Wednesday April 27 A walk on the cyber side: Journalist Douglas Rushkoff took a leap off the technological cutting edge and the result was his book Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace, a look into the virtual reality world with insightful interviews of William Gibson, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna…
Mackey Gallery’s Annual Photo Show grows more popular with each passing year. The current, third edition displays the young artspace’s customarily astute selection of more or less traditional fine-art photos, this time augmented by adventurous photo collages, photograms and 3-D photo constructions, all by local artists. Nostalgia tints Patricia Barry-Levy’s…
Because of dazzling special effects and a funny, bloodcurdling villain called the Trickster (he looks like a Mohawk warrior freaked out on acid but talks like a Phi Beta Kappa), the witty techno-fantasy Brainscan could be the teen hit of the spring. But there’s something else here, too–a distinction between…
At first glimpse, Iain Softley’s Backbeat looks like a gritty trifle aimed at nostalgic Beatles buffs. It dusts off the old story of Stu Sutcliffe, John Lennon’s best friend in Liverpool, who played bass with the group from 1959 to 1961. A halfhearted musician, Sutcliffe found his head turned by…
Wednesday April 20 Riddim method: Reggae queen Judy Mowatt has all the right roots–when Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingston left Bob Marley’s Wailers, she stepped in alongside Rita Marley and Marcia Griffiths as one of the I-Threes. Since then, this talented Rasta gal has gone solo, making waves wherever she…
The pungent smell of peeled onions welcomes viewers to a rambunctious exhibit of installation art at Edge Cooperative Gallery. Three artists turn the alternative space into separate and diverse environments, each defined by gallery walls. Since works constructed onsite like this are almost impossible to sell, the dedication and sacrifice…
Daniel is lonely. He misses the barrio, and a distant ‘burb with a goofball name like “Enchanted Acres” is a bleak wasteland in comparison to the warm feel of the old ‘hood. But Daniel is more than lonely: He’s in the midst of a mid-life crisis with cultural overtones. Tired…
John Waters may have grown up, but he hasn’t gone straight. In his days as an enfant terrible, the most notorious moviemaker in Baltimore served up raw sensation, black comedy and low camp to fringe audiences who prided themselves on all manner of deviance. Those raucous midnight screenings of Pink…
If the Manson Family hadn’t stumbled across Sharon Tate, maybe Roman Polanski would be making movies for the Disney Channel. As it is, this once-fascinating artiste of the cinema has turned his personal life into a trashy novel and his mercifully infrequent movies into guided tours of his own sour…
Wednesday April 13 How big was it?: On the subject of fishing, you probably fall into one of two categories–those who do and those who can’t fathom it. Author John Gierach belongs to the former group and his book Dances With Trout, a collection of perceptive fish stories, does everything…
Longtime CU art instructor Luis Eades’s extraordinary paintings at first resemble illustrations in children’s science books. His clean, expert representational style is technically flawless and viewer-friendly. But the paintings on display at Foothills Art Center are far from simplified schematics of difficult subjects. Instead, Eades attempts to portray complicated interconnections…
Love may be hard to find, but trust is even harder. The regional premiere of Trust, a new play by expatriated Denverite Steven Dietz (he now lives in Seattle), dives into the shallows of contemporary lust and longing to prove just how tough trust is to come by. Funny, twisted…
The ironically titled Belle Epoque (“Beautiful Age”), winner of the most recent Oscar for Best Foreign Film, is a playful Spanish sex farce that unfolds during the brief honeymoon between the bloodless overthrow of the Spanish monarchy in 1931 and the rise of the Fascists five years later in the…
The first installment of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Three Colors Trilogy” is called Blue, and the Polish filmmaker says it represents the French ideal of liberty. But before we get to any kind of liberty, we get a powerful dose of imprisonment–the self-imposed, emotional imprisonment of a young woman who has seen…
Wednesday April 6 Gallic symbols: It’s time to bone up on your French, Francophiles. You’ll need your linguistic chops for An Evening of Tales From Provence, presented by Denver’s Alliance Francaise and interpreted in French (and English) by mesmerizing storyteller Jean Guillon. The stories are free, beginning at 6:30 p.m…
Dreams and mythology are among the most common themes in art, yet no two artists see these related subjects in the same way. Even when dream/myth-based art shares archetypes and heroes, each piece tends to be highly personal and unique, just as dreams are. But as different as an artist’s…
Flowers spring from the stage. A miraculous healing frees a gruff old priest from blindness. A little girl dies by inches, trapped in mud after a volcanic eruption. Other extraordinary–incredible, even, to a mind trained in Western rationalism–events appear as natural occurrences. The impossible is made plausible, and the result…
This is a strange time for Hollywood to revive newspaper movies. Despite their obvious saintliness, reporters rank just north of lawyers and child molesters on the nation’s current list of heroes–and I’m not talking here only of the “Elvis Shot JFK” brand of journalism. These days, the public–and the White…
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, the Italian brothers who co-directed flinty, passionate films like Padre Padrone and The Night of Shooting Stars in the late Seventies and early Eighties, probably haven’t gone soft in the head. But Fiorile, which traces the legend of a family curse through two centuries of domestic…
Wednesday March 30 Three for the stage: You can always count on the US West TheatreFest for an interesting time–the annual series that puts new works by unknown playwrights on stage at the Denver Center for Performing Arts is dedicated to variety and innovation in the theater arts. This year’s…
If one word can sum up something as complex as Asian art, that word is “tradition.” The strictly observed methods of mixing and applying ink, the narrow range of acceptable subjects (trees, pagodas, mountains, birds), the consistently diagonal composition–all are painstakingly repeated by generation after generation of artists. But even…
Turning Nathaniel Hawthorne’s brilliant novel The Scarlet Letter into a contemporary drama is a doomed proposition. Phyllis Nagy’s torturous attempt, now playing at the Denver Center Theatre Company, is so full of error, so misguided, so utterly banal a reading of a great work of art, one can only wonder…
