Brucer Berger photographed at home in Aspen in 2005. (Aspen Times file)
Bruce Berger, author of “The Complete Half-Aspenite”and acclaimed works about the Southwest, died Wednesday at aged 82. (Aspen Times file)
Bruce Berger, the beloved writer, poet and fixture at Aspen Music Festival & School concerts, died Wednesday morning.
The cause was complications from lung disease, according to his publisher and literary executor, James Anderson. Berger was 82 and died in Denver in hospice care.
“Bruce was the unofficial dean of Aspen arts and letters,” Anderson said in an announcement, “and his Aspen cabin was a legendary gathering place for writers, physicists and musicians for more than 50 years.”
Todd Robert Petersen on the Impossible Balancing of Preservation, Leisure, and Weirdness
January 29, 2021
From a helicopter flying over a remote canyon in southeast Utah, a group of wildlife biologists spotted a curious inorganic shape on the ground. They set down and discovered a polished metal monolith three meters tall. This discovery sparked an internet conflagration. Was it the work of aliens? Of artists? Maybe both. This discovery was cool and fun, a great diversion during those bleak days after the election and the late-fall Covid surge.
Talk of the monolith kindled the imagination, causing joy in the Bureau of Land Management, who issued the following statement in response to the discovery: “Although we can’t comment on active investigations, the Bureau of Land Management would like to remind public land visitors that using, occupying, or developing the public lands or their resources without… required authorization is illegal, no matter what planet you are from.�
Rhode Island
(William Morrow)
The week before Halloween seemed the ideal moment to pick up the 617-page epic horror novel “Plain Bad Heroines” by Emily M. Danforth. The tangled story toggles between a cursed Rhode Island boarding school for girls during the early 1900s and present day when a group of queer women return to film a movie about the school’s fabled history. Danforth writes with humor and is at her brilliant best with vivid female character portrayals, who are as wild and unpredictable as the untamed Rhode Island shoreline.
South Carolina
One of the most compelling books I read this year was “Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots.” Morgan Jerkins takes readers through South Carolina and the Low Country as she embarks on a reverse migration to trace 300 years of her family’s history, much of which has been obscured by cultural erasure and lack of documentation. Through research and conversations about land displacem
Artsline
Artsline - Local Music, Dance, and Story to Challenge and Inspire
Celebrate Tu B Shevat or Birthday of the Trees with the Weinstein JCC as a day of ecological awareness.
Artsline: Virtual Edition || January 25, 2021
“This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.” ~Terry Tempest Williams
As we as a nation heal from the events of the past month and the past year - from political division to racial division, from pandemic to ecological disaster - find the stories that heal. Your local arts and culture communities tell them every day, offering a source of conciliation, solace, and inspiration to rise to the challenges before us. Look throughout your community for opportunities to connect, engage, and heal through the power of music, art, and story.
January 14, 2021
In my first year of school, we grew trees. We were taken into the playground and taught how to press our seedlings into the soil, to pat the new plants in their plastic containers, very gently, against the ground. We watered them, stuck masking tape along the sides and scribbled our names in black marker. It was the first time I had ever nurtured something, and I wouldn’t do it again until adulthood.
This was 1995. There was a hole in the ozone layer, the waters were polluted, there was trash where there should not have been trash, and there were not enough trees. We were told that day, in the way one explains things to five- and six-year-olds, that there was too much carbon dioxide in the air, that trees could absorb the CO2 and replace it with the oxygen they expelled, and that was why we needed to plant more trees. It was a period of relative calm between geopolitical storms. The Cold War was over, Francis Fukuyama had declared History was at an End, and it wa