“You want to know what it takes to sell real estate? It takes BRASS BALLS to sell real estate.” In this day and age, David Mamet’s words ring especially true, making Glengarry Glen Ross, his Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about a cutthroat competition among corrupt real-estate salesmen, still relevant despite being…
In a year resonating with the battle cry for change, in a city that hosted a convention to propel that change forward, it seems only fitting that Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a pioneering harbinger of change, is up next to take the Insight Speaker Series stage. As an activist who became…
Christoph Heinrich, the Denver Art Museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, must be a workaholic. In recent months, he’s unveiled two new dedicated spaces: a paper-works gallery in the museum’s Hamilton Building and a new-media space called the Fuse Box. Then he took on the ambitious reinstallation of the…
I was really disappointed to learn that Ann Daley (pictured), associate curator of Western art at the Denver Art Museum, had decided to step down after more than a decade in her present post and after having worked for the museum for a lot longer than that. Over the years,…
Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The fall opener at the Center for Visual Art is a conscientious survey of the careers of Christo and Jeanne-Claude as seen through their personal print collection documenting their pioneering conceptual work that began in the 1960s. The exhibit, which includes more than a hundred works of…
Braided Sorrow. No one knows exactly how many young women have been murdered in the Mexican border town of Juárez over the last decade, perhaps three or four hundred. The murder rate shot up after the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed in 1994, when several U.S. companies set…
Thankfully for the United States of America, slavery is one aspect of our past that we have struggled with and overcome. Or so most of us think. The fact of the matter is, there are more slaves on the planet today than were taken from Africa in more than 400…
A new kind of war movie for a new kind of war, Body of Lies is about the War on Terror as it is being waged on the ground, in the air, but most of all in cyberspace. Directed with terrific verve by Ridley Scott (coming after the listless American…
The old people remember the past,” a narrator says early in The Exiles over a prologue of Edward S. Curtis photographs — faces of aged Native Americans who may have had their lands taken away, but not their history or memories. For the length of Kent MacKenzie’s 1961 feature, the…
Although there was only a small audience for Listen Productions’ Mediamockracy on the night I attended, its members were intensely involved in the play. As I discovered during the actor-audience chats inserted into the performance, these were media-savvy people, deeply aware of the role of news dissemination in a democracy…
I was so bored during the first act of The Trip to Bountiful that I had trouble staying in my seat — and this despite a powerful performance from Kathleen M. Brady as Carrie Watts, the elderly woman trapped in a Houston apartment with her son, Ludie, and his disagreeable…
Les Misérables is a huge, sprawling musical filled with emotional songs that tell the story of Victor Hugo’s novel. The plot centers on the merciless pursuit of a freed prisoner, Jean Valjean, by a bitter police detective, Javert. In the course of the chase, which continues over several decades, we…
No one knows exactly how many young women have been murdered in the Mexican border town of Juárez over the last decade, perhaps three or four hundred. The murder rate shot up after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed in 1994, when several U.S. companies set up…
With no exhibition director on staff at present, the art program at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities is essentially rudderless. Executive director Gene Sobczak is running the program in his spare time, but he is no art expert, and he’s busy with other duties. In addition, Sobczak…
Adam Helms. This MCA solo is the New York artist’s first museum show anywhere. In his works on paper and in a monumental sculpture that conjures up a shooting blind, Helms explores political themes, especially armed struggle. He takes images of different radical and extremist movements from different places and…
Curse of the Starving Class. The moment you walk into the theater, you know you’re in Sam Shepard country — a place suffused with memories of the mythic Old West, but where the breadth and purity of that myth serve only to underline the disappointing realities of contemporary life. You…
There are copious ways to link How to Lose Friends & Alienate People and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Both are based on feather-light books that take a good hour to read for those who scan slowly; both feature actors on the cult side of stardom who do far better…
Redolent of Roman decadence and authority gone mad, the title Religulous rolls pleasingly off the tongue. But Bill Maher’s one-man standup attack on religious fundamentalism is a dog that has more bark than bite — a skeptical, secular-humanist hounding of the hypocrites, amusingly annotated with sarcastic subtitles and clips from…
It’s amazing how inexhaustible abstract expressionism is as an aesthetic ideology, both in its attenuated original form — going strong for sixty years now – and in its heir, neo-abstract expressionism. Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173) is currently hosting a pair of exhibits that highlight this long-lasting appeal. In…
If you like your backcountry riding videos shot in high definition, using gorgeous framing and impeccable cinematography; featuring the talents of an array of backcountry experts; filmed in British Columbia, Alaska and Silverton, Colorado; interlaced with tidbits of mountain history spoken by the people who actually lived through it; and…
Canadian-born Fred Everything seems destined to take his place alongside house-music maestros like Mark Farina and Miguel Migs as a masterful purveyor of innovative and appealing deep house. His work shows a solid knowledge and thorough respect for the style’s history and roots, as well as a refusal to be…
Witness how well the ability to put beautiful art on skin translates to more traditional media as Th’ink Tank presents a joint show for painters Jenny Lee and Sandi Calistro, both of whom work as tattoo artists. Although both pull from pop art and surrealism and feature women and the…
