Arts & Culture

Mark Wood is a toothpick of a man, a driven, wild-haired rock star with a Flying V-shaped electric violin (it’s called a Viper, kids). Best known for his gig with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Wood is also a violin maker with his own unique line of guitar-like instruments and a dedicated…

I love the annual Gifts for Yule holiday sale more than just about anything, at least anything that has to do with shopping, and here’s why. Sam Robinson’s annual local handmade market is so friendly and so pretty, and the lunchtime fare, prepared by kitchen wizardess Erica MacNeish and sinful…

One of the region’s most extensive holiday sales, the Foothills Art Center Holiday Art Market, has downsized a bit, says market manager Jen Thario, but that will be no loss to the appreciative throngs who visit the sale each year. “We’re going for a high-end fine-art look, as well as…

When I first heard about the new rage in manicures — Minx — I was a little skeptical, even though it’s all the rage in Hollywood. I didn’t know what to think, because I have lovely natural nails, and I don’t like what artificial nails do to the real thing…

Ski bums, it’s here: The 18th annual Colorado Ski & Snowboard Expo is back, promising the usual bargains and the latest snow-sports gear, as well as a convention hall’s worth of fun things to do in between aisle-perusing. New this year, you’ll find Olympian Doug Lewis’s Eliteam Training Center, an…

Before there was Superman or Batman, and way before the X-Men or Spider-Man, there was Zorro. The 1920 classic The Mark of Zorro turned Denver-born Douglas Fairbanks into the first action movie star and arguably cast the mold for every masked avenger who followed. “Douglas Fairbanks was a swashbuckler. The…

When Tran Wills first sent out the word that she’d be closing the doors of her six-year-old indie fashion boutique, the Fabric Lab, at the end of the year, there was a flurry of panic among a certain hipster/design-savvy sector of the community. How could Wills close the groundbreaking East…

In 2008, the Bronx-based Universes ensemble came to town as part of the National Performing Arts Convention, offering a reading of Ameriville, a new kind of performance work in progress, at Curious Theatre, a longtime supporter of new and exciting works. “They blew the roof off this building,” reports Curious…

Christoph Heinrich, the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Denver Art Museum, has been on a remarkable roll since coming here from Hamburg a couple of years ago. For starters, he reconceived the permanent collection and mounted a major solo dedicated to Daniel Richter. Then, a couple of…

Jonny Copp’s avalanche death in June during an attempt on China’s Mount Edgar serves as a grim reminder of the inherent risk in the adventure sports he celebrated as founder of Boulder’s annual Adventure Film Festival. Copp was an elite climber and an expert on avalanches in particular, and it’s…

Are you cool? Or, more important, do you want to be cool? Author Ted Gioia (author of The History of Jazz and other music-related tomes) thinks maybe you don’t, at least not in the smoldering, back-turned mold of Miles Davis, Bob Dylan or James Dean. Strung throughout with his own…

“Remember in middle school when you would send a flower or a candygram to someone? It’s like that,” explains Casey Cross about LUPEC Denver’s Crush Party No. 5. Except sub out the awkward adolescence, sterile classrooms and juvenile messages for drunken adulthood, a dark rock club with a dance-party attitude,…

After the astonishing popularity of the fringe productions Power to Pleasing: The Sex Lives of Teenage Girls and Pressure to Prove: The Sex Lives of Teenage Boys, writers, actors and producers Christa Ray, Liz Stanton and Bethany Urban decided to just keep going. Their latest full-length production, Promiscuity, Passion and…

This year’s Starz Denver Film Festival, subtitled “Destination: Anywhere,” promises to generate the usual high level of excitement, from this evening’s opening-night red-carpet screening of Precious to official closing festivities with The Young Victoria on November 21, both at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House. But it’s often the little things…

Jazz, as everyone from Ken Burns on down will tell you, is a uniquely American music. And yet some of its greatest practitioners have hailed from other countries. Clarinest and tenor saxophonist Anat Cohen may be a longtime New York resident, but she grew up in her native Israel —…

The other night at a wedding reception, this guy asks me if I have a reservation. I’m with the wedding party, I say. “So you have no reservations,” he says. I look confused. “No reservations,” he repeats. Huh? “You look like a young Anthony Bourdain,” he says. When I tell…

Trudging up the seemingly endless boulderfield below the Mt. Lincoln ice, I couldn’t help think how cyclical our pursuits of outdoor sports are. In the early 90s, while I was living in New York, I would save up every penny so that I could go skiing at Stowe on the…