Now Showing: The Week’s Art Options

Far North & Outer Space. Far North & Outer Space, now at Goodwin Fine Art, features new work by Beau Carey and Lanny DeVuono, both of whom create contemporary paintings based obliquely on views of the landscape. Many of the Careys are snow scenes and were inspired by a National…

Citizenfour‘s Laura Poitras Explains Why Edward Snowden Did It

With the first two documentaries in her post–9-11 trilogy — My Country, My Country, a portrait of Iraq under American occupation, and The Oath, which focused on two Guantánamo Bay prisoners — Laura Poitras seemed to be making a bid for the title of film’s most vigilant observer of American…

Whiplash Offers a Painful and Joyous Jazz Education

Jazz isn’t dead. Miraculously, there’s always a small but steady stream of young people who continue to fall in love with this most dazzling and elusive American genre, spending hours, days, and months running ribbons of scales and memorizing Charlie Parker solos in the hopes that some of the alto…

Art and Craft‘s Trickster Forger Is an American Original

Knocking out the first-rate forgeries that fooled sixty American museums? That was a curiously mundane miracle, something for Mark Landis to do while watching TV. A frail and ascetic Mississippian who resembles Michael Stipe playing Truman Capote, Landis sketched and painted minor Currans, Averys, and Cassatts with one eye on…

Sex Appeal

The Exotica Erotica Ball brings fire spinners, body paint and a “dungeon of desire” to its two-city double feature this weekend. The adult-themed and costume-required masquerade party, described by event curator Steve Wallis as looking like a “hybrid between burlesque and strippers,” has been showcased in Boulder for more than…

To Like or Not to Like

Is what we say through the voice of our social-networking persona more than just a simple status update? Decorated local poet, actor and teacher Wayne A. Gilbert thinks so, and it was the gathering of his own Internet postings that inspired tonight’s performance of Facebook Quickies: Poems From Facebook Posts…

Scare Aware

With Dismember the Alamo, a four-movie marathon of undisclosed films, the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema is aiming to re-create that feeling of discovery and joy that came from surfing late-night TV for horror in the pre-digital days. “When we came up with this concept, we wanted to go back to when…

Andrew McMahon

Soon after graduating from high school, the singer-songwriter-pianist Andrew McMahon scored a Drive-Thru Records deal with his Orange County, California, quintet, Something Corporate. Upon releasing their 2001 EP, Audioboxer, the emo-leaning piano-pop wavemakers were upstreamed into MCA Records (now part of Geffen) for their 2002 full-length, Leaving Through the Window…

Crowd Pleasers

Often mistaken for an offshoot of standup comedy, the national improv scene is always looking for its own way to shine, and this year’s Denver Improv Festival will try to shatter the standup myth with an array of local and national creative talent. “Improv is really theatrical; you’ll get a…

Fashion Passion

“I feel extremely re-energized,” says Brandi Shigley, the entrepreneur behind Fashion Denver, which is celebrating its ten-year anniversary this year. And she’s planning big things for the Fall Fashion Market: Elevate, the newest version of the clothing-and-accessory showcase that Shigley throws on a semi-regular basis. “We’re doing four fashion shows…

A Hairy Situation

Bearded men from across the country will flock to Longmont this weekend for the Boulder Facial Hair Club’s second annual Beard and Moustache Competition. “We have competitors coming from as far away as Texas and New York,” says Tobin Voggesser of the BFHC, who adds that an all-star panel of…

King Con

When MileHiCon returns this weekend for its 46th year, the literary science-fiction convention will have more than eighty authors in attendance. That lineup is headlined by Hugo and Nebula award winner Michael Swanwick and the writing duo of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, creators of the Expanse series coming to…

Inspiration Porn

The working title for the sketch-comedy show Vox Phamalia: Pity Pity Bang Bang was “inspiration porn,” reveals Edith Weiss, who co-wrote the show with Jeremy Palmer and the rest of the creative cast at Phamaly Theatre Company. “It’s a series of sketches with a comedic take about living with disabilities,…

Small-Town History

Ruth Cave Flowers, who moved to Boulder from Cripple Creek with her grandmother in about 1917, came to the foothills town looking for an education but was nearly denied her diploma from Boulder High School because of her color. Flowers went on to became one of the first African-American women…

Girls Next Door

Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, says the working title for his new book, Beautiful You, was Fifty Shades of the Twilight Cave Bear Wears Prada. In it, he lampoons a few tropes from chick-lit and mommy porn. Sure, there’s a nod to Fifty Shades of Grey in Beautiful You,…

Change Order

Jeannie-Marie Brown believes that theater is an important part of social change. She created the new Denver-based Stay Awake! theater company, named for a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr., on the premise that change is a consequence of thinking. “At the core of it all, theater is a unionizing…

A Sense of Multidiscipline

A taste of work from the University of Colorado at Boulder’s arts/academic glitterati will be shared in Denver tonight when the literary press and tiny multi-arts venue Counterpath celebrates the release of internationally known author/artist Mark Amerika’s new book Locus Solus, while simultaneously launching the monthlong exhibit Albert Chong: The…

Set the Night on Fire

Some people say that you haven’t really seen the continuing Chihuly outdoor exhibit at the Denver Botanic Gardens until you’ve seen it at night, when the nature-inspired, site-specific glass installations are illuminated with spotlights (and from within using neon tubes, in the case of one spectacular golden tower). Up until…

Jeffrey B. Miller Tackles Epic Tale of Forgotten WWI Heroes and Belgian Relief

Jeff Miller’s grandfather never talked much about how he happened to meet Jeff’s grandmother while he was assisting civilian relief efforts in German-occupied Belgium during the Great War. That reticence stirred Miller’s writerly curiosity about the little-known exploits of the American-led Commission for Relief in Belgium, which went to ingenious…

Film Podcast: Oscar Season Opens with Birdman and Listen Up Philip

It’s awards season and the hyped movies are starting to land in theaters. On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, we talk about Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, starring Michael Keaton, and Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip, and carve out some time to recommend Nothing Bad Can Happen and Glen…