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If you live in Portland and have a camera, sooner or later you'll end up with a bunch of photos of downtown's uber-famous Ira Keller Fountain. Or at least that's what's happened to me.
Normally the Keller Fountain wouldn't meet my criteria for inclusion here. It's not at all obscure, certainly; it's about as non-obscure as anything in the whole city. I also don't have any particularly original insights about it. I do have some photos, though, and it's popular enough that it's not hard to find random weird stuff about it out on the net. So I figured I'd pass a few of those links along, along with a few of my old photos, and presto, voila, a new post here on this humblest of humble blogs.
That may be the secret to this blogging racket: The lower you set your standards, the easier it gets.
Special insights or not, I do love the place, especially the little behind-the-waterfall nook. They'd never put something like this in these days, for fear of homeless people sleeping back there, like anyone could sleep with all the noise, no matter how drunk they re. Or there might be perverts lurking, or evildoers doing evil, or ne'er-do-wells doing their thing, whatever that is. Or teens engaging in a bit of heavy petting after the prom, for that matter, which is of course the worst thing of all.
It seems like there's always a faint whiff of weed smoke when you walk past the fountain at night. And sometimes during the day, too.
The park was recently invaded by Imperial Stormtroopers. You know, from Star Wars. Dang, I missed it. Everyone fighting over who gets to be Vader, and when it's finally your turn you realize it smells all sweaty from the last 20 geeks who've worn it, and then it turns out you get lice or crabs or cooties or something from the costume, and you have to explain to the doctor what you were up to. And what's with the single sandperson over on the side? Do you get to be the sandperson by drawing the short straw, or the long one? I guess I just don't understand how these things work.
Also, whenever you see someone dressed as Leia, why's it always the white-robed, earmuff-haired Leia from the first movie, I mean, Episode IV? Why's it never the shiny metal bikini Leia from Episode VI? It's all wrong, I tell you.
The Mercury mentions the recent Halprin-themed TBA event. I caught a rehearsal for the Keller Fountain segment, but didn't have a camera along at the time. It was basically women in flowing white outfits, alternately wafting about the fountain, and posing, gazing into the waters in contemplation. Pretty much waft, contemplate, waft, contemplate. I realize that modern dance is high culture, and as a liberal educated sort of person I ought to like it, and sometimes I actually do, but we wandered away after maybe 10 minutes of the rehearsal. It just sort of didn't resonate with me, I guess.
KATU, or a "YouNews" contributor there, apparently never heard of the old detergent-in-the-fountain gag. The gag will never go away, because it's always funny the first time you see it, and they try it, and when they're tired of it someone else will come along and think it's hilarious, and so on.
This was probably inevitable: A VR panorama of some guys doing parkour at the fountain. Some discussion of that here and here. My wife enjoys watching parkour, and I'd probably score serious points for trying it, right up until the first injury.
Here's an awesome pinhole photo of the fountain -- but the caption claims that the park is empty on hot summer days, unlike all the other fountains in town. Weird. That's never been my experience of the place. The sun comes out, the place is packed. Possibly he's thinking of nearby Lovejoy Fountain, which *is* empty most of the time. (Shhhhh, don't tell anyone....)
