“Democracy is not a spectator sport,” says Wes McKinley. The rancher/math teacher/trail-ride wrangler/cowboy poet has been an active participant in democracy for close to six decades, since he first learned all about his civic duty in a one-room schoolhouse in that dusty corner of southeastern Colorado where he still lives…
Simple, modern aesthetics shine at Composition, a tiny haven of creative paper products on the ground floor of LoDo’s Annex at the Steelbridge Lofts. “I’m basically obsessed with paper,” says Jennifer Roberts, a civil engineer who opened Composition almost a year ago. “And I thought there was a need for…
Welcome to Colorado, the sex-assault capital of the world, where our governor goes on national TV to talk not about snow falling over the Rockies, but fallout over the University of Colorado’s recruiting scandal — and the rape charges that initially got buried in a CU snow job. Eighteen months…
Like 89 million other people, Daniel Weiss was watching the Super Bowl, sitting at home in Colorado Springs and minding his own business — which, since he’s the full-time media and sexuality analyst for Focus on the Family, usually means minding everyone else’s business — when out popped Janet Jackson’s…
“Get your ass in here.” It’s another day at the Arapahoe County Clerk and Recorder’s Office — January 23, 2002, if you want to get picky — and Leesa Sale needs to talk to her boss, clerk Tracy Baker. “Get your ass in here,” she says. Almost every American worker…
SAT, 1/24 Head to the land Down Under at today’s screening of In Search of the Tasmanian Devil, with John Nelson, shown as part of the Macky Auditorium Travel Film Series. “Tasmania is a place that a lot of people don’t go to when they visit Australia, but it’s a…
Today, Castle Rock. Tomorrow, the world. Watch out, Michael Powell. This past June, Daniel Lewis, a twenty-year-old singer with the band Dysarranged, grabbed a mike and uttered these timeless words: “I want to dedicate this song to the Castle Rock police. I hate you fucking pigs.” The pigs never got…
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 They say blood is thicker than water, and when it comes to The Duke Ellington Orchestra, the family lines are still flowing strong after more than 75 years. The pedigree is impressive. Edward “Duke” Kennedy Ellington led his illustrious orchestra to prominence in the 1920s through a series…
One hot day this past summer, an owner of King’s Land Seafood, the dim sum mecca at Alameda Square, called in a panic after she spotted a utility truck cutting into the pavement right outside her place. This was it, she said. They were seizing her property. The city was…
MON, 1/12 Who really knows, other than a sculptor, what goes on in a sculpture studio? It’s actually a loud, messy business — with machinery buzzing and dust flying — but it’s also an endeavor that undergoes many stages of evolution between drawing board and finished work. Most of us…
MON, 1/5 We’ve all heard the term “the fabric of life,” but Santa Fe fiber artist Lauren Camp puts a new twist on the old metaphor by giving life to fabric. A jazz aficionado who’s found a unique way to express her love for music and musicians, Camp debuts The…
“I predict that a large city in Colorado will be the victim of a strange and terrible pressure from outer space, which will cause all solids to turn into a jelly-like mass. I predict that this pressure will not affect any other part of the world but will be pinpointed…
FRI, 12/26 For many holiday revelers, December 26 marks the first uneventful day after a long string of yuletide festivities. For those who celebrate Kwanzaa, however, it’s the beginning of a week-long celebration of family, community and culture. Started in 1966 by Maulana Karenga, chairman of the University of California…
A hundred bottles of tequila at the bar, a hundred bottles of tequila.Jesse Morreale and Chris Swank, the folks behind Nobody in Particular Presents, and three new partners have given Capitol Hill/City Park residents reason to sing. A hundred and four reasons, to be exact, which is the number of…
The interior of the old Federal Theater can be pretty chilly this time of year, but the action on stage this coming Wednesday promises to be plenty hot. Over the past several years, the monthly Stories for All Seasons series has featured some of the state’s best authors reading their…
The windows by the entry are still painted with evergreen and holly, but this building hasn’t seen a very merry Christmas for many, many years. The onetime True Value store stands empty, and beside the faux holly is a notice that the former occupant owes $11,376 in property taxes. The…
The bad news came not in a front-page story or on a TV broadcast. It arrived in a letter from the principal of Denver’s Fairview Elementary School. “I am very sad and regret to inform you of the death of one of our Fairview students,” Kathy Wiemer wrote to Fairview…
Welcome to Ver, Colorado. That’s the economical, creative side of the Mile High City. While Den is all about Cherry Creek and fur coats and sleepy thinking and SUVs that never go anywhere near the mountains, Ver is the edgy end of Denver. The place where necessity is the mother…
THURS, 11/13 When Denver resident Jason Bosch first attended the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in July 2001, he realized that knowledge, not ignorance, was bliss.”I felt kind of ashamed that I was so ignorant about the world,” says Bosch, adding that the New York-based festival “gives people the…
There’s no place like homeless for the holidays. At the initial meeting of the city’s new task force on homelessness, more than two dozen representatives of social-service organizations, the private sector and public office debated what to do with the residence-challenged folks who hang out on the 16th Street Mall,…
Pleased to Greet You While marketeers float puffy, potential slogans far above the Mile High City, one new program will take Denver’s message straight to the streets. Make that street — specifically, the 16th Street Mall. The Business Improvement District that stretches along the mall, both monitoring and funding its…
