Blogs

The overhaul of the former Gates Rubber Co site into a $1 billion transit-oriented development has gone off-track for the moment thanks to a mysterious move by builder Joseph Freed and Associates to “create a different relationship” with master developer Cherokee Denver, which owns the site.

Freed senior vice president Steve Jacobsen explains it like this: “Because of the current market conditions and the way the market is right now, the arrangement we previously had with Cherokee had to change. The land contract has expired and we are in the process of creating a new arrangement.”

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The three consecutive evenings that the Focus on the Family radio broadcast is devoting to the subject of the Matthew Murray shooting rampage is shaping into a fascinating listen – and not just because it’s the first time that the parents, Ronald and Loretta Murray, are speaking publicly about their disturbed son. It’s a chance to witness in real time how a seemingly meaningless act of violence is re-interpreted as a modern-day parable that can then be pitched to a worldwide evangelical audience.

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March would mark the 104th birthday of the late Dr. Seuss, and the event is being celebrated at elementary schools around town, where teachers are reading books and stories by the author, whose real name was Theodor Geisel, and by the big-screen release of the animated Horton Hears a Who! (which stars the voices of Jim Carrey and Steve Carell, and which will hopefully be better than Carrey’s live-action Grinch or Mike Myers’s live-action Cat in the Hat).

So leave it to the religious-right-wingnuts at the anti-abortion group, Colorado for Equal Rights, to poop on Dr. Seuss’s party by appropriating this book, which was written to entertain children and capture their imaginations, not for political purposes or a social agenda, and its famous slogan, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.” The reason? Colorado for Equal Rights is trying to organize a ballot measure asking voters to say that "personhood" begins at conception, meaning fertilized eggs would be protected from that moment on. The group would like to make abortion illegal. “It's so true that whatever stage of life you're in, you're a person, whatever your size,” Kristi Burton, the founder of the group was quoted as saying in the Denver Post.

Thanks Kristi. And a Shmuck’s a Shmuck, no matter how big.

To read about last week’s Shmuck, click here.

Sandy Carson announced this morning that she has sold her namesake gallery, building and all. It would be an understatement to call this a surprise since it's actually more of a shock. "It’s time,” Carson explains. “I’m 68 years old, and I’ve been in the art business for 33 years.”

The whole thing came out of the blue last week when Jan and Bill van Straaten, owners of the van Straaten Gallery and Riverhouse Editions, a fine art print maker in Steamboat Springs, walked in and asked what it would take to purchase the place, lock, stock and barrel. Within days, a price was agreed on, and the sale moved forward. Word is, the van Straatens, who started their art business in Chicago before moving to Steamboat twenty years ago, wanted to live in a city again.

Carson will stay on at least until June, and afterward will likely serve as a consultant. Gallery director William Biety, who is traveling with the van Straatens on a buying trip right now, is also planning to stay. The exhibition schedule already in place will be carried out. There’s no word on whether the gallery will take a new direction, but presumably printmaking will be increasingly showcased.

“It happened so fast, I feel like I’m on another planet,” says Carson with a laugh. And she believes the decision is good news all around. She’s going to kick back a little after a long career, and one of the city’s great galleries will remain up and running for the foreseeable future. -- Michael Paglia

For nearly thirty years, Denver Art Museum curator Dianne Vanderlip had complete control of the Modern and Contemporary department, but she retired right after the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building was opened in 2006. It was a sad irony because, after begging for space for decades, she finally got it in the new facility, and then, almost immediately, she left.

But she did stay long enough to install the permanent galleries on levels three and four. Laid out more or less historically, the collections begin on level three with a small prewar modernist section followed by the orderly march of the American-dominated abstract styles – from abstract expressionism to minimalism. The newer material is on level four. Her replacement, Christoph Heinrich, plans to shake things up with a remodel of both floors meant to be completed by August in time for the Democratic National Convention.

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Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton square off in the first-ever Vlog the Impaler Presidential Debate.

Eighteenth Judicial District Attorney Carol Chambers wasted no time responding to our February 28 feature examining her unusual cost-shifting approach to three death-penalty cases. Within hours after our article appeared online, she fired off the memo below to her prosecution team, blaming the high cost of such cases on defense attorneys and judges like the one in the current David Bueno trial, in which jury selection alone is dragging out for months.

Chambers’s contention that the death penalty doesn’t have to be expensive fails to address one point made by her adversary David Lane in our article: defense attorneys have to explore every tactic and legal avenue in such cases or be accused of providing inadequate counsel. Judges allow them such leeway for fear of being reversed down the long, winding road of appeals a capital case inevitably takes. To suggest that defense attorneys play dead in court so their clients can be killed more efficiently probably isn’t going to make her any friends among the defense bar. But see for yourself:

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Slide Show
So, Knight Rider is back. Which is one of those sentences that most people don't want to hear, like "Your check engine light is on," or "Hey, look, circus clowns!" But honestly, KITT and company aren't the worst things that could come back from '80s TV.

The Avalanche have been very good to us. When the team arrived from Quebec in 1996, they showed up with a pair of first ballot hall-of-famers, almost immediately traded for another, won us our first major sports championship and galvanized a latent hockey base that has since become one of the most vociferous in America. Seven years ago, during our last Stanley Cup run, the Avs were – as painful as it is to admit – the Yankees of the NHL, loading the roster with players whose busted-up faces would someday become bronze busts. And just when the team seems to be hitting a rut, with attendance down and our marquee players banged up, Avs GM Francois Giguere reaches for his magic wand, taps the brim of his stove-pipe hat, and pulls out Peter Forsberg. As an encore, he covers an empty cage with a cloak, says a couple of magic words (in French-Canadian) and presto! It’s Adam Foote.

The crowd goes wild.

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In order to make more sense of the world around us, illustrator and public house naturalist Nate Stone is compiling here a taxonomy of different barflies. While you're out and about in Denver, if you spot any of these specimens please add your observations about their habitat (where to find them) in the comments section below. Also, if you have any pictures of these colorful creatures, please email them here so we can fully document their existence.

CU student and inveterate controversy magnet Max Karson has made plenty of headlines in recent years for his satirical writings and attention-getting stunts, as this February 21 More Messages blog outlines. However, his latest contretemps, spurred by a piece entitled "If It's War the Asians Want..." that ran in CU's online Campus Press, appears to have more staying power than even many longtime Karson observers might have guessed.

In advance of a February 27 rally intended to condemn the column, as well as a meeting between protestors and CU chancellor G.P. "Bud" Peterson scheduled to take place immediately thereafter, CU has affixed a sprawling resource page to its website, complete with an "open letter to the CU community," a comprehensive chronology of event, and statements from Peterson, Campus Press advisor Amy Herdy, and CU journalism department dean Paul Voakes, who makes an appearance in the February 28 Message in regard to a more positive subject -- CU's recent hiring of three Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, including longtime Rocky Mountain News scribe Jim Sheeler. Meanwhile, the Campus Press has gone into overdrive, offering an article about the process that led to the original column's appearance, a letter from various Press editors who want to make it clear that they objected to the decision to publish from the get-go, and a lengthy exploration of satire -- an art form many of the parties on both sides of the issue seem to understand none too well.

Unexpected incidents aplenty have already been generated by this hullabaloo. For example, Herdy, a former Denver Post reporter, didn't return a call from her old paper according to a February 22 Post update. But an interesting side note about Karson has been lost in the frenzy. Shortly before the firestorm over the Asian column, he wrote "Bruce and Me," a Press essay about a public confrontation between him and incoming CU head Bruce Benson -- and among those publicly praising it was an associate professor from the very CU journalism department that's currently taking heat for his prose.

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Back in the dark ages of television (i.e., the mid-20th century), the term "breaking news" was typically reserved for the biggest stories -- incidents so important that viewers needed to be informed about them immediately, regardless of the regular newscast schedule. In recent years, innovations like the bottom-of-the-screen video crawl have eroded the concept. But even by these degraded standards, the must-see update that flashed before those watching a repeat of Two and a Half Men on Channel 2 at around 6:23 p.m. on February 26 was comically absurd. The text read: "Breaking news from the CW2 newsroom: Rolo, the five-year-old German shepherd, has been found guilty in an Arvada courtroom of biting a neighbor..."

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Crepes ‘n Crepes is uncompromisingly, unabashedly and unstintingly French. The cooks are French. Owners Kathy Knight and Alain Veratti have imported all their iron crepe griddles from France. The ingredients and preparations -- the Camembert and Chambord, ratatouille and sauce aux champignons -- are French. And the space itself -- the ramshackle, patched, plastered and sunny dining rooms, cramped back bar, sundry collection of plates and flatware --gives off the honest and earned vibe of café-along-the-Seine frugality and disorder. The place is lovely in only the way that something so necessarily unlovely can possibly be, and after retiring briefly to use the facilities, Laura, who has been everywhere, came back and settled the matter. “Unisex bathroom,” she said. “How very European. Substandard plumbing and all.”

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The letter, received by fax last week, read like countless others before it. “ATTENTION: Director/CEO,” it began. “I write, asking for your indulgence in re-profiling funds to the tune of Twelve Million, Eight Hundred Thousand United States Dollars (US$12.8m) which we want to keep safely overseas under your supervision.”

The letter’s author, “Mr. John William,” explained he was a project director at the Department of Minerals & Energy in Pretoria, South Africa, and that the money was surplus funds from a project his department had overseen. He was hoping the letter’s recipient could help him hide the money overseas – and as compensation was offering to hand over 22.2 percent of the riches.

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After a winter of hibernating, the Denver Kickball Coalition (DKBC) is rinsing up with mouthwash, wiping that crusty green shit from its eyes and slicking back its unwashed hair with a fresh coat of pomade in anticipation of its eighth season as the Front Range’s most dynamic coed kickball league. And by dynamic, I mean drunk.

But seriously, kids: It’s time to submit team proposals.

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