#89: Jean Smith Clay artist Jean Smith Is a familiar face in the co-op community, where she’s been building and exhibiting works both joyful and challenging for many years. Her creations range from colorful wall pieces and fanciful shrines to major ceramic installations, often referencing plant forms, flowers and sea…
At the tail end of 1984, a film from one of the medium’s undisputed masters, adapting one of the great science fiction novels of all time– hell, one of the great American novels of all time — was released. David Lynch, adapting Frank Herbert’s masterpiece, Dune! What could go wrong?…
The Berningers are a talented family: Tom Berninger is a filmmaker, and when his brother Matt, a member of the Brooklyn-based band The National, asked him to go on tour as a roadie, he obliged. Tom needed a job and some direction, and his brother’s request inadvertently offered both. Tom…
The Narrators features local writers, comedians and musicians who are brave enough to share revealing personal stories with total strangers. This month’s installment revolves around the theme of (TBD) but that’s just a loose guideline, says co-host Robert Rutherford. “Though generally The Narrators has been sold as ‘creative’ people,’ we…
1959. Dean Sobel, director of the Clyfford Still Museum, is the host curator for Modern Masters at the Denver Art Museum, and he’s done a companion exhibit at his own stamping grounds called 1959: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery Exhibition Recreated. (Special tickets allow visitors to see both.) The backstory for…
And the Sun Stood Still. The shining strength of Dava Sobel’s And the Sun Stood Still is that, at a time when the sciences have been so muddied by sloppy thinking, willful ignorance and financial pressure, it provides insight into the scientific process and eloquently communicates the sheer beauty of…
Going bald is the best thing that ever happened to Jude Law. Britain’s prettiest export did the best he could with his burden of good looks. He played a genetic ideal in Gattaca and a robotic ideal in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and in The Talented Mr. Ripley, his golden-god perfection…
Sometimes it’s helpful to know certain details about how a film has come together. And sometimes it’s just so much information. Transcendence, the directorial debut of Christopher Nolan’s go-to cinematographer, Wally Pfister, was shot on film rather than digitally, as most big Hollywood movies are today. Is that going to…
Today, it’s hard for us to fathom why preachers used to rail so vehemently against jitterbugging. Even with cultural context — black music infiltrating white America, the triumph of rhythm over melody — the whirligig boogie craze of the ’30s and ’40s now looks as wholesome as the ice cream…
The musical Animal Crackers, starring the Marx Brothers, debuted on Broadway in 1928 and was filmed a couple of years later. It’s a romp, a trifle — full of puns, malapropisms and visual jokes, and utterly, unabashedly silly. The plot is just an excuse for the crazy brothers, nominally playing…
Lauri Lynnxe Murphy is well known here, having established her name as both an artist and an art advocate over the past two decades. But she fell off the radar for a few years when she moved to Columbus to earn her MFA at Ohio State University, where world-renowned installation…
Cheech & Chong have had a longstanding willingness to appear at any weed-related event, which means the duo has been seeing plenty of Denver lately. The musical-comedy buds remain America’s most beloved stoner cliche after more than forty years, earning fan adoration with a series of cult-classic albums and films…
In 1984, the epic space opera of Frank Herbert crashed headlong into the hallucinatory weirdness of David Lynch, and the film version of Dune was born. But adapting Herbert’s dense plotting and impossibly detailed backstory into a coherent film proved beyond Lynch’s abilities. As a result, Dune is a confusing,…
There’s nothing like getting whomped with colored powder at every kilometer marker when you’re running a 5K — which is probably why events like the Color Run have become so popular during the past few years. But today’s event at Copper Mountain is going to be unlike other, similar events…
The idea for Kevin Pharris’s book came to him as he was leading bus tours for senior citizens, hearing them say, “When I was a child….” Pharris was intrigued by their recollections of the city’s past through tales of Denver’s once-vast streetcar system. Today, he’ll discuss Riding Denver’s Rails: A…
Now in its 25th year, the Colorado Poetry Rodeo — aka the “Podeo” — has deep roots that hark back to the Beat poets, as well as magnificent branches that stretch all the way into the big sky of modern slam poetry. Its legacy of diversity and community is what…
Prior to the advent of the Cartesian coordinate system for mapping, Flemish mapmaker Gerardus Mercator created maps of the world drawn not from calculations, but from memory and perception. Inspired in part by these maps, Laleh Mehran and Chris Coleman’s new multimedia exhibition, Transitional Fragments, imagines and maps our world…
At the third annual Mile High Festibowl, revelers can start their 4/20 weekend in a haze — and then choose from live music by more than sixty bands and jokes from over 25 comedians without ever leaving that haze. The performers are too numerous to list, but comedy highlights include…
Though last year’s event was overshadowed by the non-fatal shooting of three people in the crowd, the 420 Rally at Civic Center Park event was hitherto known as a peaceable gathering at which participants joined a massive smokeout in protest of cannabis prohibition. A yearly tradition for Denver’s most blunted…
The Internet has enabled a new era of fascinating filmmaking. From bizarre, artistic short films to videos of guys getting hit in the nuts, there’s always something to look at on your monitor, phone or device. The only thing that could make it better would be putting these wonders on…
Author, researcher and counselor Kat Duff says she’s always loved sleep, but she didn’t start delving into the topic seriously until about a decade ago. “I started to notice that many of the clients who came to me as a counselor were not sleeping well,” she says. “And when we…
The Downtown Denver Partnership launched its CityBuild program last year with the intent of helping to pave the way for future urban movers and shakers in the new millennium. CityBuild’s CityMixer series is designed to aid that directive by providing a meeting ground where young and old can network and…
