Pics: O'Bryant Square

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Since I'm on a deadline and don't have a lot of free time at the moment, I thought I'd raid the archives again. So here are a few old photos from downtown's much-maligned O'Bryant Square.

You might notice that almost all of the photos are of flowers. Hey, that's what I had in the archives. I don't have time right now to go take a new batch of photos, or do research for a "comprehensive" post about the place. I just don't.



People seem to think of O'Bryant Square as a miniature no-go zone, full of homeless people, criminals, and junkies. In reality, there are about as many homeless there as anywhere else around downtown. And I've never seen people shooting up, or shooting each other, in all the times I've been by there. It may still happen, I guess, but I've never seen it. So I imagine it can't be as common as local mythology would suggest. The "needle park" thing may have been more true 15 years ago than it is now.



Anyway, they're planning to totally redo the place in a few years, assuming they find the money. Which is fine, I guess. It's pretty much a generic brick plaza as it is now. They don't even run the park's "Fountain for a Rose" fountain anymore. Which is a real shame, as it's kind of a cool fountain. I'd happily do a fountain post about it, if only it was operating. So my wish list for the overhaul has exactly one item on it: Either keep the fountain like it is now, or move it somewhere else that has a bit more visibility.

december sunset

Nobody really wants to be at the office on Saturday, at sunset, still trying to sort out that last stupid bug before the Deadline hits.

When your office is in downtown Portland, though, sometimes there's an upside...

Broughton Beach expedition

Sure, it's Oregon in December, but occasionally the sun comes out, and then it's time to go to the beach. So here are a few photos from Broughton Beach, which is actually a river beach on the Columbia, next to the west end of the airport. I was about to say it's not a "real" beach since it's not on the ocean. But it does have water and sand, and I think that's pretty much the dictionary definition of "beach", so I guess it counts as one. And "real" or not, it's a lot closer than the ocean, so there's that at least, and it's not all that noisy unless there's a jet taking off next door.

A 2007 Oregonian article insists you can't be a real Portlander until you've hung out here on a hot summer day. That must only be true for out-of-towners moving here.

The place is probably packed with screaming kids in the summer anyway. This morning, in contrast, I was the only person there for a while, and then a few people showed up with dogs. It seems to be a popular place for that. The long, flat Marine Drive Trail runs past Broughton Beach, so running and cycling are popular here too. Plus there's watching fireworks. And there's just hanging out on the beach, too, I guess.

This used to be a Multnomah County park, but it was handed over to Metro back in the 90's along with the boat ramp next door, and all the other Multnomah County parks.

The beach is named after one Lt. Broughton, and assistant to George Vancouver when they explored the area way back in 1792. Broughton Bluff, near Troutdale, and Broughton Landing, further upstream near Hood River, are named after the same guy.

A page about Broughton Beach at Columbia River Images mentions that it was once known as "Diddlers Beach". I can sort of understand why the name was changed. A name like that is liable to attract the wrong sort of person.

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.

700th post

So this is the 700th post for this humblest of humble blogs. In a way, I mean; that number includes a handful of posts languishing in draft folder limbo. But I'm sure I'll get around to finishing quite a few of them eventually, or not, probably.

This blog also turns 3 years old in a couple of weeks. Which comes to roughly 233 posts per year, or about one every 1.5 days, roughly. Wow. Phrased that way, it almost sounds like work. I mean, except for the money part.

I took advantage of this quasi-joyous occasion to tweak the blog template in a couple of subtly undetectable ways. The HTML header contained a number of keyword metadata fields explaining what this blog is supposedly, allegedly, about, except that I haven't changed them since the beginning of time, and as it turns out I almost never post about hockey, and it's been many moons since I've done a math post. And tagging one's blog as "anti-Bush" is finally, thankfully, mercifully passe, not that I've done a lot of political posts lately anyway. The other problem with the keyword fields is that Google sometimes substitutes them in place of actual post contents in search results, and I'm not sure which of the four fields is responsible, since I'd set them all to be identical. So I went ahead and commented all four out. I may revisit this if I get a sudden precipitous decline in readership or something. Right now, mostly I'm just happy at being able to remove "anti-Bush", finally. It felt good.

I also added a few more links to the Link Tree, things I'd been meaning to add for a while now. Several of them have linked here for a while now, like Lost Oregon and Dave Knows: Portland, so it's only fair, really, and rather overdue. My current inclination is to go through and prune out some old links as well, but I haven't gotten to that yet. And sooner or later I really ought to refresh the whole template, maybe give it a new look or something, since the current template dates back to the Old Blogger days. Seriously. It's just that the current template fits like an old shoe, and I have a bad habit of hanging on to old shoes much longer than I ought to. I'll get around to it sooner or later, for sure, probably.

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.