Ironbridge, the subdivision located between Carbondale and Glenwood Springs, may be in trouble with financing. The adjacent Ironbridge golf club is owned by LB Rose Ranch LLC---a subsidiary of Lehman Borthers. The LLC wants bankruptcy protection, and that will impact the plans for dozens of housing units, stalling mortgages and also reducing the number of affordable units that can be occupied.
Continue Reading Add comment February 27th, 2009
Watching The Beatles in “A Hard Day’s Night” last night, thinking about George Martin, their genius producer who ultimately put multi-track recording to the test. The rest is history, but multi-track recording, in its way, ends up being closer to the book because all of those endless layers end up in service to a linear creation. The song starts, the song plays, the song ends. Nonetheless we have the notion of layering, of things not always seen or heard below the surface to create the overall work, is a powerful idea. And you can of course have multi-track music in the Supernovel.
Film and video editing has the same kind of layering of moving image, voice, sound effects, soundtrack, setting, set design, costumes all mixed together to achieve a whole the editor and/or director intended. (Think Walter Murch in “The Conversation.”) The art is in the selection and juxtaposition of the detail, but again the endgame is a linear work of art.
So one comes, doesn’t one, to the notion of layering but not linear. If story, story, story is still the key then the story must be told in some way, shape, or waveform. The story—distinct from the telling of the story—has to exist in some way in linear form. It might be told inside out or bassackwards, but the story per se at some level has a beginning, a middle, and an end. In my BOOK OF O’KELLS, for example, there is a simple chronology, a family history over 100 years and three (maybe four) generations, starting with grandfather Jake O’Kell and ending with Rebecca O’Kell’s children. Simple really—and really no different than any other story.
Continue Reading Add comment February 27th, 2009
If you don’t think the folding of the Rocky Mountain News is a tragedy, a big one, let me recount what happened to my father, Frank Conniff, the editor of the World Journal Tribune, the largest afternoon daily in the country, when it folded in 1967.
He had a stroke. The day the paper folded.
My father never recovered: multiple strokes and a few years later he was dead. I was 17. I told anyone who asked: “He died of the newspaper business.”
Continue Reading 4 comments February 26th, 2009
Mobile is here and you had better get your website ready for all those mobile web users who visit your website. Qittle can take your existing website and make it load correctly for mobile devices.
Wireless Application Protocol (commonly referred to as WAP) is an open international standard for application layer network communications in a wireless communication environment. Its main use is to enable access to the Internet from a mobile phone or PDA.
Continue Reading Add comment February 26th, 2009
A couple of Aspen High School students face expulsion after a small amount of marijuana was found recently in their lockers. The unidentified youths apparently bought the drug from another student---who will also face expulsion, which is required under state law. All three have been suspended.
The last time a drug bust occurred was five years ago, when several bindles of cocaine were bought and sold near campus.
Continue Reading Add comment February 26th, 2009
As an amateur ornithologist I look forward every year to the changing of the guard in migratory bird populations. After a long cold winter, the springtime arrival of robins is always a welcome sight, a harbinger of warmer days ahead. And when their numbers dwindle in the fall, I know winter is on the way.
This time was different: the robins never left. At first I hardly noticed, but when in December I began to see flocks of thirty to forty of the red-breasted birds lining roof eaves and crowding bare tree limbs, I knew something unusual was going on.
Continue Reading Add comment February 26th, 2009
I don’t think there’s any question the most significant, indisputable driver of innovation is technology. I was just reading about Les Paul and the Les Paul guitar, the pioneering electronic instrument. He also invented multi-track recording for good measure. Up until that point people were simply trying to amplify acoustic guitars. He (and Fender) created the electric guitar, a whole new animal. As he sees it, he had no choice but to invent the tools he needed.
Trying to figure out the Supernovel, sometimes I feel like a tool.
Continue Reading Add comment February 26th, 2009
Worse, Marks in her personal attack on a local citizen just for speaking out on legitimate community concerns seems to be employing a double standard, violating the very principals she expects from local media.
Continue Reading Add comment February 25th, 2009
Wednesday February 25, 2009
Has serious crime returned to Aspen? Residents are alarmed at the armed robbery of a cab driver last Saturday night.
Cab driver Jeffrey Evans was answering a call at Truscott affordable housing when a white male in his twenties brandished a knife and demanded money.
The bandit made off with about $140----police are still looking for the suspect. No one was injured in the robbery.
Mountain snow packs are in good shape---more than 115 percent of average in most areas----but temperatures are definitely getting warmer and that—is causing rocks and boulders in canyon areas and other steep sections to break away with the spring thaw.
In Glenwood Canyon this week----both lanes of Interstate seventy were closed for three hours after a rock fall that occurred, luckily, in the very early morning hours---the road nearly deserted at the time.
Those spring temperatures will be with us again on Thursday, as we can expect temperatures in the upper forties.
Add comment February 25th, 2009
Well, you have to start somewhere so I’ll start with Neil Young and his plan to publish an archive of songs, lyrics, photographs, articles, and reviews. I’ll start with “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, deKooning, and American Art, 1940-1976” at the Jewish Museum in 2008, the exhibit that included letters, journals, magazines, photos. I’ll start with your garden-variety movie on a DVD, the kind that always comes with out-takes, trailers, scenes cut out of the movie, and actors and directors telling you what in the hell they were trying to do.
Think of it as raw sludge: the raw stuff from whence art or a reasonable facsimile thereof is produced. Think of it as the stuff of dreams or just stuff—the garbage you throw out after a meal. This source material is the sine qua non of any story or history, the exhibits the historian (or forensic CSI criminologist) must sift through to select only those things that bring a story to life.
Continue Reading Add comment February 25th, 2009
