Although there is plenty of flexing and grunting, Bending Steel is a surprisingly soft and intimate story about a 43-year-old New York man who decides to become a sideshow strongman at Coney Island. Certainly there are scenes when the strongmen straighten out horseshoes and, veins bulging, smash nails into pieces of wood (without the use […]
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 inNews
The Race is On
Former city councilor will take on Patrick Flaherty in the 2014 district attorney election
John Hummel, 44, has just announced that he’ll run for Deschutes County district attorney against Patrick Flaherty in the May primaries. Hummel, a former Bend city councilor, has worked as an attorney, professor, and, from 2008 to 2010, he helped rebuild a justice system in war-torn Liberia. Today he’s the director of the Oregon Primary […]
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Now or Never
Is the city of Bend doing enough for sustainability?
For any heel-dragging doubters of global warming—a reality that will increasingly shape the livability of the planet—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a panel of several hundred Nobel Peace Prize winning scientists, recently released a draft report that said, yes, beyond doubt global warming is happening and, what’s more, it's happening at a rate faster […]
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Oh, Safeway!
I love your selection of yogurts (thank you, Safeway for carrying big tubs of the Tillamook vanilla bean) and, truly, you-all have a pretty decent florist, but . . . you’ve been polluting on us? Oh no. The EPA announced today what they called a settlement of “the largest number of facilities ever under the […]
Posted inCulture
Really? This Happened?
The Skies Belong to Us is, simply, well-told history
At a recent event in Portland (er, sponsored by my book club, the Beef & Book Club, the greatest book club in America), author Brendan Koerner flashed through slides of news articles from the late '60s about a spate of skyjackings. Like a professor unveiling an alternative and largely untold history to eager college students, […]
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I Have A Dream
“What will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation,” begins Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And, 50 years later, those words still hold true. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smEqnnklfYs On Saturday, a march commemorating that great march and “I Have a Dream” speech will begin in Drake Park and work […]
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Where Have All the Eco-Saboteurs Gone?
Conditions may be ripe for a radical activist revival
In the predawn hours of July 28, a cool night with a quarter moon shining, a small band of activists cut through a chicken wire fence. They were there to release thousands of minks from their cages at a mink farm in south-central Idaho. An anonymous communiqué published subsequently on the Earth First! Newswire blog […]
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Sam Adams is More Than a Long Cool Drink
Portland’s former mayor brings ideas for economic growth to Bend
Until a year ago, when he became executive director of Portland’s City Club, Sam Adams had spent 20 year with City Hall as his business mailing address—starting in 1992 as a 29-year-old chief of staff to Mayor Vera Katz, then as a one-term city councilmember and, finally, from 2009 through 2012, as a controversial yet […]
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Canary in a coal mine
Don’t say you haven’t been told so
“Please call me Bill,” the man testifying at city council last Wednesday requested, “No one calls me doctor.” He went on to apologize for talking fast because he had just downed a Coke before entering city council chambers, but the emergency room physician, Dr. Bill Reed, there to testify about the “Follow-up Report on Fire […]
Posted inCulture
The Dawn of Swayze’s Career
Red Dawn is a rambunctiously fun time capsule
It shouldn’t be a complete surprise that the director and screenwriter of 1985’s Red Dawn first climbed into fame for Dirty Harry, in which he put the words, “Go ahead, make my day” into Clint Eastwood’s mouth. John Milius is not a household name, but he has left his manly marks all over American pop […]
