If I ever get lost in an avalanche, I hope I’m lucky enough to have a Beacon Bowl champion looking for me. Now in its seventh year, this annual competition — in conjunction with Avalanche Awareness Day — lets ski patrollers from nearby ski areas test their search-and-rescue skills in…
“There’s a pretty strong grassroots ukulele community around Colorado and around the country,” notes Michael Schenkelberg of the Swallow Hill Music Association. That explains why last year’s inaugural Denver UkeFest was such a sweet success — and why Swallow Hill is bringing it back for a new year. “Even for…
Birthdays, Valentine’s Day, good times and bad: Any excuse for chocolate is a good enough excuse for me. Fortunately, Julie Pech, Colorado’s chocolate therapist, says that enjoying chocolate every single day is beneficial to your health. At today’s eighth annual Chocolate Affair in Olde Town Arvada, you can listen to…
Clubbers, beware! Something wicked this way comes — an alien hybrid built out of the DNA of hip-hop, electro, jungle and glitch, fused together via DSP wizardry and masterful laptop skills. With bowel-rupturing sub-bass, teeth-rattling beats and mind-bending cuts, edits and processing, it’s the aural equivalent of an industrial-strength cleanser:…
Rex Fuller of Opera Colorado loves Brandi Shigley and Fashion Denver. He also loves the Denver Public Library’s Fresh City Life. Serendipity — and a really cool opera — brought all three together to collaborate on Zandra Rhodes’s Fashion of Desire, an introductory event at the library that highlights local…
From its opening-night film, Noodle, the story of an abandoned Chinese boy who falls into the lap of a widowed El Al stewardess, to the closing-night offering, Lemon Tree, about a Palestinian widow who fights to save her lemon grove from destruction by Israeli security forces on the West Bank,…
Hey, Sugar: Valentine’s Day, nine days and counting. What will YOU be presenting your friends with when the celebration of love draws nigh? You’re DIY, but not in that lace-and-cupids kind of way, and you’re on a budget that precludes buying long-stemmed roses and diamonds and shit. But you don’t…
I’m a total map freak, and I suppose that’s been true since the very first time I ever spun my family’s old globe of the world and let my chubby little finger fall on some far-flung nation. Later, my mother the hiker began bringing home those topographical state forest maps…
There’s a major changing of the guard in the art world right now in Colorado. The biggest news came this past fall, when Cydney Payton, the powerhouse director of MCA Denver, announced her departure. Then, two Western art curators at the Denver Art Museum — Ann Daley and Peter Hassrick…
Damien Hirst. You’d have to be living under a rock — or have absolutely no interest in contemporary art — not to know that Damien Hirst is a superstar, and that everything he makes is worth millions of dollars apiece. The tight solo at MCA Denver (formerly known as the…
Doubt. Set in 1964, when the second Vatican Council was convening, John Patrick Shanley’s play follows a priest who may have molested a twelve-year-old boy — who just happens to be the sole black kid in the predominantly Irish and Italian school where the priest teaches — and the nun…
Inana is set in a shabby London hotel room, where the director of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, having done all he could to secure the treasures in his care, has fled with the bride he acquired through an arrangement with her father, a young woman he barely knows. The…
She’s too thin. She’s a bobblehead. Her forehead doesn’t move. Where has that Jerry Maguire girl gone, the one we once knew and loved? Did the Oscar from Cold Mountain ruin her forever, or is Kenny Chesney to blame? It’s not easy being America’s Sweetheart. Nor any easier being Lucy…
The crowds were thinner, the temperature warmer, and Barack Obama’s name mentioned so many times that you might have thought he had assumed leadership not just of the free world, but the Sundance Institute, too. Otherwise, it was business as relatively usual as the Sundance Film Festival turned 25. If…
Even as an ardent, tireless fan of zombie cinema, I’ve never seen anything quite like Otto; or, Up With Dead People. Existing in some heretofore undiscovered common ground between the arthouse and the grindhouse, Otto is a tale of a young gay zombie in a cruel world that’s as dead…
When it comes to adaptations of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend, Will Smith can suck it. The 1964 Last Man on Earth (aka The Damned Walk at Midnight) may not be well known among today’s horror fans, but it’s a seminal classic that stands head and shoulders above the…
Don’t underestimate the snowmen around Nederland and Eldora. According to local legend, these angry Front Range ice cubes are more bad horror flick than good-natured Frosty. Tales of the Screamin’ Snowman describe a mysterious creature with a Yeti-like shriek that leaves no footprints — just plowed paths leading into the…
Like millions of Americans, Michael Chavez took a break from work on January 20 to watch the presidential inauguration. The Foothills Art Center curator had already planned an exhibit to reflect what people were thinking about at the turn of an administration, but he was still overcome by the magnitude…
One of the ironies of hospital care is how little life there is inside a building that’s all about trying to save lives — or at least make those who are dying more comfortable. Page and Tess Phillips found this out in early 2007, when their infant son, Cash, was…
You may have explored the liquid assets of Pabst Blue Ribbon, the pale lager that’s seen a revival in recent years, but can you make art out of it? The three-year-old PB-Arts Contest is betting that you can, challenging Pabst lovers to incorporate the iconic PBR can into artwork in…
First of all, 7dancers spokesman Lee Prosenjak notes, there are actually eight dancers in the cast of Passengers, but that’s not what makes this travel-themed production so different. It won’t be performed on a stage or even in a set area, but will instead trek through the expanses of a…
Who knew wearing pajamas could be so profitable? Denver’s Road Home has already collected more than a half-million dollars in donations through its annual PJ Party, and planners are hoping this year’s incarnation will do well, too. “We know that the economic crisis right now is definitely hitting people hard,”…
