Volume 4, Issue 18 // August 31 - September 13, 2017 Up In The Sky. Drones Are Taking Over! SOUND pg 20 SCREEN pg 27 WELLNESS pg 28 Slow Corpse’s Bass Medford Filmmakers’ A Double Dose Player’s Solo Album! Japanese Noir? of Advice! 2 / WWW.ROGUEVALLEYMESSENGER.COM SUMMER EXHIBITIONS Tofer Chin: 8 Amir H. Fallah: Unknown Voyage Ryan Schneider: Mojave Masks Liz Shepherd: East-West: Two Streams Merging Wednesday, June 14 through Saturday, September 9, 2017 The Summer exhibitions are funded in part by a generous donation from Judy Shih and Joel Axelrod. MUSEUM EVENTS Tuesday Tours: IMAGES (LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM, DETAILS): Tofer Chin, Overlap No. 3, 2016, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 34” Free Docent-led Tours of the Exhibitions Amir H. Fallah, Unknown Voyage, 2015, Acrylic, colored pencil and collage on paper mounted on canvas, 48 x 36” Ryan Schneider, Many Headed Owl, 2016, Oil on canvas, 60 x 48” Liz Shepherd, Mount Shasta at Dawn, 2012, Watercolor on riches paper, 19.5 x 27.5” Tuesdays at 12:30 pm MUSEUM HOURS: MONDAY – SATURDAY, 10 AM TO 4 PM • FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC mailing: 1250 Siskiyou Boulevard • gps: 555 Indiana Street Ashland, Oregon 97520 541-552-6245 • email: [email protected] web: sma.sou.edu • social: @schneidermoa PARKING: From Indiana Street, turn left into the metered lot between Frances Lane and Indiana St. There is also limited parking behind the Museum. AUGUST 31 – SEPTEMBER 13, 2017 / THE ROGUE VALLEY MESSENGER / 3 The Rogue Valley Messenger CONTENTS PO Box 8069 | Medford, OR 97501 541-708-5688 page page roguevalleymessenger.com NEWS SPORTS [email protected] Established three years “The pay-to-play THE BUSINESS END OF THINGS ago, the Oregon Promise model,” says Dave 26 7 BUSINESS MANAGER Blake Helmken Grant opened the door to Kaufman, founder of SALES REPS Coleman Antonucci and Sydnie Gilinsky college for hundreds of Medford United Futbol WEB MASTER Tammy Wilder Oregon residents. But with Club, “leads to an elitist OUR FINANANCIAL WIZARD Sara Louton, Advanced Books new restrictions add each sport.” To eliminate DISTRIBUTION Olivia Doty subsequent year since its financial burdens to OUR WORDSMITHS approval, this grant serves the sport, Kaufman has as a canary in the coal mine created Medford PUBLISHER & EDITOR Phil Busse ASSOCIATE EDITOR Sara Jane Wiltermood example of how funding United. Writer Charles MUSIC EDITOR Josh Gross is offered and can just as Fischman checks in with PRODUCTION MANAGER Katie Ball quickly vanish. the program. CALENDAR EDITOR Jordon Lindsey ART CRITIC Jordan Marie Martinez page pagepage OUTDOOR EXPERTS Jeanine Moy, Mike Dickenson SOUND SCREEN COLUMNISTS Rob Brezsny, Shannon Wheeler, Merging an academic Deborah Gordon, Dan Smith Slow Corpse are hometown FREELANCERS favorites with their rich blend 20 background in Fine Arts, 27 Tyrell Trimble, Tuula Rebhahn, x Melissa Haskin, Julie Gillis, Charles Fischman, Anna of studio production elements, a taste for film noir, a Diem, Josh Davis, Christopher Lucas, Jacob Scheppler electronic textures, and hip-hop Kurosawa actor and an and Catherine Kelley actress that starred with GET IN TOUCH influenced beats. But now their bass player Cole Zollinger has Elvis Presley, Medford- EMAIL [email protected] released a solo album. The tracks based filmmaker Ray MUSIC [email protected] break from that mold; deeply Nomoto Robison is EVENTS [email protected] personal minimalist ballads in producing a special ADVERTISE [email protected] the vein of early Dashboard cinematic blend. SALES DEADLINE: 5 pm Thurs Confessional or Bright Eyes. EDITORIAL DEADLINE: 5 pm Thurs CALENDAR DEADLINE: 12 pm Thurs Food & Drink 23 CLASSIFIED DEADLINE: 4 pm Thurs Don’t Shoot the Messenger 4 Deadlines may shift for special/holiday issues. Letters 5Culture 24 News 7 Sports & Outdoors 26 ON THE COVER: Feature 9Screen 27 Photograph: Shane Stiles Photography Our Picks 11 Wellness 28 "Oak Savannah Sun" Live Music and Nightlife 12 Free Will Astrology 29 www.shanestilesphotos.com Weed Garden 30 Events 16 Rec Room 31 Design (with drones added) by: Katie Ball Sound 20 Residential & Commercial Solar Made Easy Call us today for a free consultation 800.947.1187 | truesouthsolar.net 4 / WWW.ROGUEVALLEYMESSENGER.COM DON’T SHOOT Bear Creek THE MESSENGER Salmon Festival Veto Saturday Governor October 7 Brown’s Veto Last week, Southern Oregon University an- 11 am - 4 pm nounced that the new athletic pavilion will be North Mountain Park named after the DeBoer family—as in, the family 620 N Mountain St, Ashland that founded and owns Lithia Motors. 541.488.6606 In 1946, in the years before car culture really expanded throughout the United States, Walt DeBoer founded the company. They only sold 14 cars that year, but since then the company has since grown to dealerships in 18 states, a “Communities Connected by Water” multi-generational family affair, and one of Oregon’s only three current Fortune 500 companies. • Interactive Educational Exhibits This isn’t the DeBoer first donation to SOU. They have donated funds for art buildings and athletic scholarships. The donation is $1 million, and helps • Kids Activities & Crafts complete the ambitious sport arena for the school—and pushes forward an • Native American Demonstrations important step as SOU continues to try and develop as a contender. Whether by design or happenstance, like many universities, SOU seems to be pursuing a • Live Music All Day game plan of increasing its academic standing by raising the profile of its sports • Salmon Spiral Labyrinth teams. In the past few years, the sports programs at SOU have decidedly up their game. The Raider football team went from perennial loser to national title. • Food Concession by Sultan’s Delight Cross-country and track teams have landed high marks at the national level and the new rowing team scored a gold and silver medal at national competitions this past spring. BearCreekSalmonFestival.net Although SOU doesn’t compete at the top Division I level, there is an estab- lished tradition that success in sports is perhaps the most efficient way to boost overall reputation and standing. For example, an appearance by a school’s bas- ketball team in March’s NCAA tournament translates into a bump in application numbers. But not everyone is happy about the DeBoer contribution. In response to the naming of the pavilion, the Messenger received a few notes and phone calls from current SOU students concerned that they were not given buy-in to the naming. One current student left a voicemail. “Hi Ashland resident and SOU student here,” the voicemail said. “The SOU Foundation decided to sell the new athletic pavilion; it’s gonna be named after Lithia Motors and the DeBoer family.” He added, “The student body is beside ourselves.” On a follow-up phone call with the Messenger, the student pointed out that the students were not given opportunity to voice their opinion on the name of the athletic faculty, and indicated that he thought the family’s politics may not jibe with the student body’s sensibility. Naming a building is a tricky proposition, especially on current college cam- puses, where many different persons feel strong affinities towards the facilities. Help create the second annual, one of The name can indicate attitudes and affiliations, and in the eyes of students, a kind Apple Outlaw Community Cider. manifest whether the school is more wed to its ideals or its business necessities. Bring your wormy apples, fallen plums Hampshire College, an esteemed eastern college, for example, holds the liberal and overripe pears to the Co-op for arts philosophy of emphasizing its students’ wants over the business needs of collection: Sept. 15—17, Oct. 13—15. the school. As a result, over the decades most of the buildings on campus have been named from suggestions by the students, like Malcolm X and Emily Dick- For more information visit enson, as opposed to names of donors. The trade-off for such idealism, however, www.ashlandfood.coop is that Hampshire College costs upwards of $50,000 each year. This isn’t a completely new tradition. In the 19th century, for example, An- drew Carnegie donated a boatload of money to Princeton, with the caveat that the school would never host a law school and instead would build a lake for a rowing team. “The world needs more rowers, not lawyers,” he is credited with saying. Increasingly schools are relying on these large donations from benefactors as, increasingly, college tuition doesn’t fully pay for the operations of a college, and universities have become needed to fold private donations into their business plan. But perhaps the biggest lesson is that the DeBoer family is choosing generosi- ty over greed. Especially during these times when the leading example of wealth in the United States has used his wealth to flaunt his ego, it is encouraging that a wealthy family in southern Oregon is instead using their money to build com- munity. AUGUST 31 – SEPTEMBER 13, 2017 / THE ROGUE VALLEY MESSENGER / 5 LETTERS Send your thoughts to: HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY? [email protected] Letters must be received by noon Friday before next print date for inclusion in the following week’s paper. Please limit letters to 250 words. Submission does not guarantee publication. RE: OUR MUSIC EDITOR freedom and that I do not want cops or laws involved with our lives, but There is a LOT of music he isn’t fond of and likes to describe in rude instead seek unmediated authentic relationships based on real dynam- comments, which is why I don’t bother to read his columns. Rather than ics, instead of rhetoric and politics. I also made it absolutely clear that “Music Editor” perhaps he should be retitled “Only Specific Kinds of I am not PC, I am skeptical of the progressive agenda (again, we’ll talk Music Editor.” about that later), I am not into censorship, and I am no friend of Tipper -Maureen Soar Gore, but, that I did find the band pretty messed-up and gross and that they were sure to bring out the local neo-Nazi scum, as well as inciting an anti-fascist response, and therefore, probably a dangerous disaster in RE.: THE MENTORS the making.