Pigeons, it seems, have at least one other use besides shitting on statues: racing. For its upcoming exhibit Thinking About Flying, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver partnered up with the Foothills Pigeon Racing Club to train a group of racing pigeons to fly from the homes of MCA visitors,…
The decorative arts — furniture, ceramics, glass and so on — are the stepchildren of the fine arts. In fact, they used to be known as the minor arts, distinguishing them from the major ones: drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture and architecture. This distinction fell by the wayside during the last…
Another Victory Over the Sun. For this group show, all of the exterior light sources at MCA Denver have been covered over so that the interior is essentially dark. Organized by director Adam Lerner and assistant curator Nora Burnett Abrams, Another Victory is made up of art that’s meant to…
Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…
The Guard is a shaggy-man character study, its subject a fifty-something policeman in West Ireland, Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson). No by-the-book cop, Boyle spends his days off romping with hookers and has no qualms about gulping MDMA from the pockets of a freshly dead teenager; he also displays a…
Directed by Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig from a screenplay by David Nicholls and based on his novel, One Day stars Anne Hathaway as Emma, a too-serious would-be writer in coke-bottle glasses and combat boots. She’s nursing a crush on Dexter (Jim Sturgess), her too-good-looking rich-boy college classmate. She’s earnest, tenacious…
A cinematic reboot for the patron saint of 98-pound weaklings, Conan the Barbarian is both truer to the vision of its character’s creator, Robert E. Howard, and more satisfyingly pulpy than John Milius’s 1982 movie incarnation. Director Marcus Nispel, along with no fewer than three screenwriters, eschews the lugubrious mythmaking…
The opening scene of Chazz Palminteri’s Faithful is intriguing: a woman tied to a chair, a mobster with a gun preparing to finish her off. The tension is ready-made, and the dialogue comically and continually upends our expectations. The woman, Margaret, is feisty, scoffing at the very idea of a…
In a turn of events I cannot describe, I ended up at the Magic Laundry on South Monaco Parkway and Iliff Avenue last night at 10 p.m. Positioned in the back, shabby corner of a dead strip mall left label-scarred by its now-vacant anchor store, King Soopers, the 24-hour laundromat…
It’s a well known fact that animals are people, too, which is why Morrissey doesn’t eat them. Less well known is that some animals are actually people, a rare and fascinating sub-genus of sapiens sapiens known as Furries, which work, play, hunt and mate unseen among the less heteroclite members…
The concept of the ‘ciclovía’ (Spanish for “bike parkway”) was hatched in Bogotá, Colombia, over thirty years ago. It’s waxed and waned over the years there, but today well over a million people participate in an event that every Sunday and holiday closes 70 miles of road in the heart…
We were warned about the Bonnie Knees Contest: there was sure to be bribery, kilted men and somewhat bawdy behaviour, Colorado Scottish Festival director John Thornton told us. Without fail, the contest was indeed all of those things. “It’s not really about who’s got the best knees,” explained contest judge…
It’s been a banner year for Slam Nuba, the newer nationally competitive arrival on the Denver slam poetry scene, and for a group started hardly four years ago, it’s seen some remarkable achievements already. Having placed in the top ten finishing teams at the National Poetry Slam (slam poetry’s annual…
Jake Norton, a mountain climber from Golden, CO, is in Uganda this week to climb Mount Stanley’s Margherita Peak, a 16,763′ peak in the Ruwnezori Range, as the next step in what he’s calling Challenge21. Climbing the Seven Summits — the tallest peaks on each continent — has long been…
What makes Google+ games, since people apparently now demand a gaming platform on every social network imaginable, different than Facebook games is pretty simple: the games don’t show up in your feed, meaning you won’t be bombarded with news every time a friend tops your score or plants a new…
This summer, dozens of grown adults spent hours upon hours of valuable time playing with LEGOs toward the goal of winning mild fame and glory in Build-A-Brickbuster Pixelfest, an international film festival and contest celebrating the art of making stop-motion animation with tiny toys, held over the weekend of August…
Encapsulating everything that is creepy about talking inanimate objects created in the name of children’s television programming, this new video from the London-based This Is It Collective is just that: creepy. The short begins innocently enough, with a small cast of sort-of identifiable characters sitting around a table and sing-talking…
Jose Mercado has been a man with a mission when it comes to turning inner-city kids into accomplished thespians for years now, and his ardor for what seems an impossible task never seems to diminish. It’s just that he’s so good at it. Mercado came from his own barrio roots;…
In the small (literally) but fascinating world of people who make art using GI Joes, Gio Toninelo is pretty much a god. The founder and curator of GI Joe Fest, an international GI Joe-centric stop-motion film festival that branched out of Denver last year to locations as far-flung as Slovakia…
The town of Bessemer, which immediately surrounded Pueblo’s storied reason-to-be, the mighty Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, was incorporated in 1886, 125 years ago. It was home to hard-working immigrants from around the world — Italians, Eastern Europeans, Germans, Asians and others — who moved to the area to work…
After intermittent bouts with alcoholism and diet pills, Bree Davies has channeled her addictive personality into a somewhat less unhealthy obsession: yoga. That’s the subject of her latest edition of Breeality Bites, wherein she acknowledges that it comes with the side effect of trying to compete with grandmothers but denies…
Slam poetry is to the literary world what hip-hop music is to jazz — a progression of talent and a revolutionary outlet. Denver is lucky to boast of two solid teams that compete nationally. Both Slam Nuba and the Denver Mercury Cafe Poetry Slam Team advanced to the semi-finals last…
