Summer Guide: Vote for Your Favorite Look

(Photos by Mark Manger) The Summer Guide is finally here. On stands today (Thursday, June 7). Cat is pretty happy with how it turned out. Even though we were photographing in a bone-chilling downpour, all the fashion images look beautiful. Dark and moody and maybe not so summery, but, hey,…

Cheap, Chic Dresses and More!

Happy day, happy day! Cat just stumbled on Plasticland, which features the most darling dresses (and more) for cheap. Like Forever 21 prices. (Okay, maybe a little more.) If you like vintage styling or a rock-and-roll edge to sweet, classic pieces, you’ll love what they’re offering. Cat just better not…

Talking Shop

Denver newbie Patricia Branstead is a master printer, papermaker, book artist and teacher of all of the above, a globe-trotting treasure who decided to roost here. Raised near Washington, D.C., and schooled in the Bay Area, she founded and ran the Aeropress intaglio studio in New York City for seventeen…

Climate Change

Anyone who’s sat through An Inconvenient Truth knows that a PowerPoint presentation — no matter how disturbing the facts — isn’t all that compelling. That’s why EcoArts, a Boulder nonprofit, combines world-renowned scientists with artists to create projects that are both scientifically accurate and moving. This summer, EcoArts invited the…

Only the Lonely

Writing is a lonely job. Sometimes you wonder if it’s really worth it — especially when you can see your apartment’s pool from your desk. Those glistening sun-worshipers just look so goddamn refreshed and uninhibited and happy that I — er, you, that is — just have to ask yourself…

Oceans Thirteen

Lowest Common Denominatorism writ large and engraved in stone like the Ten Commandments according to Cecil B. DeMille, the Hollywood blockbuster is often an allegory for itself. Walt Disney, the notoriously litigious studio that successfully changed the nation’s copyright laws to protect its trademark Mickey Mouse but more recently declared…

Crazy Love

A true-crime yarn told largely by the criminal, with supporting testimony from his curiously forgiving victim, Crazy Love comes billed as a documentary. But it can’t really be considered journalism — unless you count as journalism the sort of lurid tabloid exposé whose hundred-point headline blurts “ACID-ATTACKER MARRIES HIS VICTIM!”…

Day Night Day Night

Afrail-looking young woman, outfitted with a bomb, wanders through Times Square — finger on the switch, searching for the moment to blow up. That, in a sentence, is the premise of Julia Loktev’s outrageously abstract Day Night Day Night. Terror is existential in this highly intelligent, somewhat sadistic, totally fascinating…

Severance

The idea of “getting axed” is exploited for maximum double-entendre value in Severance, a grisly horror-comedy from the U.K. that has its tongue planted so firmly in its cheek that you half expect it to pop out the other side. Yes, heads (and, in one indelible bit, a severed foot)…

Soul Survivor

This is the second time this season that I’ve watched an actress struggle into her pantyhose onstage. Both times, the sequence was brilliantly executed and brought down the house, and each version illustrated that actress’s particular strengths. In Modern Muse’s Bad Dates, it was Diana Dresser — blond and lithe…

Every Secret Thing

Judy GeBauer’s Every Secret Thing deals with the effect of McCarthyism on a group of high school teachers, and it couldn’t have premiered at a more fitting time. Fox’s Bill (“Shut up!”) O’Reilly has just set his sights on a Conference on World Affairs panel at Boulder High School that…

Now Playing

Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead. Apparently major changes occurred when members of Charles Schulz’s well-loved Peanuts gang reached their teens: Pigpen became a sex-obsessed, homophobic jock; Lucy entered a psych ward after setting the little red-haired girl’s hair on fire; Linus morphed into a dazed pothead; Schroeder…

Homare Ikeda

Surely Homare Ikeda is on just about everyone’s list of the most interesting and important contemporary painters in the area. His work is in the permanent collection of the Denver Art Museum, and he’s had pieces included in shows at any number of venues, particularly the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver…

Fourteen Stations/Hey Yud Dalet

The Singer Gallery of the Mizel Center (350 South Dahlia Street, 303-316-6360) is nominally a Jewish institution, although the programs are typically more secular than religious. However, the current exhibit, Fourteen Stations/Hey Yud Dalet, is thoroughly Jewish, and the subject is the Holocaust. On display are fourteen monumental charcoal drawings…

Sketches

Altar Girls. Two very different exhibits roughly collide into one another in the middle of the Museo de las Américas. One part, put together by Museo curator Kristi Martens, is an extravaganza of santos made mostly in Colorado, Mexico and New Mexico, and primarily culled from a recent gift to…

Sagebrush & Spaghetti

The Sergio Leone Anthology (MGM) Sergio Leone made Westerns like Wagner made ditties. This essential boxed set — four films with four discs of supplemental material, much of it scholarly and insightful — shows the Italian director supplanting the elegiac Monument Valley iconography of John Ford with a darker, ruder,…

Three’s a Charm

Bold proclamation time: There wouldn’t even be an Xbox 360 without Halo. Microsoft lost billions on the original Xbox even with its mega-successful sci-fi games, so it’s hard to imagine the red ink that would have spilled without them; even suggesting a second go at the console business would’ve had…

Our top DVD picks for the week of June 5

The Abyss: Special Edition (Fox) The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: Extra Frills Edition (MGM) Bruce Springsteen With the Sessions Band: Live in Dublin (Sony) The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: A Re-Imagining of the 1919 Masterpiece of Horror (Image) CHiPs: The Complete First Season (Turner) Coming to America:…

Tee Party

This cowtown is brimming with great style and interesting ways to while away a lazy summer afternoon, from the perfect mojito to a perfect getaway dress. Treat yourself. Tee Party High temperatures are no excuse for too-short shorts and baggy T-shirts. These sweet tops sold at The Fabric Lab are…

Starry, Starry Nights

Bag Lady The best parts of summer: adventure and the open road. Be ready to embark at a moment’s notice with a whimsical tote bag and a pair of go-with-anything, go-anywhere Frye wedges. You’ll always arrive in style, wherever the pavement leads. — Amy Haimerl Top photo at left: Inner…

Love Story

Q: What books are you looking forward to reading this summer, and what is your literary guilty pleasure? “The books I recommend are all serious and sometimes dark. I can’t help it; I like it that way. This summer I’ll be reading Snow, Ashes, by Alyson Hagy; Spring Tides, by…

Idle Wild

Idle Wild It’s patio season again, and Denver has a bevy of beauties. So whether you’re whiling away a morning, noon or night, grab a book or just your best people-watching goggles and set up camp. Just remember to order often — and tip your waitstaff. Gaia Bistro on Old…