Another Slice

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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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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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… about a new book of previously unpublished stories by Vonnegut.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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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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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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Held downtown on Friday night, 20-30 local restaurants (both hole-in-the-wall and top-flight), caterers, and clubs set up booths on Hunter Street and Cooper Avenue, and serve a free soup that’s their proudest offering.  In a small dixie cup.  And several hundred appreciative locals get to go from booth to booth and sample lots of great soup!

Each taster gets a ballot, and so you get to try as many soups as you want (which really hit the spot, on a cold January night, especially after standing in line for a couple of minutes for each booth).  And then you vote for the soup of your choice.

This year’s winner was the restaurant “Garnish,” which won for the 4th consecutive year, I think, with a new version of their classic lobster bisque.

(I voted for Johnny McGuire’s entry, a spicy corn chowder.  Maybe next year.)

And maybe next year, you should schedule a trip to Aspen…

… just for the soup!

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courtesy of Steve Morrison.

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Books You Might Enjoy

(besides mine)

My wife’s the one in the family who’s taking the lit class– once again– from Tom Buesch at CMC (Colorado Mountain College), so she’d have the goods on “serious reading.”  The ones below are just fun.

FICTION

• Gerald Durrell.  My Family and Other Animals.  (1956)  His first book.  Younger brother of Lawrence Durrell (The Alexandria Quartet, et. al.).  Gerald was the naturalist in the family.  Started the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust.  A pioneer in the field of breeding endangered species in captivity, and then re-introducing them back into their native habitat.  The man’s career was truly inspiring, and his many books are fun (and funny) cold-winter-night reading.
• Kurt Vonnegut.  The Sirens of Titan.  (1959)  I know, we’ve all read this, years ago.  But it (and a lot of his other stuff) bears re-reading.  And an UPDATE:  I just found a new book, Look at the Birdie, previously unpublished short fiction of Vonnegut’s from the 50′s & 60′s, at the library.  (Delacorte Press, 2009.)
• Flann O’Brien.  The Third Policeman.  (1967)  The Dalkey Archive.  (1964)  Irish writer virtually unknown in the U.S.  My own personal crusade.  His “misterpiece,” as James Joyce referred to it, was At-Swim-Two-Birds.  (1939)  One of my all-time favorites, but these other two are easier.  (Dalkey contains a great send-up of Joyce.)
• Daniel Dennett.  If you can find it at the library:  The lecture found at the tail-end of Brainstorms: “Where Am I” (pp.321-23).  (1981)  Dennett’s become a leading– strident– voice in the contemporary “atheist onslaught,” but this short piece (delivered to a convocation of “professional philosophers”) is both thought-provoking and amusing.  I even tried to turn it into a screenplay once, during my Hollywood days.
• Neal Stephenson.  The Baroque Cycle.  (trilogy: 2003-2004.  2600+ pages)  Great beach reading– if you’re going to be at the beach all summer.  Spans continents, and 250 years.  One of the main characters (I’m not making this up) is Isaac Newton.  His nemesis, Gottfried Leibniz, is in it, too.

NON-FICTION

• Emily Wilson.  The Death of Socrates.  (2007)  Writing about Socrates has lately become an industry in itself.  This book might be the best of them, for general readers.  It’s enough, at least, to make you wonder whether you would’ve voted against him, yourself.
• Damian Thompson.  Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science, and Fake History.  (2008)  The title pretty much covers it.
• Richard A. Muller.  Physics for Future Presidents.  (2008)  From a bona-fide expert: the background science you’d need to master for intelligent policy and resource-allocation decisions.  And how you’d explain those decisions to a science-challenged citizenry.
• John C. Bogle.  Enough.  (2009)  A short book from the founder of the Vanguard Mutual Fund Group (and you’d only have to read the first half, to get the point).  A reminder that needless complexity, when it comes to investing, isn’t meant to enrich you.  The ancient Stoics would’ve loved this guy.

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Number One (and only) Son won his group in this year’s first terrain-park competition, this past Saturday on Snowmass’s Coney Glade.

In case you’re not familar with slopestyle and half-pipe skiing, that’s where you do tricks: monster jumps (seriously huge), rails, boxes, wheels, etc.  And, of course, half-pipe, where you zoom up the walls of a big… half-pipe.. and execute various mid-air maneuvers.  Scary.  Like you see on the ESPN X-Games, which are coming up later this month from Buttermilk (here in Aspen).

Anyway, after walking away with the win, he explained to me that he only needs one more win– anytime this year– to qualify for Nationals.  Wherever they’re gonna be.  Hope they’re not up in Vermont, or Alaska.

One way or another, I’d better change the oil in the family vehicle.  And stock up on spring wax and road treats.

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