The Open Space Between the Lines

Can you hear the dreams crackling like a campfire? Can you hear the dreams sweeping through the pine trees and tipis? Can you hear the dreams laughing in the sawdust? Can you hear the dreams shaking just a little bit as the day grows long? Can you hear the dreams…

DIY Walden

It sounds like a gala event for a frog, but the Parade of Ponds is designed more for parched humans — not amphibians — who are eager for a little waterfront property close to the homestead. Sponsored by BR&D Landscape as a fundraiser for Hudson Gardens, the parade gives attendees…

Big Splash

When Colorado’s Ocean Journey co-founders Bill Fleming and Judy Petersen-Fleming moved to town in 1992 with an idea for an aquarium in the Platte Valley, they appeared to be a couple of pipe-dreaming flakes. The very idea of a facility devoted to marine life seemed absurd in landlocked Denver –…

Art Beat

ILK, at 554 Santa Fe Drive, is a raggedy, upstart co-op that nonetheless frequently displays some of the most original art around. It is currently presenting a pair of intriguing solo shows. In ILK’s south gallery is New Works by Victoria del Carmen Pérez; in the north gallery is Size…

The Gods Must Be Crazy

What is it they say? That even a flea can reach Mount Olympus riding in Pegasus’s mane? Well, in the case of the new Albert Brooks comedy The Muse, Brooks is the flea and Pegasus is his delectable co-star, Sharon Stone. But I get ahead of myself. In The Muse,…

Conjoined at Birth

There is something fairy-tale-like, but also deeply human, about Twin Falls Idaho, a gentle, beautifully realized tale of love and intimacy that marks the feature-film debut of identical twins Mark and Michael Polish. Michael directed the film, and both brothers wrote the script and star in it. It is what…

Cultural Revolution

Shifu Howie Solow would shrug off the notion, but he’s easily the Boulder Baryshnikov of Shaolin Hung Mei Pai Kung Fu. Wiry and hard, with poised muscles, Shifu Solow is an ordained martial arts master, and it shows in the fluid snap, crackle and pop of his artful movements. Every…

Down by the River

Imagine yourself on the banks of the South Platte, lifting a Zang’s brew with one furry-tongued William McGaa — Denver’s actual founder, or at least that’s what he said — as the sun sinks below the Rockies skyline. Never mind that this McGaa, in the company of his three Indian…

Straight Shooter

The Center for the Visual Arts is celebrating its first anniversary this summer in an expanded space on Wazee Street. The CVA, which operates under the auspices of Metropolitan State College of Denver, was originally located around the corner on 17th Street, in the building that is now occupied by…

Art Beat

Big-time local ceramics talent Rodger Lang is currently the subject of Lines & Space & Time at Artists on Santa Fe, 747 Santa Fe Drive. Though it’s economical for a solo exhibit, with only a few groupings of pieces, the show does lay out examples of each of the major…

Teacher’s a Pet

If Kevin Williamson has anything to say about it, the good works of noble movie schoolteachers like Mr. Chips and Miss Dove and Mr. Holland will be wiped out in one fell swoop. In their place, the creator of TV’s hormonal Dawson’s Creek series proposes an unmitigated horror: a high…

Play Right

As a filmmaker, actor John Turturro clearly believes in drawing from personal experience: His directorial debut, the 1992 Mac (which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes), was avowedly based on his father’s life. For his second feature, Illuminata, Turturro takes a look at the theater, showing us the ambitions, fears…

Blue in the Face

Lo and behold the plight of the American gangster. John Gotti, the Dapper Don, has been sent down the river. His big-time heavy, Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, is famous and face-lifted for being a no-good dirty-rat stool pigeon. And Robert De Niro, the reigning deity of hoodlum heavies in films…

Night & Day

Thursday August 12 Author Patricia Hersh doesn’t just report on American teens in her book A Tribe Apart: A Journey Into the Heart of American Adolescence–she quietly weaves herself into the fabric of their lives, the result of which is a fascinating, immediate cultural study that reads like an especially…

Pandora’s Box

When it comes to television, no one’s ever gone broke taking the low road. And when it comes to the Web, let’s face it: Taking the low road may be the only way to make a quick buck (we’ll be impressed with our Amazon stock when the company actually starts…

The Information Flyway

If you believe that “the truth is out there” but that it’s being smothered by diabolical forces, Dean Stonier can help you. Since 1980, Stonier, a congenial retired nutritionist, has served as the director for Global Sciences Congress, a Thornton-based collaborative that gathers the kind of inside-out info that Scully…

Seasonal Winds

Well, it’s that time of year again–late summer, when the art world, which is centered in New York, essentially shuts down, with many galleries actually closing for the entire month of August. This hiatus is a response to the stifling heat and high humidity that engulfs the East Coast this…

All in the Family

If you’re tired of being bombarded by wall-to-wall news coverage of heinous crimes, tragic accidents and inane controversies, or of slogging through the nightly prime-time lineup of hospital dramas (in which half of the characters die), crime movies (in which the characters commit the acts that send their victims to…

Kiss of Death

Larry Kramer is perhaps best known as a pugnacious sort who regularly vilifies the editors of the New York Times and intimidates genteel talk-show hosts like Charlie Rose. In 1985, though, the gay activist and co-founder of ACT-UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) became famous for writing The Normal…

KISS-ed Off

Do not be fooled: Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss receive top billing in Detroit Rock City, but KISS doesn’t actually appear in the film until its final three minutes. And when the band does show up, its members clad in their de rigueur leather-and-greasepaint getups, it’s…

Murphy’s Law

Filmmaker Bobby Bowfinger, the lead character in the intermittently funny Hollywood satire Bowfinger, starring Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy, has a dream. Nothing so grand as an Academy Award or even a table down front at the Golden Globes. No, when Bowfinger (Steve Martin) allows his fantasies to run wild,…

Over the Rainbow

In truth, the miles between Hong Kong and Denver can’t be counted. So how does one individual reconcile such an insurmountable distance? M. Elaine Mar doesn’t exactly have the answer, but she’s living testimony to the process, a uniquely American rite of passage she chronicles on the most personal level…