March Powwow offered fancy dancing, bliss

​The 2011 March Powwow and all the festivities therein taught me something I suspect is tremendously important. If you are wearing feathers, mirrors, bells, and dancing like you are a force of nature — if you are even in close proximity to people doing these things — it is near…

Denver’s Next Improv Star week 8 recap: in praise of the absurd

Somewhere between the literary obsessiveness and the heroin-haze that, together, consumed his life, William S. Burroughs developed a technique called cut-up writing, which uses fragments of preexisting works and rearranges them to create something new. The results, generally, are dizzying and nonsensical, but wonderfully so: because they are unintelligible, they…

Santa Fe Drive: The Street of Blue Lights

No, it’s not your imagination. The Art District on Santa Fe Drive does look different. That’s because about 200 new high-efficiency LED lights have been installed in all the street lamps along Santa Fe, between Sixth and Tenth avenues. Oh, and they’re blue. Not golden, and — for goodness sakes!…

RedLine and Super Ordinary: Yeah! That’s what I like about Denver!

It wasn’t First Friday or even Second Saturday, for that matter, but last Friday night was still art-heavy with receptions as the Month of Photography progresses. A lot of people, I found out, were over at Belmar, ringing in Feminine Influence, a woman-centric show curated by Katie Taft at Flash…

Our Commercial Culture: South Africa Fashion Week

Like graffiti, most adverts sloppily plastered to the screens of the technospere fall under the heading of worthless cultural detritus, but also like graffiti, some pop up out of nowhere and shock us with their inventiveness and brilliance. They cause us to take pause and reflect on our own humanness…

Hipster Traps: Will they work in Capitol Hill?

Someone is setting ‘hipster traps” in New York, as photographed by this Reddit user. The awesomely cartoonish bear trap surrounds a pack of American Spirits, a can of PBR and sunglasses. Please warn your jobless young friends to avoid these traps…

Chuck Norris does not celebrate birthdays. Birthdays celebrate Chuck Norris.

Celebrating Chuck Norris’s birthday is kind of like celebrating the birthday of time itself: impossible. Nevertheless, several news outlets have reported that the noted martial arts expert and godlike figure of Spartan manliness turns 71 today. Because anything having to do with Chuck Norris is by definition dangerous (the word…

How to get my job: Phone sex operator

Phone sex is a dying, uh, breed, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still a lucrative business. While many folks have turned to the slightly more anonymous internet to rock their socks off, plenty of people still desire a bit more of a human touch. We decided it was due…

Tonight: Dana Cain and Anthony Camera talk collecting photography

For anyone who missed the opening salvo of Denver’s Month of Photography on First Friday, there’s yet time (a lot of time, actually) to check out the more than one hundred venues dedicated this month to showcasing one of the more underappreciated fine arts, and tonight brings yet another excellent…

Our Commercial Culture: Batchelors Super Noodles

Our world is full of advertising. Everywhere we look, it’s buy this; feel like that. That’s a given. We’ve come to expect it — maybe even enjoy it sometimes as a subtle reminder that we’re not alone. “Other people want excellent bleaching power from their laundry detergent too? Gosh, I…

Denver’s Next Improv Star week 6 recap

The exquisite corps is an oddity generally only seen in literature. If you are an exceptionally obsessive lit nerd and/or have taken eighth grade English, you’ve probably encountered it somewhere: someone begins a story with a sentence and other people finish it, sentence by sentence, without seeing any part of…

Month of Photography: Nine shows to see

The city’s Month of Photography has gone from a blip to a major event over the last few years; credit photographer Mark Sink for choreographing this year’s liftoff into the stratosphere. MOP has emerged as a force to be reckoned with, but how do you navigate through all the shows…