Under the Certified Creative Districts program enacted in 2011, areas all over the state of Colorado have a chance to apply for financial and organizational aid to help grow their artistic communities and creative economies. The Pueblo Creative Corridor was one of the fifteen chosen for initial funding and development…
#48: Andy O’Leary Andy O’Leary, a Denverite since childhood, is a poet, a DJ at KUVO and a general man of the people. But music is his mistress. Ever since he was a kid in the ’60s whose brain was split open by the Beatles and then picked up a…
One of the handsomest and best exhibition spaces in town is in an artist cooperative, of all places: the main space at Ice Cube Gallery. Upon entry, visitors are confronted by a large room, cut up by moveable walls and topped with a high ceiling, that’s ideal for displaying art…
Charles Bunnell. A pioneer abstractionist is the star of Charles Bunnell: Rocky Mountain Modern at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The show was curated by Blake Milteer, the CSFAC’s museum director and curator of American art, who built it around the private collection of James and Virginia Moffett, who…
There’s something unsettling about Anne Fontaine’s Adore, and, surprisingly, it has nothing to do with the two middle-aged women who fall in love with each other’s teenage sons in the film. The cougars in question are Lil and Roz, best friends since childhood played with notable earnestness by Naomi Watts…
Here’s a humble wig-out, a curio that could endure beyond its creators’ more demonstrably successful works — and that for decades will certainly confound audiences who think they’re streaming/torrenting/eye-jacking some broad Paul Rudd comedy they had forgotten about. Prince Avalanche director David Gordon Green gives star Rudd more chances to…
Like The Wire or Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s oeuvre, Short Term 12 is the kind of film that sounds agonizingly depressing on paper but mesmerizes onscreen. It’s a delicate yet passionate creation, modest in scope but almost overwhelming in its emotional intricacy, ambition and resonance. Easily one of the best…
50 Shades of Loud. Heritage Square Music Hall will close down at the end of the year after more than two decades of hilarity in its Golden home, where a unique small company evolved an equally unique performing style. The shows are simultaneously bumbling and brilliantly staged, professional and apparently…
All manner of spoilers below. Nearly anyone with a grievance against America’s dysfunctional prison system can find a scene to illustrate their protest in the first season of Orange Is the New Black, Netflix’s women-behind-bars dramedy. Admittedly, the wonkiest or most disheartening issues, like prison privatization or endemic sexual assault,…
As another summer movie season characterized by cynicism and excess draws to a close, there are few activities less valuable or interesting than complaining about it. The blockbusters arrived, flattened cities, vomited effects, deafened with explosions, made money, didn’t make enough money, pleased populist critics, displeased elitist critics, and finally…
In 1953, the Venice Film Festival jury didn’t award its top prize, the Golden Lion. Instead, it made the highly unorthodox decision to award the second-place prize, the Silver Lion, to six films, among them I Vitelloni and Ugetsu. How did I know this? To celebrate the festival’s 70th edition,…
It’s 8:20 and you’re in the breakfast room at your hotel, having your customary bowl of muesli. By 9:20, you’re watching a spurned wife cut off her teenage son’s penis–and eat it–as retribution for her husband’s infidelity. Ah, Tuesday. But wow, Kim Ki-duk’s Moebius is some movie! If you have…
Expectations for a Denver Broncos team haven’t been as high as they are this year since the days of the legendary John Elway/Terrell Davis duo: They have one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time in Peyton Manning; a passing offense that got even deadlier with the addition of Wes…
Anthony Garcia lived in Globeville for 25 years before recently moving on, but as director of the Birdseed Collective, a grassroots group promoting neighborhood unity through the arts, he hasn’t left the community behind. And for the last three years, one of his favorite Globeville projects has been Street Kidz…
Cities on both U.S. coasts have had graffiti jams for years, but local street artist and muralist Dread wanted something bigger for Denver’s writers and crews. So he helped create Colorado Crush, a celebration of the often unheralded artistic style; the daylong block party, which includes music, painters and merchants,…
Local actor and theater educator Jose Antonio Mercado met Hollywood couple Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman the same way they met each other: acting in a production of The Berlin Circle in Los Angeles back in 2000. They all became fast friends — and in the case of Mullally and…
For those not familiar with New Belgium Brewing’s annual touring Tour de Fat celebration, the sight of local bicyclists parading down 17th Avenue from City Park in an array of costumes both silly and inspired might seem a little peculiar. But that’s how it is at the Tour de Fat,…
Hopping on Salon Romantik’s tour bus tonight will take you on a very different sightseeing adventure than you’d have on your typical tourist van or party bus. Fear & Prophets, the newest avant-garde performance from Control Group Productions — and the third in Salon Romantik’s series exploring romanticism — offers…
Andy O’Leary grew up on radio. As a kid, he holed up and listened to music and old-timey variety shows; now, as an adult, he’s translating his love of the theater of the mind to the stage. Inspired by Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, the host of KUVO’s Sunday-night…
“One of the great things about having thirty-plus distilleries in this state is that there’s something for everyone,” says Josh Mishell, co-organizer of the Colorado Distillers Festival. And with a couple dozen of those distilleries representing at the festival, attendees will be able to find spirits to their tastes. “I…
Mike Birbiglia is one dour clown. As the biggest star to come out of This American Life since David Sedaris, Birbiglia understands how to take the bitter flavors of life and sweeten them with humor. “There’s no subject that’s too sad and I won’t try to make funny,” says the…
The nose knows. You walk into a room, and instantly a smell connects you to a memory. And when that smell is connected to food, it’s often a family memory. “Smell is such a powerful sense, and it lives in the base of your neck, where all your memories are…
