Ashes of American Flags, Wilco’s live concert film and documentary, portrays a reality that is almost the antithesis of the typical glamorized rock-and-roll road picture. In the place of sex-crazed groupies and stylized drug-binge montages, we see the band icing up sore limbs and necks after strenuous performances, eating chips…
Think you don’t know how to make things? Once you’ve met Wiley Sherer, the resident jack-of-all-trades at the TACtile Textile Art Center, that outlook will change forever. Every Friday from 5 to 7 p.m., Sherer hosts DYIFri, a free, drop-in workshop series with changing projects created from ordinary materials. Sherer…
As a women’s studies professor, Elissa Auther was frustrated by narrow, stuffy discussions that never engaged anyone outside of academia. So last year she founded Feminism & Co., a Lab at Belmar series that brings a campy, irreverent style and creative performances to critical debates on women’s issues. The series’…
The Tang Dynasty, which ruled over China from 618 to 906 A.D., is considered by many scholars to be the acme of progress and prosperity in that nation’s history. Tang Concubines tells the story of two women – both concubines — who helped shape the Tang Dynasty, but their similarities…
Ballerina, a documentary that premieres at Starz FilmCenter on Friday, March 27, may not be an especially daring piece of work, but its subject matter is so fascinating that the results are regularly compelling anyway. Director Bertrand Normand’s look at Russia’s Kirov Ballet is primarily a celebration, and the five…
Poetry is not all old-fashioned hearts and flowers. As delivered by members of the Slam Nuba Team, poetry is vital, thoroughly modern and not remotely well-behaved. See for yourself tonight, when National Poetry Month gets off to an invigorating start Friday at Slam Nuba Team Slam Off 2009, at Crossroads…
The nightly news is unremittingly gloomy, and it just seems to get worse every day, which is why we need something to cheer us up — something fun and artsy, like the 18th annual Aspen Shortsfest. The five-day film festival starts today and features a variety of shorts, from Academy…
The Tony-nominated musical Quilters began its run 26 years ago when the Denver Center Theatre Company breathed life into the production. “Even though Quilters wasn’t the first production we did, it was one of the first world premieres, and certainly the first premiere to go on to critical success,” says…
If you are free through April 4 and have an extra $1,000 lying around, you might want to load up the Escalade and drive up I-70 for the nineteenth annual Taste of Vail. The four-day event, featuring thirty chefs and fifty winemakers, will consist of a variety of tastings, classes,…
Talk about Nero fiddling while Rome burns: When the Denver Auto Show opens to the public April 1 at the Colorado Convention Center, 700 14th Street, GM will be touting new Corvettes and Cadillac station wagons for 2010, while Chrysler pushes out its all-electric Town & Country EV wagon and…
During the early ’90s, the Samples helped put Colorado on the map. Led by gifted pop songwriter Sean Kelly, the band signed with a locally based label, What Are Records? (W.A.R.), toured incessantly from coast to coast, released a slew of albums, endured a series of personnel and business changes,…
It’s tough staying punk-rock. Although the ideal itself has never officially been defined, die-hard supporters of the genre have long claimed that to be a true punk-rocker, you must shun mainstream music and always remain a dark, oily stain on its bright shiny surface. What if, in spite of a…
Laura Gibson’s smoky warble and elegant, jazzy phrasing will probably have you thinking Feist in fairly short order, but the Oregon indie-folk singer-songwriter has her own mesmerizing vibe going on – more the soundtrack to a sepia-toned Dust Bowl documentary than a contemporary Parisian café (or iPod commercial). Her unruffled…
As Earth Day approaches and everyone and their ninety-year-old grandmothers seem to be getting into the chip-in-and-be-green act, the time is ripe for WeeCycle, a local nonprofit started by attorneys, friends and fellow moms Jayme Ritchie and Sunny Heydorn to collect gently used and new baby gear for the children…
Denverites have had a long love-hate relationship with our Western heritage. We either laugh or cry about it, because maybe, just maybe, the Mile High City really is just an overgrown cowtown. All joking aside, however, the result of this syndrome has been a collective low self-esteem — and some…
Damien Hirst. You’d have to be living under a rock — or have absolutely no interest in contemporary art — not to know that Damien Hirst is a superstar, and that everything he makes is worth millions of dollars apiece. The tight solo at MCA Denver (formerly known as the…
Eurydice. Playwright Sarah Ruhl has created her own magical, eccentric, gutsy and entirely original interpretation of the Orpheus-Eurydice myth, one in which the Lord of the Underworld is a comic-fearful shape-changer, ruling over a place populated by people of stone; Eurydice’s father, already dead, longs for her from the Underworld…
Ballerina, a documentary that premieres at Starz FilmCenter on Friday, March 27, may not be an especially daring piece of work, but its subject matter is so fascinating that the results are regularly compelling anyway. Director Bertrand Normand’s look at Russia’s Kirov Ballet is primarily a celebration, and the five…
Just when we thought the “bromantic comedy” had overstayed its welcome, the genre reaches its high point with I Love You, Man. The subtext is finally the text; it’s right there in the title. The movie delivers an absolutely complete, fully realized, delightfully novel redo of the hoariest of forms:…
Whether it’s the amnesiac super spy of the Bourne franchise or the weary law-firm fixer of Michael Clayton, Tony Gilroy specializes in characters who wear so many masks that, memory loss or no, they scarcely know who they are anymore. Guided by instinct, his soldiers of fortune patrol a ruthless…
In a list of the great rivalries in the history of mankind, the enmity between Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison would have to rate somewhere near the top. Tesla (a native of Croatia) began his life in the United States as Thomas Edison’s assistant until Tesla took seriously a statement…
It’s quintessential Colfax: Nestled between a head shop and a boutique selling wigs, Sompong’s Beads & Jewelry appears small from the outside. But its contents belie its appearance. Walking in the door, you’re assaulted by rainbows of beads — strings containing every shape, size and color of bead draping the…
