Hoover Dam

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Photos of Hoover Dam, taken several years ago before the new bridge opened. I took these earlier on the same day I went to Red Rock Canyon, over on the other side of Vegas, and failed to take any photos of the city itself. In any case, the dam looks kind of cool in an Art Deco sort of way, and the hydropower keeps the lights on in Vegas, although the dam's turned out to be not so fabulous from an environmental standpoint.

As with Red Rocks, I'm pretty sure I need to go back and take some photos with a Real Camera, and in this case I also need photos of the bridge. And by "need", I mean it would be a logical extension of this weird ongoing photoblog hobby I've ended up with.

Borrego Palm Canyon

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Some photos of Borrego Palm Canyon, part of California's enormous Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. The surrounding area is nothing but dry, barren rocky hills, and then you come to this one little canyon with a stream running through it, its banks lined with palm trees, and it's shady and relatively cool. It's quite a pleasant oasis, even when it's full of tourists. Which it often is since there's a state park campground and a large parking lot nearby. Despite all that, it still kind of feels like you've stumbled across a secret oasis in the desert.

These are California fan palm trees, the only palm species native to the western USA. Palm trees are iconic in Southern California, but ornamental palm trees are often imports like the Canary Island date palm. Even California's native palm species isn't indigenous to the Los Angeles area; several years ago the city council decided that ornamental palm trees are undesirable, and the city plans to replace most of them with other trees that provide more shade and less mess. Except for major tourist areas, of course, because tourists demand palm trees.

Red Rock Canyon

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A few photos from Red Rock Canyon, at the western edge of suburban Las Vegas. This is the dramatic and colorful bit of rugged scenery you often see while flying in to McCarran. These photos, though, were taken the first time I visited Vegas, while travelling on a sort of hippie tour bus, which seemed like a great idea at the time. I was a bit self-righteous back then and turned up my nose at Vegas itself -- an opinion I've long since been cured of -- and I took no photos of the city. In retrospect I wish I'd done that, since the place has changed dramatically since the early 1990s, and it's be fun to see what it used to be like. But hey, those were the days of film photography, 36 shots per roll at best, and I wasn't exactly rolling in dough at the time.

In any case, the tour bus spent an afternoon here and we hiked around a bit. My recollection is that the place was more interesting to photograph than it was to hike at. I keep meaning to go back with a Real Camera, but I somehow haven't gotten around to it yet. The Clark County bus system ends just short of Red Rock Canyon, and I never seem to end up renting a car when I'm in town. So maybe next time. Still, I think a few of these shots turned out ok even though I had a lame camera and had no idea what I was doing. Most of the credit here goes to the scenery, not to me.

Wupatki

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A few old photos from Wupatki National Monument, which protects a number of pueblo ruins just south of the Grand Canyon. When I visited, I was amazed by how well-preserved the ruins were; only later did I find out that some parts really were intact, and others had been reconstructed in the early 20th century. So I'm not entirely sure what we're looking at here.

There weren't a lot of other visitors while I was there; at one point, it was just myself and an older lady of a New Agey sort of persuasion. We chatted briefly, but it was obvious we were each getting something entirely different from being here. She said the ruins were a "power center", or something along those lines. I recall saying something inarticulate about the incredible age of the buildings and how well they were constructed. Which is pretty much what I'd say now, come to think of it. I mean, most of these ruins were houses, and a 700 year old house is exactly as mystical (or non-mystical) as a year old house is. Pretty sure that building here didn't require any help from crystal aliens or psychic dolphins or anything.

The archaeology of the desert Southwest is not really my forte, so rather than trying to explain the history of the place, let me just pass along a few links if you'd like to learn more about it. Several of these pages are hosted at Northern Arizona University, which is just down the road in Flagstaff.

• Land Use History of North America - Colorado Plateau
• Anthropology Laboratories of Northern Arizona University
• American Southwest Virtual Museum
• A blog post from a University of Maryland undergrad geology trip to Arizona

Fog, Tehachapi Pass

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A few old photos from Tehachapi Pass, in southern California. I drove through on a cold, foggy winter day, and the effect was quite spooky. Looking at the photos I ended up with, I think I failed to capture just how spooky it was. But in my defense, this was years ago, and I had a crappy film camera. Plus I was kind of busy driving a giant Ryder truck just then. I probably shouldn't have taken any photos at all, come to think of it, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

One thing I didn't get any photos of was the famous wind farm in the pass. Giant windmills spinning silently in the fog may have been the spookiest part of the whole episode, but (as you might imagine) it was a bit windy at that point, so I had both hands firmly attached to the steering wheel, for a change.

Hanauma Bay

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Some photos from Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve, on the island of Oahu, east of Honolulu. It's a popular spot for snorkeling, which we attempted to learn by doing, with mixed success. We did have the foresight to buy a waterproof single-use camera, which is how I took the photos you see here. The camera supposedly used special film that captured underwater scenes better; I'm still not sure what that meant, since this is the only time I've heard of special underwater film. It's possible our photo processor back at home bungled the job, since even the above-water shots came out an undersea blue sort of color, which I think is the exact opposite effect from what you'd want an undersea camera to do.

This was the second time I'd been to Hanauma Bay. The previous time, when I was about 14, we were visiting relatives who lived nearby at the time. They taught us their little secret about the place, which was that the bay's fish absolutely loved eating frozen peas. We brought several bags of frozen peas and had a great time tossing them in the water, creating a feeding frenzy we were standing right in the middle of. This practice, and any other fish-feeding secrets you might come across, are now highly illegal, and rightly so. So just don't.

Gentle Reader(s) of roughly my parents' age may remember Hanauma Bay as the setting of the 1961 Elvis Presley film "Blue Hawaii":

Since our attempt at snorkeling-by-guessing didn't go so well, most of these photos were taken by sticking the camera underwater and hoping it was pointed at a fish or two. This worked out ok surprisingly often, but not always. I've included a few shots of nothing but blue water, on the idea (or hope) that they might count as cool and abstract rather than crappy. I've studied just enough art theory that I can no longer reliably distinguish between the two, so I figured I'd toss them out there in case it turns out they don't totally suck.

Cedar Mill Falls

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A slideshow from Cedar Mill Falls, a small-ish waterfall (roughly 32 feet high) cleverly concealed in Portland's western suburbs, at the intersection of NW 119th Avenue & Cornell. Cornell crosses Cedar Mill Creek just east of that intersection, and the falls are right on the south side of Cornell. These photos were taken from the sidewalk on Cornell, if that gives you any idea. Yet somehow the falls aren't visible when you're driving by on Cornell. I've done that fairly regularly for a long time, and I never knew there was a waterfall here until I stumbled across it in someone's database of northwest waterfalls. Initially I was skeptical, since I've seen the gentle ripples at Marshall Park described as waterfalls too, which is quite an exaggeration. The land's only been under public ownership since 2005 or so, and improvements for public access are only just starting to happen, which is probably why the place has such a low profile.

There's a boardwalk under construction which should eventually give a closer view of the falls. I can't find a current ETA on when it's supposed to be open; it's been delayed for years due to various permit tangles and financial issues and so forth, so they may have just stopped announcing completion dates at this point. It looks nearly done though, so I can't imagine it will be longer than next spring or so.

Just west of the falls is the historic 1869 house of John Quincy Adams Young, who built a cedar mill at this location, thus naming the area, as well as the creek and the waterfall. The house needs restoration and isn't open to the public yet, so there isn't a lot to see. Even in its current state, it's still kind of fascinating to see this one single pioneer-era house sandwiched in among contemporary parking lots and subdivisions and chain stores.

The creek passes under Cornell on what's marked as the "Larry Vincent Memorial Bridge". A 1981 Oregonian article tells the story: Vincent was 15 and a promising middle school cross country runner when he died in a truck accident in Eastern Oregon. His father, a landscape architect, was already involved in pedestrian improvements to the Cedar Mill neighborhood. After his son's death, he designed the footbridge at the falls as a living memorial to his son.

What Cedar Mill Falls lacks in sheer size it makes up for in convenience. The weather in the Columbia Gorge tends to be really awful in the winter, and it's kind of a long drive even when the weather's nice. In contrast, Cedar Mill Falls is right on a main road, in an inner suburban part of town. There's a church parking lot just west of the Young house. I parked there, briefly, while taking these photos. I didn't see any signs threatening to tow people who weren't there on church business, so you may be ok parking there too. Alternately, there are TriMet bus stops right at the intersection with NW 119th, so you could just take bus 47 or 48 to the falls if you prefer. The eastbound stop has Stop ID #1200, and the westbound one is #1201, if that helps at all.

Bunker HIll Monument

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Photos of, and from, the Bunker Hill Monument, in the historic Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, across the Charles River from downtown. I'd wandered across the river to see the USS Constitution, and decided I'd take in the Bunker Hill Monument while I was in the area. I was mostly interested in taking photos from an elevated location so I'd have some semi-panoramic shots of the city, and I'm surprised how few pics I took of the outside of the monument. It's your basic obelisk, along the lines of the Washington Monument, but it's a bit shorter and wider and projects a sense of extreme solidness. I don't know if that was intended to represent the spirit of the hill's doomed defenders, but it succeeds in doing that.

For those of you who slept through Revolutionary War trivia, this spot, the site of the famous battle, is actually Breed's Hill, not nearby Bunker Hill. The confusion started almost immediately and there's no disentangling it now. I just thought I'd pass this bit of trivia along because it's a favorite of annoying history pedants, and now you're either armed against such people, or armed to become one of them, whichever you prefer.

Honestly though, I'm more intrigued by the engineering aspects of the monument than about the battle it commemorates. It was completed in 1843, less than 70 years after the battle, which -- speaking as a West Coast native here -- makes it absurdly old for what it is. One of the nation's first railroads was constructed just to transport the monument's huge granite blocks. Inside, there's a 294 step spiral staircase to the top, which like the exterior gives a feeling of extreme solidness. In that respect the contrast with Oregon's Astoria Column couldn't be greater. I was embarrassingly tired once I reached the top. The windows aren't that great, but I got the photos I came for. Eventually I took the stairs back down, which was obviously a lot easier, and wandered off to find the nearest brewpub, which Boston has a few of. Mmmm... beer...

Terry Schrunk Plaza

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An accumulation of photos from Terry Schrunk Plaza, on 3rd avenue downtown across from the federal building. It's next door to the Plaza Blocks (Chapman and Lownsdale Squares) and looks like just another city park. But it turns out to be federal property, as it sits on top of the federal building's parking garage. More precisely, the park belongs to the General Services Administration's Public Buildings Service, and it's policed by the Federal Protective Service, part of the Homeland Security department. It would be interesting to see a list of GSA-run parks across the country, but so far I haven't encountered one.

The city vs. federal distinction usually doesn't matter a lot, but it came up during last year's Occupy Portland protests. The city temporarily tolerated campers in the two Plaza Blocks, but the feds absolutely prohibited anyone from camping overnight in Terry Schrunk Plaza, and people who tried were swiftly evicted.

This is a role reversal from the late, lamented pre-9/11 era, when the park was actually a favored spot for political rallies and marches. I'm not sure whether that was due to more lenient federal rules about protests, or just because the park's bowl amphitheater was a good place for speakers with megaphones.

The city vs. federal confusion is furthered by the fact that the park's named for a Portland mayor. And not just any mayor, but one who was investigated (but never indicted) by the feds on corruption charges. I suppose this is the sort of thing one does in this city, purely for the irony points.

The park also contains a display from Suzhou, China, a Portland sister city, which features a large Taihu rock. Prior to the rock's arrival, the park used to host the city's Liberty Bell replica, which now sits at the 4th Avenue entrance to city hall, just across the street. Incidentally, the current bell replaces a previous one that was destroyed in the still-unsolved 1970 Liberty Bell bombing.

Of a more Federal nature, the park has a very small plaque honoring Vietnam veterans, erected in 1974 when putting up a memorial of any size would have been rather unpopular here. (Although that was the same year the Hollywood District's veterans memorial flagpole went up.) There's also an Oklahoma City bombing memorial inscribed on stone from the Murrah federal building, and a very small memorial along with a tree honoring a few federal law enforcement officers who died in the line of duty.

The park actually opened in 1975, so I'm not sure whether the Vietnam plaque was moved from somewhere else, or whether it was added during construction. The Oregonian published an artist's conception for "Federal Plaza" as early as 1972, so it's possible there were construction delays. According to that image, even though it was the 1970s, and it certainly looks the part, the park's amphitheater was never intended to serve as a groovy federal jacuzzi. Although that's an urban legend I'd really like to spread around, if you feel like helping me out here. The park got its first big test less than a year after opening when it hosted a huge (for the time) Jimmy Carter campaign rally.

A very utilitarian sign gives the official name as "Terry Schrunk Federal Plaza", and instructs the viewer to contact Homeland Security's "Denver MegaCenter" about any security concerns. That page insists said MegaCenter is simply an alarm-monitoring facility. Maybe that's really all it is, and they picked a strange Orwellian-sounding name just because someone thought it sounded cool. Maybe if your project doesn't sound scary it doesn't get funded. Dunno.

On a more cheerful note, the park does have some great flowers in the springtime. The area around the amphitheater includes a stand of flowering cherry trees, and the southern end of the park is full of enormous rhododendron and azalea bushes. I have a few photos of each here, and I'm fairly certain that a lot of photos posted under artsy yet generic names like "azaleas (white)" or "april rhododendrons (iii)" were actually taken here, but I only took close ups and neglected to keep track of where they were from. Oh well. If I take more next year and remember where they're from, and upload them to the right Flickr photoset, they'll automatically show up in the slideshow you see above. Unless you're an iOS user or otherwise don't have Flash installed for some reason, in which case you're out of luck, at least until Flickr's Yahoo overlords catch wind of this shiny new HTML5 thing the cool kids keep talking about. That may take years, and then I'd probably have to go back and fix all the slideshows in all my old posts, which could take additional months depending on how motivated I'm feeling about it.

Pics: Downtown Tacoma

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A set of photos from downtown Tacoma, WA, which is full of old, historic, and often empty buildings. I took these photos several years ago and uploaded the set a while back, but never got around to creating a post around them. In large part this is because I don't know anything about any of the buildings you see here. I actually spent much of my childhood in Federal Way, just north of Tacoma, but as far as I can recall we never went anywhere near Tacoma's downtown. Nor do I recall going there at any point between then and the day I showed up with a digital camera. Nothing looked remotely familiar when I stopped by, which is actually a pretty reliable indicator. In any case, the first couple of links above have some info about the city's historic buildings, so you might want to follow those if you see anything interesting in the slideshow here.

There's one other structure I'd like to mention here, which isn't pictured because the city never managed to build it. Back in the mid-1990s, a pair of Russian "paper architects" were asked to design a pedestrian bridge connecting downtown Tacoma with the waterfront, far below. They came up with a fanciful wooden pier-like structure that quickly became a cause celebré in town. Which, unfortunately, was not the same thing as having actual funding for the project. It was around this time that the Portland Art Museum hosted a show of their designs, Brodsky & Utkin: Paper Architecture in a Real World. Based on those designs it's hard to say how realistic, by which I mean buildable under the usual laws of physics, their Tacoma proposal may have been. Was still a cool idea though.

Sculpture Stage

Photos of Sculpture Stage, the stainless steel wall thingy in Waterfront Park, near the Saturday Market canopy & the new Naito Fountain. If you're like me, you may not have realized it's supposed to be art at all. It's by the same guy behind Land Form in Lair Hill Park. Both pieces date to about the same era, although there isn't an obvious resemblance between the two. For more about all that, I'll just point you to a snarky Portland Public Art post about the guy's various works around town.

None of the links above mention this, but the piece adorns an outer wall of an old (but still operating) sewage pumping station. The station is in the middle of an inconveniently well-touristed area, so there's kind of a social convention to not see it and to pretend it's not there. You'd think the arts community would be less squeamish about this sort of thing, but it's still Portland, after all, not Paris, and the oddest things make us squeamish.

Ya - Wa

Some photos of Ya-Wa, the sculpture at the entrance to the ODS Tower in downtown Portland. It's the pair of dead trees shackled to the building on both sides of the front door. Looks inspiring, huh?

I mentioned this one briefly, without photos, in a post wayyy back in January 2006, on a day I was feeling a bit snarky. This was apparently before the thing had been given a name, or at least before I knew what the name was:

"Untitled", at the ODS Tower, in which Judy Pfaff went all Abu Ghraib on a poor innocent tree. This is the best pic I could find. Most pics of the ODS Tower don't show the tree, and for good reason. Depressing and authoritarian as anything you've ever seen. Manages to surpass the "best" works of the most hardcore 60's brutalists, and gets extra brutalism points for incorporating an actual dead organism, instead of just working in grey concrete and rusting steel like in the old days. Someone should convince Dick Cheney to buy this thing and take it off our hands. It's right up his alley. On top of everything else, the artist couldn't even think of a name for the thing.

The name now is just an indian phrase for "there it is", which is barely a name if you ask me. Anyway, I'm not sure I'd be quite that harsh about it today; it's just art, and it's not even publicly-funded art, and I'm also not an ODS customer. So the only real stake I have in the matter is that my office is nearby, and I have to look at Ya-Wa a lot, and it depresses me. A brief mention of the piece in a post at Portland Public Art seems to blame the site rather than the art itself. I can see a reasonable argument there; the ODS Tower (sometimes nicknamed the "Odious Tower") is a seriously unimpressive chunk of architecture. And the other works featured on the artist's website aren't bad. So sure, I'm willing to spread the blame around a bit. Still don't like it though, regardless of whose fault it is.

Friendship Circle

Some photos of Friendship Circle, the sculpture at the far north end of Portland's Waterfront Park. It's yet another local piece by Lee Kelly, the guy behind Leland One (aka Rusting Chunks No. 5), this time in collaboration with a composer. The sculpture commemorates Portland's longstanding sister city relationship with Sapporo, Japan, and it (supposedly) plays a 35 minute musical piece we're told was inspired by Asian temple music. As far as I can recall I've never actually heard this music, and I've been around the thing more than a few times. So all I can really say is that multiple sources insist it does this from time to time.

If you're looking at it and thinking, jeebus, this is one phallic-looking piece of art, you'll be pleased to know you aren't alone. The blog Culture Shock compiled a list of sorta-suggestive public artworks back in 2009, and this is #2 on the list. Also listed are Pod, aka "Satan's Testicle", Tikitotmoniki from the Pearl District, and Stack Stalk reppin' for the eastside. We've probably acquired a few more of these bad boys since that post went up, given that public art commissions still mostly go to male artists.

Ascension

A couple of photos of Ascension, the series of ladder sculptures at the 1st Avenue side of Fire Station #1, near the Burnside Bridge in downtown Portland. The RACC public art database describes it:

The ladders symbolize the direct connection between the buildings, the firefighters and equipment used to protect them. Not only do they function as a symbol of the fire bureau, but also as an abstract representation of striving and accomplishment. Together the ladders and columns tell a story of the past and how the present we continue to revere such goals and achievements.

It's maybe not the most eye-catching artwork in town, and so far I haven't come across any mentions of it on the interwebs other than various maps and public art inventories. So I don't have much to pass along on that point. I did come across an interview with the artist, who explains that he got sick of dealing with bureaucracy and has moved on from seeking new public art commissions.

Curiously, an image search turned up a completely different sculpture of a ladder, titled Ascensión. This one's by the Cuban artist Ernesto Rancaño, and is covered in thorns for reasons the article about him doesn't explain. A piece at ARTslant comments about it:

Rancaño’s work also can be very aggressive. Ascension 2006 shows a white ladder with a thousand spiny protrusions that will slow, if not thwart altogether any inclination to ascend. Strangely, viewers are beckoned to climb.

Pretty sure that would never fly as a public art piece, not in this country anyway. Because lawyers. Also, concerned parents.