Hey, whined the city booster who’d just read my cheap shot at “Downtown Denver: A Great Place to Live, Work and Visit, or Dangerous Urban Jungle?,” the downtown residents’ forum held Tuesday night at — where else? — the Wynkoop Brewing Co., the restaurant founded by John Hickenlooper, now king…
“Meeting in fifteen minutes, people,” shouted the newspaper editor before slamming the door of his office. “That means everybody.” The water-cooler conversation started gushing. Watermelon, watermelon, watermelon. So the rumors were true: The paper was being sold. Watermelon, watermelon, watermelon. The paper being sold was not Westword, but the Denver…
“Shall the voters for the City and County of Denver adopt an Initiated Ordinance to require the city to help ensure public safety by increasing peacefulness — that is, by defusing political, religious and ethnic tensions, both locally and globally — through the identification and implementation of any systematic, stress-reducing…
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library,” said Jorge Luis Borges. And standing at the gates to that paradise will be a librarian, one index finger pressed to pursed lips while the other punches the delete key on the computer system tracking patrons’ reading records,…
I’m waiting for the phone to ring. Shooting starts next week on Silver City, the political potboiler that renowned writer/director John Sayles has set in Colorado, giving the local film industry a much-needed boost and, come next summer, offering filmgoers what’s certain to be an eye-popping look at our state…
“For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Albert Einstein said that, but Peter Barton lived it. And exactly a year ago, the legendary entrepreneur, sports enthusiast, rock-and-roll fan, husband and father of three escaped the boundaries of time altogether, dying…
Come and listen to my story about a man named Bill A poor mountain guv barely filling his state’s till And then one day he was gunning for some cash When up from the ground came a grinning jackass… Tourist, that is… pure gold Texas twee How does this sound…
“Denver is open for business,” Mayor John Hickenlooper announced at his inauguration, between hugs and feather blessings. Open for business — if there’s any business to be had, that is. In these dog days of summer, the economy bites. And when President George Bush breezed through town earlier this month…
FRI, 8/8 Loveland: the vortex of internationally acclaimed sculpture. Who knew that the unassuming town happens to be a hotbed of artistic expression? Lots of folks. And art aficionados will have a unique chance to get up close and personal with all manner of three-dimensional works at not one but…
FRI, 8/1 The lowly limerick is “the Rodney Dangerfield of poetry,” according to the Limerick o’ the Day Web page. “Limericks proudly broke into what had been the one unbroachable frontier in proper English society: smut.” Smut is in the ear of the beholder, of course — and there was…
Next month, Boulder will try to break the Guinness World Record for the largest group hug — as if that town wasn’t locked in an eternal clinch. But this week, Denver has Boulder beat. The changing of the city’s political guard was such a touchy-feely event that Happy Haynes, the…
MON, 7/21 Hold on to your helmets, because tonight Mr. Pacman, those intergalactic video-game playboys and local Atari rockers, unleash the PacFashion show on Panopticon, 60 South Broadway. Like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome meets Tron, PacFashion is a full-contact show of primitive punk-entangled astrowear, with the models engaging the Mr…
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was…
Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. Or eat it. A hundred years ago, radium was a miracle cure, a wonder drug, the turn-of-the-century equivalent of Viagra — and Colorado was playing doctor to the world. Marie Curie herself came out West, prospecting for uranium; Denver turned…
SAT, 6/21 The recent news that the last of the old-style Volkswagen Beetles will trundle off the assembly line this summer at VolkswagenMexico in Puebla, Mexico, may be just a blip on the radar of Gens X and Y as they whiz by with daisies in their dashboard vases. But…
The last time Richard Florida came to town, to speak to a ballroom full of business types about his book, The Rise of the Creative Class, John Hickenlooper seemed like just another one of those business types — although not quite as well dressed. And while he’d rubbed ill-clad elbows…
Clara Brown is not your typical operatic heroine. She’s no done-wrong courtesan, dying of consumption. She’s no callow teen, dying of a broken heart. She’s no Jezebel, no Valkyrie. She’s a washerwoman, an ex-slave who came to the gold camps of Colorado when she was about sixty years old (birth…
This is not the story I intended to write. The notes for that story have been lost in luggage limbo for 45 hours and counting. Then again, I never thought I’d get stuck in a flying sardine can with thirty Slurpee-slurping fellow travelers — and no bathroom. But let me…
Hanging in my office is a black-and-white-plaid suit jacket with big pearl buttons. It’s the sort of jacket a suburban matron might wear to an opera matinee — or a newspaper editor might wear to court. That was the first and last time I’d worn the jacket until this past…
In New York City, they’re throwing chump change at a $4 billion budget gap by fining 86-year-old men for illegally feeding pigeons, and teenagers for sitting on unauthorized milk crates. In Denver, where next year’s budget deficit is projected at $50 million, they nailed Larry Barnhart for trying to sell…
Mayor Wellington Webb will soon be gone, but he won’t be forgotten. Not when he’s left his size-thirteen footprints all over this city. Webb’s name will live on at the $130 million Wellington E. Webb Municipal Office Building, a stunning new structure draped around the old International-style Civic Center Annex…
SUN, 5/18 As part of the third annual City Park Festival of the Arts today, Denver mayoral hopefuls John Hickenlooper and Don Mares will be the main attraction at a mayoral runoff forum. But their lovefest, at 11 a.m. in the City Park pavilion, could be overshadowed by a stealth…
