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In the Spring Issue and online here:

• Montana’s Cash Cowboy
• Real Ranch Living: Not Everyone is Selling Out
• Essay: The Family Farm, Version 2.0
• Essay: Tracks Across A Landscape
• Have Your Ranch & Develop It, Too
• Design Showcase: The Big and Little of Western Building
• Stuff It: Can Wolf Hunting Help Conserve the Species?
• Traffic Perplexes New Western Communities
• Boise in Its Own Little Bubble
• Revenge of the Resource Economy
• Spotlight North Idaho: On the Agenda: Youth, Growth & Silver
• Spotlight North Idaho: Players of the Panhandle
• Spotlight North Idaho: Coeur d’Alene Tribe Rides the Idaho Boom

[more]

By Robert Struckman, 2-01-08 | comments (22) | email story | print story

 

Gallatin Valley Non-Profit Series

For 30 years, the Intermountain Opera Association has provided two or three performances of at least one fully-staged opera classic each year starring singers well-known in the opera world, backed by an orchestra and chorus made up of the best musicians from our region. With 15 people serving on the board, two year-round part-time staffers and hundreds of volunteers, the organization is currently expanding their outreach activities to develop new audiences and ensure the survival of live opera in Montana. President Janet Young expands on the organization and their efforts. [more]

Saving Snow, Saving Lives

Sam Porter is on to something; if you want a skier’s attention, talk about snow. Porter (Porterhouse Productions) is about to take this attention-grabber to a whole new level.

Avalaunch – Porter’s latest “medium for change” through the arts and environment– begins this week at the Salt Lake City Outdoor Retailer Show at The Depot, January 24, 25 and 26. The hybrid event is the launching pad for what Porter hopes will be a nation-wide tour through 21 major North American ski communities bringing entertainment, education and sustainability together in an effort to save lives and snow.

“There are 200 million skiers all over the world,” Porter says. “I know skiers that almost love snow more than their kids. Snow reaches a demographic of this planet that is incredibly passionate about this world because they love it.”

The focus of Avalaunch is two-fold: raising avalanche awareness and reducing global warming contributions from the many, many people who rely on snow for fun and survival. [more]

February 14-20, 2008

Official selections for the 2008 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival are now on-line, here. See complete list after the jump.

From February 14 - 20, 2008, the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival celebrates its 5th year by showcasing 98 films from 40 countries. The official selections represent a broad array of filmmaking styles, formats and production dates, from classics to World Premieres. The 2008 films were selected from nearly 1000 submissions from across the globe. [more]

New West Book Review

Evelyn Cameron: Montana's Frontier Photographer
By Kristi Hager
Farcountry Press
120 pages, $14.95

Evelyn Cameron was a remarkable photographer who lived in Montana from 1893 until her death in 1928, recording everything from weddings to roundups to Montana fauna, capturing a way of life that was soon to vanish, but her work was almost lost to time. She had no children and made no plans for what was to happen to her photography after she died, so her negatives and prints lay piled in the basement of her friend Janet Williams for fifty years. Kristi Hager writes in Evelyn Cameron: Montana's Frontier Photographer about their eventual discovery: "In 1978, Donna Lucey, a writer looking for material to illustrate a book on pioneer women, won Janet Williams's trust, entered her basement, and discovered 1,800 negatives and more than 2,700 prints, as well as 35 diaries." [more]

Local Belgrade Artist

There is a certain fluidity about pottery, the transition between taking a chunk of clay, spinning it on the wheel, and molding a form from it, that has both intrigued and inspired Carl Sheehan for more than three decades.

“There’s a sensuous feeling of working with clay, taking a hard lump of clay, spinning it in on the wheel and turning it into a soft, almost liquid-like form and then creating something beautiful from it, that keeps me interested,” said Sheehan, who operates out of his garage-turned studio, Fire Hole Pottery, located just west of Bozeman.

Looking around Sheehan’s studio, two themes are immediately evident: family and pottery. Adorning the walls are a lifetime of pictures and children’s art projects, a mix of memories proudly displayed that paint the picture of both his career and his personal life.
[more]

Your 15 seconds of fame

Tryouts for the next season of American Idol are not going to be held in Boise. But don’t chuck your dreams of being an American Idol just yet.

North By Northwest, a Spokane- and Boise-based production company, is looking for several people to be featured in an upcoming series of television commercials for the Idaho Lottery’s new American Idol scratch ticket game.

Okay, so there’s no Ryan Seacrest, but the prospective notoriety is pretty sweet, and on the plus side there is no Simon Cowell either.

Individuals can video tape themselves singing any audition song, turn it in and potentially star in a commercial and get $500. [more]

the holiday spirit

Sunday night was the sixth night of Chanukah. Boiseans celebrated the Jewish Festival of Lights with a crowded gathering at the giant menorah on Capitol Boulevard.

Chabad Jewish Center of Idaho hosted the Grand Menorah Lighting party for the dozens of revelers who braved the cold and avoided black ice to dance the Hora in a parking lot beneath the giant menorah.
[more]

Music Review: Stocking Stuffer for Blues Lovers

You never know what to expect from a compilation CD. Most of them have a spotty record (think of the music sold on late night TV) while others are very good.

As a casual blues fan and a Northwest native, a collection of Northwest blues music sounded promising. So I was eager to listen to "Behind the Mic." However, when I first looked at the artists featured on this CDs 18 tunes, I didn’t recognize even one.

Upon closer inspection, I noticed that The Heard was included. That’s right, Idaho's own impure folk original songsters (as they like to call themselves) are part of "Behind the Mic." [more]

First Friday Opening

This past September, a group of Missoula artists called the Tainted Saints were hired to create a Halloween "haunted house" for the Badlander bar. They did much more.

In two months of after-hours labor--involving metalworking, carpentry, video production, make-up, dumpster diving for materials, and the consumption of truly astounding quantities of very bad beer--the Tainted Saints transformed a defunct Mexican restaurant into an Old West Zombie Brothel, in which they performed a blood-soaked, in-your-face, sensory-confounding performance art piece seen by more than 1,000 Missoulians on Halloween night.

Photographer Chris Lombardi documented this spontaneous eruption of community art, which involved the generous creative efforts of more than 40 people. You are cordially invited to the Badlander this First Friday, December 7 to see photos and a multimedia production in the zombie brothel where the event took place. The brothel will be torn down immediately following this show, so this is your last chance to see what will surely become a bloody little chunk of Missoula legend.

Beer, zombies, pretty pictures of pretty people making really ugly faces, inside Missoula's only undead brothel. It's a no-brainer.

Who: Photographer extraordinaire, Chris Lombardi
What: Photographs and multimedia
Where: Old West Zombie Brothel (The Back of the Badlander, 208 Ryman Street.)
When: Dec. 7 5-9 p.m. [more]

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