Arts & Culture

Now that $4-a-gallon gasoline has graduated from a worst-case what-if to a daily reality, scooters are looking less like an affectation for the terminally hip and more like the only practical way to get around. “My truck cost $80 to fill up the tank; my scooter costs $6,” says David…

I’ve never had a massage. I’ve always thought of spa services as a luxury for the rich, which I am not. I’d feel too guilty spending that much money on something I couldn’t at least wear or digest. But Massage for the Cure gives me an excuse to splurge on…

“Life has changed over the last fifty years for Vietnamese women, gaining more rights and freedoms — but with the pressures of family duties, work and the persistent cultural expectations of women to serve the men in their lives there, art has not been an area where many have been…

A single actor relays the entire plot of Moby-Dick using a goldfish in a bowl. A group of actors gives us Franz Kafka’s life story, cleverly interwoven with the plot of his most famous work, The Metamorphosis, while skating on artificial ice. Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty tragedy, Titus Andronicus, is transformed into…

Chance being the fickle thing it is, everyone could get a hole in one on a golf course at some point in life. Maybe you only get one shot at glory, but still, everyone has that chance. Why not use up your one shot today at the Million Dollar Hole-in-One…

The stereotypical Richard Nixon isn’t part of Nixon in China, a 1987 opera by composer John Adams and librettist Alice Goodman that Opera Colorado is reviving for four performances beginning tonight. According to Opera Colorado artistic director James Robinson, the figure at the center of the narrative, which revolves around…

Richard Brenne, author of the upcoming book The Truth About Everything, calls Al Bartlett a prophet of what should be common sense, but too often isn’t. Bartlett, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Colorado and a friend of Brenne’s, has been documenting the effects of exponential population…

The joys of childhood meet experimental art — and cake will be enjoyed by all — at Cinema Jou Jou III, a fundraiser for TIE, The International Experimental Cinema Exposition. “Jou Jou is ‘little toy’ in French,” explains TIE curator Chris May. “The whole theme is childhood. We’re having cakes…

Jerry Seinfeld doesn’t have to appear in concert tonight. Thanks to ubiquitous reruns of his signature sitcom, not to mention dough from DVD sales and that bee-movie thing, he’s got more than enough money already. Enough to retire a thousand times. Enough to purchase every sock in the world and…

In 1978, a small radio station in the people’s republic of Boulder was born. Inspired in part by a handbook on community radio called Sex and Broadcasting, and fostered by a coalition that met in a 1973 Free School class titled “A Desperate (or Last Ditch) Attempt to Start a…

Joel Heath founded the Teva Mountain Games seven years ago as a way to fuse athletics, art, music and mountains into one event. Today, the festival in Vail is the biggest outdoor adventure event in the country. “You can do anything from watching athletes to learning from some of the…

One of the darker points in the history of cultural relations in America, the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943 — an altercation between uniformed sailors and zoot-suit clad Angeleno Mexican-Americans, or pachucos — clearly concluded on an unfair note. Not one of the sailors who came ashore…

Two-wheeled vehicles are so hot right now. There just seems to be something about summertime that brings out the bipedalist in all of us. And the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities is cashing in on the popularity of all things two-wheeled with a pair of new summer exhibitions,…

City boosters suffering performance anxiety over the upcoming Democratic National Convention should take heart in the major gathering that hits town today: the National Performing Arts Convention, with more than two dozen disciplines banding together at one confab to share thoughts on the challenges they face — and then sharing…

Hifalutin’ do-gooder hotelier Walter Isenberg (the Oxford et al.) and his wife, Christie, know how to raise cash. They employ a little trick called putting the “fun” in fundraising. Their charity, Concerts for Kids, kicked off its first flagship event — an annual concert — in 2004, and since then,…

There’s something ever so glorious about watching a movie from a lawn chair under the stars, caressed by the breeze and lit by moonshine while the little kids giggle and the big ones cuddle and smooch. It’s good, and it’s usually free, and it almost doesn’t matter what the movie…

“Post-rock” may not be the most ridiculous descriptor in contemporary music; I’d cast my vote for either “sadcore” or “neo-prog.” Still, the term means next to nothing when it’s applied to a band like Russian Circles, which co-stars on this roster with Daughters and Young Widows. On 2006’s Enter and…

Emmylou Harris explored the arty side of the street on her previous three studio albums: 1995’s indelible Wrecking Ball, helmed by studio auteur Daniel Lanois, plus 2000’s Red Dirt Girl and 2003’s Stumble Into Grace, made with Lanois protegé Malcolm Burn. In contrast, All I Intended to Be, her forthcoming…

Bluesman David Booker, who moved to Denver from England in 1981, is one of the busiest musicians in town. You can hear the guy nearly every night of the week playing in solo, duo or trio settings or with his Swingtet. While Booker didn’t study music formally, he learned a…

Deemed “the Godfather of Goth,” Peter Murphy built the paradigm for surly, baritone-voiced broodfests. When the English singer broke through the London gloom-tune scene in the late ’70s with his seminal band, Bauhaus, he already had the high-cut cheekbones and deep voice of David Bowie, along with the androgynous costumes…