Blocks Party

Colfax Avenue may be the longest main street in the world, but the most important stretch today is just a couple of miles long, from east of the State Capitol to Colorado Boulevard. “We’re just getting people out of their houses to play on Colfax — the same old thing,”…

Iron Wills

There is no fair description of what goes on at an iron pour. Sure, there are flames and sparks and glowing molten metal, seen through an aura of smoldering heat and acrid smoke, but heck, you’ve really just gotta be there. Even among the esoteric milieu of sculptors working in…

Quaking Aspen

The cover of Dizzying Heights, “the Aspen novel” by Denver attorney/author Bruce Ducker, shows a lovely chocolate cake — an apt illustration, because this book is a completely delicious, acidic-yet-sweet romp through Aspen and all the affectations that plague not just that high-priced town, but modern society. An Aspen reviewer…

Return to Forever

After working with jazz luminaries like Stan Getz, Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy Gillespie, pianist Chick Corea performed and recorded in Miles Davis’s electric bands in the late 1960s and early ’70s. During that time, he played on Davis’s Bitches Brew, a revolutionary album that gave birth to jazz-rock fusion. Davis,…

Girls Night Out

If you’re like me and you enjoy shopping, drinking, shopping, trying new beauty products and shopping, then tomorrow night’s Shecky’s Girls Night Out should be just about the perfect pre-weekend retreat. Billed as “America’s Favorite Shopping Party,” the Shecky’s event promises everything from complimentary cocktails (including mojitos and Chambord martinis),…

Cougar Bait Worthy of Sex and the City

This piece of bait is named Phil. Phil is not just pretty, he’s also functional. For example – can’t find your cheese grater? Try Phil’s stomach. It’s just that easy. Phil will be out and about this weekend, so go fetch, ladies! (You’re welcome.)…

The Men of Sex and the City

With the long weekend over and only three days to go until Sex and the City opens on the big screen, let the countdown to a fun, fashionable weekend begin. Visit The Cat’s Pajamas every day through Friday for musings on the women and men of Sex and the City…

Queen for a Day

With all the wet weather we’ve been having, this weekend will be a great time to get out in the garden and work. But, while the damp earth makes weeding easier, it also tends to bring out the bugs in full force. Lynne Killey, owner of Queen Bee Skin Care,…

Sex

The countdown has begun. Only seven days until the most anticipated movie of the year for people with breasts opens in theaters. I’m talking about Sex and the City: The Movie people, and if you say you don’t care you are a liar. I’ll be the one standing in line…

Talking Shop: Common Threads

When Libby Alexander and Mae Martin opened Common Threads in Boulder last fall, their intent was two-fold: On one hand, it would serve as a business tailored to Alexander’s design background, and on the other, it would provide an outlet for girls from AIM House, a local youth residential mentoring…

Fashion on the ‘Fax

Not only is she skinny, tan, beautiful and can wear anything, she is totally cool which pisses me off because I can’t hate her. I think Bobby needs a stronger prescription on those glasses so he can check the mirror before he leaves the house. Style maven and Colfax Avenue…

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Here’s your hat, Indy, but, really, what’s your hurry? Because nineteen years after the Last Crusade that clearly wasn’t, and fifteen years after the old man joined Young Indiana Jones on the small screen to recount his glory days blowing horns with Sidney Bechet, it’s almost unfathomable that this hoary…

Standard Operating Procedure

It’s been twenty years since Errol Morris made The Thin Blue Line — a found “noir” that served to free an innocent man convicted of murder. Gathering evidence and dramatizing testimony, Morris’s movie circled around a single, unrepresentable event: the death of a cop on a lonely stretch of Texas…

Direct to Video Game

Steven Spielberg may rule Hollywood, but in the video-game biz — the more profitable of the two industries, becoming more so with each passing year — he’s a bikini-clad babe in Jaws-infested waters. Perhaps that’s why in 2005, Spielberg, an avid gamer, signed with developing giant EA Games for three…

The Denver Project

Every semester, my freshman class at the University of Colorado stages a debate on whether or not you should give money to beggars, and every semester, my students reveal an almost identical set of prejudices and convictions. Those opposed to giving money seldom offer the one rationale that strikes me…

Now Playing

Dinah Was. The story opens with Dinah Washington, at the height of her fame, arriving at the Sahara in Las Vegas for a show. Though the manager expects her to fill the house, he refuses to give her a room at the hotel, insisting that she stay in the trailer…

Dale Chisman

Dale Chisman is an exceptional figure in Denver’s art world, not simply because he’s one of the region’s most talented abstract painters, but also because he’s been at it, day after day, for more than forty years. What makes this kind of commitment remarkable is how rare it is. In…

Making Public Buildings

Cydney Payton, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver (1485 Delgany Street, 303-298-7554, www.mcadenver.org), has programmed the place to the max, and shows are constantly opening and closing there. One that’s on the way out soon is Making Public Buildings, a traveling show with special relevance to the MCA. The…

Now Showing

Berghaus, Douglas and Riverhouse Editions. In the front spaces at Sandy Carson, there’s a whimsical yet intelligent show called Clearing: The Kinetic Sculpture of Marc Berghaus. The pieces are mechanical, with the most clever use of machinery being “Freeway Chase,” in which viewers look through the frame of a TV…

Shots in the Dark

CANNES, France—No need for dreaming here. Each Cannes Film Festival generates its own metaphors for a 10-day regimen of visions in the dark. It’s impossible to forget, let alone transcend, one’s unnatural situation here. The opening film of Cannes’s 2008 edition clobbered participants with a cautionary allegory. Regardez: The civilized…

Bygone Days

Listen closely on the corner of 27th and Welton in Five Points: With a little imagination and the right kind of crazy, you might hear the ghostly improvisation of jazz legends such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. During the first half of the twentieth century,…