The wee and sprightly mandolin, cousin to the workhorse guitar much as the piccolo is cousin to the flute, has a migrant nature. Though the typical American sees one and immediately thinks of bluegrass, a mandolin is actually an instrument stoked by centuries-old traditions, the strains of which have worked…
Poor Dave Robicheaux. After years of solving crimes too close to home, the brash, volcanic homicide detective carries more psychic baggage than even a cop ought to expect: one wife murdered, another with a mobbed-up past, the crushing toll of his own epic struggles with the bottle and with the…
Cydney Payton, director of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, is set to leave the institution she essentially created out of thin air at the end of the year. The handsome Elbows & Tea Leaves — Front Range Women in the Visual Arts (1974-2000) is the next-to-last BMoCA exhibit that…
Mind Over Matter, an exhibit of recent paintings by Victoria del Carmen Perez that now occupies ILK’s south gallery, may be an uneven show, but the best pieces are extremely good. And unusual. In fact, some viewers may be put off by the materials that the Cuban-born painter uses, and…
Plagued by divisions between working folks and the well-to-do, Germany, like much of the industrialized world in 1928, teeters on the brink of socioeconomic collapse. Seemingly oblivious to this pervasive gloom — or perhaps too aware of it — a steady parade of movers, shakers and edgy dream-chasers keeps the…
I have never read The Odyssey, A Tale of Two Cities, Pride and Prejudice, or, for that matter, the Bible. But I have read, from cover to cover, Occupation: Skateboarder, the just-published autobiography from Tony Hawk. I have never seen most of the films of Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, or…
As any Klump family member can tell you, this has been a hot summer for black comedians. New movies starring Martin Lawrence, the Wayans brothers and Eddie Murphy have already pulled down more than $300 million at the box office, and by the time Chris Rock’s remake of Heaven Can…
When John Waters is at his best, as he is in his latest, Cecil B. Demented, he can grab you in a way few filmmakers have ever managed to do. But recognizing that fact can sometimes be difficult in today’s market-driven context. In fact, for the first half-hour or so…
The average visitor at the Wynkoop Brewing Company doesn’t usually walk in with art on his mind. No, he’s thinking about microbrewed beer and a burger and maybe a few rounds of pool. So the challenges of being an art curator at the brewpub are many, though longtime local art…
When Johnny Rodriguez auditioned to be a tenor singer with the Temptations in Chicago in the 1960s, he was told that he was neither tall enough nor dark enough. But that rejection didn’t deter him from his dream. In 1973, his love of music led him to join his cousin’s…
By way of celebrating the first anniversary of its opening, Bayeux Gallery owner and operator Carla St. Romain has mounted her most important show yet, the 3rd American Tapestry Alliance Biennial Exhibition. Bayeux is an appropriate stop for this national traveling exhibit, because it’s the only regional gallery specializing in…
In the main room at Pirate, co-op member Tony Coulter is presenting Only Mercy, an exhibition of a dozen elegant abstract paintings. Coulters method is simple: He smears paint horizontally and vertically on a linen canvas. The best pieces in this show are the three large ones that incorporate found…
“Please hold for Tammy Faye.” The few seconds between those words and those that follow, uttered by the woman who once haunted pay-to-pray TV like a mascara-ed harlequin, are interminable. Until a month ago, the notion of talking to Tammy Faye Bakker-Messner, once the most adored and reviled figure in…
In the view of documentarians Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, fallen ’80s televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker — she of the pink feather boas and the streetwalker mascara — was the misunderstood victim of right-wing religious zealots, unscrupulous reporters and a corrupt judicial system. Now living “in exile” (also known as…
There’s no explicable reason for the existence of The Replacements, which is to the football-film genre what Major League was to the baseball movie: sports rendered as sitcom (or Police Academy sequel). The Replacements, which takes as its cue the 1987 National Football League players’ strike, is stocked with every…
Clark Secrest doesn’t write antiquarian books, but he does write about antiquarian times, and to do so, he’s had to turn to…antiquarian books and documents. So it makes sense for the former Denver Post police-beat reporter and editor — now the author of a book on Denver’s shadier days and…
At the age of six, Raymond Rodriguez decided he wanted to dance. Specifically, he wanted to tap dance. His family was against it but relented when parents of a friend gave him tap shoes for his birthday. “They said, ‘He already has the shoes, so I guess he can take…
A solo show in the Denver Art Museum’s Vance Kirkland Close Range Gallery is the most highly sought-after gig in the entire exhibition world in Colorado. It’s not that the Close Range is an impressive room — it isn’t. Rather, it’s an awkwardly shaped space shoved into the corner of…
Ties That Bind, at the Singer Gallery of the Mizel Arts Center, though nominally a group show, is actually three solos, as each artist has been given a separate section. The first featured artist is Amy Lee Solomon, who rarely exhibits locally. Her Structures of Atmospheric Turbulence: series, which is…
Actors who portray Shakespearean villains, heroes or clowns are sometimes tempted to overinflate the dialogue for epic effect or add tiny mannerisms to humanize larger-than-life characters. But neither approach, by itself, does dramatic justice to men and women who are part invention, part human, and whose needs, wants and desires…
I am Vlad the Impaler, Joe Eszterhas penis. You know Joe, right? Bigfoot-looking son of a bitch, like Jerry Garcia after he swallowed Brian Wilson on an Acapulco Gold high? The guy who wrote Basic Instinct and Showgirls and Flashdance and a whole lotta crap for which he was paid…
Irish charm and British eccentricity are hot properties on this side of the pond, especially among U.S. moviegoers. Witness the phenomenal success of The Secret of Roan Inish, in which a ten-year-old Irish girl finds her lost brother living among seals off the rugged western coast, or of The Full…
