The FIFA World Cup, the international showdown that’s held soccer fans rapt nearly every four years since it began eighty years ago, might not be as highly heralded in the U.S. as it is in practically any other nation on earth, but there’s a reason for its global popularity: It’s…

Last year, Infinity Park, the metro area’s center of the rugby universe, pulled a major coup when it brought rugby’s touted Churchill Cup to the region, hosting preliminary matches at the Glendale park and farming the final out to Dick’s Sporting Goods Park. Something must have gone incredibly right, because…

Situated a stone’s throw from La Junta, out on the eastern plains, Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site isn’t what you’d call a famous destination, but its value as a swatch of Western history can’t be denied. That’s why then-president Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the attraction, located on the site…

In an effort to keep you thinking during the long, hot summer, the Denver Public Library’s Fresh City Life program will present Presence of the Camera: Documentaries, a film series dedicated to — and sometimes mocking — the cutting edge of reality, throughout the month of June. The library’s sixth…

The Morgul-Bismarck Loop in Boulder County first gained fame in the 1970s and ’80s as a treacherous leg of the Red Zinger and Coors Classic bicycle circuit races famous for the notorious “Wall,” a culminating incline with a 12 percent grade. In those days, it mostly wound around the undeveloped…

What could be better in the middle of a holiday weekend than four stages of music, twenty bands, interactive booths, a gaming area and a beer garden? And all for free? This year’s Denver Day of Rock, a music festival designed to draw attention to the good work of local…

When it comes to you-are-there reporting, Sebastian Junger is top of the heap: The best-selling and award-winning author of The Perfect Storm and A Death in Belmont knows how to weave a yarn around straight facts with gripping and thought-provoking results, regardless of the subject. Junger’s new book, War, an…

For nearly fifteen years, Steve Friesen has lived and breathed the lore of Buffalo Bill (aka William F. Cody) as director of Lookout Mountain landmark the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave. And he’s proud of the collection of artifacts he’s so lovingly curated during that time, so much so that…

Ivar Zeile of Plus Gallery says it’s a jungle out there right now for independent galleries, but that’s no reason to hunker down and play it too safe. The gallery’s new show, Invincible Cohort, borrows its name from a painting by metaphysical surrealist Giorgio de Chirico, hinting at the unobvious…

Artist Sarah Haney always thought there was something odd about the way her Barbie dolls smiled all the time, and though as a child she subjected her fashion dolls to all forms of torture, “Barbie still had that little smirk on her face.” As an adult, Haney takes the experiment…

You have to be a certain kind of nerd to be into typography, and especially the fine art of letterpress printing, a crafty, hand-set art all its own. But the results of that nerdy hard work take on a life all their own, giving off an aura that’s at once…

Buntport Theater’s Evan Weissman doesn’t really want to tell you what Jugged Rabbit Stew, the company’s last production of the season, is actually about. “It just comes off as sounding so hokey and strange,” he laments. Another atypical Buntport musical inspired by the success of the troupe’s first one, a…

It took local author Manuel Ramos, best known for his Denver-centric crime fiction, ten years to finish King of the Chicanos, a novel that rides on the history of the Chicano movement of the ’60s. But he knew it was something he had to do. “I believed that some of…

It’s been thirty years since book-loving siblings Tom and Marilyn Auer put out the first edition of The Bloomsbury Review, a homegrown journal that’s gained national recognition over the years for doing what other national journals didn’t: Writing about mid-list literary treasures that were under-promoted and often overlooked by the…

Curious Theatre’s annual Denver Stories fundraiser always starts with the same formula: The quartet of local celebrities chosen to be honored with an on-stage bio invariably includes a restaurateur (handy for snacks), a politician, an entrepreneur and a figure from the arts and culture scene. “We just decide that this…

Creating a lavish new architectural studio in Denver’s RiNo district is hard work. And Brian Higgins and Elizabeth Salvione decided to celebrate the completion of RAW Architecture’s new headquarters by taking on more hard work — and throwing a party for charity. Explains Salvione, “We thought that the new space…

Like any good dance teacher, April Charmaine of the Sol Vida Dance! studio loves to show off her young students at the end of a year of training. But the question this time around was how? “I felt uninspired by the idea of a cookie-cutter recital,” Charmaine says. “I wanted…

One of the most interesting trips I ever took was a visit to Provincetown in the dead of a winter so cold that ice floated in the peninsular surf. It’s pretty much a ghost town in the winter, except for the locals — Portuguese fishermen, stray cats and brave housesitters…

The true saga of Lawnchair Larry, aka Lawrence Richard Walters, a Southern California trucker who built himself a flying lawn chair hooked up to a slew of helium-filled weather balloons in 1982 and famously took flight in it, ended sadly, several years later, with a suicide brought on by an…

Local author Irene Rawlings was driving down the highway in Wyoming one fine day when she spied something out of the ordinary. “It was a caravan of trailers, and they were all beautifully painted with murals, and they had names like ‘Rhinestone Cowgirl’ and ‘Calamity Jane’ written on them,” she…

The paintings of Colorado Springs artist Margaret Kasahara, the first-generation American daughter of Japanese immigrants, are as neatly arranged as a bento box, often featuring cultural symbols juxtaposed in cleanly delineated, black-outlined partitions. And not unlike the bento, each compartment sports a cross-cultural flavor all its own, creating a metaphor…

As any fan of local author Mario Acevedo would tell you, character Felix Gomez isn’t your average vampire: He’s also a private eye. And he’s funny. Ver-ry, ver-ry funny. He battles zombies, aliens, werewolves and nymphomaniacs, all while retaining a certain lecherous charm that makes us love him. If that…