Culture Features

Artist and doll-maker Christine Alvarado lifts the lid of a sturdy box, then a layer of bubble wrap like she's gently peeling a blanket from a sleeping child. Staring up is a delicate creature – Brighid, Bride to the Wind – dressed in a white paper gown with a veil of paper dragonflies surrounding her face. Brighid was inspired by an assignment of sorts, an online community challenge to illustrate the Four Elements through the creation of a doll.
Doll making is a long-lived tradition, with endless cultural connotations. For many artists and collectors dolls are a sophisticated form, more sculpture than toy. Alvarado, who has been developing her art and selling her dolls for the last two years, has taken the tradition and infused it with her own unique perspective. She has chronicled the process on her art blog, Du Buh Du

Editor’s Note: For more Fall Style, check out this week’s special issue.
If you're like me, you don't enjoy changing your clothes more than once a day. You want to wake up, shower off if you find it necessary, dress in the outfit you've committed to for that particular day and then bike your way to work. And you don't want to change clothes, even if you want to, for example, hit up the rock climbing gym after work.
Bend's own Dirty Snowflake Apparel has focused on the idea of “crossover clothing” with its newly unveiled line of goods. Douglas Robertson, the former owner of Bluefish Bistro, and his business partner and fiancée, Dara Robson, founded the fledgling company in January of this year. Robertson says the mission of Dirty Snowflake was to combine style with casual clothing – something that's not always easy. For example, your boss probably isn't too thrilled with your Costco sweatpants by now.

After some 36 hours encamped on a stretch of dusty Central Washington farmland dotted by Honey Buckets, make-shift Bloody Mary bars, rented RVs and taking in about 40 songs from one of rock music's most storied live bands, here is how I'll remember the Phish shows at the Gorge Amphitheater last weekend…
Winding through the gleeful horde at the allegedly sold-out second show on Saturday night is a man seemingly in his 40s with an at-least-12-foot fishing pole protruding from a complex and clearly self-made, harness-like apparatus around his chest. Dangling from about six feet of fishing line at the end of the pole is a Homer Simpson doll adorned somehow with flashing lights and as he walks, fans both viciously and joyfully bat the doll around. Now, the doll itself isn't that strange. What's intriguing is the fact that someone would A) go through the effort of creating this thing B) somehow get it though the ostensibly rigid security at the gate and C) willfully wear this intentionally annoying and spatially impractical apparatus around for four hours.