Arts & Culture

Polyester might not wrinkle like its natural-fabric cousins, but neither will this disco child get you laid. Well, actually, it won’t get rats laid. In Mary Roach’s new book, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, you’ll learn about the Egyptian doctor who dressed vermin in little underpants for…

Truth be told, El Hijo del Santo probably could have ridden comfortably on his father’s coattails. The son of legendary professional wrestler and Mexican icon El Santo, El Hijo was born into a large shadow and could easily have cashed in on his father’s good fake name. But Mexican wrestlers…

What is it about Trevor Appleson’s new exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver that reminds me of Cormac McCarthy’s prose? Is it the intense quiet, the obsessive detail or the undercurrent of violence? Honestly, it’s probably a little bit of each. Edging out all background distraction with a large…

I’ve been raving about Jeff “Maestro” Hughes, a violinist whose music mixes hip-hop sensibilities with classical technique, since I first clicked on his website (www.maestrohughes.com). But you can catch him in person tonight at the Denver Food Rave, which promises plenty of other tasty entertainment, including samples from Elegant Catering…

In Pueblo mythology, the Corn Mother is the ultimate earth mother: Like the corn she emulates, this deity dies and is renewed again and again, carrying in her kernel the very secret of life. She’s not unlike the Chicano Humanities and Arts Council, which returns annually (CHAC’s just turned thirty)…

When we asked poet Andrea Gibson about the significance of her poetry collection’s title, Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns, she had this to say: “One night, my girlfriend and I were outside of a music venue in Boulder. The band inside started playing gospel hymns, and the music was so…

A visitation of things both “wild” and “Western” couldn’t possibly be complete without a style element, so the concept of the Fresh City Life exhibit I Wanna Be a Cowboy, and You Can Be My Cowgirl, which opens today at the Denver Central Library, was a dead-on no-brainer for Fresh…

lthough we no longer live in the days of the Wild West, it’s tough to get away from our Western roots here in Denver, with events like the National Western Stock Show, summertime rodeos and more bringing history to life. And why bother escaping? The West has so much to…

Artist Sherri Lynn Wood likes to say that her Mantra Trailer is “parked at the intersection of imagination, evangelism and propaganda.” Inspired early on by slogan-swathed church signboards she encountered throughout the South, the interactive traveling meditation chamber with a recording studio inside bears a rotating series of watchwords on…

Eating in the dark might be a recent trend, but jumping on a bandwagon was the last thing on Greg Goldfogel’s mind when the Alto owner conceptualized tonight’s Wine Dinner in the Dark. “I’ve got a longstanding relationship with a guy named Nicholas Delmonico, who is a blind gentleman and…

Spike Lee, who speaks under the auspices of the University of Colorado Denver tonight, is among the most fascinating and frustrating of modern directors. He’s extremely talented and relentlessly passionate, yet during the two decades-plus since the breakthrough success of 1986’s She’s Gotta Have It, he’s only occasionally been able…

A lot of women need to be kicked out of their houses this time of year, like mama bears from their dens, and forced to put on makeup, buy new outfits and rejoin the real world. The only difference is that unlike the bears, who’ve been hibernating and emerge skinny…

Standup comedy is best seen live. The atmosphere of a live set (not to mention the alcohol usually involved) has caused me to laugh at jokes that I didn’t actually think were funny. It takes more skill — and better jokes — to create a standup routine that people will…

Funplex, the B-52’s’ first album in sixteen years, pumps up the volume, cranks the guitars, and rocks harder than anything the veteran group has done since its 1979 debut. There’s nothing here as sweet or as catchy as “Roam” or “Love Shack,” both of which made these unlikely new-wave rejects…

Last fall, rock mags aplenty spilled ink on behalf of the Black Kids, a Florida combo that scribes repeatedly described as a cross between the Cure (thanks to singer Reggie Youngblood’s Robert Smith-like pipes) and the Go! Team (by virtue of pep squad-style chanting). As it turns out, this description…

Since his 1979 debut Look Sharp, Joe Jackson has into delved into a variety of genres, traversing through pop, jazz, Latin, even trying his hand at classical. While some of the twenty subsequent albums he’s released have been grandiose affairs, his latest effort, Rain, is stripped to the bare essentials…

Even politicians, whose careers frequently hinge on a perpetual state of economic denial, are beginning to face up to the ugly fact that this country is in the grips of a full-blown recession. In trying times such as these, people naturally turn toward the time-honored traditional means of dealing with…