Culture Features

Big Names at BendFilm
There are several facets of a film festival,
but in one respect, the festival can be split into two areas: there's
the excitement of film buffs taking in day after day of independent
cinema and then there's the filmmakers who show up in town to well,
watch other people watch their films. Oh, and those filmmakers are
hoping that the big names also in attendance take notice of their work.
This
year's BendFilm features the most significant gathering of industry
powerhouses in the festival’s existence. The most notable name
appearing is Tony Safford, head of Acquisitions Worldwide for Twentieth
Century Fox, which means he's been behind films like Little Miss
Sunshine and Thank You For Smoking. Before getting into the world of
acquisitions, Safford was the program director at the Sundance Film
Festival. So yeah, this guy knows how the festival world works - and
filmmakers are certainly hoping Safford takes a look at their flicks.

“A woman needs a man,” by Kristin ProvostLenora James was in a pickle. This last May, the Bend woman forgot to
send a birthday gift to a friend celebrating her "Happy Boobday."
James, inspired by the breast theme, applied paint to her breasts and
imprinted them on a blank canvas

She soon realized this was a
perfect fund-raising project to fight breast cancer. Members of James'
family had struggled with the disease, and she had just helped a close
friend cope with the Easter Sunday death of her mother. James soon
contacted the Sara Fisher Project (the breast cancer education and
assistance powerhouse based in Bend) and the Joyful Bosom Affair was
born.
The original goal of the Affair was simple: get women to
paint their breasts, press them onto a canvas and incorporate the
imprints into a painting. The paintings would then be displayed and
sold at the First Friday Art Walk on October 3 as well as the Bend Fall
Festival with the proceeds going to the Sara Fisher project.

It's only the second performance by the cast of Driving Miss Daisy, but
it seems like the 100th. Cast members Michael Learned, Willis Burks II
and Dirk Blocker are seasoned acting veterans and it shows. As the show
ends and the lights on the stage go out, the nearly full theater for
Sunday's matinee performance is immediately on its feet and the
applause echoes off the walls of the Tower Theatre. The three actors
take their bows and exit stage left. With several local theater
companies in Bend putting out quality productions on a regular basis,
the cast of Driving Miss Daisy had some high standards to live up to.
After all, this wasn't a community theater performance where you expect
a few mistakes here and there. These were professional actors and the
audience wanted a production akin to those in New York, Los Angeles or,
at the very least, Portland and Seattle. Thankfully, this play lived up
to all the expectations.

Last Sunday afternoon, a group of 27 artists, art aficionados and
curious bystanders crowded into the parking lot of Atelier 6000 - a
small art studio/workshop in the Old Mill District whose name was
derived from the French word for "workshop"-to watch an enormous
steamroller run over wooden plates that the artists spent as many as
four weeks working on. With the very real chance that the steamroller
would crush the plates and leave nothing but a mess of paint, wood
splinters and carpet padding, the crowd anxiously waited for the
steamroller to back away from the printing surface. Owner Pat Clark
along with Bruce Emerson and artist Dawn Emerson approached the area,
pulled back the padding and lifted the large white sheets of paper from
the plate. Emerson's design, a horse, survived the steamroller's
crushing weight and the resulting print drew applause and "oohs" and
"aahs" from the crowd.

Clark, an emeritus professor from the
California State system on a "failed retirement" says she wanted to do
an event like this because it gave artists an opportunity to create
prints on a larger scale and showed the community another side of print
making.

Super FloatyThe growing cold, the occasional frost, the ski shop sales: Winter is
just around the corner. With last year's epic snow season still in the
back of our minds and the last patches of the deep snow pack still
holding in the mountains, dreams of bottomless powder and of floating
smoothly into the pillowy abyss below creep back into our subconscious.
While we mere mortals may only realize our winter desires on the
weekends, saving our on-hill heroics for deep REM sleep, elite skiers
from around the world further the limits of possibility to feed our
fantasies in the form of the ski film. And the debut of these mountain
flicks has become as synonymous with winter's return as the first
snowfall.
For years, Bend's Rage Films has charged ahead into
exotic locales and enough shots of our own backyard to hype up the
eager crowd. This year's release, Such is Life, is no exception,
delivering an ample dose of kickers, bottomless Japanese powder, one of
the most brutally awesome haircuts ever, and the creativity and quality
we’ve come to expect from this crew.

The back to the future at the pine. Last December, Christmas came early in Prineville. A handful of days before St. Nick was scheduled to shimmy down chimneys and/or bathroom vents of good little boys and girls, Prineville received the best gift a town could ask for: a movie theater.

Scratch that, an open movie theater.

You see, Prineville always had a movie house; there was just this small matter of it not showing any films for the last 20-odd years. Word on the street is that the Pine Theater-first opened in 1938-went dark on account of rowdy teenagers. Damn those youths (insert fist waving in air)! Oh, and something about lack of appropriate fire exits.

Yet one chilly night, nine months ago, the neon sign flickered on and the marquee lit up. After a twenty year hiatus, date night in Prineville was back; and not a moment too soon.

Over the last decade, Prineville swelled from a big town to a small city of over 10,000 people. While new shops opened catering to locals, entertainment options were in short supply. There were no venues for live music, no brew pubs for smoke-free socializing, and the only bowling alley sits miles from downtown.

I've been pacing back and forth in the reference section of the Bend Public Library for a good twenty minutes now, every once in a while stopping to pounce on the unsuspecting atlas or dictionary and rifle through the pages before sighing and shoving the book back into its spot on the shelf. Local artist Mark Bernahl told me that one of his random acts of art had been spotted amongst the stacks a mere two weeks ago and I was determined to find it. Possibly find it, take a picture of it in a cooler and proceed to call a national press conference. Maybe it was because I'd gotten way too into the whole Sasquatch-gate scandal or maybe it was just because I simply wanted to see one of Bernahl's creations for myself, but I wasn't ready to give up after twenty minutes, that's for sure.

Bernahl is every librarian and book purist's worst nightmare. His offenses are much worse than bent corners, creased spines and the occasional pencil scribbling or highlighted sentence. He cuts out entire sections of books and carves designs in the pages. The thing is, librarians don't know he exists. In fact, they don't even know the "damaged" book exists. Bernahl is an artistic phantom, leaving only hidden traces of his work for the random passerby to stumble upon. He uses books that libraries have gotten rid of, alters them, and stashes them back in the stacks where they sit, gathering dust, until the day someone finds them. Finding them, as it turns out, is another story altogether.

Bernahl says he has placed a total of 21 of his creations in libraries and bookstores throughout the Northwest. His work has infiltrated the stacks in libraries in Bend, Corvallis, Eugene, Portland, Boise, Vancouver and Baker City, to name a few. Bernahl does not keep a list of which book he's placed in which library, he only archives what he's created.