Guts Against Gravity

THURS, 1/27 ESPN and its Winter X Games Nine spike Buttermilk Mountain with a gut-flipping dose of adrenaline today through Tuesday, February 1. Athletes will push the limits of gravity and sanity during the high-energy event — the athletic equivalent of pouring monster shots of Red Bull and Stoli onto…

Ante Up

Amateur card sharps get their day. SAT, 1/29 In May 2003, Tennessee amateur Chris Moneymaker won $2.5 million at the championship final event of the World Series of Poker. The victory came as quite a surprise to the poker community, as the World Series was Moneymaker’s first actual casino tournament…

Jazz Time

SUN, 1/30 Boulder jazz drummer and composer Chris Lee first fell for Canadian trumpeter Kenny Wheeler’s music in the 1970s, when the percussionist, only fourteen years old at the time, listened to Wheeler’s debut album, Gnu High — a fine romp with Keith Jarrett, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette –…

Class Act

Vicki and Kent Logan are high-profile art collectors and generous donors. Former residents of the Bay Area, they first made a name for themselves in the art world when they gave a substantial gift of contemporary works to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This happened at roughly the…

Artbeat

I ran into John Grant from the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs last month, and he told me he was going to prove me wrong about the Performing Arts Sculpture Park on Speer Boulevard next to the Colorado Convention Center. He was referring to what I had written when Jonathan…

Now Showing

The Eternal Gift. The Taylor Museum in the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is showing off some of its treasure in The Eternal Gift: Selections From the Fine Arts Center’s Permanent Collection. The Taylor’s inventory has many strengths, including modern art from the early to mid-twentieth century, which is what’s…

Re-Joyce

The Hunger Artists have made something of a tradition of staging a reading of James Joyce’s The Dead in the historic Byers-Evans House at the beginning of each new year, and it’s a good tradition. The story, subtle and beautifully multi-layered, filled with references to snow, memory and, as the…

Home on the Mange

Who is Silvia? What is she, That all our swains commend her? Holy, fair and wise is she; The heaven such grace did lend her, That she might admired be. Is she kind as she is fair? For beauty lives with kindness. Love doth to her eyes repair, To help…

Encore

Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…

Run, Dick, Run

You have to hand it to Sean Penn. Okay, you don’t absolutely have to, and if you’re a red-stater through and through, you certainly won’t want to — but give him some credit. After being pilloried in the press for visiting Iraq under Saddam’s reign, torn apart by housecats in…

Unlucky 13

Assault on Precinct 13, the sluggish remake of John Carpenter’s grungy 1976 movie of the same name, begins with a bang to which it never lives up. In a smoky den of all manner of iniquity, Ethan Hawke’s trying to close a drug deal. With his girl splayed out on…

Is It Over Yet?

The promos read: “24 hours. 350 miles. His girlfriend’s kids. What could possibly go wrong?” In the case of Are We There Yet?, here’s the short answer: a flaccid screenplay; bratty kids stripped of depth and personality; a single joke replayed in every scene; unearned attempts at sentiment; and a…

Flick Pick

When the great French director Jean Renoir immigrated to the United States, he wasted no time making an American masterpiece that is, in the view of many film scholars, the equal of Grand Illusion or The Rules of the Game. The Southerner, released in 1945, chronicles the struggle of a…

Hunka Burning Styro

Ladies and gentleman, Elvis has left the building. But — hot diggity damn! — it seems he forgot his Styrofoam cup. And on Tuesday, January 25, the polystyrene wonder will be on display at the Boulder Theater as part of Nutballz Night Out, a fundraiser for the Center for Celiac…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

Thursday, January 20 Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House tells the story of Nora Helmer, a woman ruled by her father and her husband, who awakens from her unexamined life of domestic comfort when her marriage is put to the test. OMayO’s A Selfish Sacrifice, premiering today at 8 p.m. at…

Home Style

In the fall of 1976, Roberta Price found herself facing a truly Western dilemma: be inhospitable to strangers or serve the two cowboys suddenly standing at her door the THC-laced doughnuts cooling on the table. The Manhattan-raised Vassar girl chose wisely: She gave them each a doughnut and sent them…

Take a Seat

FRI, 1/21 Colorado aesthetes, mark your PDAs: Here comes another extracurricular activity for the creative class. Tonight, the Colorado Theatre Guild introduces Theatre Night Out, a nomadic tour of area venues and productions held on the third Friday of every month. Taking a cue from the wildly successful First Friday…

Wooden Nugget

FRI, 1/21 Has Russian nesting doll fever swept Denver, thanks to the Nuggets? Da! I was among those scurrying to the Pepsi Center the night after Christmas, ostensibly to watch the NBA home team blow a game against the Dallas Mavericks. But the real reason for the breathless arrival? Simple:…

To Your Welsh!

SAT, 1/22 It so happened one year that I found myself in the seaside town of Swansea, Wales, two weeks before Christmas. A friend of my good friend and traveling companion lived there, and he took it upon himself to show us around. One night he led us through a…

No Worries

TUES, 1/25 Charismatic singer Bobby McFerrin, who beatboxed his way up the charts in 1988 with the Grammy-winning “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” brings his bebopping rhythm and jazz — not to mention that signature grin — tonight to the Newman Center for the Performing Arts. McFerrin, who studied with Leonard…

Color Fields Forever

One of this season’s most important shows — at least to those of us with an interest in the history of contemporary art in our region — is Opened Windows, a retrospective devoted to the work of Boulder painter Virginia Maitland that is nearly through its too-short five-week run at…

Artbeat

It’s hard to believe that Pirate: a contemporary art oasis (3659 Navajo Street, 303-456-6058) is a quarter of a century old, but since exhibition titles don’t lie — and the current one is 25 Years of Pirate: Past and Present — it must be true. The venerable artists’ cooperative debuted…