Grape Escape

Be one of the first oenophiles to swirl and sip Balistreri Vineyards’ new wine releases today at the winery’s eighth annual Balistreri Harvest Party, a tribute to the fruit of the vine that benefits CASA of Adams and Broomfield counties. “We’re releasing more than twenty new wines to taste from…

Think Pink

Organizers of the eighteenth annual Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure are expecting as many as 60,000 people to walk and run today at the Pepsi Center. And that’s good news for breast cancer awareness, prevention, and treatment efforts, says spokeswoman Amarilis Viera-Simoes. The Denver affiliate of the organization…

Happy Trails

If your kids have been sitting around the house playing video games and whining, now might be the time to get some grit in their teeth — and the Colorado Mountain Bike Association’s sixth annual Take a Kid Mountain Biking Day celebration at Bear Creek Lake Park could do the…

Vital Organs

Churches: Love ’em or leave ’em, they’ve got all the damn organs in this town, so if you want to see and hear a towering set of time-honored pipes reverberate with melody, you’ve gotta get inside. But if church just ain’t your thing, don’t worry: Shawn Snow, tour director for…

Fight Club

Imagine, if you will, sweaty, scantily clad men groping each other inside a cage until one is dominated: If you’re thinking “gay bondage,” then you’re only partially right, because what we’re really talking about is World Extreme Cagefighting. And if you’re into that sort of thing — not that there’s…

A Flea is Born

Local artist Amy Yetman, seasoned by time spent living in big cities like Chicago and Boston, has always loved outdoor markets, with their funky mix of art, craft and antiques. “It was a little dream of mine,” she says. “But I was always waiting for someone else to do it.”…

Process Makes Perfect

Photographer Mark Sink says his current show, Mark Sink Photographs 1975-2010: Encounters With the Past, at the Byers-Evans House Gallery, isn’t so much a retrospective as it is a survey of techniques he’s used over the years, from lo-fi toy and Diana cameras to the colloidion wet-plate process he works…

Frida Feista

It’s the wild woman in Joy Barrett that makes her connect with the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, whose flamboyant mode of dress and intensely personal paintings have kept her a cult figure long after her death in 1954. “I admire her lifestyle and how she was able to express herself…

Take a Shot at Lola

Lola, the coastal Mexican cantina, is a perfect place to throw back shots or just kick back on the animated patio with a cold cerveza. And while tonight’s Tequila 101 — part of a three-class, three-month series — won’t be a drunk-fest, it does offer knowledge and enlightenment about tequila,…

Muse

Where does a band go after winning the O2 Silver Clef Award and being presented that award by its rock-and-roll heroes, Roger Taylor and Brian May of Queen? What more could your band ever hope to hear after Roger Taylor called your project “probably the greatest live act in the…

Gratuitous Randomness: Socially Awkward Penguin

Well, this is awkward. Earlier today, Joel Warner wrote a post about the stupidity of blogs about memes, and now here we are with a stupid blog about memes. But by gum, it’s Wednesday, and Wednesday is the day we bring you the best of our weird internetz world in…

Style Local: Samuel Schimek

Samuel Schimek is one of the enterprising Denver designers behind YesPleaseMore, a Create Denver-sponsored temporary retail store that boosts local products. From those wicked-cute Horndribbles plushies to Rick Griffin’s Matterial letterpress stationery, the reasonably priced merchandise in the recurring shop is 100 percent created by Colorado artists and designers. There’s…

A random sculpture appears, a mystery is solved

In the pale light of dawn yesterday, an odd thing appeared in front of the Westword office: a sculpture, roughly four feet tall, made of wire and duct tape. Crafted to resemble an open hand, the sculpture sported an array of colors and textures, along with a couple of painstakingly…

Browser game of the week: Kick Ass

We know the deal: You’re looking for ways to waste time at work, and we’re here to help you waste it. Hence, Browser game of the week, where we’ll comb the depths of the Flash game vortex and pick different games for you to waste away your Wednesday with. We’ll…

Is Impossible creative agency the Pixar of Denver’s ad scene?

Despite valiant efforts to resuscitate it, Colorado’s movie biz has been more or less flat-lining ever since those purty pictures of downtown in the title sequence of Dynasty went off the air. Still, at least we can take solace in the fact we have some heavy hitters in the TV…

Dana Cain’s Art Collection: Susan Meyer and Riva Sweetrocket

Dana Cain is the lady with her thumb in a million pies: A local maestra of event-planning throws several well-attended collectors expos, art shows, parties, chocolate fests each year. Her latest – and biggest – project is next summer’s Denver County Fair. But Dana is also an avid art collector…

Today in stoke: The Reunion, Boulder’s 19th annual snowboard season kickoff

Boulder’s Fox Theatre hosts The Reunion tonight with the premieres of The Arena from FODT Productions and Mark Frank Montoya, Videograss’ Bon Voyage, Airblaster’s Respect Your Elders and Instalite’s Ride With Us 2010 (trailers after the jump), plus autograph signings from many of the featured athletes and lots of swag…

Artbeat: Kate Petley and “Wild” Bill Amundson glow at Plus Gallery

The season opener at Plus Gallery (2501 Larimer Street, 720-394-8484, www.plusgallery.com) is Kate Petley: One Big Dream, on view in the main space. It’s mostly made up of the Colorado-based artist’s cast-acrylic abstractions but includes other sorts of work as well. For a while, Petley was getting super-experimental, but with…

Now Showing

Exposure. Eric Paddock is the Denver Art Museum’s first full-fledged photo curator to head up his own new department. To unveil the permanent gallery for photography in the Ponti tower, he’s put together Exposure: Photos From the Vault, highlighting a range of gems from the DAM’s collection. Collected in fits…

A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop is a single-night masterpiece

Following up his Beijing Olympics opening-ceremony mega-production, Zhang Yimou remakes the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple by dressing it up in flamboyant silk and translating it into Mandarin. The honky-tonk of the Coens’ Southwestern noir becomes a noodle-shop compound on the edge of a painted Western China desert, some time in…