“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” So begins The Metamorphosis, and those famous opening words are unmistakably Franz Kafka’s — at least they were, until local independent filmmaker Gwylym Cano decided to make a few changes…
Maybe it has to do with how complicated the world is, but for whatever reason, contemporary art — locally, nationally and internationally — has been getting increasingly stripped down. Of course, there’s nothing new about minimalism. Even the so-called original, the 1950s- and ’60s-era New York School variant, was hardly…
There’s a very nice show at Pirate right now called said and done. Installed in the main gallery, it is made up of four colored-pencil drawings and six oil paintings by Denver artist Wes Magyar, a contemporary realist. Magyar’s subject matter is the ordinary, if alienated, events in the lives…
One of the fun things about the media is that many people who work in it lie almost constantly, creating a social minefield that keeps everybody hoppin’. For instance, take the big studios (please). Sometimes we call them up and say, “Hiya, we noticed that you have a major motion…
Looking at the original Blade now, it’s not as impressive as it seemed at the time; its hugely positive reception among the comic-book crowd may have been simply because it didn’t suck. It came out before The Matrix brought Hong Kong-style wires and trenchcoats to the world’s attention, and also…
If guitarist Mason Williams hadn’t ventured to Aspen in the winter of 1960, he might never have written the song that made him famous: “Classical Gas.” Williams, then a 21-year-old college student, was playing gigs in Oklahoma City with a folk group called the Wayfarers Trio. Since Aspen was a…
At the close of Sounds of the River, Da Chen’s second memoir set in the tumult of a rapidly changing People’s Republic of China, young Chen is ready to depart for America — a place akin to another planet for the country boy from southeast China, whose hard work and…
If you’re like me, you’re getting pretty tired of all the brown grass, bare trees and snow that’s wearing out its welcome around here. Spring officially starts next week, but the signatures of winter are sure to be around for at least another month. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, then,…
The contemporary craze for backlit translucent photos in wall-hung boxes seems to be moving full speed ahead, and it has been for at least a decade. This type of thing is so popular right now among artists that it has completely transcended its original role as a simple stylistic device…
In choosing to mount Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George, the Trouble Clef Theatre Company has taken on a hugely ambitious project and, to a large extent, has succeeded with it. Written in the early 1980s, Sunday in the Park is a musical about art, its place in…
Kissing Jessica Stein ends several times — a likely explanation of why a film with so short a running time, 94 minutes, feels as though it lasts much longer — and each conclusion satisfies; each feels real, natural and, best of all, inevitable. That is, except for the actual finale,…
Ice Age poses a heretofore unfathomable question: Is it possible for computer-generated characters to go through the motions? Everything about this endeavor — from 20th Century Fox, playing cartoon catch-up after 2000’s Titan A.E., which seemed to be stolen from Saturday-morning television — feels pilfered and stitched together. There’s not…
It’s the usual sad story in today’s numbers-oriented music business: San Francisco’s Peter Case had a hit in the early ’80s with the power-popping Plimsouls, but like the girl in the song (“A Million Miles Away”), success proved elusive. Since then, Case has continued to do what he really does…
They may wear gorilla masks, but the Guerrilla Girls don’t monkey around. Members of this anonymous group of women artists, formed in 1985 to highlight the lack of women and minorities in the art world, are coming to Denver for the first time to raise a little consciousness. Sporting simian…
Artyard, Denver’s premier sculpture gallery, turns sweet sixteen this year, and director Peggy Mangold is quietly celebrating with Sixteen Years at Artyard, a small show devoted to the gallery’s two biggest attractions over those years: her husband, Bob Mangold, and Chuck Parson. Bob Mangold holds a distinguished position in the…
There are a couple of interesting shows right now at CORE New Art Space (2045 Larimer Street, 303-297-8428). Up front is Doug Craft: Collage and Montage in Golden Ratios, and in the spacious, handsome back gallery is Juhl Wojahn. Though he’s in his late forties and has been dabbling in…
The central joke in the ’40s comedy Arsenic and Old Lace concerns spinster sisters Abby and Martha Brewster, who are pillars of the local church, much loved in their community, and always happy to provide soup for the sick and hospitality to the lonely. They live with their nephew, Teddy,…
Science fiction can wow us with gadgetry, but only the truly ambitious stuff lights up our imaginations with disturbing and unshakable aberrations, be they incredible shrinking men, fifty-foot women or Sting’s winged panties from Dune. Within this vast genre, it figures that the ultimate human construct — time — proves…
Cell phones and silk saris, dot-coms and arranged marriages — Monsoon Wedding, the latest film from Indian-born director Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala) captures the heady mix of old and new, rich and poor, traditional and modern that defines contemporary India. A sort of Father of the Bride set…
Since its inception five years ago, the National Education Association’s Read Across America celebration has fallen on (or around) March 2, the birthday of Theodor Seuss Geisel. Best known in the kid-lit realm as Dr. Seuss, in the 1950s Geisel invented a unique literacy-boosting formula by creating attention-grabbing kids’ books…
Sculptor Ann Cunningham’s life is like her works: a touchy-feely gestalt of related things. Tactile art is her forte, but the title doesn’t fully describe her craft’s sensual boundaries. She also teaches art to blind people, trying to get inside their unimaginably different world. Teaching, the Golden resident readily notes,…
It was back in 1990 when the Denver Art Museum hired curator R. Craig Miller to establish a department of architecture, design and graphics. Miller was working at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art when he was stolen away by Met alum and longtime friend Lewis Sharp. Sharp has made…
