There is one intensely effective passage in Elyzabeth Wilder’s Gee’s Bend. Against her husband’s wishes, the protagonist, Sadie, has gone to Selma to march with Martin Luther King Jr. She returns, bloodied and half blinded by tear gas, to find that her husband has locked her out of the house…
The Baseball Show. Evil, malaprop-prone Vincent Vascombe, owner of the Beloit Bulldogs, is determined to hold on to his star player, Bill “The Bomber” Dawson. But Dawson — aided by his smart, competent fiancée, Helen — has plans for the majors, and there’s a talent scout hanging around. So Vascombe…
Over the years, I’ve often seen the truth in the old saying “One person can make a difference.” Often it’s for the good — for instance, the way Hugh Grant at the Kirkland Museum has almost single-handedly raised public awareness about the history of Colorado art, or the way Clark…
Monroe Hodder really gets around. In the past twenty years she’s lived in New York, San Francisco, Rome and — get this — Almaty, which is in Kazakhstan. Currently the painter is dividing her time between her permanent residence in London and Steamboat Springs, where she has a second home…
George Carlson. Put together by curator Ann Daley, who has shaped and defined the Western collection at the Denver Art Museum, George Carlson: Heart of the West deals with the career of an accomplished neo-traditional artist who looks to the century-old Impressionist style for inspiration. The Carlson exhibit includes nearly…
If you took a bunch of Gary Buseys and locked them in a room with an equal number of typewriters, a buffet of psychedelics and an infinite amount of time, they probably wouldn’t re-create the works of Shakespeare. However, they’d have a damn good shot at nailing The House of…
I’ll let you in on a little secret: Firefighters are super-hot. Maybe it’s the aura of heroism about them in all their pulling-small-children-and-pets-from-burning-buildings glory. Or maybe it’s just their rock-hard abs and bulging biceps. Whatever that je ne sais quoi quality, there’s no denying that firefighters are sexy, sexy beasts…
It may not inspire widespread, degenerate gambling like its basketball counterpart, but the NCAA Frozen Four Hockey Tournament still boasts one of the most exciting post-seasons in collegiate sports, and this year marks the return to its ancestral home of Colorado. The first ten Men’s Hockey Championships were played in…
Last year, Tony Shawcross won a Westword MasterMinds award for the amazing work being done at Deproduction/Denver Open Media — and it just gets more amazing, as tonight’s Open Source/Sustainability Party at the studio at 700 Kalamath Street will prove. “It’s going to be awesome,” Shawcross promises. But then, how…
That Denver’s Chicano Humanities and Arts Council is celebrating thirty years on the local arts scene is no surprise. Few grassroots non-profit arts organizations have as much wherewithal when it comes to sticking to the plan. Now as entrenched as an ancient tire rut burned into a road paved with…
College hoops fans have been in the grips of March Madness all week as the annual NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship series heads toward its pinnacle on Monday. But the Final Four games will be played today in San Antonio, Texas, between the sport’s best teams, and the match-ups are expected…
By most measures, Colorado isn’t any more liberal than other western states. So how come the state has managed to put to death only one prisoner in the past forty years, while some of its neighbors — Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma — have kept their execution chambers hopping? One reason is…
I have a love-hate relationship with bacon. I love stand-alone bacon, crispy-fried on a side plate. But I hate bacon in my entrees; I don’t do bacon in salads as a general rule, because then my entire salad tastes like nothing but bacon. I feel the same way about bacon…
In club lingo, a “mash-up” is two or more seemingly dissimilar popular songs combined into a unified creation. “Bootie” is a double entendre, referring to the illegal nature of said pirated songs and what you shake when you hear them. Maybe this sounds too much like those tired rock/rap remixes…
Conceptual artist Laurie Anderson didn’t name her new production Homeland on a whim. Tonight’s multimedia presentation uses the word as a jumping-off point for an exploration of current cultural preoccupations — including the title term itself. “‘Homeland’ now has so many quotation marks around it that nobody really knows what…
After taking my first pole-dance class in January, I thought it would be my last. Then I received a letter from Lori Huett, owner of TranZenDance Studio (70 Broadway, Suite 275). “Pole dancing,” Huett stressed in her letter, “need not be provocative or explicit.” I reminded myself that Huett is…
Don’t expect to see any of FoxNews’s business yappers at today’s Cost of Freedom Peace and Protest Party. That network’s “Cost of Freedom” biz-news lineup has nothing to do with the peace presentation/party that kicks off at the Mercury Café, 2199 California Street, at 2 p.m. This Cost of Freedom…
When he was on the road, local standup comedian Christopher Cannon used to check out a lot of antiques malls. Often he would find a booth selling photographs. Stacked in a box were somebody’s memories, family photos of smiling moms and dads. He wondered who the people were and where…
Almost fifty years ago today, humanity took its first tentative steps into the infinite void when Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. To celebrate that milestone, space lovers in forty countries around the world — and the astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station — will come…
Although perhaps a bit dated, George Carlin’s infamous “seven dirty words” routine is still one of the most famous — and funniest — standup shticks of all time. The world has come to expect nothing less of Carlin, the first person to host Saturday Night Live (on October 11, 1975)…
Every poet has a secret life: Denver Poet Laureate Chris Ransick’s is stored in a keg. Aside from fostering his deep love of verse, Ransick has also nursed a twenty-year obsession for home-brewing that’s left him an experienced aficionado with a palate for poetic suds. One of his favorites, a…
Opening with the bouncy, infectious “Ramona, Just the Other Day,” These Record Highs finds Breezy Porticos in the familiar mode of slipping smart, emotionally mature observations into finely crafted pop masterpieces. Pop music doesn’t need to be dumb or rife with cliches to be enjoyable, something Breezy Porticos proves in…
