Small World

Kids are such deep little creatures. Though most parents will shake their heads at the notion of youngsters making truly meaningful New Year’s resolutions (other than shallow pledges promising to be even more greedy in the coming year), the small-fry will surprise you. And when we came a-polling, even those…

Naughty and Nice

It doesn’t have what I’d call a seasonal character, but Eye Candy, at Judish Fine Arts, does feel at times like a really wild holiday party. As the title implies, the exhibit is not sharply defined, but comprises things whimsically selected by gallery director Ron Judish according to whether they…

Artbeat

It all started in November, when Art Students League artist Cong Lu won a prize for his painting “Self-Portrait of a Martyr.” Conservative in style, it shows a very buff Lu raising his T-shirt, revealing that his abs are strapped with explosives. Some students and viewers objected, and this thin…

Chicago-Style Deep Dish

Al Capone himself probably couldn’t kill Chicago. The ribald Kander and Ebb musical has been charming theater audiences since 1975 with its gleefully jaundiced view of life, and Rob Marshall’s inventive movie version is likely to win a lot of new friends for the stage-struck murderess Roxie Hart, her sharpie…

Rabbit Punch

Based on the true story of three young aboriginal girls who walked 1,500 miles across the Australian Outback to be reunited with their mothers, Rabbit-Proof Fence might well be subtitled True Grit in recognition of the courage and single-minded determination that drove the trio to undertake such a perilous journey…

Flick Pick

The long collaboration between the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and his alter ego, actor Toshiro Mifune, was one of the most fruitful in all of film history: The ideal vessel for Kurosawa’s ideas and obsessions — from the definition of classic Samurai honor to modern man’s need for compassion…

Pieces of the Past

Book dealer Linda Lebsack specializes in books on regional history, but she’s also been on a Denver-history-collecting tangent, partly because there was a market for it. “There wasn’t much more to be said about the Gold Rush,” she notes, “and young people just didn’t care about it anymore.” So she…

Rat On!

The Nutcracker: Been there, done that. The classic Christmas ballet has been grandly produced, fiddled with, animated, televised and Barbiefied to death. But this year, Boulder aerial choreographer Nancy Smith and her Frequent Flyers company decided to transform the holiday cliche with a countercultural twist provided by longtime Boulder Ballet…

Free For All

If your wardrobe includes ten-gallon hats, cowboy boots and belt buckles the size of Texas, we’ve got just the outing for you this holiday season: the Colorado Country Music Hall of Fame’s fifth annual Christmas Gathering. Held from 2 to 7 p.m. Sunday, December 22, at the Rockin’ West Caravan…

Here’s to Ya!

A legitimate excuse for frivolous hedonism comes but once a year, so we say make the most of it. Don a silly hat (everyone else will look stupid, too), pop a magnum of champagne and blow your horn: 2002 is finally done. Whether you want to dine, dance, drink or…

A Few of Our Favorite Things

1. Downtown Denver New Year’s Eve Fireworks: No matter what you do with the rest of your evening, be sure you’re in the vicinity of the 16th Street Mall at either 10 p.m. or the stroke of midnight, when Denver’s nippy skies will be bursting with fabulous displays of pyro…

Hair of the Dog

While Westword doesn’t encourage irresponsible drinking, we know that many of you will be riding the hangover tide on New Year’s Day. To help preempt the pain, we asked some local experts for tips on curing your self-induced misery. Pressure Power: To silence your jackhammer, try acupressure, an ancient Chinese…

Out, Damn Spot!

The first rule of New Year’s Eve party hosting is to never let the soiree get out of control. But since we all know how likely that is — not — here’s something useful for the morning after: cleaning tips. Because you never know what you’ll find when people are…

Dress to Impress

New Year’s Eve is like no other night of the year. It calls for drama and demands flair. It turns the game of dress-up into a grown-up affair. If you’re seeking the final touches for that fabulous holiday costume, look no further than our must-have list. Trust us: You’ll party…

True Romance

Ah, New Year’s Eve. It’s one of those nights that just begs for some serious romance. And whether your purse strings are pulled tight or you’ve got wads of cash to throw around, Westword wants to help keep you lovers happy. So put down the popcorn, put back the movie,…

Cheers to You

To toast or not to toast? It’s truly an age-old question. Our advice is to take the plunge. By following a few simple rules, you can be the talk of the party — and not because you left your fly open. “There are three basic rules: rehearse, rehearse, rehearse,” says…

Just Do It

It’s the same story every year. Your head is pounding, and your mouth feels like a giant cotton ball. All you want to do is eat a huge, greasy brunch and then lie on the couch watching football all day. But it’s the first day of 2003: Go do something!…

Risky Business

Contemporary art is dangerous territory to map. There are so many different aesthetic and intellectual paths to follow, half of them leading in opposite directions. There’s a confusing array of named and unnamed stylistic tendencies vying for attention and comment — some concerned with championing the object, others with destroying…

Artbeat

With so much attention directed at all the major exhibits around, many modest but equally worthwhile offerings get lost in the shuffle. Hopefully, that won’t be the fate of a quartet of interesting solos in two of the city’s co-ops. In the front space at Spark Gallery (1535 Platte Street,…

A Christmas Carol Glows

There’s a power to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol that defies analysis. On one level, it’s a sentimental fable, a codification of the tamed bourgeois, Victorian Christmas that replaced the dangerous excesses of earlier generations, when drunken laborers took to the streets to sing, challenge the rich and turn propriety…

Profound B.S.

A new company called Rorschach Productions has put together a sequence of short plays that constitutes one of the more interesting evenings of theater around. It’s a combination of late-ish Samuel Beckett and very early Sam Shepard titled An Evening of B.S. In the first piece, Beckett’s Catastrophe, a director…

Gangs Mentality

Martin Scorsese’s latest epic of the streets, Gangs of New York, means to show us how a great metropolis was forged from the mid-nineteenth-century cauldron of unbridled greed, ethnic violence and the Civil War. It means to give us the city as wild frontier — without the usual cowboy hats…