Come on and take a free ride…well, it’s not exactly free, but for a small fee you’re invited to take a ride with the Edgar Winter Band, Saturday at Belly Up. Watch the multi-instrumentalist, albino, synthesizer, saxophone and drum-playing Texan who gave us the fist-pumping ‘70s rocker “Frankenstein” and the pop hit “Free Ride” brings his decades of jazz, blues, rock and experimental showmanship to the Belly Up Aspen stage. His music can be found on radio, tv in film and video games.
Aspen Post blogger Dr. Bill is back at it again, this time going Gene Shallot on "Sleuth, the remake of the 1972 film of the same name and starring Michael Caine again but in the role more fitting of current generation. I found Sleuth to be a fascinating study of relationships and trust/distrust between men. Kenneth Branagh brilliantly directs Caine and Jude Law to profound performances. The setting is Caine's characters's home where a meeting has been arranged between Caine's character and his wife's lover played by Law. Let the games begin. Each take turn in enrolling one another in a selfish and dangerously exciting scenario. Caine and Law's acting is celebrated in this extreme thriller... Loved this film and it's images keep showing up in my mind four days and four films later."
In this, the final chapter of DROP DEAD BEAUTIFUL, the mystery novel by Michael Conniff set in Aspen, we learn our hero Arnold Bagdikian must nurse the woman he loves back to life--and there is the small matter of the small daughter he has sired in the test tube. But things could be worse. He and Amanda Madison have 50 weeks together high atop Red Mountain, and the Bag Man is now the proud recipient of half the settlement money for the O’Kell heirs, a cool $1 billion dollars. You have to start somewhere.
In this, the final chapter of DROP DEAD BEAUTIFUL, the mystery novel by Michael Conniff set in Aspen, we learn that the life of our hero Arnold Bagdikian will never be the same. First, he must nurse Amanda Madison, the woman he loves, back to life after the kidnapping; second, there is the small matter of the small daughter he has sired in the test tube for Angie Frangello and Jimmy Burns. But things could be worse. He and Amanda have 50 weeks together in a trophy home high atop Red Mountain, and the Bag Man is now the proud recipient of half the settlement money for the O’Kell heirs, a cool $1 billion dollars. You have to start somewhere.
There just has to be an easier way to come up with $1 billion semolians, but what does our hero Arnold Bagdikian care? After finding his beloved Amanda Madison, he is in receipt of said amount and so are the test-tube heirs of the O’Kell family. (That was easy, wasn’t it—once you got past the kidnapping and murders and threats?) But now the Bag man turns to his mentor Rick Tennyson to try to put the pieces of his life back together. He nearly got the woman he loved killed, and now she—and they—have to recover from the shock of her kidnapping. Bagdikian is left to contemplate the ineffable question: what’s a billion dollars without the woman you love?
The thrilling conclusion of DROP DEAD beautiful arrives when Arnold Bagdikian, gun in hand, is forced to fight his way through a terrorist simulation that becomes all too real when he meets up with Sheriff Dominic Picatti. The prize: the kidnapped Amanda Madison, the only woman he has ever really love--and the billion dollars he will reap from the O'Kell heirs now that he has solved the riddle of what once was called eternal life. Thank the Lord Ozzie Newcombe is there to provide some nice clean backup.
There is no time for discussion when Ozzie Newcombe and his friends from an unnamed federal agency nab Diana Campobello at Montrose Airport. There is no time because no amount of human placenta is going to keep Diana Campobello alive forever, and she alone holds he key to finding Amanda Madison, the love of Arnold Bagdikian’s life. To find out Amanda’s whereabouts, they first have to show the empress has no clothes.
He seemed even taller and thinner than before, like he had not been eating. His skin had a papery texture to it and the bones seemed to be ready to explode through the skin, like a computer-generated mummy in the movies. The cast was off and the broken arm looked about one-half the size of the good one. He took the pillow case and dumped out the contents on the coffee table. There were hundreds of them in all shapes and sizes, from plain postcards to oversized “Get Well” cards.
“Jesus,” I said.
“We’re all rooting for you,” Eugene Koksher said. “Some of them have been praying for you and for your girl. It takes all kinds to be an O’Kell.”
Dr. Melville cracked the paper open at arm’s-length, like an official proclamation. “‘Bagdikian,’ it says. ‘If you’re reading this it’s probably not so good for me but maybe not so bad for you. I know where she is but that makes it sound much too easy. It’s a place called Bighorn Ranch and it’s in the mountains about a half-hour outside of Telluride. Most of the guests get in there by helicopter. Everybody there is into guns and there’s some other weird anti-terrorist shit that’s going on there that I’m still running down. But if you’re reading this, it means I wasn’t able to put together all the pieces for you.’”
You see, every time Arnold Bagdikian tries to solve the murder of Sam Albright, somebody he never quite seens to kill him. It's happened twice now in DROP DEAD BEAUTIFUL, the mystery novel set in Aspen, and the Bag Man is getting sick of it. But that doesn't mean he's going to stop. Amanda Madison, the love of his life, has gone missing, and our hero is not about to let the possibility of permanent brain trauma--and the advice of qualified medical professionals at Aspen Valley Hospital--stop him from finding his woman.
The Bag Man is in big trouble, so banged up that he can barely remember what happened to Amanda Madison--the kidnpapping of the woman he loves by the dark side of the force, namely Pitkin County Sheriff Dominic Picatti. Rather than face the music, he lives for a time with the notion of death and the world beyond that he can't possibly understand. It takes Aspen Free Press reporter Skip Taylor to get Baggie to snap out of it, for God's sake.
All is well and more than reasonably lustful for our hero, Arnold Bagdikian, and Amanda Madison, the woman he loves, until they are beset at a party under a Rocky Mountain sky by a half-dozen men dressed in black and armed with fungo bats and other instruments of destruction. Just when he thought life could not get much better, the Bag Man finds out that the kidnapping of his one true love means things could get much worse.
Bagdikian, a lawyer of some repute, refuses to muck around with a fool for a client. Instead, Katherine Hallaby (the great) does the heavy lifting and gets all charges dropped without even a blip. There’s nothing to do than but to repair to the J Bar for libations and celebrations—and a toast to the late Sam Albright.
