SUN, 10/30 Walking the line between sanity and madness — or pretending to do so — helps give Halloween its juice. Stripping that path down to classic literature heightens the experience in ways that slasher movies can’t, because written words conjure up images unique to each individual’s cranium. The scare…
Playwright José Cruz Gonz´lez grew up inside stories. His grandfather — a laborer from Mexico who moved wherever the work was, from Arizona to Southern California — told tales and riddles to help soften the hard realities of life in the United States. That legacy of imagination extends beautifully into…
When Rodney Wallace was badly injured in a motorcycle accident in 2002, fellow artist and gallery owner Lauri Lynnxe Murphy practically pounced at the opportunity to help him. “The first time she saw me in a wheelchair, she said, ‘I can do a fundraiser,'” Wallace recalls. “That was her first…
James Brown may have been right when he said this is a man’s world: Social scientists have long postulated that we might well live in a less war-torn, ego-crazed culture if women, rather than old, trigger-happy white dudes, were in charge. And though it’s a long way from world domination,…
Martha Thayer’s brown curls bounce as she nods admiringly at the Primrose, an elegant-looking coffin sitting against the south wall of her classroom. “This is the same kind of casket that Karen Carpenter was buried in,” she says. “That’s sort of its claim to fame. But when I tell my…
Robbie Fulks (right) is a bona fide smart ass who has almost too much talent for his own good. Reared in both the South and the Northeast and a graduate of Columbia University, Fulks emerged as an early star of the insurgent country movement that orbited Bloodshot Records in the…
When Neal Greenberg met Leonard Cohen over dinner in 1996, the Boulder banker gushed that it was a rare honor to dine with the iconoclastic writer and musician — a celebrity since the late ’60s for his cerebral, soul-baring songwriting. They ate and talked, and within several months Greenberg was…
THURS, 6/16 Remember Rumpelstiltskin, that funny little fairy-tale guy who taught the miller’s daughter to spin gold from straw? Well, Rumpel’s not the only one with those powers. Dumpster-diving sisters Kathleen Hackett and Mary Ann Young didn’t get an assist from a tiny man, but they did have a remarkable…
SAT, 6/11 You don’t need a reason to bike in the buff, but it helps — especially if a lot of other people are doing it with you. That’s the idea behind the World Naked Bicycle Ride, a global exercise in critical mass and mass nudity taking place today in…
FRI, 5/27 The synthesizer is a powerful tool that has suffered much abuse since its entrance into the pop world. Cheese-doodling, lipstick-wearing hairspray bands of the ’80s are to blame for the synth’s lowly place among “real” instruments like guitars and snare drums. But Sci-Fi Uterus, a Denver electronic trio,…
SAT, 5/21 Madeline and Sylvia, two New York senior citizens enjoying the challenges of continuing education, are on a field trip with their junior college’s Women’s Studies class. They walk into Las Hermanas, a feminist-lesbian health-food restaurant. “Oh, Mad, look at this floral watercolor. It’s so vibrant,” says Sylvia. “I…
No matter how much helium Lawrence Phipps pumped into his inflatable sheep, he could not get the damn thing to levitate. It was 1997. Phipps was making his first voyage to the Burning Man Festival, and he had absolutely no idea what he was doing. He’d flown from Denver to…
It’s thirty degrees and dropping at seven o’clock, and the thick gray clouds that cap the sky in all directions look about ready to dump. Rita Anderson knows this could be bad news for the monkeys. “We have to remember that when we’re out here suffering a little bit in…
MON, 5/2 Bush bashers refer to the powerful triumvirate of George W., Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney as the real “Axis of Evil.” In her best-selling book, Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species, Laura Flanders regards the women in and around the White House as an equally diabolical force. Combining…
Sarah Eggerichs flexes her biceps like a sailor. “Ladies, I want you to reach over and squeeze your husband’s muscle,” she says to scores of women in the audience at the First Church of the Nazarene. Without word or pause, they reach over and squeeze the arms of the men…
Reverend Benjamin L. Reynolds stands at the pulpit in a rhubarb-colored dress shirt, shaking his narrow hips from side to side, ready to get down and dirty. “In the black church,” he says, eyes wide, “we sit with the saved and the unsaved. We use our hips and our buttocks…
TUES, 4/5 Ask any kid on the street who Charlie Chaplin was, and you’ll probably get a blank stare or, at the very least, a snicker about that retarded dude with the weird mustache and big feet. It’s just a fact of nature: The little guy on the flickering screen…
SAT, 3/5 Michael Reynolds’s vision of the future is totally wireless: There will be no matrix of pipes or power lines connecting humans and their homes to supply plants and water- treatment facilities. The creator of the Earthship — a self-sustaining, eco-friendly form of architecture made primarily from refuse –…
Not long after David Mallamo arrived at Mount View Detention Center last August, he made lists of weapons he wanted to build into an arsenal and lists of people he wanted to kill. He wrote a letter instructing a staff member to go to his parents’ house, “cut all phone…
One hundred and two days. That’s how long it took Josh Caldwell and Hunter Weeks to travel from Seattle to Boston on a Segway — a journey that takes roughly five hours by plane. Last August, the pair hit the road with a couple of digital video cameras, plenty of…
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…
