On past New Year’s Eves, people would cry, When looking back and saying goodbye, That’s because with the chiming of the midnight bell, They’d say so long to stuff that’s swell. But this year finds a Lang Syne Auld, Covered with some icky mold. The year we know as 2001…
As years go, 2002 might be facing something akin to a sophomore slump. There are no sci-fi film classics about 2002; no dire apocalyptic scenarios are attached to it. Two years in, we’ve grown fairly comfortable with life in the Oughts. Despite past predictions, we’re not flying around in spaceships…
The new year has not always started on January 1 — or with a hangover. In the Middle Ages, most European countries used the Julian calendar and marked the beginning of the new year on March 25. Called Annunciation Day, it was celebrated as the day on which Mary learned…
“Auld Lang Syne” may be the most famous song that no one knows the words to — especially after four or five glasses of champagne. Not many people know where the song came from, either. The words “Should auld acquaintance be forgot” can be traced back to an anonymous 1568…
The new year symbolizes a time of renewal, rebirth — and all of those pesky resolutions that will be broken before the month is out. Every year we vow to exercise, save money, lose weight, get a better job. Every year, we abandon all of our good intentions before the…
It’s 8 a.m., your alarm has just gone off, and you feel as though you’ve been hit by a truck. Happy new year! Now if you can only remember what you did last night that caused a fog the size of Canada to descend on your brain. Clearly, drinking was…
Beneath the hazy, mystifying layers of Vanilla Sky lies a remarkable Tom Cruise performance — one that, to a large extent, takes place beneath a makeup artist’s piled-on scars and a costumer’s blank “prosthetic” mask. As David Aames, hipster publisher of Maxim-like magazines, Cruise plays a lothario so vain he…
It took five men to concoct the hackneyed plot and conceive the brainless jokes that constitute Not Another Teen Movie, meaning there are five men in Los Angeles right now still trying to wash that stink off their soft, idle hands. Five men — the very thought boggles the mind…
“Mr. Human Rights,” they once called him, and though his was never the most famous name on the bill–that was Bono or Bruce Springsteen, Sting or Peter Gabriel–as the organizer of the Conspiracy of Hope concerts in 1986 and the Human Rights Now! world tour two years later, Jack Healey…
After seeing the stunning Martha Daniels, Amy Metier, Betty Woodman installed on its first floor, I’m tempted to say that the William Havu Gallery has never looked better. This is hardly surprising, and it’s obvious why: All three artists are stylistically linked to one another in a variety of ways…
Last spring, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center announced an incredibly stupid expansion plan. Cooked up by Minneapolis-based facility planner Hammel, Green and Abrahamson, the concept called for a huge box to be plunked down on the front of the building. That building, as it happens, is a 1936 moderne…
This version of Little Women — The Musical first played at the Littleton Town Hall Arts Center three years ago, and it was voted best new musical by the Denver Drama Critics Circle. The show brings to life Louisa May Alcott’s beloved Civil War-era children’s book about the four March…
Conundrum State Productions, which claims to stage “theater for the discriminating audience member, as performed by the seriously unwell,” is presenting three short plays under the umbrella title Mortal Fools at the LIDA Project Theater. Each play contains something worthwhile — a fragment of insight, a snippet of surprise, a…
The lights go down, and the puzzlement begins. Ensemble cast of superstars? Check. Loose remake of amusing curiosity? Check. Built-in, pre-fab sense of cool? Check. A little something for wistful fans of Dino and Sammy? Check. So…wait a minute: Is this The Cannonball Run Redux? With his ambitious but unnecessary…
The film Tape, a film by Richard Linklater, isn’t. It’s high time for some cinematic clarification: If a project is shot on celluloid, with light searing images onto emulsion, then it’s a film. If it’s recorded with magnetic frequencies or digital code (as is the case here), then it’s a…
It is difficult to mistake the humble snow globe for an objet d’art. While today’s variety of the cultural relic — generally, a plastic orb filled with water and sealed with a rubber stopper — has a certain amount of low-rent charm, the funny world-within-a-world bubbles are often derided as…
Nationally recognized folk artist Eppie Archuleta is weaving again in her San Luis studio. The octogenarian, who comes from a long line of weavers, abandoned her loom a short while ago. She was depressed after the recent deaths of her husband and her mother, Agueda Martinez, who passed away at…
For the past few years, Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art has simply closed its doors on “A Day Without Art,” a global observance of World AIDS Day, December 1, that was first introduced in 1989. But this year, the museum staff wanted to do something more high-profile while still preserving…
If you grew up Jewish and American in a certain time and place, Yiddish — that linguistic mishmash of German, Hebrew, drama and high sarcasm — was always in the background, if not at the forefront, of your everyday life. Perhaps your grandparents used it among themselves; perhaps your parents…
Clark Richert is surely on everyone’s list of the most significant Colorado artists of the last quarter-century, and his work has been included in museums and corporate and private collections around the country. What made him famous around here is the work that he began to produce in the 1960s:…
With so many people staying home this winter, it’s virtually a public service that the Spark Gallery (1535 Platte Street, 303 455-4435) has been transformed into a vacationland of the imagination. In the front gallery is Being There, a selection of charcoal drawings and oil paintings by Barbara Shark that…
It seems every decade has its defining murders, and you can tell a lot about an age by which homicides grab national attention, how the press frames the crimes, and the ways the cases are disposed of by the courts. In the 1990s, it was O.J. Simpson’s alleged fatal slashing…
