THURS, 12/11 If you’ve ever wondered how the simple pressing of a button on the remote control can summon legions of different characters for your personal entertainment, you are not alone. “We all know that televisions are complicated pieces of machinery,” write the producers of Idiot Box, an evening of…
The Sandy Carson Gallery has kept its position as the flagship venue of the Santa Fe Art District by using a simple formula: Present only high-quality art shows. And that’s precisely the case with the two wonderful offerings currently on tap. In the front half of the gallery is the…
A few months ago, Hugo Anderson opened the Emil Nelson Gallery at 1307 Bannock Street (303-534-0996), behind the Denver Art Museum and next door to the Camera Obscura Gallery. Despite its high-profile location, the gallery has kept a low profile — but the current show, herbert bayer remembered, is likely…
David Sedaris’s sardonic The SantaLand Diaries is a Christmas sugarplum all by itself. Well, it’s something more impudent than a sugarplum: a sourish cranberry tart, perhaps, or a bittersweet chocolate brownie laced with hash. Whichever, the Bug Theatre doesn’t serve Diaries unaccompanied. It adds to the mix the gleeful, iconoclastic…
Every time I attend one of Thaddeus Phillips’s one-man shows, more of my friends ask to accompany me. Phillips is a genuine phenomenon, and his performances delight and amaze. He’s an experimental-theater artist who works with words, puppets, objects, sound, video, toys, light and shadow to create entirely original worlds…
Maybe you know the feeling. Maybe it struck you one morning as you stared in the mirror before trundling off to the job you hate, or maybe it hit you so hard one night it woke you from your sleep like a prowler in the bedroom. It’s that feeling of:…
In his career as a Hollywood action figure, Tom Cruise has been dressed in some pretty hip outfits — a macho fighter pilot’s sleek leather jacket, a NASCAR driver’s logo-speckled fire suit, assorted silken Armani sports jackets, even a black cape and fangs. So it’s a bit unsettling to see…
Honey is one of those movies you will see, swear you’ve seen before in several other guises and incarnations, then immediately forget you ever saw to begin with. Its story, about a would-be dancer trying to plot her escape from mean streets (or mean movie sets and back lots), has…
Every year, Santa eats the cookies. Every year, Uncle Elmer overdoes it on the eggnog and lurches into the Christmas tree. And every year, good guy Everyman George Bailey painfully rediscovers the true value of his small-town life and then gathers family ’round the hearth and takes joy in his…
Because I played a dancing mouse in The Nutcracker as a little girl, my mother gives me something featuring the classic little soldier every December. Two years ago, it was a nutcracker doormat; last year, it was nutcracker salad tongs. And just last week, I received a package of nutcracker…
Thursday, December 4 Of all the light shows in all of the metro area, you just have to walk into this one. Garish though the display may be, when the Denver City and County Building switches on the holiday wattage, it marks the return of a tradition as integral to…
The last thing you expect to see this time of year is a gigantic arts festival. We’ve had it drilled into our pointy little heads that such events belong in the summer, when they can be outdoor affairs with blaring music and good stuff to eat and drink and a…
FRI, 12/5 It’s full speed ahead into spring as the 2003 Max Fashion Show charges onto the catwalk tonight at El Jebel Event Center, 4625 West 50th Avenue. This is an opportunity for the upper echelon of the fashionista community (or those who just want to resemble it) to hobnob…
THURS, 12/4 Hey, ladies: Get off the beaten path and learn about the simple joys of snowshoeing at today’s Atlas Explore Winter Women’s Workshop held at the REI Denver flagship store. “The biggest thing we want to point out is that snowshoeing is fun,” says Mark Guebert-Steward, REI special-events coordinator…
TUES, 12/9 Take a break from the yuletide hustle and bustle, and step into a snow-globe-like winter wonderland with a screening of Dr. Seuss’s classic tale How the Grinch Stole Christmas at tonight’s first annual Holiday Film Festival at the Wildlife Experience.”We went through all the classic holiday films, from…
For Colorado State University professor Diane Sparks, who specializes in textile design and merchandising, curating Divya Vastra: Heavenly Garments, an exhibit of about a hundred saris now on view at CSU’s Curfman Gallery, was a labor of love for cloth and all of its possibilities.Once Sparks starts describing each outfit…
WED, 12/10 In the Simpsons episode “How I Spent My Strummer Vacation,” Homer attends a Rock-and-Roll Fantasy camp to be trained in the ways of rock. Brian Setzer makes a memorable guest appearance. Weighing in as the Professor of Slide Guitar, the rockabilly guitar legend is referred to as “Brian…
It’s hard to live in Colorado and, at the same time, to love architecture. The problem is twofold: There’s very little of the built environment that’s any good, and the few buildings that are good are constantly being threatened with demolition or insensitive remodeling. I was contemplating these ideas while…
Dutch Walla has been taking photos for over fifty years, beginning as a protegé of the late Denver photographer Otto Roach and eventually taking over the older man’s processing business, Roach Photography. Now, at the age of 75, Walla has turned the day-to-day operations of Roach Photography over to his…
It’s the ultimate question, the one that preoccupies all active minds: Why death? Why the inevitable, final dissolution? And why the process — nasty, smelly, embarrassing — by which we lose ourselves, degenerating bit by bit into squalling infants, with none of the charm of infants or their ability to…
Bad Santa, in which Billy Bob Thornton plays a drunken department-store Santa who repeatedly swears at children, pisses himself publicly, chain-smokes like an industrial plant and cracks safes on Christmas Eve, is the least sentimental holiday release ever made. No one is redeemed; no one comes to believe in the…
In director Ron Howard’s The Missing, Samuel Jones (Tommy Lee Jones) takes his place among the oldest archetypes in the Western genre — the white man who has lived among the Indians so long he has at last become one. This plot device, used in Hombre, Nevada Smith and myriad…
