If you think nothing could be worse than downtown rush-hour traffic, you’ve never been a motorist stuck behind Critical Mass. Started by San Francisco bike messengers in 1992, Critical Mass is a passive-aggressive movement of bicyclists seeking social change that’s reached more than 300 cities to date. On the last…
The young men move about the muddied hillside engaging in a friendly afternoon game of that national pastime known as hurling. On their way home, they are accosted by a platoon of “Black and Tans,” the occupying soldiers sent from England to stamp out the crackling embers of Irish independence…
Jafar Panahi is a paradoxical populist. He makes crowd-pleasing art movies, often set in the midst of life — the urban crowd is one of his subjects — and is a virtuoso director of (non) actors. On the other hand, this most widely seen of Iranian filmmakers is also the…
10 People will fight. 9 people will die. You get to watch.” So proclaims the poster for The Condemned, a movie executive-produced by World Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon and starring self- professed “whup-ass machine” Stone Cold Steve Austin and oft-suspended former soccer star Vinnie Jones. So can someone please…
Speaking as the owner of a new puppy, I can say definitively that a dog is both more and less annoying than the average person. Year of the Dog makes much the same point with its pack of uncontrollable pooches, including a cute beagle that rips into the wrong bag…
When director Sam Peckinpah made 1969’s The Wild Bunch — a highlight of the spring film series at the Denver Art Museum — he’d been working in Hollywood for well over a decade and had three previous features under his gun belt. But that didn’t stop him from transforming the…
Richard Rodgers was an astonishing musical talent, and for decades the soul of that entirely American creation the musical comedy. To some extent, he revolutionized the hitherto fluff-filled form by taking on such themes as racism (South Pacific), wife-beating (Carousel), the abuses of monarchical power (The King and I), and…
We are one of the last Western nations to retain the death penalty, but you don’t hear much about it these days. Where executions were once front-page news, they’re now relegated to single paragraphs far back in the paper — if they’re mentioned at all. Most of us go about…
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This is one ugly family that’s gathered in Big Daddy’s Mississippi Delta home to celebrate the patriarch’s 65th birthday. What almost everyone except Big Daddy himself knows is that he’s dying of cancer. There’s Big Mama, operating in an acute state of denial; son…
There’s something about abstraction that keeps it keeping on, despite a fairly successful assault from postmodernism’s conceptual realism that posits a sharp rejoinder to abstraction’s decorative tendencies. And sure, painting itself has long been said to be dead — particularly a style as quaint as abstract painting — but it’s…
The stable of artists featured at Sandy Carson Gallery (760 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-8585) work in a range of styles, but one stands out: magic realism. This painterly hybrid combines realism with surrealism, makes folk-art references, and is influenced by comic-book and children’s-book illustrations. Distinctive variants of it are currently…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For one of the special shows inaugurating the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg has selected over a hundred works for the…
Planet Earth (BBC/Warner Bros.) Roll over, Marlin Perkins, and tell Jacques Cousteau the news: There’s never been another nature series like this. You will spend forever glued to this five-disc collection, finding among such holy-shit discoveries a herd of never-before-photographed camels who live in the frozen wastelands, great whites dining…
Our top DVD picks for the week of April 24: Al Franken: God Spoke (Docurama) Code Name: The Cleaner (New Line) Columbo: Mystery Murder Collection 1989 (Universal) Déjà Vu (Buena Vista) The Documentaries of Louis Malle (Criterion) The Drew Carey Show: The Complete First Season (Warner Bros.) Flipper: Season One…
A game based on 300 has no excuse not to kick ass. Just picture yourself leading 300 Greeks (that’s 1,800 abs) against the Persian empire’s massive armies, led by the evil, pierced, and preening King Xerxes. Since your Spartans are the deadliest soldiers in the world, the Persians’ only chance…
We’re down to our last sketch for the Cydney Payton Design Challenge! That means tonight is the big night, the showdown, the climax, the night we find out who wins the Tamarac Square Fashion Project — and whose drawing of a museum-opening outfit Cydney, the MoCA-D curator selected. It’s been…
Today, we have Jose Clark’s sketch for the Cydney Payton Design Challenge, a special Cat’s Pajamas competition as part of the Tamarac Square Fashion Project. Only one more day until we find out who the director and curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver picked… Here’s Jose’s artist’s statement:…
We’re down to the final three designs for the a Cydney Payton Design Challenge, a special bonus competition that Cat organized as part of the Tamarac Square Fashion Project. Cat will announce the winner on the runway this Wednesday, April 25 — the last Fashion Project show for this year…
Cat got a little behind on posting the sketches for the Cydney Payton Design Challenge, a special addendum to the Tamarac Square Fashion Project. Eight of the competing designers submitted “museum-opening outfit” sketches to the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, who will choose her favorite. The winner will…
Richard Bemis It’s a busy, busy fashion weekend in town. Here’s your cheat sheet for making it through; just put it in your Trapper Keeper and head out on the town. Oh, and if you score any good — or so bad they’re good — fashion photos, send them over…
The slideshow of the Tamarac Square Fashion Project third runway show is now up. Check out all the designs here, then come back and visit Cat to post a comment about who you think should have won. The designer with the most “votes” will score a gift certificate to Sketch…
Sweet Jerusalem, are you ever effed. ZQAYXTF? You’ll never make a high-scoring word out of those tiles. Think. Don’t panic. You’re good with words — a total dictionary junkie. Get it together! Oh, the shame! Relax. This is Scrabble Club, remember? Your toughest decision should be whether to have hot…
