Next week is the National Park Service’s annual National Park Week, which means free entrance to all 392 parks in the national park system, plus special promotions at many of the parks: A perfect excuse, as if you need one, to explore the four national parks and six national monuments…
Among the city’s cooperative venues, Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173, www.edgeart.org) is almost always interesting. Because the membership is diverse and quite accomplished, shows here are often surprising and always worth viewing. A friend had contacted me about In the Manner of Pollock, a solo made up of recent…
Looking for the Face…. The half-dozen shows at MCA Denver are collectively titled Looking for the Face I Had Before the World Was Made. Adam Lerner, the museum’s director, acted as lead curator for the exhibits with new hire Nora Burnett Abrams acting as his assistant. Michaël Borremans is a…
Chicago. Sort of Brechtian, sort of Cabaretish, Chicago tells a story of injustice and corruption, and tells it in the most seductive way, with witty, memorable songs, elegantly glistening dance sequences and a smart, cynical and grown-up script. Roxie Hart is an evil, self-serving little hoofer. Having murdered a man…
Mother, Bong Joon-ho’s followup to his killer killer-tadpole allegory The Host, is a more subtle yet no less visceral horror-comedy. Opening as tumultuous slapstick, this tale of a 27-year-old village idiot, Do-joon (Won Bin), and the local madwoman who is his single parent, Hye-Ja (Kim Hye-ja), quickly darkens once someone…
Kick-Ass, the Matthew Vaughn-directed adaptation of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s graphic novel, sets itself up as an unadulterated exposé of the teenage mind. Tired of being mugged by high-school thugs in a Manhattan that’s notably scummier than the real thing, our hero, Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson, a hot…
Why is Iago so intent on destroying Othello? Iago himself gives two reasons: He’s been passed over for promotion, and he believes Othello has slept with Emilia, the wife whom Iago treats with brutal indifference. But the script leaves his true motive murky, and no one has ever come up…
Mariela in the Desert is a beautiful play, a serious piece about the way art works in the lives of the human beings who create it, the possibilities of transcendence it offers. The action unfolds slowly and quietly to the occasional sound of guitar strings — the original music is…
Today at Four Mile Historic Park, you can learn how your great-great-grandmother’s lifestyle was eco-friendly long before green living and sustainability were buzzwords. Turns out our ancestors’ simple, thrifty habits like reusing and repurposing things until they fell apart made them paragons of environmental virtue. “They weren’t trying to be…
Comic-book conventions bank on the superstar writers and artists who attend. Local creators, if featured at all, are usually afterthoughts. But Jason Page, one of the organizers of this weekend’s ComicFest — which runs across the street from, and in conjunction with, Denver’s long-running sci-fi convention, StarFest — decided to…
Holding the now-seasonal Cafe Nuba cultural extravaganza in conjunction with Earth Day seemed like a natural fit to event organizer and community activist Ashara Ekundayo. And it also seemed natural to turn this go-round of Café Nuba into a fundraiser for Ekundayo’s own GrowHaus, the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective and…
Mother, Bong Joon-ho’s followup to his killer killer-tadpole allegory The Host, is a more subtle yet no less visceral horror-comedy. Opening as tumultuous slapstick, this tale of a 27-year-old village idiot, Do-joon (Won Bin), and the local madwoman who is his single parent, Hye-Ja (Kim Hye-ja), quickly darkens once someone…
If Dr. Who was a steampunk epic done in the style of German expressionism, it would be Quest for the Indie Tube, filmmaker John Hartman’s high-concept sci-fi series created for the Internet. In it, a hundred-year-old inventor has to seek out new arthouse creations to stay young. He uses the…
Local treasures seem to be intersecting in a billion ways this weekend, with Create Denver Week closing up shop and Doors Open Denver doing what it says. If ever there was a weekend to go out and appreciate what your city has to offer in terms of interesting places and…
The grand passage of Denver history past and present, so well preserved in the city’s buildings, is the theme of this year’s Doors Open Denver, dubbed an architectural paean to Adaptive Reuse: Buildings With a Second Life. The sixth annual lookie-loo tourfest that features dozens of buildings both historic and…
A musical based on a Fellini film is, right off the bat, a bit of a risk, but if Nine, Rob Marshall’s attempt to bring back the charisma of his previous film musical, Chicago, had anything going for it, it was the amazing cast and plethora of beautiful, sexy women,…
Bucking boring stereotypes of feminist dialogue, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Feminism + Co: Art + Sex + Politics series puts a hip and engaging spin on the old rhetoric with performers, artists, business leaders and less traditional feminist speakers. Tonight, Judith Nafziger, manager of Ten Thousand Villages, and Tamra…
If you’ve ever seen Office Space, you already know that “flair” refers to the use of pinback buttons (the more the better) as a way to express yourself. But who knew that the actual button-making process could be so much fun? All it takes is a pin-sized message or recycled…
Duane Davis, co-owner of Denver’s legendary Wax Trax Records, has more than one reason to be happy about this year’s Record Store Day. True, the store is sure to receive an influx of music fans flocking toward exclusive Record Store Day releases from artists like Muse, Wilco and Built to…
Boulder herbalist Brigitte Mars, a professional champion of natural remedies for forty years, knows – by default – a lot about how to perk up your sex life without popping a bunch of pills. So it’s simply about time that she put all that wisdom down in a book. “People…
When Anne Lamott started penning Rosie in 1980, she had no idea that the family contained therein — Elizabeth, James and Rosie — would be reappearing for Crooked Little Heart and again in Imperfect Birds, her just-released novel that begins the summer before Rosie’s senior year in high school. “A…
Although sports stars get all the attention, Denver’s artists are the real hometown heroes. So in 2005, Westword started the MasterMind Awards as a way to not just recognize the aesthetic adventurers who are changing the cultural landscape of this town — who are literally creating Denver — but reward…
