THURS, 8/26 It was August 26, 1964, general-admission tickets were $6.60 apiece, and parents feared the worst. They were utterly certain that when the Beatles took the stage at Red Rocks forty years ago today, the crowd, high on that mysterious evil force called rock and roll, would surely riot,…
WED, 8/25 Denver’s El Centro Su Teatro proudly traces its roots back to the 1960s theatrical-political actions of Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, which supported César Chavez and the United Farm Workers grape boycotts, and later evolved into the prototypical Chicano theater group. Such solidarity is just part of…
On Tuesday evening, after the following column went to press, Jon Lipsky got a call from the FBI telling him he was not allowed to discuss the Rocky Flats case. Lipsky read a statement to that effect at Wednesday’s press conference and said nothing more. He was not wearing a…
If only Colorado’s current Kobe connection would disappear so effectively. Twelve miles south of Leadville on Highway 24, just before the valley narrows, the words “Kobe, Colo” appear written in stones on a hillside. Below, by the train tracks alongside the Arkansas River, a metal shed bears the word “Kobe.”…
Sitting in a restaurant in Cherry Creek, minding my own business — which means, of course, everyone else’s — I spotted a table of well-groomed, well-heeled white-hairs, the sort of people whose third homes might be in Aspen. They poured an amusing but not inexpensive red wine, then raised their…
Last year, 165,000 books were published in this country, and this year’s final score could come close. No respectable gambler would make book on the chance that one volume would break out of the pack — but 4th and Fixed has the feel of a winner. Reggie Rivers, former fullback…
What do ‘zines, pirate radio and hacking all have in common? For one thing, they all have subversive underpinnings, and for another, the folks who are into such things tend to like trading information: in cyberspace, by snail mail and under the table, in print and blogs. So when you…
Over a century ago, you could buy almost anything in that area of Denver that would later be known as LoDo — a house, a horse, a whore. And even in the neighborhood’s darkest days — the ’60s, when the skid-row pawnshops were scraped off and turned into parking lots…
WED, 7/14 More often than not, we Americans get our news in increasingly attention-deficit- disorder-friendly ways. Sound bites, Internet-server headlines and bits of information flashed across the bottom of television screens are the means by which most of us learn what is going on in the world today. A Cliff’s…
FRI, 7/9 The Mars Hill Cafe is not really a cafe, and it doesn’t have much to do with the Red Planet — although the Highland church that hosts it does sit on a hilltop. Instead of the intergalactic eatery its name connotes, Mars Hill is a Friday-evening gathering that…
This was better than sending out a cheery Christmas letter: So you believe in mandatory sentencing. By Saturday evening, my voice mail was full of messages from people across the country, friends and former colleagues who’d crowded into showings of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 — which, at most theaters, is…
Denver’s dailies and newscasts love to localize any story they can — if a plane crashes in India, a victim’s second cousin is found grieving in Longmont — but even with all the ink and airtime devoted to the passing of Ronald Reagan, they’ve overlooked Colorado’s connections to the fortieth…
“A miserable yellow melancholy stream” was how Mark Twain described the South Platte River. Fortunately, the Greenway Foundation — established thirty years ago to transform the Platte from a dumping ground into an urban amenity — chose the riverway less traveled by when it first floated a boat past Confluence…
Colorado has taken a serious beating in public print recently, with the Columbine High School massacre, the football rapes in Boulder, the Jon-Benet Ramsey case, and the repulsive police corruption that stains Denver’s once proud image. Denver has never pretended to be a civilized place. When you think of Denver,…
This past Christmas, I cleaned the LoDo Tattered Cover out of every last paperback copy of Plainsong, Kent Haruf’s lyrical novel about life, loss and love on the Eastern plains in the fictional town of Holt. This wasn’t simply some lame attempt to confine all of my holiday shopping to…
FRI, 5/7 Hot rods, tattoos, nudie flicks and cartoons — such are the sources of inspiration for lowbrow art, a movement on display at tonight’s opening reception for Cute, Cuddly and Curvaceous, the inaugural show at D.C. Gallery. The concept of “lowbrow” art originated in the surf and custom-car culture…
So, did you hear the one about how the commission investigating the University of Colorado recruiting program hung on every word of testimony…from an official at the Air Force Academy, the institution that raised the bar for sex-assault scandals? But Colonel Debra Gray’s appearance Tuesday before the Independent Investigative Commission…
The Columbine collection at the Colorado Historical Society stretches across fifteen linear feet. And this is just the paper collection. The three-dimensional items — the T-shirts, the teddy bears, the beanie babies, the banner from a Texas church — are kept in secured storage in two more departments in the…
Gary Barnett, the still-on-paid-leave-for-two-more-weeks coach of the University of Colorado football team, finally got to sing Tuesday before the panel investigating whether CU used alcohol or sex (as if the two were ever independent of each other) in the Buffs’ recruiting program. “There is no question in my mind that…
All of Denver’s panhandlers must be over at the State Capitol, lobbying to make marriage legal only when the two participants are not of the same sex, but of the same religion and, probably, on the same page of the hymnal. This week they sure weren’t hanging out along the…
WED, 3/24 Tracy Turnblad has big ambition and a bigger bouffant. It’s 1962, and the tubby Turnblad dreams of dancing on TV’s Corny Collins Show, but when she splits hairs with the program’s most popular pre-pubescent starlet, she’s tossed into a teenage tangle that could crush her curls and squash…
“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…
