Because I grew up in London, where the ghosts of Roman soldiers, Saxon traders, Renaissance poets, Victorian merchants, Cockney fishmongers, bishops and queens and kings and murdered princes whispered beneath the pavement, it took me a long time to acknowledge that there was any such thing as Colorado history –…
Love is hard to find. If you find anything — anything at all — remotely resembling it, you should hang on for dear life. Or at least take a long, thoughtful second look, no matter how absurd the thing seems initially or how tempted you are to cut and run…
The Caretaker. The setting is a grimy, one-room flat filled with papers, boxes and mismatched bric-a-brac. It’s an appropriate mole hole for sad, befuddled Aston, who thinks he’s good with his hands, tinkers constantly with a screwdriver and dreams about building a shed in the yard — but it also…
The blues captured the musical imaginations of many a young white pop star on either side of the Atlantic back in the ’60s, but somehow the British bluesers came out with the higher profile, while those stateside — many of them associated with Paul Butterfield or the Siegel-Schwall Band —…
Ruralites Bren Frisch and John Roberts take both farming and parenting more seriously than most. While they work the fields at their Longmont-area Sunflower Farm, they’re also active as foster and adoptive parents who recognize the value of farm life in rearing kids who’ve had a rough start. A few…
For an industry in decline, print journalism has done a fashion publicist’s job of staying in vogue, particularly among the more stylish of career-seeking college grads. Never mind telling these BlackBerry-toting eager beavers that even an unpaid gig in the field is as rare as a winning lottery ticket: The…
After all that, just…this? After all the anticipation, all the hype, all the product available on toy-store shelves and kiddie sections at bookstores, after all the promise that this would be the most super of Superman movies, all we get is just this…this…remake? Because let’s first call Superman Returns what…
Tragic hipsters, unite! What could be a more effective antidote to the scourges of school’s-out joy and summer sunshine than a month-long tribute to David Lynch? Beginning Friday, June 30, Starz FilmCenter will present a series of five films by the celebrated creator of the groundbreaking TV series Twin Peaks…
Cydney Payton, the director and curator of Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, has really outdone herself with Decades of Influence: Colorado 1985 – Present, her four-part paean to the art of our region. The first chapter in the blockbuster is on view at the MCA itself, where Payton has installed the…
Of the four aspects of Cydney Payton’s marvelous Decades of Influence: Colorado 1985 – Present, the part on view at the Carol Keller Project Space (1513 Boulder Street, 303-298-7554) is by far the edgiest. When I first heard that the Keller spot was part of the Decades extravaganza, I naturally…
The Armory Group. In a summer art calendar that’s uncharacteristically filled with significant exhibitions, The Armory Group: 40 Years has got to be one of the most important of them all. The story begins back in 1966 in Boulder — specifically, in the fine-arts department at the University of Colorado…
An old woman lies dying as her son sits by the bedside. Tension vibrates between them. Each character offers a poetic monologue that feels a bit forced; when a playwright has someone gaze out above the heads of the audience and wistfully emote, the writing needs to be more powerful…
There are many, many ways for a production to be awful, and The Yiddish Are Coming, at the New Denver Civic Theatre, hits on just about all of them. It’s a cheap little venture — small cast, easy set and costumes, empty-headed concept — put together for the sole purpose…
The Caretaker. The setting is a grimy, one-room flat filled with papers, boxes and mismatched bric-a-brac. It’s an appropriate mole hole for sad, befuddled Aston, who thinks he’s good with his hands, tinkers constantly with a screwdriver and dreams about building a shed in the yard — but it also…
For comic geeks, an X-Men game that promises to fill in the backstory between movies sounds hotter than a date with Jean Grey. Finally, we get to discover what Wolverine has been up to between films — besides winning Tony Awards as alter ego Hugh Jackman, of course. That’s the…
The Devil’s Sword (Mondo Macabro) Few trash movies live up to their reputation, but here’s a balls-out wonder that surpasses it. Grab a 12-pack of Bintang and cue up this jaw-unhinging slab of Indonesian sword-and-sorcery circa 1983 — a start-to-finish feast of martial arts, mullets, flying heads, vestal virgins, dry-ice…
Commander in Chief: 2-Disc Inaugural Edition Part 1 (Disney) The Complete Sherlock Holmes Collection (MPI) Cow Belles (Disney) Danger After Dark (TLA) Evil (Magnolia) Is It Really So Strange? (Frameline) Failure to Launch (Paramount) Family Affair: Season One (MPI) Fear Factor: The First Season (Universal) Imagine Me & You (Fox)…
The one bad thing about PrideFest is that it’s never long enough. We wait all year for our one day in the sun, and when it’s finally here, we give mad props. We wear silly costumes, we march in the parade, we dance, we flirt, we drink warm, weak draft…
Every generation needs an anthem, and for the Beat Generation, it was “Howl.” Spewed onto paper in the mid-’50s by a young Allen Ginsberg, the poetic rant began with “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” and foresaw much of what’s come since, from the rise…
Eureka! There’s no Starbucks in Silver Plume. No Baby Gap. No Disneyfied vision of what the Olde West must have looked like. That’s because Silver Plume is still the real deal: a National Historic Landmark District largely unchanged from the way it looked when silver was dug out of the…
Tango — the dance of love — seems to be gaining the kind of popularity that swing dancing garnered six or seven years ago. And although you might be tempted to brush off the tango scene as yet another dance fad, there’s more to those slow-slow-quick-quick-slow steps than meets the…
Bicycling is freakin’ cool. It is. Rollerblading never even neared cycling’s mastery of coolness. Actually, there’s nothing that can contend with biking, and apparently, more than 18,000 people in metro Denver agree: That’s how many participated in last year’s Bike to Work Day. “This year, we expect around 20,000 people,”…
