Whether participating firsthand at the Pepsi Center or in front of the TV, convention-watching, what do we all need when the DNC closes up its smoke-filled rooms for the night? Comedy! Luckily, the town will be overflowing with it, but self-proclaimed liberal Jewish political comic Scott Blakeman hopes his nightly…
First off, if you’re expecting some guy in whiteface trying to get out of an imaginary box on a street corner, forget it. The illustrious San Francisco Mime Troupe has spent most of its fifty-year history taking on issues in a manner that’s decidedly out of the box: Since the…
To borrow a phrase from the infamous 1968 DNC, the whole world’s watching. That’s why the City of Denver put its irons in the fire months ago to create Dialog:City: An Event Converging Art, Democracy and Digital Media, a public program showcasing commissioned works by renowned artists that doubles as…
I’m partial to corny hometown celebrations, and Littleton’s is undoubtedly one of the best around. No measly weekend of face painting, goofy competitions and pancake breakfasts, the ongoing eleven-day Western Welcome Week summer fete is actually all this and more, featuring no end of family fun, from gold panning to…
Chickasaw poet and novelist Linda Hogan, a Colorado native who grew up in Oklahoma and now teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is a quintessential writer’s writer and thinker whose works often intermingle environmentalist concerns and respect for nature with historical Native American and feminist perspectives. It’s an…
Rhubarb? An acquired taste that sometimes needs doctoring up before it’s palatable. So is Garrison Keillor. NPR listener or not, you either love or hate the guy, but it’s his entourage that tips the scale in his favor: The laconic denizens of Lake Woebegone, fictional gumshoe Guy Noir, the stellar…
America owes a lot to her dreamers, the people who stayed true to their beliefs, building personal empires — and anti-empires — that helped shape what’s come to be known as the American Way. Which, if you think about it, is really a story of multiple roads taken. Iconoclasts, romantics,…
I tried to chat with Betsy Tobin by phone, I really did — but her cell signal dove in and out like a shadow creeping across a rock as she traveled through the expansive desert southwest toward a gig at the Grand Canyon. Our conversation wasn’t meant to be, perhaps,…
Mike Judge is a deeper guy than you might have thought. That’s the only way to explain why The Animation Show 4, the latest in a series of independent animation anthologies the Beavis and Butt-head auteur curates by his lonesome, is so unexpectedly sophisticated, showing off an international flavor and…
How Gregorio Alcaro and Trinidad “Trini” Gonzalez — cousins whose family members started the Casa Mayan restaurant in Auraria in the 1930s and maintained it into the 1970s — managed to find a way to link their enduring family history to the approaching Democratic National Convention is a story almost…
In the acoustic-music realm, über-mandolinist Chris Thile needs no introduction, but some of his Punch Brothers bandmates, regrettably, might. Guitarist Chris Eldridge, bassist Greg Garrison, banjo player Noam Pikelny and violinist Gabe Witcher, who join the erstwhile Nickel Creeker in the musically adventurous sideshow (which includes their masterwork, The Blind…
If you’ve ever felt like a stranger in a strange land, you’ll completely grok Frolics and Frippery, a new exhibit of “intimate objects for the body” created by area artist Janice Jakielski, opening today at Vertigo Art Space. The soft-sculpture objects — cloth goggles, hearing devices and other wearables —…
Although textile maven Dianne Denholm’s TACtile Textile Arts Center has been developing for several months, she’s just now beginning to truly flesh out the center as both a meeting place and classroom for fiber artists and their guilds, and a public showcase for their wares. So tonight’s open house will…
We’re all embracing it these days, yet there’s more to the local food movement than meets the eye. After all, it’s nice to know that your food has a shortened carbon footprint and all, but did you ever stop to think about where it actually comes from? On Zweck’s Farm,…
Some rock photographers have it, others don’t, but Lynn Goldsmith is the pinnacle to which they all should aspire. A photographer since childhood and, perhaps more important, a career fan, she has a loving way with the lens that infuses her celebrity prints with surging, active life. That she loves…
I’m the first to admit that Bill Maher is an asshole. He’s a sexist jerk and a foolishly staunch libertarian, and yet I love him to death and feel lost and depressed every Friday night that his HBO show is on furlough — which it is right now, until August…
What the heck is a Pet-o-Mat? In Colorado fiber artist Christine Marie Davis’s own words, it’s “a mini museum of tactile art contained within a rotating sandwich vending machine. It is home to 49 curious creatures that live in the remodeled pet condos awaiting visitors to touch and play with…
Wandering artist/filmmaker and Stan Brak-hage disciple Eric Waldemar used to live and work here, showing films at the Denver International Film Festival and local galleries until he departed to study at New York University ten years ago. In between, he says, disaster ensued: His personal life fell apart and nothing…
Big thinkers from the little town of Glendale really do have a lot to crow about, now that the block-wide Infinity Park complex, with its state-of-the-art rugby stadium, newly minted YMCA-run fitness center and not-quite-finished event center, is mostly off the ground and running. And what better time to do…
Leave it to the alternative galleries to host an alternative July Fourth bash: Pirate, NEXT, Edge and Zip 37 galleries are celebrating the auspicious convergence of Independence Day (get it?) and First Friday with an All-Gallery Weenie Roast Picnic, taking place tonight from 6 to 10 p.m. and masterminded by…
Along with the site’s rustic auditorium, the 1898 dining hall is one of two original buildings at Boulder’s historic Colorado Chautauqua, which was created at the turn of the last century as a summer stopover for a then-vigorous Chautauqua Movement circuit that brought entertainment, lecturers and artists to pastoral resorts…
With a Democratic National Convention hot on our heels, these are downright presidential times in Denver. On the first of July, it’s already the sort of summer when everything local has developed some sort of cultural tie to a political theme. We’re all jumping on soapboxes to expound, watching and…
