In the new film Dancing in September, black TV executive George Washington tells the woman he loves, sitcom writer Tommy Crawford, “One day I just may be the first black president of a major network.” The start-up network he works at, WPX, is trying to gain a niche with minority…
Popular culture is the province of the young-and-getting-younger. Teenage singers routinely sell millions of albums; basketball players ascend to the royalties of the NBA straight out of high school. But in architecture, the old-timers rule. The two most talked-about new buildings in years — the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain,…
They flowed into the streets, shouting and waving signs, angry at Denver police. Mostly they were young teens and college kids, more than a thousand of them, demanding justice for two boys they say were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the protesters weren’t in Denver. They…
Bounty hunter Duane “Dog” Chapman slips out the front door of his office, which is across the street from Sloan Lake Park, dodges the cars speeding down Sheridan Boulevard and rescues a fellow dog, a large black poodle named Copper. Lost for hours, Copper had roamed onto the street. When…
Near the mouth of Denver International Airport’s Jeppesen Terminal, right before Peña Boulevard splits into the east and west entrances, and just out of view, is a huge parking lot filled with hundreds of taxicabs, a dozen shuttles, several limousines and an RTD bus or two. In the middle of…
Tracy Jenkins sounds like she’s fielding three calls at once. It happens when you’re one of two people responsible for a new cable channel that was supposed to air last week but at the last minute has been delayed. Though the Hispanic Entrepreneur Channel has fizzled out, the Black Entrepreneur…
On Wednesday, February 23, Sharon Vigil and Scott Flores, the president and chairman of the Denver Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, respectively, posed in front of the former Denver District Attorney’s building at the busy corner of Colfax Avenue and Speer Boulevard. They were announcing that the Hispanic Chamber would be…
Hip-hop in Denver, says the MC and rapper known as Apostle, is all skeleton and no meat. All foundation but no house. The dream of unity if not yet the reality. “You go into any mom-and-pop store in Denver, I swear everyone’s a rapper,” he explains. The challenge, then, is…
What’s wrong with James Stewart? As photographer L.B. Jefferies, the wheelchair-bound hero of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Stewart would rather spy on his neighbors than make out with Grace Kelly. In what must be cruel Hitchcockian irony, Stewart, laid up with a broken leg, is bored by Kelly’s romantic overtures…
The last time Mike Quintana made the papers, he wanted to run for Denver City Council. He didn’t. But just as it seemed like the Graffiti Avenger’s fifteen minutes of fame were up, he has settled in for a lawsuit against the city over an incident in which he says…
Aspen Burkett holds the national girl’s high school record for the 50-yard dash — 5.84 seconds — but the last six months of her life have been sluggish. In July the 23-year-old came down with mononucleosis, which laid her up for three months and took her out of fall training…
Denver was a ghost town on New Year’s Eve, with cops everywhere, revelers in short supply and nary an official firework. Not exactly the things you’d associate with a supposed world-class city. But there was one honest-to-God party in the Mile High City that night. It was over at the…
When the lights dim over the crowd, a child clad in African robes ascends the stage and in a slightly nervous voice introduces The Black Nativity. The cast gathers on stage one by one until one becomes forty, and for the next two hours, one powerful voice after another belts…
Jamal Muhammad has a good falsetto. It’s not quite on the level of Earth, Wind and Fire frontman Philip Bailey, but it’s solid, and this is really unexpected. Because the last time Jamal Muhammad opened his mouth, there was nothing sweet in his voice. That was four years ago, when,…
In 1989, Denver voters approved a $2.5 million bond for what would have been the city’s eighth golf course on an empty chunk of land close to the area where Denver International Airport would be built. Throughout the 1990s, the city talked a good game about building the course at…
Within the boundaries of Denver City Council District 8, high-rises loom above downtown. City Park spreads out around the zoo and the natural history museum. Nightspots draw nouveau-cool crowds to 17th Avenue. Neighborhood kids walk to East and Manual high schools, while vagrants wander near the Ballpark Neighborhood — Denver’s…
In the last forty years, has anyone in pop culture been cooler than Sean Connery as James Bond? We don’t think so. Thank God a new 007 film, The World Is Not Enough, starring Pierce Brosnan, opens tomorrow to remind us of the glory days of style and save us…
Denver’s booming economy this decade has been made possible in large part by bonds. In 1990, voters approved bonds — which pay dividends to the people who buy them and are often tax-free — to fund a new central library. Bonds paid for Denver International Airport. And just last week,…
Rafael Maldonado came to the United States from Mexico to attend high school in Oxnard, California, in 1985. He received a temporary green card in 1990 when he married an American woman, but his card expired in 1992, and he divorced a year later. Maldonado was afraid that he might…
The good news is that a toxic plume is creeping out from underneath the former Lowry Air Force Base slowly, at only about a foot per year. The bad news is that the federal, state and city agencies in charge of cleaning it up are moving even more slowly. Eleven…
Phil Urso holds a letter that trumpeter Chet Baker wrote to him in 1971. “I have always felt you were and are the most underrated of America’s jazz players and composers,” Baker begins. His letter continues for a few pages, telling Urso about his experiences abroad, and then concludes, “Well,…
Last November, a task force of state and local police, the FBI and the U.S. Customs Service assembled near Mile High Flea Market for an operation called Flea Powder IV. It was the latest in a twice-yearly sweep to identify counterfeit merchandise and arrest vendors who sell it. The day…
