Tonight Mayor Michael Hancock and Denver’s Community Planning and Development Department will honor fifteen projects for excellence in architecture, design and place-making during the 2014 Mayor’s Design Awards ceremony at The Studio Loft of the Denver Performing Arts Complex. “This year’s winning projects are phenomenal examples of what makes Denver…
We’re guessing the faces of the folks behind the Starz Denver Film Festival fell as the temperatures dropped in advance of Wednesday’s opening night at the Buell Theatre. They’d already taken a gamble by booking 5 to 7, a low key romance that’s generated relatively little buzz to date, as…
Writer Nancy Stohlman doesn’t need a lot of words to make an impact. In fact, she needs fewer than a thousand. Stohlman has spent the last few years championing flash fiction, stories told in under 1,000 words. She will release her new solo anthology of flash fiction, The Vixen Scream…
Geeks have a lot of reasons to be excited about this year’s Starz Denver Film Festival. There’s the sweet Stanley Nights program of horror (one of my picks for the top geek events this month). Among the “normal” films, you’ll find a sweet-looking Alan Turing biopic that should be of…
Again this year, Starz Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Today, he spotlights El Critico. See also: The Ten Best Movie Events…
Every holiday season, the Colorado Governor’s Residence Preservation Fund commissions a new Christmas tree ornament that is inspired by or modeled after an object inside the Governor’s Residence at the Boettcher Mansion; the ornament is then duplicated and copies are sold to the public as a way to raise money…
If the universe is infinitely finite, an entity whose mystery is knowable only through an evolving progression of theories and equations, it’s nothing compared to a marriage. Every marriage or long-term partnership is knowable only to the people inside it — and sometimes not even then. The Theory of Everything…
During a 2009 Daily Show interview with Maziar Bahari, the Canadian-Iranian journalist who had been imprisoned in Iran for 118 days on espionage charges earlier that year, Jon Stewart said, “We hear a lot about the banality of evil, but so little about the stupidity of evil.” Or about its…
Though it’s tempting to laugh at the endless stream of neologisms and cosmologies that Tumblr hath wrought, the nobility of intent is undeniable: Everyone feels the need to define and understand himself, herself or itself. (If I went through my teenage years as a happy goth, someone else has the…
Buried Child. Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1979, still carries a creepy wallop. The story of a violently dysfunctional family — a drunken, abusive father who has destroyed his sons and is now being destroyed in return — it was hailed in its time as…
Discovering and Interpreting the West. This ambitious three-part extravaganza at the Arvada Center highlights Western landscape art. The nineteenth-century examples are in the Theater Gallery, the twentieth-century pieces are on the upper level, and the 21st-century renditions — the main course — are on the lower level. All three were…
Tales of fame and its trappings — and the way they’re never enough to build a life — are as old as show business itself. Maybe for that reason, almost any story about discovering the hollowness of fame is often written off as a cliché. But what’s the difference, really,…
In the mid-1990s, self-appointed cultural gatekeepers used to wield Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s Dumb and Dumber as proof of the deterioration of film artistry. Those people hadn’t, of course, actually bothered to see the movie, and thus had no sense of its peculiar, sweet-spirited, un-toilet-trained brilliance. Times have changed, thank…
Sit down and take a load off, because tonight, the humble chair will be elevated and celebrated at Chaircuterie, an art party and a fundraiser for the American Institute of Graphic Arts Colorado and the Denver Art Museum Design Council. More than one hundred chair-inspired works will be showcased and…
When film-goers get bored with Hollywood’s action-movie clichés and formulaic rom-coms, they have a thriving indie film scene to turn to, where innovative ideas can flourish. It’s no different in the world of games. When gamers find themselves tiring of the latest iteration of Call of Duty or yet another…
For more than a century, anarchists have gathered together at annual balls to laugh, dance and joyfully share their views on social justice and political injustice. Denver Anarchist Black Cross took up the tradition more than five years ago and has been hosting the Martyr’s Ball fundraiser ever since. “It’s…
If you’ve walked past the Buffalo Exchange on Broadway this month, you might have noticed the Kork-Ease Pop Boutique, a temporary installation and display designed to emulate fashion boutiques such as Biba, the illustrious London shop from the 1960s and ’70s that revolutionized how young people found and purchased clothing…
Science-fiction films don’t have to have astronomical budgets or use absurdly elaborate special effects to be engaging; in fact, the science-fiction canon features nearly as many small-scale, low-budget classics as it does Hollywood blockbusters. In preparation for the debut of director Alex Cox’s latest film, itself a low-budget sci-fi epic,…
Beer and bacon lovers will unite to celebrate two of the best things in the world at today’s Bacon and Beer Festival. More than twenty breweries will be on hand to pair their beer with 26 bacon-filled treats from local restaurants. The event sold out in each of its first…
When David Fodel helped launch MediaLive two years ago, one of his goals for the performance-, workshop- and talk-filled symposium was to showcase artists who are exploring new forms of live audiovisual work. “These communities, they thread back into themselves,” Fodel explains. “It’s at these kinds of festivals that you…
More than one hundred visual artists from around the country – and one photographer from Tokyo – are coming to Denver this weekend for the inaugural ArtDenver, a three-day indoor exhibition and more that will close out Denver Arts Week. The juried art show will feature 91 artists who have…
Avant-garde animator Larry Jordan, who has crafted more than fifty experimental shorts since the 1950s, compares his creative process to alchemy. “The common conception of alchemy is trying to make gold out of lead. That was not really what it was,” he says. “It was trying to find something more…
