Devilish Adventure

SAT, 1/24 Head to the land Down Under at today’s screening of In Search of the Tasmanian Devil, with John Nelson, shown as part of the Macky Auditorium Travel Film Series. “Tasmania is a place that a lot of people don’t go to when they visit Australia, but it’s a…

Just the ‘Fax, man

Amid the nourishing chaos of city life, we urban dwellers find ourselves brain-deep in startling juxtapositions. Mid-morning one Tuesday, a formation of squawking geese sweeps its shadow across a used-bookstore window, dimming the dog-eared covers of The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, and Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol. An instant later,…

The Apes of Wrath

One hot day this past summer, an owner of King’s Land Seafood, the dim sum mecca at Alameda Square, called in a panic after she spotted a utility truck cutting into the pavement right outside her place. This was it, she said. They were seizing her property. The city was…

Living a Legacy

FRI, 1/16 They say blood is thicker than water, and when it comes to The Duke Ellington Orchestra, the family lines are still flowing strong after more than 75 years. The pedigree is impressive. Edward “Duke” Kennedy Ellington led his illustrious orchestra to prominence in the 1920s through a series…

Behind the Scenes

MON, 1/12 Who really knows, other than a sculptor, what goes on in a sculpture studio? It’s actually a loud, messy business — with machinery buzzing and dust flying — but it’s also an endeavor that undergoes many stages of evolution between drawing board and finished work. Most of us…

Stop, Look, and Listen

MON, 1/5 We’ve all heard the term “the fabric of life,” but Santa Fe fiber artist Lauren Camp puts a new twist on the old metaphor by giving life to fabric. A jazz aficionado who’s found a unique way to express her love for music and musicians, Camp debuts The…

Happy Goo Year

“I predict that a large city in Colorado will be the victim of a strange and terrible pressure from outer space, which will cause all solids to turn into a jelly-like mass. I predict that this pressure will not affect any other part of the world but will be pinpointed…

Soul Food

FRI, 12/26 For many holiday revelers, December 26 marks the first uneventful day after a long string of yuletide festivities. For those who celebrate Kwanzaa, however, it’s the beginning of a week-long celebration of family, community and culture. Started in 1966 by Maulana Karenga, chairman of the University of California…

Take Your Best Shot

A hundred bottles of tequila at the bar, a hundred bottles of tequila.Jesse Morreale and Chris Swank, the folks behind Nobody in Particular Presents, and three new partners have given Capitol Hill/City Park residents reason to sing. A hundred and four reasons, to be exact, which is the number of…

Nailed!

The windows by the entry are still painted with evergreen and holly, but this building hasn’t seen a very merry Christmas for many, many years. The onetime True Value store stands empty, and beside the faux holly is a notice that the former occupant owes $11,376 in property taxes. The…

All the Word’s a Stage

The interior of the old Federal Theater can be pretty chilly this time of year, but the action on stage this coming Wednesday promises to be plenty hot. Over the past several years, the monthly Stories for All Seasons series has featured some of the state’s best authors reading their…

The Sounds of Silence

The bad news came not in a front-page story or on a TV broadcast. It arrived in a letter from the principal of Denver’s Fairview Elementary School. “I am very sad and regret to inform you of the death of one of our Fairview students,” Kathy Wiemer wrote to Fairview…

Ted Alert!

Welcome to Ver, Colorado. That’s the economical, creative side of the Mile High City. While Den is all about Cherry Creek and fur coats and sleepy thinking and SUVs that never go anywhere near the mountains, Ver is the edgy end of Denver. The place where necessity is the mother…

Rise and Shine

There’s no place like homeless for the holidays. At the initial meeting of the city’s new task force on homelessness, more than two dozen representatives of social-service organizations, the private sector and public office debated what to do with the residence-challenged folks who hang out on the 16th Street Mall,…

Lights, Camera, Reaction

THURS, 11/13 When Denver resident Jason Bosch first attended the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in July 2001, he realized that knowledge, not ignorance, was bliss.”I felt kind of ashamed that I was so ignorant about the world,” says Bosch, adding that the New York-based festival “gives people the…

The Bare Necessities

On Monday evening, there wasn’t a city booster in sight at the Diamond Cabaret & Steakhouse, the strip club that had just landed Denver all over the national press. No Angela Baier, Denver’s first-ever director of marketing. No Tom Clark, who heads the Metro Denver Network, the eco-devo branch of…

Pleased to Greet You

Pleased to Greet You While marketeers float puffy, potential slogans far above the Mile High City, one new program will take Denver’s message straight to the streets. Make that street — specifically, the 16th Street Mall. The Business Improvement District that stretches along the mall, both monitoring and funding its…

Mall in the Family

Hey, whined the city booster who’d just read my cheap shot at “Downtown Denver: A Great Place to Live, Work and Visit, or Dangerous Urban Jungle?,” the downtown residents’ forum held Tuesday night at — where else? — the Wynkoop Brewing Co., the restaurant founded by John Hickenlooper, now king…

Roll ‘Em

“Meeting in fifteen minutes, people,” shouted the newspaper editor before slamming the door of his office. “That means everybody.” The water-cooler conversation started gushing. Watermelon, watermelon, watermelon. So the rumors were true: The paper was being sold. Watermelon, watermelon, watermelon. The paper being sold was not Westword, but the Denver…

Om, Om on the Range

“Shall the voters for the City and County of Denver adopt an Initiated Ordinance to require the city to help ensure public safety by increasing peacefulness — that is, by defusing political, religious and ethnic tensions, both locally and globally — through the identification and implementation of any systematic, stress-reducing…

Read Alert

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library,” said Jorge Luis Borges. And standing at the gates to that paradise will be a librarian, one index finger pressed to pursed lips while the other punches the delete key on the computer system tracking patrons’ reading records,…

Lights, Camera, Action

I’m waiting for the phone to ring. Shooting starts next week on Silver City, the political potboiler that renowned writer/director John Sayles has set in Colorado, giving the local film industry a much-needed boost and, come next summer, offering filmgoers what’s certain to be an eye-popping look at our state…