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Author: Susan Viebrock

[click "Play" button to hear Susan's conversation with Kent Tompkins]

Tompkins uses words/images to go "Beyond Shamanic Visions" April 22  at Wilkinson Library in Telluride

4-22 Shamanic Telluriders may be exceptions to the rule. We tend to march to our own drum. However, in this Piscean Age, the rest of the world has made like sheep, relying on bellwethers for guidance to the Promised Land. According to healer/counseler/documentary photographer Kent Tompkins that mindset is about to become toast. Just as the flower children of "Hair" sang: "It is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius," when each individual becomes capable of spiritual awareness without the intercession of religious authority.

To date, the way of the seeker has been littered with metaphysical possibilities, rituals, prayers and lessons entirely from ancient cultures, largely from the East. Yoga, Sufis, I Ching, Kaballah are on a long list of examples.

20 April, 2009 /

BERKELEY, CA – Telluride Film Festival (September 4-7, 2009), presented by National Film Preserve, Ltd.  announces its call for entries.Student film submissions must be received no later than 5:00 pm, July 1, 2009. Short and Feature film submissions must be received no later than 5:00...

19 April, 2009 /

[click "Play" button to hear Susan's interview with Joanna Kanow]

4-20 Green Film On April 20, 6 p.m., Telluride's Wilkinson Public Library in collaboration with The New Community Coalition and Joanna and Daniel Kanow’s EcoSpaces continues its Green Film Series with "Addicted to Plastic: The Rise and Demise of a Modern Miracle." The program opens with a trailer of “Bag It,” another look at the shrink-wrapped world we live in, a work-in-progress by local Suzan Beraza.

Sign From styrofoam cups and boxes to tote take-out to artificial organs and the credit cards we use to buy them (often referred to simply as "plastic"), the demand for plastic in our culture is so great, my tortoise-framed sunglasses could become an endangered species. For better and for worse, no invention in the past century has had more influence than these synthetics, affecting nearly every ecosystem and invading nearly every nook and corner of human society, including our dinner table, where the toxic chemical compounds on land and in our oceans travel up the food chain and wind up in our food.

18 April, 2009 /

[click "Play" button to listen to Susan's conversation with film MC Seth Cagin]

Telluride Film Festival and Wilkinson Public Library: Chabrol's "Les Bonnes Femmes"

Les Bonnes Though less famous than sidekicks Godard and Truffaut, Claude Chabrol may be the most prolific of the French New Wave directors, having averaged almost one film a year since 1958.

"Les Bonnes Femmes" is early Chabrol. The film is a biting social drama with a Hitchcockian ending that presages the director's reputation as a master of mystery thrillers . (Chabrol co-authored with colleague Eric Rohmer a book on their film idol/mentor Alfred Hitchcock.)

"Femmes" covers three days in the lives of four Parisian shopgirls doing their best to escape their likely fate: marital ennui and tedious work lives. One is a party girl; another a mouse ready to sacrifice her hazy identity to secure a mate; an aspiring singer so insecure she hides her ambitions from her hanging buddies; and a day-dreamer yearning for a Prince Charming to rescue her from a vacant existence.

Bottom line: "Femmes" is a valentine to working class women  – written with a poison pen

11 April, 2009 /

[click "Play" button to hear Susan's interview with Ralph]  Sometimes life in Telluride is such a drag – especially when dragster extraordinaire Ralph Dinosaur takes to the stage. The cross-dressing Ralph and his band of renown headline KOTO's end-of-season...

02 April, 2009 /

[Click the "play" button and listen to Telluride Film Fest's education coordinator/local liaison Erika Gordon discussing the importance of "The Real Dirt"]

Farmer.john11x17 The image on the cover of his cookbook, "The Real Dirt on Vegetables," says it all: Farmer John Peterson is posed with a pitchfork like the man in Grant Wood's signature portrait "American Gothic" –  only Farmer John is also wearing a bright red boa.

Farmer John, who, by his own admission, is also Farmer " Elton" John, is a wise and wacky human being working to change the world one seed at a time with Angelic Organics, his Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm in rural Illinois.

Filmmaker Taggert Siegel's award-winning docudrama (over 30 festival honors), "The Real Dirt on Farmer John,"  spans 55 years, beginning with Farmer John's childhood, and then covering the failure of his conventional farming operation, the dark period that followed, and finally the farm's – and farmer's – rebirth.

27 March, 2009 /

37 Allergies? Dust? Something in the air at Telluride's  Palm Theatre was making me tear up while watching Tuesday's dress rehearsal of the Telluride Repertory Theatre/Telluride Choral Society's cosy and warm production of the terminal blockbuster, "The Sound of Music." Surrender. Cry uncle. Guaranteed you, like Clint and I, will succumb to the charm of this Rogers and Hammerstein classic.

True the book is sugar-coated, enough to cause a toothache, but nowadays the blowsy optimism seems to work to the play's advantage: how nice to be able to take a time out from the long shadows cast by today's headlines to bask in the musical's sunshine and light. True the music itself is unapologetically melodic, but that melody creates a structure as solid and reassuring as the convent walls that try – but fail – to contain the moonbeam known as Maria, the novitiate.

Directed by the feisty, focused, uber  talented L.A. import, Cate Caplin – a newbie to town  but with over 100 productions to her credit as director/choreographer and an international dance champion – The Rep's adaptation of the Broadway show is marvel of restraint. She and partner in crime Dr. David Lingle, the equally but quietly gifted artistic director of the Choral Society, clearly made a decision to focus on the business end of the musical: they tell their story of courage and the power of love  – and song – to triumph over evil with few frills. In lock step with the two directors, the producer, Lutz Florczak and crew of about 20 deliver the goods: the sets, costumes/make-up, lighting, sound, are wonderful, but never upstage the actors, the heart of the matter.

26 March, 2009 /

[click "Play" button to hear Amy's podcast]

S1132047190_8046  Intermediate School math teacher Amy Van der Bosch is poised to become Telluride's sweetheart. Listen to her describe her path to Telluride and Maria in "The Sound of Music," and talk about her fellow cast members and director, by clicking the "play" button and listening to her podcast.

Did she or didn't she? Historians claim Maria did not fall head over heels for Georg Ritter von Trapp – she loved the children, and later grew fond of the man – but America swallowed the conceit hook, line and sinker, falling head over heels for Maria in the bargain.

"Maria" is the star of Roger and Hammerstein's hit musical, "The Sound of Music," the postulant nun who leaves her abbey to try her hand at being governess to von Trapp's seven motherless children. She sticks around and after the standard digressions becomes their stepmother.

26 March, 2009 /