Cold Run

Well, here’s a race that tells it like it is: The Frosty’s Frozen 5 is just what it says it is, and a bit more. Featuring both five- and ten-mile courses, the second leg of the Winter Distance Series will be run regardless of frigid and icy conditions, through the…

Thrift Store Art

Phil Bender has raided your grandmother’s attic. Bender’s Last Place exhibit at the Laboratory of Arts and Ideas highlights the barely recyclable stuff of culture, including old potato mashers, nutcrackers, matchbooks, wooden tennis rackets and quilted hot pads. After excavating our cultural flea market, he catalogued these forgotten objects like…

Walking Large

Prepare yourself for the return of the dinosaurs, the most awesome creatures ever to have walked the Earth. Thanks to the tireless efforts of some of the world’s best engineers, designers and scientists, these prehistoric beasts have returned to life. Okay, it’s only animatronic “life,” but it’s still impressive —…

Cloverfield

It took nine years for Godzilla to rise up out of the ashes of Hiroshima and wreak his destruction on the good people of Tokyo in 1954. Here in America, it’s taken just over six years for the idea of an escapist disaster movie set on the streets of New…

Stock Show Style

Slide Show Yesterday, the National Western Stock Show took to the streets of downtown Denver with its annual parade. There were loads of longhorns, heaps of horses, copious cowboys, rafts of ranchers, and a jillion journalists to document their every move. But more noteworthy than the parade were the parade-goers…

A Person’s Right to Choose

Not too long ago, a dear friend of mine (Let’s call her something fabulous like… “Bianca”) called me up in hysterics. It seemed that her boyfriend of over a year (Let’s call him “Big Fat Jack Ass) had fallen out of love with her and decided it best to break…

American Gladiators Is Still Kicking My Ass

Quick story: some friends of mine and I were at Six Flags Magic Mountain out in California. It was the late 80s, and we were freshmen in college, on our first road trip. We had, as college freshmen tend to have, plans and dreams. (More the latter than the former,…

American Gladiators: Smells Like 1989

This is some painful déjà vu. Was it not enough that it’s nearly 20 years later, and we still have a Bush in the White House? Do we really need to revisit American Gladiators? NBC apparently thinks so. The peacock network resorted to bringing back this product of the Reagan-era…

The Orphanage

Having a child destroys your immune system to horror, real or imagined. Before the blessed event, you could laugh off The Exorcist, The Omen, or any of a thousand gory shockers with some wide-eyed tyke as either the prey or the spawn of Beelzebub. Afterward, you can’t even see the…

First Sunday

Since promising Armageddon in the leadoff bars of Straight Outta Compton, star-producer Ice Cube has been one canny career man. In recent years, he’s pulled up stakes in the foundering rap game and doesn’t seem to think twice about the cred damage that could come from pratfalling through PG family…

Shift Happens

When I was twelve, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway totally screwed me over. After visiting the famed Brickyard and eagerly paying ten bucks to take “a lap around the track,” I was placed in a golf cart that putted around the asphalt at a not-entirely-death-defying 9 mph. This was not the…

Boy Trouble

Joshua (Fox)George Ratliff’s movie, a sort of satirical take on Rosemary’s Baby, came and went upon its release; seems no one got the joke about how parents (Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga, in this case) are scared shitless of their own children — especially the titular Joshua, played by Jacob…

Up and Coming

The All New Super Friends Hour: Season One, Volume One (Turner) American Carny: True Tales From the Circus Sideshow (Koch Vision) Cary Grant: 4-Disc Collector’s Set (Republic) Casablanca (Warner Bros.) Death Sentence (Fox) Eagle vs. Shark (Miramax) Evil Roy Slade (TMG) Golden Door (Miramax) Happy Tree Friends: Complete Season One…

Live Hard

On December 14, I got a call from a good friend. Her tone was uncharacteristically formal, so I knew something was wrong. “Mark Travis was found dead in his studio,” she stoically told me. This news was shocking despite the fact that Travis had been in declining health for years,…

Twinkle Twinkle

Ivar Zeile, the owner of Plus Gallery (2350 Lawrence Street, 303-296-0927) has often described his approach to showing contemporary art as “eclectic,” and in his case, that means embracing competing ideologies at the same time and in the same shows. The problem with this approach is that offerings of this…

Now Showing

Color as Field. It’s no exaggeration to say that Color as Field: American Painting 1950-1975 is one of the best shows presented in Denver in a generation. Filled with a who’s who of American art — Still, Rothko, Frankenthaler, Stella — it’s like a brief vacation into a world where…

Jane Austen: Literature’s Posthumous It Girl

Jane Austen is an anomaly. No other author aside from Shakespeare has sustained such modern acclaim and interest. The evidence is abundant: Austen’s success on the big screen includes classic versions, such as the 1996 Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle, Emma, as well as modern takes on Austen’s stories, such as 1995’s…

Planet of Crisis

When a midlife crisis includes searching for an antenna-wearing childhood TV icon named Tamara Tomorrow instead of buying hair plugs and a red sports car, you’re either still living in your parents’ basement or you have an interesting sense of humor. In Music From a Sparkling Planet — a coming-of-age-meets-midlife-crisis…

A Whale of a Tale

It’s a good thing that actor Jonathan Bender has had years of experience with character acting: In Bender’s solo performance, In the Belly of the Whale, he plays nine distinct characters to tell an age-old story with a twist. “The main character is a spoken-word poet; his name is J.,”…

Supernatural Stories

Vampires and werewolves have been fodder for fiction since long before Interview With the Vampire and An American Werewolf in London hit the big screen. So authors Lynda Hilburn and Carrie Vaughn will be in good company when they pair up this afternoon at the Denver Book Mall, 32 Broadway,…

totaly rad

once upon a midnight dreary while i pondered eak an dweary over a forgotten volume Wed., Jan. 16, 2008…

The Sun’s Day

From ancient myths of sun gods to the Cheeto-orange tans of today, humans have constantly shown appreciation for the life-giving globe of super-heated plasma we call Sol. That love affair with the source of all life and energy is celebrated in SunWorks, an exhibit of art aimed at showing the…