Michael Conniff
Michael Conniff purports to be a third-generation newspaperman, the son of a Pulitzer Prize winner, the first person ever hired fulltime in new media at NBC, the first writing instructor at Harvard ever to use word processing as a teaching tool, a Breadloaf Scholar in fiction, a ballboy for the world champion New York Jets in 1969-1970, the host of "Con Games" on KNFO 106.1, the editor-at-large at Aspen Peak, and the guy's guy behind Post Time Media Inc. and Aspen Post, Snowmass Post, Skiing Post, and Fractional Post.
If you were an honest man, you would have to confess that every time you arrive at the Aspen Ideas Festival you come to the conclusion that you are the invisible man.
Look around: there are scores of famous and famously accomplished people brought here by the Aspen Institute, and you are not even close to being one of them. Worse: you would never find a jury of your peers among this group, because these are not your peers. Any glimpses of grandeur you might have felt in better days was undermined when the press pass arrived and you were told you could only go to the second half of the Ideas Fest: without thinking twice, you know you are not even half a man in the all-seeing eyes of the Aspen Institute.
Continue Reading July 3rd, 2009
Okay, I’m a convert to Theatre Aspen. At the end of the day—at the end of the night—if it ain’t on the page it ain’t on the stage, but if it ain’t on the stage you’ve got bupkus.
Of course, Theatre Aspen has its own page to turn: Paige Price, the singer-actor-labor official-artistic director now responsible for the pages that end up under the tent on the stage on the edge of Rio Grande Park. First recruited as a performer to Theatre Aspen by former bossman David McClendon, she has not only raised expectations for a regional-caliber troupe but has begun to deliver this season with “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” a raucous and occasionally raunchy musical comedy now well underway under the tent and running through August.
Continue Reading July 1st, 2009
Nothing beats the idea of “the level playing field” when it comes to boneheaded American mythology. The analogy no doubt emanates from the national past-time yet is meant to resonate in every America cranny, including any and all branches of government. The idea that the same rules—and the same opportunities—apply to everyone could be stamped on the Statue of Liberty’s crown.
Pity the fool.
The news that Sammy Sosa—late of the Chicago Cubs and lesser Major League Baseball (MLB) nines—applied performance-enhancing drugs during his career was about as shocking as the word echoing across the canyons of finance that implied Wall Streeters are greedy to the point of gluttony, with the law little more than a nuisance.
Ain’t that America? In baseball and high finance, our citizens are more than welcome to game the system as long as nobody finds out.
Continue Reading June 18th, 2009
LAS VEGAS—From the balcony of our honeymoon suite here at The Platinum Hotel, you can see the backside of The Strip—Mandalay Bay on the far left to the Wynn and Encore on the way right—and you can almost convince yourself that you live at some remove from the vacationing hoi polloi who decamp from the fruited plain to Sin City.
Even on a honeymoon in Vegas, The Platinum’s status as one of the few classy no-smoke, no-gamble hotels within proximity of the Strip—and my own inclination not to drink—might put us at a psychic distance from the action…but not so fast. No matter how much distance there might be in Vegas between one and the Strip one block away, there’s no escaping what this place means to these United States.
Continue Reading June 9th, 2009
Okay, it’s official: the bound and tattered book is dead.
For me at least.
Continue Reading May 22nd, 2009
By sheer coincidence—what other kind can you find in deep space—I went to see the new “Star Trek” movie on the same stardate as the news arrived that Pat Tillman’s parents were protesting the selection of the general to lead U.S. troops in Afghanistan—the same officer who botched the investigation into their son’s death.
The Tillmans, not surprisingly, are apoplectic that Lt. General Stanley McChrystal has been appointed by President Barack Obama to lead American troops in the same country where Pat Tillman died by friendly fire. Tillman, of course, is the late National Football League (NFL) star who eschewed $3.6 million and more to enlist after 9/11 with his brother in the Army Rangers. The true story of his death was covered up multiple times by the U.S. Army—long enough for him to be buried as the quintessential American hero who gave his life for a cause greater than his own. The original story of his putatively heroic death turned out to be a complete fabrication: his family became angrier and angrier as the truth failed to unfold and the coverup began to unravel.
Continue Reading May 15th, 2009
Out with the old brand, in with the new.
At a time when the pathetic, peripatetic National Council for a New America—yes, another conservative puppet show—the answer to the salvation of the Republican Party is staring the punditocracy square in the face.
Want a new brand?
How about killing the Republican Party and replacing it with the far more powerful Conservative Party?
Continue Reading May 6th, 2009
When faith fails, true believers on the political Right can always turn to science. Nowhere is the tactic more egregious than when the Righties need to defend marriage as between a man or a woman--a union that neither gay man nor beast can put asunder.
Continue Reading April 28th, 2009
Because we live so obviously and obliviously within the tyranny of the moment—don’t be bitter about Twitter—it’s easy as apple pie to miss the steps on the way to the conservative abyss.
William F. Buckley Jr., the late loquacious Godfather of the movement, famously said of feminists: “Give them an inch, they’ll take a mile”—this as a proposition to be debated with Germaine Greer. In the 21st Century, the Right is giving up inch after inch on a myriad of social issues so as not to appear both absurd and irrelevant. Creationism, gay marriage, and climate change are the power trio of this kind of conservative political impotence.
Continue Reading April 20th, 2009
Liberal talk radio? After twenty years of bleating bleeping conservatism, when I began my show on KNFO in Aspen on April 18, 2004, there was just barely such a thing. Air America had managed to make it onto the air—my brother Frank Conniff even worked there as a staff comedian—before imploding instanter for business reasons. At the time I had never even heard of another liberal talk show host other than Alan Colmes of “Hannity and Colmes” on Fox. Give or take the stray blowhard in a big city, liberal talk show hosts simply did not exist.
They had to be invented.
Continue Reading April 17th, 2009
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