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Denver Culture Feed Newsletter

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Most Interesting Public Art in Denver
Dancers at DCPA
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Total votes: 8

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Summer Movies: The Sweet, The Light And The Loud Trailer: 'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen' Trailer: 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' Trailer: 'The Hurt Locker' Trailer: 'Whatever Works' Trailer: 'Julie An

NPR - Mon, 05/26/2014 - 21:00

The summer-movie slate looks like a typically airheaded one, from Land of the Lost to the naughty new spoof Bruno. But fear not: We found a few dramas — even some foreign weepies — to help tide you over.

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Writing On The Sly, Nathaniel Rich's Secret Debut

NPR - Sat, 10/05/2013 - 08:13

It took over five years for Nathaniel Rich to finish his first novel — maybe because he was writing The Mayor's Tongue secretly, first as a college student, and then while writing film criticism during the day.

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Arts & Leisure Preview: The Unfinished Tale of an Unlikely Hero

International Herald Tribune - 24 min 44 sec ago
Harvey Pekar, the obsessive chronicler of everyday lives, was collaborating at the end of his life on a Web project whose fate in print remains uncertain.

Movie Review | 'Going the Distance': Nothing Keeps Them Apart Except a Continent

International Herald Tribune - 28 min 1 sec ago
In “Going the Distance,” Drew Barrymore and Justin Long are young lovers struggling through a cross-country romance.

Movie Review | 'A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop': Remade in China: Coen Brothers’ Tale of Infidelity and Revenge

International Herald Tribune - 38 min 45 sec ago
The director Zhang Yimou honors the unlikely affinity between himself and Joel and Ethan Coen with a remake of their movie “Blood Simple.”

Movie Review | 'Prince of Broadway': A Street Hustler Becomes a Reluctant Father

International Herald Tribune - 41 min 31 sec ago
Like its subject, the movie is sharp, charismatic and so light on its feet we never know which way it will turn.

Loving the Lowbrow (It Has Its Own Hall of Fame)

International Herald Tribune - 42 min 7 sec ago
“Bad art” — rescued from trash heaps and thrift shops — has become a genre in itself, with its own fans.

Brendan Fraser To Make Broadway Debut in 'Elling'

International Herald Tribune - 53 min 33 sec ago
Brendan Fraser to make Broadway debut in "Elling"

Good Day for Paul Hogan: 'Crocodile Dundee' Star Can Return to U.S.

International Herald Tribune - 59 min 37 sec ago
Mr. Hogan had been prevented from leaving Australia, where authorities said he owed millions in unpaid taxes.

Review: In Venice, Feting Architecture (or Is It Art?)

International Herald Tribune - 1 hour 50 min ago
Under the curatorship of Kazuyo Sejima, the 12th Architecture Biennale is above all marked by its diversity, unified under the usefully unspecific overarching title of “People meet in architecture.”'

Elliott Gould on 40 Years of ‘MASH’

International Herald Tribune - 1 hour 58 min ago
Mr. Gould, who played Trapper John McIntyre in Robert Altman's war satire "MASH," reflects on the film, his work with Mr. Altman and his influential facial hair.

ADVISORY-Lloyd Webber art exhibition story withdrawn (Reuters)

Yahoo News - 2 hours 2 min ago
Reuters - Please be advised that Friday's London story saying composer Andrew Lloyd Webber's private art collection is to go on show this month is wrong. The exhibition has already taken place. The following story has been withdrawn.

'Yank!' Won't Reach Broadway This Season

International Herald Tribune - 2 hours 28 min ago
The musical, about two World War II G.I.'s whose friendship turns into romance, has been delayed until the fall of 2011.

The Covington on Cherry Creek - DENVER, CO - Apartment Rentals

Denver and Art - 2 hours 36 min ago

Author: apartmentfinder29
Keywords:
Added: September 3, 2010

The Bentley Apartments - LAKEWOOD, CO - Apartment Rentals

Denver and Art - 2 hours 36 min ago

Author: ApartmentFinder14
Keywords:
Added: September 3, 2010

The Bentley Apartments - LAKEWOOD, CO - Apartment Rentals

Denver and Art - 2 hours 36 min ago

Author: ApartmentFinder14
Keywords:
Added: September 3, 2010

Graphic Books Best-Sellers: Throwing the Book at Them

International Herald Tribune - 2 hours 42 min ago
A manga clan whose family pet may violate the terms of their lease, and an exhibition on comic-book characters who have found themselves in court.

Capturing nature's harvest for seasons to come | Fergus Drennan

Guardian Unlimited - 4 hours 26 min ago

Photography adds another dimension to wild food foraging – not just for identification purposes but as an art form

• Send your photos of nature's harvest to our Green shoots Flickr group

There are as many reason for the current resurgent rise in enthusiasm for all things wild food and foraging-related as there are wild foods themselves – from belt tightening austerity measures, to a desire to source local, sustainable food without the organic price tag and creativity in the kitchen. Some people choose to forage rather than shop in order to connect with seasonal rhythms instead of the discordant economic and clock-watching dictates of a mundane working week.

As a full-time forager – someone with an all-encompassing hobby that I sometimes try to pass off as work – all of the above, as well as deep-seated philosophical, psychological and spiritual reasons, have led me to an all-embracing commitment to wild food. It is a commitment that seeks to engage with – indeed even capture in some small way – the verdant, fleeting and ephemeral delights that nature exhibits.

As a child, the first books I encountered that seemed to capture in small part the magnificence of nature were Edith Holden's delightful 1906 The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady and Rev William Keeble Martin's exquisitely illustrated The Concise British Flora in Colour. Later, as a teenager, I came upon the book Wild Food by the now grand master of photographic guides, Roger Phillips. His superb photography seemed to truly capture the mysterious elements that made foraging for wild food so appealing - delightfully arranged rustic compositions showed tarte aux myrtilles on the banks of a woodland stream; blackberry pies, tarts and jams against a backdrop of stubble-burning field, and Carragheen soup precariously balanced on craggy waveswept rocks. These pictures were alive with the raw beauty, hinted dangers and creative promise of wild food.

Being neither well-suited to poetry nor painting, photography allowed me to add an engaging and enjoyable dimension to my wild food pursuits. The photographic dimension to foraging is wonderfully varied: plant portraits for identification; final dish shots; underwater photography of seaweeds resplendent in their natural element, or arty photos just for the creative and celebratory joy of it all.

In the UK, the changing seasons and varied habitats of specific wild plant foods offer endless scope for exciting pictures: nuts, berries, leaves, roots and fungi, their fascinating colours naturally juxtaposed against storm-leaden skies, misty rivers, and sun-baked earth. Raw settings and macro lens offer up the unique perspective of the intimate and super close-up view, revealing hidden details and mysterious patterns in seed husks and fruit skins.

The following list of wild foods available in September is in no way exhaustive. Apart from Hottentot figs and bilberries, that don't grow here, and truffles that I've never been lucky enough to find, these are all the things I regularly forage down in Kent:

Fruit: Elderberry, Juke of Argyle's "Goji" tea plant berries, black nightshade berry (some caution advised), dog rose hip, mulberry, wild service tree and other sorbus spp berries, Japanese rose hip, hawthorn berry (haws), staghorn sumac berries, blackberries, dewberries, bilberries, sloes, sea buckthorn berries, apples, crab apples, rowan berries, pears, figs, Hottentot figs, Himalayan honeysuckle berries (some caution advised), Yew berries (lots of caution advised), cherry plums, greengages, Juniper berries, hops.

Leaves: Watercress, sea aster, seabeet, sea purslane, perennial wallrocket, fat hen, water mint and other mints, Canadian fleabane, sow thistle, wood sorrel, common sorrel, ox-eye daisy, sea plantain, marsh samphire (tips), bristly ox-tongue.

Flowers: Yarrow, heather, common mallow.

Roots/bulbs: Burdock root, horse radish root, dandelion root, ramsons/wild garlic bulbs (and roots).

Nuts/seeds: Walnuts (soft - for making pate), beech nuts (mast), Himalayan balsam seeds, hazelnuts, great plantain seeds, wild carrot seeds, fennel seeds, poppy seeds, cabbage family plant seeds, common hogweed seeds.

Fungi: Giant puffball, summer truffle, chanterelle, parasol, fairy ring, jelly ear, penny bun and other boletes, fly agaric (caution advised, toxins must be leached out first before consuming) summer truffles, cauliflower fungus, beefsteak fungus, field and horse mushroom and other agaricus species.

Seaweeds: Dulse, laver, Carragheen, grape pip weed, oyster thief,

Wracks: Bladder, toothed, horned, egg, spiral, channelled,

Kelps: Oarweed, furbellows, sugar kelp, thongweed, sea lettuce, gutweed and other ulva species, dabberlocks, japweed, pepper dulse.

For those new to wild foods, apart from attending wild food or plant/fungi identification courses, I'd recommend Roger Phillips's Wild Food, The Wild Flower Key by Francis Rose and Clare O'Reilly, the photographic edition of Richard Mabey's classic Food for Free, Miles Irving's The Forager Handbook and the excellent web-based resource and database, Plants For A Future.

Fergus Drennan is a broadcaster and writer.

Send your photos of nature's harvest to our Green shoots Flickr group


guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds


Master of war

Guardian Unlimited - 4 hours 52 min ago

Da Vinci's study of two soldiers, at the Royal Academy this autumn, captures battlefield trauma as ferociously as Don McCullin

War is coming to London. A drawing that shows us the reality of battle reflected in an old warrior's eyes will be shown this autumn at the Royal Academy, and it brings with it the despair, sorrow and numbness of a lifetime of violence.

The drawing is by Leonardo da Vinci. When he drew this compelling head, flanked by a second grimacing profile, in about 1504 he was in his early fifties and had spent much of his life working with soldiers and men of war. When he was about 30, the painter left his native Tuscany and went to Milan, where he applied for a job at the court of Ludovico Sforza, not as an artist but a "master of war". His surviving notebooks show that he did indeed design a staggering variety of bizarre and cruel weapons in Milan, including missiles, machine guns and an armoured car. Then at the start of the 16th century he set off on his travels again, and in 1502 became a military engineer to the terrifying warrior Cesare Borgia.

Those experiences are distilled in the bleak eyes, the despairing scream and the leathery skin – superbly created using soft grey shade – of Leonardo's bitter survivor. He has death in his eyes. What has he seen? What has he done? We see in this portrait the faces and the inner beings of mercenary soldiers Leonardo knew, fighting their battles for power and money. The drawing has a nightmare quality reminiscent of Shakespeare's Macbeth, as the weary soldier screams as he glimpses the evil of his life.

Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of military psychology is astonishingly modern. It speaks to our age of war as truthfully as it spoke to his own. It is fascinating to compare the mask of rage he draws so acutely with the shell-shocked face of a soldier photographed by Don McCullin in Vietnam.Both faces distress us because we are made to imagine what they have seen. In these faces damaged by battle the vast horror of war is suggested more profoundly than in a hundred gory pictures. War destroyed minds then, and it destroys them now, but Leonardo looks into its abyss and keeps a steady drawing hand.

Jonathan Jones
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds


Guardian Camera Club: Aaron Hargreaves' portfolio

Guardian Unlimited - 6 hours 15 min ago

A review of Aaron Hargreaves' portfolio



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