How do summer music festivals get started? Are they products of some mammoth marketing machine, designed to milk as many dollars as possible from a public hungry for entertainment? Or are they like a suburban-neighborhood block party that starts out as two families grilling together one summer afternoon and then…
Surely one of the most appealing art-world attractions in Denver this spring is JUDY PFAFF: New Work, at Denver’s prestigious Robischon Gallery. It’s the kind of thing that’s unexpected in the off-season, but there’s a reason Denver audiences are being treated to such a big deal at this time of…
In the intimate and inviting Viewing Room in the back of the Robischon Gallery (1740 Wazee Street, 303-298-7788) is a wonderful show, Trine Bumiller: new paintings. The elegant Bumillers provide the perfect visual chaser to Judy Pfaff, which is on display up front (see review). True, the space in the…
In staging The War Plays, Promethean Theatre is trying to open a dialogue about the causes of war and its horrors. This is a good time for such a dialogue. Neoconservative ex-CIA director James Woolsey recently told an enthusiastic Denver audience that in conquering Iraq, the United States has won…
The Bas Bleu Theatre Company stands in the heart of Fort Collins’s old town, a pleasant collection of galleries, eateries and shops that is less commercial than the downtown malls of either Denver or Boulder. The theater stages stimulating work in a tiny, beautifully converted auditorium that seats forty people…
In November there will arrive on newsstands a music magazine edited by Alan Light, who left Spin to embark on his endeavor of publishing a journal devoted to that long-ignored audience: the over-30 CD-buyer, the old fart for whom “new music” is a mystery left to be fathomed by The…
Whenever the stars of the adolescent street-racing fantasy 2 Fast 2 Furious were feeling balky or temperamental on the set, as movie stars are wont to do, the cure was probably easy: an oil change and a tuneup. John Singleton’s adrenaline-spiked sequel to the surprise summer hit of 2001, The…
The French government should officially proclaim actor Jean Rochefort a national treasure. A fixture of Gallic cinema for five decades, he is best known to American audiences for his comedic turns in such sex farces as Pardon Mon Affaire and The Closet, and, of course, his near-miss as Don Quixote…
Once the enfant terrible of post-war German cinema, the single-minded director Werner Herzog made half a dozen great films in the 1970s, including Fata Morgana, Every Man for Himself and God Against All and his chilling update on F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu, the Vampyre. But Herzog’s most memorable (and most characteristic)…
Hanging in my office is a black-and-white-plaid suit jacket with big pearl buttons. It’s the sort of jacket a suburban matron might wear to an opera matinee — or a newspaper editor might wear to court. That was the first and last time I’d worn the jacket until this past…
Thursday, June 5 CU-Boulder’s International Film Series kicks off its summer session in classic style, by presenting a film connoisseur’s dream come true: Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and actor Toshiro Mifune, an artistic match for the ages, will be in the spotlight on Thursday nights through mid-August, beginning tonight with…
The last time around, in the fall of 2000, the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver’s Colorado Biennial was in different hands, while current MCA curator Cydney Payton was wrapping up her tenure at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Payton was never shy at BMoCA (she had her own ideas of…
SAT, 6/7 Calling all citizens: The Capitol Hill United Neighborhoods People’s Fair is back in full force. Let’s check the numbers: Two hundred fifty thousand fair-goers are expected to peruse 350 juried arts-and-crafts exhibitors while eating 3,000 turkey legs from 38 food vendors, using 130 porta-potties and listening to 75…
First Fan Fair feeds frenzy SAT, 6/7 Nobody knows for sure how many die-hard Broncos fans are going to show up at Invesco Field at 11 this morning and tomorrow morning for the team’s inaugural Denver Broncos Fan Fair. What is certain is that every current player and coach, as…
SAT, 6/7 Where did you go to read when the summer turned hot, you had nowhere to go, your friends were all away on road trips to Yellowstone or spending their afternoons at some swanky pool, and your back bike tire caught a thorn in a vacant lot and went…
FRI, 6/6 One week, one blank, date-stamped canvas and an urban landscape with distinct boundaries: Those were the limitations given to artists who participated in Paint Our Town: Old, New, Now!, a contest and exhibit opening today at the Art Students League of Denver, 200 Grant Street. Based on the…
TUES, 6/10 When you go to the movies, do your eyes get more of a workout than your brain? Luckily, Alexandre Philippe has a cure for what ails you. Philippe, a Lighthouse Foundation and University of Denver screenwriting instructor, is currently presenting a four-movie series called “The Deconstruction of Film”…
You’ve been warned: This is a column about politics wherein a popular-culture critic (dunno what that is either, but says so on my tax returns) interviews a former rock journalist-turned-publicist-turned-band-manager-turned-record-label-executive about how the Democratic Party alienated everyone under the age of death. You may take this with a grain of…
For a while back in the ’80s and early ’90s, it looked like formalism — essentially non-objective abstraction — was on the ropes. Then about five years ago, it rose, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of neo-expressionism, on the one hand, and annoyingly personal conceptualism on the other, re-establishing itself as…
Surplus, at Studio Aiello (3563 Walnut Street, 303-297-8166), is the big-tent title connecting three unrelated solos — but just for good measure, each also has its own title. The show starts with Clare Cornell’s Dress Formal, which combines photo-based pieces and sculptures. The sculptures from Cornell’s “Lingual Discharge” series are…
Some aspects of dictatorship — at least of certain kinds of dictatorship — are irresistibly funny. This has to do with what happens when a man possessed of a colossal ego finds himself in a position where that ego goes completely unchecked. Many dictatorships of both the right and the…
avid Auburn’s Pulitzer-winning play, Proof, has been much discussed and debated, both in the United States and in London, where Gwyneth Paltrow starred in it last year. As Proof opens, we learn that the protagonist, Catherine, interrupted her own life and education when her father, Robert, a mathematical genius, succumbed…
