Our Commercial Culture: Jameson’s Epic Patriarch

Everyone loves a hero. Add a little mystery and some suspense, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for an epic tale of valor and woe, which we all love. (If you don’t love a tale of valor and woe, you can get the hell off this planet.) The folks at…

Jersey Shore in Italy: Five disaster scenarios

The Jersey Shore’s third season just wrapped up, and the crew is headed to Italy. In a statement last January, MTV announced that the show’s fourth season will be shot in “the birthplace of the culture [the cast members] love and live by” — a questionable decision, given that the…

Month of Photography continues with Down the Rabbit Hole at Hinterland

Sabin Aell of Hinterland took up the challenge of Denver’s Month of Photography by putting out an international call for entries for work that is “wild, uncontrolled, different, luminous, beautiful, sparkling, in the flow.” It’s a tall order, but that’s exactly what came up out of the ground for jurors…

Randomized piano: Timothy Flood brings some crazy musical instruments to Core

Timothy Flood is into deconstruction. And right now, he’s into musical instruments — specifically, pulling them apart and rebuilding them into things that basically perform the same tasks, but in radically different ways and for totally different purposes. How different? Try this on for size: One part of the installation…

Our Commercial Culture: Skittles gets weird

Advertising is an expression of the culture in which it exists. It is a reflection of ourselves through the lens of very intelligent people whose job it is to know more about our inner psychology than any of us want to admit. Turns out that psychology degree was not a…

Tomorrow: Ka-pow! Action Figures to the rescue!

Some years ago, Denver artist (and Westword MasterMind, class of 2007) Katie Taft instigated and curated the Self Made salon series at Mario’s Double Daughters Salotto, wherein artists gave informal talks and networking and discussion ensued over food and drink. Financial realities and life then got in the way, and…

March Powwow offered fancy dancing, bliss

​The 2011 March Powwow and all the festivities therein taught me something I suspect is tremendously important. If you are wearing feathers, mirrors, bells, and dancing like you are a force of nature — if you are even in close proximity to people doing these things — it is near…

Denver’s Next Improv Star week 8 recap: in praise of the absurd

Somewhere between the literary obsessiveness and the heroin-haze that, together, consumed his life, William S. Burroughs developed a technique called cut-up writing, which uses fragments of preexisting works and rearranges them to create something new. The results, generally, are dizzying and nonsensical, but wonderfully so: because they are unintelligible, they…

Santa Fe Drive: The Street of Blue Lights

No, it’s not your imagination. The Art District on Santa Fe Drive does look different. That’s because about 200 new high-efficiency LED lights have been installed in all the street lamps along Santa Fe, between Sixth and Tenth avenues. Oh, and they’re blue. Not golden, and — for goodness sakes!…

RedLine and Super Ordinary: Yeah! That’s what I like about Denver!

It wasn’t First Friday or even Second Saturday, for that matter, but last Friday night was still art-heavy with receptions as the Month of Photography progresses. A lot of people, I found out, were over at Belmar, ringing in Feminine Influence, a woman-centric show curated by Katie Taft at Flash…

Our Commercial Culture: South Africa Fashion Week

Like graffiti, most adverts sloppily plastered to the screens of the technospere fall under the heading of worthless cultural detritus, but also like graffiti, some pop up out of nowhere and shock us with their inventiveness and brilliance. They cause us to take pause and reflect on our own humanness…

Hipster Traps: Will they work in Capitol Hill?

Someone is setting ‘hipster traps” in New York, as photographed by this Reddit user. The awesomely cartoonish bear trap surrounds a pack of American Spirits, a can of PBR and sunglasses. Please warn your jobless young friends to avoid these traps…