Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, “Undaunted muckraker,” in a special issue about community media in the West. Named for the brown rubber boots with hefty soles popular among fishermen, the zine Xtra Tuf is a richly tinted window into the fishing industry’s turbulent culture. Its creator, Moe […]
Arts & Culture
Posted inOctober 2, 2006: From the ground up
Radio: Spice for the ears
Note: This article is one of several feature stories in a special issue about community media in the West. It sounds as if a lone angel alighted on the head of a pin, and encountered — to her surprise — a choir of angelic cousins there. Of course, we know that angels like gathering in […]
Posted inJune 26, 2006: The Tamarisk Hunter
The Tamarisk Hunter
In the desert Southwest of 2030 Big Daddy Drought runs the show, California claims all the water, and a water tick named Lolo ekes out a rugged living removing tamarisk.
Posted inOctober 17, 2005: The Ghosts of Yosemite
His photographs trace the passage of time
NAME Mark Klett VOCATION Photographer and regents’ professor of art at Arizona State University AGE 53 KNOWN FOR Documenting our changing relationship with Western landscapes HE SAYS “Photos always seem to exist as sort of stuffy, unnecessary antiques that we put in a drawer — unless we take them out, put them in current dialogue, […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2005: A Military Town Fights for its Life
Cano’s Vision
Just outside the small town of Antonito, in southern Colorado’s sparsely populated San Luis Valley, a highway sign points to the state’s oldest church, a twin-towered sanctuary built of brick and local dark volcanic rock. A bit farther on, the towers of a very different sanctuary rise over a dusty neighborhood on the other side […]
Posted inJune 13, 2005: Owning a Piece of Paradise
William Henry Jackson’s ‘The Pioneer Photographer’
William Henry Jackson’s ‘The Pioneer Photographer’ Bob Blair, 248 pages, clothbound: $39.95. Museum of New Mexico Press, 2005. William Henry Jackson was the official photographer for Ferdinand V. Hayden’s survey of the Western territory from 1870-1878. Now, Bob Blair has compiled photos, map sketches, paintings and notes into a fun coffee-table book. Chapters range from […]
Posted inFebruary 7, 2005: The Asphalt Graveyard
Caught in the Headlights
A personal obsession leads one woman into a world of scientists, wildlife rehabilitators and eccentrics who are mesmerized by the often bloody relationship between wildlife and roads
Posted inMay 10, 2004: Shooting Spree
Filmmakers Filmmakers Dru Carr and Doug Hawes-Davis: Documenting the Evolving West
MISSOULA, MONTANA — Filmmaking isn’t about big budgets, explosions or special effects for Dru Carr and Doug Hawes-Davis, the only full-time employees at the Missoula, Mont.-based High Plains Films. Instead, it’s the tool they use to document — and, they hope, protect — the ever-evolving West. In the early ’90s, Carr and Hawes-Davis were students […]
Posted inApril 15, 2002: Raising a stink
For the love of spoons
What does frilly Victorian flatware have to do with Navajo silversmithing? More than you might imagine. In her new book, Navajo Spoons, Cindra Kline uncovers the unlikely convergence of Victorian America’s obsession for commemorative spoons, love of tourism, and the “classic period” of Navajo silversmithing. In the late 1800s, when the railroad reached the West, […]