Be prepared: A night at the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus owes far more theoretically to Tod Browning’s Freaks than it does to Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey. Started seven years ago in New York by graphic artist turned fire-eater Stephanie Monseu (aka Philomena) and her lover/mentor, Keith Nelson (Mr. Pennygaff),…
No genre of music generates giggles quite like polka. But while many see polka as the soundtrack for lederhosen-wearing seniors, Marty Rome sees it as a life-changing force. “I don’t know what kind of person I’d be if it weren’t for polka,” she says. A Denver polka addict for seventeen…
Last fall, a national search was conducted to find a replacement for Cydney Payton, the respected former director of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art who has taken over at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In January, BMoCA’s board of trustees announced its selection, Ken Bloom. It’s taken a few…
It’s hard to know what to call the Mizel Arts Center (350 South Dahlia Street, 303-399-2660). Its real name is the Mizel Family Cultural Arts Center, but the shorter Mizel Arts Center has been a convention for years. Confusing the issue is that the institution has been merged with the…
Far too often, those who work in the music industry are so concerned with making a living they often forget they’re capable, at their best, of making history as well. They sacrifice art and artists in the name of commerce, then sleep soundly wrapped in bedspreads made of silk and…
Woody Allen’s latest romp through old New York combines (among other things) a skirt-chasing insurance investigator with the charm of a rodent, a wise-cracking Vassar grad who takes no guff and a nightclub hypnotist in a sequined turban who doubles as a major jewel thief. The year is 1940. The…
After nearly a decade’s absence from the big screen, Suture auteurs Scott McGehee and David Siegel finally deliver a second feature with The Deep End, an exciting, sharply realized, melodramatic film noir based on Elizabeth Sanxay Holding’s novel The Blank Wall, which was also the source for the 1949 Max…
Once upon a time in lower downtown Denver, before anyone ever dreamed that there might one day be a hip, happening LoDo — or, in fact, ever dreamed that the rundown area of abandoned warehouses and pawnshops might one day be given the nickname “LoDo” — there was Larimer Square…
Denver is a festival town: Our hot, dry, sunny summers and balmy autumns are not just a boon to the sunscreen industry — they also provide the perfect backdrop for mass fun in the great outdoors. We eat and dance and view art under blue skies each year, and now,…
A couple of months ago, the Denver Art Museum and the city’s office of planning unveiled the latest model for a new addition to the museum. The wing, which is being designed by Berlin-based architect Daniel Libeskind, along with Denver’s Davis Partnership, is to be built adjacent to the existing…
If Sergeant York and Captain Willard ever run into each other on the battlefield — or the backlot — they’ll have plenty to talk about. Army food. The firepower of the Springfield ’03 versus the M-16 carbine. Mud and grime. The night sweats. Overwrought assistant directors. They might even discuss…
The social lessons of Captain Corelli¹s Mandolin, all of them suitable for framing in just about any dorm room, are these: War is bad. Love is good. The Italians love to sing, even when they’re supposed to be at war. The Greeks are freedom fighters. And whatever you do, don’t…
Well, my goodness, look at you! You are so alternative, so fringe, so punk! So artsy and alienated! So utterly aimless and oozing with angst! Tell us, girl, what ought we to call you? Edwina Scissorhands? That’s one easily justified reaction a viewer may take away from Thora Birch’s power-moping…
Art houses are out. Micro cinemas are in. These small, super-independent venues for showing underground films from across the country and around the world are on the rise throughout the United States. Filmmakers off the mainstream map can now bypass corporate distributors and get their films directly to audiences through…
Some poets don’t live in ivory towers. Some don’t even come close. New Mexican bard Jimmy Santiago Baca started out on a tougher road than most before clawing his way out of adversity on a bridging torrent of words. Despite ensuing laurels as a poet — from numerous literary awards…
Through August 25 at the Museo de las Américas, 861-865 Santa Fe Drive,
The Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173) is currently presenting three quirky solos. In the front space is I Need It ‘Cause I Want It, a sculpture show made up of recent pieces by Jill Nasman. All the pieces concern the consumer culture. In “Candy” (seen above), Nasman has built…
Ten years ago, Robert Harris picked up the phone to find on the other end a relative stranger bearing extraordinary news. This man was at a film exchange in Toronto, where movies are housed and rented out to exhibitors, and he was holding in his hands canisters of film containing…
Tran Anh Hung’s beautiful meditation on family ties and family traumas, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, marks a captivating new chapter in the career of the writer-director who was the first to give Americans a glimpse of Vietnamese filmmaking. In 1994, Tran’s The Scent of Green Papaya made its…
During this cinematic Summer of Dumb, it would be all too easy to celebrate half-assed cleverness as a virtue, especially when proffered by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who elevated the gross-out to an art form in Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary. Osmosis Jones, one of two films the Booger…
The sly galoot in the Big Suit was a hoot. Anyone who was at Red Rocks when Talking Heads singer David Byrne sauntered on stage the night of August 26, 1983, with his gassed-back hair, oversized outfit and white sneakers will probably agree that the concert was one of the…
If America were as ballet mad now as it was in the 1970s, or if last year’s Center Stage were as good a movie as The Turning Point, the name Ethan Stiefel would be as iconic as the name Mikhail Baryshnikov. It’s certainly familiar to anyone with even a passing…
