Ready for Takeoff

SUN, 8/1 Cirque du Soleil is dazzling, but audience members often find themselves gasping as much from the high-flying prices as from the high-flying stunts. For the next two weeks, Boulder’s Frequent Flyers offers some relief, with Cirque-like performances at prices that won’t make spectators queasy. Starting today, the Flyers’…

Absolute Scoot

SAT, 7/31 “Last year, even Mayor Hickenlooper hung out at the Bluebird. He showed up with his scooter, flip-flops and even a Hawaiian shirt,” says Phil Lombardo. Unfortunately, Hizzoner is on vacation and won’t be back for this year’s Mile High Mayhem, but the rest of the city will rev…

Talking Shop

Silvana Vukadin-Hoitt is a woman of the world. The German-born Bosnian speaks four languages and has been there, done that, and still hasn’t grown tired of it all. For Vukadin-Hoitt, every day, even the quiet ones spent overseeing her neighborhood boutique, Silvana L’Amour, promises adventure of some sort. Her enthusiasm…

Killing (Stuffed) Animals for Art

Fresh out of the East and rising into the international art world are unique toys for adults. No, not those kinds of toys. Well, maybe those kinds of toys. “Mine are pornographic,” says Capsule curator Lauri Lynnxe Murphy of the artwork she’s included in the gallery’s Plush: Perverse Playthings. Without…

Vision Quest

Writer Joseph Campbell spent his life examining the archetype of the “hero,” and his concept of the hero’s journey in mythology is indelibly etched into our culture through vehicles such as Star Wars. The gang at Arts Street’s Comedy Theatre used the idea as the basis for (in)EXPLICIT: Parental Advisory,…

Literary Tricks

FRI, 7/23 By nature, the curved, concrete, fly-away world of skateboarding simply flips off the literary world. It’s tough to imagine, after all, how a seat-of-your-pants extreme sport embraced predominantly by fourteen-year-old males and few tough, old hardcore adults in baggy shorts might have anything to do with the written…

Talking Shop

What do ‘zines, pirate radio and hacking all have in common? For one thing, they all have subversive underpinnings, and for another, the folks who are into such things tend to like trading information: in cyberspace, by snail mail and under the table, in print and blogs. So when you…

Giant Steps

SAT, 6/26 Polly Letofsky was walking on a “barren highway through a tiny town in northern Australia” when a senior citizen flashed her. As Letofsky tells it, an “eighty-year-old, kind of big woman” hailed her by name and then told her in a heavy Aussie accent that she’d survived a…

Talking Shop

Karen Moore is a walking fashion statement, the keeper of a personal style so strong that she’s managed to shape it into a local retail temple of rich, delicious, quirky interior design. And when her business, DjUNA, a two-story tribute to shabby chic and modern vintage style, first hit Cherry…

Dream Weavers

For weavers, introspection comes with the territory. In its simplest form, the repetitive act of weaving cloth, driving threads together into an artful entanglement of warp and weft, is something like time itself: slow, steady, drifting, building. The weaver moves deliberately, thinking all the time, perhaps dreaming. And even in…

Goodnight, Gracie

FRI, 6/18 At the beginning of Say Goodnight Gracie, comedian George Burns is in limbo. Caught between this world and the next, Burns is unable to reunite with his partner in love and work, Gracie Allen, until he gives the performance of his lifetime to none other than God. The…

Hearty Appetites

FRI, 6/18 Last New Year’s Day, while the rest of us were watching Bowl games or trying to figure out where, exactly, we lost that tooth the night before, Emily Blong and Natalie Taylor were frolicking together on a dump truck in north Denver. Summoned to the strange locale by…

Hollywood Square

Robert Lecher says he was born in Spain and grew up in a small town of 5,000 somewhere in the Nebraska heartland before eventually landing here in Denver as a traveling “I Love Dancing Country” workshop instructor. “But my mind,” he notes, “has always been in Hollywood and New York.”…

Crybaby

THURS, 6/10 These days, you’re as likely to come across George Lopez on ABC as you are on HBO or Univision. His smiling face is everywhere: on stages across the country, on his hit weekly sitcom George Lopez, in films, on late-night talk shows, even on Inside the NFL. The…

Tin Can Alley

SAT, 6/12 Back in 1979, the art of home brewing was just a bit of foam with possibilities, relegated to the garages and basements of plebeian beer tinkerers in such forward-thinking towns as San Francisco, Seattle and Boulder, where fermenting experiments bubbled forth from primitive barrels and jugs. Most of…

Yard Artists

FRI, 6/4 The relationship between people and their gardens is an ancient one, primeval as a redwood, humanity’s link to its own natural beginnings. And not only do we love gardens for their beauty, but also for the creativity they inspire. That’s how it is for Boulder artist Cha Cha…

Road Warriors

We love our cars — that’s a fact. They’re our homes away from home, the canned personification of whatever freedoms we have left to enjoy in these uptight times. But automobiles also reflect popular culture in a seasonal blueprint of design, color schemes and technology that rewrites itself annually. Cars…

Living Color

When invited by the City of Broomfield to put on an art exhibit in the building shared by its library and public auditorium, members of the Women’s Caucus for Art made certain the theme fit the environment. As an enhancement for the Mamie Doud Eisenhower Public Library’s summer reading program,…

Rev It Up

MON, 5/31 If you’re feeling the need for speed this Memorial Day, get to Bandimere Speedway for the annual Pepsi All-American High School Drags. The showdown is open to high school students between the ages of sixteen and nineteen with a valid driver’s license and a release form signed by…

The Eagle Soars

MON, 5/31 The Shona people of Zimbabwe call the bateleur eagle (a rare native raptor that in Shona religious lore serves as a messenger of the gods) “Chapungu.” It’s no mistake that the name also applies to the contemporary stone art of the nation, a relatively recent cultural endeavor that’s…

Get a Move On

SAT, 5/22 As Karl Marx said, revolution is not a fixed, static phenomenon; it’s a perpetual and ever-evolving process. So it makes sense that after seven years of showcasing the progressive and subversive at its current location, Revoluciones Collective Art Space is moving. The award-winning gallery was opened in 1997…

Aria Ready?

FRI, 5/21 Opera usually brings to mind a grand spectacle with lavish sets and costumes, supertitles and glass-breaking arias. But in these parts, if you take away all the grandeur, you’re left with a rich pool of vocal talent aching to be heard. Colorado boasts far more fine voices, in…