Tenor saxophonist and composer Fred Hess is comfortable playing songs by Lester Young, Ornette Coleman and pretty much everyone in between, as he’s shown on the thirteen albums he’s released over the past seventeen years. While most of those were done with smaller groups, the local musician’s latest disc, Hold…
It’s October, that rare and glorious time when seasons merge and you get best of summer’s weather along with the beginning of fall’s greatest attraction: football. Finally, your excuse to drink to excess on Mondays has returned. And to that end, they mix Monday Night Football with tequila and sangría…
I can measure how challenging my week has been by how much I think about running. Sometimes running is just another item on the to-do list. But when things are rough, as they have been lately, I think about running all the time. What better way to work off tensions…
First of all, 7dancers spokesman Lee Prosenjak notes, there are actually eight dancers in the cast of Passengers, but that’s not what makes this travel-themed production so different. It won’t be performed on a stage or even in a set area, but will instead trek through the expanses of a…
It would be easy to argue that all art is partly about the artist who created it. But that doesn’t mean every piece can be classified as art of identity. No, that relies on a person’s sexual, ethnic, racial or religious background as a key element. The current art-of-identity era…
Al Wynne. Al Wynne is one of the greatest artists to have ever worked in Colorado, and his accomplishments rank right up there with those of acknowledged masters such as Vance Kirkland and Herbert Bayer. And Black Forest Magic: Paintings & Sculpture by Al Wynne proves it. The Colorado native’s…
Most movies dealing with terrorism these days treat it as fundamentalist insanity or societal cancer. In contrast, 1962’s Le Combat Dans L’ile turns the subject into, of all things, a complicating factor in a love triangle. The marriage of mood-swingy Anne (Romy Scheider) and rich kid Clément (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is…
The ushers at a packed screening of Michael Moore’s latest movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, came proudly decked out in T-shirts bearing slogans like “Make Love, Not Capitalism” and “Capitalism, We Have a Problem.” The shirts and the movie are brought to you by those filthy Reds: Overture Films, which…
For the children who compete in them, spelling bees are a very big deal. They represent an arena where poor kids, rural kids and the kids of immigrants can find identity and pride. Indian-Americans, like the winner of this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee, Kavya Shivashankar, seem to do particularly…
For green chile lovers, the weeks between late August and mid-October are the best time of the year. That’s when chile roasters set up stands along Federal Boulevard and elsewhere in the Denver area, selling their fiery green gold by the bushel and the basket. In fact, you could call…
Novelist Gregory Maguire tells familiar stories from an unfamiliar perspective, be it that of the ugly stepsister or the cowardly lion. But before Maguire delved into the lion’s psyche, he examined another character from Oz — the Wicked Witch of the West — and gave the witch, also known as…
As the founder and executive director of the former Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar, Adam Lerner and his team put together a variety of funky, informative programs aimed at making contemporary art both accessible and engaging for people of all backgrounds. Now the director of the Museum of…
I try to live a low-impact lifestyle. I’m a vegetarian, and I buy organic and local whenever possible. I use only non-toxic cleaning products and recycled toilet paper. I think I’m pretty mindful of my carbon footprint. Of course, I still drive a car, and my energy isn’t supplied by…
Zombies are, by definition, comebacks — but don’t refer to the recent zombie renaissance as a “comeback” around Kris Hipps. “I’m not sure they ever really left us,” claims Hipps, director of the Bug Theatre’s stage production of George Romero’s 1968 zombie opus, Night of the Living Dead. “They were…
Robert Mangold (Bob to everyone in the Colorado art scene) is surely the dean of Denver’s contemporary sculptors, with a fifty-year career under his belt. His best-known pieces are those colorful and familiar whirligigs called “Anemotive Kinetics,” a number of which can be seen around town. Still, it’s been years…
If you’re headed to the Denver premiere of The Film Dailies, Boulder’s indie electronic act, you’re in for more than just music. Drawing on her experience as a promoter booking shows, Dailies member Molly Cherington decided to offer something beyond the usual supporting bands for the group’s local debut. “In…
The title sounds exotic, but a luthier is simply someone who makes or repairs stringed instruments. Still, there’s nothing simple about this work, which requires considerable training. And while quite a few colleges have courses on how to make and repair guitars or violins, there aren’t many at the high…
Fuck. It’s satisfying just to say the word, isn’t it? Not only is “fuck” one of the most vivid and malleable profanities ever to get your face slapped or a kid’s mouth rinsed out with soap, but it possesses a certain phonetic integrity, a graceful yet utilitarian compactness, from opening…
Most movies dealing with terrorism these days treat it as fundamentalist insanity or societal cancer. In contrast, 1962’s Le Combat Dans L’ile turns the subject into, of all things, a complicating factor in a love triangle. The marriage of mood-swingy Anne (Romy Scheider) and rich kid Clément (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is…
The seed for René Marie’s new one-woman play, Slut Energy Theory, was planted during a long-ago conversation with a friend about how women often focus more on their relationships than on their own creative selves. “We use up all this energy, physical and emotional, and my friend called it ‘slut…
If you really love music, those cheap computer speakers and hand-me-down dorm stereos just don’t cut it; you need serious gear. Time to head to the sixth annual Rocky Mountain Audio Fest to see — and, more important, hear — the newest electronic gizmos from more than 300 manufacturers. More…
Balistreri Vineyards won’t be harvesting any grapes from its nearby vineyard on Washington Street this year; winter cane damage killed the crop. But the Balistreri family still has plenty of reason to celebrate today at its seventh annual Harvest Party. “We’re celebrating all the other harvests — we’ll be getting…
