Running Horses

Today's stop on the occasional tour of transit mall art is Running Horses by Tom Hardy, on SW 6th Avenue near Madison. If you have a vague sense that this one isn't actually new, you're correct. The horses were commissioned as part of the original Pioneer Courthouse Square project in 1986, and were a sort of companion piece to Animals in Pools, apparently. So they've been removed from their original context here, but I'm not sure that's a problem. There probably is such a thing as too many animal sculptures in one place.

Sybilla Avery Cook's Walking Portland describes the sculpture:

Running Horses, a metal sculpture, is on the Pioneer Courthouse side of the square. Tom Hardy, a noted Oregon artist, has been designing motion-filled sculptures of stone, welded steel, and bronze for over 50 years. Portland contains many of his birds and other animal pieces. His work can be seen all over the United States; an eagle medallion he created adorns the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington D.C.

I don't usually pay very close attention to animal sculptures; I have only the vaguest recollection of where exactly Running Horses was located at Pioneer Courthouse Square. I'm fairly certain I never stopped to look at them in either location until I took the photos you see here. So it's possible I've seen any number of Hardy's other works around town and I just wouldn't know it. The only one I know of that I've seen is the heron sculpture up at Howell Territorial Park; once you know they're by the same guy, the stylistic resemblance is pretty obvious. For more info about him, OPB's Oregon Art Beat did a profile of Hardy in 2005.

Note that in several of these photos, you'll see that Running Horses is just across the street from Hilda Morris's Ring of Time (the little black onion ring-shaped thing across the street). I think it's worth crossing the street to go have a peek at, but I realize I'm not most people, and your mileage may vary.

Big Edge

More art from CityCenter in Las Vegas. This is "Big Edge", by Nancy Rubins, in the traffic circle between the Aria & Vdara hotels. It's huge and made of canoes; you can't miss it.

So why all the canoes, here, in the middle of the desert? An LA Times profile of the artist explains what's going on here. (It's complicated.) And from across the interwebs, here are photos of other similar works, in La Jolla, CA and a temporary one at Lincoln Center in New York, and various others.

a brief metablog update

Just a quick update on the ongoing renovations here at this humblest of humble blogs.

• In a step I've been alternately promising and wringing my hands about for a few years now, I've updated the Map tab here so now it does basically the right thing in almost the right way. Previously you would have seen a couple of mostly broken embedded maps, plus a few paragraphs of me griping about what was wrong with them. Now it's all different. The embedded map was created directly from an exported copy of this blog, converted to KML and then imported into Google Maps. The Map page describes the procedure in more detail and explains why it still isn't the 100% solution -- but despite the process issues this is a big improvement. You can now browse for blog posts on a map, or you can even download the KML file from the Maps page and follow my, uh, excellent adventures in Google Earth. Which looks really cool, but also points out that I really ought to get out there and travel a bit more.
  
  
• I believe I've finally upsized all the photos here to a properly modern size, 640x427 instead of clunky old 500x333. If you see a spot I missed, drop me a line or post a comment and let me know, ok?



• In the same vein, I also upsized the handful of crappy video clips I've posted here over the years. And, I dunno, a few of them look a little better now that they aren't postage stamp-sized anymore. Oh, and there's a link to my pathetic YouTube channel in the navigation bar now if anyone wants to go endure the whole schmear at once.



• I actually made a second pass through after upsizing several videos in order to move everything to YouTube's shiny new-ish IFrame-based player. The controls look slightly different, but the big advantage here is that it's not tied to Flash anymore, and iOS (i.e. iPad, iPhone, etc.) users can now enjoy the crappiness along with everyone else. So sure, I'll probably have to make a third pass through and change everything again once everyone starts using the new <video> tag in HTML 5, but that probably isn't going to happen for a while yet.



• In a similar but not quite the same vein, I thought I'd freshen up my movie posts by embedding trailers from YouTube where possible. In a number of cases it was possible to take it a step further and embed the whole movie, so I've done that in cases where it appeared that the movie had been uploaded legally by someone entitled to do so. I'm aided in this by the fact that many of the best crappy B movies were made prior to the advent of modern US copyright law in 1976, and it was quite easy for films to lapse into the public domain if the paperwork wasn't quite in order. And as this was prior to the home video era, it was generally assumed that your film's productive life was over the moment it left the theaters, so taking care of long term copyright protection was not the high priority it is now. In short, there's now a small motley assortment of cheesy movies you can watch without leaving the confines of this blog, should you care to do that.

world (first avenue)

A few photos from in front of Portland's little World Trade Center complex. The logo has this shiny map of the world, and the map reflects street scenes and so forth, so here we are.



Viewers might reasonably conclude there's some sort of social commentary at work here. I mean, it's a batch of photos of different parts of the world, and the third photo (below) even includes a ginormous police SUV looming over the Himalayas.



I didn't have anything in particular in mind, though. I really just thought it was an interesting reflective surface. Unless maybe it was all completely unconscious, in which case your guess is as good as mine. I mean, if the photos did mean something I have no idea what they're trying to say. If it's just clunky & unoriginal platitudes about globalization or cops being pigs or something, I'm going to be very disappointed.

moray, waikiki aquarium

A moray eel at the Waikiki Aquarium. I didn't make a note about what sort of moray it was, but it might be a dragon moray, Enchelycore pardalis.

dusk, waikiki

february snow, 2011 edition

As usual, all of this melted shortly after I took these. And, as usual, the office was open, and I live way too close to work to plausibly use this as an excuse to stay home. But nearly all of my meetings today were cancelled for lack of attendees other than yours truly, thus I managed to spend a big chunk of the day actually writing code for a change, so... Mission Accomplished!

yellow crocuses

More photos of the same crocuses I showed you 3 weeks ago. (The ones I posted a couple of days ago are different.) More flowers this time, but they aren't actually much bigger and many of the flowers haven't opened yet. The ones that do open promptly tip over flat on the ground as their stems can't bear the weight. I blame the lack of sunlight and warmth, although it's true that I blame many things on the lack of sunlight and warmth. I'm often right, though.



FWIW, these were taken with a vintage mid-60's German lens I found at Goodwill earlier today. (Steinheil Auto-D-Quinaron, 35/2.8, in M42 mount, if you're really curious.)

0.2 (pearl district)

As seen recently in the Pearl District. Don't be fooled by signs that say "warehouse" in this part of town; the Pearl is wall-to-wall luxury condos. Would it be overly snarky and controversial if I was to call this a little unsettling?

Anyway, I don't know what the "0.2" part means.