Nothing in the house for dinner? Just step outside, scoop some little critters off the ground and pluck a few berries from the garden, and you have the makings for a tasty snack of “black currant and roasted ant tarts.” That’s just one of the delicacies on the menu at…
There’s something special about vinyl. It could be a record’s versatility, its maneuverability, the crackle of the needle skimming the surface — whatever the je ne sais quoi element happens to be, it’s kept records around longer than any other music medium. Emile Berliner patented the first gramophone sound system…
“It’s a wagon with slightly clunky wheels, but that’s intentional,” says performance artiste extraordinaire Nina Rolle. “It’s a traveling medicine show that pitches a tent in whatever town it’s in, and then these rogues show up and put on a production. It’s got that kind of flavor.” It’s tough to…
Few things bleed post-modernism more profusely than the films of Andy Warhol. The prolific artist shot more than sixty stories from 1963 to 1968, among them Sleep, which shows a man sleeping for eight hours, and Blowjob, 35 minutes of fellatio footage. And although Chelsea Girls was certainly his most…
Today in history, Robert Oppenheimer — daddy to the atomic bomb — was born in 1904; in 1915, Germany first used chlorine gas cylinders in World War I as a weapon against the French army at Ypres; and in 1970, during the Nixon years, the first Earth Day was celebrated…
Vast legions embrace the thing as gospel. Skeptics dismiss it as ecstatic nonsense. In any event, James Redfield’s peculiar novel, The Celestine Prophecy, has been a bulwark of new-age metaphysics since it first hit the bestseller lists back in 1993. By recent estimates, there are 14 million copies in print,…
Wanna knock the prez? Let’s make a show — preferably on television. Paul Weitz’s new satire American Dreamz imagines the Bush regime as an episode in the history of American entertainment and American Idol as the quintessence of U.S. democracy. So what else is new? The vision of America as…
If you can tell a society by its smut, America in the 1950s couldn’t have been just a Frigidaire of repressive hysteria. Hidden somewhere in the closets of Pleasantville and Peyton Place, after all, was a stack of fetish mags bearing the face and hourglass figure of Bettie Page and…
Amid brutal competition from A History of Violence, Caché (Hidden) and Last Days, the top prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival went to L¹Enfant (The Child), a Belgian drama about a twenty-year-old hustler who sells his infant son like a bag of weed. The makers of this provocative movie,…
If you’re craving an antidote to the sanctity of repressed gay cowboys, you could do worse than Adam & Steve. This good-natured comedy from writer-director Craig Chester uses gently sly wit to poke fun at neurotic gay singles, coming of age in the 1980s and dating in the era of…
The second Central and East European Film Festival gets under way on the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus Monday, April 24, with a program called “Reading Between the Lines: Subversive Films Banned Under Repressive Regimes,” with screenings of Milos Forman’s classic 1967 satire from Czechoslovakia, The Fireman’s Ball, and Juliusz…
Up until the 1960s, people argued in all seriousness that photography was not a fine art because a machine was used to produce it. Today this seems not just naive, but incredibly wrong, as photography is now the predominant form in all types of contemporary art. Photos themselves are a…
Five to ten years ago, there seemed to always be some kind of over-the-top installation at Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173), but lately such displays have been few and far between. They do take a lot of effort, after all, and are completely un-sellable. Being outrageously ambitious and a…
Apparition. The brand-new Gallery Severn, which is owned by art collector and retired executive Andy Dodd, aims to be what he has called a “launch pad” for emerging artists. This specialty in fresh faces instantly makes the place interesting. Also interesting is Dodd’s decision to feature only one artist at…
I’ve been dancing around this conclusion, trying to find a way to put it more tactfully, but I can’t: Waitin¹ 2 End Hell is a nasty, misogynist play. You can dress it up all you want with theories about the problems of the black family and the unfair and emasculating…
Quartermaine¹s Terms simply refuses to come to life. In fact, from the current Germinal Stage production, I can’t quite figure out what the play’s supposed to be about. It seems like one of those gentle, wistful British comedies in which all the meaning lies beneath and around the actual lines,…
The Clean House. The first act of Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House is close to a perfect piece of theater. On a stunningly evocative, elegantly gray-and-white set, Matilde cleans house for a pair of doctors — Lane and her surgeon husband, Charles. Matilde hates to clean. She wants to figure…
Americano (MTI) Before he is due to take a high-powered corporate job, college graduate Chris (Joshua Jackson) heads off with two friends (Timm Sharp and Ruthanna Hopper) to Europe, where they end up in Pamplona for the running of the bulls. There, he encounters one of those saucy Latinas (Blade…
A Bigger Splash (First Run) Breakfast on Pluto (Sony) Cross of Iron (Henstooth) Event Horizon: Collector’s Edition (Paramount) Games of Love and Chance (New Yorker) Herbie Hancock: Possibilities (Magnolia) Hostel (Sony) I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (Plexifilm) Kickboxer: Five-Disc Collector’s Set (Lions Gate) The Killing Time (Anchor Bay)…
Marlon Brando sleeps with the fishes. But before the legendary actor died, he worked one last job. Curiously, it was for a videogame. In The Godfather: The Game, Brando attempts to relive his Oscar-winning role as Don Vito Corleone. From the raspy voice to the drooping jowls, it’s Vito, all…
Aggressive panhandling is forbidden in Denver, but at The Mock Trial of Baby Doe Tabor, a Colorado History Group/Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame production, the cast will be begging shamelessly for laughs. Patty Limerick, Mary Mullarkey and Tom Noel will prosecute Colorado’s most notorious homewrecker on a variety of charges,…
Jake Adam York read at least 200 books of poetry last year. Of those, Catherine Wing’s slim debut volume, Enter Visible, was one of the most intriguing. “It was the funniest book I’ve read in a long time,” says York, a University of Colorado at Denver prof and poet. “It’s…
