river legend

They'll probably send me to Guantanamo for posting this. These pics are of a large sculpture in downtown Portland called "River Legend", which you've probably never seen or heard of before. This is because it's cleverly hidden around the back (2nd Avenue) side of the ultra-70's-ugly Green/Wyatt Federal Building, which faces the Plaza Blocks. The sculpture's on a raised landing behind a row of trees, and you can only see the very tip of it from the street. To see more you have to climb a steep flight of stairs, or walk around the building from the 3rd Ave. side.

Naturally, being a federal building, there are cameras everywhere. The area around the sculpture looks like it might be the designated smoking area, so that might explain what seems like an excessive number of cameras even by federal standards. I can easily see some wingnut Bush crony deciding smokers are extra-sinful and need close monitoring. Or maybe they're just worried about skateboarders. Who knows? In any case, they're bound to have video of me taking photos of the sculpture, and modern face recognition software could easily pair that up with my driver's license photo, and from there it'd be a trivial step to discover that I'm a registered Democrat and I always vote. Even though taking photos, and being a Democrat, and voting are all still legal, technically, it wouldn't surprise me if I'm now flagged as an evildoer in some shadowy government database. Even though -- and I'd just like to emphasize this -- my interest was strictly in the sculpture itself. The building appears in a couple of photos, but that's sort of unavoidable from certain interesting camera angles.

But enough about me and my probable Kafkaesque legal future. "River Legend" dates to 1976, and was created by the sculptor Dimitri Hadzi, whose website offers another photo of it. He seems to specialize in themes inspired by Greek mythology, but in this interview he indicates "River Legend" was inspired by the Indian tale of the Bridge of the Gods (the original one, not today's rather scary toll bridge). So, ok, that explains the name and the basic shape, although it looks like there's still a lot of Greek influence going on there. Well, that's what I'm getting out of it. Casual passersby, or smokers, probably just see yet another big blob of modern art. More than likely it barely registers, as it's not obviously anything in particular. Not too many people would be curious enough to check the interwebs for more info, and doing so turns out to be a bit of a chore, since the sculpture isn't even marked with its name, at least not that I saw anywhere. This little bit engraved toward the base was all I had to go on. What all those initials stand for is anyone's guess.

I can't really blame people for not being curious about the sculpture. Our fair city has more than its share of chunky 70's public art, and it all looks about the same, quite honestly. Regardless of the inspiration, or the materials used, back then everything came out big, brown, and slabby. I don't know if there's an official art world term for it, but there was definitely a look, or a movement, or school of thought at work.

So you might be wondering why I was curious. Well, as I mentioned, you can see the tip of something over all the bushes, and that bit looked sort of chunky and art-like, but tucked away in an obscure and rather forbidding location. I can't resist stuff like that, even if I'll probably pay for it later. So I suppose it isn't a very good reason, under the circumstances. Once they're waterboarding me down in Gitmo, I'll patiently explain it to them again for the umpteenth time, and they'll just assume I'm hiding my true purpose and break out the electrodes or something.

It's not entirely accurate to call "River Legend" big, brown, and slabby. Big and slabby, definitely, but its exact color is giving me trouble. The thing's made of basalt, the same volcanic stuff most of our fair state is made of, and I've always sort of thought of basalt as a flat dark grey color, but the more I look at it, the less sure I am. I spent a great deal of time in GIMP tweaking these photos, compensating for my digital camera's auto-overexposure misfeature, bringing out colors, etc., which turns out to be harder than you might think. At this point I'm not entirely sure what color it is, or if it has any particular color at all, or it all depends on the quality and angle of light you've got at the moment. So I just sort of tried to use my best judgment and hope the outcome doesn't look too cartoony or amateurish. Personally I'm inclined to blame the rock, for making things far more difficult than they needed to be. Maybe I should've just bailed on the color business and converted the pics to black & white or something. Hmm. I wish I'd thought of that before.

Whatever color or colors the thing is, it does have an interesting texture in parts, and a little Unsharp Mask action really brings it out.

No "dig a little deeper" post of mine would be complete without a pseudorandom fact dump. So here are a few tidbits related to the sculpture:

• The Smithsonian owns a maquette for "River Legend".
• A gallery shows a small version of the sculpture here.
• Hadzi's other commission for the GSA is located in Alabama.
• Locally, he's also got a piece in Eugene.
• Hadzi also created monumental doors for a Protestant church in Italy, a fact which gets a quick mention in an interesting recent obit out of Seattle.

So, ok, those aren't the most enthralling bits of trivia I've ever come up with, but unless you want me to start simply making stuff up, it'll have to do. I suppose I could try to start a legend that walking under it is good luck, or possibly bad luck, or maybe a bit of both, or not. It's not a very good legend, is it? Oh, well. I tried.

reflected lamp

More kitchen table photos. I think these turned out rather OK, for once.

Ingredients: 1 table lamp, 1 glass of water, 1 camera, 1 easily amused photo dork.

Only in Portland!? Seriously!?

So I did a very minor good deed yesterday, and now I'm pissed off about it. Let me explain. I got on the bus last night after work just as a woman got off, and when I sat down I noticed she'd left her gloves on the seat. I took them up to the driver, who honked and got the woman's attention, and gave the gloves back to her. Mission accomplished. So far so good. So I sat back down, and the guy across the aisle smiled and chuckled and said "Only in Portland.", in the smug, self-satisfied tone people always use when they say "Only in Portland". That's when I got annoyed.

I think the implication of "Only in Portland" is that we're fortunate to live in the only city in the entire universe where people will spare a whopping five seconds for an act of basic common decency that costs absolutely nothing. If that's true, the human race is doomed. "Only in Portland" is crazy talk. You can only honestly believe it if you've never traveled much outside of here. There are, believe it or not, nice people to be found outside our city limits. Honest. I suspect most people know this, deep down, but say "Only in Portland" anyway because it reinforces our collective smug tribal identity. Either way, it's idiotic and I don't want any part of it.

"Only in Portland" also suggests everyone here does what I did yesterday, which again is untrue. Like, duh. If it was true, nobody would think it worth remarking on when it happened. Which would be nice, really. Oh, and I ought to point out that the asshat across the aisle, Mr. Only In Portland himself, didn't budge a single inch or lift a single freaking finger to get those gloves returned. He had to have seen the gloves, yet he sat there and did nothing. Apparently he still gets equal credit, though, just for living in the same city as me. I dunno why. It wasn't Portland that gave those gloves back, it was me, dammit. I'm not saying this because I want mad props for it. As I said, it was a very minor thing, and I'd rather it had passed entirely unremarked-upon. But if you really, absolutely, must say something, is it so hard to say "That was a nice thing you just did", without any tribal-identity nonsense? Is that really so impossible? I don't see how the city has anything to do with it. If I was in Detroit, or London, or Cairo and saw someone misplace a pair of gloves, I'd do exactly the same thing, and so would a lot of people. And, you know, I probably wouldn't get a smug "Only in Detroit" for my trouble.

Feh.

misc. photomisc

Mt. Hood from Washington Park, your basic classic tourist photo.




Another sign of fall: It's winged ant season. I didn't squash this guy -- it's the one fleeting moment of glory available for male ants, so I figured I'd let him have his day, for all the good it's going to do him.





A couple of sunset photos from a few days ago.




Spooky, mysterious Kelly Butte lurking in the fog, near SE 82nd & Powell.




At the streetcar stop @ 21st & Lovejoy. Or was it 19th & Lovejoy?





Yet another sign of fall: Attractive but inedible fruit.








A few assorted photos from my mini-roadtrip back in June. These are from Hart Mountain again. The first two from the road there, and the third from the ranger station up top.




And finally, a seagull in Old Town.

tourist telescope digiscoping

So this is what it looks like when you put a quarter in a tourist telescope and hold your digicam up to the eyepiece. These are from the Vista House out in the Gorge. Top one's Beacon Rock, and the other shows some cliffs on the Oregon side of the river.

Doing this isn't a terribly original idea. Here's a post where someone else did it, with (IMHO) better results.

The technical term for this is "digiscoping". I've tried it before with a telescope I have at home, with very little success. I finally broke down the other day and ordered a T-mount adapter so I can hook a "real" camera up to the thing, just in time for the rainy (i.e. starless) season. Impeccable timing is maybe not my thing, I suppose.

fall film forays, mildly misanthropic

Some photos from the sunny days we had last week, taken with that vintage film SLR I've been playing with lately. One unfortunate thing I've noticed with this camera is that people see it and want to talk to you. I don't like talking to strangers very much even in the best of times, and I'm even more antisocial when I'm friggin' busy. I don't know what it is that draws 'em. I had a guy ask me, in all seriousness, how I managed to take pictures while it's windy. What made this a stupid question is that I was taking pics of Rusting Chunks #5 at the time, which is made of the finest Cor-Ten steel and must weigh several tons at least. Possibly it wouldn't remain perfectly still during a tornado, but we don't get those very often here.

So you get a few stupid questions, but you get even more people who want to be helpful and won't take no for an answer. They assume you're a tourist and they want to make a new friend. They rattle off a list of things you need to go take photos of while you're here. The Grotto is always a big favorite among these people for some reason. (I'm probably not going to take their advice, either, because religion creeps me out.) So, OK, it's not totally unreasonable to see a camera and think "tourist", but one time I mentioned to someone that I'd lived here for close to 30 years, and it didn't even slow him down. Grotto this, Rose Garden that, blah blah Pittock Mansion, blah blah Multnomah Falls. I wouldn't mind so much if they'd come up with something original now and then, but nooooo.

In any case, the first few pics are from Tanner Springs. Tanner Springs is a good place for photos because it's usually empty. If you do run into any locals, nearly all of them are recent transplants from California, so they probably won't try to give you "helpful" advice about Portland.





I realize the next photo is sideways, but that's how the scan came back from the photo lab. I must've made it too abstract and they couldn't tell which way was up. After looking at it for a bit, I decided I kind of liked this little accident and left it the way it was.

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And now a few from Washington Park.



This next photo required a bit of work. It was a sunny day, and some guy was hanging around the Chiming Fountain you see here, waylaying passers-by and chatting them up. I kept a safe distance and waited for Mr. Friendly to leave, and he just wouldn't leave, dammit. I thought I had a good shot and took it, and just as I did he saw me and waved and wanted to make a new friend or ask stupid questions about my camera or something. Luckily I was around 30 or 40 feet away, so I acted like I didn't realize he was talking to me and wandered off.

Then when I got the photos back I noticed Mr. Friendly had wandered into the frame, the bastard. So I loaded the photo into GIMP and erased him. That was quite enjoyable.

It's not the first time I've erased people out of photos before posting them. I like to think I'm just being considerate, since I don't really like taking photos of people without their permission and posting them on the interwebs. While it's apparently legal to do so, I'm not comfortable with the idea and I generally just sort of don't want to. I think I'd make a really poor street photographer, in the unlikely event I ever felt like giving it a try.

Besides, people don't know how to hold still, dammit, and they whine and complain if they don't like how your photos of 'em came out. Even if they really are that ugly in real life, they still feel it's still your fault somehow. So I think I'll stick to flowers and waterfalls and stuff, thanks.

pinecone

A few days ago I promised to post some pinecone macro photos, and here they are, for good or ill.

Generally speaking you're supposed to have the lens stopped wayyyy down so you get adequate depth of field this close. But if you do that, you need to compensate by pouring mass quantities of light onto the doodad you're photographing, and I just don't have that kind of lighting gear at my disposal. If you leave the lens at a wider aperture you'll get the dreamy sort of effect you see in the top photo. I really like this effect, actually.

double overlook

A few more photos from the eastern Columbia Gorge. First a few from the Rowena overlook, just across the street from the Tom McCall Preserve.

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And a few from the Memaloose overlook, a few miles further west.

The McCall Preserve at Rowena

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A few photos from the Nature Conservancy's Tom McCall Preserve at Rowena, out in the east end of the Columbia Gorge. This may be my favorite spot in the Gorge. It may be one of my favorite spots, period, but explaining why is difficult. I don't think I've ever convinced anyone. I could go on about the wind in the grass, sheer basalt cliffs, and so forth, but most of eastern Oregon is basically like that. There's something else I can't put my finger on. I don't mean that in a mystical mumbo-jumbo sense. It just means it's something I haven't figured out just yet. If it comes to me, I'll let you know.

So for now I'll proceed under the assumption I haven't convinced you. And really I'm not sure I want to convince too many people about the place. Present company excepted, of course. Feel free to visit, O Gentle Reader(s), but don't tell anyone else about it. They'll all show up at once and ruin the silence and desolation. They'll probably stand around with their cellphones yakking to their brokers, or whine that there's no Starbucks nearby, or drive all over everything in their gigantic SUVs, or demand guardrails for the protection of small children and large dogs. They'll ruin everything. In short, it's best to take a Tom McCall sort of attitude about the place.

So the preserve is a desert plateau high above the Columbia River, pretty much the last place you'd expect to find a wetland area. But the preserve hosts a couple of small ponds, with frogs, lilypads, trees, the whole works. You can see one of them in the top photo, right above the cliff. Here are a few closeups of one, including a couple of infrared pics.

One of the many trails around the plateau. Here's a decent page about hiking the area, although I'm not sure that's necessary. It's hard to get lost here, being mostly flat and treeless. But if you do, the plateau's surrounded by cliffs on three sides, roughly, so there's only one way on or off. In the worst case, you could just find any cliff and do a wall follower algorithm and you'll get back to the entrance eventually, probably.

When you do see people discussing the McCall Preserve, it's often about spring wildflowers. I've never actually visited when the plateau was in bloom; there were a few tiny blue ones being whipped around in the wind, but that was it. I've seen some photos, though, and I think I may have to go check the place out in April or so. A few good wildflower galleries can be found here, here, and here.

Looking southwest, with the tip of Mt. Hood in the distance.

The road past the preserve is an eastern bit of the old Gorge Highway, and it crosses over a narrow part of the Rowena Dell on another of those great, photogenic bridges they built back then. I don't want to sound like one of those old coots who insist everything was better back in the Good Old Days, because that would be stupid. I'm sure modern bridges are built to a high standard of technical excellence and so forth. They just aren't as photogenic, generally speaking.