In the main room at Pirate, co-op member Tony Coulter is presenting Only Mercy, an exhibition of a dozen elegant abstract paintings. Coulters method is simple: He smears paint horizontally and vertically on a linen canvas. The best pieces in this show are the three large ones that incorporate found…
“Please hold for Tammy Faye.” The few seconds between those words and those that follow, uttered by the woman who once haunted pay-to-pray TV like a mascara-ed harlequin, are interminable. Until a month ago, the notion of talking to Tammy Faye Bakker-Messner, once the most adored and reviled figure in…
In the view of documentarians Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, fallen ’80s televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker — she of the pink feather boas and the streetwalker mascara — was the misunderstood victim of right-wing religious zealots, unscrupulous reporters and a corrupt judicial system. Now living “in exile” (also known as…
There’s no explicable reason for the existence of The Replacements, which is to the football-film genre what Major League was to the baseball movie: sports rendered as sitcom (or Police Academy sequel). The Replacements, which takes as its cue the 1987 National Football League players’ strike, is stocked with every…
Clark Secrest doesn’t write antiquarian books, but he does write about antiquarian times, and to do so, he’s had to turn to…antiquarian books and documents. So it makes sense for the former Denver Post police-beat reporter and editor — now the author of a book on Denver’s shadier days and…
At the age of six, Raymond Rodriguez decided he wanted to dance. Specifically, he wanted to tap dance. His family was against it but relented when parents of a friend gave him tap shoes for his birthday. “They said, ‘He already has the shoes, so I guess he can take…
A solo show in the Denver Art Museum’s Vance Kirkland Close Range Gallery is the most highly sought-after gig in the entire exhibition world in Colorado. It’s not that the Close Range is an impressive room — it isn’t. Rather, it’s an awkwardly shaped space shoved into the corner of…
Ties That Bind, at the Singer Gallery of the Mizel Arts Center, though nominally a group show, is actually three solos, as each artist has been given a separate section. The first featured artist is Amy Lee Solomon, who rarely exhibits locally. Her Structures of Atmospheric Turbulence: series, which is…
Actors who portray Shakespearean villains, heroes or clowns are sometimes tempted to overinflate the dialogue for epic effect or add tiny mannerisms to humanize larger-than-life characters. But neither approach, by itself, does dramatic justice to men and women who are part invention, part human, and whose needs, wants and desires…
I am Vlad the Impaler, Joe Eszterhas penis. You know Joe, right? Bigfoot-looking son of a bitch, like Jerry Garcia after he swallowed Brian Wilson on an Acapulco Gold high? The guy who wrote Basic Instinct and Showgirls and Flashdance and a whole lotta crap for which he was paid…
Irish charm and British eccentricity are hot properties on this side of the pond, especially among U.S. moviegoers. Witness the phenomenal success of The Secret of Roan Inish, in which a ten-year-old Irish girl finds her lost brother living among seals off the rugged western coast, or of The Full…
It’s a pleasure to say that Clint Eastwood reverses his recent downward slide — A Perfect World (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Absolute Power (1997) and True Crime (1999), each of which has seemed less satisfying than its predecessor — with Space Cowboys, his latest. It isn’t an…
Its tempting to think theres something twisted about her tale. After all, she was a mere 18 the first time she had sex in front of a camera — for money, small change that would soon enough blossom into a pile of cash–and did so only at the insistence of…
Under the direction of Sally Perisho, the Metro Center for the Visual Arts on Wazee Street has, more often than not, offered museum-quality shows, and this summer’s 20th Century Drawings and Objects, on loan from the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, is no exception. But wait a minute: What…
Last Thursday the atmosphere in Schlessman Hall, on the first floor of the Denver Art Museum, was positively electric. DAM trustees and staffers, community leaders, politicians, interested members of the community, reporters and photographers all gathered to hear Mayor Wellington Webb announce the name of the architect for the new…
That unfunny dramatic theorist Aristotle probably would have loathed the idea that the high point of the Central City Opera’s production of Dialogues of the Carmelites occurs in Act One, long before a proper “rising action” develops. Even so, audiences will undoubtedly appreciate the fact that mezzo-soprano Joyce Castle marvelously…
On the eve of an infamous assassination, several concerned Romans gather in their leader’s home to plan the next day’s doings. Like any cadre of revolutionaries, Brutus and his gang of nobles spend a great deal of time reassuring each other that the only way to preserve the body politic…
Murphy and Pryor. Skywalker and Kenobi. Amos and Zeppelin. Regardless of the creative universe, the maverick apprentice tends to stride off into territory beyond the edges of the master’s map. So it is with Alan Rudolph, whose career blossomed after he served as assistant director to Robert Altman on Nashville…
It would be the easiest thing in the world to write off But I’m a Cheerleader — the story of a teenager discovering her sexual identity through a program designed to repress it — as a Saturday Night Live sketch somewhat awkwardly inflated to feature length. But when you start…
The idea of dangling from a ten-foot pole that’s hooked to the ceiling and alternately swiveling from side to side and moving in a circular motion might be considered more of a nightmare than an avant-garde artistic endeavor, but for aerial dancer Jo Kreiter, it’s the perfect way to expand…
Yes, there is a cutting edge in Jewish liturgical music, and her name is Basya Schechter. A free spirit who grew up in the Orthodox community of Brooklyn’s legendary Boro Park, where elders with conservative religious views constantly monitored how freely one moved or dressed, Schechter was first drawn not…
Graduating from college can be liberating and exciting — unless you don’t have a job lined up, and the threat of homelessness, starvation and destitution consumes your once-carefree mind. But a local art gallery is helping to ease the mind of artists who are facing this dilemma. Karen and Dean…
