Thursday May 21 Budding filmmakers will be in the spotlight when the Denver Public Schools Film/Video Arts Program Student Film Festival screens tonight at the Bug Performance & Media Art Center, 3654 Navajo St. The festival, which includes works written, produced, directed and edited by both high-school students and adult…

Next time you run into a group of people dressed all in white, bedecked with brightly colored ribbons and sashes, jingling with bells and wildly waving sticks and hankies at dawn, don’t direct them en masse to the nearest asylum. They’re probably Morris dancers, and it must be spring. This…

Documentary filmmaker Don McGlynn is one of those charmed individuals who do for a living exactly what they like to do most. But in his case, it’s a little more involved. It’s a matter not only of being a filmmaker, but of being an archivist, a film junkie and a…

Only a pilgrim would be caught dead in blue jeans at a mountain-man rendezvous. And depending on whom he met there, the dang flatlander might either get it between the eyes with a tommyhawk or get lucky and find some kind soul who’d lend him a spare pair of buckskins…

Nancy Smith is a motion addict. “I had a childhood love for spinning, for getting dizzy and falling down,” she says. “I loved swings and swingsets and motion–repetitive motion that takes you into an altered state.” So when the Boulder choreographer first saw aerial dancer Robert Davidson perform on a…

Thrusday May 14 We’re not going to speculate. We’re not even going to cry. But even we have to admit that the last episode of Seinfeld is a cultural event not to be missed. Some will prefer to mourn quietly over tuna sandwiches and Snapple in their own living rooms,…

Here’s to the girlie-girls of bygone days. Beginning in the 1920s, their doe eyes and impossible dimensions began to grace all persuasions of advertising, from laundry-aid promos to nightclub matchbook covers, finally culminating in the unself-consciously lush and ridiculous Vargas Girls of the Forties. Nowadays that seething sexuality seems soft,…

Thursday May 7 It’s a good Thursday to go dancing, with a couple of concert offerings guaranteed to put some oomph in your step. New Orleans’s unshakable Funky Meters provide nonstop R&B grooves tonight at 10 at the Aggie Theater, 204 College Ave. in Fort Collins. True classics of their…

On the folk scene, one way you can separate the newer singer-songwriter fans from the well-rooted moldy figs is to play a song. If everyone in the room sings along, they probably belong to the latter group. And if you do it, too, chances are you’re old enough to remember…

International Dawn Chorus Day developed as a lay introduction to International Migratory Bird Day, when really serious birders convene to count the various species that pass through the region each spring. But taking part in the dawn chorus requires no special gear, manuals or fancy binoculars. It’s simple, and it’s…

Thursday April 30 During the Holocaust, Oskar Schindler wasn’t the only guy with a list. Varian Fry, an American, helped a select group of thinkers, scientists and artists escape Nazi Germany’s death-hold on Europe during World War II; among them were such cultural luminaries as Marc Chagall and Marcel Duchamp…

The professor wears high-top sneakers. One’s black, one’s white; both look well-broken in. It’s the kind of statement trumpet player Ron Miles seems fond of making: No big deal, it just is–but doesn’t it look really, really good? Miles is sweet-tempered and rumpled and always thinking, in his quiet way,…

In 1991, New York City native Julie Dash made Daughters of the Dust, a gorgeous pastiche of a film dense with African symbolism and a distinctly feminine spirituality. Set in the 1890s on a remote South Carolina sea island, it documents life among members of the Peazant family, Gullah people…

Thursday April 23 Some folks would just put their tails between their legs and hide in the nearest closet after being dissed for radical politics by the President of the United States, but onetime assistant attorney general nominee Lani Guinier has not backed up an inch. The Harvard law professor…

Angel Vigil is a walking, talking, Hispanic-culture-spoutin’ machine of a man. Best of all, he’s powered by his mom’s secret chile recipe–the only product of folk wisdom he’s not more than happy to divulge. That one might get him into trouble, but the rest is what he lives for. Vigil…

When you drive through the Curtis Park neighborhood, kids are the first sign of life you’ll see. They’re everywhere–all sizes, shapes and colors, running down the sidewalks, sharing bikes and bubble gum, hollering, laughing and watching over one another. It’s a good sign. It means that there are families in…

Thursday April 16 If you like your bluegrass slightly slick and not so whiny, the Nashville Bluegrass Band has your number. The Grammy-grabbin’ quintet, which includes one small pickin’ legend after another, blends the old-time traditions pioneered by the likes of Bill Monroe with more updated interpretations by artists such…

When Glen Hanket and his bride, Susan, went on their honeymoon, they didn’t go to Paris or a Caribbean island, or even to Niagara Falls. Instead, they took a year off from their workaday lives to walk from Maine to Oregon, picking up roadside litter along the way. Hanket, usually…

Paul Davis takes the mike. He’s wearing loose plaid shorts, he lunges when he walks, and his glasses are smudged. “‘Clocktower Physics!!'” he announces, then continues: “Motion! Emotion! Men and women/are in motion. They are not defining God./They are PIERCE-nosed boys and TATTOOED girls/under the clocktower. They hang out an…

From the late ’20s to the early ’40s, Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom was the swing-dance capital of the world. All of the best big bands played there, sometimes competing against one another in wild battles of the bands and always propelled by dancers on the smoky, sweaty floor. The mass of…

Thursday April 9 The Evil Companions Literary Award, presented annually by Colorado State University’s Colorado Review to a poet or writer with ties to the West, goes this year to author Dorothy Allison, whose stark, straightforward style first caught readers right between the eyes in Bastard Out of Carolina, a…

The idea of sustainability in architecture has been kicking around for years. Never mind that most of us haven’t got the slightest idea what it means. For architects, who seem to interact in a subtle, theoretical world that makes perfect sense to them, it’s all in a day’s work. Richard…