Does Toyota Make Trains?
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Superpipe
Just in case you’ve never actually seen an X-Games monster halfpipe.
In this case, referred to as a “Superpipe,” here’s a photo taken from the bottom, looking up toward the start house. Those little ant-like creatures in the middle are a competitor and a hand-held cameraman following her. (The camerman is 22 feet below those folks you can see standing on the lip, to his left.)
And as with any snow event, it’s a heckuva lot scarier in real life, whether you’re at the top looking down, on even standing up on the lips at either side.
Though I’ve always found this strange: Ski slopes themselves always seem steeper and more difficult when you’re standing on them in the summer, when it’s just rocks and weeds, and looking down and imagining having to negotiate your way down. Once there’s a nice blanket of snow, however big the moguls are, it seems a lot easier. Strange.
The X-Games organizers put on a new competition this year, at the tail end of Sunday night: They selected 6 guys (skiers, not boarders) and had them just try to see who could get the highest (above the lip on either side). No tricks, no style points, just height. All they had to do was jump real high, then land clean– no hands, no butt slides.
The winner, Peter Olenick (from just down the road in Carbondale), posted a jump of 24 feet, 11 inches. (And that’s not from the bottom, inside the pipe. That’s from the lip, which is 22 feet above the bottom, inside. And remember: It’s built on a ski run, so the whole thing’s tilted… down… severely. Yikes.)
And did I mention that the surface is as hard as a skating rink? So you have to be able to ride a flat ski on your way up, then grab an edge real quick when you land. Obviously, you’re not going in there with standard recreational skis.
You’re not required to do this, when you come out to visit.
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I need a nap.
Now that the Winter X-Games are over, it’s time for a much-needed rest.
That last run in the SuperPipe was a killer. I don’t know how I let Peter Olenick beat me.
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The Wheeler Opera House
I just added this to the beginning of Chapter One of Risa and the Dog…, so I thought I’d add it to the blog site, as well. I use the picture, in the manuscript, as a way of visualizing the opening cartoon.
Anyway, this is the restored (c. 1984) interior of Aspen’s Wheeler Opera House. The vintage fire curtain is a painting of the then-recently-completed Brooklyn Bridge.
Before the renovation, the place was a fire trap. (Not that those of us who worked in it worried. The precursor to the Aspen Writers’ Foundation had its offices on the top floor, and we never gave the safety issue a thought. It was just a long trek up two floors’ worth of rather steep stairs) A friend of mine who owned an insurance agency couldn’t even figure out how the city could get the building insured, for a while. But now it’s revamped, and a fun place to go see a play, an opera, a movie, or whatever.
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Then who’s this?
If memory serves, I think it’s Malcolm McDowell.
When I was in school, an acquaintance of mine spent a weekend at Yale at some “cinema” workshop/festival/seminar thing. And he wound up sharing a room with none other than HUGE MOVIE STAR Malcolm McDowell. Who’d become world-famous in Lindsay Anderson’s If. Then Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.
My friend said McDowell was a totally British gentleman, charming, soft-spoken, thoughtful, considerate (which must have been a shock, given the roles he’d played), right down to the (unexpected) three-piece Bond Street suits and the Oxbridge accent.
True story.
Later on, I got a kick out of watching McDowell in Time After Time. Where he played H.G.Wells, and had to time-travel to 70’s San Francisco to chase Jack the Ripper (who’d stolen his other time machine and arrived there first), played by a nefarious David Warner. The “love interest” in the film was Mary Steenbergen, who went on to marry McDowell– in real life. (Though that didn’t last, and she later wound up with Ted Danson, if memory serves.)
Next question: Were Malcolm McDowell and Winona Ryder ever in a movie together?
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About that new Vonnegut book…
Being a big Kurt Vonnegut appreciator (as opposed to just “fan”), I added a note in my “Suggested Reading” category, “Xtra Credit: Books You Might Enjoy (besides mine)”…
… about a new book of previously unpublished stories by Vonnegut. (Presumably from the 1950’s and 60’s, though the artwork copyrights are all from the 1990’s and 2000’s.)
Now that I’ve read through them all, I have to admit that some of these stories (like much of Vonnegut’s later-years work) aren’t much fun. I go so far as to recommend not reading the final story, “The Good Explainer.”
It almost seems like the stories in this volume become increasingly dark and un-fun as you read along.
But the first few are GREAT. Vintage Vonnegut. Hard to imagine why he didn’t like them enough to publish, when they were written.
One personal note: When I was in college, I knew a girl who worked at the Sears store in Falmouth. On Cape Cod. And she explained to me once that Kurt Vonnegut used to buy all of his clothes there. (From her personally, I think she meant to imply.)
I soon moved out here to Aspen, and we didn’t have a Sears any closer than Grand Junction, but we did have a JC Penney in Glenwood (40 miles away), so I decided that if the clothes at Sears were good enough for Kurt, the clothes at JC Penney should be good enough for me.
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It’s always the way.
Did you ever notice how it always snows right before a ski event? Not two weeks ahead of time, when you’re doing course prep work, but right before it? When you specifically don’t want it to snow?
Well, we finally got some new snow over the weekend…
… and the X-Games start Thursday.
And it’s supposed to snow again Tuesday.
So now I’m getting calls to “volunteer” to help slip the courses, starting with practice on Tuesday. Through the weekend, I presume. (Though ESPN apparently pays you to help. Which in itself is a pretty foreign concept. Getting paid to help out at a ski event? How corporate can you get?)
On the bright side, one of my kid’s friends left her bike in the yard this fall, and despite of repeated pleas to take it home, it’s still out there. It made for the subject of my wife’s Christmas-card painting this year.
And now that we’re done with football– except for the Super Bowl, which I don’t count as real football– I’m starting to wonder when I’m gonna start clicking on the Golf Channel for brief, surreptitious fixes. And I’ll be wondering how soon my son’s going to mention the possibility of driving down to Battlement Mesa for a quick round. So far, we’re settled into a pretty good ski groove. But that’ll have to end, someday.
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Working your a** off.
I know it’s only the end of January, but hope, as they say, “springs” eternal. And “Spring” is just around the corner. Somewhere.
And so this year I’ve got yet another exercise-related plan for improving my golf game.
Last year, all I heard was “core training.” So I’ve set about doing more abdomen-related stuff, in hopes that all this “core values” talk really makes sense.
Intuitively, it seems reasonable. I’ve found that I strike the ball better– and more consistently– when I’m aware of the mid-body resistance in both directions of the swing. Like coiling and uncoiling a spring.
The hardest part, really, is keeping my balance in those 3-inch heels.
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