Tomorrow: Celebrate Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day

I often look through old albums of my grandfather’s family photos from the 1920s, marveling at how he must have labored to produce them in his hobbyist’s darkroom, even creating clever photocollages for my mother’s birthday invitations. In the present, everyone’s a photographer, and our cameras have become a ubiquitous…

A conversation with Garrett Ammon and Alex Ketley

Ballet Nouveau Colorado’s innovative season draws to a close this weekend with a program of four brand-spankin’-new pieces, one by BNC artistic director Garrett Ammon, one by company artist Jason Franklin, and one each by guest choreographers Maurya Kerr and Alex Ketley. We caught up with Ammon and Ketley to…

It’s Earth Day! Here are five ways to celebrate

While most people ostensibly make their resolutions, to keep or forget, on New Year’s Day. But I think it makes more sense to save them for Earth Day and resolve to take doable ecological steps with an infinitely more likely capacity for follow-through. I also think it’s something to celebrate…

Comment of the day: Get over it?

It’s been over a decade since the Columbine High School shootings, but the wounds are still pretty raw for a lot of folks out there; certainly they are for the people of 13 Families, a documentary that looks at the coping process of the families who lost kids to the…

This weekend in Stoke: Easter eggcelence edition

Thank you, Easter bunny! Copper Mountain’s Spring Sunsation festival and 2010/2011 ski season winds up this weekend with a world record attempt on Saturday at 10 a.m. “Time to break out those swimsuits and sunglasses, because we’re going to be trying to break the world record for most people to…

10 things to do for $10 this weekend, April 22-24, 2011

We’ve finally started getting some of those April showers the old tales speak of, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be venturing out in to the great big world this weekend. While the ground might be a little damp, you’ll still have plenty of indoor and outdoor activities to choose…

Does canv.as live up to the hype? Yes, but it’ll never replace /b/

It takes some wading through sludge of child pornography, gore, rampant racism and herp-a-derp-check-out-my-dubs threads, but the best thing (and possibly the only truly good thing) about /b/ has always been the memes, little image-based internet in-jokes that people revise and riff on in endless variations to often hilarious results…

Five fun facts about Ann Landers

In advance of the Arvada Center’s production of The Lady With All the Answers, which starts its previews tomorrow night, we started researching the woman the play was based on: Eppie Lederer. Known to the public for 47 years as advice columnist Ann Landers, Lederer was a fascinating lady. And…

Comment of the day: Creature from hell

It’s long been our position that the Evil Blue Horse that guards DIA is pretty much the baddest-ass public art maybe anywhere in the world — what other city would put something that fucking METAL right outside its airport? — and so when we put together a list of best…

Ten best fictional killer plants

Tonight at the Denver Botanical Gardens, writer Amy Stewart will be presenting a history of killer plants of the very real variety. While that’s all well and good, we prefer to keep our deadly botanical assassins in the realm of the fiction so we can still sleep through the night…

Time-wasting photo: Cat bong

There’s nothing funny about household pets perishing from smoke inhalation, but a cat in an oxygen mask, apparently, is hilarious — even the cops in the background think it’s funny, and cops never think anything is funny. The cat, however, is not amused…

Over the Rainbow

Artist Shelley Irish-Smith spent a year creating Chakra Rainbow, a self-portrait project detailing the imbalance and subsequent healing of her body’s energy systems. Through fifteen oil paintings, Irish-Smith explores various stages of the seven chakras. “I used these paintings to speak to my own archetypes,” explains the certified Reiki master…

Scrap Yard Dogs

The main spaces at Ice Cube Gallery are so large that two full-scale single-artist shows can be presented side by side. The current offerings are Ray Tomasso: Transitions, featuring cast-paper paintings made with strips of old blue jeans rendered into pulp, and Brian Cavanaugh: Migratory: Transplant, which examines the artist’s…

The Cruelest Month

T.S. Eliot once famously wrote that “April is the cruelest month,” but if that old ragged set of claws scuttling across the floor of silent seas were alive today, he might not be so damn depressing about it. These days, besides mixing memory and desire, April is also National Poetry…