A few years ago, my daughter used to be all about Grease, 24/7. She watched it all the time and knew all the songs. So how was I to know that in the ensuing years, wherein she became a full-on middle-schooler and teen-in-training, everything had changed? Yet she still inexplicably…
Dana Cain is the lady with her thumb in a million pies; a local maestra of event-planning, she throws several well-attended collectors’ expos, art shows, parties and chocolate fests each year. Her latest — and biggest — project is next summer’s Denver County Fair. But Dana is also an avid…
As we reported here last week, Boulder dancer/choreographer Mary Wohl Haan is dancing solo on the Pearl Street Mall for ten minutes at 10 a.m. every single day of this, the tenth month. So far, stage fright hasn’t gotten the better of the intrepid performer, who says she’s been there…
The story of how Denver alternative cartoonist Stan Yan and syndicated cartoonist and 2010 Inkspot Award-winner Keith Knight (The Knight Life), a Bostonian transplant living in California, became friends is one of those “six degrees” deals: They first exchanged work nine years ago at the Alternative Press Expo in San…
I don’t know how many stories Scott Simon has told during his long tenure as an NPR commentator and host. I would guess it’s in the tens of thousands at this point. But I do imagine that the one he tells in his book Baby, We Were Meant for Each…
Seems like a day doesn’t go by when I’m not writing something about Dana Cain, my favorite event coordinator, art collector, sci-fi and pop-culture geek, ’60s freak and frivolous idea machine. It’s as if she microchipped my brain one night as I lay sleeping and can read on her computer…
Talking to the Dead, which went up on the wall of the MacSpa the other day, is all about the occult as a commodity. Featuring a series of artsy Ouija Boards created by local artists and juried by Eric Matelski, the show reflects the season smartly and with panache, accompanied…
Cultural programming at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities has long been the product of partnerships with other arts organizations, something executive director Gene Sobczak credits with the center’s growth over the past couple of years. “So I wanted to see if the same model could fit with…
As a cross-cultural adoptive mother, I’ve read a hell of a lot of books on the subject: memoirs, treatises, psychology books, rants, you name it. But until I read NPR host Scott Simon’s Baby We Were Meant for Each Other, I’d never found an adoption book that rung completely true…
The Beats never completely go out of style, and every few years it seems like another book comes along to renew interest in the post-war, mid-century socio-literary movement led by such luminaries as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg is now the subject of a new film, Howl, that explores…
Loy Merck of the Meadowlark observed the open-air street festivals of Mexico and had an idea: What if he threw a fest in the same spirit, where kids could participate and sell their work? Nice idea. Now in its third year, Merck’s Larimer Sidewalk Arts Festival provides just such a…
Andrew Novick is known in this town for many singular reasons — a big one being his artfully out-of-control need to collect things, any things, nay, all things, and another his involvement with the legendary band the Warlock Pinchers — but his spot-on fashion sense is probably not one of…
Cultural programming at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities has long been the product of partnerships with other arts organizations, something executive director Gene Sobczak credits with the center’s growth over the past couple of years. “So I wanted to see if the same model could fit with…
I’m supposed to know everything that goes on in town, but here’s something that passed me by completely: For the last five years, the local firm BurstMarketing has been recording and posting podcasts of Tattered Cover book events, as many as three or four a week, online for free at…
A solo show by artist Michael Whiting, known for his sculptures of large painted steel squares combined to create iconic “pixilated” forms of animals or figures, opens later this month at Plus Gallery. And if all goes well, the show will coincide with the unveiling of “Rhino,” a self-explanatory, large-scale…
Boulder dancer/choreographer and free spirit Mary Wohl Haan began dancing in the street, literally, last Friday morning at 10 a.m. in Boulder in the “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” spirit for the entire month of October. It’s part of her HAAN Dances: 10 @ 10…
I know I felt lucky as I walked up to the new Horseshoe market in Berkeley Park on Saturday. It was cool and sunny and it smelled like pizza — really good pizza — and the parking lot at the Moore Olinger Howard Chapel was filled front to back with…
You could almost hear the monkeys chattering in the little back yard behind Tennyson Street’s Comfort Cafe on Friday night: Amid the lingering smoke of the pig they’d roasted there the night before, a blaze of fruity Mexi-color filled both the yard and the cafe itself for the sixth annual…
First Friday on the first of October? Sounds like a witching hour to me. There’s a distinct chill in the evening air, but don’t let that stop you from painting the art districts red…and azure, sienna, viridian, alizarin crimson and any other color you can think of. Pull on your…
You love cocktails. You love Wes Anderson. Methinks that could lead one to a dangerous crossroads. But that is the delicious dilemma of Bitter Bar mixologist Mark Stoddard, who tonight will host a Wes Anderson Cocktail Social, featuring mixed drinks inspired by four quirky Wes Anderson flicks: Bottle Rocket (a…
Nothing says Colorado better than an artful skateboard deck: The perfect union of our predilections for outdoor sport and DIY thinking speaks visual volumes about living on the edge, being casually modern and bursting with pride for the state’s magnificent climate. The folks at the Colorado branch of the American…
It’s the wild woman in Joy Barrett that makes her connect with the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, whose flamboyant mode of dress and intensely personal paintings have kept her a cult figure long after her death in 1954. “I admire her lifestyle and how she was able to express herself…
