As the days warm and the sun sets late in the evenings, Central Oregon’s music scene steps outside.  From Prineville to Madras and Metolius to Bend, the high desert is bursting with opportunities to break out your lawn chair, pack a picnic and soak in the sun with some fantastic tunes. If you haven’t ventured…

Spring this year in Central Oregon may well be remembered as the season of public art. Sculptures and murals have been appearing at a terrific pace around Bend and Redmond, not only beautifying our roundabouts and walls, but engaging visitors and residents to interact in new ways with our public spaces. Two new roundabout sculptures…

We may not be able to prepare the future for our children, but we can at least prepare our children for the future. – Franklin D. Roosevelt   There are many marks of a healthy and vibrant community, among which the education of our children appears at the top of the list. Reviewing this month’s…

On a recent drive out to Summer Lake Hotsprings, I stopped at Picture Rock Pass to look for the namesake petroglyphs. After hunting on both sides of the road, the tell-tale images materialized when I had just about given up hope of finding them. Several line drawings of animals and human figures had been scratched…

Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.  ~Charlie Parker While reviewing the album, At Peace by Ballake Sissoko and Vincent Segal, I was immediately transported to the dusty sub-Saharan landscape of Burkina Faso, West Africa, where I spent two years of…

“History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.” Robert Penn Warren I am guilty of knowing little about the history of my adopted state. I know that much of Oregon has…

If you are reading this, we survived the end of times and are facing another year filled with art, music, literature, dance and all the creative endeavors that make Central Oregon an amazing place to live. Gracing our cover this month is the image Beyond the Rim from astrophotographer Brad Goldpaint with his incredible view…

“No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.” – Kenneth Tynan After I attending Thoroughly Modern Production’s musical, Assassins at 2nd Street Theater, I walked away mulling over the theme. The timing of the production, directly after the reelection…

The unique development of Central Oregon in the last few years has created a community that thrives on collaboration and harnesses the emerging highlights of the area: recreation, beer, art and a strong entrepreneurial drive. Some may be tempted to focus on the recreation aspect, or beer, but these would be leaving out the richer…

I had the good fortune to spend the entire weekend at the Sisters Folk Festival in early September. Aside from the excellent music, much of it new to me, I was inspired by the involvement of the community in many of aspects of the festival. From local businesses providing many of the eight stages (Angeline’s…