As the owner of the Downtowner Media publishing company, Danial Griggs dabbles in film, comedy and music – and he sees a lot of ways that all three can work together. So when it became clear to him that his Downtowner Film Festival had outgrown its home in a Littleton…
You haven’t really experienced skateboarding until you’ve seen downhill skateboarding, a breakneck extreme sport requiring special longboards that are built more for speed than fancy skateboard tricks. And it takes a special kind of athlete to pilot one – in particular, one who’s addicted to adrenaline and probably has some…
One supposes it would be tough to hold down an artist as diverse in style as Peter Coffin, an internationally known master of multi-media whose work plays out in every form, from video to sculpture. But the Aspen Art Museum did: Coffin served as the museum’s second Jane and Marc…
When’s the last time you had a laugh-out-loud good time in an art museum? Like, never? That will all change when a show that brings out the Three Stooges in all of us opens tonight in the Project Gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver. Denver artist Jim Green’s sound-art…
No less than an all-out love affair between British comedy and the Great White Way, Monty Python’s Spamalot pairs a plot blatantly (and with blessings) stolen by Eric Idle and Mike Nichols from the screenplay for Monty Python and the Holy Grail with music and lyrics by Idle and John…
For decades, Denver artist Roland Bernier has used words written out in printed letters as the principal forms in his paintings, works on paper, sculptures and installations. A workaholic, Bernier has relentlessly found new ways to employ words, such as in collages made from photocopied magazines and comic books, with…
Curiouser. Singer Gallery director Simon Zalkind is one of the top curators in town, and one of the secrets to his success is presenting artists whose efforts are worthwhile but who for some reason rarely exhibit their work. That’s what’s happening now with the unusual show Curiouser: A Dozen Years…
Eccentricities of a Nightingale. It’s fascinating to observe the different acting styles on stage in this production, and to think about the ways they work with Tennessee Williams’s characters and dialogue. Brian Landis Folkins subsumes his personality to the role he’s playing. Minute by minute, the outlines of the character…
Among the most pleasurable entries in director Orson Welles’s filmography are those projects that find him trying to wedge his eccentricities into a standard genre template and failing to do so with fascinating results. The Lady From Shanghai, a late-’40s noir elaboration being screened on Tuesday, May 5, as part…
Morisot Reclining tells two love stories — both involving great artists of the impressionist period, neither of them consummated. Edouard Manet had a decades-long friendship with Berthe Morisot, who eventually married his brother, and there is great warmth and intensity in the paintings he did of her. Edgar Degas, arrogant…
Two weeks after jowly Matthew Perry transformed into pretty Zac Efron to relive his adolescence in 17 Again, Warner Bros. releases Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, another backward and backward-looking child-is-father-to-the-man rom-com, with Matthew McConaughey, who, eighteen years Efron’s senior and slightly butcher, has just a few more years of prettiness…
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have transformed some of the saggiest, most cliched genres with smarts, non-screechy politics, superb acting and visual beauty. Though on paper its premise could have easily elicited groans, Half Nelson — their 2006 feature debut (that Fleck directed and the two co-wrote) about a white…
Teresa Shear, director of cheerleaders and game entertainment for the Broncos, used to get calls every year from people asking if they could come watch cheerleader tryouts. The answer was always no, because she didn’t have the right space or setup to accommodate an audience. But this year, she thought,…
When there are no more open lanes in hell, the dead will roll on Earth. Or at least that seems to be implied strongly by the existence of the Zom Bowl-A-Thon tonight, a fundraiser for the upcoming locally produced movie Atom the Amazing Zombie Killer from Bizjack/Flemco productions. “I thought…
“It’s been around for a long time,” Rose Berner says of the Royal Gorge Rodeo. Try 137 years. It almost makes the 34 years Berner has been attending the event sound paltry. The 66-year-old was asked twenty years ago by the Royal Gorge Rodeo Association if she would stand in…
Meet Tracy Weil, tomato farmer. After the local painter and graphic designer saw the potential on his expanded RiNo studio grounds, he planted nearly 250 heirloom tomato starts this spring, with dreams of planting his own little urban farm right in, yes, his own back yard. Okay, so maybe Weil…
In high-school psychology class, we took an IQ test biased toward black men growing up in the 1970s. Oddly enough, I got a perfect score, primarily because I had watched every black-themed film of the time, from Shaft to Foxy Brown to Blackula. I couldn’t get enough. And now I’m…
Among the most pleasurable entries in director Orson Welles’s filmography are those projects that find him trying to wedge his eccentricities into a standard genre template and failing to do so with fascinating results. The Lady From Shanghai, a late-’40s noir elaboration being screened on Tuesday, May 5, as part…
If you thought belt sanders were just for sanding wood, you’d be wrong. Nope, in the spirit of American ingenuity and, well, competition, belt sanders can also be used to race against each other since they will move themselves forward if you lock their triggers. Rockler Woodworking and Hardware will…
Although any hope of finding gold in Denver quickly went bust, on May 6, 1859, prospector John Gregory discovered a real treasure trove in a gulch outside of what would soon be known as Central City, triggering the “Rush to the Rockies” — and setting Denver up as the jumping-off…
The jury is out on this question: Is it better to let the chef cook those epicurean concoctions for you, or would you just as soon whip the same dishes up yourself? Each boasts its charms, but if the latter lights the fire on your shiny Wolf gas range, better…
SETH was at the very first Poetry Rodeo, which took place twenty years ago at the now-defunct Muddy’s Java Cafe. He got together with his poetry-performance partners at that event, “so for that reason, it’s dear to my heart,” he notes. That weekend-long poetry extravaganza is far in the past,…
