Santa Fe Style, Part Two

“Funky” still lives on Santa Fe Drive. For instance, on the 700 block, a collective of potters, painters and photographers has banded together, bypassing middlemen, to sell their unique wares directly to the public at Artists on Santa Fe. Here you’ll find Cristine Boyd’s black-and-white animal-print ceramics, James Garnett’s raku…

Opposites Attract

In the year or so that it has been open, Ron Judish Fine Arts in LoDo has established itself as a key player in the contemporary art world in Denver. Its well-thought-out shows always feature an eclectic mix of the work of top local talents and nationally celebrated artists, and…

Art Beat

Guiry’s, which just opened a new, 25,000-square-foot store in the Ballpark neighborhood near Coors Field, is celebrating a century in business this year. “At first it was a wall-cleaning business,” says Dick Guiry, president of the company and grandson of founder Joseph Guiry. “Then they got into selling mirrors and…

Days of Wine and Poses

Smaller in scope and more conversational in tone than last season’s effort by the Denver Center Theatre Company, the Avenue Theatre’s production of Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile proves nearly as amusing and, at times, more affecting. More than anything else, though, John Ashton’s environmental approach enlivens and…

Friends for Life

The committee that awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1962 cited John Steinbeck for his “sympathetic humor and sociological perception” — qualities that his detractors had long disparaged as little more than sappy sentimentalism and simplistic moralizing. Regardless which assessment is more valid, each suggests Steinbeck’s ability to articulate…

Grand Illusion

The world’s demand for minimally talented thirty-year-old high-school dropouts who believe they’re great poets or great musicians or great movie directors isn’t going to catch up with the supply anytime soon. That won’t keep the strivers from striving, of course; nor will it snuff out their dreams. Case in point:…

To Market, To Market

The engaging and delightful low-budget feature Where’s Marlowe? began life as an unaired one-hour TV pilot. Somehow director Daniel Pyne and John Mankiewicz, his co-writer, have managed to expand their footage to roughly an hour and forty minutes without any of the seams showing. That would be an accomplishment in…

In God He Trusts

“Yesterday I wasn’t even sure God existed,” laments Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), the reluctant yet divinely touched heroine of Kevin Smith’s ambitious new film, Dogma. “Now I’m up to my ass in Christian mythology.” As it turns out, so are we. Strutting to a spiritually snappy groove not observed in mainstream…

Remembrance of Scorns Past

The back pages of Colorado history are filled with hardy souls who conquered the rugged territory, who defied the odds with gusto. One of Colorado’s toughest early settlers was Augusta Pierce Tabor, a frail New England society girl whose transformation from debutante to pioneer is the most impressive makeover the…

Fashion Victim

As the longtime fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, where she started out writing a snobbish — and frequently satirized — advice column called “Why Don’t You…?” and later, as editor-in-chief of Vogue (where she was abruptly given the gate in 1971), Diana Vreeland ruled New York’s fashion world for nearly…

Santa Fe Style, Part One

When was the last time you really saw a neighborhood in flux? LoDo is over; with the addition of a few new restaurants, the Golden Triangle will be here to stay; and even Capitol Hill, bless its over-inflated heart, can just hitch its future to a star, because upscale inner-city…

Mature Audiences

The Denver Art Museum is riding high on the success of the traveling Impressionism exhibition, which pushed overall attendance to record levels — nearly 100,000 visitors in October alone — and following its $62.5 million capital improvement bond, which was overwhelmingly approved by voters last week. The money, which will…

Art Beat

You’ve got about ten days left to catch Master Drawings: 700 Years of Inspiration at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The show, which includes approximately 150 pieces, highlights a selection of drawings from the collection of the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. The exhibit has been intelligently installed in…

This Crazy, Jazzy World

Vowing to “revivify the vital fluids stored in the neural coconuts,” a failed jazz singer and his eccentric, ivory-tickling sidekick attempt to explain how the “elastic wholeness of the biomatrix” — or, in layman’s parlance, life — has slowly deteriorated since an event known as the Big Snafu occurred. With…

Girls Talk

For anyone who likes sitcom-style playlets in which characters with low self-esteem point blaming fingers at their childhood, the media, the men in their life and/or the healing professions, Women Aloud: Artistic Estrofest ’99 might prove illuminating or even therapeutic. But those who easily tire of gripe sessions set in…

Lying Down on the Job

The mutant children of Dr. Hannibal Lecter and his star pupil, agent Clarice Starling, remain doggedly at large in moviedom. There’s no serial killer (and no gruesome method of dispatch) that Hollywood now refuses to indulge, and no detective, no matter how hackneyed, who cannot be assigned to the case…

Ruined in Rouen

Luc Besson, director of La Femme Nikita, The Professional and The Fifth Element, is not the first name that would leap to mind to helm a biopic of Joan of Arc. Sure, he’s French, and sure, most of his films have women/girls as the protagonist or savior, but this is…

Of Gods and Demons

Much like the religion that has swirled around the Star Wars trilogy for twenty-some years, the fanaticism evidenced among American fans of Japanese anime remains a mystery to some of us. Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s megahit Princess Mononoke does very little to cast light on this obsession. And more’s the pity,…

Mommy Weirdest

Susan Sarandon is one of the screen’s most gifted actresses, a fiercely intelligent artist who invests her roles with depth, compassion, wit and humor. She has the ability to elevate even mediocre material, taking a potentially schmaltzy part, as in Stepmom, and making it totally believable. In her best films…

A Womans Tap

There are a lot of tangled branches in the tap-dance tree — there are jazz, rhythm and show tap, to name a few of the principal limbs — but Ellie Sciarra’s not willing to sort them out. An athletic dancer with more than twenty years in and out of the…

High Wire Acts

When Stephen Keating picked up the cable and media beat at the The Denver Post in 1995, he didn’t realize that the industry was on the verge of revolutionary change. “I was lucky enough to be covering this just as it happened,” says Keating. “I didn’t have any foreknowledge or…

Venus and Mars

Bill Havu has put together a wild amusement park ride of a show called Women & Allegory at his prestigious William Havu Gallery in the Golden Triangle. The exhibit, which lasts through the weekend, features a quartet of artists who deal with both feminist and feminine imagery. The work, according…