Arts & Culture

mu-zjik n : 1. a Russian peasant. 2. The highest-scoring stand-alone word possible in SCRABBLE, earning the lexical leviathans who drop it 29 points, plus another fifty if they’re clearing their rack at the end of the game — and that’s without any of that sissy triple-word-count baloney. If you…

Nobody does underbelly, let alone Bangkok underbelly, better than John Burdett, whose detective thriller Bangkok Haunts is set into motion by the unsolved mystery surrounding the victim of a snuff film. This is the third installment in Burdett’s series, which stars Thai cop Sonchai Jitpleecheep and a corrupt cast of…

Foul, foul, foul! We just can’t have any fun without The Man sticking his rules where they don’t belong. Seriously, in the NBA, you can’t even trash-talk without a penalty these days. (Shi’, honky — everyone knows that’s half the fun.) Well, if you’re tired of that no-contact, mind-your-manners version…

When I was a kid, my dad scooped me up every night when he got home from work, and I loved the gasoline scent on his flight suit and his prickly, day-old stubble. When I was a teenager, he invited me on his weekly Corvette cruise, where we would drum…

Before ballroom dancing became a left-field TV sensation thanks to So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing With the Stars, there was Burn the Floor, a live production that began touring the globe in 1999. Floor artistic director/choreographer/dancer Jason Gilkison doesn’t take credit for the success of these broadcast…

The fun starts as soon as the doors open tonight at 6 p.m. at Pandora Jewelry, 220 East 13th Avenue. “We’re immediately doing a free tote-bag giveaway to the first fifty people,” says owner Stephanie Shearer. Then Vivienne VaVoom from Burlesque As It Was (aka Westword contributor Michelle Baldwin) will…

The closing reception for artist Bill Amundson’s Colorado Landscape II: Suburban Graffiti is more final than usual. For several weeks, Amundson has been creating Landscape — a sprawling work that combines illustrations with ambient audio and text representations of random remarks — on the walls of the Philip J. Steele…

Admit it: You know you watch those crazies on TV juggling flaming chainsaws. The burning tools of death float and twist in the air, tossed up and down in a mesmerizing blaze. Deep down, you wish you were that marvelous stuntman, one slip away from losing your hand, one twitch…

Farmers’ markets seem to be sprouting up all over town these days, some of them fabulous and some merely mediocre. But the Old South Pearl Street Farmers’ Market — located in the 1500 block of Old South Pearl between Florida and Iowa avenues and taking place every Sunday through October…

Although Tracy Morgan regularly acts like a crazy person on television (catch his character Tracy Jordan on 30 Rock if you don’t believe us), the comedian is truly just…normal. “Outside of show business, I live a normal life,” Morgan says. “I have my own friends that I’ve known for thirty,…

Mid-June is the time for fresh cherries and strawberries (and rosy stalks of rhubarb for those ephemeral strawberry-rhubarb pies); July and August bring apricots and sweet corn, Colorado peaches and heirloom tomatoes by the bushel. As the good stuff from in-state earth begins to ripen, farmers’ markets all over Colorado…

Jason Bosch, sole dynamo behind the weekly ArgusFest human-rights film series, originally planned to screen the Errol Morris documentary, Standard Operating Procedure, a stark look at the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, tonight at the Mercury Cafe. But he changed his mind when he decided to also host the fest’s annual…

I heard it all, musically, as a ‘tween in the Sixties, in the inner sanctum of my brother’s room. And while Mark allowed me my own forays into weirdness — I was obsessed with the Who’s “Happy Jack” — I allowed him some, too, including his fixation on that most…