3 things to do for free in Denver this week, June 16-19

Summer is in full swing and you’re probably saving up your cash to party with 2 Chainz this weekend at the Westword Music Showcase. So if you want to have a good time this week without burning a hole in your wallet, here’s a few things to try. Celebrate sports,…

Photos: Flyboys and jitterbugging dames at the 1940s WWII Era Ball

The annual 1940s WWII Era Ball goes back in time right down to every last retro detail, with re-enactor appearances by ’40s celebrities, swinging to big band music and some cherry examples of WWII aircraft for a backdrop at the Boulder Airport. Photographer Jake Shane was there on Saturday night…

TEDx Mile High premieres tomorrow with sixteen regional speakers

TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design brings sixteen local leaders innovators and entrepreneurs to Ellie Caulkins Opera House tomorrow for an independently organized TEDx Mile High event. The theme is “Emergence” — of new ideas, thinking and technology — which will be threaded through the presentations. Educators, musicians,…

Gary Reilly’s posthumous pre-war novel shows some life

We’ve written before about the strange career of Denver cabbie and secret author Gary Reilly, who wrote more than two dozen novels over decades but never tried to publish any of them before his death from cancer in 2011, at the age of 61. That long silence is now being…

Gallery Sketches: Three shows for the weekend of June 13-15

It’s Friday the thirteenth, but that’s no reason to stay home: Tonight and in the days to come, Friday Flash, Denver Comic Con and OhHeckYeah will transform downtown into a wham! pow! high-tech and pop-culture art paradise, while the otherworldly, monumental glass shapes of Chihuly will wow the crowds at…

How to make a geek: Nurture nerdiness

It doesn’t take a geek to raise a geek, but it sure helps. My elder daughter will turn 21 this year, and as she reaches the final gateway to adulthood (woohoo, booze!), it’s safe to say that just as surely as she got my genes — sorry about that terrible…

Another 100 Colorado Creatives: Ivar Zeile

#74: Ivar Zeile Ivar Zeile collects artists with a keen eye for talent and trends as director of RiNo’s Plus Gallery, but he also makes some free-swinging hunches as he tries to get a sense for what’s next in the contemporary art scene. In recent years, Zeile’s search for the…

Now Showing

1959. Dean Sobel, director of the Clyfford Still Museum, is the host curator for Modern Masters at the Denver Art Museum, and he’s done a companion exhibit at his own stamping grounds called 1959: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery Exhibition Recreated. (Special tickets allow visitors to see both.) The backstory for…

In 22 Jump Street, the original magic has dimmed a bit

One of the biggest selling points of 21 Jump Street, the 2012 TV-remake comedy, turned out to be its seemingly unscripted lunacy, the way it put Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill in police-shorts outfits and let them riff on their characters’ mutual ineptitude. As undercover cops who pose as teenagers…

The Signal delivers some thrills, too many spills

There’s still one kind of dread that today’s genre filmmakers can reliably stir up: that everything we’ve been watching on screen is going to be upended by some last-minute twist, that all the clues and portents we’ve puzzled over will be swept away in favor of some revelation so big…

A gorgeous new Jeff Wenzel solo pairs paintings and ceramics

Jeff Wenzel is one of Colorado’s great abstract artists, with a solid body of work done over the past few decades. Though his roots are in ceramics — he was a protégé of Peter Voulkos, whose abstract-expressionist approach to clay completely revolutionized that medium — Wenzel has only rarely exhibited…

Now Playing

Shrek: the Musical.T here are a lot of things to like about Shrek: The Musical at Boulder’s Dinner Theatre. They include the Dragon, created by Cory Gilstrap and manipulated by a handful of actors. Blessed with the rich, seductive voice of the inimitable Amanda Earls, she’s a riveting, literally huge…