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Charles Bunnell. A pioneer abstractionist is the star of Charles Bunnell: Rocky Mountain Modern at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The show was curated by Blake Milteer, the CSFAC’s museum director and curator of American art, who built it around the private collection of James and Virginia Moffett, who…

Salinger fails to do justice to the author’s legacy

If they made a movie, Holden wouldn’t like it,” Martin Sheen opines deep into the new documentary Salinger. He’s speaking of the possibility of a film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye, a disastrous idea that J.D. Salinger prevented in both life and death. Sheen, of course, could be…

With Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Edge has uncaged a hit

Zoos tend to fare badly during wartime, with the plight of captive animals mirroring that of besieged populations. Diane Ackerman’s beautiful book The Zoo Keeper’s Wife tells the story of the Zabinskis, who ran a zoo in Warsaw that was devastated by German bombers: “The moaning of lions and yowling…

Screw Tooth’s Some Kind of Fun isn’t much fun

Multimedia artist Adam Stone has collaborated on four of Buntport’s most interesting shows, making music for three and contributing a soundscape and his own haunting presence to Wake, the company’s take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. So a fair amount of excitement greeted the recent announcement that he had created a…

Pleasure in the Rubble: Why the Summer’s Last, Smallest Blockbuster Was Its Best

We’ll always have Iron Man, they must be telling each other in Hollywood. As summer wanes, the hulking corpses of would-be blockbusters litter the home-video distribution channels like fallen kaiju from Guillermo Del Toro’s giant-‘bots-vs.-giant-beasts movie Pacific Rim, the most enjoyable of 2013’s many urban-renewing summer blockbusters. In Del Toro’s…

Ovation Station

“What always happens with Off-Center — which is both fun and terrifying — is that we have this initial inspiration, and then we bring a bunch of people together to make it happen,” says Charlie Miller, co-curator of Off-Center@The Jones. “But it is often not until it gets closer to…

Great American Techo Festival

When it comes to hard, dark, pulsing techno, Droid Behavior is one of the best labels out there, and the Great American Techno Festival will fill your need for some gritty underground sounds this weekend. The main festival takes place Friday, September 13, through Sunday, September 15, at Skyline Park,…

Alien Nation

Set aside those Independence Day fantasies. When the aliens invade, our technological achievements will look primitive and pitiful next to their superior technology. Resistance will be futile: When they come for you, you’re going to have to run or die. Train for our eventual race against extinction in the Area…

Chug-A-Lug

If you’ve ever run a marathon, the inaugural Denver Beerathon, a liver-saturating craft-beer palooza that blows into town today, should be a cakewalk. After all, Sam Gelin, the brains behind the traveling brew crawl, insists, “It’s only like a marathon with respect to the fact that there are the same…

All Aboard

In past years, Snowboard on the Rocks kicked off the carving season with snow-sports film premieres and music at Red Rocks. This year’s Snowboard on the Block will re-package the concept and bring it down to the party-ready EXDO Event Center in RiNo. And though the surroundings won’t be as…

Video Vault

Culture and technology are splintering in every direction these days, but nothing brings us all back together like our collective memory of VHS tapes. “We want our videos to be the perfect crap storm of comedy, beauty and non-preachy social commentary,” says Commodore Gilgamesh of Everything Is Terrible!, the found-footage…

School Days

Alamo Drafthouse Littleton’s September programming is all about back-to-school themes — and Mean Girls is the perfect choice for a quote-along, notes Alamo spokesman Keith Garcia. “When you think about movies that bring back all the feelings, good and bad, about being in school, Mean Girls is right at the…

Play Anime

Loyal disciples will come together this weekend for the seventeenth incarnation of Nan Desu Kan, one of the country’s largest anime conventions. For three days and nights, NDKers will take over the Marriott DTC in full anime regalia, enjoying keenly organized programming that brings the industry’s biggest stars, experts and…

Film Queens

Drag and Broadway have been in a long-term relationship since maybe the beginning of musical theater, if not time, and the beautiful music they make together builds to a glittery, madcap crescendo in Priscilla Queen of the Desert: The Musical, an adaptation of the 1994 Academy Award-winning film. Priscilla first…

The Reel Deal

Pablo Kjolseth of CU-Boulder’s International Film Series held out on going digital for as long as he could, but circumstances — and the passage of the Digital Cinema Initiative — made that increasingly difficult in a world where new celluloid film is a thing of the past. After a fast…

Comic Sense

Having just powered through two local festivals within a week of each other, it’s easy for fans to forget that comedy shows exist outside the city limits of Denver. Hopefully you’ve saved a few laughs for the Oddball Comedy & Curiosity Festival, which arrives in town tonight and stars Dave…

One For All

As an incubator for the arts and a show space for up-and-coming creatives for more than thirty years, the Chicano Humanities & Arts Council Gallery is all about inclusion, and tonight’s opening of the Los Vatos Renaissance show is the embodiment of just that: It’s a presentation of work from…

Back to Nature

Museo de las Américas director Maruca Salazar wisely chose the work of five young Latin American artists to represent the museum during this summer’s Biennial of the Americas 2013. All of them, she says, are part of a new generation deeply concerned with environmental issues in a world overrun by…

In the Sway

Most of Spun, the Denver Art Museum’s summer mélange of textile-related exhibits, is already open, but many will consider Nick Cave: Sojourn its centerpiece. Focusing on Cave’s signature mixed-media assemblages and Soundsuits (fabulous wearable costumes stitched together with found objects and unusual fibers and designed to make sounds when worn),…