Post blogger Michael Conniff spent a night under the tent in Rio Grande Park and finally found out dysfunction can be damn funny. "Maybe you've seen the movie with Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange, and Sissy Spacek," he blogs, "but the stage version at Theatre Aspen surpasses those performances in my opinion. The actors almost seem to bust out of their seams with talent: toward the end of the evening the three McGrath sisters also show you that they can all sing beautifully--to go with their mastery of comedy, drama, and that place in between where most of life goes down. You hear their beautiful voices after all the comedy and carnage that has transpired, and you know from that point on there's nothing these actresses can't do."
The Con Man welcomes William McKeen, the professor of journalism at the University of Florida at Gainesville, who has just completed his second book on Dr. Hunter S. Thompson Jr., "Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson." Among the questions asked: was he destroyed by drugs and alcohol--or celebrity? And what's his place in the pantheon of American writers?
Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist of The New York Times, was officially christened as king of the world over the weekend in Aspen—and why the hell not?
He wore the mantle lightly at the Aspen Ideas Festival, in part because he married into the gazillionaire Buxbaum family, who have so far given tens of millions of dollars to the town, with the latest dollop a $25 million downpayment for a spanky campus at the Aspen Music Festival and School. But Friedman’s wallop at the podium has all but nothing to do with Bucksbaum bucks, and everything to do with his prescient ability to package the zeitgeist with the tidiness of a juice box—the kind that comes with its own self-piercing straw.
Highlights of Ideas Festival sessions open to the public (tickets required) include:
· US Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff in conversation with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg
· Alice Waters in conversation with The Atlantic’s Corby Kummer, with dessert served from her cookbook
· Award-winning National Geographic photographer James Balog exploring ice on the run in his “Extreme Ice Survey”
· A global perspective on the US elections from Der Tagesspiegel’s Christoph von Marschall, Ha'aretz’s Ari Shavit, Edward Luce of the Financial Times, and others
· A talk with four young, resilient survivors of genocide, war, and gang violence, moderated by playwright and actor Anna Deavere Smith.
The thing I love most about the Food and Wine festival here in Aspen is the famous people I’ve never heard of and would not know from Adam. It’s like going to the Super Bowl with no clue about frozen tundra—you should have stood in bed instead of taking up space in the stands.
A couple years back I was saving a chair at the Hotel Jerome for my fiancée when a woman took the chair for her husband without asking. She said something that indicated her husband was some kind of a big deal in the world of food, but I could not have cared less if he were Wolfgang Puck. It was our chair. I had saved the seat under the universal law found in the Constitution that decrees all men are created equal no matter how nifty you might be with pulled pork and coleslaw.
When Robert Downey Jr., the inherently ironic leading man, arrives on the scene in the Marvel Comics blockbuster “Iron Man,” it takes us a beat or two to realize his character, Tony Stark, is a drunk, philandering scumbag who just happens to be in the back of a Humvee in Afghanistan, where bad things are all but guaranteed to happen.
A little stark? You can say that again. But it’s not booze or the references to multiple rendez-vous with pin-ups that make Tony Stark a consummate ass—it’s his status as the greatest arms inventor and dealer in the world. You immediately wonder how in the name of all that’s Uzi are we going to end up liking this hipster merchant of death, a quandary multiplied by the realization that in the Great American Blockbuster Movie you have to end up loving this guy.
And we do.
Suffice to say that post-Afghanistan Tony Stark is both (a) an iconic super-hero; and (b) a pacifist who swears off the military industrial complex like an alcoholic face-to-face with a cold Budweiser on a hot day.
The news that the Wheeler Opera House will be home to a new comedy festival this Memorial Day is great news for Aspen, if not quite as good as the possibility that HBO might one day return for the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival (USCAF).
The Aspen Rooftop Comedy Festival is coming in a partnership between the Wheeler Opera House and the Rooftop Comedy operation based in San Francisco.
“…Ms. Josefowicz's musicality is as dazzling as her technique.”― Allan Kozinn, New York Times
Closing the Aspen Music Festival and School’s 2008 winter music series on March 10 is Leila Josefowicz, a violinist who has won the hearts of audiences around the world with her honest, fresh approach to the repertoire and her dynamic virtuosity. Josefowicz will be joined by international concert pianist John Novacek. The program includes Brahms’s Scherzo in C minor; Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata in F minor, op. 80; Stravinsky’s Duo concertant for Violin and Piano; and Schubert’s Rondo brilliant in B minor, D. 895, op. 70.
“Leila has a reputation world-wide for playing with great passion and total connection with the music,” says AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher. “This is her debut performance with the Festival, and we’re sure Aspen will embrace her as one of our own.”
One of today's best-known and most highly regarded musicians, pianist Emanuel Ax lends his mastery to works by Schumann and Beethoven on Tuesday, February 26 at 7:30 pm in Harris Concert Hall.
“Once Upon a Time…” theme offers a season-long exploration of folklore, legends, mythology and fairytales through music
David Zinman conducts the world premiere of John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby Suite, an AMFS commission which captures the spirit of the big band era
“Once Upon a Time…” shines through the Aspen Opera Theater Center this summer with two adult versions of the classic Cinderella tale and a production of Hansel and Gretel
Piano mega-star Emanuel Ax returns to Aspen with two extraordinary programs, including a special concert with pianists Joseph Kalichstein, Yefim Bronfman and Misha Dichter
A live taping of the nation’s most popular classical music show, From the Top, features
talent from Aspen’s own stellar student body
Jazz songstress Patti Austin joins the Count Basie Orchestra in a tribute to the first lady of American song, Ella Fitzgerald, presented in association with Jazz Aspen Snowmass
Multiple collaborations with Aspen’s arts elite, including the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, Jazz Aspen Snowmass, the Aspen Institute and Aspen Film
More than 350 public events feature appearances by Joshua Bell, Sarah Chang, James Conlon, Emerson String Quartet, Vladimir Feltsman, Julia Fischer, Nicholas McGegan, David Robertson, Gil Shaham, Leonard Slatkin and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, among others.
Aspen is so cool and hip that it would be outrageously uncool and bodaciously unhip to admit that I really hate the X Games. To say so makes me feel like a traitor to my home base—and worse—because I find myself (again) in the position of insisting Aspen is not nearly so cool as it thinks.
