To Market, to Market

SUN, 5/9 The lot at the corner of Tenth Avenue and Osage Street is about to blossom. But it won’t be an array of flowers that sprouts today. Instead, the west-side neighbors who wanted to fill the site with all the color and flavor of an international marketplace will get…

Fetching Idea

SAT, 5/8 Teach your pooch to soar through the air at today’s Colorado Disc Dogs Spring Training Seminar, a hands-on workshop that covers such topics as how to throw a Frisbee for your dog and the rules of the game for canines. “We start with the basics — the correct…

The Kitsch Is All Right

FRI, 5/7 Hot rods, tattoos, nudie flicks and cartoons — such are the sources of inspiration for lowbrow art, a movement on display at tonight’s opening reception for Cute, Cuddly and Curvaceous, the inaugural show at D.C. Gallery. The concept of “lowbrow” art originated in the surf and custom-car culture…

Palsy Becomes a Punchline

MON, 5/10 Local comedian Josh Blue turns his disability into a laughing matter. Blue, who says he “puts the cerebral in cerebral palsy,” uses humor to help audiences overcome preconceived ideas about the disabled. And while he has recently caught the eye of scouts for David Letterman and Ellen DeGeneres,…

Mexican Heritage

There’s an important exhibit at the Denver Art Museum that’s being given the royal treatment, which makes sense, because it’s filled with regal pieces. The blockbuster is Painting a New World: Mexican Art and Life, 1521-1821, a mammoth endeavor that includes more than fifty paintings, many of them monumental in…

Artbeat

California-based photographer Rick Nahmias was researching famed TV journalist Edward R. Murrow when he came upon Harvest of Shame, Murrow’s 1960s documentary about the dreadful living conditions of farm workers. The film inspired Nahmias to revisit the topic, and the results are the dozens of wonderful photos that make up…

Now Showing

Evan. For the first show at Capsule on Santa Fe, director Lauri Lynnxe Murphy chose to feature the work of her old friend and fellow ILK co-op founder, Evan Colbert. Not all of the pieces in the wonderful solo are new; a few were done years ago, when Colbert had…

Small Town Downer

I’ve been a fan of Lanford Wilson’s work ever since I saw one of his early one-acts at the legendary Caffe Cino in New York in the mid-1960s. It might have been This Is the Rill Speaking, and I think it played in tandem with Sam Shepard’s Icarus’s Mother. I…

Badly Dated

I’m absolutely mystified by the weakness of this script. Playwright Rebecca Gilman has won awards and been praised in all the right places. Although it had problems, I rather liked her Spinning Into Butter, which was produced at the Denver Center a couple of years ago. But Boy Gets Girl…

Encore

Bat Boy: The Musical. The character of Bat Boy is based on a recurring character in the Weekly World News — a two-foot-high boy, found in a cave in West Virginia, who endorsed Al Gore for president and later almost died after being sprayed by a pesticide truck. In the…

Teen Spleen

One thing few may mention about Mean Girls is that it could have been unrelentingly terrible. It isn’t — it’s actually pretty fabulous on its own terms — but consider: a rush-job comedy (hastily lensed a few months ago) constructed around a high-concept title with built-in ka-ching and endless potential…

Kill Wil

Suicide made merry. Brotherly devotion tinged with carnal deceit. Personal tragedy transformed by malicious humor. These are some of the oil-and-water notions advanced by Lone Scherfig’s Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself), a mood-switching meditation on love and death that goes out of its way to yank our chains. From the…

The World According to Ki-duk

Ever evolving, always changing, the universe nonetheless sustains many constants. Hair metal never really goes away. British women inevitably become besotted grumps. And short men always turn into intolerable control freaks. Another “true generality” holds that males of all statures develop their innate behavioral characteristics within patriarchal cultures that, while…

After the Fall

Those seeking a spiritual counterpart to the yin of Lynne Ramsay’s masterfully moody Morvern Callar will find their yang in David Mackenzie’s exquisitely sorrowful Young Adam. Art-house aficionados may recall that in Ramsay’s recent film, a young male writer commits suicide, leaving his simple girlfriend to absorb his very being…

Missing Links

Pour a couple of Old-Fashioneds into the average golf historian, and it won’t be long until he gets misty-eyed over Robert Tyre Jones Jr. Jones not only ruled golf in the 1920s, the fellow will tell you; he also epitomized the gentlemanly ideal of the old Scottish game, transplanted to…

Flick Pick

The strangest and most obsessive of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, Vertigo has fascinated assorted movie buffs, philosophers and psychiatric professionals since its release in 1958 — not least because this tangled tale about an acrophobic ex-detective on the trail of an old friend’s beautiful wife suggests that reinventing a living woman…

Historic Save

Sometimes folks tackle a project even though they know it’s gonna be bigger, tougher and meaner than they are. That’s how it was for local artist Michael O’Donnell and the Historic Oriental Theatre: One day he looked at the now-empty north Denver movie palace, a neighborhood treasure he’d grown up…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

Thursday, April 29 School fundraiser season is in high gear, as parents scramble to collect bucks for next year’s programs. It’s no different at the Denver Public Schools’ Academia Sandoval in northwest Denver, which boasts a bilingual Montessori curriculum. Backers have organized a benefit to match the elementary school’s multicultural…

Beat Regeneration

Black berets, bongo drums, Maynard G. Krebs… These are a few images that come to mind when someone utters the word “beatnik.” But the term will be reclaimed this weekend when three eminent African-American cultural figures — Oscar Brown Jr., Amiri Baraka and Melvin Van Peebles — converge on Auraria’s…

No Snooty Zoots

WED, 5/5 Suavecito’s owner Craig Peña is a flirt. His wife knows it. Everyone knows it. Not that Peña acts on his overtures; he’s just a romantic at heart. A romantic with a long streak of smartass. So when he met Holly Kylberg, Denver’s reigning society “It” girl (see “The…

Water You Waiting For?

SAT, 5/1 Wind will rush through your hair and icy water will spray your face at the Rocky Mountain Shootout, a two-day open regatta at the Cherry Creek Reservoir. The boat set embraces such bracing conditions. “The sailing community is surprisingly large here in Colorado,” says Joe Beierl of the…

Song Cyclist

FRI, 4/30 People are always telling country rocker Marshall Chapman: “You talk in song titles.” And she does. The thirty-year Nashville veteran, a tough, six-foot blonde of genteel Southern extraction who’s been a cohort over the years of everyone from Waylon Jennings to Jimmy Buffet, is a walking card catalogue…