Echoes

Next we've got a few photos of Echoes, the cool wavy glass art outside the new-ish Dianne apartment building in the Pearl District at NW 11th & Hoyt. A small sign next to one of the panels explains:

Transparent glass laid flat becomes opaque,
Sunlight glints over the curved and rippled surface,

Echoing streams long forgotten

2018
Ivan McLean - Anna McLean
Mark Wingfield - Karina Adams - Darrell Adams

This is another post that's been lurking in Drafts for a while, but not due to editor's block this time. I took these photos after having brunch nearby, shortly before Covid really got going, and I was a bit wobbly thanks to mimosas served by the pitcher. (Looking over my photos again, I clearly thought I was taking very artsy and abstract photos of the thing, but in retrospect that was probably just the mimosas thinking.) And so it came to pass that I neglected to either make a note of exactly where this was, or take a wider photo of the setting for context. Which was a problem, because I have sort of a rule here about posts needing a specific location, so that you -- o Gentle Reader(s) -- can go see for yourself if you like something you see here.

When I got around to starting this post, I quickly realized Google was (and still is) completely useless and it had absolutely no useful results for what I was looking for, which seems to be an increasingly common problem. Although they showed me a big pile of unrelated ads in the process, so it was still a win as far as they're concerned. That was my plan A. My Plan B would've been to go do brunch again and see if I could retrace my uneven steps and stumble across the same art again, but this time write down the address, but by that point everything was locked down for Covid and I was busy avoiding everything and everyone, and retracing seemed like a bad plan just then. My Plan C was to wander around the area on Street View instead and see if anything leaped out at me. That was a dismal failure, and to further complicate things McLean's website hasn't been updated since 2016, several years before Echoes was created. At that point I shrugged and this post sank deep down into the Drafts folder and I basically forgot about it until recently (January 2023). On a whim I checked again and realized he'd simply moved over to Instagram, and I just needed to scroll backwards until I started seeing Echoes photos and see if any of them mentioned where it was. Fortunately one of them did, so now all I need to do is make myself stop rewriting this big dumb paragraph.

pearlhenge

Some construction photos from somewhere in the Pearl District, at the tail end of the condo bubble. I'm not sure which building this turned out to be; I haven't been paying close attention to the Pearl recently, and many of the new buildings aren't overly distinctive anyway.

It's almost a shame the bubble didn't pop earlier, leaving a forest of concrete slabs and bits in its wake. Grainy black & white photos of this scene in midwinter would've been Holga-licious.

On a related note, I ran across a fascinating video tour inside the unfinished Fontainebleau Las Vegas. Billions already spent, billions more needed and unavailable. Which in turn is oddly reminiscent of the Commie-era Palatul Parlamentului in Bucharest, Romania.

Not that I'm trying to suggest an analogy between Mayor Adams and Nicolae Ceaucescu or anything, no sirree. Although it is curious how so many people seem afraid to publicly criticize Sam for any reason. Why is that, exactly? What sort of hold does he have over people? What are they so afraid of, and -- more importantly -- should I be afraid of that too, whatever it is? Maybe I should stop talking about this now. Yeah.