Arts & Culture

Tucson artist Kate Breakey found her calling one day in 1995 when a bird she tried to rescue died in her hand, leaving her moved and fascinated by her closeness to the creature’s final moment. By photographing it and, later, more birds, as well as reptiles and flora found dead…

From a stomping by the Hells Angels to dodging “bats” on a desert road outside Barstow, California, Hunter S. Thompson is the counterculture icon of American letters. Immortalized as Uncle Duke in the “Doonesbury” comic strip, channeled on the big screen by both Bill Murray and Johnny Depp and author…

Just as Lucy, Peter, Susan and Edmund all pass through the wardrobe into Narnia to find a world they can be part of, the goal of tonight’s Frozen Balls: A Carnival in Narnia at Naropa’s Performing Arts Center (2130 Arapahoe Avenue in Boulder) is to create an inclusive winter festival…

BDSM 101. Female ejaculation. Anal play for beginners. These aren’t your typical convention-floor seminar topics. But then again, The Sex Show — an erotic trade and educational show taking place today through Sunday at the Denver Merchandise Mart, 451 East 58th Avenue — isn’t your typical convention. “I’d like to…

Last year, harmonicat Clay Kirkland hit the big 6-0 — an achievement that surprised him. “I never expected to live until sixty, and actually took steps to prevent it,” he admits. To mark the occasion, he staged a concert he dubbed Beat the Reaper, “because every extra day was like…

Connections between hip-hop and the “green” lifestyle generally refer to, well, reefer. In the rare instance when “eco” does get hype, it’s usually during a streetside purchase of misspelled Ecko gear. But tonight, Urban Allyance aims to prove that environmental awareness and consciousness mean more to hip-hop heads than merely…

For their Asian pop-culture boutique, Andrew Novick and his wife, Janene Hurst, wanted a name that was too long and translated funny — like the nonsensical English phrases on Japanese T-shirts. Inspired by a plastic model of a dessert they spotted in the window of a Japanese cafe, they named…

As far as anyone can tell, ski-waxing began in the 1860s in California, when gold-rush miners held impromptu downhill races. They discovered that smearing compounds on the bottoms of their skis helped the equipment slide over snow, increasing their speed. Many early waxes were not actually made of wax —…

Banish the hump-day blues at Distortion Disko, a weekly excursion into the groove at the hi-dive, 7 South Broadway. The night features an eclectic, electric mix of dancefloor-friendly tunes mixed by DJ Rockstar Aaron and weekly guest DJs. “The night’s going to open up with some Brit pop and rock,”…

Last time the non-profit organization Human Rights Watch counted, there were 2,270 juveniles serving life without the possibility of parole in prison in the United States, 45 of them in Colorado. In the rest of the world, there is one. The issue of juveniles serving life sentences has recently caught…

Mourning becomes eccentric at In the Dead of Winter: Victorian Mourning, an event at Four Mile House showcasing the customs of Victorian sickness, death and grieving. “The Victorians connected to the dead, talking to people in the other world through seances and spiritualism,” explains Mary Jane Bradbury, volunteer coordinator. “I…

Along with the number zero, the compass, the kite and the seismograph, China apparently cornered the market on Barnum and Bailey-style acrobatics thousands of years before kids in Idaho ran away to join the circus. Tonight, the Peking Acrobats will perform gravity-defying stunts with roots as far back as the…

Each year, CultureHaus — a social and educational support group of the Denver Art Museum — hosts its signature party and fundraiser. For this year’s bash, the theme is Art of Passion, and CultureHaus has worked hard to create an event that will tantalize all five senses while raising money…

Considering that it falls on the eve of Israel’s sixtieth anniversary, it’s a happy coincidence that the emphasis on Israeli film is so heavy this year at the twelfth annual Denver Jewish Film Festival, a well-paced ten-day spectacular hosted by the Mizel Arts and Culture Center. “In the past, we’ve…

The Boulder Acoustic Society’s Aaron Keim, one of the organizers of today’s first Colorado Ukulele Festival, loves the uke for reasons that have everything to do with simplicity. “Because it’s a modest instrument, with just four strings, when you perform a piece of music, there’s little to dress it up…

“Colorado has such a rich tradition of strong ceramic artists,” says Michael Chavez, curator of the Foothills Art Center. “The Colorado Clay exhibition is important because it showcases this tradition.” Twelve ceramicists from all over the state were hand-picked to display eight to ten pieces touching on everything from functional…

Jamaica Kincaid’s writing career got started because of New Yorker columnist George W. S. Trow, who would take her with him while he conducted research for the magazine’s Talk of the Town section. With Jamaica along, his stories always seemed to get better. He went from mentioning her in the…

The relaxed, warm vocal style of Glen Phillips can be deceptive. It allows him to tell stories of human depravity, evoking the darkest depths of human emotions, all while being pleasing to the ear. His innovative folk rock songwriting was honed during his tenure as the frontman of the critically…

Between the popularity of the can-can, the appearance on stage of such performers as Frank Sinatra and Édith Piaf, and the madcap spectacle of director Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 hit Moulin Rouge!, the historic Moulin Rouge cabaret in the Parisian red-light district of Pigalle has fueled the imagination since it was…