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August 2010

[click "Play" for an interview with several Mudd Butts principals]

Mudd Butt Poster 2010 The Telluride Academy's Mudd Butts is a four-week theater intensive covering all aspects of what it takes to make a play happen. Through the Mudd Butts, kids aged 10 – 14 get to explore theater games, script and songwriting, improvisation, dance, voice, even marketing. But that's only what's described in the Academy's brochure.

Read between the lines and it becomes clear the young people fortunate enough to participate in the Mudd Butts wind up acquiring invaluable and indelible life tools. Kids meet their inner artist while developing confidence and discovering ways to laugh at themselves and navigate the mine field of group dynamics. What the directors are after is broadening kids' horizons about social, political and environmental issues. Through the Mudd Butts experience, kids travel from a local address on to the world stage. (Literally at times. There is a Mudd Butts International program.)
07 August, 2010 /
August 5 to 12, 2010

Visible Planets: Morning: Jupiter  Evening: Mercury, Venus, Mars and Saturn

Astronomy & Astrology - the Visible & Invisible

Webvic10_Aug08ev_450px The other day I had a friend come up to me and ask, “Is that Mars and Saturn conjunct in the evening sky at dusk?” When I responded in the affirmative, he said, “Well, that explains it!” and gave me a piercing, knowing look.

I always love it when people comment on the visible – and invisible – planets. A few years back, a woman who has risen well before dawn for years asked me about a brilliant point of light she had been watching each morning above the eastern horizon. Could it be a UFO or space station? No, it was only Venus at perihelion, awesome and dazzling in the predawn blue-black darkness.
07 August, 2010 /
[click "Play" to hear Kate Jones on Kate Jones]

Kate at Arts Fest The history of The Telluride Council for the Arts & Humanities is the modern history of our town, from the tie-dyed days of hippies and falling down shacks to robust resort packed with ski bums, entrepreneurs, and ex-CEOs, living in hot-and-cold running condos and restored Victorians.


In 1971, Telluride was emerging as a ski resort and the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, the Telluride Chamber Music Festival and the Telluride Film Festival were small events about to happen in a small rinky dink town filled with Fibroids. These people who loved to make quilts and knit pretty things had plenty of time on their hands, but not much money in their patched pockets.
05 August, 2010 /
[click "Play", Brooke Ahana for Two Skirts]

DSC00145 Brooke Ahana is a big-city gal, but for the past seven years, the artist has spent summers in Telluride teaching kids and adult classes at Telluride's Ah Haa School for the Arts, where a show of her abstractions, birds, and portraits of women was on display in July. One of Ahana's Ah Haa classes was "Medal of Honor," in which she taught students how to transform found objects into wearable art in the form of pins.

Kristin Holbrook of Two Skirts, Telluride Inside... and Out's fashion expert, thinks Ahana's mixed media pins made from old keys, pocket watches, chains and more are so cool, they are hot. They fall right in line with the military trend that emerged this Spring and continues into the Fall.

05 August, 2010 /
[click "Play", Susan talks with Paul Machado and Terry Tice]

The history of the Telluride Jazz Celebration in digestible sound bytes.

Jazz 2010 Postcard Final The story begins in another tranquil mountain village in Yugoslavia. A young man named Nick Terstenjak, who was passionate about jazz, migrated to America, settled in New York for a spell, then moved on to Telluride in 1975. The Telluride Jazz Celebration was born out of Nick's KOTO radio show in 1976.

Over the year, the Telluride Jazz Celebration changed hands time and again, but the line-up remained star studded. In 1983, the Town of Telluride took over. By 1984, downtown clubs and bars as well as Town Park became event venues. When Lynn Rae and Buck Lowe took over the event, Paul Machado became their stage manager. He also worked for the Lowes' successor before accepting the baton in 1991.
04 August, 2010 /


A show of new work, her fifth at the Telluride Council for the Arts & Humanities' Stronghouse Studios, by local artist and county commissioner Elaine Fischer opens Thursday, part of the all-day showcase of Telluride's fine art and retail scene, with venues open late until eight. (For further information about what's happening at other locations, go to the TCAH website or call 728-8959 or 728-3930.)

"Mixed Messages" makes it abundantly clear Fischer has come into her own as an artist. A survey of the work, which runs the gamut from abstraction to portraiture to still-lifes, even a landscape and several bowl-like shapes, points to a virtuoso whose through-line is authenticity. Naturalism be damned. Fischer uses shape and color to express her true emotions with a detachment from any conventional notions of beauty: What she feels is what you get. And that is true even for the self portraits. Here is someone who can look in a mirror without squinting. The one in her studio. And the mirror of life.
04 August, 2010 /
[click "Play", Susan speaks with Jim Bedford]

2005-01-178a Thursday, August 5, the Telluride Historical Museum's next Fireside Chat asks the question: "What Came First the KOTO or the Community Radio?" The talk features the two guys with the answer: Jim Bedford and Jerry Greene. Ben Kerr is moderator. The event takes place at the firepit in the Mountain Village and is FREE to the general public.


FM and AM radio dials are crowded with commercial stations, offering not very much worthwhile around the clock, an incessant roar of rock, C & W, lots of “oldies,” inane talk and harsh rap. There are a couple of thousand public radio stations, but only a few like KOTO with no commercials or commercial underwriting whatsoever. KOTO’s history is the history of Telluride, from love child to respectable citizen. It all began with Bedford, at the time, a long-haired visionary. (jThe haircut is different today, a whole lot shorter. The visionary bit still holds true.)
04 August, 2010 /

Thesorcerersapprentice_smallteaser Despicable-Me-Poster Telluride's Nugget Theatre will be busy with music during the Telluride Jazz Celebration this weekend, Friday through Sunday.

On Monday, it's back to movies. "Despicable Me" (rated PG) returns for two showings a day through Thursday. See last week's "Nuggets" for a description.

The late movie, Monday-Thursday, is "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (PG), a Disney movie that gives a nod to the old Disney masterpiece, "Fantasia". Only the older audience members will remember Mickey Mouse doing battle with enchanted brooms and buckets. I personally remember nightmares about that sequence. In this case, we are talking about Nicholas Cage as a good magician with a young apprentice who has the "Gift". Together they must prevent bad magicians from the time of King Arthur gaining power in today's world. Got it?

See below for showtimes and the Nugget website for trailers and reviews.

04 August, 2010 /