On Sunday night at five o’clock, about fifty people fill the worn, brown pews at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church on Ogden Street. They’re surrounded by stained-glass windows colored with Christian images — but the church altar bears a Buddhist shrine, not a cross. And at the beginning of the…
WHY AM I TALKING? On this damp summer morning, the question beams out from bulletin boards and bathhouse doors all over Shambhala Mountain Center. It’s a rhetorical question, of course — a Xeroxed Zen koan. Because right now, no one is talking much at all: The bumper stickers on cars…
SAT, 7/17 Many Christmas mornings from my childhood stand out, but one occupies a special place. That vivid year, after the presents were opened and the stockings pilfered, we turned our attention to our beloved pets. The dogs found their way to their Yule bones as our curious cats began…
On Tuesday, June 29, Alemshet Workie and about ninety other drivers angrily disconnected themselves from Freedom Cab — at least for now. In a demonstration at Freedom’s headquarters, a small office near the train tracks in northeast Denver, drivers formed a caravan along Smith Road and, one by one, removed…
Alemshet Workie is under attack. At nine o’clock this Wednesday night, at the corner of 11th Avenue and Sherman Street, unidentified ammo is hitting his taxicab. It sounds like rocks or paint-gun pellets raining down from who knows where. When one of the missiles zings in through the window and…
In four performances in early June, the cast and crew of North High School’s Zoot Suit Riots reprised their show for those who missed it the first time around or couldn’t get enough of playwright Luis Valdez’s pachuquismo-packed script (“The Next Stage,” April 22). And while the curtain has now…
SAT, 6/5 Three years ago, a group of teens approached Douglas County Libraries community-relations specialist Aspen Butterfield with an interesting proposal. “They saw that the library had children’s performers coming through, and they wanted to know if they could play music there, too,” Butterfield explains. But before flocks of nebbish…
As a songwriter, Rebecca Folsom shows many faces on Shine, a collection of twelve original songs she recorded last year in Austin. At times her approach is pensive and spare, with minimally instrumented songs that recall other cerebral female writers, such as Edie Brickell and Nanci Griffith. This approach lends…
In 1987, the Colorado General Assembly authorized the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to collect and track intelligence information on gang members and their associates. At the same time, metro police departments began compiling their own databases — and a person didn’t have to commit any crime in order to make…
Robert Duran was lying face down, his hands tied behind his back, when his life as a gangbanger came to a violent, terrifying end. A group of men who said they were cops had busted into the apartment the eighteen-year-old Duran shared with his girlfriend. Now she was next to…
When Andrew McDonald started as a freshman at South High School, he thought politics were dumb, boring and totally irrelevant to his teenage life. Four years later, he spends weekends volunteering for the John Kerry presidential campaign and writes and performs politically charged poetry in local slam events. “I didn’t…
Shakespeare said that all the world’s a stage. But in the modern era, it seems more apt to say that every life is a movie waiting to be made: Thanks to digital media, filmmaking is morphing from an unattainably expensive art form into a more democratic medium. “Storytelling is how…
Saul Williams has a tip for the Department of Homeland Security. “If I was an FBI or a CIA agent, I’d be stationed at a poetry reading,” says Williams from his monastic loft in Los Angeles. “That’s where young people are empowering themselves. They’re not marching on Washington. They’re finding…
Carlton Wayne Stewart has never played the stock market, but he watches it every day. So he can tell you that, at the moment, the market value of a pound of aluminum is roughly 46 cents, or $1,000 a ton, making it the most valuable of all reclaimable scrap metals…
A cloudless spring day in northwest Denver. JOSÉ MERCADO is standing in the doorway of a small brick house on Zuni Street, trying to convince an eighty-year-old woman to let him into her basement. That’s where he believes he’ll find the woman’s seventeen-year-old grandson, ERNEST APODACA. JOSÉ: Would you mind…
Terry Gross has mastered the quiet craft of listening. As the host of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, she’s conducted more than 10,000 on-air interviews, and she faces everyone — artists, pornographers, international war correspondents, Tammy Faye Bakker and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog — with a willing ear and…
The members of Depeche Mode spent years defending their work as real music: Their use of electronic instruments was blasphemous to punk and new-wave artists who couldn’t imagine life without guitars. But by leaping ahead of those who sought to preserve the instrumental status quo, Depeche Mode became one of…
When Roxanne Whittles decided to further her education, she soon had a good problem on her hands: too many grad schools to choose from. At 21, Whittles already had a reputation as a rising star in the field of biological research. In 2002, she’d graduated summa cum laude from Stanford…
Things can get wild on Market Street, where sports bars, music clubs and taverns teem with rowdy life on weekends. But if the walls of many of the street’s historic red-brick buildings could speak, they might say something like: You ain’t seen nothin’, kid. At the close of the nineteenth…
Until February 20 of last year, Jack Russell was best known for one song — a cover of Mott the Hoople’s “Once Bitten, Twice Shy,” performed with a big-haired bravado that made his band, Great White, a momentary star of the ’80s hard-rock firmament. What a difference a year makes…
Warnings and rules are posted all over Pierre’s Supper Club. No colors, no athletic wear, no weapons. Stay out of the kitchen. Hang on to the handrail when using the stairs — lest you fall down the shag-covered steps leading from the upstairs dining room to the downstairs bar. Since…
Tracy Rollert thought it would be fun — roaming around an abandoned old school with her boyfriend, Jim, maybe making love to him in an empty classroom. A neighbor who saw them climb the chain-link fence surrounding the property yelled at them to be careful. Instead, the fearless 36-year-old removed…
