wRite: Capture This Moment

Posted inCulture

wRite: Capture This Moment

Intern

The color of it moved something in him long forgotten. Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember…
…Where you've nothing else, construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.
– Cormac McCarthy, The Road

This whole rhapsody, better go capture this moment
And hope it don't collapse on him…
– Eminem, “Lose Yourself”

I'm walking away from my credit union toward Fred Meyer. I have just failed to be able to use one of my new credit cards to get a cash advance so I can deposit it in my son's California bank account so he can pay his rent. He can't pay his rent because he is a writer living in Los Angeles who works every day for chump change, and in America, 2009, “Writer who works every day for chump change” is a redundancy. My mind is nothing but run-on sentences, bad practice for a writer.

Posted inOutside

Nina de la Tierra: Child of the Earth: The mystery of the Jerusalem Cricket

The Source Staff

I've been getting phone calls and e-mails recently reminding me this is the time of the year when unsuspecting humans meet up with our colorful and common—but sometimes alarming—Jerusalem Cricket.
Of all the insects that live in, under, over and on Central Oregon, none can catch a person's eye and generate more fear, questions, admiration, revulsion and other human emotions like that of Stenopelmatus fuscus, the Jerusalem Cricket, AKA:

Posted inCulture

Treacherous Love

Intern

Amelia Gray's AM/PM
Amelia Gray's AM/PM (Featherproof Books, $12.95) consists of 120 impeccably compact stories of love, discomfort and concert souvenirs. The single-page stories were written, one in the morning and one in the evening, over the course of two months. This timeline, and their brevity, may make it sound like this is a simple little book, but it's not; like the best tiny tales and single lines, Gray's snapshot stories are treacherous and sly, capable of changing the cadence of your thoughts and tinting the way you look at the ordinary things around you.

Posted inFood & Drink

Peace, Love and Five Kinds of Gravy: Let the healing begin in CHOW's magic garden

The Source Staff

Last Sunday morning found me a little worse for the weekend wear. But as disjointed text messages lamenting the night before and proposing breakfast started coming in, I realized that compared to my potential dining companions, I was in reasonably good shape. My one-too-many was certainly a far cry from the impressive 3 a.m. nightcap at Starz that one of them reported. I could tell it was going to be a delicate brunch with disaster looming around every corner. The slightest lapse in service or undercooked egg could send someone over the edge. I bargained that the best chance of pleasing four fragile, hungover friends (well, really three hungover and one still drunk) with many and varied sensitivities was CHOW.

Posted inFood & Drink

Peace, Love and Five Kinds of Gravy: Let the healing begin in CHOW's magic garden

The Source Staff

Last Sunday morning found me a little worse for the weekend wear. But as disjointed text messages lamenting the night before and proposing breakfast started coming in, I realized that compared to my potential dining companions, I was in reasonably good shape. My one-too-many was certainly a far cry from the impressive 3 a.m. nightcap at Starz that one of them reported. I could tell it was going to be a delicate brunch with disaster looming around every corner. The slightest lapse in service or undercooked egg could send someone over the edge. I bargained that the best chance of pleasing four fragile, hungover friends (well, really three hungover and one still drunk) with many and varied sensitivities was CHOW.

Posted inCulture

Toy Soldiers: Trying to see the good in the dismal G.I. Joe

Intern

A wise woman once told me that the older she got the more she tried to see the good in things rather than the easier route of criticizing everything. I have thought of that comment virtually every day since she said those words, but never more than while watching GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
The problem for me with this movie is not that it brings to life the Hasbro action figures first introduced in 1964 – that's kind of cool – but it does so with none of the freshness or originality of other similar efforts like Sin City or the humor and self-deprecation of the Superman franchise, or the passion of Iron Man. The creators bumbled a golden opportunity here to laugh at the effort itself, you know, the tongue-in-cheek stuff. There is nothing interesting about this effort and no humor to buoy the comic book dialogue. See the good.

Posted inCulture

Set To Blow: The Hurt Locker goes for intense psychological study

Intern

The frequently used term “nail-biting” has never been more appropriate than to describe The Hurt Locker. Focused on a bomb squad assigned to dismantle IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in Baghdad circa 2004, the gritty realism and sheer tension of this movie sucks you in, hooks you and keeps you dangling the entire time.
Based on the true experiences of journalist Mark Boal, who spent time embedded with such a unit (Explosive Ordinance Disposal or EOD), Hurt Locker is not an Iraq war statement but rather an in-depth character study of addiction to risk and danger. It's also a classic study of men in combat and under stress that could have taken place anywhere, detailing strong characters thrown together in the harshest of times, forced to deal with each other's psychotic idiosyncrasies and insecurities.

Posted inFood & Drink

Welcome to the Jungle

Intern

Most children by the age of ten can recite a chilling version of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” or another outlandish ghost tale. At summer camp they sit around late at night terrifying one another by raising the ante with each story. But the child who terrorizes like no other is always the child of an Oregon bartender. No other child has experienced the true-life horrors of the creature many simply refer to as OLCC. Stories of their pappies disappearing in the middle of the night because daddy's server permit was at home instead of tattooed on his upper right shoulder and tales of mommy turning into an evil mummy because she told someone over the telephone that her place had happy hour on Fridays.

Posted inMusic

CD Review – Black Ice Cream Anyone?

Intern

Helado Negro
Awe Owe
Asthmatic Kitty Records

Helado Negro's debut album (or Roberto Carlos Lange latest project), Awe Owe, is a mix of traditionally structured songs sung and strummed by Lange, with heavy looping, samples, handclaps, the dabbling of woodwinds and Latin percussion. The album can be patchy as if intended for a canvas or tapestry. It's oddly mysterious, too, with 11 relatively short compositions that meander from one to another without much interruption. The album has a densely ambient feel, yet the repetitious sounds never command a repetitive feel.

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