Culture Features

photographs from caldera’s hello neighbor project grace the source weekly headquarters.When was the last time you talked with your neighbors? Maybe they're your best friends, or perhaps more likely, you've never even really gotten to know them beyond a simple wave. Somehow, we seem more likely to seek out friends on MySpace than we are to take the time to understand the individuals who make up our community.
 
Caldera, a non-profit organization that mentors students in Central Oregon and Portland schools through artistic programs, has brought to town the Hello Neighbor program, a project meant to encourage kids to get out and meet the people in their neighborhoods.
The murals are hanging from the Boys and Girls Club on Wall Street, on the side of the Merenda restaurant, the Des Chutes Historical Museum, and of course, on the brick façade of the Source's Bond Street headquarters. The photos are hard to miss, given their seven feet by five feet size, and it's likely you've already seen a few at the aforementioned locations.

 Toward the end of Jhumpa Lahiri's mournful, deeply satisfying new collection of stories, two Bengali lovers visit a museum in an Italian town founded by Etruscans. There, amidst dusty sarcophagi, they discover shelves lined with terra-cotta urns depicting the journey the Etruscans made to this landscape - a landscape since claimed and reclaimed by several other populations. "The sides were covered with carvings showing so many migrations across land," observes Lahiri's narrator, "departures in covered wagons to the underworld." It is a beautiful, yet idealized, image of how people get from here to there. Nothing at all like the scattered, dislocating journey she or her family made to the U.S.
 
"Unaccustomed Earth" is a profound meditation on the emotional undertow
of these migrations. Ranging in setting from Seattle to suburban
Boston, Rome to the clattering streets of Calcutta, Lahiri's cast of
mostly Bengali characters struggles to grow accustomed to their new
homes, their new families created by loss sustained in faraway places.
In the title story, a recently widowed father flies out to Seattle to
visit his daughter, a new mother, ferrying a secret about a woman he
has begun to see. "Once in a Lifetime" chronicles a brief time when the
Chaudhuri family lived with friends outside Boston while searching for
a new home. It later emerges that their house hunting has a haunted
edge: Mrs. Chaudhuri has cancer. The home they buy will be the place
she dies. 

David Barsamian loves public radio, but he hates what it has become - a mouthpiece for mainstream politicians and a timid political presence, unwilling and unable to challenge conventional thinking. Barsamian, who produces a weekly radio program out of Boulder, Colo. featuring dissidents’ voices like his longtime collaborator, Noam Chomsky, will be in Bend to discuss his work and what it will take to reclaim the airwaves from corporate America. The presentation is sponsored by KPOV, as part of its ongoing look at alternative media.
 
the Source Weekly: Do I hear birds?
David Barsamian: Yeah, I'm in my garden. I've a lot of stupid dandelions. It just rained yesterday, which is good because it's pretty easy to get them out.
tSW: You've got a new book out called Targeting Iran.
DB: I've also got a new book with (Noam) Chomsky out, called What We Say Goes and there is information about that on my website.

feeling flush at CTC’s urinetown. Dystopia, the opposite of utopia, is not an uncommon a sight in American drama. Think of plays such as Waiting for Godot and films such as Bladerunner. Think of the spectacle of the current Bush administration. Briefly. My point is, Americans conscious of the forces that have spawned such work would hardly expect a drama titled Urinetown: The Musical (UTM) to paint a vision of paradise. So, the fairest question that can be put to The Cascades Theatrical Company's current production of UTM (playing at the Tower Theater) is: "How well does it paint its particular vision of dystopia – given the expressive possibilities of the stage, as opposed to the screen, and of musical comedy, as opposed to, say, 'straight' drama?"
 
Urinetown: The Musical is a Tony-winning work that, according to
Wikipedia, "rejects musical theatre convention, parodying . . . shows
such as Les Misérables . . . and West Side Story." Pu-leez. UTM's book,
like "Les Mis's," pits have-nots against haves, and, like West Side
Story's, heightens dramatic conflict to the plane of life and death.
But when leads Bobby Strong (Ricky Johnson) and Hope Cladwell (Briana
Jayne Hinchliffe) harmonize unreservedly about "love," "peace" and
"tomorrow," what's "shattered," if anything, is the pretense that even
such a hoary convention as poor-boy-and-rich-girl-meet-and-fall-in-love
are interrogated, much less demolished, by UTM.

Tyler West, brewer at Silver Moon, fills out a score sheet. Now that’s what we call homework. You probably have an opinion about homebrew. You've likely tasted some funky brown stuff your neighbor made that one time, or that your college boyfriend tried to woo you with once shortly before you split. Or maybe you're still one of those who think this sort of thing happens in bathtubs in rural Missouri, or some other far away back wood.
But I have tasted the fruits of some damn fine homebrewers and am prepared to say that, in Bend at least, it isn't just for bathtubs anymore. And if you haven't been exposed to this "little weekend hobby" - which is how my husband put it so many hundreds of dollars ago - you're not likely to stay uninitiated in this town.
That's because homebrewing has officially grown up around here. The throngs of Central Oregon hop heads proved that two weeks ago with the first APA/BJCP certified homebrew competition in the region. That little bit of alphabet soup just means national homebrew organizations sanctioned the event and nationally certified judges helped run the show.