“The hippies with their drug-fried synapses and political lobotomies give the town the distinctive tone that we locals have a phrase to describe,” writes on-again-off-again local Stephen Coonts in his travel memoir The Cannibal Queen. “When you see something really screwy or kinky, you say how ‘very Boulder’ that is.”…
Madeline is an eight-month-old puppy. She acts like any other eight-month-old puppy, chewing up cell phones and remotes, digging in the garbage and generally acting like she could use a good dose of Ritalin. The problem is, she doesn’t look like just any eight-month-old puppy. She looks like she’s part…
MON, 5/31 The Shona people of Zimbabwe call the bateleur eagle (a rare native raptor that in Shona religious lore serves as a messenger of the gods) “Chapungu.” It’s no mistake that the name also applies to the contemporary stone art of the nation, a relatively recent cultural endeavor that’s…
SUN, 5/23 Most Playboy centerfolds don’t list getting the shit kicked out of them as one of their hobbies. But most Playboy centerfolds aren’t Mia St. John. The total knockout is getting ready to lay a TKO on Avalon nightclub tonight as part of an all-women boxing card. She’s scrapping…
WED, 5/5 Suavecito’s owner Craig Peña is a flirt. His wife knows it. Everyone knows it. Not that Peña acts on his overtures; he’s just a romantic at heart. A romantic with a long streak of smartass. So when he met Holly Kylberg, Denver’s reigning society “It” girl (see “The…
FRI, 4/23 “My mission is to make something new out of an old piece of crap that nobody wanted anymore and to bring forth genius — satirical, irony-filled attitude — to a mundane world of fashion drones,” says Boulderite Rachel White, who will show her new designs at tonight’s Retrofit…
The people behind the Denver Tent City Initiative are getting restless. They’ve been working on their proposal to create a tent city here since last summer, but progress seems stalled in committee. So when the group met again last Saturday at the St. Francis Center, some members were ready to…
FRI, 4/16 Think you play a mean pinball? Prove it. You’ll be up against the best of the flippin’ best at the Rocky Mountain Pinball Showdown, which starts today at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds. Elton John will be there, ready to whup your ass from behind the glass of his…
Although Portland’s Dignity Village is by far the most prominent — and vocal — tent city in the United States, a handful of other cities have also harbored such communities, with varying degrees of success. Seattle is already on its third tent city in a decade. The first, Tent City…
It’s dark and rainy outside, but in here it’s warm. Keith has just put another piece of scavenged wood in the stove, and the fire’s popping brightly, illuminating the surrounding faces. Ed, Dog Dave, Tim, JP, Shaun, Mark. A train whistle cuts through the incessant sound of rain beating on…
THURS, 3/11 The average person has probably never heard of the seven women artists featured in a pair of exhibits opening today at the Metro State Center for the Visual Arts. The shows highlight the women’s works from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. “That’s what’s wrong with this world,” grumbles…
Elton John kicks my ass. Well, it’s not so much the big-goggles singer as it is his namesake 1975 Bally Capt. Fantastic pinball machine. I go through quarters — three balls for 25 cents — the way some people dump them in the slots at the Double Eagle. It’s like…
Tran Wills is Colfax. Her T-shirt says so. Not the old hooked-out, cracked-up Colfax, but the new urban-hipster Colfax. The street that’s home to Mezcal and the Red Room, Hairspray salon and Wills’s store. The stretch of pavement that accepts streetwalkers and winos as part of its charm but asks…
FRI, 2/13 Nobody knows more about love among the animals than zookeepers, whose livelihoods rely to some extent on successful sex in captivity. “Ninety percent of the animals you see in zoos were actually born in zoos,” notes Denver Zoo spokeswoman Suzanne Balog. So if Leo and Leona aren’t getting…
Amid the nourishing chaos of city life, we urban dwellers find ourselves brain-deep in startling juxtapositions. Mid-morning one Tuesday, a formation of squawking geese sweeps its shadow across a used-bookstore window, dimming the dog-eared covers of The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, and Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol. An instant later,…
FRI, 1/16 Given enough time, I do believe that people eventually begin to look like their pets. I’ve seen it happen: English bulldogs marching their masters down the street, both of them with oddly sagging jowls; poodles with their hair and nails done, exactly matching their owners’ style. Honestly, it’s…
I once actually put a moratorium on bringing books into the house. In all fairness to me, though, my boyfriend and I lived in a 300-square-foot apartment, and novellas and novels and short-story collections and true crime and biographies and classics were taking over every possible surface. Even the cat…
THURS, 1/8 The Denver Center Theatre Company is heating things up this winter with a new production of Tennessee Williams’s sizzling drama A Streetcar Named Desire. In a twist on the award-winning classic, the DCTC show will feature an all-African-American cast. “To do Streetcar with an all-black cast was a…
FRI, 1/2 Steve McQueen loved motorcycles, Nicolas Cage covets comic books, and Bob Barker has a fetish for military men. No, not in that way. We’re talking about collecting, of course, that uncontrollable passion to possess. A multitude of memorabilia will be herded into the Colorado Convention Center, 700 14th…
TUES, 12/30 In Chris Mosdell’s world of poetry, all roads lead to Nowhere, and there are suitcases with wings, galactic fried eggs and chewing-gum mud. The author, who goes by “Mozz,” is a modern-day Dr. Seuss or Shel Silverstein, creating worlds that are often nonsensical but always whimsical. And at…
Peace has returned to the 3000 block of South Race Street. Earlier this summer, the Cherry Hills Vista community was a hotbed of barking dogs and even louder humans, as neighbors squabbled over whether Mike Newbury and his girlfriend, Marla Leighton, should be allowed to keep five miniature dachshunds in…
Dogpile: Duane “Dog” Chapman, Denver’s very own celebrity bounty hunter, finally hit the bigtime last week when he guested on Hollywood Squares, a gig he snared through recent publicity over his capture of fugitive rapist Andrew Luster. It wasn’t the quarter-of-a-million-bucks reward he was hoping for, but it was some…
