The long collaboration between the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and his alter ego, actor Toshiro Mifune, was one of the most fruitful in all of film history: The ideal vessel for Kurosawa’s ideas and obsessions — from the definition of classic Samurai honor to modern man’s need for compassion…
Book dealer Linda Lebsack specializes in books on regional history, but she’s also been on a Denver-history-collecting tangent, partly because there was a market for it. “There wasn’t much more to be said about the Gold Rush,” she notes, “and young people just didn’t care about it anymore.” So she…
The Nutcracker: Been there, done that. The classic Christmas ballet has been grandly produced, fiddled with, animated, televised and Barbiefied to death. But this year, Boulder aerial choreographer Nancy Smith and her Frequent Flyers company decided to transform the holiday cliche with a countercultural twist provided by longtime Boulder Ballet…
If your wardrobe includes ten-gallon hats, cowboy boots and belt buckles the size of Texas, we’ve got just the outing for you this holiday season: the Colorado Country Music Hall of Fame’s fifth annual Christmas Gathering. Held from 2 to 7 p.m. Sunday, December 22, at the Rockin’ West Caravan…
A legitimate excuse for frivolous hedonism comes but once a year, so we say make the most of it. Don a silly hat (everyone else will look stupid, too), pop a magnum of champagne and blow your horn: 2002 is finally done. Whether you want to dine, dance, drink or…
1. Downtown Denver New Year’s Eve Fireworks: No matter what you do with the rest of your evening, be sure you’re in the vicinity of the 16th Street Mall at either 10 p.m. or the stroke of midnight, when Denver’s nippy skies will be bursting with fabulous displays of pyro…
While Westword doesn’t encourage irresponsible drinking, we know that many of you will be riding the hangover tide on New Year’s Day. To help preempt the pain, we asked some local experts for tips on curing your self-induced misery. Pressure Power: To silence your jackhammer, try acupressure, an ancient Chinese…
The first rule of New Year’s Eve party hosting is to never let the soiree get out of control. But since we all know how likely that is — not — here’s something useful for the morning after: cleaning tips. Because you never know what you’ll find when people are…
New Year’s Eve is like no other night of the year. It calls for drama and demands flair. It turns the game of dress-up into a grown-up affair. If you’re seeking the final touches for that fabulous holiday costume, look no further than our must-have list. Trust us: You’ll party…
Ah, New Year’s Eve. It’s one of those nights that just begs for some serious romance. And whether your purse strings are pulled tight or you’ve got wads of cash to throw around, Westword wants to help keep you lovers happy. So put down the popcorn, put back the movie,…
To toast or not to toast? It’s truly an age-old question. Our advice is to take the plunge. By following a few simple rules, you can be the talk of the party — and not because you left your fly open. “There are three basic rules: rehearse, rehearse, rehearse,” says…
It’s the same story every year. Your head is pounding, and your mouth feels like a giant cotton ball. All you want to do is eat a huge, greasy brunch and then lie on the couch watching football all day. But it’s the first day of 2003: Go do something!…
Contemporary art is dangerous territory to map. There are so many different aesthetic and intellectual paths to follow, half of them leading in opposite directions. There’s a confusing array of named and unnamed stylistic tendencies vying for attention and comment — some concerned with championing the object, others with destroying…
With so much attention directed at all the major exhibits around, many modest but equally worthwhile offerings get lost in the shuffle. Hopefully, that won’t be the fate of a quartet of interesting solos in two of the city’s co-ops. In the front space at Spark Gallery (1535 Platte Street,…
There’s a power to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol that defies analysis. On one level, it’s a sentimental fable, a codification of the tamed bourgeois, Victorian Christmas that replaced the dangerous excesses of earlier generations, when drunken laborers took to the streets to sing, challenge the rich and turn propriety…
A new company called Rorschach Productions has put together a sequence of short plays that constitutes one of the more interesting evenings of theater around. It’s a combination of late-ish Samuel Beckett and very early Sam Shepard titled An Evening of B.S. In the first piece, Beckett’s Catastrophe, a director…
Martin Scorsese’s latest epic of the streets, Gangs of New York, means to show us how a great metropolis was forged from the mid-nineteenth-century cauldron of unbridled greed, ethnic violence and the Civil War. It means to give us the city as wild frontier — without the usual cowboy hats…
Fantasy is at its best when it ennobles our reality, and at the movies this year no fantastic adventure towers above The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The second installment of J.R.R. Tolkien’s delightful yarn is adapted just as handily as last year’s The Fellowship of the Ring,…
The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A miracle in midnight-movie finery; a spot-on analysis of adolescent ambition, gender struggles and xenophobia; an eternal pop-culture time capsule: Richard O’Brien’s madcap musical, adapted with and directed by Jim Sharman, offers participation-primed audiences — who aren’t sounding their smartest these days — the secret…
Some clutch pictures of loved ones, others lug around heavy books. A number even tote cell phones. As two Boulder artists have discovered, the homeless take their personal effects everywhere. Ariadna Capasso and Patricia Tinajero-Baker have also learned that the definition of “home” doesn’t have to include walls and a…
Not getting any action, ladies? Colleagues treating you like a doormat? Forget the push-up bra and the red “Respect me!” blazer. What you need is some good old-fashioned witchcraft to lure the universe back into your corner. Vermont-based witch, astrologer and author Cal Garrison helps enchantresses of all ages overcome…
White-haired boomers with turbulent pasts are certain to show up at the Swallow Hill Music Association’s Evening to Celebrate Songs From the Anti-War/Peace Movement (8 p.m. Saturday, December 14), but Swallow Hill director Jim Williams hopes the event will attract a younger crowd, too. They’re the ones who really need…
