Culture Features

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.

After handing over $10 and collecting his free t-shirt at the sign-up for the BendFilm 72 Hour Shoot Out, my boyfriend Guy wanted to go swimming. At the panel discussion the week before, we'd been warned that making a short film over one intense weekend warranted a case of Red Bull and a gang of helpers. Other filmmakers hustled away like they hadn't a minute to spare. But Guy had made well over 200 short movies before, and even some feature-lengths, in well under 72 hours (see youtube.com/guyjjackson). That was his method; putting his energy into writing rather than elaborate production, rarely using more than one actor and never a crew, wielding the camera like that cartoon Tasmanian Devil, and being happily surprised when he created entirely different movies at the editing stage than were originally conceived.

I come from a long line of Irish-Catholic skeptics. When I told my
sister I was attending the recent psychic fair at Between the Covers
books she replied, "You mean the psycho fair?" When I regaled
my husband with tales of seeing a certified Reiki Master that afternoon
he quipped, "After this is she going to "reiki" the lawn?" So you can
imagine my hesitation towards the world of the "healing arts."

 I hoped a visit with Clairvoyant Astrologer Eileen Lock would change
things. I'm the kind of person who wears black most of the time and
views Kafka as light summer reading. Without knowing this (or did
she?), Eileen agreed to give me a complimentary reading a week before
the fair. Eileen was affable yet straight-shooting, with a
non-hippie-dippy delivery that enabled me to listen to her with open
ears. But it didn't stick. With 40 years of experience, Eileen comes
highly recommended. And I do believe many things she says have
validity, except when she told me to wear less black because black
means you are hiding something. I thought black was chic?