Artist/illustrator Lucas Richards’s work may be familiar to buyers of local recordings: He’s done covers for the Volts, the Dinnermints and the Pindowns, among others. But it’s within the pages of Starving Magpie, a quarterly comic-book-style publication, that his vision is most fully realized. Richards and collaborator Soapy Argyle –…
Founded in 1972, Music Disc has exchanged its storefront on Hampden Avenue for a warehouse space at 3895A Newport Street in Denver; 45s are available for browsing by appointment, but the rest of the stock isn’t. Fortunately, though, the entire library is accessible on the Web — and what a…
“Headbanger and Zombie Fag Extraordinaire” Maris the Great is up to his neck disemboweling Denver’s heavy-metal finest — a fiendish plot that the little ghoul expects will launch his own band to the forefront of the underground scene. As a contributing critic to Throat Culture Magazine (and the now-defunct Soundboard),…
When Ralph Stanley invited the sold-out crowd at the Paramount Theatre to hold hands and join him in a call-and-response version of “Amazing Grace,” few in the audience declined the offer. When else does the average country-music lover have a chance to join in a chorus with Emmylou Harris, Allison…
Both the business world and the music industry offered a slack-jawed response to the news that Nobody in Particular Presents, the tiny local promotional firm, had filed an anti-trust lawsuit against promotional behemoth Clear Channel Entertainment in federal district court last August. Full of nasty allegations of illegal power-mongering and…
Barry, Barry, Barry: How can we miss you if you won’t go away? Last summer, in a battle plan that rivaled the Invasion of Normandy for buildup and strategizing — although the plans for D-Day were kept secret — longtime concert promoter Barry Fe re-entered the fray, joining up with…
Cafe Nuba is home to some of Denver’s most creative and outspoken folks. Housed at the Gemini Tea Emporium — possibly the warmest, most comfortable hot spot in Denver — the Cafe is a celebration of independent art, with an open mike for spoken word, modern dance, political prose and…
It may not be as titillating as the recent TV catfight between Tonya “TNT” Harding and Paula “The Arkansas Pounder” Jones, but the Throw Down in D-Town boxing match will come out swinging anyway. “This is going to be one of the best fights Denver has had in a long…
Before he died of congestive heart failure in March 1992, Richard Brooks, director of The Blackboard Jungle and In Cold Blood, used to tell this story. It takes place sometime in the late 1940s, when Brooks was ascending royalty in Hollywood; after all, he’d written John Huston’s Key Largo, starring…
A few years ago, it seemed that the art world was aging — and aging fast. The problem wasn’t just Father Time; it was that few, if any, young people seemed to be interested in art. Even many of those associated with the alternative scene — presumably a bastion of…
Ocean Journey is scheduled to close next week, and I, for one, am sorry to see it happen. It’s not that I’m an aquarium enthusiast, it’s just that the building is so darned good. In fact, it is unquestionably one of the finest things to have been built around here…
There are two observations I can make about the Curious Theatre Company’s dark-themed farce, Fuddy Meers: I laughed out loud several times during the performance, but afterward, I couldn’t figure out the point. Claire (Ethelyn Friend), the play’s preternaturally chipper protagonist, wakes every morning to a world washed clean. She…
A man stands alone on the small square stage of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, a gun to his head — except that the gun is really his own hand. He tells us that he’s the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust, that we in the audience are ghosts,…
The eternal beauty and constant surprise of baseball are always getting sabotaged by Hollywood’s urge to reduce the grand old game to a set of cliches as tedious as spring-training drills. The ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson elevated Field of Dreams, the Wild Thing’s errant fastball gave momentary charm to…
With Panic Room, about the night Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and her teenage daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) are home-invaded by a trio of burglars seeking hidden treasure, dyspeptic director David Fincher reveals himself as little more than a derivative visionary. For some, this will be plenty enough: As mainstream, studio-financed…
It’s readily apparent that Danny DeVito’s Death to Smoochy deals with a thoroughly debauched children’s television host (Robin Williams) who plots, amid much dark zaniness, to destroy his squeaky-clean successor (Edward Norton). It’s also quite easy to proclaim it the greatest movie ever made…about a singing vegan in a fuchsia…
Bored with watching Russell Crowe battle in Gladiator, prattle in A Beautiful Mind or tattle in The Insider? Then here’s your ticket for a journey back to the real world: The Colorado Theatre Guild wants you to take in a live show on March 23 as part of its first…
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” So begins The Metamorphosis, and those famous opening words are unmistakably Franz Kafka’s — at least they were, until local independent filmmaker Gwylym Cano decided to make a few changes…
Maybe it has to do with how complicated the world is, but for whatever reason, contemporary art — locally, nationally and internationally — has been getting increasingly stripped down. Of course, there’s nothing new about minimalism. Even the so-called original, the 1950s- and ’60s-era New York School variant, was hardly…
There’s a very nice show at Pirate right now called said and done. Installed in the main gallery, it is made up of four colored-pencil drawings and six oil paintings by Denver artist Wes Magyar, a contemporary realist. Magyar’s subject matter is the ordinary, if alienated, events in the lives…
One of the fun things about the media is that many people who work in it lie almost constantly, creating a social minefield that keeps everybody hoppin’. For instance, take the big studios (please). Sometimes we call them up and say, “Hiya, we noticed that you have a major motion…
Looking at the original Blade now, it’s not as impressive as it seemed at the time; its hugely positive reception among the comic-book crowd may have been simply because it didn’t suck. It came out before The Matrix brought Hong Kong-style wires and trenchcoats to the world’s attention, and also…
