Lawrence “Bud” Stoecker spent his life running a modest family business building A-frame cabins in the Rocky Mountains. At home, he was a practical engineer, too. One winter in the 1960s, Stoecker designed a sleek, cone-shaped series of connecting concentric circles that hung from the ceiling — his own shiny…
The mid-season finale of The Walking Dead will fill zombie lovers with dread and sorrow as some number of beloved regulars and untold numbers of secondary characters are killed off. Fans of the show everywhere are quite excited about Sunday’s show, but fans here in Denver should consider DVRing this…
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Damon Redd started Kind Design back in 2008, but last year Mother Nature threatened to end his clothing line. “I never in a million years expected to wake up and find my business under five feet of water and mud in Boulder, Colorado…
See also: Ferguson, ISIS and the Ice Bucket Challenge: What Happens When We Choose Our News…
What do you do with the family after Thanksgiving is over? You dress them up and take them to see A Christmas Carol, because some stories were just made for retelling, generation after generation. And if you don’t have a family with spit-washed faces, you can throw a little whipped…
When the European Space Agency’s Philae lander touched down on Comet 67P on November 12, millions of people were watching. For one day, the washing-machine-sized robot was the world’s biggest celebrity, spawning a Google doodle and making the home page of the New York Times. From his house in Fort…
Thinking of all the aches and pains of winter ahead, a group of holistic healers have banded together to give the public a chance to sample their offerings — everything from massage and herbs to acupuncture and psychotherapy — at the Holistic Health Care Fair. See also: Denver’s Zen Magnets…
Some local stages stick with the classics for the holidays, such as the Denver Center Theatre Company’s A Christmas Carol and the Colorado Ballet’s The Nutcracker. But if you like things light and perhaps a little bit wacked, there are a few ways to buck tradition and deck the halls…
Earlier this week, for the first time in more than a decade, something novel happened in the world of Denver film: No films were programmed by Keith Garcia. The name may mean nothing to you, or you may not have much idea what it means to be a film programmer,…
L.L Bean will open its 22nd American retail store outside of Maine at Park Meadows Shopping Center (in the former home of Grand Lux Cafe) on Friday, November 21. The company was founded by avid outdoorsman Leon Leonwood (“L.L.”), who in 1912 returned home from a hunting trip with cold,…
Have all your do-it-yourself projects been stymied by a lack of tools? A crowdfunding campaign that starts tomorrow is designed to built a bank account for the Denver Tool Library, a Blockbuster-like facility devoted to home improvement that could soon open on Santa Fe Drive. See also: Five Amazing Zines…
There’s always a lot of fake blood — and spare body parts — at the Denver Zombie Crawl, which runs down the 16th Street Mall every year. But the ninth annual incarnation of the event, which took place on October 18, ended with some real blood and plenty of pepper…
Bright and bold graphic-printed fashion is all the rage these days. Over the past week, we’ve noticed photographic imagery printed on everything from skirts to socks, and everywhere from the streets to the runway. Read on to learn more about these graphics, how to wear them, and why people like…
Back in August, I went to see Dave Chappelle perform at the Boulder Theater with my boyfriend and a gaggle of our best dude friends. A longtime fan of Chappelle’s work, it was the first time I would be seeing his standup live, and I was stoked. But halfway into…
#43: Noah Van Sciver If you read Westword, you’re familiar with Noah Van Sciver — since 2008, when he started inking the 4 Questions feature in Backbeat, the hard-working cartoonist has been making observations about modern society and its many characters in these pages and online at westword.com. But Van…
Curling up in front of a screen on a cold, snowy day is one of winter’s underrated pleasures, and it’s one that wasn’t lost on the crowd at the Denver Indie Games Expo at Clutch Gaming Arena in Arvada on Saturday. Players and creators who had braved the slippery roads…
The start of Dillon Morton’s clothing company, Fake Diamonds, came in 2009, “when I first learned to convert an art piece of mine in photoshop to have screen-printed on a shirt,” he recalls. “After I was able to sell those initial twelve shirts, I went for it and designed about…
The shift happens so fast, it’s nearly imperceptible, but that won’t last for long — Halloween’s over, and the holiday shopping season is on. Shopping handmade and local is the trend, and we’ve made it a little easier for you to navigate the best of the markets, sales and small…
Geeks have a lot of reasons to be excited about this year’s Starz Denver Film Festival. There’s the sweet Stanley Nights program of horror (one of my picks for the top geek events this month). Among the “normal” films, you’ll find a sweet-looking Alan Turing biopic that should be of…
#44: Britta Erickson Britta Erickson, a Denver native who’s the director of the Starz Denver Film Festival, not only builds the fest from the ground up behind the scenes but also serves as its public face. Popular Denver Film Society side projects such as Film on the Rocks and the…
H&M just unveiled its annual designer collection, this time a collaboration with Alexander Wang. In the hours leading up to Thursday’s release, we chatted with some of the diehard fashionistas who were waiting in line by the H&M at Denver Pavilions so that they could shop the collection first. Keep…
When artists and roommates Laura Conway and Anna Winter started talking about curating their own gallery show in their home, it was crucial to challenge the traditional format of a place for art. “While subverting the white wall gallery model isn’t new, we wanted to experiment in our own alternative…
