Photos: Snowboard on the Block in RiNo

Despite September temps that felt like the height of summer, pro snowboarders hit the rail yard — built on 35 tons of manmade snow shipped in to the streets of RiNo for the occasion — at last weekend’s Vans Pro Jam at Snowboard on the Block. The event also included…

Ten Most Amazing Abandoned Places in Colorado

Nature versus civilization is a time-honored battle, and there are some beautiful, abandoned places in Colorado where it is clear nature has won: worn, rusted places returning to the earth. As summer ends, you can enjoy seeing nature triumph — and leaves turn — while also checking out everything from…

Marilyn Minter Talks Photoshop, Feminism, Fashion and Fine Art

For the past three decades, Marilyn Minter has produced images that are explicit, engaging, and up-close and personal as she explores human sexuality in popular culture while blurring the line between highbrow and lowbrow art. The New York artist’s fascinating career is now being highlighted in a major retrospective opening…

Review: American Girls Dances With the Challenges of Teenagers

American Girls might be the antidote to Girls Only, a giggly, anodyne and essentially contentless production based on the teenage diaries of its two creators: never mean, never disconcerting, never surprising — the kind of show you take in when you crave drinks with your girlfriends and don’t have the…

It’s Bobby Fischer vs. His Own Mind in Pawn Sacrifice

The hardest type of guy for an actor to play is one without charisma. That’s the challenge faced by Tobey Maguire in Edward Zwick’s Pawn Sacrifice, which tells the story of Cold War-era chess champ and totally strange human being Bobby Fischer. He’s good at it — maybe too good…

The Mayday Experiment: Out With the Old, In With the New

There have been several setbacks since the beginning of this project, but none greater than losing my Ford F250, Bertha. Leaking oil out her tailpipe, she came to her final resting place at the inconvenient and terrifying juncture of I-225 and I-70, right at the bend in the road. Waiting…

Another 100 Colorado Creatives: Jerry De La Cruz

#11: Jerry De La Cruz Artist Jerry De La Cruz, who nows splits his time between studios in Denver and Miami, has been a force in the local Chicano art movement for more than forty years. His signature magic realism is all his own, sometimes tapping into cultural roots and…

Denver Author BR Sanders on Putting LGBTQ Perspectives in Fantasy

Fantasy, as a genre, can feel pretty tired after a while. The same themes — prophesied heroes saving the world, ancient evil uniting reluctant warriors to a common cause — crop up again and again. The same mythology — elves and dragons, swords and sorcery, knights and kingdoms — is…

Insightful Acting Adds to the Success of A Brilliant Young Mind

The minds of math and science geniuses have long fascinated the makers of crowd-pleasing narrative features — which is curious, since the complexities that fascinate those minds are antithetical to the feelings-first bounce of popular filmmaking. The movies, having settled into candied naturalism, already struggle to suggest interiority, even of…

Scott Cooper’s Black Mass Is a Tightly Wound Piece of Work

James “Whitey” Bulger was more like a character from a seventeenth-century folktale than a late-twentieth-century criminal, the sort of figure who’d murder innocents on wooded roadways and then, with a shrug, toss their bloody bones to hungry wild dogs. In 1980s and early-’90s Boston, he headed a criminal syndicate known…

Photos: New Belgium Brewing’s Tour de Fat Rolls Into Denver

The annual Tour de Fat cycling rave-up in City Park is like the perfect storm of favorite Denver pastimes: Biking, beer, music and costumes mingle in harmony for one crazy day, to the delight of participants and onlookers alike. Photographer Ken Hamblin was at the Tour to Fat stop on…

For Painter Kery Allen, It’s What’s Inside That Counts

You can find art all over town — not just on gallery walls. In this series, we’ll be looking at some of the local artists who serve up their work in coffeehouses and other non-gallery businesses around town. Aurora native Kery Allen filled up her high school schedule with art…