These days, Denver homebuyers fall into two categories: the rich, and the filthy rich. Everyone else has to buy a home in Aurora, or Arkansas, or Englewood — like me, for instance. Last December my family moved into a modest brick Tudor, circa 1931, that came with all the quirks…
With the Labor Day weekend looming just ahead, and the important fall season hard on its heels, there’s only one or two days left to catch two of the most significant exhibits presented this summer: Peter Durst, which combines installation with ceramic sculpture at the Curtis Arts and Humanities Center,…
Though Steven Alarid lives in Dillon, hes exhibited his idiosyncratic paintings, watercolors and drawings in Denver for more than a decade. Currently he is the subject of a solo show in the front gallery at Pirate. Its made up of pieces from his Empirical: series, which includes the untitled painting…
Fresh from a mid-morning rehearsal break, several members of Xpressions, a local troupe made up of youths between the ages of thirteen and nineteen, regroup at the Ralph Waldo Emerson Center’s tiny upstairs theater for a scheduled run-through of the play they’ve written together. After listening to a few encouraging…
When last we left The Kentucky Cycle, the ill-fated Rowen and Talbert clans were embroiled in the same sort of inbred conflict that nearly tore apart the nation during the Civil War. As Robert Schenkkan’s nine-play epic continues in Part Two, the descendents of both families wage a different kind…
Success is relative in Hollywood, like a third cousin twice-removed who doesn’t recognize you at family reunions, and doesn’t care to. Fame is so fleeting it has a month-by-month lease. Six years ago, Christopher McQuarrie was as famous as any screenwriter on the backlot known as Los Angeles. He had…
The strange love affair that rules Patrice Leconte’s Girl on the Bridge is full of old-fashioned European art-movie attractions. The young heroine, Adele (pop singer and Chanel model Vanessa Paradis), is a delicate, doe-eyed woman-child who can’t tell love from sex and is so melancholy that she wants to leap…
Amanda Peet has some really large teeth. Seriously. Even given the fact that it’s in vogue for a hot, young, would-be sex symbol to have a set of brightly polished choppers prominent for all to see (think Neve Campbell, Casper Van Dien or Denise Richards), Amanda’s impressive ivories take the…
Denver’s Society for the Advancement of Poetics has an inside joke: “We’re just a bunch of SAPs,” quips society founder John Munson, a poet and former railroad engineer who now works as an investigator for law firms. But it’s all in good faith. Munson and friends formed the group in…
Debra Ginsberg has actually spoken to the two people in the country who didn’t wait tables at some time in their lives. The rest of us, she surmises, must have stooped to delivering dishes for a living somewhere down the line, lending a cozy insider’s sense of belonging to all…
It was a couple of years ago that Jane Fudge, at the time an assistant curator at the Denver Art Museum, came up with the idea for Colorado Masters of Photography, the exhibit currently on display in the Merage Gallery on the DAM’s first floor. But the show, which is…
The funkiest of the funky new galleries to open in the last few months must surely be Apart Modern Gallery on South Kalamath Street. The two-building complex, joined by a rough-hewn courtyard covered in gravel and accented with sculptures, is located hard by a busy railroad track. The gallery is…
The time commitment required to see all of The Kentucky Cycle shouldn’t deter area theatergoers from sampling Robert Schenkkan’s nine-play, six-hour epic (the first half, which includes five of the short plays, opened a few days ahead of Part Two, which will be reviewed in this space next week). The…
The raw emoting and whiny arguing that plague many experimental productions are, thankfully, in short supply in Lucifer Tonite, Denver playwright Don Becker’s scathing ode to the vexations of science, religion and various other weighty subjects. Propelled by Nils Kiehn’s tour-de-force turn as a raconteur-ish Satan, the two-hour work stimulates…
“I’m not the celebrity type,” says Vincent D’Onofrio, and he does not lie. His is a household name in very few neighborhoods; it appears in film credits buried just beneath those of actors more famous, or just luckier. Rare is the filmgoer who utters the words, “Dude, let’s go check…
Honestly, of late have you found yourself enthralled by pleasing stimuli? Please, no nauseating responses like “Aromatherapy shifts my reality” or “After I get Rolfed, my heart is more open to love.” Instead, think of the good, serendipitous stuff, the random intoxicants that bombard your subcutaneous organs. For example, has…
Despite its late-summer release date — usually a sign of studio jitters — The Art of War is a mostly well-constructed action flick with a number of flashy, well-choreographed fight and chase scenes. Wesley Snipes stars as Neil Shaw, a super-secret operative of a super-secret “dirty tricks” agency, whose methods…
The wee and sprightly mandolin, cousin to the workhorse guitar much as the piccolo is cousin to the flute, has a migrant nature. Though the typical American sees one and immediately thinks of bluegrass, a mandolin is actually an instrument stoked by centuries-old traditions, the strains of which have worked…
Poor Dave Robicheaux. After years of solving crimes too close to home, the brash, volcanic homicide detective carries more psychic baggage than even a cop ought to expect: one wife murdered, another with a mobbed-up past, the crushing toll of his own epic struggles with the bottle and with the…
Cydney Payton, director of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, is set to leave the institution she essentially created out of thin air at the end of the year. The handsome Elbows & Tea Leaves — Front Range Women in the Visual Arts (1974-2000) is the next-to-last BMoCA exhibit that…
Mind Over Matter, an exhibit of recent paintings by Victoria del Carmen Perez that now occupies ILK’s south gallery, may be an uneven show, but the best pieces are extremely good. And unusual. In fact, some viewers may be put off by the materials that the Cuban-born painter uses, and…
Plagued by divisions between working folks and the well-to-do, Germany, like much of the industrialized world in 1928, teeters on the brink of socioeconomic collapse. Seemingly oblivious to this pervasive gloom — or perhaps too aware of it — a steady parade of movers, shakers and edgy dream-chasers keeps the…
