Brand X I am writing in response to Bill Gallo’s August 3 review of Spanking the Monkey. This response is directed not at Gallo’s opinion of the film’s merits as a story but at his opinions about the film’s raison d’etre. As I watched David O. Russell’s story unfold, not…
Chet sits in a plastic-belted lawn chair facing the Washington Park tennis courts, classically dressed: white shirt, pocketed shorts, a white cap settled high on his head, smooth-soled canvas Converse sneakers, Jack Purcell edition. Next to him is a blue plastic bag. The handle of an off-the-shelf wooden multi-ply Cragin/Garcia…
On the surface, the battle for the Denver Botanic Gardens is nothing if not polite. The genteel institution on York Street has long been the pet project and preferred playground of Denver’s blueblood elite. Even after months of prim political fisticuffs, the prominent Denverites scuffling over its future decline to…
Airport ’95: Although last Thursday’s Big Baggage Solution announcement originally was slated for Denver International Airport itself, the actual unveiling was held in the second-floor rotunda of the City & County Building. It seems that more than a few of the folks who were to gather in support of Mayor…
At a time when baseball fans would rather be thinking about rally caps than salary caps, the Sultans of Snit and the robber barons who grudgingly pay them are taking the game from us. This will be the eighth interruption in twenty-two years. If present-day players were as good at…
MarkAir, the Anchorage-based airline Denver officials hope to woo to Colorado with a $30 million incentive package, has a history of financial turbulence–including more than $10 million in delinquent loans to the state of Alaska. The troubled carrier, which operates eighteen flights a day from Denver, has said it wants…
Don’t Call Me Chief! Steve Jackson did a wonderful job reporting on University of Colorado professor Ron Grimes’s struggle with whether a European-American ought to be teaching Native American studies (“Family Feud,” August 3). Perhaps it would be better for colleges and universities to establish a general rule that Native…
An economics magazine used as a teaching aid by the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs is giving the school a crash course in accounting. This spring, The Margin, a nine-year-old journal owned by the university, folded. Its demise has left UCCS holding title to several thousand back issues, its subscription lists–and…
One book at a time, Professor Ron Grimes clears the shelves of his small office at the University of Colorado. There are several hundred. Black Elk Speaks. The Book of the Hopi. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Grimes, who looks the part of a religious-studies scholar–which he is–with his…
part 2 of 2 Kyle Schoepflin appeared healthy when his mother carried him off the plane at Stapleton International Airport, says Dell Lofton, a National Jewish employee dispatched to escort the pair to the hospital. “She said the boy had been sick on the airplane, but he looked normal to…
part 1 of 2 Teresa Schoepflin used to dream of returning triumphant, college diploma in hand, to teach at the rural consolidated school she’d attended in tiny Mulhall, Oklahoma. That dream seemed about to come true in 1983, when she was awarded a basketball scholarship to Oklahoma State University in…
You be the judge: Mayor Wellington Webb’s appointment of Claudia Jordan to the Denver County Court bench won universal raves–except, perhaps, from a handful of prosecutorial types who’d come up against Jordan during her five years as a deputy state public defender. But the course of Jordan’s swearing in was…
That little punch-up the other night in Barcelona meant nothing, of course. Still, there were a few surprises: No one poisoned Al Davis’s paella. Denver’s defensive backs failed to plant a bomb on the Raiders’ team plane. The Raiders didn’t burn Denver deep on the second play of the game…
Fighting through a wave of protest in 1987, the owners of Deep Rock Water Company demolished two century-old homes in the nationally registered Curtis Park Historic District. So when Deep Rock purchased a three-home piece of land in that same neighborhood two months ago, some residents experienced deja vu. Several…
Last year, in the midst of Denver’s “Summer of Violence,” Mayor Wellington Webb took several steps to help stem the flow of blood on city streets. One was beefing up the “Neighborhood Watch” program with civilian employees, who could overcome mistrust of the police in high-crime areas and help organize…
Jock in the Pulpit Who needs Bill McCartney when you can worship Kenny Be? His July 27 Worst-Case Scenario, “Promise Keepers’ Male Order Merchandise,” was brilliant! We are not worthy! Terry Keating Denver Kenny Be, you’ve done it again! Many kudos for the comical and well-deserved stick-beating you’ve administered to…
Accountants do it when they crunch numbers on their relatives’ tax returns at no cost. Lawyers do it when they handle a friend’s legal advice for free. Car mechanics do it when they perform a valve job on a girlfriend’s car, no charge. When it comes to doctors and nurses…
part 1 of 2 Kayla Moonwatcher remembers putting the finishing touches on the sweat-lodge altar. It’s perfect, she thought, as she looked around the field outside Lyons. Just right for the most important day of my life. In three days she would be adopted there by her spiritual mentor, Oscar…
Denver Mayor Wellington Webb’s Safe City Summit began last fall with a simple goal: to keep youth violence in check during the summer of 1994 by giving nonprofit agencies a cool $1 million in taxpayer-funded grants. But the summer of 1994 is more than half over. And after a series…
part 2 of 2 Avis Little Eagle joined Indian Country Today fresh out of journalism school. She is Hunkpapa Lakota, the people of medicine man Sitting Bull, from the Standing Rock reservation near Little Eagle, South Dakota. At first Little Eagle did the usual small stories handed to young reporters…
Ardor in the court: This month’s sexual harassment suit against cowboy-booted lawyer Phil Lowery put that dull stuff in L.A. to shame. One of the most delicious moments came when a former lawyer with Lowery’s firm, John Giduck, accused one of the plaintiffs of “unprofessional” behavior. Veteran court-watchers may recall…
Amid the current outpouring of nostalgia about those American footprints in the lunar dust, the observations of former Apollo astronaut Alan Bean seem particularly apt. Bean recently told a magazine interviewer that whenever he looks at Norman Rockwell’s painting of Neil Armstrong’s small step/giant leap, it strikes him as a…
