Arts & Culture

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the beginning kayak pool classes offered by Confluence Kayaks. The pool lessons are taught over three two-hour sessions, and are designed to get you comfortable with kayak basics like strokes and the all-important Eskimo roll. The first class taught the wet exit…

Founded in 2007 by bartender/crocheter Emily Marshall, Aspen-based Free Time Goods hand-makes colorful wool hats. While Marshall has a few home-crocheters who help her out making other designs, she makes all of the company’s killer Colorado State Flag hats herself out of yarn sourced from a Nebraska sheep farm where…

A contemporary crime drama edged with Greek tragedy, Ajami is an untidy, despairing, oddly exhilarating joint venture by writer-directors Scandar Copti, an Israeli Arab, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew. Set on the tinderbox margins of a rundown quarter of the Tel Aviv-adjacent city of Jaffa, the movie’s multiple plots…

The International Film Series ends its six-film Aliens Attack program tonight with a showing of Cloverfield, one of the best giant-monster movies ever to grace the screen. The entirety of the story is shown in a first-person, cinema-verité style via a camcorder wielded by one of the characters (Denver East…

“There seem to be burlesque troupes popping up all over Colorado,” says Lola Spitfire, who — with Fannie Spankings, Midnight Martini and Honey Touche — is producing the inaugural Colorado Burlesque Fest, set for July 8 through 11 this year. “We’ve all performed at big festivals,” notes Spitfire, “and we…

Sometimes the first day of the Boulder Farmers’ Market finds the street blanketed in snow, or everyone shivering under a freezing hail. Also, the farmers don’t usually have a lot to sell: April 3 is a bit early even for starter plants. But that won’t deter the faithful, who’ve been…

Even if you hit spring break a little too hard, you can’t blame the booze for the snowboarding chickens, skiing bunnies and yetis you’ve seen out of the corner of your beer goggles on the slopes. New Belgium Brewing concludes its three-mountain Scavenger Hunt series today at Loveland, and costumed…

The galleries are all on to First Fridays now, which is why they don’t necessarily always open shows to coincide with the monthly community event — two receptions are better than one, after all, and the more the merrier. This month’s First Friday offers a great opportunity to see some…

Watch Captain Swift fight for humanity! Witness the devious alien plot to assassinate the Galactic President! Marvel as he escapes malevolent computers, crash landings, fetid dungeons! Thrill to the unparalleled sense of adventure and wonder! Tune in for all twelve thrilling episodes of Captain Swift and the Invasion From Dimension…

As the fiftieth anniversary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — a milestone in the history of the civil rights movement in America — approached, Denver playwright, director and filmmaker donnie l. betts was searching for a way to mark the date on the local level, but it wasn’t until…

The Conference on World Affairs is a longstanding Boulder tradition that has attracted participants as far-reaching as Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur Miller, Henry Kissinger, Roger Ebert and Patch Adams. Focusing on a different theme every year, the CWA brings together experts in fields as varied as music and the environment, visual…

Essentially a locked-room mystery with lashings of gore and sexual brutality, Stieg Larsson’s novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo disguised the simplicity of its narrative by embedding it within an almost Balzacian depiction of Swedish society, warts and all (but mainly warts). Niels Arden Oplev’s adaptation relies more on…

If you care about where your food comes from, then April is a great month to eat out. More than a dozen food temples are participating in the Green Route Restaurant Tour, a month-long environmentally turbocharged map crawl ballyhooing restaurants (and other businesses and organizations) that are practicing sustainability. The…

You never know exactly why people choose to collect certain things. Sometimes it just starts accidentally: one object leads to another, ad infinitum. But part of the joy of collecting anything is in how it becomes an act of personal whimsy, a private freedom that can mean everything to you…or…

Graphics have been an important part of snowboard culture from the beginning, and lately, they’ve been elevated to high art, with most board companies employing full-time art directors and contracting with A-list artists. Today the Design Within Reach Denver Studio, 2500 East Second Avenue, Suite 120, hosts the fourth annual…

Denver’s newest green yoga studio, the Yoga Mat, opened on Wednesday, March 31 — but the real party is tonight, during the first Art Opening at the Mat. “We’re hoping to have a lot of art openings and make it a home base for some community things,” says owner Erin…

In Karen Zacarías’s Mariela in the Desert, this year’s nod to the Latino community by the Denver Center Theatre Company, a young woman artist returns to her desert home in Mexico to visit her father, also an artist, under the assumption that he’s dying. It’s a story of how they…

Since it reopened in 2003, Boulder’s West End Tavern has embraced bourbon as the truest of American spirits. Today the restaurant and bar offers the largest bourbon list in all of Colorado, with nearly 75 varieties of the whiskey God gave the United States. And as far as general manager,…