ICE seizes torrent websites in Wack-a-mole-esque operation

When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) isn’t prowling our borders for drug traffickers, it’s prowling our digital borders and shutting down torrent domains that facilitate the piracy of copyrighted material. But seizing a domain name is a lot like playing Wack-a-mole: the second you hit one, another one rears…

PlatteForum gets a sizable grant to study graffiti

It’s a common complaint about art: “I don’t get it.” The French theorist Nicolas Bourriaud explored that idea back in 1996 — how art can often be so removed from the everyday human experience, cordoned off in museums and behind velvet ropes, that it becomes something obscure, something elite and,…

Two young stars of the art world are on display this month in Denver

So many young artists — those in their twenties and thirties — come out of colleges, universities and art schools every year that they often have trouble getting noticed. Nowhere is this situation more pronounced than in China, where seemingly a million students have, upon graduation, become internationally famous. Even…

Stupid ad of the week (from the archives): Overturn Prop 8

In the modern world, advertising is one of the most powerful tools available to get one’s message out to the public. Urgent issues are spread wide through our wonderful super technology. But just because you can send a message out to millions of people simultaneously doesn’t mean it’s going to…

Photos: Black Friday Flash Mob and Dance Party at Cherry Creek Mall

On what basically amounts to a national holiday dedicated to crass commercialism — Black Friday — at least a few people were gathered to do something at a mall that did not involve hemorrhaging money: It was the Black Friday Flash Mob and Silent Dance Party, where folks converged in…

Denver County Fair announces time and place

Local events promoter Dana Cain has locked down the time and place for the brand-new Denver County Fair. The event, envisioned as a hip, urban version of the classic rural-style county fair, will be held July 28-31 at the National Western Stock Show complex. Cain and cohorts Chandler Romeo and…

The Nutcracker in 3D is this week’s most ridiculous movie trailer

There’s nothing Hollywood loves more than taking a universally beloved story or concept and remaking it — after all, what’s a more surefire moneymaking bet than something that’s already proven to be universally beloved? In that remake process, these five steps are generally observed: 1. Strip the story or concept…

Black Friday Dance Party exemplifies what flash mobs are all about

Every once in a while, crowded train stations have been known to break into song and dance and then disperse as if nothing happened. Large groups of people freeze for a period of time and then continue walking with onlookers amazed. Choreographed ninja fights happen out of the blue for…

Absurdist Interview: Artist/Photographer Sara Ford

Colorado native artist and photographer Sara Ford started painting in college because she didn’t want to take the color theory class everyone hated. Needless to say, she got really good at it. Through photography, she has worked with clients such as 303 Magazine, Denver Magazine and DVLP clothing, among others,…

Tonight: 101 Broadway gets spectacular, brings on the reindeer

It’s been a long, ongoing, dirty process of restoring the First Avenue Hotel at 101 Broadway — for the last year and a half or so, owner Jesse Morreale (of Rockbar, La Rumba and Mezcal, among others) has been slowly but surely pecking away at restoring the long-vacant landmark, restoring…

Gratuitous Randomness: Joseph Decreux, archaic rapper

The internetz are all about the law of unintended consequences: Once you put it out there, there’s no telling where it’ll go or in what form it will return. Of course, there were no internetz back in the day of Joseph Decreux, but it’s perhaps reasonable to speculate that the…

Stupid ad of the week: Heineken’s smug dating advice

Stupidity abounds in our daily lives, and the internetz have only exacerbated its abundance. Commercials hold a rather large market share of the overall world stupidity index, and since beer commercials own a significant amount of broadband real estate, by extension they also are responsible for much of the stupidity…

Studio Shots: Viviane Le Courtois, RedLine

Diminutive and soft-spoken, with black owl-eye glasses and long, wavy dark hair, Viviane Le Courtois is one of those “still waters run deep” types, whose mind, you just know, is working overtime, all the time. Viviane is a thinker and an observer: There’s a bit of a scientist in this…

Monday Night Football: That’s what she said?

The game of football has a long, storied tradition of homoerotica: the spandex pants, the frequent bending over, the sweaty, man-on-man grappling — it’s a classic case of Sparta syndrome: athletic, highly ritualized body-worship. And though uncomfortable fruit-salad shots and gratuitous ass-slapping are by no means unusual in a televised…

The furniture of Eero Saarinen, on display at the Kirkland Museum

The Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts (1311 Pearl Street, 303-832-8576, www.kirklandmuseum.org) is a collecting institution with three areas of focus: the work of Colorado’s premier modernist, Vance Kirkland, the work of other Colorado artists, and international design. It’s this third category that’s on view now in The Furniture…

Foursquare profiles: Michael Mulhern, mayor of the 15 Bus

Michael Mulhern would like you to know that he is “not a crack whore.” Apparently, that’s the first thing people assume when you’re the mayor of the 15 Bus via East Colfax. “Yeah, I got a lot of weird comments when I posted that I got that mayorship on Facebook…

How to get my job: Mixed Martial Arts Instructor

Bashing someone’s face in, locking their arms down, kicking them in the stomach — it’s all in a day’s work for a mixed martial artist. Of course, every fighter has to have a teacher to learn technique from, which is where Billy Hendricks, a former MMA fighter, comes in. As…