The lineup for the musical act Tijuana Sweetcakes reads like a who’s who of Denver’s cabaret scene: Kim Franco on vocals, piano and percussion; Dario Rosa on vocals and guitar; Jon Gray on vocals, piano and trumpet; Paul Mrozak on vocals and bass; Zack Littlefield on drums; and Jefferson Arca…
For Colin Shattuck, it all started with ska music. The founder of Sportique Scooters had always loved the rude-boy lifestyle, and when he grew up, he wrote the book on it: Red Eyes, Whitewalls, and Blue Smoke: The Story of Scooters in America. Shattuck is also one of the grand…
I love beer. Ales, stouts, pilsners, lambics — I love them all. In the summer heat, my love affair with beer evolves into something like a full-blown obsession. Lucky for me, I live in Colorado, where a great many folks share that obsession, so I get to go to lots…
Eddie Izzard’s heady and manic standup routines ramble like some Ritalin-popping offspring of a transvestite and my favorite Baileys-and-coffee-swilling professor. “Someone’s killed 100,000 people,” said Izzard in Dressed to Kill. “We’re almost going, ‘Well done! You killed 100,000 people? You must get up very early in the morning. I can’t…
“Nathan’s has its contest on the Fourth of July,” notes Steve Ballas of Steve’s Snappin’ Dogs. “They have official competitors eating 65 hot dogs, and they’ve been doing it for 35 years. I don’t see any reason why we can’t have an event here in Denver that can grow into…
Italy has always enchanted me. I was twenty when I first floated through the canals of Venice at dusk, and the magic of the twinkling Rialto bridge was enough to draw me back to the country to study the language and cooking when I was 22. I lived in an…
I think the world is going to shit. And not in that new-age, Nostradamus, Mayan-calendar doomsday-silliness sense — in the we fucked-ourselves-and-we’re-not-doing-anything-about-it sense. What pisses me off the most is that we had to sit back and watch eight years of a belligerent administration that hasn’t bothered to hide its…
How Gregorio Alcaro and Trinidad “Trini” Gonzalez — cousins whose family members started the Casa Mayan restaurant in Auraria in the 1930s and maintained it into the 1970s — managed to find a way to link their enduring family history to the approaching Democratic National Convention is a story almost…
Mike Judge is a deeper guy than you might have thought. That’s the only way to explain why The Animation Show 4, the latest in a series of independent animation anthologies the Beavis and Butt-head auteur curates by his lonesome, is so unexpectedly sophisticated, showing off an international flavor and…
When veteran groups release albums long after their commercial prime, they’re routinely described as new. But this last word usually belongs in quotes — a point proven by Saints of Los Angeles, the most recent platter by Mötley Crüe, joined at Fiddler’s by Buckcherry, Papa Roach, SIXX:AM (Nikki Sixx’s other…
For those who pine for the days of their carefree youth but don’t want to sacrifice their booze, New Belgium Brewing Company is offering a happy compromise: the Urban Assault Ride, a scavenger hunt on bikes followed by a beer-centric after-party. Our fair city — one of eight chosen to…
The British sometimes call cupcakes “fairy cakes.” Maybe that touch of magic explains the recent cupcake renaissance — which you’ll have noticed unless you’ve been hiding your head in the sand for the past two years or so. The term “cupcake” actually began in the nineteenth century, when cupcakes weren’t…
Last week, Cydney Payton, curator and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, announced that she was stepping down, effective this fall. My reaction to the news, which she delivered to me in a phone call, was one of shock, even if I did have a little something more than…
Alternative spaces often feature the work of emerging artists, and that, of course, means their offerings are a mixed bag, and most often, the shows aren’t very good. But Spark, the oldest of the city’s artist-cooperatives is different with most of its members being artists with decades-long careers under their…
Director and curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, Cydney Payton has scoured the world looking for exciting cutting edge art. Her latest pick is Israeli-born Berlin-based artist Omer Fast whose solo opens tonight in the New Media Gallery on level one. Fast is a conceptual artist who’s interested in…
As promised, I’m bringing you the popular teen “preppy” style and mixing it with this fall’s latest fashions. Shopping at stores like American Eagle, Hollister, and Abercrombie & Fitch will give you great tools to add a pop of color to the grunge styles that are in right now. Keep…
Just in time for the summer rush, Crocs is going to start warning customers about the dangers of riding an escalator while wearing their flimsy, colorful plastic footwear. Avid readers will recall that we issued an appropriately Cassandra-like alert on gruesome Croc-related escalator accidents more than a year ago. Crocs…
Vanessa Gochnour, our local designer this week, is a model of preparation, single-minded vision, and involvement in the Denver scene. Stills in Motion, the name of her line of bags, purses, and wallets, combines Vanessa’s personal photography with her hand-sewn fabric creations. She uses pre-cut fabrics with paper backings that…
There seems to be some sort of magnetic attraction between my soul and old clothes. From funky pieces that have clearly been pre-loved, but still have life in them, to immaculate relics that somehow remained unworn for decades, their faded and yellowed tags still attached, I am draw to seek…
There is an old and powerful saying that goes: “Judy, Liza, Barbara, Bette… These are names I shan’t forget.” These names belong to the crème de la crème de la gay icons of musicality. There are others… Cher, of course. Madonna goes without saying. Tina Turner, Rosemary Clooney, Bernadette Peters…
Click here for a slide show of the event. Photo by Jim J. Narcy The ominous rain clouds and wind couldn’t deter the crowd at last night’s Riverfront Fashion show. The theme of the event, Yellow Sun, was evident in the clothes worn by the guests. There was so much,…
My daughter is into animals. Especially the cute ones infesting the kingdom of YouTube (and in particular the ones found on the YouTube serial, Ultra Kawaii, which she robs off the Internet and e-mails to everyone she knows in the whole entire world. And why should I mention this, bringing…
