By Daniel Rigney
I'm on an anthropological field trip to Aspen, Colorado this week to study the lifeways of the American social elite, and to observe the customs and consumption rituals of this seemingly genteel tribe in its natural habitat. In truth, my wife and I are actually here to attend our younger son’s performance with his school’s percussion ensemble in the Aspen Music Festival. But why miss a chance to do a little whimsically impressionist cultural research on the side?
As I take field notes, I try to resist the temptation to confirm every populist stereotype anyone has ever had of the American financial aristocracy. But Aspen doesn’t make it easy to resist stereotyping. Arriving here, we’re clearly no longer among the common folk. We’re traveling in the higher circles now, and the social altitude is making it a little hard for these democratic lungs to breathe.
The Heart of Whiteness
Aspen makes no apologies for being an enclave of extreme wealth, though its status displays are tastefully understated in dress (designer casual) and manner, as befits an imagined aristocracy in a nominally democratic society.
The bus driver on our mountain tour of the magnificent Maroon Bells formation mentions that the average price of a home in Aspen is around $5 million. And that’s just Aspen’s millionaire ‘middle’ class. A billion dollars or more, give or take, and we’re talking real Aspen money.
At the very summit of Aspen society we find the one percent of the one percent, The Aspen 50, a financial honor roll consisting of some fifty billionaires who have places in town. At these higher social altitudes we find families that ‘summer’ or ‘winter’ in Aspen, turning seasons into verbs.
I regret that while we're here, we won’t have time to take in the “Aspen Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”
tour, which, according to its website, features an “exclusive look at
how the movers and the shakers of the world live and play in Aspen.”
I'm disappointed. We could have seen the second or third homes of “Movie Stars, Television Stars, Sports Stars, Music Stars, Super Models, Fortune 500 CEOs and Royalty!” For
just $89 apiece we could have caught a passing glimpse of “up to 75 of
the most beautiful and expensive homes in the world,” including
“amazing 50 Million Dollar Mansions!”
Aspen can be fairly described as a price-gated community, and it is surely one of the most exclusive and exclusionary class enclaves in the country.
[For
more information on whether Aspen might be right for your real estate
needs, consult with Sotheby’s International, the art auction folks. They
seem to be the first name in real estate properties here, some of which
may qualify as works of art.]
If
we’d taken the Rich and Famous tour, we might now be returning home
with a rekindled faith in the American Dream, which is within the reach
of anyone who works hard, thinks big, and (more often than not) is born
not too far from the top of the mountain.
Besides
missing out on the mansion tour, we’ll also miss opportunities to enjoy
high-altitude golf (the longest drives you’ll ever hit) and
heritage-insect flyfishing in nearby Fryingpan River, just a ways down
the road from a town paradoxically named No Name, Colorado. (And no, I’m
not making these names up.) A luxury lodge in the mountains is the
place to come if you’re looking to get closer to nature.
Back
in Aspen, we’re strolling past the Gucci shop and several high-end art
galleries as we walk toward the center of town. Dog walkers are
everywhere. You know the saying that people tend to resemble their dogs?
It rings true in Aspen. We see scores of well-groomed golden-haired and
pedigreed purebreds padding along the picturesque brick streets ...
walking their pets. But seriously.
It
seems a little odd that we see few if any mutts in the streets of
Aspen, a town that oversees a nation of mixed ethnic breeds, most of
whose citizens live down in the economic valleys. Aspen, by contrast, is
a more ethnically elevated community.
Here we have truly
arrived at the heart of cultural whiteness. I’m not saying Aspen is
waspy, but this may be the palest town this side of Branson. But Aspen isn’t entirely edelweiss.
There’s a visible and growing Hispanic presence in the region. Many of
Aspen’s service workers serve affluent residents and tourists by day,
and then, when the restaurants close and the lodge rooms are cleaned,
get onto free buses and ride to their night’s sleep in outlying towns in
what I’ll call 'Affordable Valley,' where we too are staying to avoid
financial altitude sickness. If you’re looking for signs of African-American culture here, you may have to drive several hours east to Denver to find them. (Less than one percent of Aspen's resident population is black.) Happily, the route to Denver will take you over the continental divide and through some of the most jaw-dropping scenery in the country. But don’t accidentally drive west from Aspen, or you’ll wind up in Salt Lake City, where the only Jazz you’re likely to encounter is the basketball team.
a slanted view of downtown Aspen
The Beauty of Wealth and the Wealth of Beauty
Say what you will about Aspen’s plutocratic culture, but there’s no denying the natural beauty of its landscape and the tasteful charm of its alpine village architecture and ambience. Little wonder that people come from as far away as the Upper East Side and Beverly Hills, Hong Kong and London, to find their well-earned or well-inherited respite in these pied à terres in the peaks.
By reputation, Aspen is one of those places where a globalizing elite comes to see and be seen, to form networks of shared advantage, and to introduce their children to each other so that good taste and philanthropic virtue might survive to reproduce itself through yet another generation.
Aspen is a dense nodal knot in the central nervous system of world power (known here as ‘leadership’). The traditional American social elite are the 'serious' and 'responsible' people -- the 'grownups in the room.' They come together in venues like Aspen (and Davos and Langley and the Yale Club and the Bohemian Grove) to sustain the illusion that they’re in the cockpit of spaceship earth, guiding its course as it hurtles through space and time.
Something of a traditional waspish elite -- it used to be called the American 'establishment' -- is preserved in Aspen like a fly in amber. As the nation and its leaders have grown increasingly diverse, contentious and polarized in recent decades, the traditional elite, reflected in the culture of Aspen, has lost some of its control of American life.
But while the waspish elite may be losing its grip on history’s joystick, it remains culturally artful nonetheless. Aspen is where wealth and beauty (eurocentrically understood) meet and have intimate congress with each other. It’s about fine food, understated fashion, classical and neo-classical music, well-regarded investment art, and refined, cautiously progressive ideas. It’s about the dialectical synthesis of wealth and beauty.
The food in Aspen is superb. Who knew that kale could be braised in so many inventive ways?
At one meal, I’m tempted by a wine that promises to fairly leap from the glass, playing kiwi notes against a roasted almond counterpoint, and building to a crescendo of flavor kept playfully in check by a vibrant acidity.
I’d better pass, though. Sounds tasty, but we’re trying to stay under $300 a bottle, and we swore off wine as soon as we saw the menu prices. We'll have the artesian tap water, please.
Aspen's art, like its cuisine, is fine but expensive. The walls of its art galleries are covered with intriguing paintings and photographs, and if I were a wealthy art collector I'd probably buy some of them and turn my house into a public art gallery. But the gallery art, like the wine, is too rich for my blood.
On this trip we'll have to find most of our beauty in the concert venues of the Aspen Music Festival, and in the mountain views, which are free of charge until someone figures out a way to monetize them.
Overheard As we stroll around Aspen, I keep my eyes and ears open for anthropological clues to its cultural life, and record these bits of ephemera in my notepad, ever at the ready.
Yogi Berra said (or is said to have said) that “you can observe a lot just by looking.” The same can be said of listening. As I move about the town, I gather small swatches of conversation overheard from residents and visiting time-sharers alike.
“What are your share dates?”
“I don’t trust Ken’s leadership.”
“Charge him $20,000. It’s family money. He needs to learn a lesson.”
“Funny story. I know a guy who bought a Jaguar and drove it all the way to Aspen just to show it to friends.”
“I couldn’t face moving all my stuff from London, so I ordered new things online and had them sent ahead to my new address in San Francisco.”
Then there’s this message from a display outside the ski lodge at Mt. Aspen:
“If global CO2 emissions continue to increase rapidly, Aspen is projected to warm by 14 degrees by 2100, giving it a climate more like Amarillo, Texas.”
Ski Amarillo? Anyone? Anyone?
nature's own mansion
A Town for All Seasons
As American towns go, Aspen is among the greenest and most environmentally conscious I’ve seen. The Rocky Mountains, its imposing vertical and diagonal environs, stand as constant reminders of the smallness and transience of the human species against the vast backdrop of a greater nature.
Signs of non-human (or inhuman) nature are all around us here. The opera house ticket lobby displays a life-sized cutout of a black bear, with the helpful suggestion that if we meet one on the trail, we should avoid eye contact and back away slowly. (The same advice may apply to hostile encounters with Elitus socialus, a resourceful and potentially dangerous variety of Homo sapiens.)
The town of Aspen shares its ecosystem with countless thousands of other species, including the elegant aspen tree (resembling the New England birch celebrated by Robert Frost and Ansel Adams), the marmot (which looks to me like a prairie dog), and an assortment of crows and magpies, also known locally as ‘Colorado pigeons’ or ‘Colorado flying rats.'
All of these life forms coexist with mountains that have been here long before our species existed and will be here long after we’ve done ourselves in.
The mountains are impassive. They endure in geological, not historical, time. My wife remembers seeing a sign earlier that read, “The mountains don’t care.” Neither, apparently, do extreme natural events, such as rockslides, avalanches, tornadoes, and with human abetment, climate change. Whether in winter or summer, these phenomena all seem utterly indifferent to our human survival.
Hidden deep in these mountain rocks are the precious metals to which Aspen owes its beginnings as a 19th-century silver mining town. Later, with the decline of the silver economy, Aspen very nearly became a ghost town. Still later it was reincarnated as a ski village.
Aspen is still a ski destination in winter, when the population swells from a resident base of 7,000 to about 30,000. Today, Aspen is near the epicenter of executive-class family skiing. A snow avalanche here could potentially wipe out entire management teams.
In the summer, Aspen swells again, though not so much as in winter, hosting festivals of art and ideas. But in every season, natural beauty surrounds and abounds.
Two programs dominate Aspen's cultural landscape in the summertime. The first is the Ideas Festival, a meeting of elite ‘thought leaders,’ as they’re called here. The second is the Aspen Music Festival. Both are productions of the illustrious Aspen Institute.
Founded in 1949 by an intellectually-inclined Chicago industrialist, the Aspen Institute aspires to “create an international community of artists and thinkers – to convene – to share work – to produce new works – to inspire new models” that link the arts to the public issues of the day. The institute’s projects have received generous corporate and private funding from the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie Foundations, and from (gulp) the far-right Koch family, whose name (David’s) is on one of its campus buildings.
The annual Ideas Festival has brought the likes of Bill Clinton and Bill Gates to town to ponder a future that participants themselves will have a hand in shaping.
The festival purports to be non-partisan, and its participants typically range from center-left to center-right on the ideological colorwheel. I think of it as an A-list event that promotes collaboration and cooperation within a national elite which, though it has become increasingly diverse and divided in recent decades, still bends toward the center lane of a winding political road.The Ideas Festival seems to represent an attempt, for better or worse, to work toward elite consensus and thus to build a center that can hold.
We arrived in Aspen on an evening when Arianna Huffington and David Brooks were holding forth on the future of communications media, both online and off. Their program was scheduled against Katie Couric and Nate Silver, discussing the art and science of political prognostication.
The Aspen Daily News (June 29) noted that while the Ideas Festival may be perceived as “a high-minded infotainment for jet-setters,” other Institute programs, such as the Action Forum, starting up this week, actively pursue creative “on-the-ground solutions” to pressing national and world problems.
The Aspen Institute seems to pride itself on its role in developing future leaders, attempting to help identify and cultivate talent and ideas that will inform the next generation’s American and global power elite (though it would be impolitic and unremunerative for AI to describe its efforts so candidly in public).
To spin it more positively, the Action Forum and programs like it are looking for creative ways to integrate corporate profitability with social and democratic values – to explore the practical possibility of capitalism with a human heart.
For the foreseeable future, Aspen will likely continue to serve as a meeting lodge and networking node for future generations of wealthy philanthropists and corporate progressives who’ve figured out that, as the sign in the local Upper Crust restaurant says, “The most important things in life are not things.”
Greed, it’s turning out, may not be a sustainable value in the long run.
We arrived in Aspen several days ago at the tail-end of this year’s Ideas Festival. We also narrowly dodged a national Republican governors’ conference that saw New Jersey governor Chris Christie commence a urinating contest with right-libertarian maverick Rand Paul over the future direction of the G.O.P.
We missed these excitements. But in any case, we didn’t come to Aspen for the Ideas Festival, or for the political waters. We came for the music.
Encore
From where we've sat and what we've heard, we have to give the 2013 Aspen Music Festival a standing ovation. We won’t soon forget the trombone quartet that played Gershwin from the 11,000+ ft. summit of Mt. Aspen, where I lay happily in the light rain under an evergreen with a rock for a pillow. Nor will we forget the Aspen Festival Orchestra’s darkly haunting performance of Benjamin Britten’s ominous opera, “Peter Grimes.”
The highlight of the Aspen Music Festival was, for us, our son Ben’s participation in Monday evening’s Percussion Ensemble concert. The ensemble’s performance reminded us once again that experiments in percussion are at the wildly inventive and growing edge of 21st century world music.
The Aspen Music Festival? We give it four thumbs up.
Aspen tree, Gucci boutique, Rocky Mountains
Danagram
:] hand-crafted memes since 2011
Photos by author.
Photo at top: Knots on aspen trees often uncannily resemble human eyes.
P.S.: Readers who liked the slanting slope of this article should also see "Palm Beach: New Hollywood of the Right?”
No comments:
Post a Comment