Riding in the comfort of your SUV, 35 miles per hour might not seem too fast. But try that same speed inches above the pavement, ripping turns through a slalom course on a skateboard lacking brakes, and you’ll get a much different perception of 35 mph. Even if you just…
Ladies, a question: When are you going to finally address the mess of broken jewelry in your house? You know, that clump of chains and pendants and one-sided earrings and all the other shiny stuff that you can’t wear anymore for one reason or another. (Yes, we know about your…
To break out of the “record a record, play a CD-release party, go on tour” box, John Common turned to friend Alicia Bailey, owner of the Abecedarian Gallery, for help. Together they came up with the Common Box Project, a multimedia collaboration that’s grown to involve more than sixty artists…
Twenty-three years ago, the Denver Black Arts Festival was created to give black artists an opportunity to showcase their work. “Back in 1986,” explains festival spokeswoman Sheryl Renee, “there was no place for African and African-American artists to show their wares, no outlet for visual artists from mainland Africa and…
Everyone knows this particular time of day: I call it “Blue Time,” but a more classical designation for the full-on blush and ebb of dusk, when everything glows and then sinks into the shadows, is the “Violet Hour.” That playwright Richard Greenberg, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his plays Three…
What could be more perfect on a summer evening than a big, sprawling musical featuring larger-than-life characters and a message to match? Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which opened July 14 on the Arvada Center Main Stage, promises to sweep away audiences of all ages for a few…
Everyone claims a drop of Celtic blood on St. Patrick’s Day, but in Denver, the real time to celebrate the heritage of the Emerald Isle is at the annual Colorado Irish Festival. Every July, organizers incorporate yet another aspect of Irish culture, keeping things fresh while maintaining tradition. “The Cultural…
No school has a closer connection to the Beats than Naropa University. So it’s no surprise that Naropa’s archives are a treasure trove complete with audio files of “actual teachings and conversations, interviews, panels and essays that were presented at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics here in Boulder,”…
Indie comic Moshe Kasher has it all going for him: youth, brains, wit, a twisted edge and an inside track on what’s really funny in the 21st century. Once you’ve seen him, you won’t forget him. Comedy Works maven Wende Curtis certainly didn’t after she caught his “Best of the…
According to her good friend (and Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art adult-education coordinator) Sarah Kinn, Lyons painter Sally King isn’t so much a feminist as she is “spiritual and into the feminine.” So King’s Breast Prayers for Peace project – for which women are invited to leave imprints of their…
The Thief of Baghdad is an enormous contradiction of the auteur theory. The 1940 release credits three directors — Ludwig Berger, Tim Whelan and Michael Powell — and only the latter assembled a filmography of any particular note. Moreover, it’s likely that producer Alexander Korda and others contributed to the…
While Buntport Theater’s tRUNks team – the very funny Matt Zambrano, Mitch Slevc and Jessica Robblee – takes a summer break from the usual serial creative kids’ comedy based on book titles, the droll trio has cooked up something delicious for adults: Love and Potatoes, a well-packaged threesome of short…
Local artist Kyle Banister is all about baseball. Yep, he lives it, breathes it, reveres it and draws it. “There isn’t an emotion that you will feel in life that you won’t feel on a baseball field if you spend enough time there,” Banister writes online, and that’s why, in…
The past ten years have been a remarkably interesting time for the fine arts in Colorado. The most obvious evidence of this cultural flowering has been the museum-building boom we’ve all witnessed. But there’s also been a consequent growth in the commercial-gallery realm, with the emergence of many art districts…
The Psychedelic Experience. The AIGA graphics curator, Darrin Alfred, has only been on the job at the Denver Art Museum for a year, and already he’s the author of a major blockbuster, The Psychedelic Experience: Rock Posters From the San Francisco Bay Area. Alfred selected around 300 posters from a…
Annie. Boulder’s Dinner Theatre is at the top of its form; it has to be. How else could the company make Annie anything but a smirking sentimental bore? As everyone knows by now, the story of Annie concerns a little red-haired girl’s rough life at an orphanage run by the…
Eddie Adams, the late photographer at the center of An Unlikely Weapon, which opens July 2, was a romantic of an especially cantankerous sort. He’s most famous for a Vietnam-era photo of a prisoner being executed in the middle of a street — but rather than reveling in the accolades…
They’re all about where people come from. Nobody seems to wonder where somebody’s going.” So says the Depression-era bank-robber-cum-folk-hero John Dillinger upon surveying the clientele of a chic Chicago eatery in a key scene from Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. And, much like its subject, Mann’s exhilarating movie exists in a…
Oren Neeman’s Conviction tells a fascinating story about the Spanish Inquisition and the 1486 persecution of Andres Gonzalez, a Catholic priest — a member of a family that had been forced to convert from Judaism — who finds his way back to his own religion through the love of a…
Character is destiny — at least for Woody Allen’s Whatever Works. Allen’s exercise in Woody Allen nostalgia opens with a snatch of Groucho Marx singing his trademark paradoxical assertion (“Hello, I must be going”) and is powered almost entirely by the presence of a single, larger-than-life — and less than…
Why do people keep coming back year after year to the Crested Butte Wildflower Festival? “I don’t know what is so unique about Crested Butte,” admits Sue Wallace, director of the 23-year-old event. “It is just so lush, and we have such diversity here; you see such an abundance of…
Back in 1991, the night before “limited-stakes gaming” was officially introduced in three Colorado mining towns – Black Hawk, Cripple Creek and Central City – a group of journalists gathered in Central City to document the start of legal gambling. (Central City’s budget was largely based on illegal games back…
