Westword Book Club: Brandi Shigley focuses on the essential and eliminates the rest

This week, Westword asked fashionista Brandi Shigley about her favorite books. The interview was fittingly conducted in front of an adorable lofted book shelf, which Shigley refers to as her treehouse, at Fashion Denver, her combination boutique, studio, consulting office, and mini roller-skating rink. After years of a Sisyphean effort to bring boutique fashion to Denver’s polar-fleece-clad hordes, Shigley has sharpened her focus on helping others accomplish their goals in her Do What You Love seminars.

The five best Kentucky Derby parties in Denver

You’ve picked your horse, you’ve dusted off your largest hat, and you’re ready for your annual guzzling of mint juleps — but if Churchill Downs isn’t in your weekend travel plans, where shall you go? Westword has compiled a list of the best derby-themed parties taking place in parking lots,…

100 Colorado Creatives: Norman Broomhall and Jean Albus

#73: Norman Broomhall and Jean Albus Norman Broomhall raises chickens, sells vintage objects and mirrors antiqued by hand, plays the guitar and takes photographs; Jean Albus is a photographer, as well. Both are inspired by the call of nature and, together, they’ve created Into the Within, an installation that’s been…

Now Showing

Ania Gola-Kumor. One of Colorado’s greatest abstract painters is the star of Ania Gola-Kumor: Moving Paint, at Sandra Phillips Gallery. These large oil paintings, along with small works on paper that were done in oil stick and oil bar, represent both a continuation of Gola-Kumor’s longstanding interests and a new…

Looking back at Shane Black

Iron Man 3 opens this week. For some viewers, the film’s appeal isn’t the eponymous superhero, but the sarcastic-yet-sensitive hero behind the gravity-defying, repulsor-ray-shooting suit of armor. I refer, of course, to Shane Black. Iron Man 3’s co-writer–director recharged the buddy-cop flick in the ’80s with his screenplay for Lethal…

Leviathan‘s cinematic density stimulates the synapses

End of days or the beginning of new ways of seeing? Fittingly, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan, an all-senses-consuming chronicle of a fishing trawler, takes its title from the sea beast described in the Book of Job, lines from which constitute the film’s epigraph: “He makes the depths churn…

Everything that happens in God of Carnage is expected…and not

Let’s start with the setting, so pristine, white, minimal and tasteful: chairs with gracefully curving legs, a glass table on which art books are meticulously arranged, a vase of white tulips, nicely grouped with just one flower swaying slightly out to the side. Tall panels of white brick form a…

The Color Purple is long on talent, short on passion

When it was published in 1985, Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple was a groundbreaker — illuminating places that had been in shadow and, like most groundbreakers, intensely controversial. It described the plight of many poor, black rural women through the unforgettable voice of the protagonist, Celie, a voice that…

How to define a movie critic’s job in the summer of comic books

To: Stephanie Zacharek From: Alan Scherstuhl Hi, Stephanie, welcome again to the Voice! Like you, I found myself worn out by Iron Man 3, especially the long, kabooming climax. And, like you, I found myself wishing that Robert Downey Jr. had something deeper to play, and that the character had…