Suppose you put 100 public figures together in one place, gave them some provocative subjects to expound on and then just set them loose with one another. It’s Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect, right? Wrong. Actually, it’s the brainchild and culminating statement of the late Howard Higman, a former CU sociology…

Thursday April 2 Plenty of musicians work at paring off the layers, inching just that much closer to their inspirational wellspring. But few do it in a purer fashion than slide guitarist/songwriter Chris Whitley, who’s switched from his tortured, dense, feedback-shot sound of a few years ago to the totally…

Thursday March 26 The only thing better than listening to a Los Lobos record is seeing rock’s best performing band live. It’s no secret why. The bandmembers play with a depth not often found in the slick, overproduced and overhyped world of popular music. Guitarists David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas…

Douglas Coupland doesn’t have time to be anyone’s guru. He’s flown from San Francisco to New York in the middle of a grueling book tour, is waiting for a grilled cheese sandwich from room service, wants the heat turned down in his hotel room and will have to hang up…

Sixty-six bands have their fingers crossed. Only a few will be lucky. But they’ll all have a chance to strut their stuff Sunday at the annual Capitol Hill People’s Fair Entertainment Auditions, an eleven-hour marathon designed to separate the local music community’s wheat from its chaff. The auditions, which are…

We all know Molly Brown didn’t go down with the Titanic. So why host a wake in her former home, a Denver museum commemorating her name? “Molly was unsinkable,” local-history scholar Tom Noel attests. “Her mother was not.” Noel, who teaches local lore at CU-Denver, will be the ringleader Sunday,…

Long before Jerry Garcia picked up his first banjo or Spock was a glint in Gene Roddenberry’s eye, there were Sherlockians–or Holmesians, as they prefer to be called in England. A cultist’s cult dedicated to good, if somewhat macabre, clean fun, the fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective…

Thursday March 19 While playwright August Wilson reworks his script for Jitney, originally scheduled by the Denver Center Theatre Company during this time slot, director Israel Hicks will take a break from his ongoing Wilson marathon to stage something a little different. Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky stays…

Last year, during a Scientific and Cultural Facilities District funding evaluation, Industrial Arts Theatre (IAT) director Phil Luna sat mute, listening to others debate the reasons why his nonprofit troupe should be awarded a grant. “There was a question in the grant application–does your company do works for underserved populations?”…

Thursday March 12 The whole Megillah: The main protagonist in the Purim story–Queen Esther–was one tough cookie. It’s no wonder she’s such a great role model for Jewish women today. Her saga, recounted each spring by Jews everywhere, is the focus this morning at a special women’s Megillah Reading taking…

People hang on to the junkiest stuff in their garages and basements–old tools, newspapers, broken bicycles. But members of the Colorado Independent Press Association stash a far more precious cargo in the musty depths of their houses: boxes of self-published books, the finished fruits of their many-sided labors. “I’m out…

Thursday March 5 Art for art’s sake: If only you knew Picasso like Lucien Clergue knew Picasso. The French photographer, known for his portraits of members of the modern Gallic intelligentsia such as Jean Cocteau and Roland Barthes, caught Pablo on film extensively over a period of twenty years, until…

“Tentacle Piece” squats on angular, black steel legs, spewing prehensile canvas digits that hang in expectant stasis, waiting for motion. In spite of its greasy pulleys and cogwheels, there’s something almost endearing about the thing. But that’s not hard to fathom once you meet its maker. In fact, 23-year-old kinetic…

Thursday February 26 Chip off the old Monk: Following in the footsteps of the great pianist and jazz innovator Thelonius Monk isn’t an easy task, but it’s one that his son, T.S. Monk, an accomplished musician in his own right, handles with plenty of poise and style. It was when…

Frank White stands at an overlook on the high road from Taos for a long time, looking out over the clean, cool, sunny New Mexico mountains before shaking his head sadly. He’s thinking about how the native peoples of the Taos Pueblo settled these lands long before Spaniards like Coronado…

Thursday February 19 Amazing grace: No one these days gets closer to the wellspring of bluegrass than Del McCoury, a veteran of Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys whose only professional wish is to keep the Monroe flame burning forever. For McCoury, that’s a family affair: When the guitarist with the high,…

A teller of tall tales makes things up as he goes. Bailey Phelps, for instance, piles clause upon clause while he chats about the job, just to make a point: “Stories are the oldest way in which human beings remember history, convey values, enjoy fantasies, imagine what the world is…

Thursday February 5, 1998 Telling tales: When elder Ediberto, called “Papi-tres” by his great-granddaughter Camila, uses cuentos, or traditional stories passed down among generations, to connect with the modern young girl, he doesn’t seem to get through at first. But eventually, with help from El Cucui, the Mexican béte noire,…

Really just the pulverized, roasted and melted-down by-product of the humble cacao bean, it’s when blended with mounds of butter and sugar that chocolate takes on that glorious, sexy sheen. And that’s where the trouble begins–just ask the people who make it. “It is one of the four main food…

Thursday January 29 Detroit wheels: Life on the streets of Detroit gave former street performer Robert Bradley ample opportunity to hone his talents as a musician. Like the late Ted Hawkins, the Venice Beach busker who gained fame and recorded some fine albums before his death, Bradley, who is blind,…

Blond-haired and blue-eyed, Luis Alberto Urrea is Mexican. And he’s American. Either way, he’s a Renaissance man of letters, juggling disciplines with an compassionate and down-to-earth concern for piecing together the puzzle of human experience. He sometimes introduces himself at readings by saying, “I know I look like Bubba.” But…