Vegas: Inside the Luxor

SF: 560 Mission Street Plaza

View Larger Map

This is the fountain in front of the JPMorgan Chase tower in San Francisco's Financial District. Apparently this spot is fairly new. You don't see a lot of quasi-public spaces like this in the city, or at least this part of the city. I suppose it's like Tokyo in that way: Land is way too expensive to devote any to things that don't produce revenue. So on the rare occasions when you do stumble across a little park or plaza or fountain or something, you're experiencing a weird form of conspicuous consumption: "Behold, puny human: We have so much money we can buy land in your city and not build on it". Or make it a playground for high-end designers and architects, as the case may be. Note that this place dates to the middle of the real estate bubble, before the wheels fell off of everything and everyone needed a taxpayer bailout.

I mean, it's owned by a monstrous too-big-to-fail conglomerated megabank, and naturally I'm going to impugn their motives and suspect the worst and generally strive for maximal cynicism. But whatever their reasons were, it still means there's a bit of open space where there otherwise wouldn't be. The local Yelp reviewers seem to like the place, for whatever that's worth.

Pettygrove Park

View Larger Map

Downtown Portland's Pettygrove Park often gets overlooked. It's in the middle of the 60's urban renewal maze that is the South Auditorium district, and it's bordered by pedestrian trails rather than streets on all sides, so you aren't likely to run across it if you don't already know it's there. It would be bordered by 2nd & 3rd Avenues, and Montgomery & Mill Streets, if any of them existed. It also doesn't help that most of the other city parks in the area come with big flashy fountains, and Pettygrove doesn't. Instead it has a cluster of grass-covered earthen mounds and a bunch of trees, and at one corner a bronze sculpture in the center of a quiet pool.

I have less of an excuse for overlooking the place, since I walk right through it on my way to and from work. And yet I've never done a post about the place. I've posted individual photos from the park here, here, and here, plus photos of the Dreamer sculpture in the park's SE corner, and a small fountain in front of an adjacent building. But that's all.

So to remedy that, here's a slideshow about the place, with the photos of it that I've uploaded over time. They aren't exactly comprehensive and mostly focus on the art (which I'm rather fond of). I seem to have never posted any photos of the mounds, which is too bad. I'm not sure what their function is here, but they do break the space up and make the park seem a lot larger than it actually is. And to me they look a lot like ancient Celtic or Kurgan burial mounds or barrows. In one of those photo posts I made a crack about either hobbits or barrow-wights living here, come to think of it. Or possibly there's an enormous hoard of Scythian gold buried somewhere around here. Or leprechauns, or a few very small dragons.

Two sides of the park are bordered by condo towers, one completed this year, another converted from a 60's high rise apartment tower. They've had mixed success moving the condos, such that the new tower is being rented out as apartments for now, at least until the real estate market improves. You'd think that it would occur to the developers to spin the neighboring park as a magical land of mystery and magic (of the upscale variety, of course) to make the place stand out in the market, but that doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone except me. In fact, it's possible the entire real estate crisis could have been avoided if only everyone had come to me for advice, for a reasonable consulting fee. Since nobody ever did that, my claim can't be easily refuted, which is convenient.

In any case, there is an amusing reality-based aspect to the place. The two sides of the park that aren't bordered by condo towers face the offices of a large health insurance company. They have signs posted outside their buildings letting everyone know it's a smoke-free campus, which I guess makes sense being a health insurer and all. But since this is a public park and not part of the campus, it effectively serves as the corporate smokers' lounge. And as such it's very, very popular. So every morning I get to walk through a bunch of sullen (and often kind of chunky) chainsmoking office drones, all of them (it seems) griping nonstop about their miserable lives and careers.

So next time your insurance claim gets denied, just know that the faceless bureaucrats who did it subsist on nothing but Snackwells, Virginia Slims, cheap gin, and Prozac. They're far less healthy than you are, and simply can't understand what you've got to complain about: "You think you're sick, huh? Let me tell you about my gout, and my dang bunions..."

Yecchhh.

SF: Bay Bridge

View Larger Map

A couple of mediocre photos of the Bay Bridge, which I wouldn't bother posting if I had any others to share. But I don't, unless you count some ancient film ones I haven't gotten around to scanning. Seriously, I really did only take these two photos you see here. But in my defense, when I took these I'd only had the new DSLR for a week or two and didn't have the hang of it yet, and I hadn't clued in that you can take a ginormous raft of photos without running out of space or juice. Although I've found that having too many photos can be a real problem too.

The Wikipedia article linked to above informs us that the bridge is officially called "The James 'Sunny Jim' Rolph Bridge". Huh. Can't imagine why that name never caught on.



Another thing I didn't realize is that there's currently no pedestrian or bike access across the bridge, although there's an ongoing discussion about maybe someday fixing that. In general, it wouldn't be very feasible to do the equivalent of my ongoing bridge project in the Bay Area. You can walk across the Golden Gate and Dumbarton bridges, and it's strictly forbidden to walk or bike the San Mateo or Richmond-San Rafael bridges, or the old abandoned Dumbarton railroad bridge for that matter. According to this page a couple more bridges in outlying areas are accessible too, but the general rule across the Bay Area is "Motorized Vehicles Only". Which is rather surprising and disappointing. Oh well.

SF: Wood & Steel

SF: Marine Firemens Union

A couple of pics of the San Francisco Marine Firemens Union building, at 240 2nd St.

The union has a website here -- their history page is very detailed and interesting. The sad thing many people don't realize is that modern commercial shipping almost always relies on cheap labor from places like Bangladesh and the Philippines, and there are very few US jobs in the industry anymore, union or otherwise. Going by the wage tables at the union site, it looks like many of the remaining jobs involve government contract work, where using US labor is required by law. For a poignant and fascinating look at what remains of the industry (circa 1990), you'll want to read John McPhee's Looking for a Ship, which is a good read even if you have zero interest in this sort of thing.

This beautiful Art Deco union hall harks back to an earlier age, before the jobs literally went overseas. If I was in this union, the building would make me proud and sad at the same time. It appears they now share the space with a few other unions, including IATSE Local 16 (mostly the TV & movie industry) and CWA Local 9410 (mostly ex-Bell System telcos).

My passing involvement with another branch of the latter union is mentioned, a bit, here, although the body of the post is mostly just griping about the company, which doesn't seem as interesting now as when I wrote it. That was written over a decade ago, so maybe I was just more excitable way back then, I dunno.

pile

A few photos of "Pile", one of the new public artworks on the revamped transit mall in downtown Portland. I'm not sure how I feel about this one. It's kind of whimsical, and isn't overly large (which is nice, for a change). The bit with the crow standing on the pigeon's face is a little odd, but I suppose that's one of those things where you're an uncultured mouth-breathing barbarian if you spend too much time trying to figure out what (if anything) it's supposed to mean. So I'll just speculate that it may work better in a gallery setting than it does on city streets. Which isn't a bad thing, necessarily.



The artist's website shows a few of her other works, as does the local gallery representing her. And here are two articles on recent shows of hers. But what you really want to do is read this entertaining interview that gives a better idea of where she's coming from, with a few more photos of other works. And let me just say, the guinea pig wrecking ball is awesome.

Rooftops of San Francisco

A few photos from one of our less successful vacations, in which we learned why February is considered the off season in San Francisco, tourist-wise (i.e. it's cold and damp, just like Portland, but far more expensive), and why there are plenty of rooms available in the Financial District on weekends (i.e. everything's closed and there's surprisingly little to do.) When all else fails (which will happen sooner or later), you can always fall back on taking photos from your hotel window, which is where these came from.



I have a complicated relationship with San Francisco. Or it might be more accurate to say the city has a complicated relationship with me. When I'm there, tourists always mistake me for a local and ask me for directions. And what's worse, I can usually give them useful directions, because my sense of direction is weirdly attuned to the place. Apparently I cannot get seriously lost within city limits no matter how hard I try. I should point out that my only experience living there was when I was six years old, and we lived elsewhere in the bay area, for less than a year.

Also, during this most recent visit, we were in the museum store at SFMOMA and I noticed that they were featuring a line of wallets made by a Portland designer, and I happened to have an identical one in my back pocket. A few hours later, I was in a shop buying something, and the cashier was moved to marvel at length at my wondrous wallet. If I believed in fate, which I don't, these things would seem like signs.



In short, the city keeps beckoning to me and trying to lure me in. Which might work, if only the city didn't aggravate the hell out of me when I spend more than a day or two there. It feels like everyone you meet desperately needs to be told how extremely special and unique they are, all day, every day, everywhere you go. It rapidly gets exhausting. Apparently everyone's supposed to take a turn at this, and it mystifies people if you don't try to explain who you are and give them a chance to shower you with approval. Or pretend-approval. I'm not sure anyone can tell the difference anymore.



So I've concluded it's a relationship without a future, unless a.) I get my own personal cloaking device, so I can tolerate the locals; b.) I somehow become a multi-trillionaire, so I can afford to live there; and c.) global warming fixes the rather tragic climate, so the place might be habitable (or at least visible) during months not named "October".

Now watch me not hold my breath.



In any case, enjoy the photos...

pumice desert, crater lake

View Larger Map

A few more old mini-roadtrip photos, this time from the Pumice Desert area in Crater Lake National Park. As this article explains, the sparse vegetation is due to poor soil (that would be the pumice part), rather than low precipitation. So I suppose this isn't technically a real desert, although it certainly looks like one. Either way, it's quite a peculiar landscape.

Strength of America

View Larger Map

At the corner of 35th & Belmont, in inner SE Portland, is an old historic fire station that now serves as a firefighting museum. On the streetcorner in front of the museum is this monumentally craptacular statue called "Strength of America", which is supposed to be a 9/11 memorial. You didn't realize we already had one of those, did you?

Portland Public Art describes it with an extra helping of snark:

As a nation we’ll look back on our response to 9/11 in a decade with chagrin, I expect. So many decisions made from fear instead of facts; and some of these were aesthetic as well.

This Doc Savage mock up has his hands full, holding an enormous snake with one hand, and a kerosene lamp in the other. Adjoining him is a US flag and an eagle, wings out swept. For some reason he is shirtless, dressed in jeans and tiny work boots. Surrounding the base are roughed Plexi blocks with names of people killed on 9/11, and the lord’s prayer written in childish script and signed by Caswell.

It’s a blink and a silent WTF? Damn, you’ll say, that’s incongruous for Sunnyside. Then you’ll shift it into the context of 9/11 and list it within that long list of other bad decisions our nation made afterward, we as individuals made.

One quick quibble with that: The words in childish script are actually not the Lord's Prayer, they're lyrics to "God Bless America". You know, the song Kate Smith used to sing before every Flyers riot, er, game.

Nitpicking aside, it really is a very weird statue. Note how it entertains fanciful notions about male anatomy. Look at that moobage, with man-nipples an inch or so too low. And the abs, which stretch all the way up to the moobage, with no intervening rib cage or anything. And the hands, oddly long and skinny fingers all about the same length.

The snake's cool though. I think the snake's supposed to symbolize the Evildoers, slithering about and deviously doing evil with their Weapons of Mass Constriction. Or something. Whatever it represents, the man-n-snake combo invites comparison with other person-n-snake-themed artworks down through the ages -- "Laocoön and His Sons", for example, and who can forget the famous Nastassja Kinski photo with the python?.

The eagle's not terrible either, although it's kind of smiling, which is weird. And it's stealing our hero's flag, which eagles aren't known to do in the wild. Maybe if you took the flag, dunked it in fish innards, and wrapped it around a live salmon, then eagles might take a professional interest. Although then you've defiled the flag and you're supposed to burn it, because them's the rules, fish innards and all, and that would really smell. So let's just agree that the bit with the eagle isn't modeled on real life.

Call me a minimalist if you like, but all in all I think the memorial would've been more effective with just the rubble and the fire helmet, and maybe the tablets with the names.

One thing that surprised me is the size of the thing. The photos I saw made it look bigger than it actually is. In reality it's only maybe 2/3 or 3/4 life size, if that, and like all the other photos I've seen of it, my photos fail to convey this small scale. I'm actually kind of disappointed by the whole thing. With subject matter like this, you naturally expect something a bit more imposing. If the scale matched the sheer melodrama of the thing, our hero here ought to be Paul Bunyan's big brother, and the flag-thieving eagle should be about pterodactyl-sized, and the whole thing would constantly play patriotic country-western songs at 120 decibels. Except on Sundays, obviously.

Based on my limited and biased experience in this area, I'm working on a set of guidelines to help you, the Gentle Reader, determine whether something constitutes Bad Art. Here are the rules so far, as they apply to statues. Abstract art will likely need its own set of guidelines.

• If a statue is painted, it's Bad Art. It's a sign the sculptor wasn't talented enough to get the point across with mere sculpture, and had to layer on a little paint-by-numbers to make the thing work.
• If it's a grouping with more than one person, it's often a sign of badness. In particular, if there are more people than strictly necessary, two or six when one would've done just fine, it indicates the artist doesn't know when to stop piling it on. Also, if people are depicted talking or looking at each other, that's surprisingly hard to get right. They tend to come out looking like brainless idiots, badly sculpted. Whereas if your people are working together (say, raising the flag over Iwo Jima) or just standing in a group (say, riding an elevator), often that can be fine.
• A similar situation applies when there's at least one person, plus one or more animals. Equestrian statues are an exception; they're a traditional form, and they can turn out ok. I suppose because the rider isn't typically interacting with the horse.
• It's also generally bad if one or more children is present, regardless of whatever else is there. Sculptures of children tend to turn out looking kind of weird and creepy, especially if they're smiling. Almost as creepy as 19th century painted portraits of kids, come to think of it.
• If any books are present, and their titles are visible, typically it's bad art. If you're meant to see the books (Bible, Das Kapital, Kerouac, etc.), a heavy-handed message is usually intended, and the artist wasn't able to make the art speak for itself.
• Similarly, if the art comes with a long explanatory plaque or artist's statement, it's usually bad. The art should either speak for itself, or STFU.
• If the artist bungles basic human anatomy, it's automatically bad, even if none of the other guidelines are met.
• If the art dates from before, oh.... say 1800 or so, it gets a free pass, as the product of another culture and another age.

The 1800 cutoff is needed because as it turns out, the aforementioned "Laocoön" clearly breaks the multiple-person and person-and-animal rules, and it's long been speculated that the ancient Greeks painted their statues, which would break another rule. And the two sons, well, they look maybe old enough to escape the no-kids rule. At least nobody's carrying any books. So, in short, make of these guidelines what you will.

Some people might go, wait a minute, the last time you really bashed something for being Bad Art was "The Promised Land" (the crappy pioneer sculpture in the Plaza Blocks), and like "Strength of America" it's conservative Bad Art. Isn't this Good vs. Bad yardstick just your ideological biases showing? Actually no, that's not it. Or that's not completely it anyway. I do have another Bad Art post in the works, this time about a local example of liberal bad art that just might be the most supremely craptastic statue of them all. Here in town, I mean. Any guesses?