Ghost Ship

The last stop on our tour of Esplanade art is Ghost Ship, which is probably my favorite of the group. It's probably due to the glass. The brief description on its name plaque reads:

"A glowing lantern against a grey sky - Ghost Ship pays homage to the many ships that have come through Portland, and the ones that have gone down in crossing the Columbia River Bar."

...although please note the blue sky in these photos. Anyway, the city parks Esplanade page has this to say:

The Ghost Ship by James Harrison, sited on the south end of the wall, is a grand lantern made of copperplate, copper bar, a stainless steel substructure, and fit with hundreds of prismatic pieces of art glass. It pays homage to the many ships that have come through Portland, and the ones that have gone down in crossing the Columbia River Bar.

A later piece by Harrison titled Stacks grew out of his work on Ghost Ship, and another titled Daahoud grew out of it in turn.

With that I'm all out of material about the piece itself, and Halloween's coming up in a few days, so let's talk about actual ghost ships instead. Wikipedia has a long list of ghost ships, real, suspected, and fictional, including the infamous Mary Celeste. I recall reading a story about the Mary Celeste as a kid, and having nightmares for a week afterward. More recently, the derelict Ryou-Un Maru showed up in Canadian and later US waters a year after being washed out to sea by the 2011 Tokohu earthquake & tsunami. After salvage attempts failed, the US Coast Guard sank the vessel with cannon fire to prevent it from posing a hazard to shipping.

The 1943 Val Lewton film The Ghost Ship isn't really about a ghost ship, or even about ghosts, but it's a tense and spooky film that's worth seeing. It doesn't appear to be public domain and so isn't available for free on YouTube, but in searching I ran across a couple of interesting videos about derelict vessels: The former USS Sachem and an abandoned riverboat, both near Cincinnati, Ohio.

Closer to home, longtime Portlanders may remember the old River Queen floating restaurant (a converted San Francisco & Puget Sound ferry boat) , which was moored near the Centennial Mills building in what's now the Pearl District. The restaurant closed in 1995 and the vessel was towed to a remote dock on the Columbia near Goble. It's remained there ever since, awaiting a buyer.

Stack Stalk

The next piece of Esplanade art is "Stack Stalk", a tall skinny object near Alluvial Wall. The description from its sign:

"Part smoke stack, part sheaf of wheat - Stack Stalk is a beacon holding a Japanese glass fishing float from the coast up to the sky."

The city's page about the Esplanade says:

At the north end, Stack Stalk, also by Ean Eldred, is a hybrid beacon - part masthead, part wheat stem, part smokestack. Made of rolled steel tubes and a stainless steel basket, it suspends a Japanese glass fishing float in the sky as a reminder of the river's connection with the Pacific Ocean.

If anything there's even less on the interwebs about Stack Stalk than for Alluvial Wall. It got a quick mention in a Willamette Week Dr. Know column a while back, in which Orville B. of Portland asks why so much local art is so phallic-looking. A post at Culture Shock elaborates on that and includes photos. Of the art, I mean. I would imagine that, even today, a substantial majority of public art commissions go to male artists, so that might have something to do with it. Or it could all be a big case of pareidolia, except with genitalia instead of faces. Could be, could be. Dunno.

Alluvial Wall

This humble blog's occasional public art tour ventures across the river to visit a cluster of related pieces on the Eastbank Esplanade. I actually wrote a post about Echo Gate way back in July 2006. I either didn't realize it was part of a grouping, or it just didn't occur to me at the time that I was embarking on a Project that would involve posting about the others. Or it's also possible that my camera ran out of juice or its SD card was full after Echo Gate. Both problems happened a lot back in the old days. Truly, it was a dark and primitive time.

Anyway, today's first stop is "Alluvial Wall", which wraps around a bend in the Esplanade path about midway between the Hawthorne and Morrison bridges. The sign next to the piece describes it thusly:

"Interwoven layers of sediment and erosion - Alluvial Wall is an echo of the natural shape of the river before Portland was Portland."

The city parks page for the Esplanade explains further:

The final piece, the Alluvial Wall by Peter Nylen, clings to a concrete retaining wall and echoes the natural shape of the river before Portland was Portland. It alludes to the interwoven layers of the river’s pre-industrial geology and human artifacts; an amalgam of sedimentation and erosion formed of cold-forged steel plate with bronze castings lodged between its layers.

The Smithsonian's art inventory says simply:

Abstract wall sculpture made with slender horizontal bars intersected by slender vertical bars.

A recent public art guide to central Portland expands the credit to "RIGGA (Ean Eldred, James Harrison, John Kashiwabara, Peter Nylen) 2001", and lists its materials as "mild steel, bronze, electric light", although I can't vouch for the electric light.

I've run across a few other links with photos to pass along. Not as many as I was expecting, considering how many people walk, run, or bike past Alluvial Wall on a daily basis. I should probably take that as a sign this public art thing is a strange little project, and an interest that's shared by relatively few people. Or maybe I just need to search harder. Tumblr and Instagram and DeviantART could be absolutely full of hip, moody photos of it and you wouldn't necessarily know just from searching with Google. In any case, check out the photos at 500px, DLMark.net, and ExplorePDX. The photos are pretty tiny in the last one, but they do pick up on some angles I didn't notice during my brief visit. I'm already planning a trip back to take more photos, this time bringing the DSLR and not just my phone, as nice as it may be by phone standards.

sailboat, eastbank esplanade

vera on the esplanade

Today's adventure takes us to the east bank of the Willamette River, just north of the Hawthorne Bridge. This location is home to this statue of former Portland mayor Vera Katz, located on the, uh, Vera Katz Eastbank Esplanade, not to be confused with Vera Katz Park in the Pearl District.

I'll spare you my usual rant about naming things after living politicians, even though this would be the perfect opportunity for it. I'll just pass along this news story about the statue's 2006 unveiling, a surprise event to which the real Vera Katz was invited. The story features a photo of her sitting next to the statue, which is one of those things that just shouldn't ever happen. To anyone. Any person so honored -- you, me, an ex-mayor, anyone -- is bound to feel a number of things in this situation: You will be embarrassed, you'll be flattered, and you'll be creeped out. So will anyone else. Any difference here is just a matter of percentages. I'd be all "aw, shucks, you shouldn't have" at the ceremony, and then I'd rush straight home and blog about how weird and creepy it was sitting next to a life size bronze copy of myself, a copy that will likely be around long after I'm gone. I'd go on about how it wasn't even a good likeness, how the body language is all weird, etcetera, and generally not have anything positive to say about it. And secretly, a little, deep down, I'd be just a bit flattered. And I'd never, ever admit it to anyone, lest people think I'm shallow or egotistical or something.

So about the statue. It's titled simply "Vera Katz", and was sculpted by Bill Bane, a local artist out of Newberg. It happens to be #60 at ThingsAboutPortlandThatSuck, and Portland Public Art describes it as "Vera Katz - unimpressive sculpture". (PPA has posts about other Bill Bane works: Captain Carlton Bond at the Pearson Air Museum up in the 'Couve, and former Governor Vic Atiyeh. at the Portland Airport, plus he's done a bas-relief of pioneers at the Clark County Courthouse, also up in the 'Couve.)

I wouldn't call this my favorite sculpture in town either. It's not the worst, by any means -- that honor would go to the stupid Promised Land pioneer sculpture in Chapman Square. But it also falls short of, for instance, the Abe Lincoln in the South Park Blocks. And to be fair, the things about it that I don't like seem to be stylistic trends in contemporary sculpture, or at least in the contemporary sculpture our fair city buys, such that offhand I can't think of any recent statues I'm very fond of.

First, the composition is on the mundane side, not larger than life or heroic or idealized in any way. It's deeply unfashionable these days to depict politicians (living or otherwise) boldly striding forth into the heroic future, and I'm sure that's a desirable thing in general. But when you agree those are the ground rules, and you put up statues of your politicians anyway, the results often aren't very impressive. Of course it doesn't help matters when your politicians are kind of tiny and gnome-like.

Second, I don't care for the rough, almost lumpy look of the statue. It's as if it constantly wants to remind you that it's a big chunk of cast metal, not a person. I'm not sure of this, but I think this look may be intentional, since seemingly all contemporary sculptors do this. I think it's a sort of modernist tic, something about being honest about your materials and the frank expression of how things are made. Similar to how you're supposed to be able to see the imprint of the wooden forms in concrete buildings. Or, I guess, the lack of sets in a Bertolt Brecht play for that matter. Although it's also true that it's easier and cheaper if you don't care whether your statue's skin looks sort of slag-like. So that if buyers are willing to settle for cheap rough-n-lumpy statues, artists of a more perfectionist bent are soon driven out of the marketplace. But I'm in an unusually charitable mood today, so I'm inclined to blame this on a stylistic choice I happen to disagree with, rather than the buyer being cheap or the artist being unskilled.

So it's not a work of art for the ages, but it's still useful in that it practically begs to be posed with, decorated, or otherwise roped into some sort of creative scheme. A few examples, from across the Series of Intartoobs:

• A silly sequel to the famous "Expose Yourself to Art" poster, starring -- count 'em -- three ex-mayors. Note that in addition to the trio here, we have two more ex-mayors, plus the current guy. One ex-mayor, Frank Ivancie, is in his mid-eighties, and is of a fairly conservative bent by Portland standards, so we can probably rule him out. And the other two, well, it would be pretty weird and creepy to include either in a photo like this, for obvious reasons.


• Vera with an Arrogant Bastard (No, I don't mean Sam Adams, the mayor or the beer.)


• An empty Flickr group that requests: "Take a photo of yourself and Vera Katz wearing your bike helmet." There's also a single-post blog here, with a single photo. So not much to see here, but the fad may yet catch fire, and hipsters will line up around the block to take part in the latest ritual of the tribe. Or not.


• stereo anaglyph - more anaglyphs in same photostream


• with a teddy bear in the snow


• con sombrero y margarita


• And there's a MODKATZ group on Flickr dedicated to decorating the statue, although not a lot of photos there right now.

Echo Gate

A photo of, or at least at the Echo Gate sculpture on the esplanade right under the Morrison Bridge. Despite the view of downtown, it's not the most tranquil location you could dream up. There's a huge amount of noise from the bridge overhead, and even more noise from I-5 just a few feet away, directly behind where this photo was taken. Maybe that's where the "Echo" part comes from. The sculpture is the curvy bit on the left. If you'd like to see what the thing as a whole looks like, instead of scratching your head over this in-vain attempt to be "artistic", you might try: here, here, here, and here. Here's a profile of the artist.

This large pdf from the city says of the sculpture:

Echo Gate: Located underneath the Morrison Bridge, the Echo Gate gives human scale to this immense site. The sculpture echoes the erased pier buildings and Shanghai tunnels of Portland’s past.

The city parks department elaborates:

The Echo Gate, located beneath the Morrison Bridge, is a sculpture that echoes erased pier buildings and the myths of Shanghai tunnels. It is made of copper plate that was heat-formed, fitted, and welded. Two pieces of art sit on a concrete wall that is a remnant from the bulkhead of the Port of Portland's Terminal 2 and serves as a reminder of early maritime commerce along Portland’s eastside.

As a confirmed "Shanghai tunnel" skeptic (see this earlier post for a couple of good links), I'm kind of disappointed to see the city itself buying in to the stories. And even if the legends are more than fairy tales and wishful thinking, is it really a good idea for the city to celebrate a very serious (if picturesque) crime, something the city was supposed to try to stop, something that (allegedly) thrived here because the police force was extremely corrupt and incompetent? What'll they do for an encore, put up gold statues of all those "faces of meth" tweakers? Sheesh. But I digress.

Anyway, I like this sculpture. So new, and already so obscure. By all means, go and track it down, just don't stay for long or you'll go deaf, unless you're run down by speeding bicyclists first. Or people jogging with those giant SUV-style assault strollers. Yikes!

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Meanwhile:


Further afield, here's a new Cassini photo of Saturn's dinky moon Polydeuces. Don't tell me you don't think this is exciting stuff. In previous photos the moon was just a faint dot moving against a starry background, but now we've gotten a slightly closer look. See, it's oval-shaped!

(Ok, I'll admit that I didn't think this quite merited a post of its own, but I still devoted precious blog space to it.)

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Meanwhile:

It's a sickness. It's an addiction. It's a cheap and easy way to generate blog content without actually writing anything. It generates a few page hits from Technorati, mostly confused bloggers wondering why the hell I linked to them. Yes, it's time for another modest batch of referrer pages. People are on some other Blogger blog, and then somehow they then end up here, and I see where they arrived from, and I post it here, because I've apparently got nothing better to do with my limited time here on this planet. At least I didn't devote a separate post to it this time around.

• Greenwich Village Gypsy
• The Best Blog of All Time
• Dlisted
• Power Word Fold, an origami blog. The name is by analogy with "Power Word Kill", one of the most powerful D&D spells out there. Don't ask me how I know this. Please. I beg of you.
• Scaryduck
• Metal Music Blog, from Lithuania. If this blog's any indication, Norway may have a new competitor for the "Heartland of Metal" title. Norway may still have the edge, but I'd still like to see 'em fight it out all the same. Because that would rock.
• Reyno de Letras (possibly NSFW here in the prudish ol' US of A, but pretty tame, and done for artistic purposes.)
• "rake up the past, and discover the mysteries"
• Tamlin (in Finnish. I think.)
• Help! I'm in a Nutshell!
• Semanario La Opinión. In Buenos Aires, seems to be a newspaper or publication of some sort.
• Un Choripán en el Malba
• El Mundo del Graffiti. Graffiti in Chile. Call it art, call it what you will, but whatever you call it, the Chileans clearly have us beat in this department.
• Laura's project life
• Pink Panther going places weird food, tribal practices... cool.
• Amigo Net
• Turismo News. About tourism & cultural events in Italy, in Italian.
• 0okm. All about Sony PSP h4x0ring. As a non-PSP owner, ok, as a non-gamer, in fact, I know basically nothing about this, but it sounds interesting. (Note to Large Media Corp. lawyers: This isn't an endorsement, I'm sure you have all sorts of extensive DMCA and/or Patriot Act powers to use against these guys and all that.)
• mikeperry. The top post at the moment features a cute cat named Samus. Awwwwwww....
• Nicole Angeline's Personal Blog, looks to be new as of today (7/13).
• SueAndNotU, currently travelblogging from Georgia and Armenia.
• Beervana, yet another local beer blog. No, I didn't find this one at random, but I thought I'd pass it along anyway. Prost!