Much like Ol’ Saint Nick, Elvis Presley was a giving man. As well as contributing to a long list of favorite charities, Elvis handed out cash, cars and even houses to friends and to strangers in need. That’s why Christmas was his favorite holiday, according to Chris Barber, aka the…
After watching the 1999 World Trade Organization protests unfold before their eyes in Seattle, Jill Dreier and some like-minded friends returned to Denver energized and ready to do something to further the message of the burgeoning anti-globalization movement. Dreier says that at any of these large protests, you can find…
“Rocketman” Jimmy Descant and his wife moved to Salida in 2006 under less than auspicious circumstances. “I’d been a lifelong resident of New Orleans, but it was getting time for me to go out west somewhere,” Descant says. “When Katrina happened, we were at the end of a few-month trip…
About three years ago, Jimmie Lee Smith and his wife were having sandwiches and coffee at the cafe in New York’s Angelika Film Center. They wanted to take the sandwiches into the theater, but they weren’t allowed. Although Smith — a Denver native who spent sixteen years in New York…
Although a classic in its own right, Run-DMC’s version of “Walk This Way” isn’t the type of reimagining that the Marcus Roberts Trio has in mind. No disrespect to the guys sans shoelaces, but Re-Creative Fusion is a more complicated animal. Tonight, starting at 7:30 p.m. in Macky Auditorium on…
Swallow Hill has long been Denver’s main haven for folk, roots and acoustic music. But Chad Johnson, who’s been giving private drum lessons there for the past seven years, is throwing something a little heavier into the equation with Rock Academy, which he started in August. He wanted to teach…
So you’ve put away your Elmo costume, and you’re coming down off your candy-corn-fueled sugar high, and you’re asking yourself, “Why exactly do we go door to door in silly outfits, demanding that outright strangers give us vast quantities of candy?” If you’re looking for a macabre holiday with a…
Nirvana put out some of the most exciting and influential music of the past quarter-century, yet these sounds are nowhere to be heard in Kurt Cobain: About a Son. According to the documentary’s production materials, director AJ Schnack had been planning to use a single Nirvana tune near the film’s…
What started out as a little sample sale ten years ago — conceived as an opportunity to offer more one-of-a-kind prototypes to the public by collaborating designers Debi Belk of Lele Knitwear and Laura Woodward of Garden Girl — has turned into a holiday tradition. The dressmakers have been joined…
The elephant journal is Boulder personified: Touted to be the town’s “guide to the mindful life,” it deals with all things natural, organic, ecological, indie, spiritual and yogic, with just the right level of laid-back, we’re-okay, let’s-jam temper we all expect of someone dispensing such Boulderiana. Well, when in Boulder,…
It’s no mystery where the Sherlock Holmes aficionados will be tonight. Dr. Watson’s Neglected Patients’ annual Guy Fawkes Day Celebration is going on this evening at the French Quarter Condominiums Clubhouse, 155 South Monaco Parkway, from 5 to 9 p.m. The free annual event includes a potluck supper and a…
Everyone’s complaining about the cost of health care, and the plight of people with no health insurance and medical bills to pay is very real. Take, for example, local photographer Judy Sanchez: Recently hospitalized, she ended up needing a cardiac arrhythmia procedure and was left owing a substantial amount of…
Contemporary furniture-maker Chase DeForest already has a style all her own, building topsy-turvy cabinets and drawers from both reclaimed materials and fine hardwoods alike. But it’s her side line, inspired by her own sports-minded disposition, that’s turning heads and making people smile these days. That endeavor, characterized by pieces built…
Paul Krugman might not be everybody’s cup of tea — there are those who argue that his biweekly op-ed column in the New York Times is more partisan than academic — but the man’s got brains, and you can’t argue with that. A professor of economics and international affairs at…
Day of the Dead devotees will just die for Beads, Braids, Brows and Bones, an All Saints Day tribute to apparitions past and present, featuring ten local artists flaunting their Fridastyle. This is the third year Studio Bead has hosted the haunting affair, which shines a light on art, culture…
This year’s Cocktails & Karaoke fundraiser for the Kunsberg School for chronically ill children (located on the National Jewish Medical and Research Center campus) is going to be much like the previous five — because you can’t improve on perfection. After all, what could possibly be more entertaining than a…
Gentlemen, polish your best British accent, practice your witty one-liners and prepare to step into the shoes of suave secret agent James Bond. Ladies, slip on a cocktail dress and adopt a suggestive double entendre as a pseudonym, and who knows? Maybe you’ll meet the Bond of your dreams. Tonight’s…
After making a mint off a series about nothing, Jerry Seinfeld apparently decided his first feature film ought to be about something — in the case of Bee Movie, the enslavement and torture of bees for the pleasure and profit of humans, which is, like, hilarious. It’s rather tempting to…
Dan in Real Life has this much going for it: It is not the worst Steve Carell film of 2007. That honor, of course, goes to Evan Almighty, which even the Lord walked out of during the second reel. Fact is, Dan in Real Life isn’t really much of a…
Named for the spot in Christian-fundamentalist hell where sinners are condemned to spend eternity, Tony Kaye’s Lake of Fire is a provocatively beautiful movie on the hottest hot-button issue in American life: a woman’s right to an abortion. The British-born Kaye, an enormously successful maker of deluxe TV commercials, relocated…
Rock films come in two forms. The first is the concert/documentary variety, the best of which dynamically pinpoint a band’s musical moment within the context of its era: the Maysles Brothers and Charlotte Zwerin chronicling the Stones in Gimme Shelter, Martin Scorsese celebrating the Band in The Last Waltz. Then…
I gave up after about 100 pages of John Burnham Schwartz’s 1998 novel Reservation Road, a typically overwritten and contrived slice of mass-market literary pablum that hopscotches between the points-of-view of three people — the grieving mom, the grieving dad and the perpetrator — involved in the hit-and-run death of…
