Naughty, naughty. You’ve been so busy — sleeping off the Thanksgiving turkey, gorging on Christmas cookies, festooning your house in a blinding tangle of watt-wasting holiday lights, wearing a lampshade at the office party — that you completely forgot to shop. It’s okay. Read the following, take a deep breath,…

Arrrrrr! Just in case you hadn’t noticed, pirates are in this year. But you won’t run into Johnny Depp or any other lonely peg-legged seafarin’ brigands at the 24th Anniversary Group Show, which opens on Friday, December 19, at Pirate: A Contemporary Art Oasis, one of the oldest cooperative galleries…

THURS, 12/11 You’ll find an odd mixture of high and low culture in LoDo and its environs these days. Essentially, there are galleries and there are clubs, diametrically opposed venues with clienteles that rarely clink glasses, let alone even meet, other than to pass in the night once a month…

SUN, 12/14 Author Michael Shapiro is pure Brooklyn. A man of his borough through and through (though he no longer lives there), the fifty-something journalist speaks thick Brooklynese punctuated by a flurry of exclamation points, and his enthusiasm for the Brooklyn he grew up in — the fabled blue-collar Brooklyn…

What do you do when even the funky stores all start to look alike? For some shoppers out there, that dreadful moment when sweet eclecticism degenerates into a marketing ploy could signal the end of life as you know it. But for the moment, you can put away the smelling…

For Colorado State University professor Diane Sparks, who specializes in textile design and merchandising, curating Divya Vastra: Heavenly Garments, an exhibit of about a hundred saris now on view at CSU’s Curfman Gallery, was a labor of love for cloth and all of its possibilities.Once Sparks starts describing each outfit…

TUES, 12/9 Take a break from the yuletide hustle and bustle, and step into a snow-globe-like winter wonderland with a screening of Dr. Seuss’s classic tale How the Grinch Stole Christmas at tonight’s first annual Holiday Film Festival at the Wildlife Experience.”We went through all the classic holiday films, from…

FRI, 12/5 It’s full speed ahead into spring as the 2003 Max Fashion Show charges onto the catwalk tonight at El Jebel Event Center, 4625 West 50th Avenue. This is an opportunity for the upper echelon of the fashionista community (or those who just want to resemble it) to hobnob…

The last thing you expect to see this time of year is a gigantic arts festival. We’ve had it drilled into our pointy little heads that such events belong in the summer, when they can be outdoor affairs with blaring music and good stuff to eat and drink and a…

MON, 12/1 Since it premiered on December 1, 1989, as an artists’ response to World AIDS Day, A Day Without Art has gone through a lot of shape-shifting. Instead of closing galleries or draping artworks in black shrouds, artists now tend to speak out on AIDS in visual terms, by…

Boulder author Ying Chang Compestine, a native of Wuhan, China, has been at home in Colorado since coming to the University of Colorado in 1986. Now she’s about to move to California, and it’s a shame: Compestine’s departure is a loss for members of the area’s burgeoning Chinese-American community. But…

SUN, 11/30 In the Jewish tradition, books are central to life: The urge to study the world is ingrained among families, generation to generation, and a well-stocked bookshelf provides the impetus to learn in many Jewish homes. But while the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture’s annual Leah Cohen Festival…

On the phone, Tish Hinojosa is not long on words. But the Texas singer-songwriter, who weaves her tunes from a patchwork of folk, rock, country, swing and Tex-Mex influences and delivers them in a crystal-clear voice, seems to do most of her talking through her low-key and beautiful music. Over…

SUN, 11/23 The image of the perfectly appointed dark-haired beauty in a pillbox hat and blood-spattered pink suit is the first picture that comes to mind at the mention of Jackie Kennedy, the princess of Camelot who sat by her husband when he was shot and killed in Dallas forty…

FRI, 11/21 While his contemporaries flocked to New York and Paris, twentieth-century painter Vance Kirkland chose to spend more than fifty years living and working in Denver. He was not only an innovative artist who painted his way through five major periods, but also an educator — teaching art at…

Belle and the Beast, an updated version of the eighteenth-century fairy tale by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, has waltzed into Boulder’s Nomad Theatre. “We always try to do something classic that appeals to families during the holidays,” says Nomad resident producer Theresa Klebert. “We want you to have a lighter,…

FRI, 11/14 When does an independent film become a work of art? The International Experimental Cinema Exposition (TIE) poses that question to nearly fifty featured directors who carve and sculpt in celluloid. The result is a sort of dadaesque feast for the eyes in which said filmmakers manipulate their avant-garde…

THURS, 11/13 When Denver resident Jason Bosch first attended the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in July 2001, he realized that knowledge, not ignorance, was bliss.”I felt kind of ashamed that I was so ignorant about the world,” says Bosch, adding that the New York-based festival “gives people the…

THURS, 11/13 Mayor Hickenlooper doesn’t have to worry about cleaning up the city after The Day It Snowed Tortillas. Fortunately, the edible precipitation will be confined to the Denver Puppet Theatre, 3156 West 38th Avenue. The 45-minute Southwest-inspired production tells the story of a small town in which villagers save…

THURS, 11/13 Why, exactly, does brown mustard suck? Find out tonight at the premiere of a new Denver-based sitcom, So Dope, to be screened at the entertainment extravaganza So Dope: An Evening of Comedy.”It’s a story about two lifelong friends who don’t want to work their corporate jobs anymore, so…

SAT, 11/1 Seminal New Orleans musician Jelly Roll Morton, acknowledging his own Creole roots, used to say his syncopated early jazz music evolved with a “Spanish tinge,” and it’s an element of jazz that’s always grown with the genre itself. In fact, there’s a name for what’s become of that…

SAT, 11/1 We try to get our kids to read, but it’s an uphill climb in the 21st century: The older they get, the more tuned in they are to sense-teasing technological amusements — Game Boys and Xboxes, non-stop television and computer games — and the less inclined they are…