WED, 3/23 “I am awakened at Dingboche by a sound drifting in from the edge of consciousness,” writes Peter Potterfield in his new book, Classic Hikes of the World, about getting acclimated at the foot of Mt. Everest. “Soothing and exotic, but not identifiable. As sleep fades, my oxygen-starved brain…
When the Manchester-based trio Doves unleashed its melancholy brand of Brit pop via 2000’s Lost Souls, the responses varied. Some found the album too dark and dreamy, an ethereal collection of arty, unapproachable noise. Others embraced it with Pinkerton-like zeal and sat baffled as Coldplay snuck across the Atlantic and…
I’ve never been a good test-taker. I get nervous during an exam, overthinking the simple questions and replaying entire episodes of DuckTales in my head during the difficult ones. Sometimes, for no real reason, I’ll just have a good cry. In high school, when the AP tests fell on top…
THUR, 3/10 New Yorker Chakaia Booker is making tracks across the contemporary art scene. The mixed-media artist conveys her images of struggle by twisting and contorting raw materials like wood, fiber and metal, but her signature works are created through manipulations of used, mangled tires. She weaves the discarded rubber…
THURS, 3/10 Fionn mac Cumhail, better known as Finn MacCool, was set the task of cooking a salmon one day by his tutor, the Druid Finegas, who had caught the fish after it ate nuts fallen from the hazel tree. According to ancient teachings, salmon that ate these nuts possessed…
To expand his already octave-stretching vocals, lead singer Caleb Followill quit smoking before joining his brothers and cousin in the studio to record the followup to 2003’s excellent Youth and Young Manhood. And therein lies the problem. Not that Followill’s voice isn’t as strong and unique as ever — like…
Back before What’s So Funny was able to parlay writing C- comedy into a regular paying gig, this savant scribe of the nation’s finest dick jokes was a substitute teacher for Denver Public Schools. It was while subbing for a class of Spanish-speaking first-graders that I was asked a baffling…
THURS, 3/3 Yes, what goes up must come down. But how you finesse that law makes all the difference. The Outdoor Life Network’s Gravity Games showcase people who grab Newton’s law with both hands and stretch that sucker to the limits. Copper Mountain is hosting this year’s competition, which starts…
MON, 3/7 Join the Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails tonight as they host Stand-Up for SafeHouse at the Rattlebrain Theater. The women of Denver’s most fabulous not-so-secret society are joining nationally known comics Teresa Logan, Edith Weiss, David Gray, Stephanie McHugh and Dave Burdick to raise awareness…
Any Denverite worth his weight in infrequently used outdoor-adventure gear was at the first Colorado Rockies home game on April 9, 1993. If your parents were too lazy to get tickets or too strict to pull you out of school that afternoon, you’re allowed to do something to punish them,…
The torrential downpour has slowed to a wet murmur, but Haylar Garcia doesn’t trust that the storm’s really over. He’s calling from inside a 1983 Toyota RV, which he and his crew — Damon Scott and Jeff Deel — have nicknamed “The Turtle.” At the moment, the reptilian vehicle is…
FRI, 2/25 “We filmed everyone during the auditions,” explains Morgan Ralph, director of CU Idol, a search for the University of Colorado’s best crooner, which takes place at 8:30 p.m. tonight in the Old Main Chapel on the Boulder campus. “We wanted to show highlights of all the really bad…
MON, 2/28 Were I to make a film focusing on an item of food, I would tell the tale of a single green pepper. Our story would begin with a crane shot of a slow descent from above a windswept treeline to a northern California field, where hundreds of laborers…
We were somewhere around the Capitol on the edge of downtown when the booze began to take hold. All night we had been drinking, pouring alcohol on top of thick, prime-cut steaks devoured with gluttonous glee in celebration of a friend’s birthday and the NBA All-Star Weekend. I remember sourly…
FRI, 2/18 Snips and snails and puppy-dog tails. That’s what little boys are made of, right? Find out at Will Boys Be Boys?, a mixed-media show at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver that probes the arena of modern boyology. The national touring exhibition, which was curated by the Whitney Museum…
“Now tell me,” begins the clueless commentator played by Fred Willard in Best in Show. “Which one of these dogs would you want to have as your wide receiver on your football team?” Though the question comes off as completely ridiculous in the film’s setting at the fictional Mayflower Dog…
Every year at about this time, which just happens to be Black History Month, I am seized by sudden anxiety attacks. Questions will race through my skull, causing my eyes to roll back in my head and my lips to tremble. Often I will speak in tongues. What was the…
5:55 a.m.: 7600 Broadway They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway…but right before dawn, on the hillside where Broadway begins, the only lights are a hint of orange and pink on the horizon to the east, the beacons of a convenience store a few blocks down the two-lane…
SAT, 2/12 The president and Martha Stewart are engaged in an executive laissez affair — or so it goes in performance artist Karen Finley’s newest work George & Martha, which opens tonight at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 1750 13th Street in Boulder. The two-character satire, co-starring Finley and…
WED, 2/16 “I was always dreaming about very powerful people,” Arnold Schwarzenegger says in the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron. “Dictators and things like that. I was just always impressed by people who could be remembered for hundreds of years, or even, like Jesus, be for thousands of years remembered.” It…
SAT, 2/12 Most signatures collected on a butt in two minutes: sixteen, Graham Ramsay. Most swear words on a Scrabble board: 22, Bart Scott. Longest continuous reading of Danielle Steel novels (complete books only): sixteen hours, fourteen minutes, Millie Chappell. These adventurers, cited by Guinness World Records, pushed themselves to…
In 1999, twenty young Israelis and Palestinians were invited to Japan for ten days by the Japanese Foreign Ministry as part of a joint peace mission. The group attended conferences together, ate together, sang karaoke together, even slept in the same rooms — and left embracing what they had come…
