Justin Halpern has made a living off his memories, of which he has many. Ranging from brutally honest to painfully embarrassing, the deeply funny writer earned a cult following and three-million-strong Twitter army with his wry observations on his grouchy father in Sh*t My Dad Says. Now he’s aiming his…
In preparing for its current production of The Joy Luck Club, Vintage Theatre found itself in a bind: In this town’s small theater scene with its even smaller pool of Asian actors, how was the company going to stage a play requiring an all-Asian cast of 21 actors? (See http://blogs.westword.com/showandtell/2012/04/the_joy_luck_club_runs_through.php)…
Jackson Galaxy has what he calls “cat mojo,” and it fits his image like the cat’s meow: The bald-headed, tattooed, goateed pet whisperer looks a little scary, but if you watch his Animal Planet show, My Cat From Hell, you’ll see that he’s really rather sweet, and certainly down-to-earth when…
Olympic weightlifter Cheryl Haworth is a rare commodity: a woman who lifts weights in the international arena. She’s the top-ranking lifter of any gender in the United States, tips the scales at more than 300 pounds and boasts a twelve-generation American lineage. Her greatest moment was winning the bronze at…
While Veronica Reeves recognizes that there’s a place for calculated, meticulously planned art, that place isn’t NEXT Gallery. Not right now. Reeves has organized an entire show, Mindpool 2012, dedicated to creative work that comes from intuition and chance, and celebrating risk over regulation. “At first I was a little…
It’s not unusual to place some sort of significance on a piece of jewelry, which might be an heirloom, keepsake or memento — or all three. But for former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who served under President Bill Clinton, her baubles — some priceless and some paste –…
Though the Denver Art Museum has collected photos for decades, it didn’t launch a proper photography department until 2008, when Eric Paddock was named curator. Since then, Paddock has presented one noteworthy show after another, most of them showcasing pieces in the DAM’s impressive collection — and that includes Women…
The beef started on Facebook. Creeped out by last week’s TIME cover story about attachment parenting — you know, the weird one with the preschool-age kid standing on a stool and suckling his mom’s tit — I penned an essay for the Village Voice about how much attachment parenting sucks…
Friends and fans of Denver’s vast arts network gathered at City,O’ City last night for a reception marking the five-year anniversary of Ken Hamel’s genius website, Denverarts.org. Hamel started Denverarts.org because no one else was really doing it, he recalled during a Q&A in Deer Pile, the community space upstairs…
Young filmmaker Blaine Davies’s new trailer for the 2012 Crisis Skateboards team video nails the perfect mix of what everyone wants to see in a proper skate vid: It’s a combination of equal parts mind-blowing, technical, holy-shit skateboard prowess and people wrecking themselves over and over again, as if you…
Update, May 23: We’ve picked our winner for this week’s contest! Please check your e-mail to see if you’ve won a 2012 B-cycle season pass!Among the many B-cycle stations around Denver, there are so many other forms of transportation. From public buses to free mall rides to the light rail,…
It’s difficult to say exactly what “mod” means in 2012. Even when the movement reached its zenith in London in the early ’60s, the definition wasn’t clear: not quite hippie, not quite punk, not quite English, yet not quite American, either. Inventing a sort of bohemian dandy aesthetic, the mods…
It’s Colorado Rides Electric Day — who knew? Designed to ride shotgun to the World Renewable Energy Forum now at the Colorado Convention Center, the celebration includes a two-day Electric Avenue electric car expo that’s free and open to the public from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Representatives of charging…
Wicked will end its run in Denver on May 20, and when the touring show goes, Colorado native Andy Kelso, who plays Fiyero, the hedonistic prince who becomes the third point in a love triangle with the two leading ladies, will go with it. “The Buell is where I first…
Contemporary abstraction is a well-developed scene in Colorado, with roots that go back to the 1930s, and four of the most important artists who work in this style are being featured right now in solo shows. Three are at the William Havu Gallery, and the fourth is just a few…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, founding director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist. Clyfford Still: Inaugural Exhibition starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with…
The non-fiction formula pioneered by Spellbound leads to frustrating superficiality in First Position, a glossy documentary about a multicultural collection of young ballet dancers striving to secure awards, scholarships and job contracts at the prestigious annual Youth America Grand Prix. Director Bess Kargman adheres to a now-familiar template in which…
Every once in a while, a movie comes along that’s so utterly shameless it achieves a certain grandeur. Peter Berg’s Battleship, which I swear to God is described in its Wikipedia entry as an “American science fiction action naval war film,” is one such movie. Over the past few years,…
In The Dictator, his third collaboration with director Larry Charles, Sacha Baron Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, the young, dumb dictator of fictional North African nation Wadiya. Under Aladeen’s rule, oil-producing, uranium-enriching Wadiya is a hostile threat to global peace and capitalism. And yet Aladeen himself is so attracted to…
Over the past year, Curious Theatre Company has given us a first-rate production of Pulitzer winner and Tony nominee Clybourne Park; 9 Circles, the regional premiere of a deeply humane investigation into the psyche of an American soldier on trial for war crimes; and now Red, which received ecstatic reviews…
There are two major threads in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. There’s the primary plot, in which Viola is shipwrecked in Illyria, decides to dress as a man and signs on as a servant to a local nobleman, Orsino, with whom she rapidly falls in love. But Orsino sends Viola off to…
Ten Facebook Tips: It started as an informational list on Mashable to help people optimize their Facebook usage, but it’s become a top trending topic on Twitter, full of helpful and not-so-helpful — and some of it quite telling — advice about Zuckerberg’s site. Most of the tweets, which only…
