Denver Arts Week is out of the chute today, spewing a downright miasma of cultural events, all of them held together by one loose thematic thread. It’ll be hard to pick and choose; still, you wouldn’t want to miss tonight’s Super First Friday, wherein five Denver arts districts pull out…
Getting a new theatrical production from concept to opening curtain is typically a long process. But A Play in a Day, a three-day event that gets under way tonight as part of Denver’s Arts Week celebration, reduces the schedule from months to hours. According to the Colorado Theatre Guild’s Dana…
If you take a walk around downtown Denver today, you’ll notice that it’s suddenly chock-full of arty delights that have been placed along the wide third-floor walkway at the Denver Pavilions and in once-empty storefronts — in fact, just about anywhere you look. Local artist Rodney Wallace started the Think…
Imagine climbing in the shadow of George Mallory as he clings to the face of Everest or swimming with Robert Ballard as he discovers the fossil-like remains of the Titanic. Starting tonight at 7:30 p.m. at Macky Auditorium, 17th Street and University Avenue in Boulder, First Person: Stories From the…
What do World War II and the Cold War have to do with Boulder? Quite a bit, if you listen to Keith Gleason, manager of the Sommers-Bausch Observatory at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Gleason will explain it all tonight and tomorrow night in “Sputnik & the Space Age…
“Glendale considers itself a city that’s different from the rest,” says Chris Thonis, business-development manager at Denver-based FitBeats. “We really wanted something that would be fun and different from other races.” That’s why the company chose Glendale’s new Infinity Park — the country’s first municipally owned rugby stadium — as…
Back in 1999, one of my favorite exhibits ever left its footprints at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science: Titled Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway, it was simply the most imaginative science show I’d ever seen, the creation of artist Ray Troll, the absolute R. Crumb of paleontology, whose hilarious…
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…
