Fighting mad: Regarding Bill Gallo's "Tough for Buffs," in the August 26 issue:
No surprise that Westword would hit a program when it's already down. The big question is, will Gallo eat his words when the CU Buffs have a winning season?
I'll be out supporting our team on Saturday. I encourage all real Colorado fans to do the same.
Roger Peterson
via the Internet
Germ warfare: Gary Barnett, stay home! I was appalled to read in Bill Gallo's otherwise excellent story that the CU Buffs will hold a rally in Denver on September 3. Bad enough that CU's athletic department has thoroughly corrupted Boulder; we don't need that infection to spread down here, too.
Rachel Stein
Denver
Be true to your school: As longtime residents from the wrong side of Sixth Avenue and East High parents, we laughed out loud at Adam Cayton-Holland's hilarious What's So Funny in the August 26 issue. Adam, keep supplying us with the commentary. And Westword, hang on to Adam.
Kate and Kyle Sandersen
Denver
Prince charming: Thank you, thank you, thank you for Rob Harvilla's "Let's Go Crazy...Please!" in the August 26 issue. Janet's costume malfunction was a duh. Videos are so blatant they're boring. Yet somehow Prince makes the audience come alive!
Rob was able to identify what's missing in today's music scene and then point to an antidote. Bravo! I would die to go to the concert to see His Royal Highness, but being unemployed has its drawbacks.
Keep up the good work, Westword.
Maryanne Coppinger
Firestone
Feat of Clay: Why is someone who could beat up your grandmother automatically sexy? Ask some women what is sexy: brains, clarity of purpose, manners, courage of your beliefs, kindness, love of children, dedication to a noble cause and, yes, beauty.
By the way, watch Clay Aiken perform or skate sometime. He's not as pathetic as Rob Harvilla suggests. But don't send your grandmother after him -- he's a gentleman and won't hit back. My mother and I and my daughter all think that Clay is really sexy, not a fake.
Corey Stutz
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Go, granny, go: So what's Rob Harvilla's point? My great-grandmother could beat up Prince!
Tracy Jones
Green River, Wyoming
Read alert: Two entries in last week's Letters section were self-reflexive, auto-referential gems of beauty, and surely proved that when any lame television newscasters run out of piddly banter on a slow news day, your office is the place for them to call. Taking a page from previously successful Westword authors who wrote stories using themselves as the protagonist and then who went on to write sequels after intentionally making more "news," Patricia Calhoun and Dave Herrera both used their metaphorical press badges to squeeze into the Letters section, getting the last word on people who wrote in (without being paid to do it, mind you) with their opinions on recent articles.
Calhoun bolstered her right, nay, duty, to keep beating the dead horse of Rocky Flats, which, sadly, might well be the only way to teach the moral of the nuclear story to all those gun-toting suburban relatives of Jeff Foxworthy who surround Denver with their Rangers, Astro Vans and, well, Suburbans. It might be the only way, but it's not Calhoun's job to teach them; the only ones who preach to unsoliciting deaf audiences in my neighborhood are Mormons.
And Herrera, who felt honor-bound to use his staff position to rebut the letter sent in from California by the president of a European/American Issues Forum, should feel secure enough in his literary manhood not to correct people who assert basically the same point as he does, just with fewer instances of the word "fuck."
Herrera wrote in the August 12 Westword, "From even a cursory glance at any of the coverage, you'd think hip-hop was the instigating factor in both incidents" -- the incidents in question being some assaults near LoDo hip-hop clubs that were assumed by some to be racially or musically based -- and then went on to prove how, obviously, hip-hop was not.
First, Dave, don't tell me what I'd think. I've found that it's usually unpublishable, anyway -- at least in publications with cleaner vocabularies than rappers or sailors. Second, the misleadings of such "coverage" are certainly not the fault of any one person reading newsprint at this moment in time. Third, it is nice to see someone who knows about hip-hop write a piece that credibly denies any correlation between violence and art, but then again, if people are stupid enough to believe such a correlation exists, why waste your time trying to teach them? Again, preaching to happily devilish choirs is the job of Christians who have too much time to kill before going to their just rewards.
I thank you in advance for editing my letter for content, adding several bold-faced curse words to it, publishing it, and discrediting it with the italicized paragraph which will surely appear about an inch below my name, which is:
Ben Hiller
Denver
After the Fox: I just wanted to give Dave Herrera dap on his August 12 Beatdown denouncing the local hip-hop connection with that homicide that occurred at the Bluebird, and telling the people what every underground hip-hop artist in Denver was thinking. When I saw it on the news, I immediately called friends of mine in Dialektix, Optik Fusion Embrace and Reverb & the Verse to try and figure out who the hell was playing there to have Fox say "Violence at a local hip-hop show." Everybody was at a loss, and nobody even knew who the hell was playing, so it was slightly fucked -- to say the least -- to get that kind of publicity for a show that no groups I knew were even playing at or knew about, for that matter.
Don't even get me started on Fox media. But once again, big up for setting the record straight -- even if it was just to readers of Westword. The real local hip-hop scene would thank you collectively, but I guess we are too busy stealing cars, robbing old ladies at ATMs and shooting people between verses.
Selecta Roswell
Denver
Voices carry: I am writing as a supporter of the Rocky Mountain Progressive Network. I read Michael Roberts's profile on Jared Polis, "Young Blood," in the August 19 issue. In that article, he indicated that he thought Jared is pulling RMPN's strings. As one of the co-founders of RMPN, let me share that my interest in no way stemmed from Jared Polis.
I have known Jared since 1995, and, when I first heard about the idea of RMPN from J.B. Holston, I suggested that he get a number of people involved in the founding group, including Jared. Given RMPN's original vision, I anticipated (correctly) that Jared would be interested in both participating in and supporting RMPN. Both Jared and I participated -- with a number of others -- in the initial funding for RMPN. While Jared is someone who invests in what he believes in, so am I, as are the others who contributed both time and money to help get RMPN off the ground.
My understanding is that RMPN is now the largest grassroots progressive organization in Colorado, with over 5,000 people signed up for its weekly updates. RMPN has expanded the number of its advisors to over 200 people; Jared and I are two of them. While all advisors -- including me and Jared -- have an impact on RMPN, it's extremely overreaching to insinuate that Jared or any one member, for that matter, is pulling RMPN's strings.
I'm very proud of what RMPN has accomplished to date and hope that it's a long-term contributor to political advocacy and debate in Colorado for a long time to come. Free speech is one of the exciting things about our country -- and I think it's great that we finally have an unapologetic progressive voice in Colorado.
Brad Feld
Eldorado Springs
Exit, stage right: Why would your esteemed publication run a theater review for a play that ends three days after copies hit the streets? Reading Juliet Wittman's "Industrial Strength" review in the August 19 issue, I felt shortchanged.
Adam Wasilik
Denver
Editor's note: If a play opens on a Friday and runs only through the following weekend -- as did Industrial Arts Theater Company's production of The Weir last month -- we don't have much choice. We either review the play in the issue that comes out six days after it opened, when only a few performances remain, or we don't review the play at all.
Soft duty: In response to the August 5 Off Limits, here's how to settle that U.S. Senate race between Pete Coors and Ken Salazar:
Pete, stay at your brewery in Golden where you make that swill called beer. Ken, you are supposed to be Colorado's attorney general; get back to your desk and soft pillow.
Neither one of you clowns would make a pimple on a real senator's backside. Get a life. I wouldn't vote for either of you clowns. You're both a joke.
Frank V. Sandoval
Denver
The land of Oz: "Matli Crew," Eryc Eyl's review of Ozomatli in the August 26 issue, was excellently done. This band was just in town at B.B. King's, and I am sorry to have missed them after reading Eyl's piece. I will pick up some of their stuff. Sweet work.
Royden Mills
New York, New York
