Intern, Author at The Source - Bend, Oregon

Weird Name, Big Jams: Dangermuffin liked Bend so much, they're staying for a week

InternAugust 3, 2010May 23, 2024

Dangermuffin isn't a radioactive muffin. It also isn't a dangerous robotic muffin that will aid other rebellious pastries in taking over the world in 2012. Rather, Dangermuffin is a self-proclaimed “Jamericana” band from Folly Beach, South Carolina that is storming the nation for the first time this summer and stopping in for a string of shows in Bend, a town to which they've already taken a liking to.
“We were out in Oregon at the beginning of the summer and we did the McMenamins Great Northwest Tour. Bend was the best [stop] by far,” says Dangermuffin frontman Dan Lotti.

Culture

wRite: Capture This Moment

The color of it moved something in him long forgotten. Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember… – Cormac McCarthy, The Road

InternAugust 12, 2009April 12, 2025

The color of it moved something in him long forgotten. Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember…
…Where you've nothing else, construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.
– Cormac McCarthy, The Road

This whole rhapsody, better go capture this moment
And hope it don't collapse on him…
– Eminem, “Lose Yourself”

I'm walking away from my credit union toward Fred Meyer. I have just failed to be able to use one of my new credit cards to get a cash advance so I can deposit it in my son's California bank account so he can pay his rent. He can't pay his rent because he is a writer living in Los Angeles who works every day for chump change, and in America, 2009, “Writer who works every day for chump change” is a redundancy. My mind is nothing but run-on sentences, bad practice for a writer.

Culture

Treacherous Love

InternAugust 12, 2009April 12, 2025

Amelia Gray's AM/PM
Amelia Gray's AM/PM (Featherproof Books, $12.95) consists of 120 impeccably compact stories of love, discomfort and concert souvenirs. The single-page stories were written, one in the morning and one in the evening, over the course of two months. This timeline, and their brevity, may make it sound like this is a simple little book, but it's not; like the best tiny tales and single lines, Gray's snapshot stories are treacherous and sly, capable of changing the cadence of your thoughts and tinting the way you look at the ordinary things around you.

Culture

An Epic in Your Palm: Monster Hunger proves hard to put down

Monsters have overrun the Snowy Mountains. Herbivorous Popo lumber across windswept ridges, defended by dense coats and scimitars of antlers. Deep in icy caverns, Giaprey

InternAugust 12, 2009June 3, 2024

Monsters have overrun the Snowy Mountains. Herbivorous Popo lumber across windswept ridges, defended by dense coats and scimitars of antlers.

Culture

Toy Soldiers: Trying to see the good in the dismal G.I. Joe

A wise woman once told me that the older she got the more she tried to see the good in things rather than the easier

InternAugust 12, 2009June 13, 2024

A wise woman once told me that the older she got the more she tried to see the good in things rather than the easier route of criticizing everything. I have thought of that comment virtually every day since she said those words, but never more than while watching GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
The problem for me with this movie is not that it brings to life the Hasbro action figures first introduced in 1964 – that's kind of cool – but it does so with none of the freshness or originality of other similar efforts like Sin City or the humor and self-deprecation of the Superman franchise, or the passion of Iron Man. The creators bumbled a golden opportunity here to laugh at the effort itself, you know, the tongue-in-cheek stuff. There is nothing interesting about this effort and no humor to buoy the comic book dialogue. See the good.

Culture

Set To Blow: The Hurt Locker goes for intense psychological study

The frequently used term “nail-biting” has never been more appropriate than to describe The Hurt Locker. Focused on a bomb squad assigned to dismantle IEDs

InternAugust 12, 2009August 7, 2024

The frequently used term “nail-biting” has never been more appropriate than to describe The Hurt Locker. Focused on a bomb squad assigned to dismantle IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in Baghdad circa 2004, the gritty realism and sheer tension of this movie sucks you in, hooks you and keeps you dangling the entire time.
Based on the true experiences of journalist Mark Boal, who spent time embedded with such a unit (Explosive Ordinance Disposal or EOD), Hurt Locker is not an Iraq war statement but rather an in-depth character study of addiction to risk and danger. It's also a classic study of men in combat and under stress that could have taken place anywhere, detailing strong characters thrown together in the harshest of times, forced to deal with each other's psychotic idiosyncrasies and insecurities.

Food & Drink

Welcome to the Jungle

Most children by the age of ten can recite a chilling version of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” or another outlandish ghost tale. At summer

InternAugust 12, 2009February 8, 2023

Most children by the age of ten can recite a chilling version of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” or another outlandish ghost tale. At summer camp they sit around late at night terrifying one another by raising the ante with each story. But the child who terrorizes like no other is always the child of an Oregon bartender. No other child has experienced the true-life horrors of the creature many simply refer to as OLCC. Stories of their pappies disappearing in the middle of the night because daddy's server permit was at home instead of tattooed on his upper right shoulder and tales of mommy turning into an evil mummy because she told someone over the telephone that her place had happy hour on Fridays.

Music

CD Review – Black Ice Cream Anyone?

Helado Negro's debut album (or Roberto Carlos Lange latest project), Awe Owe, is a mix of traditionally structured songs sung and strummed by Lange,

InternAugust 12, 2009February 26, 2024

Helado Negro
Awe Owe
Asthmatic Kitty Records

Helado Negro's debut album (or Roberto Carlos Lange latest project), Awe Owe, is a mix of traditionally structured songs sung and strummed by Lange, with heavy looping, samples, handclaps, the dabbling of woodwinds and Latin percussion. The album can be patchy as if intended for a canvas or tapestry. It's oddly mysterious, too, with 11 relatively short compositions that meander from one to another without much interruption. The album has a densely ambient feel, yet the repetitious sounds never command a repetitive feel.

Opinion

The Great Destination Resort Land Rush

Deschutes County already has far more destination resorts than any other county in Oregon. And according to calculations by Paul Dewey of Central Oregon LandWatch,

InternAugust 12, 2009January 4, 2023

Deschutes County already has far more destination resorts than any other county in Oregon. And according to calculations by Paul Dewey of Central Oregon LandWatch, if all the destination resorts now on the drawing boards statewide were actually developed, the number of units at such resorts would triple.
Meanwhile the county is stuck in the deepest, darkest dungeon of the deepest, darkest economic depression to hit the US in 80 years. Resorts that by now were supposed to be covered with golf courses and multimillion-dollar custom homes remain covered with sagebrush.
So what, in light of this situation, does Deschutes County think we need? More destination resorts, of course.

Opinion

It Rhymes With Mace: Going for Broke, town horror meetings and more!

The author has been sent on the road to discover a lost country formerly known as America. He has most recently been seen in PDX,

InternAugust 12, 2009September 12, 2023

The author has been sent on the road to discover a lost country formerly known as America. He has most recently been seen in PDX, then fleeing to swim across the Columbia, on assignment for Or-Bust.com and The Source Weekly.
She Made It!
Sonia Sotomayor became the first Hispanic and third female to wear a long, black robe and decide on important issues like how to use archaic maritime laws to spare Exxon-Mobil a few billion for the Exxon-Valdez spill, and whether the parents of stoners have the right to sue public schools to recoup the cost of “special education.” Congrats, Sonia! Prediction: In the next Supreme Court session, Justice Sotomayor will be the swing vote on whether Gata Gonzales illegally withheld important information from a bunch of white guys before taking all of their money in Texas Hold'em… Must a wise Latino woman show her cards first? In a related note: The Senate's 68-31 vote to confirm Sotomayor proves that the GOP has officially accepted its minority party status for the next four decades, after foolishly stonewalling a nominee from the fastest growing group of Americans.

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