Due to restrictions in the recent Top Ten edition of The Source, we had to hold a two lists from the print edition. Here is the first of those, two which was penned by Hayley Wright of Between the Covers Books.
Top 10 Books it Seemed Everyone in Bend Was Reading in 2009
Posted inNews
Au Revoir 2009: a look back at this past year
As 2009 comes to a close it’s time for a few personal observations about the year. First and foremost it was a remarkable year in that Bend seemed a much more livable place.
Posted inNews
Have Yourself a Merry Angry Christmas
It's an ancient tradition among columnists (and their Internet Age descendants, the bloggers) to present joke “gifts” to public figures at Christmas. For instance, a heart for Dick Cheney, a brain for Sarah Palin and a pair of cojones for Barack Obama.
Posted inCulture
Sing it Yourself: With a recent comeback, Karaoke is thriving like it's 1995
Four women huddle around a small flat-screen monitor, sharing two microphones as they gleefully fumble their way through a Britney Spears song. One of these women has just been crowned Miss Oregon USA a few weeks earlier but that doesn't stop her from smilingly belting out the pop tune.
Every seat in the already cramped bar is occupied, with several others standing on any vacant piece of floor they can find, many still wearing the hats and coats that had shielded from the falling snow and temperatures outside. And not one of these people seems to mind that this Britney Spears song, or almost every other song to be performed before last call, is mostly out of tune.
Posted inOutside
Adventures of a Backcountry Babe: Checking out the new 3SBC Yurts
I'm a backcountry babe. Not in the huck-it-off-the-cliff-poster-shot kind of way, though I do have a highly photogenic snowplow tuck perfected. I mean babe, as in newborn. This past weekend, I not only survived my very first backcountry skiing experience, but totally loved it, thanks especially to some awesome ski partners and the guys at Three Sisters Backcountry. What's not to like about a cozy yurt and a wood-fired sauna nestled at the south end of Three Creeks Lake just below the bowls of Tam McArthur Rim?
Three Sisters Backcountry is the dream made real of Gabe Chladek, Shane Fox and Jonas Tarlen. After many long Central Oregon approach slogs, they started talking about how cool it would be if there were a hut system here, like in so many other mountain ranges. “It took ten years of planning,” said Shane when we met him at the Three Creeks Sno-Park on Friday morning, “but we finally got our permits in September and built our yurts.”
Posted inCulture
Return Of The King Of The World: The wait is over for James Cameron's Avatar
Not often these days do we get a real “event” movie, as they are known in the business. Event movies are those that fill the theaters, provoke months of build up, endless post-viewing debate and are remembered years later. Titanic was an event movie. Most of us, even those only passively plugged into mainstream culture, will have a small folder in our minds dedicated to Leo-mania.
For all director James Cameron's assumed arrogance, he clearly understands the basics of good PR. When you pitch ideas with not just big, but record-breaking budgets, the sell means much more than the script. The frenzied build up to the release of his over a decade-in-the-making project Avatar assured, at the least, a successful opening weekend and, therefore, the money to fund his next venture. This is the kind of movie people want to have an opinion on, and it doesn't matter to Cameron whether that opinion is positive or negative as long as they care enough to pay for a ticket or two.
Posted inCulture
The Road Less Travelled: Apocalyptic vision takes you on an artistic yet painful journey with The Road
Director John Hillcoat likes dirt. His gritty western The Proposition and The Ghost of the Civil Dead, a dark and macabre look at brutal violence in Australian prisons, both feature flies buzzing around people's heads. Hillcoat has tackled all of his movies with collaborator Nick Cave either writing the script and/or scoring the film's music and now they undertake another dismal worldview in The Road, Cormack McCarthy's (No Country for Old Men) desperately bleak saga of the last men (and women) on earth.
Posted inCulture
A Clanky Kind of Claustrophobia: Crack in Time gets lost in the video vortex
Having already exploited most of the good jokes inherent in a robotic space universe, the Ratchet & Clank franchise was forced to exploit all the bad jokes for A Crack in Time. That's a shame. I wanted to laugh more. But A Crack in Time seems much more concerned with dramatizing the series' storyline and unfolding the history of Ratchet & Clank's roles in a universe that – more than ever – seems so fake as to be beyond cartoonish.
Every object in the game looks lit from within, like a backlit beer advertisement – the kind with animated waterfalls. The colors are so intense it's as though a giant bag of Skittles had been torn open, eaten and then another bag torn open and spilled onscreen, scattering lemon, lime, blueberry and cherry colors under the influence of a mounting sugar rush. Even the game's obligatory dirt-colored junkyard level looks as though it were made out of caramel and nougat.
Posted inNews
Pronghorn Plant Plunderers Pay Up
If you wonder why some Central Oregonians think the word “developer” is a synonym for “parasite,” check out the news stories about Pronghorn that appeared Monday.
Seems the developers of the ritzy “resort” (I’m putting the word in quotation marks because it’s not really a resort but an ultra-high-end housing tract with a couple of golf courses) stole hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of plants – live ones and dead ones – from the adjacent BLM land.
Posted inFood & Drink
A Little of This, A Little of That: Fusion food with the distinct flavor of Bend at 5 Spice
When Lilian Chu of Hong Kong Restaurant fame and Soba founder Di Long got together to discuss the concept for their joint venture in Deep's former Wall Street location, I can't imagine there was much argument about the cuisine. Bend's new Asian fusion supergroup went straight for what they do best. Though named for the core seasonings in Chinese cooking, 5 Spice is as fusion as you can get. Pan Asian with a European accent, flavors span the globe, often all on one plate.