When DeVotchKa’sShawn King approached Raul Pacheco to collaborate, he accepted the invitation with open arms. Despite being in the middle of recording, releasing and then touring for Ozomatli’s new album, Place in the Sun, Pacheco carved out time to work on Dreaming Sin Fronteras: Stories of Immigration and American Identity,…
Ten years ago, almost to the day, the current zombie apocalypse started in earnest. On March 19, 2004, patient zero hit theaters with the release of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead. The world of the walking dead hasn’t been the same since. See also: Shaun of the Dead: Your…
Tattoos have become a popular modern art form, but Juli Morsella is exploring tattooing’s ancient, sacred roots and has put together an exhibition with works by artists from all over Europe and the U.S., examining tattoos from around the world. The show, Tattoo in Contemporary Art, opens Friday, March 21,…
Chris Fairbanks is a standup comedian, illustrator, and skateboarder who has appeared on Conan, Comedy Central’s Premium Blend,
and Jimmy Kimmel Live. Fairbanks is making the most out of his trip to Denver, with performances scheduled every night. On thursday the 20th, Fairbanks will be at the Deer Pile at 8:00pm, sharing a story for the Narrators podcast. On Friday at 8:00pm at the Oriental Theater, he’s co-headlining Sexpot Comedy’s Vernal Equinox showcase with Rory Scovel and a bevy of local chucklers. Fans can also catch Fairbanks with the Fine Gentleman’s Club at 10:00pm Saturday at the Meadowlark and performing with Andrew Ovredahl, 7:00pm on Sunday at Comedy Works South. Westword caught up with Fairbanks before his busy visit ta talk about Sexpot comedy, Texan highway system and the Tosh rape joke controversy.
Let’s start with the ending, the closing-credits disclaimer that insists that none of the lead actors in Lars von Trier’s two-part erotic epic Nymphomaniac filmed penetrative sex. If there is real sex in the movie, and it sure looks like there is, it must have been the duty of the…
“The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach” runs the old cliché and the rather uninspired starting point for The Lunchbox, a slow-building, pleasingly low-key romantic dramedy set in Mumbai. Making his feature-length debut as writer and director, Ritesh Batra throws some emotional and logistical complications at the…
David Lindsay Abaire, who first achieved fame with such surreal and fantastical comedies as Kimberly Akimbo, about a young girl with a disease that causes rapid and premature aging, and Fuddy Meers, in which a woman wakes up day after day remembering neither who she is nor what recently happened,…
For the past several years, a pair of alternating biennials have been presented in the month of March (though the shows and events associated with them often start in February and end in April). In odd-numbered years, there’s the well-established Month of Photography, and in even-numbered years, like 2014, there’s…
Critical Focus: Ian Fisher. This show, located in the informal Whole Room at MCA Denver, is made up of a group of mostly monumental paintings of the sky. It’s the type of thing that has become the artist’s signature. Though Fisher begins with photographs of clouds used as studies, the…
The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a brilliant work, its flaws so intertwined with its crazed strengths that you can hardly separate one from the other. McDonagh grew up in London, the son of Irish parents, and invented an Ireland — and an…
Dystopian movies don’t have to make sense. As the audience, we’re obligated to sit down with our popcorn and soda and pretend that, yes, of course, in the future monkeys rule the earth, women can’t bear children, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is an everyday construction worker. It’s a mutual contract of…
If you count forward from Jim Henson’s mid-1960s TV appearances with a fringy pup named Rowlf and the lizard, made from an old winter coat, who would later become Kermit the Frog, the Muppets have outlived most of their early puppet peers by more than two generations. That endurance isn’t…
Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo is more than just men in tights: It’s a performance of camp that requires expert precision. Begun in 1974 as a parody of the sometimes stuffy dance form, the Trocks have since evolved, bringing dance to a new level with expert elements of comedy,…
This year’s Big Read was turned over by the city to Lighthouse Writers Workshop, Denver’s writing school and unofficial community center, and to the organization’s credit, they’re doing a bang-up job of sharing the book selection — Marilynne Robinson’s 1980 novel, Housekeeping — with the book-loving public. As part of…
To help celebrate Colorado Craft Beer Week, the Colorado Brewers Guild wanted to put on a truly special event. And that’s how the inaugural Collaboration Fest was conceived — because what better way to promote craft beer than through one-of-a-kind brews created by multiple breweries? “Breweries literally work together every…
While on tour, drummer Shawn King of DeVotchKa found inspiration in fellow gypsy-punk band Gogol Bordello’s relentless immigrant-rights advocacy and the slogan “No Human Is Illegal.” Upon returning to Denver, King connected with well-known local director José Antonio Mercado to collaborate on the original play Dreaming Sin Fronteras: Stories of…
In our city of wheels — cars, bikes, scooters, ’blades and skateboards — going for a walk has almost become an oddity. But the Colorado-owned business Walk2Connect works to remedy that situation by inviting people to just slow down. Part of the program is a series of community walks and…
If there’s one thing science-fiction writers love as much as the idea of exploring space and meeting aliens, it’s traveling back in time and screwing things up. From H.G. Wells to the recent reboot of Star Trek, time travel is one of the genre’s most well-explored tropes, but authors keep…
There’s a new food fest in town, and promoter Cat Kirk says A Bite of the Rockies will fill in the holes that some of the bigger events ignore — starting with its timing. “I’m a festival junkie,” Kirk admits. “I love Taste of Colorado and Cinco de Mayo, but…
The Denver Avant-Garde Music Society has been hosting monthly open-call solo and duet performance nights for about a year now, says event organizer Kurt Bauer of Bangsnap Records, and attendees never know exactly what they’re going to get. For some performers, the nights represent a chance to try something new…
The cinematic quality of Goldfrapp’s recorded work has always been evident: Singer Alison Goldfrapp and musician/composer Will Gregory create breathy, synthesizer-heavy songs that could easily sweep across a movie screen. Tonight those songs get a chance to do just that in Goldfrapp: Tales of Us, five music videos that coalesce…
Wes Anderson is arguably the most popular “underground” filmmaker of our time; although his films are widely distributed and avidly watched by his fans, he still maintains an indie sensibility through his whimsical settings and plots. “He definitely has a style,” notes Keith Garcia, creative manager for the Alamo Drafthouse…
