and the play make the inhumanity of state-sanctioned execution clear while taking into account the rage and grief of victims’ families. Dead Man Walking is, in part, agitprop, but it’s agitprop in the most thoughtful and honorable tradition. The production at the Victorian was effective, sustained in large part by the beautiful and committed work of Terry Ann Watts as Sister Helen and Michael Richman’s understated, passionate performance as convicted killer Matt Poncelet.

Commissioned to create a play about Gertrude Stein for the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture, McCarl came up with this fractured, episodic meditation on Stein’s art and relationship with the faithful Alice B. Toklas. Each scene was given a semi-nonsensical title — “Scene Sic Tea Nine: Definition of a Secretary,” “Scene 5,462: Testimony Against Gertrude” — and the play consisted of jests, insights into Stein’s writing or the times, bits of biography, character exploration. Some of the scenes were a wash, but others seemed a perfect marriage of language and feeling, as when Toklas, stung at being called Stein’s secretary, looked up the dictionary definition of the word, while a hovering and irrepressibly punning Stein teased at it until it became wondrous. Many of the play’s bons mots were worthy of Oscar Wilde, particularly delivered with actress Billie McBride’s dry wit, or in Erica Sarzin-Borrillo’s flute-like tones.

Kent Thompson’s first Shakespeare production in Colorado was the best the state had seen in years. What worked? Almost everything: The setting in fin de siecle Vienna, the music, the costumes, the cast, which included the luminous Ruth Eglsaer as Isabella, Brent Harris as a surprisingly human Angelo, John Hutton as a Duke who brings the affable manner of England’s Prince Charles to his duties, Sam Gregory’s sarcastic Lucio and a horde of vital performances in smaller roles. You could argue about Thompson’s interpretation, but you couldn’t dispute his directorial artistry.

Artistic director Jeffrey Nickelson scored a coup in acquiring Pulitzer winner Suzan-Lori Parks’s script for production, and he and director Hugo Sayles did the play proud. Nickelson and Damion Hoover played a pair of inner-city brothers named Lincoln and Booth. Both gamesters, they spent their time together sparring, telling tall tales and attempting to trick each other. At first lighthearted, even affectionate, their cons eventually turned violent. Hoover and Nickelson were brilliant, both separately and together: Hoover celebrating a shoplifting spree with a humorous striptease in which he divested himself of the loot, item by item; Nickelson demonstrating the intricacies of three-card monte; both of them bringing this fast-talking, bitter, sad, funny script to life.

Though it’s not as well-known as Death of a Salesman, and though it has dated and creaky moments, All My Sons showcases Arthur Miller’s genius and reveals his emotional and ethical depths. An excellent choice for the Denver Center, it raises questions that are as pertinent today as they were in the 1940s. Bruce K. Sevy directed this fully realized and quietly powerful production, the greatest strength of which lay in the masterful performances of Mike Hartman and Jeanne Paulsen as Joe and Kate Keller. Hartman was bluff and charming until his past corruption caught up with him and he began to crumble from within. Paulsen gave full weight to Kate Keller’s mean-spirited conventionality, and also exposed the grief that underlay it.

Gina Schuh-Turner deployed a huge, bright voice, perfect poise and perfect timing in this extended piece of camp. In the first act, she was Judy Denmark, prissing around in a belled-out skirt and gauzy little apron as the perfect housewife and mother. In the second act, she transformed into stage goddess Ginger DelMarco and was dealing with two overwhelming mothers, a spying newspaper reporter, a beautiful maid who was intent on stealing her place in the spotlight, and her ruthless little daughter. Need we say that she more than held her own?

Brian Mallgrave can produce a melodious soprano when he wants to, but he gave Sylvia St. Croix a strong and surprising baritone — even though he played the role in drag. A multiple-threat performer — Mallgrave can sing and act, be funny or serious, take on straight plays or musicals — he was a hoot as bossy St. Croix, tutoring his nasty little child prodigy, arguing with her mother and sulking quietly but eloquently in corners when he didn’t get his way.

There were a number of fine performances in this edgy production, but the most memorable was that of Todd Coulter as the mad evangelist Charles Guiteau, who shot President James Garfield because he was angry at not being named ambassador to France. The real-life Guiteau wrote a poem before his execution, “I Am Going to My Lordy,” that became one of the most grotesquely effective songs in the musical. Todd Coulter made an indelible impression as a mad and darkly luminous Guiteau — particularly singing this song and high-kicking his way across the stage as he was led to the gallows.

He was lewd. He was lurid. He was omnisexual. He was delicious. Whenever Nick Sugar steps onto a stage, he owns it, and Dr. Frank-N-Furter is a role he was born to play. What can we say, except that he strutted and preened and sang and flashed that crimson-lipped, lemon-wedge-shaped smile until he’d worked his way into the nightmare fantasies of every person in the audience.

It takes a lot of poise and talent for a teenager to romance a middle-aged woman on stage, but that’s what high school sophomore Scott Ryan was called on to do in Kimberly Akimbo. The protagonist is a teenage girl suffering from a rare disease that causes her to age at warp speed. Jeff can see the young soul behind the wrinkled facade, and he grows to love her. Ryan made his mark on this quiet but telling role and revealed a stage presence many older actors would envy.

For five years, some of the area’s most interesting theater took place on a small, square stage above the galleries at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, courtesy of Brandi Mathis, artistic director for the space. There was Eric Bogosian skewering the zeitgeist, singer-actress Ethelyn Friend singing Songs My Grandmother Taught Me, Nancy Cranbourne kvetching about menopause, the subversive performance art of Michelle Ellsworth and the first ever Colorado performance of a work by Suzan-Lori Parks. Almost every performance found the place filled to overflowing. Mathis left her post last spring, a few months after directorship of the museum was taken over by Penny Barnow and Joan Markowitz. No one is saying why.

Isabella is a would-be nun, the sister of a young man whom Angelo, a religion-crazed deputy, condemns to death for fornication. Although she pleads for her brother’s life, Isabella is in her own way as narrow and judgmental as Angelo; it is through suffering that she is eventually humanized. Isabella is a very difficult role to get right — she’s a tragic figure in a comedy, by turns cold and sympathetic, and given some of the most profound speeches Shakespeare ever wrote. Ruth Eglsaer confronted these problems with passion and integrity, and vanquished them; she made Shakespeare’s language her own. In the early scenes, her Isabella had the chilly radiance of an icicle; her anguish later in the play tore at the heart. A stunning achievement.

Assassins, with music by Stephen Sondheim, tells the story of assassins and would-be assassins of American presidents, from Booth to Oswald. With its controversial theme and difficult songs, this was an amazingly gutsy choice for a small company. Next Stage made it work with an excellent cast and a group of skilled musicians. Under the direction of Gene Kato, the production blew through the mind like an unsettling wind, hurling aside platitudes and raising a host of tormenting questions.

Sure, it was a tiny role — the woman didn’t even really have a name — but there was no mistaking the electricity that zinged through the air when Annette Helde shot on stage in her wheelchair and cut through the other characters’ confusions and rationalizations with commands barked out in a fierce German accent. As authoritative in comic roles as in tragic ones, Helde has been sorely missed on local stages in recent months.

The protagonist of Neil LaBute’s play views the September 11 disaster as an opportunity: It means he can let his wife and children assume he died at the World Trade Center while he runs off with his equally contemptible mistress. And yet there were moments during the Paragon production when you felt a guilty empathy for both of them. Director Warren Sherrill’s production of this uncomfortably honest play was first-rate, with a sparse, elegant set and evocative sound. Michael Stricker and Martha Harmon Pardee jostled brilliantly with each other as the soulless couple, their timing swift, precise and hungry.

Kristina Denise Pitt comes across as a smart, self-contained little cookie — not at all conceited, but quite aware of her own attractiveness. Her voice is clear and pleasant. She holds herself well. “Spunky” is the word she brings to mind. In short, she’s the perfect choice for one of those witty, confident Shavian heroines — which is why she was cast in Heartbreak House. Pitt didn’t disappoint, whether her Ellie was worrying about her good-hearted father, realizing she loved the retired Captain Shotover or holding her own in the cat-and-mouse games that the two older women in the play loved. This was a bright, strong, appealing performance.

Kim Staunton was silent for long stretches of the play as she cooked, cleaned and did the laundry for the imperious, semi-mythical central character, Aunt Ester. But her silence was more eloquent than most other people’s impassioned speech. You could see what Staunton’s character, Mary, thought and felt in her body, the curve of her spine, the way she used her hands, her sidelong glances at the others. She took Aunt Ester’s criticisms meekly, but when she decided — in a ringing speech — to reclaim her soul, it was clear no one on earth could have stopped her. Among a talented ensemble, this performance gleamed.

Barely out of her teens, a former gangbanger and the product of a violent home, Fatima is in prison for poisoning several customers in the fast-food joint where she worked. She claims to be able to see the future, and she exerts a profound influence on everyone who comes in contact with her — whether that influence is beneficial or malign is open to interpretation. Full of dark fury, Jackie Billotte played this role as if her own life depended on it. She was brash and insistent, arrogant and manipulative, sometimes full of tenderness, sometimes bawling like a lost child. A mind-bending performance.

Somehow the Colorado Shakespeare Festival managed to transform this warmhearted, poetic comedy into a drearily uninspiring evening. The production had one saving grace: Sean Tarrant’s Malvolio. Malvolio is a vain, mean-spirited buffoon who’s convinced by a trick letter that the mistress of the household he serves loves him. Tarrant took us through every twist and turn of the character’s thinking with inspiring clarity and precision. His reading of the letter was hilarious, but he also made us pity this Malvolio for the humiliation he suffered toward the play’s end. Tall and thin, Tarrant seemed a bit too elegant for the role until he revealed a lithe, uninhibited zaniness worthy of John Cleese.

Mark Rubald is always a pleasure to watch, and he gave perhaps the most delightful performance of his career as the Sewer Man who helped Countess Aurelia save New York in The Madwoman. A true gentleman, though possessed of a jaunty workingman’s swagger, this Sewer Man knew all the secrets of the city from his study of its garbage. Rubald can be one of the most playful actors around, and the pleasure he took in the role was infectious.

It doesn’t matter how much you praise Jamie Horton, you’re never being hyperbolic. He’s a deeply talented actor, at home in classics and contemporary work, comedy and tragedy — well, perhaps with a slight tilt toward comedy. In A Flea in Her Ear, Horton was in his element, playing two very different characters: the humorless, upper-class Victor and his physical double, the alcoholic hotel porter Poche. Horton didn’t need gimmicks to help us differentiate between the two characters; he gave each of them slightly different characteristics but an entirely different soul. And, naturally, he handled the split-second timing demanded by farce with absolute aplomb.

Though not a perfect play, George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House is a brilliant and thought-provoking one. The study of English upper-class culture in decline revealed itself as sexy as well as funny under the guiding hand of Ed Baierlein. The main characters — Captain Shotover, a retired seafarer, and Ellie Dunn, the smart and spunky young woman who realizes she loves him — were beautifully played, and there was strong work from the rest of the cast, which included a pair of terrifying sisters and some rather weak-kneed men. It’s a talky play, but everyone spoke their lines with enough confidence and wit to make this an enjoyable rendition of a fascinating play.

What is there to say about Charles Weldon, other than that he’s brilliant? In Gem of the Ocean, he played Solly Two-Kings, a man of great depth and courage, an escaped slave who risked his life and his freedom working on the underground railroad. Two-Kings could transmute dog shit into something pure and valuable, and while he was unable to rest or to set down the staff that represented his struggle while injustice existed, he did not want to shed blood. Weldon knows how to play the complex music of an August Wilson script. He explored every facet of this heroic, almost-biblical character, and made Two-Kings as human and affable as he was strong.

Bug was a study of psychosis — an involving thriller without a lot of psychological complexity. The protagonist, Peter, moved in with a drug- and booze-addled woman and infected her with his phobia about bugs. Pretty soon the cheap motel room was filled with bug repellants and he was mutilating himself, even tearing out one of his own teeth, in the belief that his body was infested. It takes a lot of generosity and guts for an actor to give himself body, soul and spirit to a role — especially one this taxing — but that’s exactly what Reid did. He was terrifying and understated at the same time, and you could feel him searching desperately for a footing through the descending darkness of his madness.

Two of the season’s most memorable productions were the work of Israel Hicks. The Madwoman, an update of Giraudoux’s Madwoman of Chaillot, focuses on the grandly near-destitute Countess Aurelia, who saves New York from greedy contractors. Hicks’s production was brilliantly cast: Kathleen M. Brady was an inspiring Aurelia, and Rachel Duvall a gentle joy as the waitress, Irma. But there was also strength, joy and vitality throughout the ensemble, with exciting performances filling every niche and corner of the stage. When actors work with this much exuberance, you know there’s inspiration coming from the director. Hicks assembled another extraordinary cast to give August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean — a work of oceanic power and depth — its full due.

Sometimes Ed Baierlein makes it look almost too easy. Along with his wife, Sallie Diamond, he is the soul and driving force behind Germinal Stage Denver, the city’s oldest serious theater company, directing plays he selects and starring in many of them. Baierlein’s performing style is so low-key and relaxed that it’s easy to miss the skill and authority that shape it. In Habeas Corpus, he played Wicksteed, a doctor disgusted with sex because he’s examined so many genitalia. Disgusted, that is, until the nubile, young Felicity swans into his orbit. Baierlein also brought ferocious but carefully repressed depths to the upper-middle-class Tobias of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance. But it was in Heartbreak House that he showed the passion that animates his work, particularly in the magical scene in which the female protagonist, Ellie, realized her love for him, and he advised her with soul-penetrating sincerity not to marry for money: “You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life, and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.” It was one of those moments that stay with you long after a play’s over.

It’s a telling comment on the shortage of roles for women that almost no local actress has worked in more than one or two productions this year, but Erica Sarzin-Borrillo made her two appearances — in Poignant Irritations at the Mizel Center and A Delicate Balance at Germinal Stage Denver — count for a lot. Her Agnes in A Delicate Balance was all haughty, enameled elegance, the head of a crazed household, fighting to keep things in balance through meticulous attention to routine. In Poignant Irritations, she played Alice B. Toklas, the woman who dedicated her life to Gertrude Stein and became the narcissistic poet’s maid, secretary, wife, muse and even writing paper. Borrillo made the character self-consciously affected — as was fitting for the hostess of Parisian salons — but also a vulnerable and conflicted woman.

This was a bridge year for the Denver Center Theatre Company. Former artistic director Donovan Marley went out in style with the beautiful sepia visuals of Fire on the Mountain, a compilation of music, photographs and accounts of the lives of miners that became more and more tragically relevant as accounts of modern mining accidents multiplied. Marley also oversaw a rich and lively The Madwoman. In the fall, Kent Thompson blew in to take things over and shake them up, increasing the overall number of productions, focusing on new plays — particularly those by women and people of color — and reaching out to the community and other theaters around the country. There have already been a couple of clunkers on his watch, but you really can’t fault a fall and early spring that included the exquisite comic timing of A Flea in Her Ear, a potent staging of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons and a production that shone the light of reason and understanding on the grim comedy Measure for Measure.

Thaddeus Phillips has a knack for simultaneously thinking large and small: huge themes, ingenious low-tech devices for carrying them out. He can create a desert from a sand-filled suitcase, an army out of toy soldiers. In The Earth’s Sharp Edge, he brought Palestinian guerrilla Leila Khaled back to life, and he once performed two Shakespeare plays by himself on a single evening, using such objects as a plastic flower and a high-heeled shoe as the other characters. El Conquistador! told the story of Polonio Castro, a Colombian peasant and lover of telenovelas, whose crops were wiped out by U.S. aerial spraying and who took a job as doorman at a apartment building in Bogota. The tenants — all played on video by well-known Colombian actors — turned out to be a crazed and outrageous lot, some of whom were involved in very shifty activities. Drugs, murder and a case of mistaken identity entered Polonio’s life, which soon resembled his telenovelas. Phillips makes his own theatrical magic, combining the joy of a four-year-old absorbed in play with a sophisticated understanding of the possibilities of theater.

School vacations sound good on paper, but when the break actually arrives, children and parents are suddenly faced with a lot of hours to fill. Theatre Daze provides a great stopgap for vacationing kids ages three to twelve. The program offers fully planned and expertly taught daylong activities that include art projects, voice and movement training, play-making and more. At the end of the day, young participants come home with smiles on their faces. So do their parents, who know a good thing when they see it.

Tuesday nights are tough. It’s hard to justify hitting the town when there’s still three days left of the work week. Still, sometimes a little tippling is in order. Self-Made is right there for you. The weekly salon, hosted by artist Katie Taft, brings in other local artists to talk about everything from how to market to how to manage the collaborative process. Plus there are cocktails and free hors d’oeuvre. Never feel guilty again for drinking on a Tuesday night.

Ten bucks per person to see live theater? That’s downright insanity. But the Colorado Theatre Guild made it so by launching Theatre Night Out in 2005. For just $80, subscribers get to see eight different shows at eight different theaters, everything from next month’s musical Chess at Next Stage Theatre to last month’s Lovers, Split, Strangers, a loopy melding of romance and headlines at the Mercury Cafe. At this price, there’s enough money for a decadent pre-show dinner and a few post-show cocktails. Drink up.

The Independence Institute’s Jon Caldara isn’t in favor of public support for art, believing that it should be left to the private sector. So when he was tipped off that Tsehai Johnson, who had received a grant from the Colorado Council on the Arts, had earlier used dildos as an inspiration for a ceramic installation, Caldara went ballistic. The whole coterie of right-wing talk jocks and assorted Republicans quickly followed. Though Johnson’s pieces were shamefully removed from the council’s website, she still got the best of her critics: Her installation was beautiful even in the face of the ugliness it generated.

There were no overt references to the war in Iraq in Iswaswillbe, but there were plenty of things that referred to war in general. The title painting, in particular, was tough to look at: A robust SS officer in full Nazi regalia drapes his arm around a skeleton wearing a prayer shawl. The Singer is in the Mizel Center, a Jewish institution, and artist Geoffrey Laurence is Jewish, but that didn’t prevent some from being deeply offended. The chilling anti-war messages in this show were delivered via meticulously done paintings, and, in truth, well-crafted pieces are rare in political art.

Politically aware realist painting has been the mainstay of Chicano art for decades. In recent years, however, more and more Mexican-American artists have branched out into what’s known as “post-Chicano” art. This switch was the topic of last spring’s Leaving Aztlan at Metro State’s Center for Visual Art, which was organized by guest curator Kaytie Johnson. In response, George Rivera came up with the idea for Never Leaving Aztlan to discuss the ongoing power of Chicano art. But in the show, as realized at the Museo de las Americas by Patty Ortiz, the post-Chicanos come out on top again.

Husband-and-wife painters Tracy and Sushe Felix have been exhibiting their work in tandem for years, so it was really interesting that the William Havu Gallery scheduled them in separate, back-to-back presentations. They were both influenced by the art history of Colorado and New Mexico, but their styles are very different: Tracy turns the mountains into a Jellystone Park fantasyland, while Sushe uses elements found in the landscape to construct swirling abstractions. Their pieces are great together, but it was nice to see them separately, too.

Bryan Andrews and Joe Riche share studio space and both sculpt, but that’s where the comparison ends. Andrews carves wood; Riche welds metal. Nonetheless, their work looks great together in their paired solos at the Arvada Center. Andrews’s show, Auditioning Gods, continues his “fetem” series of carved wooden sculptures that reconciles folk and modern art. Riche’s the good times are killing me is a showcase of his kinetic sculptures.

Andy Miller specializes in ambitious installations, but for his show at + Gallery, he opted for geometric wall-hung sculptures. Braille adorned each of the new pieces, and the simple shapes Miller used were meant to be icons expressing the sentiments of the Braille statements, which he translated as relating to the meaning of life. Andy Miller is unquestionably creative and one of the best contemporary artists in the area. It’s almost unbelievable that this was his first exhibition in a commercial gallery.

Summer Group Exhibition was clearly thrown together at the last minute, but gallery director Robin Rule is such a pro that it was still excellent. Just by pulling stuff from storage, she was able to present a variety pack that rivaled the MCA’s biennial. Summer Group Exhibition brought together several generations of Denver artists, from old-timers such as Dale Chisman, Clark Richert and Andy Libertone, who started their careers in the ’60s, to newcomers such as Jason Patz, who wasn’t even born until the 1980s. Filling the gap were mid-career talents Jeff Starr and Mary Ehrin. This generational inclusiveness was the best part of the show; it demonstrated that Denver’s contemporary art world has legs and roots. As does Rule, who closed the Broadway gallery but will be back.

Good evidence that Spark Galley is a center for ceramics was the microCOSMIC exhibit, a handsome solo devoted to the nature-based abstractions of Katie Martineau-Caron. Seeds, pods, plants and even viruses inspire her sculptures’ shapes, and she tries to emulate the colors and textures of the outdoors with her richly toned and multi-dimensional glazes. MicroCOSMIC proved that Martineau-Caron is among the best ceramic artists in town.

In the mid-twentieth century, a loose-knit group of New Mexico artists embraced the international transcendentalist movement and began putting spiritual references into their paintings. They depicted the sights of the Land of Enchantment with geometric and organic shapes and bright colors. Artist Warren Kelly grew up in Taos and adopted the style of this school. Original + Digital at Pirate: A Contemporary Art Oasis included two of his paintings, which were stunning in their own right, but it was his modern take on the old style — boldly colored neo-transcendentalist digital prints — that really made this show stand out.

Pastels seem like an unlikely material for an artist seeking photographic realism, but that’s exactly what Riva Sweetrocket uses. Her drawing style is neo-pop, and she gives more than a little tip of the hat to the great artists of the ’60s in her work. The large-format drawings displayed in her solo exhibit at the Arvada Center, Testify, are both exquisitely crafted and thoughtfully conceived. At Arvada and elsewhere, Sweetrocket’s crisply rendered and imaginatively composed drawings are incredible achievements.

Most of the photographers in Early Colorado Contemporary Photography at Gallery Sink were fairly obscure — but they shouldn’t be. This show provided a good start at turning that around. Jim Milmoe, whose career in the area dates back fifty years, organized the show, and he included some of his own work along with that of five contemporaries: Walter Chappell, Arnold Gassan, Syl Labrot, Nile Root and Winter Prather. The five comprised a group of kindred modernists who explored vanguard ideas a generation ago. But their photos looked just as fresh in Gallery Sink as they did when they were taken.

The two-story space at Walker Fine Art was the perfect setting for Bonny Lhotka’s digital photo enlargements, which were part of a group effort titled Illusions. Lhotka, who has a substantial exhibition record, is an experimental photo artist who uses novel techniques, such as lenticular photography (different images flip into focus as the vantage point changes), and odd materials, including metal and ultraviolet-cured inks. Lhotka’s compositions, jammed with images and drenched in colors, were absolutely beautiful — especially those of goldfish.

David Zimmer was one of the hot art kids in Denver ten years ago, but he moved away, and it was out of sight, out of mind. Nowhere, at Artyard, was his first solo in town in nine years, and it reminded everyone why he’d earned the early local fame. The genuine standouts were his newer pieces: miniature tabletop compositions, some with tiny LCD monitors complete with picture and soundtrack.

Longtime alternative-scene habitue David Seiler went off to the Bemis Art Center to work, and the results of his efforts were put on display at Studio Aiello last fall. Step Right Up! was one of the last outings at the now-closed exhibition venue, and it was a fitting sendoff. Seiler installed a conventional show up front, but in the back space he created the inside of a big circus tent. The effect was creepy, which provided the perfect setting for the equally creepy carnie games he placed around the room.

The Dale Chisman solo at Rule Gallery was partly devoted to Chisman’s work from the 1970s in New York, and partly given over to recent paintings done here in his Denver studio. It’s striking how consistent his aesthetic has been. Both types featured simple palettes of strong colors and had all the tricks of the abstract trade, including smudges, drips, runs and scribbles. Chisman’s stick-to-it-iveness and his remarkable consistency are two qualities that make him one of Denver’s best artists.

Maynard Tischler is a local legend in ceramics. He’s taught at the University of Denver for more than forty years and is well known for his pop-art ceramic sculptures, including a dead-on depiction of a box of books from nearly a half-century ago. That piece directly anticipated some of his recent creations, such as a pile of unbelievably real-looking garden tools. These newer pieces made up the bulk of his last solo, Maynard Tischler, at the Victoria H. Myhren Gallery on the University of Denver campus, but there were also a few anchor pieces from the 1960s. In addition to ceramics, Tischler excels in vessel-making, working in both traditional styles and his own cubistic designs. So he’s not only one of the best ceramic sculptors in the region, but one of the best potters, too.

Rhinoceropolis is a funky little art spot with an outre attitude, as much a crash pad and party house as an art gallery. Last summer it hosted an intriguing solo titled The Next Big Thing that was dedicated to the work of emerging artist Justin Simoni. The show included prints, documented performances and films that illuminated Simoni’s Warholian exploration of fame. He did a number of weird things to flesh out his ideas, including covering himself in a suit made from multi-colored posters that featured his mug and the motto “The Next Big Thing.” Other times he dressed as his mentor, Warhol. These stunts did not garner Simoni much fame, but they did get him noticed.

Andy Warhol is still a household name in art and pop culture because he changed the way people thought about many things, from Campbell’s Soup to Mao. His power to turn heads and change minds was shown off in the blockbuster Andy Warhol’s Dream America at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Ben Mitchell of Wyoming’s Nicolaysen Museum curated the exhibit using several of Warhol’s complete portfolios that were on loan from the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation. Although he was mostly regarded as a kook during his lifetime, it’s obvious that Warhol was one of the best artists of his generation.

Typically when a gallery presents different shows at the same time, there’s nothing that connects them. That’s not the case with Don Stinson, Kevin O’Connell and David Sharpe, a trio of exhibits at Robischon Gallery that are supplemented with pieces by Eric Paddock and Chuck Forsman. Each artist is great in his own right, but they are even better together, unified by the Western landscape.

LoDo’s David Cook Fine Art has cornered the market on Western landscapes, whether done in the impressionist style of the early twentieth century or the early-modernist style of the mid-century. Both types were displayed last summer in Colorado and the West, a show that included more than 100 prints, watercolors and paintings by some of the region’s most respected artists. Cook is particularly good at unearthing pieces associated with art institutions, including Denver’s Chappell House and Colorado Springs’ Broadmoor Academy, both of which are long closed. This was easily one of the year’s best shows.

The subject of Shooting Star at the Vida Ellison Gallery in the Denver Central Library was painter Frank Mechau, who was born in Colorado in 1904. He left for Paris in the 1920s, and when he returned in the 1930s, modernism was among the many souvenirs he brought back with him. Shooting Star — organized by Kay Wisnia, the DPL’s gifted special-collections librarian for art — revealed how Mechau carried out regionalist subjects in an abstract manner, thus successfully combining modernism with the down-home American scene. Mechau got a lot of mileage out of the formula during his short career. He died at age 44, but that was long enough for him to establish himself as one of the best Colorado artists ever.

When Hugh Grant, director of the Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, realized that William Sanderson’s 100th birthday was going to come and go without an exhibit, he stepped in and presented a retrospective of the artist. It was the first-ever temporary show in the Kirkland’s history, and Sanderson was a fitting subject for the honor. Co-curated by Grant and Michael Sanderson, the artist’s son, the show examined the career of one of Denver’s greatest artists of the ’40s and ’50s. His style had a cartoonish quality that referred to cubism, and when the art tides changed in the ’60s, Sanderson was forgotten. His career was reborn in the ’80s — not because he changed with the trends, but because certain art styles had finally come back around. Sanderson may be dead, but his legacy lives on, thanks to The Centennial of William Sanderson.

Though not long out of art school, Jenny Morgan already has distinctions piling up. In the past year, the twenty-something painter has had two solos: First Person at + and Mine Not Yours at Pirate: A Contemporary Art Oasis. In addition, the Fine Arts Museum of Key West acquired one of her pieces, and the juried catalogue New American Paintings included her work alongside some of the hottest talents in the country. And just a couple of weeks ago, one of Morgan’s enigmatic self-portraits was selected for inclusion in an important Smithsonian-sponsored portrait show. Not a bad start to her career.

The fifth-anniversary show at Space Gallery was aptly titled Untold Riches, considering the marvelous paintings contributed by the inexplicably unknown artist Ryan Anderson. Anderson originally trained as a ceramics artist and was serious enough to snag a stint at Montana’s prestigious Archie Bray Foundation. He’s moved on to painting, but his current pieces reference those earlier efforts. The surfaces have a glaze-like quality that looks as if it came straight from the kiln, though Anderson actually creates the effect by pouring flamboyantly colored automotive lacquers onto wooden panels. The results are some of the best paintings most have never seen.

For the color channel, Steven Read lined up old television sets at even intervals on the floor of Capsule gallery. High up on the walls, Read mounted tabletop antennae, which gathered UHF waves and transmitted them to the television sets. Read wrote a software program to comprehend the signals and then convert them from television programs to ever-changing geometric compositions. The resulting images were made up of squares, rectangles and lines — though sometimes Cops and other shows were visible underneath. Read’s cleverness made the color channel the best debut by an emerging artist in Denver in memory.

Big-name modernist Jules Olitski got famous in the ’60s with color-field paintings. A refinement of abstract expressionism and the softer side of minimalism, color-field pieces are covered in big, unbroken swaths of color. Though many painters still do this kind of thing, Olitski left the style decades ago. Since then, he’s experimented wildly. His most radical turn was the crude yet luxuriously finished landscapes shown at Sandy Carson Gallery in Jules Olitski. They were primitive, elegant and maybe even sophisticated. Gallery director William Biety is a friend of Olitski’s, so some of the best work in the show was taken directly from the master’s studio.

Denver painter Bruce Price created a batch of fabulous pieces for FULL: New Paintings by Bruce Price, his solo at + Gallery last fall. Though the work was clearly a continuation of past efforts, the paintings were also completely new-looking. Even though Price is a protege of the great Clark Richert, he’s interested in theories of decoration and ornamentation, which Richert dismisses. Price lays patterns next to one another so that they seem to collide or overlap, creating an almost 3-D appearance even though the surfaces are flat.

Amish women from the turn of the last century didn’t intend for their quilts to be works of modern art, but that’s exactly what happened, as evidenced by last year’s Amish Quilts exhibit at the Denver Art Museum. The quilts look much like the minimalist paintings done much later, but the Amish were guided not by aesthetics — as the minimalists were — but by a religious philosophy that called for plainness. They preferred solid colors in dark shades and fine dressmaking wool and fancy polished cotton, which turned the quilts into bold geometric compositions. DAM textile curator Alice Zrebiec put the show together using quilts loaned by Faith and Stephen Brown. Zrebiec’s best decision was displaying the quilts as paintings.

The scope of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s third biennial, 2005 BIENNIAL BLOW OUT, was expanded to include artists from beyond Colorado’s borders. Denver dominated the show anyway, with six of celebrity juror Kenny Schachter’s ten final selections living in town. This show is one of the most difficult to get into, so each of our artists — Louisa Armbrust, Patti Hallock, Susan Meyer, Jason Patz, David Sharpe and Jeff Starr — deserves a gold star and a huge helping of respect.

Lisbeth Neergaard Kohloff and her husband, Skip Kohloff, retired from the board of the Colorado Photographic Arts Center last year, giving up their posts as the tag team that ran the place. The Kohloffs got involved with CPAC back in the ’80s and have been the backbone of the institution. Over the years, they promoted innumerable local careers and put together a star-studded roster of exhibits that featured some of the most famous photographers in the West. It’s safe to say the Kohloffs are two of the best when it comes to making Denver’s art world tick.

Starving artists hate that rich people run the show simply by throwing their money around, but thank goodness Kent and Vicki Logan spread the wealth. The couple is giving the Denver Art Museum a $10 million endowment for the modern and contemporary department, more than 300 artworks from their personal stash (added to the more than 200 they have already donated), and their Vail home and private art museum, plus another $5 million for maintenance of the property. The Logans have been generous to our community before, but this is the best thing they’ve ever done.

Eco-devo and the arts usually go together like drinking and driving. So many artists thought it was just crazy talk last year when the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs announced it was creating a position that would help artists — not just big-box retailers — access economic opportunity. Ginger White accepted the challenge of becoming the city’s arts eco-devo specialist, but instead of careening off like a drunk, she’s been Dale Earnhardt (and not Jr.), smoothly rounding difficult corners on her way to enriching the local arts scene. Although that doesn’t mean she’s got cash to throw around, she’s finding ways to help artists work through the zoning process, access city loans and maneuver other roadblocks inherent in the city government/artist relationship.

Parking along Santa Fe Drive on a Friday night ain’t what it used to be, particularly on First Fridays. Visitors could easily spend so much time hunting down a prime parking space that they’d miss out on all the wine and cheese. In December, the Artdistrict on Santa Fe rectified the situation, offering a free shuttle-bus service to and from the light-rail station at 10th Avenue and Osage Street from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. every First Friday. Originally the free ride was only scheduled through April, but the numbers of people using the orange-dotted shuttle have risen so much that it will most likely continue on well beyond April Fools’ Day. “People have gotten to be dependent on it,” says Artdistrict president Jack Pappalardo of Habitat Gallery. “Now they’ll expect it.” There’s never too much of a good thing.

If there’s anyone who should be frontin’ for Denver, it’s someone who titles a book of poetry about civil-rights martyrs Murder Ballads. A person who understands that Denver readers want beautifully crafted prose, depth of storytelling and consciousness-raising ideas wrapped in one catchy package. In short, we want it all — and Jake Adam York delivers. The Alabama native moved here just five years ago, but he’s already fully immersed in his adopted home. He teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado at Denver and held a creative residency at PlatteForum last year, where he ran a poetry lab for students from North High School and P.S. 1, creating the art installation “A Map of Denver” in the process. York also edits the Copper Nickel, the national literary journal based at UCD, and organizes the Denver Mint Reading Series, which brings Pulitzer-level and up-and-coming poets and writers to town. On top of all that, he’s finishing his next book — Annumeration of Starlings — that will be a followup to Murder Ballads. That’s a great verse-case scenario.

Fred Ramey and Greg Michalson are proof positive that good novels don’t have to come from Manhattan — they can hail from a cowtown such as Denver, thanks to their publishing house, Unbridled Books. The independent book publisher only puts out ten books a year, which allows Ramey and Michalson to be choosy about whom they work with. As a result, “They’re all extremely important to us; our ego is attached to every single book,” Ramey says. Their focus is fiction, particularly literary fiction that concentrates on beautiful writing, strong voices, strong characters and a strong sense of place. Unbridled isn’t representing any local writers at the moment, but the house does represent well for Denver’s literary life.

Thirty years ago, Roberta Price found herself facing a true Western dilemma: Be inhospitable to the strangers at her door or serve them the THC-laced doughnuts cooling on the table. The Manhattan-raised Vassar girl chose wisely: She gave the cowboys each a doughnut and sent them on their way, deciding a light buzz was a lesser offense than poor manners. Price and her husband, David, were living in the hippie commune Libre, deep in the Huerfano Valley of Southeastern Colorado, and Huerfano is her elegantly told memoir of that experience. The Sangre de Cristo mountains were brutal taskmasters — Price spent a winter with only roofing paper between her and fifty-below nights — but they also provided her with an unlimited supply of amusing anecdotes. Featured prominently in those escapades are two Denver notables: photographer Larry Laszlo, who lived in the sixty-foot “Red Rocker” geodesic dome in the neighboring valley, and local theater impresario John Ashton, who lived at Libre for a spell. As the world turns…

A few years before the publication of 1939’s landmark anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun, the late author Dalton Trumbo published Eclipse, a satirical and sometimes caustic look at small-town life and politics inspired by Grand Junction, where he grew up. The book promptly went out of print, but the many G.J. locals who’d unwittingly served as models for his work didn’t forget it. As a result, Grand Junction didn’t officially acknowledge one of its most famous sons for well over half a century. Last year, though, an area group working in conjunction with the Trumbo family arranged to republish Eclipse as a benefit for the Mesa County Public Library District (visit www.mcpld.org to purchase a copy). With the book’s arrival in December, the sun finally set on one of Colorado’s most epic grudges.

Care for a carafe with your Capote? Landmark’s Mayan Theatre, on hip Broadway, not only has the best food in Denver moviedom (everything from fat bagel dogs to top-notch cookies from Alternative Baking), but as of January, it also features a full bar upstairs. That’s right: You can now order an imported beer or the cocktail of your choice, then take it with you into the theater as you settle in to watch Mrs. Henderson Presents or Brokeback Mountain. Which, come to think of it, features a little beer-guzzling its own self. Meanwhile, the Mayan continues to dispense top-of-the-line Dazbog coffee in several flavors, gourmet Odwalla juices, and popcorn with soy sauce or Spike multi-seasoning.

The Starz FilmCenter withdrew from a deal to relocate to the Lowenstein Theater on East Colfax Avenue, so the movie house will remain in its tatty old digs in the Tivoli building, where the auditoriums are cramped and the amenities minimal. But the films are glorious, the kind of New York-, Chicago- or L.A.-worthy fare you simply can’t find in the suburbs. Recent offerings have included everything from a revival of Antonioni’s neglected 1975 thriller The Passenger to the relentlessly spooky Japanese horror flick Pulse to a four-film retrospective honoring the late, great French director Louis Malle. If your taste tends to indies and thoughtful imports, Starz is the place.

Pre- or post-movie, grab a little loudmouth soup with a couple of olives in it over at Marlowe’s, or a slab of lasagna at Maggiano’s. The thing that still separates the fifteen-screen Denver Pavilions from all the other largely indistinguishable multiplexes from here to Castle Rock is the proximity to top-drawer food and drink on Denver’s 16th Street Mall. That, and free underground parking (be sure to get your ticket stamped in the theater lobby). Comfortably fortified, you then slip into your padded rocker for ninety minutes of Pink Panther yuks or three hours with the Israeli commandos of Munich. As with all ‘plexes, the Pavilions’ theaters are clean, the high-tech sound system is good, and the projection standards are fine.

The 28th edition of the Starz Denver International Film Festival featured more than 200 films from two dozen countries, as well as in-person visits from such movie-world luminaries as the director, producers and writers of the surprise hit Brokeback Mountain, indie star Philip Baker Hall (Dogville, The Talented Mr. Ripley) and actor David Schwimmer. The Telluride Film Festival may have more glitz and glamour, but Denver consistently delivers the goods, with everything from The World’s Fastest Indian to Manderlay, Lars Von Trier’s latest, to documentaries about the terrors of boot camp and the flaws of the death penalty. The strangest 2005 event? A festival-sponsored gathering of friends and colleagues of the late Hunter S. Thompson at the Denver Press Club — a locale the late writer often terrorized in mid-binge.

In Woody Allen’s latest movie, Scarlett Johansson plays a sexy wannabe actress in London who initially entrances the tennis-pro protagonist (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), but eventually becomes so loathsome to him that he shotguns her to death and kills an innocent neighbor to cover his tracks. Allen doesn’t explain how Johansson’s character turned out the way she did, but he does offer a few clues. At one point, for instance, she announces that she’s from Boulder, Colorado, and she’s determined never to return. Well, Boulder doesn’t want you back, either!

Justly, East High School alum Don Cheadle has become one of Hollywood’s most talented, sought-after actors. Two years ago, he gave the world a moral wake-up call with his Oscar-nominated performance in Hotel Rwanda; in 2005, he scored again by portraying a thoughtful Los Angeles homicide detective who’s having an affair with his Latina partner (Jennifer Esposito) in Paul Haggis’s Best Picture winner, Crash. A disturbing meditation on race and bigotry in post-9/11 America, the film boasts an all-star cast (Sandra Bullock, Matt Dillon, Ludacris, Brendan Fraser, Thandie Newton, et al.) that Cheadle, also one of the film’s producers, was instrumental in assembling — at bargain-basement rates.

There’s something about the quiet of an early Saturday morning, when the streets are empty and the sky’s full of pastels, that makes you feel like the only person on earth. KGNU’s Honky Tonk Heroes, three hours of Americana and country-and-Western music, intensifies the disembodied vibe of the wee hours — but in the most pleasant way imaginable. The show presents an amazing array of old-timey artists who used to be radio sweethearts — Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff, Webb Pierce and Merle Travis — plus a few wonderful nostalgic, transporting touches. You might even hear twenty minutes of Hank Williams playin’ and pimpin’ on a vintage recording of “The Old Flour Hour.” Forget sleeping in: Honky Tonk Heroes is worth getting up for every time.

It seems that every rock-and-roll radio station in town has some form of Beatles tribute worked into its rotation, but the Mountain’s Sunday-morning Breakfast With the Beatles stands out every week. Rather than endlessly spinning the fifty or so songs everyone knows by heart, DJ Archer digs deep into the Fab Four’s catalogue, pulling out rare live tracks, demos and interviews, often surprising even the most seasoned fan. Archer’s theme is more of a thread than a rule, so there are frequent oddities, such as obscure tunes recorded by artists on the Apple label and covers of popular Paul-and-John tunes done by folks from around the world. For the faithful, Breakfast With the Beatles is like that other Sunday-morning ritual: sacred, uplifting and essential.

The Walnut Room is best known as a place to catch hip bands, listen to spoken-word artists at the monthly Cafe Nuba events and preview movies made by local filmmakers. On Sunday nights, regulars gather around the bar to catch stars of a different sort. Do the names Moe Szyslak and Abu Nahasapeemapetilon ring a bell? How about Dale Gribble, Boomhauer and Stan and Hayley Smith? If so, you’ll fit right in when the bartender turns on the TV for a Fox lineup that includes The Simpsons, King of the Hill, American Dad and/or Family Guy. (Save your serious drinking for the half-hour when the godawful sitcom The War at Home comes on.) Just what was it that Ralph Wiggum found up his nose? Can Hank learn to embrace Bobby’s feminine side? What Hollywood star does Roger the alien have a crush on now? Stay tuned.

Crested Butte is Colorado’s last rugged, old-style ski village, with a downtown full of Victorian cottages and storefronts dating back to the mining days — and open space providing a buffer between the town and the condos of the burgeoning ski area. For a week every July, Crested Butte gets just a little wilder when the Crested Butte Wildflower Festival is in full bloom. Sure, parts of the festival can be quite cultured — classes on making botanical teas and potions, for example — but there are also rough hikes and horseback rides through some of the most beautiful terrain you’ll ever see. This year’s homegrown festival — the twentieth in Colorado’s official Wildflower Capital — runs from July 10 to 16. Stop and smell the primroses.

Back in 1898, moovers and shakers in this cowtown decided to brighten up the January gloom with a major stock show, complete with free beer and barbecue for the locals. After 30,000 drunken Denverites rioted through the stockyards, city boosters didn’t risk another stock show until 1906 — but it’s been going strong ever since. The National Western Stock Show now attracts hundreds of thousands of people for fifteen days every January, when they can watch people put down serious money on 4-H calves, see whip-cracking monkeys tame rodeo clowns, buy Ginsu knives, eat everything from funnel cake to Rocky Mountain oysters, and drink themselves silly in the Cowboy Bar, right by where the steers are better groomed than any Cherry Hills matron. This is how the West was fun.

Sunday nights are the hottest of hot summer nights. It’s the night that members of the Colorado Fire Tribe meet up at the Confluence Park boat launch to drum and dance with fire. These are spontaneous, informal gatherings — no tickets, no reservations. People just wander up on the spectacular view of spinners rhythmically swinging flaming lanterns suspended on chains, twirling fiery batons and dancing with all manner of blazing accoutrements. When it all comes together, it’s as much about athleticism and grace as it is about meditation and control. When it doesn’t come together, it’s mostly about leg scars, nasty head knots and pants on fire. Though seldom necessary, thick blankets are at the ready for stopping, dropping and rolling. And the roiling South Platte river is always available to cool any hotheads.

Take the customary author readings and book signings, add popular film series such as “Dueling Divas” (a hiss-off between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis), then throw in cooking demos, knitting and journaling classes, theater, concerts, lectures and oddball do-it-yourself events, and you might come up with something as invigorating as Fresh City Life, an ongoing celebration of arts both fine and domestic. And yes, every event is free, though some require advance registration through www.denver.lib.co.us/programs/fresh/.

The Boulder Fringe Festival is the spawn of a creative seed that began traveling across the ocean nearly fifty years ago. The original fest began in Edinburgh in 1947 and has since happily inspired imitators all over the world. Boulder’s version, launched in 2005, was a marathon of spontaneous art, music, performance, puppetry, film, video and installations. The roving exhibition took root online at www.boulderfringe.org and in corners and coffee shops, theaters and galleries all over town. This year’s event, slated for mid-August, will last twelve days and include hundreds of participants, all of whom are selected randomly by lottery. Boulder attracts those on the cultural periphery, and the Fringe Fest is a wildly expressive way to see the best of them at work.

The 16th Street Mall is perfect for people-watching and eavesdropping. All manner of freaks can be found on the mall — from the suited to the suit-less — but the most amusing to watch is the Bitter Biker. The anonymous cyclist rides up and down the mall yelling, “You are all sinners!” and other such Puritan dogma. Sometimes he even throws in a “I am not here to kiss your babies!” On special occasions, he ditches the bike and does his rounds on foot, strumming his guitar and opining — in key. It may not be music to the ears, but it sure makes the “Hillary is Hitler” guy at Colfax and Lincoln seem a little on the unimaginative side.

Aurora’s partly seedy, partly rebirthed main drag gets extra marks for effort in 2005. Last fall, Longmont artist Mario Miguel Echevarria put up his “Aurora Eterna: A Public Spectacle” mural atop Pasternack’s Pawn Shop, shedding brilliant neon lights on a series of stylized symbols of Aurora history. “Aurora Eterna” is the perfect companion to the stretch’s other murals (by Jason Needham and Susan Cooper), and it adds a touch of class to the tawdry.

In 2003, Carol Dickinson was facing retirement from directing the Foothills Art Center in Golden, and she decided she wanted to leave a lasting monument. A take-charge sort of gal, Dickinson went to the Foothills board and suggested having Texas artist Jesus Moroles create a sculpture garden in his signature minimalist style. (Truth be told, it was more than a suggestion; she presented the idea as a fait accompli.) The board agreed, and Moroles teamed up with architect Ted Shultz and landscape designer Susan Saarinen while Dickinson began cajoling donors for funds. Typically, projects such as this take five years to finish, but Dickinson got it done in just two and half, bringing Golden into the 21st century in the process.

The title of Lawrence Argent’s sculpture isn’t very catchy, and most people will draw a blank when hearing “I See What You Mean,” but if we say “The Big Blue Bear” at the Colorado Convention Center, you see what we mean. The piece was an instant hit with the public, and it has become a nationally known icon for Denver. Even the normally artless business boosters hijacked it, sending out a guy in a cheesy blue bear suit to promote the hotel tax during last year’s election. For all the love, however, it’s the fact that the sculpture is sophisticated, contemporary and by a hometown artist that makes it one of the best things downtown.

When concert season opens at Red Rocks, the crowds run rampant throughout the tiny burb of Morrison. It’s enough to make anyone long for a stiff drink and a classic Americana meal, which is exactly what the Blue Cow provides. Whether you prefer a Bloody Mary, a margarita or a mimosa, the staff can hook it up; they serve everything from Budweiser and Corona to microbrews and Mike’s Cranberry Lemonade — even a martini in a pinch. They also brew the strongest espresso in town, and the soft-serve ice cream and shakes are ideal on a hot summer day. It’s the perfect place to nurse away a hangover before the big show — or to kick-start the next drinking marathon.

Kudos to the City and County of Denver for finally adding a drive-thru box office for Red Rocks Amphitheatre. Patrons no longer have to park and then hike up the hill; they can just zip up and be on their way. And considering how much walking is already required at the park, this is a much-welcomed change. All you have to do now is find your spot and get down to the music.