Adriel Heisey takes pictures of landscapes that might as well be on other planets. Most of us have seen what the land looks like from an airplane–but not Heisey’s airplane, a custom-built ultralight with a control stick that straps to his right leg. With both hands free to hold his…
Canadian author Lilian Nattel grew up in the shadow of a lost culture. Her parents, Jewish Holocaust survivors, often spoke of their vanished lives in pre-WWII Poland, but there was no way for her to truly know what it was like. “It was almost a dream–like a fairy tale or…
Thursday January 28 Prepare to stretch your mind: When noted journalist David Barsamian drops by the Tattered Cover LoDo tonight at 7:30 to discuss his book The Common Good, it’s the ideas of brilliant thinker Noam Chomsky that will take center stage. Barsamian’s book, a cerebral Chomsky interview published as…
The private passions of two collectors have gone very public in Boulder. Sans Titre: Works From the Collection of Peggy Scott and David Teplitzky, which opened in mid-January at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, has been attracting huge crowds–and not just the partyers who broke all BMoCA attendance records…
After slogging through the two hours of aimless conversation and mildly entertaining lounge tunes that permeate Rick Lawson’s Incident at the Blue Parrot Cafe, it comes as welcome relief when one character finally says something that’s been on every theatergoer’s mind since the play began. Seemingly investing his remarks with…
Begging forgiveness from God and anyone else who will listen, a mortally wounded policeman staggers through the West Indian jungle and bemoans the “Africa of my mind” and “glories of my race.” The mulatto corporal, ever aware that his mixed-blood origins effectively brand him an outcast among his fellow islanders…
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” Kris Kristofferson sings in his most beguiling song, “Me and Bobby McGee.” Stephen Frears’s The Hi-Lo Country tries in vain to be just as lyrical about love and liberty. In this twentieth-century Western, a cattle rancher named Pete (Billy Crudup) narrates…
Frank Rich thinks he’s found the keys to successful filmmaking: abstinence from women and dope. “Our motto was ‘Keep your hands off the ass and your brain off the grass,'” says Rich. “No masturbation, no sucking on the bong. A clear head and pent-up sexual energy are very valuable tools.”…
Like many old structures around Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhoods, the Temple Events Center Uptown–in its heyday the third home of Congregation Emanuel, Denver’s oldest Jewish congregation–has seen better days. But if director Roger Armstrong has his way, the building’s public centennial celebration on Sunday won’t be just a tribute to…
Thursday January 21 The Colorado Symphony Orchestra honors Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. tonight with a SuperClassics Concert that’s contemporary, stirring and all over the musical map–but as CSO maestra Marin Alsop points out, the selections are the work of African-American composers, pay tribute in some way to the African-American…
Many collectors are interested in buying so-called museum-quality artwork. For a gallery owner, the trick is to convince potential clients that what they’re looking at could just as easily hang in a museum as in their own home. But Bill Havu, owner of the William Havu Gallery, came up with…
As an undergraduate at University College in Dublin, James Joyce once published an 8,000-word article on Henrik Ibsen’s final play, When We Dead Awaken, that prompted the father of modern drama to dash off a sincere letter of thanks to his ardent admirer. Moved and humbled by his literary hero’s…
A.R. Gurney is famous for writing middlebrow off-Broadway plays in which well-to-do WASPs comically mourn the passing of their cherished way of life. Past Gurney bromides examined such hallowed American myths as the old-boy network (The Old Boy, presented a few years back by the Director’s Theatre in Boulder), the…
Genius can be a terrible, destructive gift. Jacqueline du Pre, the brilliant British cellist who enraptured audiences in the Sixties and Seventies with her musical passion and intensity, lived a life of great renown and acclamation but also one of harrowing loneliness and emotional turmoil. Her story is movingly told…
Elevate The Jerry Springer Show a notch or two–in other words, dispense with the one-legged serial killers who are having sex with their blind mothers and other such nonsense–and you’ve got Willard Carroll’s Playing by Heart. Too harsh a judgment, some will say. After all, this well-meaning, relentlessly sincere ensemble…
In the archetypal dead-end town of Lawford, New Hampshire, cold-eyed men looking for trouble prowl the streets in 4-x-4s with chrome spotlights and loaded gun racks. The gloomy barrooms are not gathering places so much as solitary-confinement cells, and the most popular local sport is macho posturing. In wintry Lawford,…
The coldhearted among us have watched Camille die tragically on the late show and have seen Brian Piccolo run his last yard through the cancer ward often enough to understand the several hazards of Hollywood “disease movies”–false sentiment, synthetic emotion and tears for tears’ sake. It is with wariness, then,…
Thursday January 14 Things just cain’t be right in these parts in January without the Colorado Cowboy Poetry Gathering. Presented by the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, it’s the ultimate assemblage of all things folksy and philosophical that’s parallel to, if not quite in conjunction with, the National…
The word “wire” trips on itself right out of the gate: Fraught with imagery of fences and telephone poles, it’s all about boundaries–where one thing ends and another begins. But when it gets all twisted up, that’s when wire can become downright dangerous, as you’ll find when two different yet…
A 1992 Nobel laureate whose work is the extraordinary sum of disparate yet intertwining parts, black West Indian poet and playwright Derek Walcott grew up on a rare fusion of Shakespearean language and island patois that ultimately transcends all possible racial bonds. He’s always simply written as a man first,…
Somewhere under the glossy imbecility of Varsity Blues lurks an idea that could make a great American movie: a coming-of-age story in a setting where no one else has come of age, a place where the hero must find his way to maturity without a mentor. The setting, in this…
Because it revealed the coke-snorting, ego-fueled corruption of Hollywood in the early 1980s with such acid wit, David Rabe’s play Hurlyburly became a huge audience hit when it burst onto Broadway in 1984. Here was the inside stuff from the Left Coast, gotten up in a frenetic new language combining…
