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Half-Pipe Mega Air

Saturday, Dec 15th: It was hellishly cold. The wind howling up Peak 8, blowing snow off the high mountain ridges in giant plumes of white. And of course I had forgotten my gloves. Note to self: extreme cold, metallic camera gear, and human epidermis are a satanic mix. Fortunately, the rock ‘n roll pumping out of the speakers on the lip of the half-pipe at Breckenridge during the U.S. Snowboard Grand Prix kept me from degenerating into a quivering ball of jelly, that, and the buzz of trying to freeze frame the human pretzel contortions of the pro snowboarders as they caught huge air so close it felt like I could reach out and touch them. The Flying Tomato, aka Shaun White, won the men’s competition (he’s the flaming red, long haired guy with his own Amex commercial, in which he follows a series of snowstorms from Utah to Canada to Japan to Norway, until finally getting a text msg that the surf’s up in Maui) while Gretchen Bleiler, the silver medalist at the 2006 Turin Olympics, took first on the women’s side. Read on …

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JFK’s Daughter

Tuesday, Dec 4th: Caroline Kennedy, the only surviving child of JFK, was in Denver to talk about her book, A Family Christmas during the hectic run-up to the coming of Santa Claus. In 1999, her brother, JFK, Jr, died in a plane crash in the Atlantic Ocean off Martha’s Vineyard. A Family Christmas is a diverse, eclectic collection of Christmas themed poems, scriptural texts, lyrics, and prose from such literary heavy weights as e.e. cummings, Mark Twain, Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Dickens, and others. Oddball, quirky entries include Groucho Marx, Run DMC, and Claude Levi Strauss (RE: Strauss: What’s a French anthropologist doing in a Christmas book?). The book also includes Caroline’s “Letter to Santa”, written in 1962 at the White House when she was five years old in which she asks Santa for “…a pair of silver skates—and one of those horse wagons with lucky dips—and Susie Smart and Candy Fashion dolls and a real pet reindeer and a clock to tell time and a covered wagon & a farm and you decide anything else—And interesting planes or bumpy thing he can ride in or some noisy thing or something he can push or pull for John.” And then there was a PS: “I would like a basket for my bicycle.” Read on …

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First Twin

Thursday, Nov 29th: Security was tight. While the Secret Service and a Denver police officer stood and watched, a bomb sniffing German Shepherd salivated all over my cameras, while another shutterbug just before me complained of ’snot’ from the dog on his hardware. Unfortunately, the dog picked up a trace of ‘explosives’ on my camera backpack—I think he was going for the Cliff Bar I had in the pocket—and I had to leave and put the pack in the trunk of my car. Then I had to pass through the guy waving the metal detector wand around my private parts, and finally probed, questioned, and vetted by big men with large necks in dark suits who all reminded me of the agents in the Matrix. All this to see 26 year old First Daughter Jenna Bush speak about her book, Ana’s Story, about a young woman wrestling with AIDS. Read on …

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Norman Jewison

November 8th-18th: The 30th edition (yup, you guessed it, Virginia, it started way back in 1978) of the Starz Film Festival has rolled out its red carpet for Hollywood directors, actors, writers, producers, and your ordinary, everyday, run-of-the-mill film fanatic. Running from Nov 8th-18th, the Festival is a smörgåsbord of film playing all day every day at the Starz Film Center in Auraria. It has a little something for everyone: documentaries, world cinema, shorts, classic movies, and experimental, alternative films. Highlights of the festival include opening night with the darkly funny film “The Savages”, starring Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman, Norman Jewison, the Canadian director of the Academy Award winning In the Heat of the Night (5 Academy Awards), Moonstruck (4), and Fiddler on the Roof (3), being awarded the Mayor’s Career Achievement Award, the world premiere of Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, starring Dustin Hoffman and Natalie Portman, the screening of director Jason Reitman’s new film Juno which has Academy Award buzz, the Iraq War panel called “Bringing the War Home” in which three documentary directors discuss their work related to the Iraq war, and finally, closing night with Keri Russell and a screening of the film August Rush in which she plays a mother searching for her long-lost, musically gifted son. Read on …

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The Mick Jagger of Pundits

Monday, Nov 5th: Paul Krugman is a well known economist and pundit in the United States. A professor of economics at Princeton University, he is popular for his twice weekly op-ed columns in the New York Times, in which he opines on diverse topics, focusing largely on the American economy and polity. A liberal Democrat and neo-Keynesian economist, he is particularly storied for his unrelenting criticism of the Bush Administration. Having the ability to write in a clear and compelling fashion on complex topics, he has garnered great influence from his bully pulpit at the New York Times, and not only that—he has achieved a low level rock star status, Asia Times calling him (in 2005) “the Mick Jagger of political/economic punditry” and Rolling Stone featuring him in an interview for their current 40th anniversary edition. Hoping to become the ideological prophet of a new liberalism, like Barry Goldwater sparking the conservative movement to life with The Conscience of a Conservative, Paul Krugman was in Denver to talk about his new book The Conscience of a Liberal. Read on …