In one artist’s world, pop culture collides with the highbrow art-history ethos; in another’s, rough-hewn, featureless working people move in patches of pure color; still another mixes media with ferocious zeal and holds it all together with a stake of dark humor. Local artists Carlos Frésquez, Tony Ortega and Jerry…
Swing out to the fringes of music and art tonight with the Pendulum New Music concert series as it presents the New West Electronic Arts and Music Organization Festival at the ATLAS Black Box Theater, 1125 18th Street in Boulder. The multi-disciplinary festival features the electro-acoustic music of ten artists…
Imagine, if you will, 15,000 freestanding, golf-ball-sized golden heads, swaying gently on stakes at varying heights in a 430-square-foot room. The heads, multiples of a few hundred sculptured images, look out, face-on, at the viewer. At first you might shake your head in wonder: How can they all fit so…
How does one learn to yodel? Yodeling local yokel Bret Bertholf, aka Halden Wofford of the Hi-Beams, says, “First, pretend you’re swallowing a monkey.” The rest, he adds, comes naturally, if you let out a howl and have a friend pinch your rear mid-note. That’s just one of the many…
When Veronica Montoya first met students with the Denver Center for International Studies, a Denver Public Schools magnet program for grades six through twelve, she was so impressed, she wished she could go back to high school. “I’m vicariously living through them,” she says. That was four years ago. The…
For most of us common folk, the field of architecture is a bit too intellectual for our undeveloped minds. We enter a building and see wood and plaster, but real architects see form, function and fine art. Or so they would have us believe. Residents of Denver, prepare to air…
Not every city has a Chicano independent film festival, you know — let alone a four-day extravaganza featuring classic Mexican cinema, appearances by visiting filmmakers, regional premieres and movies with a strong local emphasis. Denver’s pretty spoiled in that regard, because we’ve got the annual XicanIndie FilmFest, which takes place…
Writers Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth receive sole credit for the movie Disturbia, which is surprising, as the film is clearly based on both a previously published work (a 1942 short story by Cornell Woolrich titled “It Had to Be Murder”) and the John Michael Hayes-penned, Alfred Hitchcock-directed, Academy Award-nominated…
Frylock, Meatwad and Master Shake — the three Stooges inhabiting Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters — will survive should you choose to avoid their movie. Truth be told, you’ve probably never heard of them anyway, unless you’re a regular viewer of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming…
On September 9, 1999, a Denver SWAT team burst through the door of 3738 High Street. Three minutes after the cops entered, Ismael Mena was dead, the victim of eight bullets and a flawed search warrant. Officers later revealed that they’d targeted the wrong house in what they believed was…
One of the perils of an English education is that it leaves gaps. While I and any of my old school friends could discuss Shaw, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Orwell and Virginia Woolf at some length — and on a more contemporary note, I’d be happy to talk your ear…
Though it has sad and even bitter undertones, Pure Confidence is essentially a comedy. The central figure is one we recognize from myth and folklore: the trickster — in this case, a jockey named Simon Cato who has an almost magical ability with horses. Small in stature, he’s big in…
House With No Walls. There’s a special category of pundit: the black conservative, those darlings of the Republican Party who profit hugely by attacking other African-Americans. The protagonist of Thomas Gibbons’s play is a more thoughtful and credible version of this kind of talker, a brilliant historian named Cadance who…
The news coming out of the Denver Art Museum over the past few weeks has been shocking. More than 200 staff members spread across every department were offered modest buyouts in exchange for their resigning from their jobs. As of Monday, April 9, thirty had complied. These include some fairly…
The radical forms of Daniel Libeskind’s Frederic C. Hamilton Building have been difficult for the Denver Art Museum’s staff — and builders — to tame, so thank goodness for that old reliable friend, Gio Ponti and James Sudler’s North Building, where, without any fanfare, changes are afoot inside. The North…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For one of the special shows inaugurating the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg has selected over a hundred works for the…
Sleeping Dogs Lie (First Look) Writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait takes a subversive concept (honesty is overrated) and marries it to an outrageous scenario (a woman’s family learns that she once, uh, performed for a dog) to create…a romantic comedy? Well, sort of. Like Goldthwait’s underrated Shakes the Clown, Sleeping Dogs Lie…
The residents of Mount Olympus haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep since Kratos moved in. Not only is the new god of war a grumpy, self-professed god-hater, he got the throne by killing Ares, something that naturally makes the other gods a little…jumpy. It’s not long before Zeus — who…
The Aura (Genius) Avatar: The Last Airbender — Book 2: Earth, Volume 2 (Paramount) The Batman: The Complete Third Season (Warner Bros.) Beneath Still Waters (Lions Gate) Bobby (Weinstein) Coming Soon (Lions Gate) Dead and Deader (Anchor Bay) A Guide for the Married Woman (Fox) Life of the Party (THINKFilm)…
At long last Cat has bio for the final contestant competing in the Tamarac Square Fashion Project. There had been some confusion over images and the like, so Cat offers her apologies to all of Lisa’s fans who have been looking for her bio. And there are many, as evidenced…
The hot pool looking over Gold Lake. Cat got away on Saturday and headed up to Gold Lake Mountain Resort and Spa, about 45 minutes outside of Boulder. The intent was to take city-slicker Stacy up to the hills for some R&R with a hike, horse-back ride massage and brunch…
Cat is out and about today with a friend who is in town from New York. Regulars to The Cat’s Pajamas will recognize her as “Stacy,” the commenter who consistently harasses Cat about her taste in shoes. While she’s in town, there’s one event we’ll definitely hit: SEED, Fashion Denver’s…
