Reader: Republicans can skateboard, too!

Skateboarding legend Stacy Peralta came to Auraria on Monday, where he talked about movie-making, skateboarding and politics, telling the crowd, “When parents tell me their kids are skateboarders, I tell them, sorry, your kids are Democrats.” But Milton puts the brakes on that:…

Out of Bounds

“How many cameras have gone to Alaska and British Columbia and places that consistently provide good skiing?” asks Boulder-based filmmaker Nick Waggoner, director of Solitaire, the Best of Festival winner at this year’s Backcountry Film Festival. “In South America, that does not exist: There’s no promise. You think that there’s…

Beginning of the End

Many Doomsday theorists have circled December 21, 2012, on their calendars with a red pen, marking the date when humanity comes to a violent end. Yet indigenous people around the world see 2012 as an era of transformation and heightened awareness. A change is gonna come, they say, but the…

Put on Your Fancy Plants

Josh LaBure of vegan advocacy group Plants & Animals Denver had seen vegan proms in New York City and San Francisco, and he thought it was high time the Mile High City got in the game. So tonight, Plants & Animals and Vegan Coloradical are teaming up to present the…

Cold, Hard Cash

“We knew we wanted to do something around Johnny Cash. We knew we wanted to call it Square of Ice,” says Emily Tarquin, the co-curator (with Charlie Miller) of Off-Center@the Jones, and that’s pretty much how ideas begin in the offbeat wing of the Denver Performing Arts Complex, which hosts…

Eating In

The grow-local movement is about more than good taste. Food justice is an issue that’s taking root in Colorado, where a range of citizen-led initiatives strive to stimulate the local economy while providing healthy food to people in low-income neighborhoods. Today, locavore foodies and activists alike will find something to…

River of Magic

Gabriel Garcia Marquez didn’t create the character of Florencia Grimaldi, but he did open the door to the world of magical realism through which she emerged, as the heroine of Daniel Catan’s Florencia en al Amazonas. Inspired by Marquez’s work, the opera unfolds during a riverboat journey through the verdant,…

Mormon Confessional

Confessions aren’t just for Catholics anymore. As proof, Denver’s Dangerous Theatre is presenting Steven Fales’s ninety-minute solo play Confessions of a Mormon Boy. It starts off with Fales as a Mormon boy in Utah and follows him as he becomes a high-priced call boy in New York City. This adventure…

With Substance

Mike Doughty’s story isn’t uncommon: Guy falls in love with alcohol and drugs, pushes through a major-label music career while still abusing alcohol and drugs, recovers and survives to tell the tale. But what is special about Doughty’s experience is how he tells it. In The Book of Drugs, the…

Moving Experience

Physics, especially the study of movement, is always the focus of Robert Mangold’s abstract and kinetic sculptures. The nationally renowned sculptor’s career stretches over five decades, and for most of that time, he’s been working right here in Denver. That makes the over-the-top exhibit Time, Space and Motion: Robert Mangold…

Trout Fisherman, Revisited

Author Richard Brautigan, whose novels were compact and dreamy, was a conundrum of a man: Embraced by the ’60s counterculture, he didn’t return the favor, and at the end of the era, the fame built on the strength of his novel Trout Fishing in America petered out. On a parallel…

Spacey Lesbian Love

It’s a tale as old as time travel. Three aliens from Zots, a planet on which romance destroys the atmosphere, travel to Earth to break their hearts and save their home. If they’re not in love, they’re not in danger of environmental collapse, right? As part of the Denver FilmCenter’s…

Strange People

Considering the rise of abstraction at the beginning of the last century, it’s interesting to note that even now, more than a decade into the current century, some artists persist in creating old-fashioned representational depictions of the human figure. A secret to the success of these contemporary realists is their…

Can Do Attitude

Architects and designers will get a chance to play with their food today as Canstruction Colorado 2012 gets under way at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. To compete in this colossal building event, seven teams will use nearly 10,000 donated cans of food to create visual masterpieces such…

Too Much Mousey Business

Lafayette-based artist Lisa Michot wants you to know that it’s Ignacio Mouser, her papier-mache rodent alter-ego, and not Lisa herself, who is an associate member of NEXT Gallery, so take that knowledge and a grain of salt with you when you go to see Ignacio Mouser and Friends, a small…

Denver’s eleven best roller derby nicknames

A roller derby nickname must be several things. Among them: short, clever and intimidating. This year’s winner of “Best Roller Derby Nickname” in our 2012 Best of Denver issue is all three: Boo Boo Radley of the Denver Roller Dolls. But there’s more cleverness and badassery to go around. Here,…

Game of Thrones Season 2 premiere was full of tumult (spoilers within)

Warning: Spoilers within! In one of the final scenes of the Season 2 premiere of Game of Thrones, henchmen of boy-king Joffrey, the incestuous product of his mother and uncle, tear through King’s Landing, slaying the many bastard children of Robert, Joffrey’s official but now totally dead father. Because his…