Chelsea Handler, who headlines a benefit gig tonight, may not be taking over the world, but she seems to be in charge of a nice-sized chunk of it these days. Chelsea Lately, her nightly E! talk show, which finds her dishing about celebrity foibles and other insanity with undisguised glee,…
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more inspirational speaker than Erik Weihenmayer. In 2001 he became the only blind man in history to reach the summit of Mount Everest. The next year, the 33-year-old completed his seven-year quest to climb the Seven Summits, the highest mountains of each continent. His…
“The whole reason I love writing about history is precisely because it’s so juicy,” says National Public Radio essayist turned best-selling author Sarah Vowell. “There’s so much death and violence and pettiness and jealousy and the occasional high-minded idealist.” That’s certainly the case with The Wordy Shipmate — the excuse…
Kitchen tales wear well. Anything, after all, that’s set behind the scenes and revolves around plates of food, glorious food, in constant degrees of preparation, can’t help but grab your gut…literally, figuratively and in every way possible. Fried: Surviving Two Centuries in Restaurants is a new, foodie-friendly history/memoir/personal tall-tale by…
Oh, my gosh, will you look at the Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails? They are just adorable today! See how that top brings out the colors in their unique LUPEC eyes? How that pair of jeans perfectly hugs those LUPEC curves? And those shoes! I have to…
The works of local artist Viviane Le Courtois never fail to fascinate, but her latest installation (and the centerpiece of Trickle Down, a show of works by Le Courtois, John Lopez and Andrew Englander at Plus Gallery’s intern-run Object + Thought, 3559 Larimer Street) will go a step beyond by…
Before the impressive Lord of the Rings trilogy (and the slew of Oscars he received) made Peter Jackson a household name, he was already a revered icon among horror fans for the brilliant, insane zombie opus Dead Alive (aka Braindead). The movie is probably the finest example ever of the…
“You want to know what it takes to sell real estate? It takes BRASS BALLS to sell real estate.” In this day and age, David Mamet’s words ring especially true, making Glengarry Glen Ross, his Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about a cutthroat competition among corrupt real-estate salesmen, still relevant despite being…
In a year resonating with the battle cry for change, in a city that hosted a convention to propel that change forward, it seems only fitting that Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a pioneering harbinger of change, is up next to take the Insight Speaker Series stage. As an activist who became…
Christoph Heinrich, the Denver Art Museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, must be a workaholic. In recent months, he’s unveiled two new dedicated spaces: a paper-works gallery in the museum’s Hamilton Building and a new-media space called the Fuse Box. Then he took on the ambitious reinstallation of the…
I was really disappointed to learn that Ann Daley (pictured), associate curator of Western art at the Denver Art Museum, had decided to step down after more than a decade in her present post and after having worked for the museum for a lot longer than that. Over the years,…
Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The fall opener at the Center for Visual Art is a conscientious survey of the careers of Christo and Jeanne-Claude as seen through their personal print collection documenting their pioneering conceptual work that began in the 1960s. The exhibit, which includes more than a hundred works of…
Braided Sorrow. No one knows exactly how many young women have been murdered in the Mexican border town of Juárez over the last decade, perhaps three or four hundred. The murder rate shot up after the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed in 1994, when several U.S. companies set…
Thankfully for the United States of America, slavery is one aspect of our past that we have struggled with and overcome. Or so most of us think. The fact of the matter is, there are more slaves on the planet today than were taken from Africa in more than 400…
A new kind of war movie for a new kind of war, Body of Lies is about the War on Terror as it is being waged on the ground, in the air, but most of all in cyberspace. Directed with terrific verve by Ridley Scott (coming after the listless American…
The old people remember the past,” a narrator says early in The Exiles over a prologue of Edward S. Curtis photographs — faces of aged Native Americans who may have had their lands taken away, but not their history or memories. For the length of Kent MacKenzie’s 1961 feature, the…
Although there was only a small audience for Listen Productions’ Mediamockracy on the night I attended, its members were intensely involved in the play. As I discovered during the actor-audience chats inserted into the performance, these were media-savvy people, deeply aware of the role of news dissemination in a democracy…
I was so bored during the first act of The Trip to Bountiful that I had trouble staying in my seat — and this despite a powerful performance from Kathleen M. Brady as Carrie Watts, the elderly woman trapped in a Houston apartment with her son, Ludie, and his disagreeable…
Les Misérables is a huge, sprawling musical filled with emotional songs that tell the story of Victor Hugo’s novel. The plot centers on the merciless pursuit of a freed prisoner, Jean Valjean, by a bitter police detective, Javert. In the course of the chase, which continues over several decades, we…
No one knows exactly how many young women have been murdered in the Mexican border town of Juárez over the last decade, perhaps three or four hundred. The murder rate shot up after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed in 1994, when several U.S. companies set up…
With no exhibition director on staff at present, the art program at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities is essentially rudderless. Executive director Gene Sobczak is running the program in his spare time, but he is no art expert, and he’s busy with other duties. In addition, Sobczak…
Adam Helms. This MCA solo 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 movements from different places and…
