Good Dog

Brody is a total monster. When we brought him home just over a year ago, he was an adorable, cuddly, thirty-pound ball of furry love. Now he’s a hulking, 125-pound yellow Lab who firmly believes that he is king of the world. Shoes, underwear and furniture are his three favorite…

Funky Junk

FRI 5/2 Junk, beautiful junk: For some creative types, junk is the very stuff of creation. There’s no end to the wonderful contraptions you can assemble from someone else’s cast-off junk — you can sculpt it, build with it, sew it together or grind it into pulp and make paper…

Go Crazy!

SAT 5/3 Boulder Reservoir is still nippy, but that won’t discourage the dozens of wild and wacky teams signed up to participate in today’s 24th annual KBCO/Bud Light Kinetic Sculpture Challenge.The morning’s schedule is overflowing: Load up on carbs for $3 at the 7 a.m. pancake breakfast, a benefit for…

Like Magic

Douglas Love, the aptly named guiding light of Walden Family Playhouse, couldn’t be happier with the way things are going at the new children’s theater at Colorado Mills. Available tickets are disappearing like magic as Walden’s second full production, Merlin’s Apprentice, draws to a close this week. “We’re becoming the…

Anglo File

THURS 5/1 This week, Denver debuts the first festival ever held in this country devoted to British movies — or so say the organizers of the British Film Festival. “Apparently, there has never been a British film festival in the whole of the United States, which is quite amazing to…

Arabian Arts

SUN 5/4 Give peace a chance. With the conflict in Iraq almost over, The Nightingale & The Rose Performing Arts Company wants to promote peace. They’ll do it artistically, too, with Middle Eastern Cultural Awareness Week, which starts today at the Dairy Center for the Arts in Boulder.”With everything going…

Break Like the Wind

They were loud once, deafeningly so–and dumbingly so, if such a thing is possible. They wore skins of leather stuffed with cucumbers of foil, towered over dwarves who danced around a Stonehenge made of pebbles, sang about women who fit like flesh tuxedos and explored the majesty of rock and…

Spring Flings

Spring is the traditional season opener for yardwork, since it’s the best time for planting trees, shrubs, flowers, vegetables and, of course, grass. But not this year, at least not in Denver. The drought and that unbelievable March blizzard has left most landscape enthusiasts not planting — not yet –…

Artbeat

The Orwellian times that we live in have piqued the interest of the Colorado art collective iMiNiMi, which is made up of Roger Rapp, Kent Smith, Rick Visser and the artist known as Bug. For the exhibit Panopticon 21: You Are Being Watched, now at the Cordell Taylor gallery (2350…

Southern Discomfort

I’m not much for American rural — slack-tongued accents, flat Coke, screen doors and heat, the heart-numbing sameness of daily life — and I tend to dislike dramas about dysfunctional families, especially when the dysfunction involves addiction or alcohol. I’ve yawned through I don’t know how many productions of Long…

How the West Was Fun

Sure, we have one of the best jobs in the universe, but sometimes theater critics get tired. Tired of gut-wrenchingly deep performances and slick, practiced shallow ones. Of being blasted out of our seats by hyped-up sound systems, enduring pretentiously poetic prose, figuring out symbolism, trying to ignore a stilted…

This Boy’s Life

The soundtrack of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s spare and beautiful new film, The Son (Le Fils) contains not a bar of music, not a tinkle of bell, not a whisper of breeze. Much of the film is set in the carpentry shop of a Belgium vocational school for troubled teenagers,…

Oh, the Horror!

You can’t be sure what to make of Identity for its first hour: Director James Mangold’s initial foray into the horror genre plays so much like a joke, it’s almost impossible to tell whether he’s making you laugh on purpose or because he is director James Mangold, maker of the…

Flick Pick

Among Hollywood’s emerging directorial talents, Paul Thomas Anderson merits special notice for the boldness of his subject matter and the energy of his style. He is, after all, the fellow who vividly proposed, in Boogie Nights, that a houseful of variously drugged and deranged L.A. pornographers could be more devoted…

War of the Words

I just want to say this is a fucked-up life In this crazy world it’s so hard to do right I wonder why it’s not hard to do wrong In this crazy world I wish I was gone… — from “Crazy World,” by Eddie Chavez Eddie Chavez, who enjoys “sports,…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

Thursday, April 24 After 25 years on the air, Boulder community radio station KGNU has the blues, but you can hold the Prozac: The proletarian, commercial-free independent is actually feeling upbeat about its third annual Women’s Blues Revue benefit. Featuring rootsy music by a trio of regional favorites — the…

Cross Purposes

When asked if he considers any subject to be off limits, comedian David Cross replies, with as much mock seriousness as he can muster, “I will not talk about Fox News. That’s sacrosanct.” Not ten minutes later, however, Cross blithely breaks this pledge, describing the cable service as “garbage. It’s…

Monumental Art

SAT 4/26 Lest you forget that outgoing Mayor Wellington Webb and his wife, Wilma, are prime movers behind the new Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library, take a look at the mural inside the arched, interior lobby.When the three-story brick library at 2401 Welton Street celebrates its grand opening at ten…

What a Knockout!

SAT 4/26 Punching, kicking, knockouts and more! Today, top karate practitioners from near and far will gather in Denver for the annual Sabaki Challenge 2003: Extreme Knockdown Karate. “The action is going to be really intense,” says Ed Voranski, the event’s promoter. “There is a lot of technique and strategy…

Toe Heads

TUES 4/29 Savion Glover, move on over: You can’t be a phenom forever. It’s time to make way for the stars of Tap Kids, a touring show featuring a unique national cast of nine remarkable kids between the ages of ten and nineteen who earned their spots by dancing circles…

Skivvie Skinny

FRI 4/25 These days, billboards, magazines and even local newspapers are filled with pictures of curvy models in push-up bras and tiny panties, but a hundred years ago, “undies” were “unmentionables.” One Denver man is taking us back to our underwear roots (though not as far back as the loincloth,…

Springy Time

SAT 4/26 Three cheers for choreographer Deborah Reshotko’s Speaking of Dance: The local company has bravely squeaked through ten years on the planet — not a bad track record in a state that trails the nation in arts funding. But successes of this sort don’t come without a modicum of…