Of all the neighborhoods in Denver, Civic Center is probably the one, from a design standpoint, with the most character. From the classical Greco-Roman columns and domes of Civic Center Park to the jutting angles of the Denver Art Museum’s Hamilton Building, there’s no neighborhood in Denver with quite Civic…
A few years ago, my daughter used to be all about Grease, 24/7. She watched it all the time and knew all the songs. So how was I to know that in the ensuing years, wherein she became a full-on middle-schooler and teen-in-training, everything had changed? Yet she still inexplicably…
Some of us were fortunate enough to have parents cool enough to buy us all the Super Mario and Sonic games we needed. Others weren’t so lucky. These poor souls were stuck with third-rate, non-licensed Christian games like Bible Adventures and Sunday Funday. Fortunately, even those of us that missed…
Tucker Max is living the dream. Since his early twenties, the author of Assholes Finish First has been getting blackout drunk, chasing women and generally indulging every hedonistic whim toward the end of compiling the stories of his wild and often shockingly hilarious exploits (one ends in him covered in…
You would think that watching the ghoulishly garbed actors of the Asylum, Denver’s best rated haunted house in 2006 and one of Hauntworld’s top 25 in the nation, chatting backstage about the stresses of writing a paper on the fall of the Ottoman empire might ease your mind about the…
Denver is host to a cornucopia of interesting people. In an effort to showcase the broad character of the populace, Westword’s own Ben Dayton is doing random interviews with Denver residents about random topics, randomly. Today, he interrupted Doug Spencer, guitarist of Snake Rattle Rattle Snake and, perhaps more importantly,…
Being an artist isn’t easy — particularly in these United States, it’s indicative of how we view our artists that the starving one is a far more common portrayal than the successful one. That’s something Deanna Miller, who runs the City of Aurora’s public art program, knows about as well…
For nearly thirty years, Eldon “E.C.” Cunningham taught printmaking as the program coordinator at Metropolitan State College of Denver. He was also the director of the school’s Vicious Dog Press. On October 1, Cunningham died suddenly, rocking the Auraria campus and causing the print program at Metro to shut down…
Nowhere Boy, English art star Sam Taylor-Wood’s oddly straightforward biopic about the juvenile John Lennon, concludes, as well it should, with the singer’s haunting, incantatory primal scream, “Mother.” But instead of tying a bow on the film’s portrait of familial abandonment, Lennon’s guttural, air-cleaving quaver puts everything that precedes it…
Kept afloat by a great cast, Woody Allen’s latest foray into the perverse follies of mankind begins with a statutory quote from Macbeth about the futility of it all. But like so much of Allen’s work over the past decade, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is more Bergman-lite…
The power of The House of the Spirits, playwright Caridad Svich’s take on Isabel Allende’s celebrated novel, lies in the accumulation of images, actions and passionate words that the play pours out into the audience, as well as the bitter sadness at its heart. Consider the scenes separately, and they…
Charles Morey adapted The Ladies Man from a farce by Feydeau — pretty loosely, by Morey’s own account. In the original, Tailleur des Dames, the beleaguered protagonist is guilty of adultery; Morey, surmising that the more puritanical American audience wouldn’t empathize with an adulterer, makes his hero the victim of…
Dana Cain is the lady with her thumb in a million pies; a local maestra of event-planning, she throws several well-attended collectors’ expos, art shows, parties and chocolate fests each year. Her latest — and biggest — project is next summer’s Denver County Fair. But Dana is also an avid…
Since time immemorial, it’s been a tradition of mega-stardom: Actors become musicians and musicians become actors. Less common, though, is the musician/actor-turned-writer — and probably for a good reason: Writing is hard and not very glamorous, and also, they only let you out of your cage once every three weeks…
As we reported here last week, Boulder dancer/choreographer Mary Wohl Haan is dancing solo on the Pearl Street Mall for ten minutes at 10 a.m. every single day of this, the tenth month. So far, stage fright hasn’t gotten the better of the intrepid performer, who says she’s been there…
Advertising agencies work tirelessly to come up with new ways to tell us the same thing over and over again: “Hey, buy our shit. Don’t you want to be happy?” Thankfully though, there are always a few ridiculous ads that cause us to take pause and appreciate the stupidity of…
Gay people are good at lots of things: getting a party on, for instance, or being stylish. But besides having a reputation for enthusiasm and panache, those good folks who favor their own gender are accomplished in a number of less well known areas as well, such as writing some…
With a billion different retailers and hundreds of different mediums to chose from, keeping up with the best and newest releases in any form is difficult. This week we’ve got a wide range of stuff you’re not going to want to miss, including the release of a television show you…
All-around film freak and local film critic Walter Chaw is the proprietor of FilmFreakCentral.net and the host of this month’s Being Tim Burton film series at the Denver Public Library, which starts tonight with a free 6 p.m. screening of the 1990 film Edward Scissorhands and continues every Tuesday through…
For most folks, Halloween is a time to get dressed up as some sort of slutty occupation, gorge on candy and begin the period of “winter obesity” traditional in these United States. But for others — specifically our nation’s often marginalized undead population — Halloween is a time for their…
Patti Cramer passed away two weeks ago — but she leaves a host of friends and fans of her work. And she leaves behind many, many paintings and drawings in private collections across the country. Two dozen of those pieces will be on display at Dazzle, 930 Lincoln Street, for…
Loveland loves to lay down its annual earliest opening day claim, and we have to say things are looking pretty good up there this week, with a little bit of natural snow and perfect conditions for snow-making operations. They’re already behind last year’s pace (Loveland opened on October 7 last…
