Thomas Lauderdale is busy. He texts me from the road. Then he texts from Columbus, Ohio. “Just finishing a month-long tour,” he lets me know. I call him back, but his voicemail is full. I text and let him know that I’ll call him the next day, just after lunch so that we can talk […]
Phil Busse
Phil Busse has done his tour of duty with alt-weeklies, starting in 1992 right after graduation from Middlebury College as the first environmental beat reporter for San Francisco Weekly. After a brief detour through the University of Oregon School of Law, Phil returned to writing as the first Managing Editor for Portland Mercury. In 2006, he started the Media Institute for Social Change in Portland, through which he continues to host a summer program teaching college students to produce documentaries.
Until he was 25 or so, Phil thought that he would be a spy, and took scuba lessons to prepare, and learned to drive a motorcycle and an 18-wheeler. Perhaps, then, it is unsurprising that his favorite holiday is the Fourth of July (he loves blowing stuff up). He feels at home with Joseph Conrad's fictional characters.
Posted inFood & Drink
As In Vegan Heaven . . .
So at Earth Below’s plant-based food cart
Sierrah Umhauer is all smiles when she steps out of her food cart. Wood paneled and with a small stained glass window embedded in the door, the small cart looks like something from the Enchanted Forest. Youthful, Umhauer begins talking immediately, introducing her dog that stands a few feet away, out of the sun in […]
Posted inCulture
Art Watch 7/22-7/29
The oil painting “Rising Above the High Desert” is a grand testimony to the contrasts in the Central Oregon landscape; a wide painting that stretches a panoramic view, the horizon is a field toasted golden, yet spiked with green trees here and there. The heat almost glows from the painting. But then there is the […]
Posted inOutside
Water, Water, Everywhere!
For a desert, there sure are a lot of water sports around here!
Last Saturday, Reese Collins, a 19-year old student from COCC, reached the end of his first pass at the annual wakeboarding competition on Lake Billy Chinook. The conditions were ideal—barely any wind stirring up waves; “glass,” in waterskier and wakeboarder-speak. Collins had already landed a “tantrum”—essentially a back roll—and the boat swung back for his […]
Posted inNews
Are you our new editor?
When I graduated from college more than 20 years ago, I made a beeline from Vermont to San Francisco with a dream of becoming a writer. I was an English major, with a head full of Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare (chocolate milkshake, we called it), but very little sense about what working for a newspaper or […]
Posted inOutside
Tough and Beautiful
Cascade Cycling Classic is a summer tradition
Sponsorship is the backbone for professional cycling, and the annual Cascade Cycling Classic—the longest consecutively running stage race in the United States—is no exception. But it is a different type of sponsorship than, say, the U.S. Postal Service or Volkswagen ponying up cash; it is something much more grassroots. “The fact that we have local […]
Posted inCulture
Iran, and Then I Biked
Part travelogue, part diplomacy, biking documentary showcases mountain biking in Iran
Sports often are the best diplomacy, from ping pong in 1971 opening a long-closed door between the United States and China, to more recently, the invitation to North Korea to join the World Cup soccer games. Add to that list: mountain biking in Iran. Iran is one of the most isolated countries in the world. […]
Posted inCulture
Art Watch 7/15-7/22
Going By Bike
The bulk of the presentation for the jury-selected paintings in A6’s “Going By Bike” are three paintings hung in A6’s front corridor. The first is from Jane Quale; a calm and demurely beautiful painting, a tomato-red background with the black silhouette of the back half of a bike covering the painting’s lower quarter. Adjacent to […]
Posted inCulture
Art Watch 7/8-7/15
Summer Festival Fine Art Promenade
One of the best smorgasbords of art in Central Oregon is hosted this weekend at Bank of the Cascades’ Summer Festival, with 150 booths and artists. There are wood carvings, water colors, and fine outdoor wildlife photography, like Dan Ester’s collection of crisp photos of osprey with fish in their talons set against the blue […]
Posted inCulture
Feasting on Fiber
Sisters’ Outdoor Quilt Show celebrates 40 years
It started inconspicuously in 1975: Jean Wells Keenan simply hung a dozen quilts made by her students outside her shop on one Saturday in July. Over the years, though, a few more quilters showed up, and then a few more, and so on, until nearly every square inch of the small town of Sisters was […]
