Main Street Blues

Colfax & 15th, an independent film set and produced in Denver, provides a glimpse into a world that many of us simply drive by on our way in and out of downtown: the concentration of businesses that provide high-interest, high-stakes loans to bounce people out of jail. In their fictional…

Poetry Shout-Outs

Hosted and facilitated by — and dedicated to — female poets, the Women of the World Poetry Slam keeps close to its gender roots. Sponsored by Poetry Slam, Inc., the competition is in its fifth year, but its first in Denver. “You have to put in a bid like it’s…

Art Attack

Among the dozens of galleries, hundreds of shows and twelve packed First Fridays in the Art District on Santa Fe in 2011, it’s inevitable that arts lovers missed something spectacular. “There are so many events that go on, and we wanted to give some recognition for different galleries,” notes Sarah…

Women Watching

The second annual Women + Film Voices Film Festival begins tonight with the documentary Ethel and follows with five more days of thought-provoking films by and about women. Over the course of the week, more than a dozen films will get their due, along with complementing salons and question-and-answer sessions…

The World According to Green Day

Maybe you never thought the day would come when suburban-Cali neo-punk would take to the Broadway stage. But, as American Idiot more than proved, the idea was neither a bad nor a far-fetched one: Based on Green Day’s eponymous, Grammy Award-winning concept album, the edgy musical took Billy Joe Armstrong’s…

Teachers’ Union

Dan Jacobs, director of the Victoria H. Myhren Gallery at the University of Denver, has endeavored to present shows that document the efforts of local artists both historic and contemporary. Being on the DU campus in the School of Art and Art History, Jacobs has a built-in roster from which…

Drama in RiNo

Miss Julie, playwright August Strindberg’s spare, sexy classic, was written in 1888, but its themes of class and control resonate loudly in the Occupy era. Set in the kitchen of an aristocratic estate, the play — and the ensuing tension — unfolds over one afternoon, as an unstable heiress trades…

Art Underground

“Showing your work at a Santa Fe gallery is like having your mom and dad home at a party,” says artist Vincent Fasano. That’s why he and twin brother Charly (also known as “City Mouse”) have been putting on art shows at the Phoenix Gallery in the basement of 3…

A Perfect Pitch

Nathaniel Adams Coles, better known as Nat “King” Cole, was born in Alabama, the son of a Baptist minister. He learned to play the organ from his mother, who accompanied his father in church. Originally a keyboard phenom, he later studied classical piano, but it was jazz — and the…

Hot Lunch Apostles, a play by Boulder’ Sidney Goldfarb, hits New York

Hot Lunch Apostles, a play by Boulder poet and playwright Sidney Goldfarb, will open at New York’s La MaMa Ellen Stewart Theatre on March 1 as part of the fabled Off-off-Broadway theater’s fifty-year celebration. Produced by the Talking Band, a collaborative group that spins evocative tapestries of words, imagery and…

Tinyamp, tiny store: Watch something grow tonight at Ironwood

The beautiful South Broadway shop Ironwood, with its plant-strewn, new-Victorianiana steampunk vibe, isn’t very big. But it’s no doubt large enough to hold the musicians of the new, diminutive local Tinyamp Records, or at least some of them — members of Amphibian, Calliope of the Future and Year of the…

Now Showing

Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, founding director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist. Clyfford Still: Inaugural Exhibition starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with…

Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie has a pure destructive impulse

The Turin Horse not excepted, Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, a comedy, is the most startlingly apocalyptic film of the year. As in their Adult Swim Awesome Show, the abiding aesthetic is free-associative channel-surfing, owing something to the public-access mash-ups of TV Carnage. (The attrition of this is significantly…