Arts & Culture

Good bowlers, bad bowlers and just plain ugly bowlers will gather tonight for the fifth annual Concerts for Kids Bowl-A-Thon, where anyone can win. In fact, in this tournament, even the team with the absolute worst gutter-ballers can take home the Gold Trophy of the Pink Pin if team members…

Matthew Dear is one of the most exciting things to happen to dance music in a long, long time. Under his own name, he’s released a series of pop-inflected electronic albums full of excellent songs and clever beats and is gaining a reputation as a top-notch live performer. Under aliases…

Vampires versus zombies ranks highly in the spectrum of inherently awesome ideas, and local author Mario Acevedo does a fine job with this can’t-miss premise in Jailbait Zombie, the latest Felix Gomez novel. It’s the fourth outing for Gomez, Acevedo’s vampire private-eye protagonist. Like Acevedo himself, Gomez is a combat…

Throughout his career, director Akira Kurosawa regularly brought his distinctively Eastern vision to Western cinematic elements, with fascinating results. But whereas Kurosawa’s best-known films, including 1950’s Rashomon and 1961’s Yojimbo, tend to be set in a medieval Japan strode by samurai, 1963’s High and Low is a contemporary crime tale,…

Danyl Cook was first inspired to paint trees on a trip to Italy, but it’s the trees in the parks of Denver that move him emotionally and creatively. “I can’t stop looking at them,” says Cook, who volunteers with the Parks and People Partnership, part of Denver’s Parks and Recreation…

The stars of the National Lacrosse League will convene in Denver this weekend for the NLL All-Star Game. This is the second time that the league, which has been around for more than twenty years, has hosted the game in Denver, home of the Colorado Mammoth. Last time, in 2004,…

Some folks just have to go retro. That’s the MO for one local filmmaker, John Hartman of Reel Groovy Films, who, after two years of shooting, is ready to release his latest, Reel-Illusionary Zone. Only it’s not the HD-slick, digitally perfect darling you might expect from an emerging director. Instead,…

I am a hopeless artist. Sure, I can draw a stick figure — but that about covers the extent of my artistic ability. And when it comes to drawing something that no one in living memory has ever set eyes on, I’m completely at a loss. Clearly, I’m no James…

You probably best know Dave Flomberg — our colleague and competitor at the late Rocky Mountain News, where he followed the nightlife beat — from his public face. But, to use his own term (and one borrowed from newspaper lingo), the “below the fold” Flomberg is a little more remote,…

Scott Walker is one of the great unsung heroes of modern music. His career spans forty years, from his quasi-boy-band origins to his eventual emergence as an avant-garde icon. His long and storied career is thoroughly and entertainingly documented in Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, a biopic from director Stephen…

The line between controlling and participating in the process of creating art is a fine one that artist Homare Ikeda has quietly mastered: His ability to go with the flow and let his abstracted images take him to new places daily is both extraordinary and inspirational to his students, whom…

Everyone loves to eat, right? From salt-and-vinegar potato chips to milk chocolate, steaks to shrimp, crab legs to McNuggets — I’ll eat (and love) almost anything. Just thinking about the newest round of Taste Test at the Lab at Belmar (and the last ever at the Lakewood location)made me hungry…

Need an excuse to get up to the mountains? Try Keystone’s first-ever Winter Culinary Festival, featuring tastings, classes and seminars beginning today and continuing through Sunday. Highlights include a martini tasting, an ice carving demonstration, a culinary-trends seminar and a chocolate class. The festival is headlined by the Grand Tasting…

Every quaint little mountain town needs a festival. Nederland has one — but the town doesn’t celebrate mining heritage, flowers, fruit, beer or mushrooms. Instead, as the Northern Hemisphere begins to tilt back toward the sun, as the days lengthen and spring stirs in the air, Nederland throws its annual…

All things zombie need not be flesh-eating, blood-crusted horrors of the night. Well, okay, maybe all zombies do need some awful accoutrements in order to appear authentic — but that doesn’t mean zombies can’t be sexy. Need some proof? Then head to Bender’s Tavern, 314 East 13th Avenue, for tonight’s…

Gallic dancer/choreographer Marie-Jose Payannet of Danse Etoile Ballet proves that egalitarianism is a French notion. Her concept behind the Broomfield-based troupe’s performances this weekend at the Dairy Center for the Arts is to show off a little of everything ballet is and can be, from elegantly classical to thoroughly modern…

At 29, the Game (aka Jayceon Terrell Taylor) is a battle-scarred vet. After getting shot five times in 2001, he recuperated by studying the styles of rap’s finest and coming up with a West Coast meets East Coast flow that attracted the attention of Dr. Dre, who produced his 2005…

We’re lucky to have a theater company like Curious around. Artistic director Chip Walton is also president of the National New Play Network, which sponsors the Continued Life Project, through which an emerging playwright develops a new work with at least three different creative teams and communities, giving the play…

If you feel better knowing you’ve burned a few calories before you indulge in a five-course meal, then the Grand Huts Progressive Dinner is just your thing. It requires a workout not only before the dinner, but between courses, as well. Hungry participants don cross-country skis or snowshoes at the…

“MATTER: Disregarding the barriers between design and art since 1999.” That’s the motto of MATTER, the fast-forward local design studio masterminded by Rick Griffith, and it describes perfectly the show Griffith has hung in the fourth-floor Jury Selection Room at the Denver City and County Building as part of the…