Blog Posts

JAMES BELFLOWER

James Belflower’s work appears or is forthcoming in: Jacket, 580 Split, EOAGH, LIT, First Intensity, Coconut, and Abovo, among others. And Also a Fountain, his collaborative chapbook with Anne Heide and J. Michael Martinez, is forthcoming from NeOPepper Press. He was a finalist for the 2008 Sawtooth Poetry Prize and the National Poetry Series Competition, a 2007 Pushcart nominee and winner of the 2007 Juked Magazine poetry prize. He runs PotLatch Poetry, a site dedicated to the free exchange of poetry books, journals, chapbooks and ephemera.

Denver Botanic Gardens Welcomes Synthesis
Works by Robin Schaefer

Opening July 15th and running through August 29th, 2008

There seems to be nothing stopping Robin Schaefer and her art.

16th Street Mall is well-known locally and beyond as a vibrant area where street performers gather.

This past week, in separate conversations, I heard two nearly unrelated things, concerning how one could approach contemporary art. The first was from a good friend, who said something to the nature of, “I don’t like most contemporary art because it’s not art.” When I asked him to explain what he meant, he referenced several controversial public art pieces in Denver (which I’ll leave unnamed, as those debates have been well-trodden elsewhere).

Vis-A-Visage, a group exhibit now on-view at Object+Thought, focuses on the question of the feminine, specifically the female face as it relates to beauty, pop-culture and history, but successfully avoids all the bad metaphors that can disempower the subject. Formal comparison of woman-to-flower, singular emphasis on fertility, and the idealization of female sexuality are not to be found here. The images though striking (and in a few cases, rather disturbing) also avoid hyperbolic gestures of female identity that push and thus expose the cultural/masculine gaze to the nth degree.

Every year, Naropa University in Boulder hosts the Summer Writing Program. Included on the roster is a series of readings featuring some of the most celebrated, strange, equally intellectual and down-to-earth writers of poetry and fiction.

Personally, I especially look forward to:

If the political is personal, then Jonson Y. Kuhn and Ariel Marks catch us with our pants down. “4 Days In Bed,” a play based on a true story and co-written by Kuhn and Marks documents the confusion, exaggeration, banality, joy, aggravation, error and quirky brilliance of Denver, a penniless, frustrated writer, and Tucson, his girlfriend, a recovering alcoholic visiting him from Arizona.

The Brad Kahlhamer exhibit recently opened at the MCA Denver, featuring two mixed media-pieces from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna and a totem-pole sculpture from the Logan Collection. Kahlhamer combines rock n’roll with landscape, spirituality with a raw sexuality, gritty realism with dreaming-life. Recurring motifs of provocatively clothed women (though never quite nude), death and American identity create a combined imagistic effect of vertigo. Form seems to occur two ways simultaneously for Kahlhamer: kaleidoscopically and vertically.

D. Biddle is getaway music, the kind you listen to when everything you cherish has burnt down, then before the dust even settles you pack-up whatever’s left and head for oblivion. The tension between oft-haunting melodies and lyrics that edge towards the poetically elegiac, quiver with urgency as well as immobility. D. Biddle traces the fallen structures of disaster, capturing in slow motion the gesture of catastrophe. Guileless emotional pitch tends to crescendo from an almost tender, though dark nostalgia into a series of aching blows and repetitions.

In Culture: Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey
by Lisa Gedgaudas

I don’t believe that I will have too much trouble convincing anyone that alcohol would be considered a large part of our cultural activities. Wine goes well with art, vodka transcends music, and whiskey- can make a man wanna dance.