A local staple for eleven years, the Colorado Performing Arts Festival offers locals an opportunity to revel in homegrown arts, whether it be music, theater, dance, or something a touch more avant-garde. Visitors to the 2002 event, held in late September at the Denver Performing Arts Complex, saw Aztec dancers,…
This annual celebration of hickory-smoked meats and serious sauce (sanctioned by the Kansas City Barbecue Society) is the high country’s best family-style blowout. Visitors sample ‘cue from more than seventy of the nation’s best grill and smoker masters, making the array of meat and sauce choices finger-lickin’ heaven on earth…
We know, we know. Poets and sunshine go together like peanut butter and broken glass. But if you ever tire of pouring your heart out from some ratty couch in some dim, cloistered coffee shop, why not give Ink! a try? First off, they brew up some mean java, grinding…
God-Shaped Hole, Tiffanie Debartolo’s tale of star-crossed love – born in the classified ads, played out beneath the artificial glow of Los Angeles life — has all of the elements of pure romantic noir: The lead character, Trixie, has a love affair with the dreamy and intense Jacob, a writer…
In a time when a collection of short stories is as de rigueur for debut authors as the tell-all publishing roman a clef, Erika Krouse’s Come Up and See Me Sometime, a novel in thirteen stories, is refreshingly honest and well crafted. In fact, the Boulder writer’s collection of independent…
Life, love and used-car lots. It’s the stuff of vanity presses. In Up, we find Becky Pine, a recent CU graduate, looking for a life (surprise) as she picks up and moves to Los Angeles. A used-car lot takes her in, and Pine gets schooled on love, life and being…
Greg Campbell knows a bit about adventure and horror. The Fort Collins freelance writer and dad was held at gunpoint and hung with the boys of Soldier of Fortune for his first book, The Road to Kosovo. But he upped the danger quotient in 2002’s Blood Diamonds, his investigation into…
Our very own single-name artist, Avi, finally won the coveted Newbery Medal this year with his fiftieth adventure novel, Crispin: The Cross of Lead. The Brooklyn-born writer dabbles in many genres, but in Crispin, he combined historical and young adult fiction, portraying the life of a thirteen-year old peasant boy…
Women have been trying to balance life and art since before Virginia Woolf longed for a room of her own and Tillie Olsen traded her ironing board for a typewriter. And for the past 27 years, Colorado women looking to fend off the mundane for twelve glorious months have turned…
There was an international flair to the fifth annual “Writers Respond to Readers” event at the Tattered Cover, where aspiring scribes and readaholics rubbed bookmarks with known authors in a small group setting. Esmeralda Santiago, Francesca Marciano, Lynn Freed and Simon Winchester made up the eclectic writerly circle this year,…
The Old Firehouse Art Center in Longmont really knows how to throw an artwalk. The community celebration, held along the town’s main drag, includes a slew of art openings, live music, artist and vendor booths, dancing, and art workshops for kids. There’s the inevitable street food, of course — hot…
It’s time to cut the cards — aces high and seven-card stud. And just $10 will get you in the game every Friday night at Breckenridge Brewery. You can spin the wheel, but you don’t have to worry about losing the rent or your pink slip: Once you’re in, it’s…
With good screen size and projection, state-of-the-art sound and the latest in stadium-style seating, the Colorado Center rates just fine in our theater-comfort category. But what sets it apart from the many other stadium-theater venues is the consistent helpfulness of the staff, good access to theaters and — as the…
While taking in the latest indie romance or taut French thriller at the Mayan, why not take something good into your body, too? The concession stand is well stocked with upscale delectables, including the Alternative Baking Company’s new vegan cookies, in Peanut Butter Persuasion or Phenomenal Pumpkin Spice. The ice…
The arrival of the New York-based Madstone chain on Denver’s art-film scene is most welcome — especially in the affluent, educated southeast quadrant of town, where the theaters are located. At the slickly redecorated complex that was once the Tamarac 6 multiplex, Madstone unspools an intriguing mix of first-run imports…
Documentarian Donna Dewey is the only Denver-based filmmaker to win an Academy Award, and last year she put her heart and soul into producing a moving non-fiction film called Chiefs, which chronicles two seasons of play by a high school basketball team on Wyoming’s impoverished Wind River Indian Reservation. Dewey…
In 2002, Australian director Phillip Noyce returned to top form with two films — a dark adaptation of Graham Greene’s disturbing Vietnam novel, The Quiet American, and the movie that set last October’s Denver Film Festival abuzz, Rabbit-Proof Fence. It’s the heroic story of three half-caste Aborigine girls who run…
In About Schmidt, Alexander Payne’s black comedy about a retired insurance man’s reassessment of his bleak life, Jack Nicholson’s Warren Schmidt sets out from sleepy Omaha in his huge motor home and takes I-80 to Denver, where he hopes to prevent his daughter’s wedding to a dopey waterbed salesman. Payne…
Last year, hard times killed the Denver Jazz on Film Festival at age four. But from the ashes rose the Denver Jazz on Film Series, a slightly shorter, but no less syncopated, bow to a great American art form as interpreted by moviemakers around the world. Thanks go to the…
Most of the movies that clog area theaters fall into predictable categories: comedies, dramas, action-thrillers, idiocy. But the Denver Pan-African Film Festival, sponsored by Starz FilmCenter, offers cineastes a tasty alternative. Last year’s event featured a hefty menu of fifty flicks, ranging from light entertainments to wrenching documentaries, and the…
Once housed at the venerable bookstore’s LoDo events space, the long-running Tattered Cover Film Series moved to the Starz FilmCenter this year without amping up the price. Curated by critic Howie Movshovitz, the series uncovers both obscure gems and the occasional classic, such as Casablanca. They even pay for the…
Wanna know who wins the Worst Parent or Guardian in a Movie award for 2002? What about Actor Who Should Have Known Better? Or Worst Attempt to Act Smart? Abby Winter and her partner, Laura Peterson, will happily slag off — even at industry favorites. The roommates use amusing photos…
