When Chelsea Handler makes her occasional appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the tension is almost palpable. In terms of comedy, Handler is like the anti-Leno, the yin to his yang; if he was pro-life, then she’d be an abortion pro. “I don’t like people who have babies…
At this point on a Wednesday afternoon, we know all too well how it goes: You’re pretty much just blankly staring at your computer, waiting out the time clock — and as long as you’re blankly staring, you might as well have a staring contest. So even though you will…
It doesn’t take much evidence beyond his most famous paintings to suspect that Salvador Dalí was a weird dude: The persistence of crazy, distended forms, melting clocks, blood, rot and genitals is probably enough to draw that conclusion. But Dalí’s weirdness went far beyond its expression in his paintings; From…
Oh, Etsy.com. You’re like the website version of that overly supportive hippie school where everything everyone creates is great, because art is you and you are art, or whatever. Luckily for us realists, there’s Regretsy.com, a site that culls only the shittiest handmade stuff from Etsy (and various other crafting…
Sick of your friends tormenting you about not having a girlfriend? The new start-up Cloud Girlfriend was created to solve all of your problems by creating a virtual lady to interact with you on Facebook. At least, that’s what the site initially promised before its launch. Here’s how it’s supposed…
Last weekend was Ludum Dare 20, a competition that tasks game designers with making a game over the course of the weekend. There were over 300 entries and plenty of those were worth mentioning, but one of our favorites was p.i.g., a curious little game that takes the idea of…
Retired chairlift chairs are a hot commodity around here, where hardcore skiers and snowboarders like to turn them into porch swings or mountain cabin decor: When Arapahoe Basin offered its old Expedition seats last year to make way for the new Black Mountain Express, the chairs went for $450 and…
Here’s a little blast from the past: On the very first day we launched Show and Tell, we used some pics photographer Aaron Thackeray had snapped of a String Cheese show at Red Rocks and turned them into a post called White People with Dreads: A Field Guide. It didn’t…
The streamlined forms, the emphasis on planes and lines, the form-follows-function mentality: all tenets of architectural modernism. At the same time, though, it’s not so easy to define what is modernism and what isn’t — a lot of schools of architecture could fall under the broad umbrella of modernism, and…
Bestselling author Charlaine Harris has seen her creation (the Southern Vampire novel series) turned into a hit television show (True Blood), and she’s kept the momentum going throughout the chain of books that document the story of protagonist Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress who finds herself deeply involved in the…
Abstract paintings and sculptures continue to be popular draws at Denver galleries, and there are several shows on display right now, but abstraction — which I’ll get to in a moment — is also in the news. First up in the abstract realm is Galileo’s Garden, made up of mixed-media…
15 Colorado Artists. The Kirkland Museum is presenting a historical show that tracks the beginnings of post-war modernism in Denver using the artist group 15 Colorado Artists as an index. The story goes that the Denver Artists Guild was hostile to modernism at the time. This led to a split,…
Five Course Love. This production consists of five musical scenes set in five different restaurants, each one a broad parody in which author Gregg Coffin spoofs stereotypes while shamelessly using and abusing them. There’s a barbecue place featuring country/Western music; an Italian restaurant where a mob wife is cheating —…
“The circus is tough and beautiful,” says a talking head in Circo, Aaron Schock’s documentary on the small, struggling, family-owned Circo Mexico. It’s an apt description of the film itself, a riveting patchwork of interconnected dramas that include difficult in-laws, arguments about money and familial exploitation, and the wrenching tensions…
Bridesmaids is a high-profile test case. Directed by Paul Feig (a sitcom journeyman most lovingly known as the creator of Freaks and Geeks), it’s the first female-fronted comedy produced by Hollywood kingpin Judd Apatow, who has weathered criticism in the past for his brand’s dude-centric point of view. It’s also…
Tenacious indie Kelly Reichardt has specialized in quirky, minimalist quasi-road movies in which loners come unmoored in some great American space. Meek’s Cutoff, shown at the last New York Film Festival, is that and more — one great leap into the nineteenth-century unknown. The members of a small wagon train…
Jean Cocteau, famed writer, director, designer, filmmaker and creator of the classic film Beauty and the Beast, supposedly wrote Indiscretions — originally called Les Parents Terrible — in 1938, during eight opium-hazed days. The central figure is Yvonne, an irrational, suicidal, diabetic woman who terrorizes her husband, George, and completely…
Rose Fleishman, a Jewish refugee from Austria, runs a delicatessen in Chicago, and right across the alley is a pub owned by Lady O’Riley, a dour Irish widow. Rose sells gefilte fish, Lady salmon loaf. Separated by centuries of history, culture and religion, the two women are coldly formal toward…
When it came out in 1974, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was one of the most violent movies ever made — so violent it was actually banned in several countries — but that’s not what makes it so great. In fact, by today’s CG-enhanced standards, it pretty tame. A long shot…
This edition of Twitter Tuesday is going to be a little different than the previous format — mostly because the Beetle Juice twitter isn’t really “real,” so to speak. It’s a Twitter Bot, and we came across it recently when looking to see if Beetle Juice might, in fact, have…
For all those who give pom-pom critters for birthdays, feel an urge to stick googly eyes on everything or just occasionally get a twitch to fold some origami, we bring you “Gettin’ Crafty,” where we feature a craft you can easily make with minimal supplies and limited finances. For all…
I’ve been at Dana Cain’s Colorado Chocolate Festival every year for the last few, both as a contest judge and as an appreciative chocoholic fool. There, I’ve tasted everything from chocolate sauces to artisan truffles, but none of it prepared me for this year’s challenge: judging chocolate cakes, along with…
