Home of the Free

On this day in 2001, thousands of Americans lost their lives in the most deadly terrorist attack ever to hit U.S. soil. Ten years later, there’s only one way to commemorate that tragic day: Let freedom ring. And there’s no better place to do that than at the 9/11 Freedom…

Crafty Collective

Five friends — Becky Hensley, Spencer Keralis, Kristin Dell’Orso, LeVar Battle and Amber Powell — put their heads together to create Craftin’ Carnival, a title with a double meaning. On the one hand, it’s an umbrella, a community of crafters and artisans, and on the other, it’s a physical craft…

Get In The Groove

Vinyl junkies, rejoice! The Denver Record Collectors Fall Expo — the Rocky Mountain region’s largest music collectors’ show — is back for a nineteenth year. Featuring the wares of over forty dealers and nearly 100 display tables, the expo is the perfect place to find rare LPs, 45s, CDs, music…

A Manhunt Manifesto

In Benjamin Runkle’s new book, Wanted Dead or Alive: Manhunts From Geronimo to Bin Laden, he tries to bring to light not just the most wanted men in U.S. history, but also the soldiers who hunted them down. While much of this history has been covered, Runkle’s spin adds a…

Are You Ready for Some Football?

Under the highly questionable leadership of former head coach Josh McDaniels, the Denver Broncos had a disastrous 2010 season, finishing 4-12 — a franchise record for the most losses in a single year — and going 0-2 against their much-hated division rivals, the Oakland Raiders. But McDaniels was fired, and…

Reefer Madness, Redux

Reefer Madness, the smash musical inspired by the original 1938 propaganda-turned-exploitation film, is back for a second run at the Bug Theatre. “We were so honored last year by the response to the show,” says Deb Flomberg of Equinox Theatre Company. “Not only did we sell out every show, but…

Reel Women

Quick! Name a female director in Hollywood. Yes, there are a handful of very good ones, and their ranks are finally growing, but to think that ’40s bombshell Ida Lupino took her first turn behind the cameras in 1949 is a revelation in mid-century feminism that gives new meaning to…

Lasting Influence

Aurora’s Red Delicious Press, a fine-print atelier housed in a gorgeous old Usonian-style library designed by Victor Hornbein, is presenting Impact: A Tribute to E. C. Cunningham. A nationally known printmaking authority and author, Cunningham died last year; he had taught printmaking for nearly three decades at Metropolitan State College…

Holyoke Mall, a time-machine back to the malls of yesteryear

Shopping malls. They certainly don’t make them like they used to. In Colorado, the old-fashioned mall is all but extinct, replaced by outdoor shopping “experiences” — or if it is a single, enclosed structure, it’s built to look like a gargantuan ski lodge (see Park Meadows) or a fancy, two-story…

Binding Barbie began my life in kink

Jenn Wohletz is the author of this week’s Westword cover story, “Field Guide to Denver Wild Life.” Here’s her first-person account of how she got involved in the the kink scene. I used to tie up my Barbie dolls. I’d strip them, smother their smiling little mouths with duct tape…

Adslife is our browser game of the week

Generally speaking, we don’t bother talking about paid games here, but in the case of Adslife we’re going to make a slight exception to the rule, because you can check out the first portion for free. Which is to say, Adslife is really something out of the ordinary — and…

The hipster’s guide to sports: an info-graphic

If religion is the opiate of the masses, as Karl Marx once observed, then sports are, like, the meth of the masses… or something. Whatever. The point is that mainstream sports — or “borts,” as we like to call them (“boring” + “sports”) — like football and baseball are for…

Sender Films announces lineup for 2011 Reel Rock Film Tour

The 6th annual Reel Rock Film Tour kicks off on Thursday, September 15, at the Boulder Theater, featuring six of the year’s most intense climbing documentaries. This week, Boulder’s Sender Films and Reel Rock event promoter Big Up Productions released the 2011 lineup and a trailer featuring each of the…

Reader: This is a pretty weak list

It doesn’t really matter what your opinion is; there will always be somebody out there to angrily disagree with it — especially when that opinion comes in list form. Maybe it’s because a list is a compound opinion, or maybe it’s because the concept of the list implicitly excludes everything…

WANTED: Fall 2011 Photography Interns

Calling all photo students! Village Voice Media (Westword’s parent company) is recruiting undergraduate photography students for its Fall 2011 Photo Intern Program. By “student,” we do not mean ” student of life.” There’s no cash offered with this gig, only credits. Don’t bother applying if this doesn’t apply to you…

Gratuitous randomness: Still got it

For most men, the depressing realization that they are no longer cool comes somewhere around the late ’30s — and while many just give up, there must always be those few brave men of oblivious overconfidence who ignore that fact, who stare boldly into the face of cruel father time…

Now Showing

Design for the Other 90%. This traveling exhibit from the Cooper-Hewitt in New York — the national design museum of the Smithsonian Institution — is being presented at RedLine, which is strange, as it relates more to technology than to art. Not only that, but it’s way too small for…

Now Playing

Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…

In Warrior, two MMA-fighting brothers reunite in the cage

You know those Affliction shirts, covered in skulls, gothic lettering and tribal patterns, all cacophonous symbols of bad-ass machismo? That’s what the mixed martial arts tie-in movie Warrior is: an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink fire sale of male-weepie tropes, awesome in its thoroughness. The collective dream of authentic blue-collar American grubbiness lives on…

Contagion reminds us it can happen here

Currently the fifth-to-last film on Steven Soderbergh’s ever-expanding pre-retirement slate, Contagion opens on day two of a global viral epidemic. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Beth Emhoff, an employee of an ominously unspecific multinational corporation who returns from a business trip in Hong Kong to her wintry Midwestern home feeling like crap…