It’s a Doozy

SAT, 10/25 Feel free to prance around in your unmentionables at tonight’s second incarnation of Floozy Night at the Buckhorn Exchange.Sponsored by local saloon girls, soiled doves and floozies — actually just a group of grown women who wanted an excuse to parade around in frilly costumes — this sultry…

Women’s Voices

FRI, 10/24 According to Boulder activist group Vox Feminista, it’s time to declare war. The target? White supremacy. And the battle starts with tonight’s premiere of White Lies.”We are a group of mostly white women who live in Boulder, which is predominantly white,” explains Joy Boston, founder of the fourteen-year-old…

Feats of Strength

There’s something edifying about retrospectives. I guess it’s their epic scope. Collected in a single place is a representative sample of an artist’s entire professional lifetime. Stylistic phases are marked, as are the topics of interest that the artist embraced over the years. Yet despite these obvious virtues, retrospectives are…

Artbeat

The front spaces at Sandy Carson Gallery (760 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-8585) are fitted out with Frank Sampson paintings (see page 57), but in the back gallery and extending into the conference room is a separate solo, Virginia Folkestad: Isthmus/go-between. Since the early 1990s, Folkestad has used traditional home life…

Denver Time

I’ve never been a particular fan of John Denver, other than acknowledging that he wrote a few pleasant tunes. And despite decades living in Colorado, I’ve been pretty much immune to the myth of the West. My dreams are filled with cities — Prague, London, New York — rather than…

Mysterious Journey

Underneath the Lintel is a seventy-minute one-act play that takes the form of a lecture by a buttoned-up, pedantic, spiritually timid Dutch ex-librarian. Peering into the audience at the very beginning, he lets us know that he’s disappointed by the turnout (despite the fact that the Aurora Fox theater is…

Smooth Sayles-ing

The six vivid women thrown together by fate in John Sayles’s Casa de los Babys are frequently divided by their bickering, but they are united in a deep common yearning — and of that Sayles has made an observant and provocative drama about the ambiguities of adult life and the…

Saint Veronica

Before you crack your wallet for Veronica Guerin, you’d be well off to rent a video of the 2000 release When the Sky Falls (working titles: When Heaven Falls and, natch, Veronica Guerin), of which this new Veronica Guerin is basically a tarted-up remake. Same story, same scenarios, same basic…

Flick Pick

This year’s North American tour of The Animation Show, opening Wednesday, October 22, and running through Friday, October 24, as part of the University of Colorado’s International Film Series, features a collection of award-winning animated shorts from eight countries. They were chosen by the co-producers, Academy Award nominee Don Hertzfeldt…

Angelou Spreads Her Words

Anyone who has ever read works written by Maya Angelou, or heard her speak, knows that wisdom radiates from her words. But while this renaissance woman delivers many lessons, inspiration is at the heart of her message. “There are certain truths that I think everybody needs to realize, one being…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

Thursday, October 16 Colorado is book country, so it follows that it’s also home to a bumper crop of published authors. You can meet more than 35 of them at this year’s Colorado Book Awards Gala, hosted tonight at the Seawell Ballroom, 14th and Curtis streets, by the Colorado Center…

Fright Full

‘Tis the season when jack-o-lanterns glow, skeletons rattle and houses morph into terror dens that crank out fear for fun. Here are the venues that the werewolves of Westword found to be the most fang-tastic: Das Meyer Fine Pastry Chalet, 13251 West 64th Avenue in Arvada, has traded its rolling…

Heads or Tails?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Guy walks into a bar and orders the cheapest domestic draft available. Bartender pours the man a beer before setting it down on the counter along with a small plastic coin with a bar logo on it. “The chip,” the barkeep explains, “is…

Cultural Pioneers

WED, 10/22 Galen and Barbara Rowell perished on August 12, 2002, when their small plane crashed outside of Bishop, California, but their efforts on behalf of Tibet continue. Galen Rowell, considered one of the world’s foremost adventure photographers, had recently returned from a remote area of Tibet. His pictures from…

Dino Might

FRI, 10/17 Tyrannosaurus Rex and dozens of his big-boned friends will roar into town today as part of the Dinosaur World Tour. Featuring the largest flying-reptile exhibit ever assembled — including the giant Quetzalcoatlus, with its 27-foot wingspan — Dinosaur World offers more than a hundred displays, including 2,000 square…

Small but Powerful

SAT, 10/18 Like most local gallery-goers, you’re probably going to find yourself fighting the crowds at the Denver Art Museum to see El Greco to Picasso from the Phillips Collection at some point during the coming weeks. All well and good: We don’t always have such a wonderful opportunity to…

Revival Music

SAT, 10/18 When Augustana Arts executive director Donald Tallman heard that renowned vocal quartet Anonymous 4 would be making its final cross-country tour, he jumped at the chance to book the group for a farewell Denver concert, which will be held tonight at Augustana Lutheran Church, 5000 East Alameda Avenue…

Everybody Loves Painting

Let me say this right off the bat: The fall-winter blockbuster at the Denver Art Museum, El Greco to Picasso from the Phillips Collection, is one of the best shows ever presented in our region. Not since the DAM’s Matisse show a few years ago has the city been graced…

Artbeat

A couple of times a year, Cherry Creek’s Gallery M (2830 East Third Avenue, 303-331-8400) puts on a photography show that focuses on a single photographer using traditional methods. The big fall exhibit, Bob Kolbrener: Celebrations of Nature, is the latest example of this worthy program. The show features sumptuous,…

Masters of Puppet

After ducking a little local controversy, the two-man Puppetry of the Penis is yanking in the Colorado crowds. Lincoln Davies and new-kid-on-the-jock Jef Benjamin are exposing their talents in the name of art. Once you get used to the terror of seeing two naked men and a seventeen-by-fourteen-foot Godzilla-sized phallus…

Members Only

Simon Morley, the Aussie creator of the internationally notorious comedy Puppetry of the Penis, summed up his unlikely theatrical juggernaught with a smile and a shrug in one interview. “It’s art. It’s a piece of skin. It’s there to be laughed at. Get over it,” he said. Considering that Morley’s…

Czech Pleaser

When we first see Fanda, the craggy, octogenerian hero of the sublime Czech tragicomedy Autumn Spring, he alights from a sleek black limousine under a rich canopy of trees and begins looking at a luxurious country mansion with obvious distaste. “Quite shabby,” he sniffs to the obsequious sales agent at…