My Page: Michael Conniff

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Winter Olympic Games

Snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler is Aspen’s sweetheart, with endorsements galore and X Games baubles already well in hand. But now there’s the 2006 Turino Olympics to consider.

With one qualifying event to go—at the Chevrolet U.S. Snowboard Grand Prix in Mountain Creek, New Jersey—Bleiler is flying high in the halfpipe. Bleiler, slowed by the stomach flu, cleaned up Sunday to win her second Chevrolet U.S. Snowboard Grand Prix halfpipe at Mount Bachelor, Oregon.

After the Jersey slide show, Bleiler and the other Olympic wannabes can expect a formal announcement about the United States snowboarding team January 21.
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Independent Bookstores

Aspen will give up threads like this one: a former mayor, a fight against fur, an independent bookseller, a vegan restaurant, a Hollywood mogul, and a computer genius.

Bill Joy is the genius, the resident technical guru at Sun Microsytems and now an Aspen homeowner. When asked a couple years back why he moved to Aspen, Joy said he wanted to move to a place with a great independent bookstore—a store like Explore Booksellers on Main Street. Katherine Thalberg owned and ran the book store and the vegan Explore Bistro on the top floor of the building. The wife of former Aspen Mayor Bill Stirling and the daughter of the Hollywood actress Irving Thalberg and actress Norma Shearer, she succumbed to cancer Friday at Aspen Valley Hospital.
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The Human Conditions

Once upon a time in the East, my fantasy was to ski black diamonds in Colorado. That was my impossible dream, and I used to think about it as my fellow ski instructors at Smuggler's Notch Resort in Vermont would go whizzing by me like I was an ice statue. In my second winter Smuggs, on the backside of snow, I even had a friend give me lessons so we could ski bumps at Copper Mountain later in the season. Reality intruded and it never happened.

Unlike my peers in Vermont who knew what they were doing on the mountain, I was a complete novice and a damn fool who figured the only way to learn how to ski as I was approaching 50 was to actually teach it. Damn if it didn't work, and sure enough yours truly is now skiing black diamonds singleblack diamonds -- in Colorado. [more]

Ski Resorts

In the Roaring Fork Valley, Aspen Skiing Co. is the company store. With four mountains to keep going, retail stores, a deluxe 5-star hotel -- the only one in Aspen -- and sundry other investments, the mini-empire controlled by the Crown family is by far the largest employer in the valley.

There’s the usual grumbling from seasonals and part-timers, but that comes with the trails at Ajax, Highlands, Buttermilk, and Snowmass. The fact is that Skico is a pretty decent corporate citizen, especially when it comes to the small matter of the environment. And that’s because Skico CEO Pat O’Donnell comes out of the Patagonia world, where corporate responsibility -- and climbing -- is right up there next to godliness.

Even so, no amount of do-gooding will ever replace the necessity of the almighty dollar, and Skico is no different. If voters had turned thumbs-down on the Intrawest-Skico development at Snowmass Base Village, that might well have been all she wrote for the Crown family. In an interview with Aspen Times community editor Catherine Lutz, O’Donnell waxed on about what’s in store for what he now describes as a “boutique� operation. Some excerpts: [more]

Fear And Loathing In Aspen

Disclaimer: I love the actor John Cusack. I’ve seen just about everything he’s ever done. My favorite movie of all time is “Grosse Pointe Blank" for his gonzo portrayal of a hit man who returns to his tenth reunion with a contract out on his old girlfriend’s father. With Jeremy Piven installed as the high school sidekick, it just doesn’t get any better, or darker, than that.

It will thus come as no surprise to noirish John Cusack nabobs that he was present and accounted for at the memorial service in downtown Aspen for the going-going-gonzo word-whacker Dr. Hunter S. Thompson Jr. The Doctor, a fear-and-loathing fixture in Aspen since the 1960s, had committed suicide some days before with his wife on the phone and his grandchild in his house at Owl Farm in Woody Creek, Colorado. Months after his passing, in the summer of 2006, Thompson’s ashes would be scattered across the face of Woody Creek in a $2.5 million drug-induced ceremony paid for by another actor, Johnny Depp.

But what might come as something of an eye-opener is Cusack’s account of the day at Owl Farm after the memorial service. Cusack, at least for that brief wink of time, took it upon himself to become the late Dr. Thompson’s Boswell, the unassuming acolyte with a notebook and pencil in hand, eager to jot down every jot of genius. The day after the memorial services, months before the author’s ashes would fly, Cusack took inventory of Hunter Thompson’s life at Owl Farm, beginning with the cocktails that greeted well-wishers.

“Outside," Cusack writes, “his wife offered liquid acid to people in the driveway."
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Living Larger

Ever wonder how the West was done? Dust off your cowboy hat and dig out your fur lemur. Time to pull your britches up by the campy fires of Aspen, where the West gets done up every year along about this time.

Here’s the way it works hereabouts. For the week from Christmas to New Year’s, the town gets tanked up and taken over by the invasion of the rich people, the wealthier-than-thou who toss a drop into local buckets with enough brio to ensure that the shops and stores and restaurants might prevail for yet another season. It’s not that we don’t love them. It’s not that we don’t know they make everything possible—from the new gondola forthcoming on Aspen Mountain to the latest version of “The Nutcracker� performed by the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet. We get all that and we thank them for it. But that doesn’t mean we can’t hate them while we’re at it, at least for this week.

There are many people here in the Roaring Fork Valley who won’t get within five miles of the roundabout during the week between Christmas and when the ball drops. Traffic would slow to a crawl were it not already scuttling like four-wheel-drive claws along the ocean floor. The best among us, overworked and overpaid at least for this week, get cranky and unapproachable. But when the gravy train flows through town you’ve got to have your ladle in hand. It’s the American way, baby. [more]

Aspen Music Festival And School

No nonprofit in Aspen exceeds the importance of the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS)—and not just because it was one of the first two cultural powerhouses founded by Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke fifty years ago, right alongside the political Aspen Institute. The Music Fest is the most important driver of summer tourism in the Roaring Fork Valley, and every summer the organization takes over the Wheeler Opera House, the incomparable Benedict Music Tent, Harris Concert Hall, and other sundry venues, indoor and out, with more than 350 events.

Such a cultural institution requires a charismatic leader as president and chief executive officer, someone with the personal and professional wherewithal to tame a beast that includes a powerful faculty, a bumptious board of directors, a ravenous public, and a working relationship with the city that is never a sure thing. Such a man was the late Robert Harth, who went from Aspen all the way to the top at Carnegie Hall before an early and unexpected death.

The powers that be at the AMFS are hoping that Alan Fletcher will be just such a man. He was introduced on the stage of Harris Hall Thursday with appropriate pomp and circumstance as a man of “unassuming brilliance�—not bad for starters. [more]

Aspen Filmfest Academy Screenings

One of my favorite excuses for being in Aspen is the Academy Screenings conjured by Aspen Filmfest. Every December for fifteen years, in the week before and the week after Christmas, Filmfest executive director Laura Thielen puts together buzzworthy cinema that features a raft of potential nominees for best movie, director, actor, actress, cinematographer, and so on. The Screenings provide a real service to the scores of members of the Academy in Aspen who need to see these films before they vote for Oscar. In effect, Thielen’s selections are a way for the Academy to know this crop is worth seeing.

But alas, as they say in the motion picture business, not all movies live up to their reputation, and in many cases not even Laura Thielen has seen them before they appear on the big screen at Harris Concert Hall. “Memoirs of a Geisha� opened Monday night and at one point I said out loud: “It finally stopped raining.� We were told the geisha, the memoirist narrating the film based on the bestseller, had water in “her eyes,� and for the first twenty minutes or so there was water, water everywhere—in the ocean, in her father’s eyes, in her eyes, and falling off canopies, umbrella, and every surface in the frame.
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Wedding Albummer

Who would pass up a look-see inside the myriad byways of a movie star’s laptop computer? And who would pass up the chance to grab the portable box if he knew wedding pictures were everywhere to be found on the hard drive?

That kind of kleptomania might appeal to some of us—can you imagine Tom Cruise’s Scientological musings on Katie Holmes?—but the laptop in question, owned by actor-director Kevin Costner, was of particular interest to Pascal Bensimon, 44, the high-priced local hairdresser engaged to make sure every hair was in place at the Academy Award winner’s nuptials at his Aspen home.

After Pascal, as he is known in town, was charged with felony theft of the laptop, the ensuing contretemps rose to the level of television’s “Inside Edition,� which asked Judge James Boyd to allow their cameras in the courtroom—but the judge said no way. The hairdresser, meanwhile, is scheduled to make his own appearance in court Monday. [more]

The High Life

The gala, gaga opening of the Hyatt Grand Aspen was one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in a party town. Great band, great food, free cappuccino, beautiful people, and women in summer tops under a tent over the skating rink where festivities were consummated.

We took a tour inside the fractionalized big house and the rooms had more plasma than a good-sized triage unit. Pepperidge Farm cookies and fancy Grey Goose vodka were there for the taking, and Aspen Mountain cooperated by merely being present and beautiful, like a dowager far above the fray.

But there’s another story to be told here, a tale about what it takes to make memories. At the Grand Hyatt Aspen, they whacked chains against expensive wood floors to make them even more expensive—$20 a square foot more after the whacking, according to the inside poop. They cut windows out of brick walls and bricked them over. They took plaster and other drygoods and made them faux, don’t you know, because the last thing you want a brand-new high-priced spread to look like is brand-new. You want it to look old in that beamish way you find in the typical Colorado ski lodge. [more]

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