Do you know why Hello Kitty has no mouth? Because she speaks from the heart… She also has a hypnotic, straight-up obsessive effect on American consumers that hasn’t seemed to flag since her debut in the States in 1976. This ubiquitous, mouthless Sanrio-creation has become a veritable fetish for women,…
The word “disabled” continues to shed meaning this week as many of the biggest names in adaptive sports are in Breckenridge for the Disabled Sports USA Hartford Ski Spectacular, an annual winter sports festival that brings hundreds of athletes and aspiring athletes to Colorado for adaptive ski and snowboard lessons,…
It hit home for members of the theater community Sunday, when they opened the Denver Post and found a gaping void in the arts pages: There was no column by longtime critic and commentator John Moore. No review. Everyone had known John was taking the Post’s buyout. His Facebook fans…
Open Space made a few headlines this week as a physical store in downtown Boulder that sells nothing. Instead, the 300-square-foot room has a few phone-and-tablet experts who promise to guide customers to apps they can use — but didn’t know existed. That’s the model behind the business launched by…
Usually it’s a literary hodgepodge of writings about the West read by Colorado celebrities — not the glitzy ones, but a round-robin of teachers, historians and politicians. but tonight’s Words to Stir the Soul, an annual tradition curated by the University of Colorado’s Center for the American West, will focus…
Bree Davies loves her job at the Shirt Folding Store, where she’s worked off and on since 2006. But she does not love asshole customers who treat her like she’s an idiot. And in this post, she highlighted other misconceptions about retail employees…
The opening of the Clyfford Still Museum last month has prompted a resurgence of interest in early abstraction in Colorado, from the 1940s to the 1970s. In the beginning, Still was way ahead of even the most advanced artists here — as well as those in New York. Some Colorado…
Birger Sandzén. Though Birger Sandzén was born in Sweden, studied painting there and in Paris and later made his permanent home in Kansas, we in Colorado can claim him as one of our own. Sandzén found his muse here — in our stunning scenery — and after his first extended…
That this film was originally titled Goethe! should give you a sense of how much silly sturm und drang boosterism awaits. A biopic more fiction than fact, Young Goethe in Love opens in 1772, when the 23-year-old aspiring poet and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Alexander Fehling) flunks his bar…
John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the 1974 spy novel generally regarded as the writer’s finest, is predicated on a pair of enigmatic personalities: the colorless bureaucratic master-spook George Smiley and the double agent the Soviets have planted near the top of British intelligence whom Smiley must unmask. Although…
Flea almost cries. Twice. There’s your four-word summation of The Other F Word, a half-poignant, half-absurd documentary on punk-rocker dads, self-described as “a coming-of-middle-age story” that thrills to the sight of, say, Rancid’s Lars Frederiksen, who looks as though a tattoo parlor and a Claire’s fell on him simultaneously, sauntering…
The setting for The 1940’s Radio Hour is the Algonquin Room at the Hotel Astor in New York, where WOV radio (the V stands for Victory) is about to go on the air. In these days before social media and effortless continual connection, the excitement of radio is intense. WOV…
Book-to-stage adaptations are often wooden. Although the Denver Center Theatre Company had great success with Eric Schmiedl’s adaptation of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, a novel that reads rather like an unfolding tapestry, its versions of Pride and Prejudice and To Kill a Mockingbird felt like lectures. But playwright Laura Eason has…
I had the perfect Christmas present plan for the out-of-towners in my life: kitschy Western-inspired accessories and home goods. I walked around town, looking for them. Talulah Jones sold necklaces with horseshoes and wood carved into antlers for wall decor, but that was it. Fancy Tiger’s Holiday Handmade Fair featured…
Update: Due to technical difficulties at the Giving First website, Colorado Gives Day has been extended until noon tomorrow. Go ahead. Knock yourself out giving! Read on: It’s Colorado Gives Day, and since the stroke of midnight, nearly 1,000 Colorado nonprofits have been collecting donations in just about any charitable…
Before writing The Descendants, and before indie-film-world-big-deal-director Alexander Payne turned her novel into a George Clooney movie, Kaui Hart Hemmings worked at Westword, selling classified ads. In 1999, right out of Colorado College, the Hawaii native got her first job with us. “Had no idea what the hell to do…
When I’m not interviewing drag queens, reviewing concerts and rating Santas for Westword, I’m working at Shirt Folding Store. For twenty hours a week, I fold shirts (and, more important, jeans) alongside other part-timers, who in their other jobs might be bank tellers, professional eBay auctioneers, art-history majors and spoken-word…
The sixth annual round of the USA Fellowship grants — fifty awards of $50,000 each — were announced last night in Los Angeles, and exactly one went to a Colorado artist: Michelle Ellsworth of Boulder, for her work in the field of dance. Ellsworth has an MFA in dance from…
It’s the season of shopping, and the jing-a-ling of purses and wallets can be heard all over the 16th Street Mall — all the way into the Denver Pavilions, our convenient downtown mid-priced clothing mecca. And just in time for the 2011 holiday shopping season, the newly opened H&M store…
As part of the event hoopla surrounding the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, Curious Theatre will be putting on a play about Still’s life. “[The Clyfford Still Museum] wanted to make a neighborhood artistic connection,” says Curious education director Dee Covington. Over a year and a half in the…
First lines are particularly important to Susan Orlean, which makes it that much tougher to start an article about someone who has written about almost everything herself. The New Yorker author’s most recent book, released more than ten years after her last extra-long-form non-fiction endeavor, The Orchid Thief, begins with…
The Red Ball Fashion Show filled the Exdo Event Center with good times and great fashions on Sunday night — and all for an excellent cause, the Colorado Aids Project. CPagano was there:…
