Professional Gamers Will Battle for $15,000 at Clutch Con This Weekend

Last weekend, French professional Counterstrike players LDLC beat out seven other teams from across Europe and the Americas at X Games Aspen, raking in $25,000 for their win. This weekend, some of those opponents will continue the fight at Clutch Con, a convention and high-stakes video-game tournament at the Crowne…

Another 100 Colorado Creatives: Lauren A. Wright

#39: Lauren A. Wright Though 2015 Biennial of the Americas artistic director Lauren A. Wright is a hometown girl, she spent nearly a decade abroad in the United Kingdom, where she explored international trends in art as a curator for Turner Contemporary and also worked on special projects for Tate…

I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghost(busters Remake)

Ghostbusters reboot was revealed earlier this week. Predictably, the Internet lost its collective mind at the news. Plenty of people were excited, but a much louder, much more obnoxious contingent took to every troll-friendly platform available to declare this new take on the busting of ghosts to be a travesty…

Black or White Stirs Up More Questions Than Answers About Racism

There are few hard-and-fast rules in screenwriting, but here’s one I think we can agree on: Something’s gone wrong if your crowd-pleasing family drama asks audiences to hope a child’s father proves to be a crackhead. That’s one baffling turn in Mike Binder’s Black or White, a movie about race…

This Year’s Oscar-Nominated Short Films Are Short on Winners

While many of Oscar’s big shots clock in at more than two hours, some filmmakers remain committed to telling unique and inventive stories that don’t require viewers to set aside an entire night to enjoy. The Academy Award-nominated short films run the gamut of topics and tones. Yet together they…

Stephen Belber and Patrick Stewart Are a Perfect Match

Writer-director Stephen Belber’s inspiring, generous Match is so good that it’s like some kind of trick. In what can only be characterized as a verdant collaboration between the director and the irreplaceable Patrick Stewart, the film offers a vivid portrait of a huge-hearted Juilliard dance professor named Tobi Powell who…

Now Playing: This Week’s Theater Options

5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche. “At the center, it’s a really sweet love story — and the funniest show of the year. I actually think that’s true. People who think women can’t be funny? Well, they should come and take a look at this.” That’s director Edith Weiss’s description of…

Now Showing: This Week’s Art Options

Charles Parson and Collin Parson. Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center museum director Blake Milteer has put together a major duet, Continuance: Charles and Collin Parson, taking advantage of the unusual circumstance in which a father and son are both committed contemporary artists. It makes sense to link Chuck to his…

Concrete Mixer IV

Musique concrète pioneered the notion of composing directly with sound, often ignoring the common rules of melody, rhythm and the like. “It’s the idea that there’s these sounds you hear around that are familiar and have their own emotive content, and that you can kind of reduce it to those…

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

The late Russ Meyer, king of the exploitation film, had an eye for the ladies, and he centered his goofy pictures on stories about bored housewives with heaving bosoms looking for satisfaction, or on buxom badass babes out to tear rotten men a new one. From snapping photos for Playboy…

Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson

“There’s so much of me out there that one could wonder, ‘What am I going to get seeing him in person?’” says astrophysicist and all-around science guy Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. “What I do know is that when I’m on stage, it’s almost like we’re one on one.” So if…

Armored Combat League Western Conference

The best part in any sword-and-sorcery epic is always the big battle — the fierce cries of the combatants, the ring of steel on steel, and the sweet sight of the bad guys falling to the ground after they’ve been decapitated by the hero. Now you can get all of…

The “Why-The-Hell-Are-We-So-Busy?” Festival

Evan Weissman, one of the programmers behind the civic health club Warm Cookies of the Revolution, says he and his cohorts have wanted to create an event about how busy everybody is for quite some time. “We were talking about this idea that everyone is so busy — or feels…

Screw Your Resolution Party

We’re one month into 2015, and by now, many of us have already given up on our New Year’s resolutions — if we ever kept them to begin with. Whether your promise to stop drinking was sabotaged by the bottomless Bloody Mary bar or your new acro-yoga gym membership has…

Oriental Super Bowl XLIX Party

Just because the Broncos fell well short of the big game and it’s come down to two of the most hated teams in the nation is no reason to skip the Super Bowl. After all, there’s still the commercials and the halftime show — and, hell, one of those awful…

Clutch Con 2015

With universities now offering scholarships to League of Legends players and head-to-head gaming scheduled to appear at this month’s X Games in Aspen, video games are getting more respect as a competitive activity. Beginning today, Clutch Con, a three-day tournament and convention organized by Arvada’s Clutch Gaming Arena, will draw…

SIA Snow Show

“It’s huge for us to have the whole industry right in our back yard, because we’re from here, all of our skis are made here, we ski here, and now most of our business is done here through the SIA trade show,” says Icelantic Skis co-founder Ben Anderson, who will…

Review: Beets Brings World War II Home to Colorado

Beets Read and Rant Productions Aurora Fox My mother grew up in what is now Slovakia, and she used to tell a story about one of the Russian prisoners who’d been sent to work on her family’s farm during World War I, when she was still a little girl. It…