Arts & Culture

If you think Samurai swordsmanship is as outdated as the transistor radio, or is useful only as an entertaining way to chop watermelons in half, or you really just want to look like John Belushi’s grunting samurai character from old Saturday Night Live skits, then you’ll be surprised to hear…

If Lakeside Amusement Park was taken over by artists and crafters, it would look something like Monkey See, Monkey Do: A Do-It-Yourself Carnival. Today at Capsule Art & Event Center, 560 Santa Fe Drive, rather than hopping on the Tilt-A-Whirl or the Whip, folks will trade in tickets to try…

Everyone has a handful of movies they watched over and over and over when they were young. Mine were The Neverending Story and Labyrinth — you know, that flick with Jim Henson’s weird and wild puppets, David Bowie playing Jareth the sinister Goblin King, and Jennifer Connelly as Sarah, a…

Most Front Range folks don’t know we have a musician as remarkable as Wu Fei in our midst. The Boulder-based Chinese guzheng virtuoso is equally handy at performing the traditional music she’s worked on since the age of six and the contemporary fusion styles she embraces as a graduate of…

It’s been five years since Tran and Josh Wills took a look around and discovered that there was no outlet for sartorially creative souls — despite the overwhelming amount of talent and style in Denver. Enter the Fabric Lab, the Wills’s brainchild of a boutique that puts only local designers…

Even though the first Denver Poets Day took place in 1976, today’s installment is only the tenth version. “The first one was dedicated to Neal Cassady by many of the people who were friends with him,” explains poet Ken Arkind. The day was resurrected in 1999 and has featured such…

Anyone who’s lived in Colorado for longer than two seconds knows about the Cherry Creek Arts Festival (CCAF) and how it’s nationally recognized as one of the best arts festivals in all of time and space, yadda yadda yadda. It’s one of the don’t-miss happenings of the summer. But not…

I’m not ashamed to admit that I carry what some people might consider an unhealthy affinity for Harry Potter. Although the copies my parents bought were intended for my youngest brother, somehow the books spirited themselves into my bedroom whenever I was home for a visit. (It must have been…

Two months into Gustavo Arellano’s book tour for ¡Ask a Mexican!, a collection of many of his weekly columns, the U.S. Senate killed immigration reform — again. Arellano didn’t need to hear the news to know what had happened; he could tell just by the intensity of his e-mail. “When…

Twenty years ago, studies showed that families in the United States who spoke Spanish at home tended to earn less money and be less educated than their English-speaking neighbors. But according to Devin Jenkins, a Spanish professor at the University of Colorado at Denver and CU’s Health Sciences Center, times…

I still endure family taunts almost twenty years after the day I ran my bike into a parked car and took it upon myself to splint my two “broken” pinkies back to health with Popsicle sticks and tape. My first attempt at mountain biking ended in a similar way —…

My father was a mountain-biking freak. He’d jet from Littleton up to Conifer on what he called a “short ride,” and he was a dynamic presence at the ride-across-the-state cycling events in which he participated. He’d occasionally try to get me to join him on these week-long “adventures,” and I’d…

Between the junk, the treasures disguised as junk and the priceless people-watching, there’s nothing like a good flea market. When Motyka Johnson, a coordinator at the Aurora History Museum, decided to organize First Saturdays Summer Flea Markets, she was hoping to do something unlike the run-of-the-mill festivals and farmers’ markets…

I will always remember having to sit through the annual orchestra concert for my middle school in Aurora, suffering the absolute worst renditions of old standards from Tchaikovsky and Mozart. For years afterward, that’s what I thought all symphony music sounded like. It took me a long time to get…

Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when everyone suddenly discovered sushi and Akira Kurosawa, it was hip to be a Japanophile, and I was. And even now, when sushi bars proliferate almost as quickly as Starbucks, I still appreciate not only the unique Japanese sense of grace and…

Why do we love First Fridays on Santa Fe Drive? Because they’re really just artsy block parties, blessed with a communal sensibility that comes together monthly in a culture clash of diverse artist enclaves — highbrow, lowbrow, commercial and committed — and swirling humanity. To that end, two of the…

This year, the Central City Opera House — built from the proceeds of the Gold Rush, restored during the Great Depression and now the nation’s fifth-oldest operating opera house — turns 130, and it still feels pretty. Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story opens with a sold-out performance tonight and continues…

Imagine asking a roomful of people to scream out a name and location for your play. Add character, plot and theme, then knead and stretch until you’ve got (hopefully) a discernable beginning, middle and end. Got it? Now do this without rewrites, without rehearsals, without anything except your wits and…