cyclotram

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Kvinneakt

Yep, the famous "Expose Yourself To Art" statue has finally returned to city streets, after an extended absence due to MAX construction. I posted about it when she was first removed, way back in November 2006, and at the time I speculated she might not be coming back, and might end up in the Pearl District or someone's private collection or something. It occurred to me later that she might not be asked back due to the whole nekkidness thing, so as not to alarm children and suburbanites. But here she is, and this time they've moved her to the corner of 6th and Morrison, right next to Pioneer Courthouse Square, I suppose so the tourists can find her more easily. I do wonder what would've happened if she wasn't famous, though.

The new prominent location is probably also so we can flaunt just how openminded we like to think we are. I have to say, though, that when I was taking these photos more than one person looked at me funny, like I was freakin' Larry Flynt or something. I mean, I'm used to attracting a little attention when taking photos of art downtown. The usual reaction is to look at me, puzzled, and then look at the art with a startled expression as though they'd never noticed it before, and then keep on walking. Generally I like to believe I'm performing a valuable public service by doing this, drawing people's attention to things they've walked past a zillion times without ever really looking at. Drawing people's attention to their tax dollars at work, that sort of thing. And generally I like to believe I'm entitled to massive government grants and subsidies for performing this valuable public service, although not once has anyone from city hall ever called to offer me money, the freakin' ingrates.

But in this particular case I'm not so sure. It occurred to me later that I could've played with the situation a little, talking to the statue like it was a model shoot -- you know, the usual "work it baby, yeah, that's it, a little to the right". If I was more of a ham and actually wanted the attention, that might've been entertaining, I guess.

Another idle concern is whether nekkid art affects how web-filtering services rate this humble blog. I really don't know how that works, since I don't think they explain their methods in any detail. I think it tends to involve a room full of people paid to look at photos all day and categorize them on an "I know it when I see it" basis. So it's a real crapshoot, I guess. I mean, I'm not going to refuse to cover something out of fear that people in Utah (for example) can't get to it at work. But I do think it would be kind of a shame if that happened. And think of the irony -- it would be safe for city streets, apparently, but not safe on the internet. Weird.

Anyway, it occurred to me (and I was mildly annoyed at this point) that if passers-by are going to look at me like a perv for taking these photos, I might as well get a shot of the feet, so here they are:

I haven't taken the time to gather an extensive "stuff from the interwebs" section this time, and there does seem to be less out there about it than you'd expect. Here are the few items I've cobbled together:

The recent remake of the classic poster, this time starring the Vera Katz statue on the Eastbank Esplanade.
three Flickr photos
two articles mentioning her in passing.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Capitalism (the fountain)

View Larger Map

A few photos of the Capitalism fountain at the Lloyd Center mall, near the corner of NE 9th & Multnomah, just outside the Nordstrom store. The Smithsonian's art inventory page for it is here, and the artist who created it has a website here, although it doesn't seem to mention this fountain anywhere.

The fountain / sculpture was installed in 1991 when the mall was completely renovated, but in spirit it couldn't be more 80's, all postmodern and money-mad and pompous and giddy all at once. It's a real period piece, in its own way similar to the groovy 70's abstract whatzits scattered around the downtown transit mall. If you stare at it too long, music starts to run through your head: "Li-ving-in-a-ma-te-ri-al-world, Li-ving-in-a-ma-te-ri-al-world", and so on. Or maybe that was just my iPod. Sometimes it can be hard to tell. Here's the song, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about.

I'm finding it hard to do my usual schtick and play amateur art critic about the fountain, since it's such an utterly 80's artifact. It would be like debating whether Nagel prints are good or bad art. The fountain just isn't amenable to this sort of question.

The Lloyd Center mall first opened in 1960 as an open-air shopping center (which has always puzzled me, since I've never heard that the climate was better here back then). It's hard to tell by looking at it now, due to all the renovations and updates over the years, but Lloyd Center was one of the nation's very first modern shopping malls, and when it opened it was the world's largest. Yes, the world's biggest mall, right here in little old Stumptown. In September 1960, the mall's ice rink hosted a campaign stop by then-VP Richard Nixon, who supposedly proclaimed the mall "America's answer to communism". Golly. I suppose that would be the flip side of how Moscow's vast GUM department store was supposed to be communism's answer to the West's decadent, bourgeois consumerism.

Although these excerpted remarks from Nixon's speech don't seem to include that claim, so it may or may not be precisely accurate. Either way, it makes for an interesting bit of local trivia.

And as an extra fun twist, many of the hits that come up when you search for "lloyd center" and "capitalism" are mentions of the recent Michael Moore film, which screened at one of the Lloyd Center theaters earlier this year.

Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial

View Larger Map

At the corner of NE Sandy, Thompson, and 48th Avenue, out in the Hollywood District, is Portland's Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial, a small monument with a very tall flagpole. I'd never heard of it until I ran across a brief mention of it in this brief document from the Parks Bureau, in which we learn when they did maintenance of some sort on various obscure spots around town. I was actually looking for info on the park at Hall & 14th, and the doc didn't tell me anything useful about that place, but it's full of other places I haven't covered yet. When I saw there was some sort of obscure memorial in town that I'd never heard of, I knew I had to track it down.

Or at least I started out by assuming it was obscure, since I'd never heard of it before. But as it turns out, it has a fairly prominent role once a year. Every year, Portland's Veterans Day parade winds through the Hollywood District and ends up right here, and the flagpole serves as the backdrop for speeches by various dignitaries and elected officials, generally including the mayor. This year marked the 35th edition of Portland's parade, the first coming in 1974 -- coincidentally when the Vernon Ross memorial was dedicated. As for the identity of Mr. Ross, the plaque here indicates he was the instigator of the memorial, rather than its subject as I originally assumed. The memorial itself doesn't explain who Vernon E. Ross was or why he was involved, but right across the street is the Ross Hollywood Chapel funeral home, which happens to be the longtime primary sponsor of the Veterans Day Parade. So I think that answers that question.

Updated 3/29/11: Thanks to the magic of the library's Oregonian historical archives, there are a few more details to relay. A July 12, 1974 article is titled Smallest block in city location for memorial. No, really, this spot is legally a platted city block, and it's our smallest, or at least it was in 1974. 48 square feet. The article says Ross bought the plot in part to prevent signs from being erected there. Ross also states that the plot is dedicated to the memory of Louis M. Heinrichs, a fellow World War I veteran.

A followup article on September 18, 1975 covers the donation:

Ross ... said he purchased the 7-by-15-foot piece of land for $3,200 and paid $19,000 to erect the flag memorial.

"The patriotism of our country has gone to the lowest level that it's been in our history," he told the City Council Wednesday.

Mayor Neil Goldschmidt praised Ross' efforts to improve the land as being "in the best tradition" of the city.

Ross died in November 1983. His obituary says he suffered a heart attack during the Hollywood Veterans Day Parade.

For a time the memorial was referred to by name as either "Ross Veterans Memorial" or "Ross Memorial Park", but both had fallen out of use (at least by the Oregonian) by the mid 1980s.

KATU has a short video clip of this year's parade, and there's an article with a photo slideshow at Salem-news.com, although neither piece shows the memorial.

One of the questions I often try to answer about various places is "Who owns it, and who runs it?" Ok, maybe that counts as two questions. Anyway, a few references around the net (like this one) refer to the place as the "Ross Hollywood Chapel Veterans Memorial Flag Pole", but the tiny triangle of land actually belongs to the city. Although my guess is that someone comes over from next door rather than from city hall when it's time to raise or lower the flag here, or tend to the roses. That might explain why the city barely mentions it anywhere on their website. The Parks Bureau doesn't list it in their inventory, for one thing. Also, a few years ago there was a proposal to erect a new war memorial on Mt. Tabor, and as part of the process the city compiled an extensive list of existing veterans memorials across Oregon. It mentions small monuments in the far corners of the state, but fails to mention this one. So we can assume the place isn't exactly on everyone's radar at city hall. Not that veterans monuments are the city's cup of tea, really. The monument, you may note, went up in 1974, at the tail end of Vietnam, and I wonder if it went up in part as a way of shaking a fist at the dirty hippies or something. And then the dirty hippies went on to take over the city and they've been running it ever since. Also, since January we've had a mayor who'd be quickly booted out of the military on account of being gay, and despite that it's still part of his job to put in appearances at events like this. His official blog doesn't mention the event at all, so I don't know how he felt about it, but it must've been deeply weird.

In any case, PortlandMaps knows the place as R259400, 48 square feet of land officially owned by the City Auditor's office. (Although I think that's just a way of saying it's general city-owned land not belonging to any particular department, or they just haven't bothered to record which department it belongs to.) In any case, 48 square feet is pretty tiny, but it still comes to 6912 square inches, compared to 452 square inches of Mill Ends Park. That's 15.3 times bigger. FWIW.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

an ex-tulip

Taken at Riverplace, downtown Portland, late April '09.

Also featuring a second, soon-to-be-ex tulip:

renyming and other miscellany

If a.) you read this blog on a recurring basis (unlikely) and b.) you pay attention to the man behind the curtain (more unlikely), you might notice that the green profile box on the right has changed. The big deal is that I finally dumped the annoying old "atul666" nym, after mulling it over for quite a while. I recently realized I could just change the display nym, without having to figure out how to switch Blogger accounts or anything ugly like that. So it's done, and something similar has been done on the Flickr side of the house too. Its replacement is a bit, well, generic, and at some point I may tweak it again to make it more distinctive, just in case someone ever needs to refer to me by name.

The profile image has changed too. The new photo is of a Cyclotram, a fictional but very swoopy mole machine from the 1951 SF movie "Unknown World" (and this humble blog's namesake, obviously). I've wanted to use it here in some capacity, and since I was tweaking my profile anyway, I figured I'd just make it my new profile image. Although it comes out smaller than I'd prefer this way. And now there isn't a splash of yellow-orange in the upper right corner like there was with Evil Bendy.

Another item on my TODO list has been to move with the times and update this blog to a New Blogger template. I've held off so far because I've tweaked my current template rather extensively and don't want to lose my precious, precious changes. So what I just decided to do was create a shiny new New Blogger blog and tweak it to look as much like this humble blog as I can. Once I'm happy with the result, I'll do the upgrade on the "real" blog here and use the template from the test blog. So you probably aren't interested in looking at the test blog, and I don't intend for it to ever be very interesting, but it lives over at "cyclotram beta" in case anyone's curious.

A second experiment has a more uncertain future. I've long thought that the chronological view of things that Blogger gives you isn't the most useful format sometimes. In my case, it would often be more helpful to have posts displayed on a map instead. I've attempted to create just such a map via Google Maps, known simply as the cyclotram map, but it's still not quite what I have in mind. Maintaining it is a pain, and I still haven't added all my old posts to it yet. And, more importantly, it's all backwards. By which I mean, it's a map with points plotted on it, most of which target posts here. When what I'd really like is to have the posts themselves geotagged individually, and then be able to generate a map based on that geotag data. Blogger In Draft has a geotag feature that doesn't quite work yet, and maybe an auto-generated map will be doable once they've got the geotag thing sorted out. In the meantime, enjoy the tedious gruntwork version of the map for this blog. And if you don't see an entry for somewhere that you know I've covered already, I can only say that I'll get to it later, maybe, if I feel like it at some point. I mean, I guess you could always mail me and complain and see if that helps, but I'll probably just think it's weird if someone does that.

Friday, November 13, 2009

infrapink

as seen on the interwebs

A fun thing about putting your photos under a Creative Commons license is that you never know where they'll show up out on the Series of Tubes. You don't automatically know when this happens, so it's nice when people email you about it, but that's not required. And when that doesn't happen, tracking photo usage becomes a question of Google-Fu, and maybe Bing-Fu for the sake of completeness. I admit there's an element of vanity here along with the pure idle curiosity, and as a result I sort of feel the need to share what I've dredged up, not that anyone other than myself is likely to be even remotely curious. In any case, here's what I've found so far:

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

three flagpoles

giant enemy crab

Looks more like a lobster actually, but then it wouldn't be a slightly-out-of-date interweb meme, would it?

If I was slightly more cynical, I'd announce this was the Virgin Mary (possibly wielding the little-known Holy Crab Claw of Righteousness), and let pareidolia and Fox News do the rest. And soon I would have all the money, mwhahahaha...

The Revenge of "Next Blog"...

Way back in the mists of time, Google/Blogger used to do a thing where, when someone arrived at this humble blog via the "Next Blog" button (see the very top of this page, toward the left side), you'd get a chunk of referrer info so you could see where the visitor was at just before they came here. So over time you end up with an appealingly random list of other blogs out there, things you'd probably never run across otherwise. After a while, something changed either with Blogger or possibly with Sitemeter, and the Next Blog hits eventually dried up.

So just a couple of days ago the trickle of Next Blog visitors started up again. I'll probably never know why, or why it stopped earlier for that matter. But I do have a nice new list of referrers to pass along. So without further ado, and for good or ill, here's the list so far:

Updated: Actually it turns out here's the reason. They decided to make "Next Blog" nonrandom, supposedly, although the list here seems fairly random to me. They argue the change was needed because "your randomly chosen next blog could have been focused on sports, and written in Tagalog", as if that was a bad thing. I thought the whole idea was to pull you out of your comfy corner of the interwebs and show you something completely different. I dunno. Maybe I just appreciate randomness more than most people do. In any case, here's the list:

Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )