Current Events

String Cheese Incident, Colorado’s principal contribution to the jam-band world, called it quits last year. But unlike other jam acts that have gone into their hiatuses in a state of quiet mystery, String Cheese went out with a bang: a four-night run at their home-state Red Rocks Amphitheatre. With singer-guitarist Billy Nershi apparently devoted to acoustic music, a reunion seems a long way off, if it ever happens. Fans, though, have something more than hissy bootleg recordings of those final shows to memorialize the band. “Hi-Def From Red Rocks” is a life-size, high-definition screening of the band in concert, featuring over three hours of music from last August’s final stand. The recording is being billed as a virtual tour and is playing one venue at a time; it hits Aspen’s Belly Up on Sunday, May 18. A preview video is available at virtualvenuesnetwork.com.

Though it doesn’t easily fit into either category, “Beaufort” is closer to a war film than an anti-war film. The Israeli production is set, claustrophobically, in an ancient, hilltop fortress (named Beaufort) in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military is set to withdraw from its 18-year occupation of the area ” yet bombs still fall, mines are being laid, young men continue to be killed. There are hardly any anti-war sentiments heard from the outside; the film, nominated for a best foreign language film Oscar, shows just enough of the world beyond Beaufort to reveal that the land being occupied is beautiful and barren. The futility of killing is thus hammered home not with argument or politics, but by showing how this particular battle hasn’t gotten anyone anywhere. Just a few more bodies piled up, a few more parents left grieving, a few billion more dollars wasted. “Beaufort,” directed by Joseph Cedar, shows Monday and Tuesday, May 19-20, at the Wheeler Opera House.

When Glenwood Springs artist Annette Roberts-Gray began “In Honor, In Memory,” she thought there would be a natural conclusion to the project. The idea was to create a unique ceramic vase for each U.S. soldier killed in the Iraq War, and Roberts-Gray believed that the war would come to an end, the casualties would stop accumulating, and she could put the work to rest. But the war has outlasted her endurance, and the project has taken a turn. While Roberts-Gray makes the occasional vase at the request of a dead soldier’s family, she stopped trying to keep up with the casualty count. Her heart, however, remains with the work, and now she makes installations using the vases still in her possession. All of the pieces ” a thousand or so ” are being exhibited, to magnificent effect, at the CMC Gallery in Glenwood Springs through June 9; a much smaller display is planned for Memorial Day Weekend at the Snowmass Chapel.