Aspen Films has Oscar-winning actress Marcia Gay Harden as the centerpiece of their Oscar-watching festivities Sunday night at the Hotel Viceroy.
Vail Resorts has decided the old "International" trail on Vail Mountain will be heretofore know as a trail named for Lindsey Vonn, the Olympic gold medalist.
The Warren Haynes jam band comes back for a sold-out show at Belly Up Aspen for those who love, like, jam bands.
Posts filed under 'Stars'
Why can’t we be more like Canada?
They host the Olympics like they mean it. They smile. They play hockey and penalty-kill. They honor the indigenous people in their midst without trying to wipe them out. And they have the Canadian Mounties.
But most of all what they have is a kick-ass national anthem, a tune that says everything about they are—and about what we, as Americans, are not.
The 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, British Columbia, was bristling with unexpected pleasures for the fan, but nothing compared to the way the Canadian people and their athletes sang “Oh Canada,” the national anthem, on the trips to the podium for the gold medal.
They sang it—they really sang it—the way we Americans almost never do with our “Star-Spangled Banner.” They sang it from the top of their lungs with no self-consciousness to speak of. They were joyful when they sang it.
Continue Reading March 1st, 2010
Yes, indeed, we have it on good authority -- an airport source -- that Tiger Woods deplaned from his private jet in Aspen Tuesday and decamped for parts unknow, most likely (we figure) to hole up in some gorgeous manse the hoi polloi (that would be us) are unable to penetrate.
What would you say to Tiger if you had the chance or had the notion?
January 5th, 2010
Well, fellow locals, we have not seen the last of Charlie Sheen, 44, last seen playing one of the full-blown men on my favorite CBS sitcom, "Two And A Half Men." Unfortunately for everybody, Sheen was last seen in Aspen in a Pitkin County Jail cell Christmas Day, after his arrest for menacing and variegated felony malfeasance, a state of wedded dis-bliss that followed a rocky Christmas morning in a house on East Hallam Avenue near the Aspen downtown core.
Continue Reading December 26th, 2009
Academy Award-winner George Clooney was seen Wednesday strolling around downtown stores in the midst of a tour of Colorado ski resorts.
If you see him, remember the unspoken rule about celebrities in Aspen: leave him alone.
There has also been a Brad Pitt sigthing as yet unconfirmed.
April 9th, 2009
History happened while your humble correspondent and a gazillion others were making ready to chow down just before halftime of the Super Bowl just past—history in the form of the greatest play ever in the history of pigskin’s game of games.
Lynn Swann me no Lynn Swann. Eli me no Tyree. On the final play of the first half, when James Harrison of the Pittsburgh Steelers—the NFL Defensive Player of the Year, no less—picked off a pass at the goal line from Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kurt Warner, the chase was on down the corridors of time.
Continue Reading February 2nd, 2009
Hmmm... let's see.... God-like cycling champeen and testicular cancer survivor Lance Armstrong announces his comeback, wins a bike race in Aspen--and puts in a bid for a house in the West End of Aspen.
Can it be true? Is it possible that our lonely outpost lost in a box canyon in the Rockies is about to get an injection of star power? Could this be the start of something big?
Continue Reading September 11th, 2008
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?
Click here for the complete "Con Games with Michael Conniff" for Friday July 18, 2008.
July 18th, 2008
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.
Continue Reading July 7th, 2008
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.
Continue Reading June 17th, 2008
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.
Continue Reading June 15th, 2008
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