“Hair as sculpture — that’s our tagline,” says Emily McAllister, painter and co-founder of Dauphine, a nascent promotion and arts collaborative, with local hairstylist Taylor McFadden. Their fashion-music-art show, A Place in the Sun — which rolls out tonight at 3 Kings Tavern, 60 South Broadway — is actually Dauphine’s…
“After almost six years of running a gallery here, you start to make some kind of sense out of the business, but one thing that will never make sense to me is how some of the best artists can also be the most ignored,” says Ivar Zeile of + Gallery,…
According to George McGovern in a Harper’s essay titled “The Case for Liberalism,” “Virtually every step forward in our history has been a liberal initiative taken over conservative opposition.” While that should make a blue-state fellow like me smile, it actually makes me kind of sad. With the 2008 presidential…
Every year at Christmas and on my birthday, my mother asks me what I’d like to receive. I always give the same, extremely unhelpful response: “World peace.” So far I’ve had no luck, but you know what? It never hurts to ask. And even though Santa and the Birthday Fairy…
After thinking long and hard, I’ve decided to quit writing. How long can I pretend I’m a “writer” before facing the truth? You’re probably all wondering what I’m going to do now. Thanks for the concern, but I’ve already decided to rob banks, which seemed to work just fine for…
Tim Burton created a masterpiece with Edward Scissorhands. The plot has a dreamlike, fairy-tale quality to it: A young man with scissors for hands, created by a loving father but orphaned and isolated, is drawn into a bland, suburban world by a well-meaning Avon saleswoman. And with such talent as…
Last year, the Denver Children’s Advocacy Center, which serves low-income children who’ve been sexually abused, neglected or traumatized by witnessing violence, had real reason to celebrate: a new home in a beautifully restored Victorian at 2149 Federal Boulevard. This year’s gala, Extreme Makeover: Community Edition, continues building on the theme…
Last week, state representative and rancher Wes McKinley took Governor Bill Ritter on a two-hour ride through a portion of his district that’s threatened by plans for the Army’s expanded Piñon Canyon Maneuver site, which one day could stretch “from Pueblo to the New Mexico border east to Kansas,” McKinley…
Frequent Flyers not only has the cleverest of clever names for a group of aerial dancers, but it also puts on darn good shows. And its latest endeavor, Wingding!, goes above and beyond. Wingding! includes a range of pieces, from choreographic premieres to hoop solos and everything in between. But…
The Black Is…CultureFeast, a five-day extravaganza that kicks off tonight, was known as the Denver Pan African Film Festival for its first seven incarnations. Why the change? “It’s a more authentic representation of what this festival has always been,” says Ashara Ekundayo, the event’s founder and executive director. “It’s never…
“We came to the shallow, yellow, muddy South Platte, with its low banks and its scattering of flat sand-bars and pigmy islands — a melancholy stream straggling through the centre of the enormous flat plain, and only saved from being impossible to find with the naked eye by its sentinel…
Writer Jonathan Lethem’s 2003 tome The Fortress of Solitude was heavy in terms of its subject matter and its actual weight. In contrast, Solitude’s successor, You Don’t Love Me Yet — which Lethem is promoting via a book signing today — is lighter in both senses of the word, and…
There’s nothing like getting a good start on the partying: Members of the Denver Gay Men’s Chorus will warm up for their upcoming 25th-anniversary concert in June with a celebratory evening of jazz tonight at Lannie’s Clocktower Cabaret. Featuring chanteuse Georgeann Low and her Nuages trio as the first-rate opening…
This week’s generically titled studio suspense thriller, Fracture, has the good sense to begin where last week’s generically titled studio suspense thriller, Perfect Stranger, ended — with the solution to that tedious riddle: Whodunit? The answer this time is Anthony Hopkins as Ted Crawford, an aeronautical engineer whose pockets of…
There are first films like Citizen Kane or Breathless, which, as radically new and fully achieved as they are, unfairly overshadow an entire oeuvre. And then there are first films, perhaps even more radical, which haunt an artist’s career not through precocious virtuosity, but because they have an innocence that…
For all the huzzahs deservedly heaped upon 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, in which it took a good long while to discern the living from the walking deceased, the zombie-flick spoof was little more than an extended sketch taken, oh, nineteen minutes beyond its breaking point. But the movie, created…
To fully appreciate the merits of Vacancy, you need to have the proper technology. Digitally projected lurid images and THX-amplified creaks and moans are all well and good, but what director Nimród Antal’s creepy cockroach of a thriller really cries out for are the shabby delights that can only be…
Holland’s gift to world cinema, Paul Verhoeven can be a very bad boy and a very good filmmaker. Any of his movies could have been titled Basic Instinct — not least his epic World War II thriller Black Book, in which a Jewish chanteuse who has watched her family massacred…
Most fictional characters in mental institutions struggle to get out, but when Dana Fielding, the artist-protagonist of The Sweetest Swing in Baseball, arrives in one after a suicide attempt, she settles right in. Battered by the response to her latest exhibit, a couple of negative reviews and a general sense…
This is one ugly family gathered in Big Daddy’s Mississippi Delta home to celebrate the patriarch’s 65th birthday, and almost everyone in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof but Big Daddy himself knows that he’s dying. There’s Big Mama, operating in an acute state of denial; son Gooper, accompanied by…
A House With No Walls. There’s a special category of pundit: the black conservative, those darlings of the Republican Party who profit hugely by attacking other African-Americans. The protagonist of Thomas Gibbons’s play is a more thoughtful and credible version of this kind of talker, a brilliant historian named Cadance…
More than any other institution in the city, the University of Denver should be credited with establishing and nurturing contemporary art in the early to mid-twentieth century. But despite the school’s important role, the accomplishments of artists associated with it have not been properly documented. Dan Jacobs, director of the…
