Kim Franco, marketing director at Lannie’s Clocktower Cabaret, knows a sad truth about the current economic climate: “People don’t have the money to travel right now,” she says. But every cloud has a silver lining. You might not be able to afford Paris, but you can surely spend a fraction…
From the start of his tenure as artistic director of the Denver Center Theatre Company, Kent Thompson has sought to give the company a strong regional voice, one in tune with a cultural constituency of many colors. To that end, he immediately gave a nod to Colorado’s Latino community, including…
“Because 2008 was a political year, we wanted to do something that had a political feel to it, but where everyone could come to the table. And that’s hard to do,” says Chris Loffelmacher, head of adult cultural programming with the Denver Public Library’s Fresh City Life. “We decided to…
French animator Michel Ocelot‘s sophisticated children’s film Azur and Asmar begins strangely and mysteriously, with an Arabic nanny cooing ancient tales into the ears of two boy babes — one pale, blond and blue-eyed, and the other dark with curly black hair. The computer-generated animation is a bit strange, too,…
Legend has it that Mary Jane was a local lady of pleasure — or, as Winter Park’s Jenn DeBerge likes to call her, “a woman who had a keen sense of supply and demand.” She acquired the land that would become the Mary Jane Trail — a sheep trail until…
It goes without saying that drug and alcohol abuse have a profound effect on the person afflicted with an addiction — but what about the families, friends and loved ones surrounding the addict? Nic Sheff was eleven years old when he first got drunk. That one incident led to Nic’s…
The ESPN Winter X Games are back in Aspen this weekend, bringing 200 of the world’s top snow-sports athletes to Buttermilk Mountain. The extreme action will be carried live on ESPN and ABC, but there’s nothing quite like seeing the mayhem – including the new Women’s Skiing Slopestyle and Snowmobile…
Michael Burnett is an accomplished painter, but unlike most of the city’s artists, he also runs his own exhibition venue, Space Gallery (765 Santa Fe Drive, 720-904-1088, www.spacegallery.org). Not surprisingly, the style of choice for the artists he showcases is the same as the one he uses in his own…
Adam Helms. This solo in the MCA’s Paper Works Gallery is the New York artist’s first museum show anywhere. In his works on paper and in a monumental sculpture that conjures up a shooting blind, Helms explores political themes, especially armed struggle. He takes images of different radical and extremist…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
The night after I saw Shining City, I had a dream. It started with some reassuringly everyday stuff about working in a kitchen with a small, spry, hyper-conventional and hyper-competent aproned woman — we seemed to be covering a toaster with lavish decorations and a thick coat of frosting. But…
The first time I saw The Toxic Avenger — possibly on HBO or Cinemax — in the late 1980s, I was floored. It was absurd, graphic, gross, and fit into none of the movie archetypes I was familiar with. Needless to say, I was hooked — and I wasn’t alone…
Notorious, about a crack dealer who becomes an iconic rapper who becomes a tragic legend, is the first film George Tillman Jr. has directed since 2000’s Men of Honor, about a sharecropper’s son who becomes the first black diver in the Navy who becomes the first amputee to return to…
Although playwright David Lindsay-Abaire is known for his absurdist humor, impossible characters and unexpected quirks, his Rabbit Hole is a serious and entirely conventional drama dealing with grief — perhaps the worst grief possible, the death of a child. Bereaved mother Becca is a rigid perfectionist, given to baking sophisticated…
One of the most persistent legends about the Chinese martial arts is that their world-famous crowning glory, shaolin kwan (Shaolin temple boxing), was actually invented by a visitor from India. Admittedly, it wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that the story began to get around that in the mid-500s CE, during…
Joseph Priestley invented soda water, discovered that plants emit oxygen, co-founded the Unitarian Church in England, wrote what was possibly the first popular science book, befriended Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, had breakfast with George Washington, influenced the writing of the Jefferson Bible, became a target of the…
Yale grad turned software developer turned geek comedy songwriting icon Jonathan Coulton had me at the line “Welcome to my secret lair here on Skullcrusher Mountain.” It’s the first line of the first song I ever heard by Coulton, and it kicks off a first-person love letter from a mad…
Boy, those folks at the Arvada Center’s annual Colorado Cowboy Poetry Gathering really know how to end a run. This year’s fest, which each year assembles rural bards from across the country (and, occasionally, from around the world) for an intensive five-day celebration of poetry and music inspired by ranching…
If you’re happy about no more Bush, clap your hands. If you’re happy about our first black president, clap your hands. If you’re happy and you know it, then your plans will surely show it. And if you’re not happy today, well, there’s always conservative talk radio. The rest of…
On this date 35 years ago, the political and cultural landscape looked almost as bleak as it does today. Disco saturated the airwaves, and Nixon was about to become entrenched in the Watergate scandal. Thankfully, the good people at Buffalo Exchange remember 1974 ending with real promise: Not only did…
Want to get your (coffee) buzz on? Then come watch some of the best and brightest in the Rocky Mountain region’s baristical scene as they grind, press, steam and pour at the second annual Mountain Regional Barista Competition. Event organizer Michael Strumpf says the competitors will prepare three drinks: cappuccino,…
You wouldn’t think a book about surviving on Mars would begin with Mark Twain, but according to author Robert Zubrin, a hundred years from now, Mars may be very much like the Wild West. “The book that I was reading when I wrote How to Live on Mars was Mark…
