When I was nineteen, my mother-in-law (the first one, I’ve had a couple more since) asked if I’d ever seen Psycho and I said something stupid: “No, but I know the whole deal, so I don’t really need to.” I will never forget the look she gave me in response;…
October is the month of madness. The month to pull out all the stops and go over-the-top with all your fashion, and one outfit in particular: your Halloween costume. Although a couple of our favorite costume stores have closed — RIP, Flossy McGrew’s — there are still some fantastic spots…
We’ve come to trust the Denver Center’s Off-Center@The Jones when it comes to offbeat theatrical entertainment. Any show put on by Off-Cente – whether it’s improv or performance art – pretty much promises to make folks in the audience laugh and/or cry, sometimes at the same time, all while getting…
As a writer who covers local issues in art, social justice and city growth, I use the word “community” on a regular basis to describe both tangible settings and loose associations between people. This past weekend, as I made hundreds of laps around DIY space Dryer Plug Studios, where I…
Although dance is considered a feminine pursuit by many people, it’s surprising to see how much of a boy’s club dance can be. Even hip-hop, one of the freest and expressive channels of the art form, seems to have a disproportionate number of men at the helm. But the Janes,…
When Jill Hadley Hooper, ace director of the Ironton Gallery, first told me about Mind Over Matter: Teresa Booth Brown, I knew I wanted to catch it, because I admire Brown’s abstract paintings — which were what I was expecting to see. But it turns out that this elegant and…
Peg is a sketch artist for the police, and her apartment is filled with charcoal portraits of criminals, both petty and murderous. As Good on Paper opens, she’s celebrating a birthday with her sister Sandy, a romance writer, and explaining the end of her latest affair: She broke up with…
You’d have to be a monster not to be sniffling by the end of Peter Sollett’s Freeheld, a weepy/rousing retelling of a real-life gay-rights triumph that serves as a helpful reminder that the dark ages were just, like, ten years ago. It’s love that lights up that darkness, of course,…
Friendships between women have the ambiguous vitality of growing vines: They can either strangle or nurture, and at times it can be hard to tell the difference. That’s particularly true for young women first stepping into the puzzling gray area of rivalries and loyalties. How best to support your friends…
A documentary about a magazine is doomed never to capture the thing it’s documenting. The best that can be said for Douglas Tirola’s Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead is that it captures, at times, the heady disbelief of paging through its subject, the National Lampoon, the headwaters of much of American…
Yesterday morning, Tran Wills of Svper Ordinary in the Source put out a plaintive plea on Facebook after the gallery and boutique co-owned by Wills, her husband Josh Wills, Pedro Barrios and Bryan Cavanaugh, was burglarized over the weekend — along with, Wills believes, other businesses in the Source: “Today…
In the late 1950s, Columbia Pictures packaged up 52 black-and-white monster movies made by Universal Studios and released them into television syndication. The package as a whole, consisting of both great and not-so-great movies, was called Shock Theater and it was followed by a second grouping called Son of Shock…
Architect Rick Epstein sees so much potential in Boulder’s built environment. “Boulder, while it’s a really beautiful city — the built environment is pretty bad. Denver, architecturally, is way more interesting,” he says. Epstein hopes to change that — and tonight, as part of Month of Modern, the architect from…
Sometimes the name says it all. Adam Stone’s initial idea for Cabal Gallery’s big birthday bash was to simply call it Ew — and according to resident artist Mar Williams, “I think most of our art evokes a bit of that.” Cabal got its start last October, when a group of…
From the outside, things have been quiet with the tiny house, and it would appear nothing is happening. But appearances are misleading: There has been a flurry of plans drawn and redrawn, as Victoria Salvador and I figure out stairs from a Sketch-Up drawing on Imgur; more research done; budgets…
#9: Karl Christian Krumpholz Cartoonist Karl Christian Krumpholz has a keen eye for the historical underbelly of Denver bar culture, as evidenced by his new weekly comic “The Denver Bootleg” in Westword, as well as his ongoing webcomic 30 Miles of Crazy!, a paean to the nightlife, people and places…
Jason Bosch’s ArgusFest has been “raising awareness since 2001,” bringing films, speakers and discussions of critical issues to Denver. But above all, films: For the past fourteen years, he’s screened films that might not otherwise be seen here, showing them in venues small and large. But now Bosch, who we named…
As You Like It is an extended examination of love set in the Forest of Arden — a place that the Elizabethans, steeped in a pastoral tradition that idealized country life, would have seen as far more pure and innocent than life at court. “Come hither, come hither, come hither,”…
Right up into the 1960s, the Hays Code demanded that criminals in American movies face punishment by the final reel, a stricture that, however well-intentioned, served to propagate our national myth: that the only route to success is hard work and decency. Crime still doesn’t pay, mostly, since on-screen crooks…
There is much to sadly shake your head at in Pan, a sort of Peter Pan Begins that manages the unlikely feat of making battles between flying pirate ships a crushing bore. Most miserably, there’s the great heap of action set pieces that are easier to wait out than to…
The Mile High Horror Film Festival returned to the Alamo Drafthouse this past weekend, as a spooky kickoff to Denver’s scariest season. Horror fans came out in droves, many dressed for the occasion. We sent photographer Aaron Thackeray to catch the frightful sights, and he survived the horror long enough…
Indie design blogger Jeanne Connolly loves to see how creative people put their houses together. In this series, she shares some of her favorite homes, taking us inside the unique private spaces of metro Denver and beyond. Mark Penner-Howell is both a musician and a fine artist working out of a…
