Look at the liner notes of the best punk and post-punk albums to come from Washington, D.C., over the past two decades-plus, and you’re likely to find Don Zientara’s name on lots of them. During the late ’70s, Zientara founded Inner Ear Studio in his basement, and since then, he’s…
The whispery, fairy-tale tone of the Slow Crash’s music is deceptively fey. Akin to the intense chamber rock of famed Fort Collins outfit Matson Jones, the sound is decidedly darker and would never be confused with more traditional indie rock. With a multi-instrumentalist singer who’s an amalgam of Johnette Napolitano…
Magik Markers, originally from Hartford, Connecticut, caught the ear of Thurston Moore, who invited the three-piece to join Sonic Youth on its 2004 tour. After that, Moore released the act’s debut, I Trust My Guitar, Etc… on his Ecstatic Peace imprint. The Markers’ original sound evoked no wave’s tortured, abrasive…
It’s hard to avoid sexual innuendos when discussing That 1 Guy, the alter ego of Mike Silverman. For starters, he calls his instrument his Magic Pipe, which is made up of two six-foot steel pipes (dude’s seriously packing) wired with a single bass string. The thing looks like a Blade…
Grab your hairpins, seamed stockings, peep toe pumps and work the 1940’s revival. And thank Christ, because my legs are officially numb from stuffing myself into narrow pants for four months. All the major magazines and fashionistas are highlighting the return to subdued sexy. Embrace the knee length, form-fitting pencil…
Well, those little thinkers with the big ideas are at it again — trying to mess with our beloved Civic Center. Didn’t the powers-that-be downtown (from city officials to civic boosters to developers) learn anything from last year’s fiasco? I’m starting to think they all have some kind of mob…
For his annual solo, Oh Me! Oh My! Whatever Does It Mean?, Michael Brohman shows off his usual approach to contemporary sculpture at Pirate Contemporary Art (3655 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058). The metal and mixed-material pieces have been set on organically shaped risers that some may recognize from the Eames show…
Clyfford Still Unveiled. A master and pioneer of mid-twentieth-century abstract expressionism, painter Clyfford Still was something of an eccentric in the artist-as-egomaniac stripe. His antisocial behavior led to a situation where 94 percent of his artworks remained together after he died — a staggeringly complete chronicle of his oeuvre that…
Anna in the Tropics. The setting is a small, Cuban-run cigar factory in Ybor City, Florida, at the turn of the last century. In those days, such factories employed lectors to read aloud to the workers. The lector in Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics has chosen Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. As he reads,…
Departure delays got you down? Escape the hustle and bustle of airport woes and discover a whole new terrain at the movie-enhanced art mezzanine of Concourse A at Denver International Airport. In between Hudson News and the Cowboy Bar, the savvy searcher will find an escalator to a secret serenity…
Director Robert Benton, best known for his zeitgeist-y divorce drama Kramer vs. Kramer, has tapped into more than a few current trends in Feast of Love. There are the interlocking mini-stories, à la Crash; the different color filters for different scenes (happy moments in yellow, sad ones in blue), à…
The Kingdom is the first film from Peter Berg since the actor-turned-director’s Friday Night Lights, which spawned an acclaimed, if struggling, franchise for NBC. There will be no small-screen spin-off of The Kingdom — there are too many corpses lying around to populate a sequel, much less a series. Besides,…
There’s a very specific strain of English humor — a sort of hyper-literate silliness — that stems from a love of nonsense as a genre. Think Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, and now think Spamalot, a musical loosely based on the legendary 1975 movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail,…
Before there was Harry Potter, there was Discworld. Created by another internationally best-selling British author, Terry Pratchett, the fantasy series, which debuted in 1983, was set on a flat world balanced on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant turtle. In the tradition of The Lord of the…
So here’s this Arab actor talking to me in Hebrew about his role as a Saudi soldier in Peter Bergs The Kingdom which ought to be enough cultural confusion to throw anyone, let alone someone just cruising onto the radar of an industry not known for casting Middle Eastern actors…
John Nathan, who fronts a group called the Rotten Gamblers, was born to perform during the fourth annual Hankfest showcase. He and Hank Williams, the country icon whose music is being celebrated tonight, share the same birthday as well as an appreciation for music founded on authenticity. “They’re simple three-chord…
The story goes like this: Corridor 44, at 1433 Larimer Street, was once a brothel owned by a reformed showgirl and her ornery husband. When the couple’s daughter began dallying with a city lowlife, the irate father sent a hit man to rub out the boyfriend — except the plan…
The beet takes center stage in Mead. The town of Mead, around 35 miles north of Denver, is steeped in sugar-beet history. It was founded more than a hundred years ago, when a railroad line was built through the area to transport beets to the refinery in Longmont. It’s fitting,…
“The best way to describe this issue,” says Jake Adam York, editor of Copper Nickel, “is if you threw a rock into a body of water and watched those ripples move throughout. Where the rock hits is obviously the point of deliberation, and while everything else may seem a little…
Jax Fish House PR gal Kate Baird saw last year’s changing of the guard at the James Beard House as a great opportunity for top Jax toques Sheila Lucero and Hosea Rosenberg. So she asked the duo to collaborate on a sample menu and sent it off to new Beard…
I resigned myself long ago to the fact that I will never be a model. With a 5’4″ frame and no desire to starve my curves away, it’s just not something that’s in my future. But I still love fashion, and I love going out when there’s no cover charge…
Have you ever looked up “nothing” on Wikipedia? It’s a six-part entry. Similarly, the enormously popular Seinfeld was a sitcom about nothing, yet ran for nine seasons. Today, Will Eno’s Pulitzer finalist, Thom Pain (based on nothing) opens at the Bug Theatre. Clearly, there is something to this nothing. The…
