Simply Divine

With the biggest lineup in its five-year history, the Cinema Q Film Festival, which opens tonight at the Sie FilmCenter, brings the stories of icons and everyday luminaries of the GLBTQ community to the forefront. Twenty documentary and narrative-film screenings will also connect directors, actors and film subjects with the…

Spinning Globeville

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Orthodox Food Festival & Old Globeville Days gathering, but the Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Cathedral has been celebrating its diverse congregation for more than a century. The food festival, originally an annual picnic for parishioners only, was opened to the public a decade…

Double Trouble

A 5K race is challenging enough, but for those who want to push their limits, today’s first-ever Double Road Race Denver will test endurance with a 10K that will be followed immediately by a 5K. “The Double Road Race is the only running event with a halftime,” says run creator…

Oh, Henry!

Named for theater impresario Henry Lowenstein, the Henry Awards honor the best work of the year: They are Denver’s version of the Tonys. The Colorado Theatre Guild organizes the voting process, while actors Jim Hunt and Josh Hartwell put the evening together, including the musical interludes — this year will…

Urban Grooves and Mountain Moves

The Vail International Dance festival starts next Sunday, with its highbrow brand of dance programming of ballet, ballroom and modern styles and ensembles. But today’s grittier 8150 Urban Dance Challenge serves as its unofficial kickoff. With a title that nods to Vail’s mountain altitude, the dance-off features some of the…

Talking the Talk

Giving recently restored silent films a live soundtrack — along with a new life on the big screen and fresh audience appreciation for pre-talkie history –- has been the Chautauqua Auditorium’s business for close to thirty years. Tonight, the 2013 Silent Film Series continues with Faust, a 1926 German-made film…

Stage Presence

Fans of Thaddeus Phillips — who brings his extraordinary Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental theater pieces to Denver far too rarely — will remember that travel is a predominant theme for him. In Lost Soles, he played a tap dancer who took refuge in Cuba after a disastrous performance and got trapped…

Denver International

How a young painter from mainland China became a local treasure is a story unto itself, but Xi Zhang seems to have settled in Denver, along with a stunning portfolio of mature, explosive work that he’s created here. Some of that work has been seen over the last few years…

Animal Magnetism

Not everyone knows that just thirty miles up the road from Denver, in Keenesburg, sits the 720-acre Wild Animal Sanctuary, a refuge serving more than 300 rescued lions, tigers, bears, wolves and other large carnivores. But the tourist-friendly sanctuary – which has a raised walkway system for safe viewing, as…

Keith Garcia’s top five picks for the Cinema Q Film Festival

Over the past five years, the Cinema Q Film Festival has grown from a handful of queer-centric films to a full-on weekend showcase of up-and-coming GLBTQ cinema. Keith Garcia, program director for the Sie FilmCenter, which will host the festival this weekend, says the 2013 season has a more diverse…

Biennial beat: A late-night party at MCA Denver

Alongside tonight’s flurry of Biennial-sponsored events — a 5:30 p.m. symposium led by Arianna Huffington at the Buell Theatre and a Canada Night shindig at Sustainability Park from 7 to 11 p.m. — MCA Denver will jump into the middle of the action at 5 p.m. with a celebration of…

Why does 103.1 want us to masturbate to standup comedy?

The ultimate aim of good satire is to parody an unintentionally funny event as accurately as possible, while spicing it up with a little exaggeration and sarcasm. But sometimes the comedy gods throw you something so ridiculous, so shockingly unreal, that all you have to do is xerox it and…

Author Mario Acevedo discusses his literary influences, Rocky Flats and writing about dogs

Mario Acevedo is a local author whose 2007 debut novel The Nymphos of Rocky Flats introduced readers to Felix Gomez, an war veteran turned undead gumshoe, and was touted as one of the best new books by a Colorado author in the august pages of Westword that year. Since then, Acevedo has published 4 more Gomez novels, and has just recently co-authored an e-book about an international ponzi scheme called Good Money Gone. I recently met up with Acevedo, a fellow dog owner, to discuss his literary influences, his career, and the community of Colorado writers at Three Dogs Tavern, where we watched our own dogs tentatively befriend one another on the patio out front.