Thirty-some years ago, Yale Drama School graduate Lewis Black and several friends drove cross-country to Colorado Springs to reclaim a dilapidated theater. “All of a sudden, we see the mountains,” Black recalls. “It was astonishing. Suddenly, like in a movie, the song ‘Rocky Mountain High’ comes on. We’re fucked, I…
Thursday, January 22 Hey, Elmer Fudd! It’s time to don your plaid shirt, hunting cap and twusty wifle and find out what’s up, Doc, at the Gart Sports International Sportsmen’s Exposition, the be-all and end-all of fishing, hunting, camping, adventure travel and outdoor-sports expos. New to this year’s extravaganza –…
Armchair-travel enthusiasts and hard-core mountain climbers alike should dive into Surviving the Extremes: A Doctor’s Journey to the Limits of Human Endurance, Dr. Kenneth Kamler’s remarkable firsthand tale of practicing medicine under extreme conditions. Kamler, a New York microsurgeon, says he’s wanted to be a mountain climber ever since he…
FRI, 1/23 Everything from bronze wildlife sculptures to intricately beaded jewelry, crafted by more than 300 artists from across the nation, will be on display this weekend at the 23rd annual Colorado Indian Market and Southwest Showcase. “It’s a mixture of Native American, Southwestern, Western and wildlife art,” says spokeswoman…
TUES, 1/27 How hard is it to turn a huge pile of snow into two camels lounging under a canopy of palm trees? Find out this week at Breckenridge’s Budweiser International Snow Sculpture Championships, when five American teams of sculptors — along with fourteen teams from as far away as…
TUES, 1/27 Move over, Squidward: There’s a new squid in town, and he’s 27 feet long and tall enough for a grown man to stand inside him. He’s the larger-than-life creation of Denver’s self-proclaimed “puppet guy” Cory Gilstrap, who built the Bunraku-style cephalopod for the new original children’s musical at…
SAT, 1/24 Head to the land Down Under at today’s screening of In Search of the Tasmanian Devil, with John Nelson, shown as part of the Macky Auditorium Travel Film Series. “Tasmania is a place that a lot of people don’t go to when they visit Australia, but it’s a…
TUES, 1/27 In her closing scene as Crystal in the cinematic version of The Women, Joan Crawford stares through her deliciously darkened diva eyes and growls, “There’s a word for you ladies, but it is seldom used in high society — outside of a kennel.” The manicured claws of bored…
More and more, it seems to me that nearly all current contemporary art can trace its impetus directly back to the 1960s and ’70s. I guess that’s why almost everything today looks like it could have been created back then. This is not a negative appraisal of the current situation;…
There’s an interesting show at Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173) that expresses some connections between Mexico and the American West. Called shared horizons/horizontes compartidos, it was organized by Ricky Armendariz, a well-known Latino artist living in Boulder. “I leaned that two artists from Mexico, Javier Guadarrama and Claudia Gallegos,…
It isn’t possible to review The Producers as if one hadn’t heard the shrieks of joy emanating from New York at the time of its 2001 Broadway opening. Critics raved about how daring and funny the show was; some proclaimed it had single-handedly revived the musical. The Producers eventually won…
Confession: I spent many years as a ballet mom. This means that when my daughter was thirteen or fourteen, dancing in the corps of some local production or other, I’d be craning my head from side to side for a glimpse of her prettily waving arms, completely ignoring the principals,…
So, have you ever wondered what exactly goes into the painting of a portrait? You may have suspected there was more to it than a painter saying something along the lines of, “Hey baby, can I, uh, paint you?” and then someone else saying, “Yeah, sure, that’d be cool.” You…
Furtive anonymous sex and deep psychological insight don’t usually accompany one another — except in the writings of John Rechy and Irving Rosenthal. But they most certainly do in Porn Theatre, writer-director-actor Jacques Nolot’s uncannily subtle mood piece, helpfully retitled from the French original, La Chatte à Deux Têtes. That’s…
The first film in a new monthly series called Seeing Queerly, presented by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center of Colorado, will be No Secret Anymore — The Times of Del Martin & Phyllis Lyon. Directed by Joan E. Biren, the 57-minute documentary chronicles half a century of…
I once actually put a moratorium on bringing books into the house. In all fairness to me, though, my boyfriend and I lived in a 300-square-foot apartment, and novellas and novels and short-story collections and true crime and biographies and classics were taking over every possible surface. Even the cat…
Thursday, January 15 At the recently renamed (+) Zeile/Judish, which is temporarily housed in the former Cordell Taylor Gallery space, at 2350 Lawrence Street, the new year takes on added meaning with a makeover that teams top gallery entrepreneurs Ivar Zeile and Ron Judish. They’ll make their inaugural statement by…
Some would call comic books a guilty pleasure, a childish entertainment meant to be put away by mature adults (or at the very least, packed away neatly in sealed plastic bags as a bankable investment). And then there are those who can’t help themselves. They never quite leave behind that…
FRI, 1/16 Given enough time, I do believe that people eventually begin to look like their pets. I’ve seen it happen: English bulldogs marching their masters down the street, both of them with oddly sagging jowls; poodles with their hair and nails done, exactly matching their owners’ style. Honestly, it’s…
TUES, 1/20 Expect to see lots of chaps worn over ski pants at today’s Cowboy Downhill. Steamboat’s thirtieth annual ski rodeo features more than one hundred professional rodeo cowboys from the National Western Stock Show and Rodeo that’s going on down in Denver. The free spectator event starts at 1:30…
FRI, 1/16 Why do we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day each year? Some would say it’s for the kids, for whom, especially, Dr. King’s vision still means something. That idea takes on a unique poignancy each year at the YMCA/Denver Nuggets Martin Luther King Jr. Breakfast, where young Denver-area…
TUES, 1/20 Mark Kurlansky has written books about the strangest things: cod, salt, Basque culture. But the one thing he’s constantly invested in all of them is a strong worldview — the social history of where such things came from and where they went. Though he’s focused on very singular…
