When you strip away the jingles, the barrage of products and the unrelenting shopping blitz, the holidays are basically about nostalgia — our memories of childhood and our need to recapture that more innocent time. And that’s really one of the only reasons we endure what the holidays actually are,…
Khyentse James, organizer of tonight’s 1940s White Christmas Ball, grew up with the sort of holiday memories that inspire classic novels. “My grandmother was on the radio in the ’40s,” she explains. “And every Christmas, she had a big party at her house, and it was amazing.” Recollections of the…
We’re all hearing a lot of talk this holiday season about shopping local and what it means to a community. But Talulah Jones shop owner Robin Lohre is doing more than that: Beginning December 1, Lohre will host a reception showcasing a different local artisan every night through Christmas Eve…
Some people just stand out. Whether their style is cutting-edge, quirky or just well-executed, they make you want to know: How do they do it? Because we work for you, we’re finding out. Each day, we’ll hit the streets and talk to one person who catches our eye and makes…
People are hilarious, and can be incredibly stupid. Thanks to the internetz, we now can watch this hilarity and stupidity unfold in myriad ways throughout the year. We’ve got rappers of all shapes and sizes, people getting hurt and basically being the complete morons we’ve come to expect from our…
One way to think of monkeys is as extremely ugly children — at least, that’s how we like to think of monkeys, because if you think of them that way, then everything they do is hilarious, even when they’re sad. So because Wednesday is by most estimates the most depressing…
If you think about it, the concept of money in general is pretty weird: Basically, we assign a value to a random object and, as a society, agree upon its representative worth — there’s nothing intrinsically valuable about a $20 bill, for example, but neither is there anything intrinsically valuable…
Holy bloody hell this one’s a doozy. Quick, think of all the things you like about games. Okay, what do you have so far? Fun, action, explosions, jumping, puzzling? Maybe you’re just interested in farming or pretending you’re a god. Now erase your list, tell your boss you’re taking a…
When we kicked off Show and Tell back in late July or whenever that was, we had an idea for a kind of a catch-all section, a place to put arts- and culture-related stuff that didn’t quite fit into our food, music and news blogs — comedy, fine arts, films,…
Update: 12:18 p.m. Thursday: We’ve picked our four winners! Thanks for playing everybody, and if you didn’t win, remember there should still be tickets available the old fashioned way! ________________ Theater critic Juliet Wittman writes in her review of Dixie’s Tupperware Party: “This show is dirty. Seriously dirty.” Right away,…
Yet another reason to head for the hills this week: The new Summit Action Sports Film Festival in Breckenridge opens tonight at 5 p.m. at Brooklyn’s Tavern, 500 South Main Street, with screenings of the People Crew’s Cheers and five other ski and snowboard films. The festival continues tomorrow and…
We’re all hearing a lot of talk this holiday season about shopping local and what it means to a community. But Talulah Jones shop owner Robin Lohre is doing more than that: Beginning December 1, Lohre will host a reception showcasing a different local artisan every night through Christmas Eve…
It was a classic case of giving back: Chris Mburu, once sponsored by an American named Hilde Beck to attend school in his native Kenya, went on to graduate from Harvard, become a human rights lawyer and start a Kenyan school of his own for students in the situation he…
In the ad industry’s constant flurry to be creative and original, boundaries are pushed — and sadly, every once in a while an animal is creepily made to look and act like a human. While anthropomorphism is almost always a bad idea — except in Japan, where there are more…
Everyone knows mascots are creepy. Like clowns, they hide behind a mask of anonymity, which, in addition to their bizarre appearance, allows them a license to act in ways that are human-like, but just far enough outside of the realm of normal human behavior that the combination is more than…
What do artists think about the city they live in, wherever that might be, and what does it mean to them? At Illiterate Gallery, a new show, Mile High on the Map, cast a few clues on the Denver point of view. We hit the opening on Friday night. Take…
New releases are an excellent option for holiday gifts, because unless you’re out shopping for someone who buys, rather literally, everything the day of release, you can almost be guaranteed that it’s something they don’t already have. We’ve got a good wide-ranging selection of stuff this week, too, with a…
This is not what we had planned. By all accounts, the Santa representative at the Aurora Mall — ahem, the “Town Center at Aurora” –positioned in front of Macy’s in a red suit and plopped down in a mildly sad, purple button-back chair was our guy. But after an elf…
No matter how you slice it, wolverines are badasses. They live in the northernmost regions of the world, remote, forbidding climates that test even the most rugged of humans. They will summit a sheer mountain slope for no discernible reason, and, with a size clocking in at about three feet…
Huge news from Silverton Mountain this week: The Red Bull Cold Rush big mountain and big air freeskiing competition is coming to Colorado, March 14-18, after being held in Canada (first at Red Mountain, then at Retallack Lodge) each year since its inception in 2007. “We worked closely with Red…
In 2005, the City of Denver acquired more than 800 paintings and 1,500 works on paper from the estate of Clyfford Still (pictured) in exchange for the promise that a museum would be built dedicated to him. Construction of the Clyfford Still Museum is now under way just west of…
Ania Gola-Kumor and Andrew Speer. The tiny Sandra Phillips Gallery has shoehorned in two solos, both highlighting longtime Denver painters. The first is Abstraction 2010: Ania Gola-Kumor, featuring the recent work of a Polish-born artist who’s been exhibiting in Denver for decades. The paintings here display her signature style, in…
