Art goes local at the Kirkland Museum: A gallery

Quietly, in December, the Kirkland Museum opened a new installment of its ongoing Colorado art survey, a range of 51 art and decorative works, most of them culled from the museum’s collection and many on view for the first time. The show’s particular focus is on works by past members…

Scientology’s got a hold on you: Five believers you might not expect

The dark empire of Church of Scientology, well known for its extensive real-estate holdings, expanded its reach in Denver yesterday by throwing down $8.5 million in cash money on a new facility to house its secretive minions. Believed by its adherents to be the one true path to enlightenment and…

Bizarre battery talk flies around slap on The Bachelor

If anyone is in need of further proof that we live in strange and litigious times, they need look no further than the gossip that’s arisen around the first episode of ABC’s The Bachelor, which aired yesterday. A slap in the face delivered by contestant Chantal O’Brien to bachelor Brad…

Jersey Shore Cast: Where will they be in ten years?

Lower Snooki in a ball in Times Square on New Year’s Eve while The Situation and other cast members lead a Guinness-breaking fist pump. That was MTV’s original plan, but the authorities shot it down. They’re doing it in Jersey instead. Season three of the show starts next week, and…

Street Art: Don’t Stop Love

This doctored stop sign is remarkable partly in that it’s persevered, untouched, for quite a long time — most suitably, in a neighborhood where people of every faith and stripe live side by side: Africans from across the Dark Continent, South Asians, Russians, retirees, young singles, Muslims and Orthodox Jews…

Ten artists who left their mark on Colorado in 2010

Colorado is a regional art center with literally thousands of artists displaying their work in venues around the state that are as varied as coffee shops and museums. Here’s a list of ten artists who made a difference with their work last year. It’s a wide-ranging group that includes one…

Dana Cain’s Art Collection: Brandon Borchert and Kym Bloom

Dana Cain is the lady with her thumb in a million pies: The local maestra of event-planning throws several well-attended collectors expos, art shows, parties, chocolate fests each year. Her latest — and biggest — project is next summer’s Denver County Fair. But Dana is also an avid art collector…

The Lindsay Lohan family is really reaching on Dogs in Pocketbooks lawsuit

The gossip blogs are abuzz today about the Lindsay Lohan PR machine’s reaction to a movie in the works that’s reportedly based on her. In one corner, filmmaker Charles Castillo, who has repeatedly mentioned Lohan’s name with regard to his upcoming Dogs in Pocketbooks, but claimed today that the movie…

Aaron Carter and Charlie Sheen, is Twitter a celebrity death machine?

As a social phenomenon, probably the most interesting thing about celebrity death hoaxes is that they are a social phenomenon at all. There’s no point to them. They’re not particularly funny (aside from the resulting lulz if the celebrity in question gets all offended about it), and they have the…

Congratulations, Crystal Harris, on your engagement to Hugh Hefner

Sorry to let you down, ladies, but it seems Hugh Hefner — commonly known as “The Sexiest 84-year-old since Bea Arthur died” — went ahead and put a ring on it. The lucky lady? The 24-year-old Crystal Harris, who made her name on the reality series The Girls Next Door,…

Studio Shots: Wazee Union

How do you get kickstarted when you’re a young artist, right out of art school with nothing lining your pockets but a smudge of paint and a fierce desire to put your talent on the map? For some lucky emerging artists in Denver, it all starts with a good studio…

How to get my job: iPhone developer

Matt Johnson is the owner of Mindful Software, LLC, an iOS developer that just released the app Group Trivia, a trivia game that hopes to bridge the gap between online and local play while providing a perfect way to waste a few minutes at a time. With iOS becoming such…

See the late Edward Marecak’s works at Z Art Department

In the ’90s, people started getting interested in historic Colorado modernism, and I’ve always thought it had something to do with the retrospective mood created by the coming turn of the millennium. Edward Marecak, who died in 1993, became one of the first local modernists to have his reputation resurrected…

Indoor dog park offers dogs warmth, personality disorders

The reason human beings are so messed up, theorized the seminal psychologist Sigmund Freud, is that our consciousness is essentially split into two parts continually at war with one another: the ego, which drives us to conform to the orderly and unnatural existence we impose on ourselves through society, and…

Three psychic solstice inquiries yeild vague, disparate results

This holiday season has taught me two things: one, that people are heliotropic as daisies, and two, that they love to celebrate it. Essentially every winter holiday relates somehow to the planet’s descent into darkness and to the eventual return of light. Most of the time, this is a metaphor…