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Becoming van Gogh. Timothy Standring, the Denver Art Museum’s curator of painting and sculpture, is the brains behind the very compelling, very interesting and, most of all, very successful Becoming van Gogh, on display now. When we think of van Gogh, we are actually only thinking of the work of…

The movies to know from Sundance and the year ahead

For the next ten days, all Hollywood eyes — and those of many a film-goer — will turn toward the frigid wilds of Park City, Utah, reportedly experiencing its chilliest winter in a decade. Their collective hope: to discover at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival (January 17 through 26) the…

Will The Last Stand be Arnold’s last stand?

We’re now a generation removed from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s brief, odd reign as the biggest star in movies. This Coppertone age lasted from 1990, when two of the ten top-grossing pictures were Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall and Kindergarten Cop, until 1993, when Last Action Hero — an attempt at a tonal gene…

The films of Kim Jong Il, now available on YouTube

When he died in December 2011, Kim Jong Il left behind more than a dynastic regime and a closet full of drab pantsuits. Jong Il, who ruled the hermetic North Korea from his father Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994 until his own passing seventeen years later, was a noted…

A Night in the Light

BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer) is no rally for yuppie trophy cars. Instead, the “beamer” refers to a projector — or, rather, a whole room full of projectors, all going at once in a dazzling DIY display of light, color and sound. Originally the concept of Dutch-Brazilian artist Rafaël Rozendaal,…

Serious About Funny

Over the last decade, the popularity of listening to people talk about standup comedy has nearly eclipsed the joys of actually listening to standup. And while this generation’s crop of indie-comedy podcasters has popularized the art of self-reflective dissection, there’s certainly some worth in letting comedy elders tell their stories…

Black Comedy

Despite our collective relief at viewing the 2012 presidential election in the rearview mirror, stressed-out political comedian Lewis Black has yet to calm down. “Hallelujah — our long national nightmare is over. Now we face a fiscal cliff. Sounds like an event from the X Games. Here’s hoping both parties…

Reel West

Whether you’re a fan of the classic Western or just want to kick back with a cocktail and a film, tonight’s screening of Open Range leads off another big year of the Movie and a Martini series at the Wildlife Experience. The evening, which includes a showing of the film…

Loving Mike Marchant

Cancer sucks, no matter what, but it really sucks when you’re a struggling musician without health insurance. The bad news is, that’s the situation for Denver’s Mike Marchant — whose work has appeared as Widowers as well as under his own name, and who was recently diagnosed with lymphoma. The…

Starting Over

Imagine a promising young ballerina walking home from a performance. But there’s no happy ending to her day: She’s struck by a car and ends up fighting for her life in the Denver Health ICU after suffering a significant brain injury. Three months later, she finds herself in a wheelchair,…

Long Live the King

Elvis Presley may be dead, but his music never will be. To make sure of that, singer and fiddler Katie Glassman will bring the King’s early tunes back to life today at Lannie’s Clocktower Cabaret with the Elvis Sun Sessions Tribute Show, featuring songs he recorded at Sun Studios in…

The Way of the Cowboy

It’s appropriate that the Colorado Cowboy Poetry Gathering — now in its 24th year — has moved from Arvada to Golden, known as “the gateway to the West,” because the gathering itself is a gateway into our Western past. “The way of the cowboy is slowly dying,” says spokeswoman Diana…

A Manhattan Yaqui

Author Luis Urrea started the fictionalized saga of his own great-aunt Teresita, a Yaqui curandera known as the Saint of Cabora, in the acclaimed 2006 novel The Hummingbird’s Daughter. More recently, he caught up with the rest of her story in a surprising sequel, Queen of America, in which the…

Getting Off at the Library

Storytime at the library won’t be for kids tonight when Anythink Library Wright Farms, a branch of the Rangeview Library District, and the Beyond the Bedroom sex-education group host “Orgasm…I want it…Where do I find it?…How do I get it?” Shhhhh, can you keep the noise down, please? Daka Dan,…

Still-Life Secrets

Photographer and University of Chicago professor Laura Letinsky’s work often portrays the leftovers of life: Orange peels, dirty cups, crumpled napkins and a cantaloupe rotting next to a half-eaten lollipop are all photographed in pristine, soft lighting. “At first glance, the colors and the emptiness of the spaces in those…