Neat Beats

SAT, 11/1 Seminal New Orleans musician Jelly Roll Morton, acknowledging his own Creole roots, used to say his syncopated early jazz music evolved with a “Spanish tinge,” and it’s an element of jazz that’s always grown with the genre itself. In fact, there’s a name for what’s become of that…

High Rollers

SAT, 11/1 If there’s a giant squid hurling gutter balls next to a harlot in pasties, hot pants and yucky brown rented shoes, then Beats & Bowling must be twinkling its toes again. The competition, which rolls its fifth installment tonight, assembles costumed and themed teams of music-industry enthusiasts who…

End Runs

The season began only a scant six weeks ago, but already many of the first shows have closed — or soon will. It’s been a crowded calendar, with more than a hundred exhibits being presented simultaneously, a couple dozen of which are definitely worth seeing — pretty good odds when…

Artbeat

The Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173) is just coming off a recent bout with censorship. As reported in Westword (Off Limits, October 9), the Denver Civic Theatre requested that Edge remove a photo from its show hanging in the theater’s lobby. The photo depicts two men kissing, with the…

Mind Games

In Blue/Orange, Christopher (Keith L. Hatten), a young black man, is awaiting his release from a London psychiatric hospital, where he’s been held for 28 days of observation. However, his psychiatrist, Bruce (Steven Cole Hughes), isn’t sure he’s ready to be discharged. He fears that Christopher is displaying all the…

Oscar Unworthy

We remember Oscar Wilde today primarily for his epigrammatic wit — the nineteenth-century bons mots that have lost none of their sharpness or humor over the intervening decades. This was a man whose last words were supposedly “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.” Wilde’s theories of aesthetics, his faith…

The Boss

On October 12, BBC America aired the second-season premiere of The Office, the beloved mockumentary that follows paper-selling rats ’round the maze of cubicles leading to the office of head cheese David Brent, a pathetic little man who says in public things no rational human being would even think in…

It’s All Good

That a new feel-good sports movie called Radio contrives to move us is just fine; that’s what feel-good sports movies are supposed to do. That its makers chose to move us in the style of a linebacker sacking a quarterback is not so good. After enduring this flagrant emotional blitz,…

Love Among the Ruins

Sometimes something so wonderful appears on the big screen that I want to leap up like a shameless non-professional and hug it. Such is the case early on in the film Sylvia, a superb drama based on the brief life of writer Sylvia Plath. While boating in Cambridge, England, with…

Flick Pick

Richard Brooks’s brilliant adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1967) remains one of the most chilling true-crime films ever made. The tale of two drifters whose disturbed personalities collide to produce their brutal mass murder of an ordinary farming family in Kansas and, in time, their double execution by…

Honey’s Dew

Call it a honey of a drinking festival: The International Mead Festival — Honey Wines of the World features the globe’s best brands of mead. A heady elixir that fueled the fun of early man, the Vikings and Chaucer, the potion still works its magic on a growing segment of…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

Thursday, October 23 Are you one of those touchy-feely gift givers? Then get your hands on some of the area’s finest fiber works this weekend at the Rocky Mountain Weavers’ Guild Annual Sale, which will feature a gorgeous array of table linens, blankets, beadwork, sweaters, scarves and more, on sale…

Soul’s Inspiration

To start a circus, you have to have a bit of the dreamer in you, not to mention an eye for the angle not taken. Cedric Walker has both, it seems: The utterly upbeat CEO and founder of the Atlanta-based UniverSoul Circus paid his dues during a life steeped in…

Fit to Be Tied

FRI, 10/24 Pour on the liquid latex and give that corset an extra tug, because the 4th Annual Victorian and Fetish Ball will cast its sexy spell tonight. The masquerade tease will harness the talents of four professional dominatrixes, unleash an exhibition of the sensual art of Japanese bondage and…

Costume Zoom

FRI, 10/24 Last year, a female quartet sailed through Scream Scram dressed as the Titanic. The women were costumed in such a way that when they stood together, they looked like the doomed ocean liner. Still, they were able to navigate independently around the 5K run’s Washington Park course, which…

Spook and Ladder

SAT, 10/25 Keep your eyes peeled for paranormal behavior at today’s Meet the Fire House Ghosts at the Denver Firefighters Museum. “There is some definite poltergeist activity going on around here,” says the museum’s executive director, Carey Southwell. Built in 1909 as Denver Fire House Number One, the station, at…

It’s a Doozy

SAT, 10/25 Feel free to prance around in your unmentionables at tonight’s second incarnation of Floozy Night at the Buckhorn Exchange.Sponsored by local saloon girls, soiled doves and floozies — actually just a group of grown women who wanted an excuse to parade around in frilly costumes — this sultry…

Women’s Voices

FRI, 10/24 According to Boulder activist group Vox Feminista, it’s time to declare war. The target? White supremacy. And the battle starts with tonight’s premiere of White Lies.”We are a group of mostly white women who live in Boulder, which is predominantly white,” explains Joy Boston, founder of the fourteen-year-old…

Feats of Strength

There’s something edifying about retrospectives. I guess it’s their epic scope. Collected in a single place is a representative sample of an artist’s entire professional lifetime. Stylistic phases are marked, as are the topics of interest that the artist embraced over the years. Yet despite these obvious virtues, retrospectives are…

Artbeat

The front spaces at Sandy Carson Gallery (760 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-8585) are fitted out with Frank Sampson paintings (see page 57), but in the back gallery and extending into the conference room is a separate solo, Virginia Folkestad: Isthmus/go-between. Since the early 1990s, Folkestad has used traditional home life…

Denver Time

I’ve never been a particular fan of John Denver, other than acknowledging that he wrote a few pleasant tunes. And despite decades living in Colorado, I’ve been pretty much immune to the myth of the West. My dreams are filled with cities — Prague, London, New York — rather than…

Mysterious Journey

Underneath the Lintel is a seventy-minute one-act play that takes the form of a lecture by a buttoned-up, pedantic, spiritually timid Dutch ex-librarian. Peering into the audience at the very beginning, he lets us know that he’s disappointed by the turnout (despite the fact that the Aurora Fox theater is…