The rules of the game: Go slow. Have a station wagon. Spring cleaning means it’s high season for dumpster diving. “It’s like shopping at a thrift store,” Mary says. “You can’t be looking for something specific.” But while on the road with veteran divers Mary and Tony, who are as…
Ted Conover is a writer who immerses himself in his subject. He has traveled with hoboes, investigated the lives of illegal aliens and hobnobbed with the rich and vacuous in Aspen. Three books came of those adventures. But the scariest assignment he gave himself is the topic of his latest…
For the last five years or so, the fine-art world has seen a major revival of interest in abstraction in its innumerable stylistic permutations. Abstraction in painting and sculpture came into its own in the first few years of the twentieth century. Its audience among artists and collectors was small…
The Philip J. Steele Gallery in the lobby of the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design is currently showing Andy Warhol: Endangered Species, a group of ten silkscreen prints commissioned in 1983 by New York’s Ronald Feldman Gallery. The year is significant because 1983 is just before Warhol broke…
What determines a Shakespearean actor’s greatness? Is it the will to uphold established practice while embracing the avant-garde? Does it depend on how ingeniously a performer wrests humanity from every role, whether central or subordinate? And when the dangers of rote and creative stagnation creep into an actor’s great room,…
The great German director Max Reinhardt may have been able to mount some 24 different versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, including a 1935 film that starred James Cagney as Bottom and Mickey Rooney as Puck. Most mere mortals, however, learn that presenting even one fully staged production of Shakespeare’s…
This was to be a column extolling the daring and inventiveness of a very groovy Sci Fi Network television show called good vs. evil, in which two dead men, a fro-sporting, cool-spouting brutha and his pale-faced partner, try to save the souls of those who have made Faustian deals with…
Digital video is poised to become a major factor in commercial filmmaking, and Time Code, the new feature from Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas), could be used as a commercial for the process, which is its greatest point of interest. The movie is not so much an intriguing story as…
Given that most film studios have multimillion-dollar marketing budgets with which to target eighteen- to 25-year-olds, it’s astonishing how little they seem to know about the everyday life of those they’re supposed to be studying. Drew Barrymore has never been kissed? Please. Rachel Leigh Cook undatable until Freddie Prinze Jr…
Cinco de Mayo celebrates a tiny slice of history — the Mexican army’s defeat of the French occupation at Puebla, deep in the heart of Mexico, in 1862. But the real celebration is more about the spirit of common people linked together in a shared cause. So, it’s a time…
Imagine this: You’re a high-end, work-driven Bay Area management consultant with degrees from Cornell and Princeton. The world is your oyster, though you swallow it in eighty-hour-a-week increments, stopping at home once in a while to — what? — brush your teeth, maybe, or dust the empty refrigerator shelves. Then…
Under the guidance of Cydney Payton, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art has become a center for shows in which women artists figure prominently. Muscle: Power of the View, in the West Gallery, is the latest example. It will be followed by Elbows and Tea Leaves: Front Range Women in…
The word is out: ILK on Santa Fe Drive has become a place to see some of the best little art shows in town, and the two exhibits on display right now, Christina Piña: New Paintings, and Bill Brazzell: Constructs, will do nothing but enhance that positive buzz. The first…
Scholars perennially debate whether it’s an opera or a musical, pundits slather politically correct whitewash over its antiquated portrait of black life and critics alternately champion and decry its eclectic score of ballads, jazzed-up spirituals and show-tune fragments. Audiences, meanwhile, never seem to get enough of the unforgettable melodies and…
There are few memorable lines or riveting exchanges in Beautiful Thing. Instead, playwright Jonathan Harvey, whose 1993 work graced off-Broadway six years after it premiered in London, uses everyday, off-the-cuff banter to explore the budding romantic attraction between two teenage boys. And rather than wallow in adolescent angst, the Theatre…
Peter Becker is the most important man in the movie business, even though you have no idea who he is. Becker himself would not cop to such a description; he, like few else in the business called show, does not put himself before the work. To describe what he does…
The highfalutin’ soap opera in W. Somerset Maugham’s fiction earned him a huge reading public in his day and made him a favorite of movie producers on both sides of the Atlantic. Maugham’s stories and novels — every one stuffed full of romance, deceit and tragedy — have inspired nearly…
There is a killing late in Gladiator, Ridley Scott’s new heroic epic, and it is one of those wonderfully cathartic extinguishings that make wide-eyed audiences rise and cheer. We’ve been herded across much of western Europe by this point, through Germanic mud, Spanish fields and Italian dust, and we’ve seen…
Everybody’s a princess at one point or another. Rich girls work it from birth to final crackup. Bourgeois girls play the precious-‘n’-misunderstood game through adolescence, shifting it into ruthless ambition shortly thereafter. Poor girls can blow an entire lifetime just screwing up their hair and pretending they’re Tolkein’s Galadriel. As…
Poor Kim Basinger! In her first role since bagging the 1998 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for L.A. Confidential (the film that should have won Best Picture and Best Director as well), the actress positively trembles with what seems to be fear. Notoriously insecure about appearing on camera, Basinger…
In the new film Dancing in September, black TV executive George Washington tells the woman he loves, sitcom writer Tommy Crawford, “One day I just may be the first black president of a major network.” The start-up network he works at, WPX, is trying to gain a niche with minority…
Jack Manning’s photograph titled “Don’t Call It Burlesque” looks like it was snapped by a detective in the 1940s: A man stands in the middle of three gloomy shadows, his head slightly turned to the right, looking quite suspect. Almost like a determined pimp, he’s standing in front of an…
