The idea of Jews as political radicals is an easy reach for me: My Jewish leftist folks, after all, stumped for Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party in the ’40s, and my father, an accountant who did books for the Mine Mill Union, among others, cast votes for the Socialist…
The Victorian era is known for many things — but sexual openness isn’t one of them. The reign of Queen Victoria during the latter half of the nineteenth century in England saw strict moral codes and crusades against prostitution and promiscuity, the particular target being “fallen women” who dared to…
The new exhibition Time and Attention: Cinema, Prints and Drawings by Eric Waldemar, opening tonight at Ironton Studios & Gallery, will be “smart and strange,” the artist promises. That’s almost inevitable, considering the mix: part video and part two-dimensional work, the show explores where the media diverge and connect, eerily,…
When fine artist Jenny Morgan last showed work in these parts, the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design grad was all the buzz — young, promising and lauded for her striking self-portraits and multiple canvases spread with cropped nudes. Now she’s back, after a grad-school hiatus at the School…
By its second year, the Denver Zombie Crawl had become one of the biggest zombie-walk events in the country, says founder Daniel Newman — and he hopes that this year, the Crawl’s fourth, it will be deemed the biggest in the world. But while Seattle currently holds the fancy-pants Guinness…
After he was hit by a bus while riding his bike, Brendt Barbur could have given up riding; it would have been the logical thing to do. Instead, he was inspired to start the Bicycle Film Festival, now in its ninth year. “I wanted to do something positive for bikes…
“We’re all tied up in gender,” says Keith Garcia, programming director at Starz FilmCenter, “and we really need to pull back on the strings and let people be who they want to be.” Examining gender stereotypes and sexuality is part of the purpose of Cinema Q, a Starz series highlighting…
Strobe lights? Check. Fog machines? Check. Zombies? Well, duh! City of the Dead, a new haunt in town, is all about the undead, from start to finish. Comprising 14,000 square feet under a giant tent at the Mile High Marketplace, I-76 and 88th Avenue, the fledgling spook house is a…
Cool fall weather always makes me want to sit by the fireplace sipping cocoa and knitting. Unfortunately, I don’t have a fireplace and I’m no good at knitting, but luckily for me and other lovers of handmade crafts, the Denver Handmade Alliance is presenting the Art by Craft market today…
Originally imagined with a Great Depression theme, a party tonight at the Holiday Chalet Victorian Hotel will instead feature a 1920s and ’30s motif, complete with burlesque dancers, era-appropriate music, a free soup kitchen, a piano player, and a DJ spinning house and acid jazz. Proceeds from the event will…
“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” That’s how Miss Maudie Atkinson explained Atticus…
Since his death in 2001, many of those who loved author Douglas Adams — and I mean adored him with all their hearts — would never, ever accept a sixth installment of his beloved Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, discourteously dashed off by a substitute author, as authentic, no…
One of my earliest childhood memories is watching Steve Martin playing banjo on The Muppet Show. (Can you think of a better early memory!?) This was ’77 or ’78, when he had a head of ashy brown hair and his performance was still a fusion of banjo picking and standup…
Thaddeus Phillips is a magician of the stage. He likes putting disparate things together — objects, images, ideas — in service of a new and transformative vision. He is also an internationalist to the core. His characters are often bewildered travelers, and maps, boundaries and foreign languages play a large…
Lorrie Moore might be best known for her short stories and essays — which have appeared in such prestigious publications as The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories of the Century — but her novels are nothing to sneeze at, either. Her latest long work, A Gate at…
Another one for the bad-stuff-happens-to-stupid-people file, The Canyon might at least offer the satisfaction of a few squirmy thrills if it weren’t so insistent on treating its central couple’s plight as the stuff of high tragedy. When newlyweds Nick (Eion Bailey) and Lori (Yvonne Strahovski) find their dream of riding…
Some art writers, including critics and commentators, have been trying to put abstraction in its grave for a generation. In fact, abstraction has been the butt of sneering invective from those who champion other aesthetic approaches since artists first embraced the style a hundred years ago — and it’s come…
Anna Kaye. The conceptual framework that underlies the drawings and watercolors that make up the handsome if small Apparition: works on paper by Anna Kaye is the effect of forest fires. Toward that end, Kaye captures the forest by employing a high level of drafting that make her drawings seem…
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. First produced in 1984, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the play that propelled August Wilson to fame, and it has everything that makes the playwright great: eruptions of humor, rage, pettiness and affection, all given resonance by a broadly humanistic sense of history and context. The…
Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. Why? Because it’s thick with sludge. Moving briskly through a stranger-than-fiction, serpentine narrative that is still unfolding, Joe Berlinger’s remarkable documentary Crude recounts an infuriating litany of South American exploitation, back-room glad-handing and bureaucratic dead ends that has, among other collateral…
Directed by Spike Jonze from a 400-word children’s picture book first published in 1963, Where the Wild Things Are may be the toughest adaptation since Tim Burton fashioned Mars Attacks! from a series of bubble-gum cards. Tougher, actually: Burton was working with ephemeral, anonymous trash; Jonze is elaborating on a…
The Yiddish shtetl shtick that opens Joel and Ethan Coen’s new movie — a Jewish peasant stumbles on an old Hasid who may or may not be a dybbuk — is pretty clumsy, but at least it tips its hat to the great existential comedy that A Serious Man might…
