His real name is Zebu Recchia, and at the age of nineteen, he left his hog-riding, bricklaying father in Denver behind to become a tramp. Though it’s hardly your usual 21st-century occupation, it seemed like the timing was just right for Zebu, whose stage name is Eddy Joe Cotton, a…

Think Italian cars — and the ensuing revelry should conjure up a Mediterranean mountainside under blue, sunny skies. A tanned and chiseled Romeo is at the wheel, a carefree dark-eyed Juliet in a sundress at his side; they’re both wearing sunglasses and the top is down. Que bella, no? Unlike…

Not everyone can expect to find a tyrannosaurus buried in the backyard, but if you ask Denver Museum of Nature & Science paleontologist Kirk Johnson, it’s, well, possible…if you live along the Front Range. And it has happened. “We have fossils with street addresses here,” Johnson explains. “Colorado has some…

When landscape architect John Ludwig first opened his South Broadway garden shop Birdsall on a part-time basis in 1988, he envisioned it as Denver’s answer to Smith & Hawken, the upscale Mill Valley enterprise that broke in as a mail-order business before opening its first outlet in 1985. Just as…

It’s hard to remember that the Capitol Hill People’s Fair, which has grown so huge and cumbersome over the last 31 years, is actually a fair for the people. But this year’s event returns to its populist roots in a small way by shining a spotlight on one of peopledom’s…

At a time when air travel’s become risky business, vacation planning takes on a whole new dimension. The newly fearful can no longer blithely book flights to Timbuktu or even Grand Rapids without experiencing trepidation. The new, extended airport regime of long hours spent being frisked, profiled and interrogated is…

Denver evolved from a patchwork of small towns, and its history reflects myriad communities that slowly knitted together to create the metropolis we now call home. But it’s the lingering differences that make an annual celebration of Denver’s rough-and-ready history worthwhile. Historic Denver Week, which begins Monday, May 13, will…

For Denver’s acclaimed Curious Theatre Company, there’s no such thing as winding down a season. If anything, the troupe’s finale at the Acoma Center, José Rivera’s Cloud Tectonics, has artistic director Chip Walton flying sky-high on a wave of the same magic realism that drives Rivera’s lyrical play, a timeless…

In Portuguese, “É minha cara means, literally, “That’s my face.” But as filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris notes, the Brazilians use the phrase colloquially: “If you see something that’s your style, say, a shirt that looks like it should be in your closet, you say, ‘É minha cara.’ Also, if you…

Denver’s had a lackluster National Poetry Month so far: Outside of a few isolated blips, it’s been business as usual for the area’s alive-and-kicking but seriously diffuse poetry community. That could all change when Gary Glazner, the Vibes (the rhythm section of the Jazz Passengers, featuring Bill Ware, Brad Jones…

Docents are the unsung heroes of every museum; primarily volunteers, they go back to school before each new exhibit opens, then lead their quiet little tours and go home. But the five docents at the Museum of Outdoor Arts, fascinated by the museum’s recently refurbished, topsy-turvy Red Grooms sculpture “Brooklyn…

When three white men in Jasper, Texas, chained James Byrd, a black man, to a pickup truck and dragged him to a grisly death four years ago, most Americans recoiled in horror. New York documentarians Whitney Dow and Marco Williams decided to explore how this could happen in this small…

“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…

At the close of Sounds of the River, Da Chen’s second memoir set in the tumult of a rapidly changing People’s Republic of China, young Chen is ready to depart for America — a place akin to another planet for the country boy from southeast China, whose hard work and…

It’s the usual sad story in today’s numbers-oriented music business: San Francisco’s Peter Case had a hit in the early ’80s with the power-popping Plimsouls, but like the girl in the song (“A Million Miles Away”), success proved elusive. Since then, Case has continued to do what he really does…

Sculptor Ann Cunningham’s life is like her works: a touchy-feely gestalt of related things. Tactile art is her forte, but the title doesn’t fully describe her craft’s sensual boundaries. She also teaches art to blind people, trying to get inside their unimaginably different world. Teaching, the Golden resident readily notes,…

Since its inception five years ago, the National Education Association’s Read Across America celebration has fallen on (or around) March 2, the birthday of Theodor Seuss Geisel. Best known in the kid-lit realm as Dr. Seuss, in the 1950s Geisel invented a unique literacy-boosting formula by creating attention-grabbing kids’ books…

As the Denver Art Museum readies plans for its futuristic new wing, it’s also come up with a sweeping exhibition that will tickle your eyes with a visual taste of things to come — in more ways than one. When it opens this Saturday, US Design 1975-2000 — a major…

Nearly every American has an immigrant experience in his or her near or distant past. As such, we’re all bound up in a loose, new-world commonality: We all have roots in other places. How American culture ultimately grew out of myriad incoming traditions is a subject of never-ending conjecture. Mark…

When you’re on top of the heap in the world of found-object-assemblage art, it’s quite possible you have actually seen everything. Consider sculptor Donald Lipski: When vacating his studio in an old movie theater in Brooklyn, he filled three tractor-trailers with stuff he’d packratted away since he began picking up…

What provides the glue that holds any multi-arts venue together? At the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture, thematic wizardry seems to do the job. Under the direction of Joanne Marks Kauvar, the Mizel continues to pump out thought-provoking interdisciplinary projects once or twice a year. Previous endeavors explored everything…

One walks into Metropolitan State College of Denver’s troubled Center for Visual Arts uneasily these days: The unceremonious booting of longtime director Sally Perisho, a ten-year veteran who’s generally been credited with building the gallery, leaves the premises reeking of indecision. CVA Education Program Coordinator Amy Banker, for one, has…