In June 2003, Richard Florida, author of the hot-hot-hot Rise of the Creative Class, was speaking to a group of despairing alternative-newspaper types when one asked if Florida had any hope for the political future. Yes, he replied. In Denver, where John Hickenlooper had just been elected mayor. Two years…
Nineteen-year-old Quincy Shannon has a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But if you’re a budding broadcast journalist, as Shannon is, that puts you in the right place at the right time. On the second weekend of June last year, the place was LoDo, where…
When a prestigious convention comes to Denver, public officials usually fall all over themselves to welcome the group — particularly when media outlets from across the country are covering the event. But while there will be plenty of falling all over when the Modern Drunkard Convention pours into Denver this…
Quincy Shannon’s journalism professor wanted him to capture some “action” on videotape. Give the kid an A for effort: His video sparked the town’s hottest story last summer. Not that Shannon got any credit for his work. No, all he got was a misdemeanor rioting charge — and a date…
FRI, 5/6 Boulder Arts and Crafts Cooperative exhibit coordinator Ellen Spiller didn’t have a feminine theme in mind when she asked eight Colorado women to take part in the new metalwork show Women of Steel — but that’s what she got. “It turns out that a lot of women are…
The next time the old-boy network starts casting about for a female entrepreneur to elevate to Colorado’s Business Hall of Fame, they should take a look at Marilyn Megenity. They won’t find her in some power- and fuel-mad Lexus: She’s retrofitted her car to run on vegetable oil, and drives…
Free speech doesn’t come cheap. On Tuesday evening, protesters wearing yellow, white, black and red converged on the University of Colorado from all sides. Officially a show of support for Ward Churchill and academic freedom, the Four Directions March could just as well have been a dress rehearsal for Denver’s…
THURS, 4/14 Adventurous gallery curator Simon Zalkind of the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture will throw Denver an aesthetic curveball tonight with Whispers of Contradiction, a site-specific, collaborative electronic-art installation created by multimedia artist Brian DeLevie of the University of Colorado at Denver and local quantum physicist D.S. Oakley…
The University of Colorado Alumni Association was finally fed up with the beating its alma mater had taken in the press. “CU is still about 25,000 great students: taking midterms, enduring chemistry labs, sweating through math homework, memorizing art history, examining business law and agonizing over how they can best…
SAT, 4/9 What’s worse than a cheap cigar? A cheap dildo. Thankfully, you won’t find any of those at Hysteria, a new “feminist, progressive, sex-positive boutique” that opens at 11 a.m. today at 114 South Broadway. Wife-and-husband team Elizabeth Hauptman and Pete Yribia modeled their shop after the internationally known…
The Kobe Bryant case. The University of Colorado football-recruiting mess. The Air Force Academy sex-assault scandal. “If you asked me what state all this was happening in,” says attorney Wendy Murphy, “I would put Colorado near the bottom of the list.” That’s because this state had developed a reputation as…
Could any pleasure be more guilty than sitting around a saloon with good company, drinking up the news — and booze — of the day? That’s what a group of Denver journalists and ad men (and they were almost invariably men) did back in the ’50s and ’60s, when the…
My grandfather was a surgeon in the first field hospital that followed the American troops into Normandy after D-Day. He sent letters home from the front, letters that because of security reasons and his own private nature didn’t go into many gory revelations. You had to read between the lines…
“If you are searching for the right place to go to college, look at the University of Colorado at Boulder,” urges CU’s website. “It’s a place of beauty and academic prominence at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. A sense of vitality and curiosity fills the campus, and yet it’s…
A year ago next week, Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell threw a big, wet blanket on the Colorado Republican Party — almost as big, and wet, a blanket as he’d thrown on Colorado Democrats nine years earlier, when the first-term senator abandoned the political party that had already seen him through…
Back in May 2003, Denver believed it had made the bling-bling bigtime when Russell Simmons, founder of Def Jam Records, stood beside then-mayor Wellington Webb and promised to bring his Hip-Hop Festival and Summit to the Mile High City. Denver’s still waiting for him to make good on that promise…
5:55 a.m.: 7600 Broadway They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway…but right before dawn, on the hillside where Broadway begins, the only lights are a hint of orange and pink on the horizon to the east, the beacons of a convenience store a few blocks down the two-lane…
On the first day of school I awoke with a sick feeling in my stomach. It did not hurt, it just made me feel weak. The sun did not sing as it came over the hill. — Bless Me, Ultima By now, University of Colorado president Betsy Hoffman must long…
SAT, 2/5 Take a trip through the West — and the past — today when Mark Klett and Kyle Bajakian, two of the people responsible for Third Views, Second Sights: A Rephotographic Survey of the American West, discuss the project that resulted in their stunning book. Klett, who’s on the…
Public Advisory: The State of Colorado wishes to provide you with information concerning the history of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge, formerly Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, the radioactive and other hazardous materials that were used and released at that site when it was in operation, and the cleanup…
Amateur card sharps get their day. SAT, 1/29 In May 2003, Tennessee amateur Chris Moneymaker won $2.5 million at the championship final event of the World Series of Poker. The victory came as quite a surprise to the poker community, as the World Series was Moneymaker’s first actual casino tournament…
At first, the darkness was intimidating and the smell of ozone strong. My mind wouldn’t slow down. Why, I kept asking myself, would a self-proclaimed ADD sufferer voluntarily submit to lying in a ten-inch-deep tank brimming with water and enough epsom salts to fill the Dead Sea? I was trapped…
