rusting chunks, 8mm

A few test shots of our old friends the Rusting Chunks, taken with a shiny new Sigma 8-16mm ultrawide-angle lens. The lens was a splurge for an upcoming vacation, and I figure I ought to learn to use it a little before getting on the plane.

The main use for the lens is actually not for wacky perspective games, but for really really wide, but normal-looking landscapes, interiors, and so forth. But tradition holds that I always go take photos of the Rusting Chunks first thing when a new gadget arrives, so here they are.

multi-rusting multi-chunks #25

Our old friend Rusting Chunks #5, as seen through a Mirage 5F multiple image filter. You know, one of those widgets that groovy with-it happening photographers were so big on back in the 70's. I picked it up at Goodwill the other day along with a couple of other funky special effect filters. I'd wanted one of these for quite a while, partly because it's so retro -- I remember thinking it was a cool look back when I was a kid, although I didn't know how they did it at the time. Another reason, which seems to me to be a very sensible reason, is that sometimes it's good to do something simply because it's unfashionable. It's hard to think of anything more unfashionable than this. You could, I'm sure, do something similar and possibly more pleasing with Photoshop. Except that people generally don't, as out-there special effects aren't really the "in" look right now. Unless you count HDR, that is. Hmm... HDR plus groovy 70's filters would make for a really interesting look, wouldn't it? Or a really bizarro look, at least.



It seemed appropriate to use the Mirage 5F on the Chunks right off the bat. Ex-groovy 70's photo gear, ex-groovy 70's art, it just makes sense. It's sort of a process of piling on layer upon layer of terminal unfashionableness until the resulting unholy agglomeration becomes inexplicably cool. Or that's the plan, at least.

Incidentally, the previous post here is about the Kelly Fountain, the Chunks' shiny, wet, and slightly less unhip sibling. That post links to a couple of articles about the guy behind the Chunks. It sounds like even he realizes just how anti-trendy his stuff is these days.

Also incidentally, I've finally found the perfect adjective to describe the chunks, a word I've been seeking for a long time. The Chunks, I've realized, are hegemonic. I don't usually indulge in academic lingo here -- I tend to get it all wrong, and maybe I'm doing it wrong now, and I'm not sure I care, quite honestly. But just look at the way the Chunks loom and dominate their surroundings. If that's not hegemony, I don't know what is. Just look for yourself. You know it's true.



The box of filters ran me close to $40, which I guess is a bit more than I think I ought to have paid for a silly lark like this. But I wanted it, so I spent the money, and now I feel like I need to use it a lot to justify the "expense". I mention this, O Gentle Reader(s), as sort of an advance warning. I may end up posting more multiple image pics here than strictly necessary. Before eventually tiring of my new toy and putting it in the filter drawer with the others, I mean, which is bound to happen sooner or later.

rusting chunks, infrared

multimorphic chunks

Ok, so here's a silly experiment I've wanted to try for a while. Over the years I've picked up a variety of thrift store photo doodads of widely varying usefulness, including a few now deeply unfashionable doodads from the groovy 70's. Among the uber-grooviest are a couple of multiple image filters I sorta-overpaid for about a year ago. I posted some photos of "Rusting Chunks #5" with one of them around that time, and warned that I might be posting "more multiple image pics here than strictly necessary". Turns out I haven't actually posted any more since then. Although as of this post I've done it twice, and that may still count as more than strictly necessary.

That time I used the Mirage 5F, this time it's the Mirage 3FP, so it's three images in a row instead of five arrayed in a circle. The effect isn't quite as dramatic as with the 5F, so for most of these pics I broke out a second widget, the Optivision anamorphic lens previously seen in this batch of cat photos.

And what better (or more convenient) subject for 70's-style photos than our old friend the Rusting Chunks? I couldn't think of a better subject, and as it turns out there aren't very many things that easily lend themselves to the multiple-image and/or the anamorphic gimmicks. And it's not for lack of looking. It's worth noting that the multiple image fad died out around the photo world started moving to zoom lenses, in place of the ~50mm prime lenses that had been the standard up until then (in the 35mm film world, I mean). A multiple image filter doesn't zoom with the lens, and pretty much only works as designed at focal lengths around 50mm, or the crop-sensor equivalent (and then not quite as well). Go longer, and you quickly lose the side images, so the filter becomes sort of pointless. Go wider, and the filter vignettes badly due to the thick rim of the filter.



It's easy to imagine someone taking photos just like these circa 1978. I can see it now. He was probably some sweaty chauvinist-pig type named Stan or Marv or something, who always wore a shiny brown leisure suit, a gold medallion, and cologne by the gallon. He'd heard that chicks really dug photographers, and besides photo gear was the latest trendy form of conspicuous consumption. He picked up a couple of multiple image filters thinking they'd help him take hip, with-it, happening pictures. When a woman fell for his cheesy pickup lines down at the singles bar, he'd invite her back to his place to check out his slides and perhaps have a glass of Riunite on ice and possibly fire up some romantic disco tunes on the ol' 8 Track. Having served their purpose, the multiple image filters went back in a drawer and sat unused for 30 years. And now they're mine, mwhahahah....



Speaking of Riunite on ice, we were messing around on YouTube a while back and ran into a bunch of vintage Riunite commercials, with that damn jingle you can't get out of your head. I think I like the skiing one the best of the bunch, although it's a tough call. Anyway, that naturally led to "whatever happened to", and the surprising discovery that it still exists. In fact, you can even be Riunite's friend on Twitter. Which led to, I wonder if it's available here in Portland. Not long after that, I found it and bought some. The Zupan's on Macadam has it, on the bottom shelf in the sparkling wine section, in case you're so inclined. A great thing about Riunite commercials is that, along with the music and happy 70's people, you also get food pairings. Ok, pairings with 70's food. The skiing commercial suggests fondue, so we thought we'd try that. And... it was actually nice. We liked it. Ok, it's kind of sweet, and lightly fizzy, and that's something that Modern Wine Experts regard with the very deepest disdain. But it would be nice on a hot day, as an alternative to beer or soda, assuming the weather ever improves. And if the weather doesn't improve, it also pairs nicely with chicken fried steak (which we verified with bottle #2).

Lest you take me for a complete barbarian, the quest for Riunite led me to take a good look at the sparkling wine aisle, something I don't typically do. So I thought, this year I'll do something different and get some proper from-Champagne champagne for New Years. So the Taittinger was kind of fabulous, and right now I have a bottle of something else in the fridge, and I'm looking for a flimsy excuse to pop the cork.

And all of this started with messing around aimlessly on YouTube. O, how I love thee, interwebs...

photo friday strikes again

Top photo: Sudden warm weather always inspires this sort of thing. Sometime next week she'll snap out of it and wonder where she left her shoes. They were still at the 1st & Oak MAX stop when I saw them. But you probably ought to hurry if you think you'll ever want them back. Or I suppose you could just buy a new pair instead. These may be last year's shoes, for all I know. It's not my area of expertise, I'm afraid.

In case you hadn't figured it out yet, this is yet another photo post. Yep, another one, and even bigger than usual, I'm afraid. It's not all photos of flowers this time though. See, I really am flexible, a little, sort of.



The weathervane on top of the old Henry Weinhard brewery, now part of the Brewery Blocks development. I'd never really looked at it before, but it's pretty great: A stalk of barley, and a brewer's grain shovel (I think).

Did I mention that Portland's Spring Beer & Wine Festival is on this weekend? I think I know what I'll be doing tomorrow. Feel free to attend as well -- just so long as you're not in line ahead of me, I mean.



The photo I promised in the previous post: An order of "Mexi-Fries Grande" from Taco Time. Tater tots and bacon. Oh, and cheese, etc. Pure greasy, starchy, fatty ambrosia.

I probably shouldn't have eaten this. Until my toe feels better I can't go to the gym and run and generally be good like I'm supposed to. But at the time it was oh, so tasty.

I understand that the Oaks Bottom Pub over in Sellwood offers a similar delicacy, which they refer to as tot-chos. And the Kells Irish pub downtown has long offered a related item they call "Irish Nachos". Regular potatoes sliced and fried, instead of tater tots, but still entirely adequate for my purposes. And they go surprisingly well with a Guinness or two.



Another shot of our old friend Rusting Chunks No. 5. The glory of springtime doesn't really improve the damn thing very much, does it?



More rusting chunks, this time viewed through the fountain of a nearby condo tower. (They (the chunks, I mean (of course)) are just to the right of the pillar, in the background.) You could probably do this in Photoshop just as easily if you knew how, but I don't. I could probably find out if I wanted to, but I'm lazy and it's not important enough. And really it's more fun (IMHO) to see what you can do with a middle-of-the-road vanilla consumer camera rather than invest in an expensive "prosumer" hardware & sofware combo. And besides, "prosumer" is a truly stupid word. If you're going to insist on coining neologisms, you can have the new word be whatever you like, so why pick something that sounds like a greasy part off a diesel engine? Sheesh.

Besides, if you're going to mess around with image manipulation, why waste your time with water effects, when you can insert a rampaging Gamera stomping on the rusting chunks. Now that would be worth seeing. But I don't know how to do that either.

There might be a setting in GIMP to do this stuff, but it beats me where they might've hidden it.



The Fremont Bridge and its reflection, in a still-undeveloped far corner of the Pearl District.



This is where fire hydrants come from. Sort of. This truck was downtown, and the hydrants are probably for the reconstructed transit mall, once they've put the new MAX tracks in.



Speaking of which, here's a shot of SW 5th Avenue with MAX tracks going in. In the unlikely event you're interested in seeing this for yourself, sorry, it's too late now. They've added the concrete, and now it just looks like normal light rail tracks. So nothing to see here. Move along.



An authentic commemorative shot glass from the real Southfork(tm), you know, from that TV show. Someone gave this to me, I hasten to add. I haven't been there. The text around the outside rattles off a few key points about the show, beginning with "Texas Oil Power Money Greed Millionaires". Oddly enough, if you buy a shot glass at the White House gift shop, the inscription on the outside says exactly the same thing. Go figure.

If my usual luck holds, the preceding brief comment will reel in a few Dubya-worshiping Bible-thumping Kool-Aid(tm)-drinking wingnuts, and they'll post illiterate, abusive rants in all capital letters, lecturing me all about the imminent Rapture and whatnot, and then I'll have to waste a minute or two deleting the rants, or possibly mocking them. It's always an adventure out here on the interwebs.



A couple of sunrise photos from last month.



Ok, that should about do it. Once again, sorry about all the big photos, dialup user(s)!

So I broke down and bought a Holga...

If you read this blog religiously, which I admit isn't all that likely, you might remember this post from a few months ago where I was playing with a toy digital camera, and swore, cross-my-heart-sorta, that I wasn't going to touch film cameras ever again, although I used the phrase "Holga envy" at one point to describe what I was up to. Well, it's a few months later and here I am with an ever-growing pile of old film cameras. And all that envying must've taken a toll, because I recently became the proud owner of a brand new Holga 120N. So here are a few photos from my very first ever roll with a Holga.

Incidentally it's not my first-ever roll of 120 film I've ever taken. I picked up an old box camera a while back and tried to trim a roll of 120 down so it'd fit in a 620 camera, because I read somewhere on the Interwebs that you could do it at home and not have to pay anyone to trim or respool your film for you. Well, um, that didn't go so well, as it turns out. But I did learn how to load 120 film properly, which is something.

Ok, so the top photo is from Mt. Tabor Park, looking towards downtown Portland. I think this one turned out rather well, even apart from the whole Holga thing. It's got the vignetting stuff, naturally, since you can't really get away from that so long as you've got the usual Holga lens on the camera. But other than that, it's really not all that crappy. Which is fine with me, actually. I hadn't originally planned on buying a Holga at all, and spent a while scavenging around town looking for cheap yet non-toy medium format cameras, but I just didn't find anything that was interesting and in good condition. After searching for a while, I was on Amazon one night after a couple of beers and though, hey, what the hell, I'll just buy a friggin' Holga and see what all the fuss is about. So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that it seemed like a good idea at the time, and there were extenuating circumstances.



And here's my old friend Leland One, a.k.a. "Rusting Chunks No. 5". C'mon, you didn't really think I'd get a new camera and not use it on the Rusting Chunks, did you? Oh, and the moon's in there too, if you look closely.

Before we go too much further, i.e. before I bore you to tears, let me point out that if you'd like to see some pics from people who really know their way around a Holga (and I mean that in a good way, honest!), there's no shortage on Flickr.



A bit of downtown Portland.




O'Bryant Square, downtown.




Tanner Springs, one of my other favorite subjects. What you see here aren't light leaks or other camera defects, actually. This was taken from a moving streetcar, and those are reflections on the window.




Yes, I'm afraid I recently wandered around First Thursday with a Holga. How artsy-fartsy is that, I ask you? Possibly I should've just gotten myself a t-shirt with "Dilettante" in big letters and wandered around wearing that instead. Although I'm not sure that would've been any cheaper.

This photo is seriously underexposed. I thought I had it in its so-called "bulb mode", but I forgot to check, and it turns out I didn't. You wouldn't think there'd be anything to get the hang of with a Holga, but the evidence suggests otherwise.




And here we are back at Mt. Tabor again. This one didn't come out so well. I was more or less facing the sun this time, and the Holga doesn't seem to be so keen on that. It took a bit of GIMP work to get it to where it is now, and I still can't say I'm entirely pleased with the results. But hey, it's a Holga, you were expecting what exactly?

Kelly Fountain

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Here are a few photos of Portland's "Kelly Fountain", at 6th & Pine on the once and future transit mall. These were taken back in August, while the fountain was still running. Like most public fountains, the city shuts it off for the winter in case we get a spot of freezing weather (and probably to save money, too). This is kind of hampering the nascent fountain project I recently semi-embarked on. There can't be any new photos of fountains in operation until next spring, so I'm pretty much stuck with whatever I've already got lurking in the archives. It's like the old saying goes, you have to blog with the fountain photos you have, not the fountain photos you wish you had. That may not be exactly how the old saying goes. It's been a long time, or at least it feels like it's been a long time, thankfully.

I put "Kelly Fountain" in quotes because it isn't quite the official name. The water bureau page linked to above says its true name is "Untitled Fountain", one of several untitled fountains here in town. Which is dumb. The Smithsonian's public art inventory has a page about the fountain too, and they insist it's actually called "Anchor". Which is the first time I've ever heard that name. Why is this so complicated?

The "Kelly" in the name is actually the fountain's creator, local sculptor Lee Kelly. He happens to be the auteur behind the notorious Leland 1, or as I always call it, "Rusting Chunks #5". He's the auteur behind a lot of cheesy public art around town, actually -- besides this fountain and the Chunks, there's the fountain up at the rose garden in Washington Park, the tall spindly stainless steel thing in Waterfront Park next to the Steel Bridge, and a few assorted stainless steel bits at the new "Howard's Way" plaza, between a couple of new residential buildings next to PGE Park, as well as smaller gallery works.

As you might have gathered from the last paragraph, I'm not a huge fan of Kelly's work. In fairness, though, the fountain is better than Rusting Chunks #5 in a number of important ways.

1. It's a fountain. The running water helps a lot. Without running water, it's just another big inexplicable hunk of metal looming over the sidewalk. Although that's exactly what it is when the fountain's not running, which is most of the year, actually.
   
2. Stainless steel is always better than rusty steel. This is inarguable. The 70's fondness for rusty metal is yet another example of that decade's pathological aesthetics, just like macrame and blue ruffled tuxedos.
   
3. It's further away from home, so I don't see it all the time. As much as I like fountains, I'd probably tire of this one rather quickly if I had to look at it every day.
   

So, ok, it's not a very long list, and it's kind of a glib list, but my point remains. The fountain's fine, I guess. It can stay, as far as I'm concerned.

Going by the dates on Mr. Kelly's public artworks, it looks like the 70's were his heyday, but his stuff at "Howard's Way" is less than a year old, so clearly he's still got a few eager customers out there. I find it remarkable that, in all this time, he really hasn't changed his style all that significantly. At some point in the late 70's he switched from rusty Cor-Ten steel to stainless, and then recently he started welding inane Zen-esque affirmations to his creations (about which, see this First Thursday post of mine from August '06). That seems to be the sum total of his creative evolution over the last 30 years. Despite that, the local art-world Powers That Be seemingly can't get enough of his stuff. I've never seen the point, really. While trying to get a handle on how this public art racket works, I ran across a few articles about Mr. Kelly. A Willamette Week article mostly fawns over him, but it contains a telling passage:

The type of work he makes belongs to a past not much revered these days. Steel sculpture has gone the way of innocuous corporate decoration. You see it now and again in public parks, plopped there by some now-defunct committee. "Clearly, I'm old hat," muses Kelly. "I don't spend a lot of time thinking about whether I fit in. I'd like to stay around long enough to see how this all pans out. I am curious to see if we'll come back to appreciate some sort of object that's more or less permanent."

An Art in America piece about a 1995 show of his insists that "Kelly's structures radiate an appealing warmth and sense of humor, qualities not usually associated with large-scale metal sculpture". I'm sorry, but I'm just not seeing it. A PNCA profile contains what may be the secret of his success:

When asked what advice he could give to young artists, Kelly jokes, “Maybe I can come up with a half of an advice: If you’re trying to do it as a livelihood, it’s really tough. I’ve just worn the bastards down after all these years.”

As shown in the above photo, there's a sort of low beveled lip around the base of the fountain, I suppose to help keep the water in. It's only a couple of inches, but for some reason skateboarders seem to find it irresistible. I always see skaters hanging out around the fountain, and I just can't figure out the attraction. It seems like they just sort of mill around, as if they all have a gut feeling the fountain's got to be good for something, but they can't work out what it might be. Kind of like the opening bit with the apes in 2001. Occasionally you see someone try out a move, but it's never anything very impressive. Maybe the fountain is the beginners area or something. Beats me. I actually searched to see if I could find any mentions of the fountain in a skate context, but I couldn't find anything on the net. Maybe they call it by a different name or something. On what I'm sure is a completely unrelated note, the RACC's page on public art conservation has a photo of someone removing graffiti from the fountain.

Elsewhere on the interwebs, the Waymarking page for the fountain comes with a bunch of photos. There's at least one photo of the fountain on Picasa, and on Pbase there's a very cool detail shot of part of the thing. But all in all, there's less stuff on the net about it than I would have expected. Which, in all likelihood, means that once this post goes live, if someone searches the net for useful/interesting info about the fountain, they're likely to end up at this humble blog instead. That's the interwebs for you, I guess.