Sapporo Friendship Bell

Here are a few photos of the Sapporo Friendship Bell in front of the Oregon Convention Center. The bell marks the longstanding sister city relationship between Portland and Sapporo (the big city on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido, host city for the 1972 Winter Olympics, and namesake of a beer you may have heard of). There's a second bell that marks the sister city relationship between Portland and Ulsan, South Korea. I didn't realize the two bells had different origins at the time, so right now I only have photos of the Sapporo bell and I guess I'll need to go back for the other one at some point. Although I may hold off on that until my Drafts folder is a bit smaller.

The two bells were the focus of a brief controversy in 1990, when a local evangelical Christian group objected on First Amendment grounds, claiming the bells were a Buddhist religious symbol and should either be removed, or joined by a nativity scene. Convention center management didn't buy the argument; the bells stayed, and there's still no nativity scene. The ACLU was reported to be "looking at the case" but they don't seem to have ever filed suit over it. I can only imagine how Bill O'Reilly would have demagogued this if Fox News had existed back in 1990.

Garden Gate

Here's another object from outside the art museum: Garden Gate by longtime Portland sculptor Mel Katz. His work has appeared here a couple of times before, namely Daddy Long Legs on the transit mall, and Red, Yellow, Blue at the 200 Market building. The museum doesn't have an online collection page for Garden Gate for some reason. It might be because it's a relatively recent acquisition; it was at Portland's Laura Russo Gallery as recently as 2002. This newness means I also can't find much of anything to share about it; many search results are actually for an entirely different Katz Garden Gate located in Bend. (I was just complaining about reused titles the other day and already here's another example How annoying.)

Based on a sample size of 3 I've seen, and a few others I've seen photos of, I think I generally like his work. This clean, colorful style was apparently uncommon in Portland's mid-20th-Century art world, which generally preferred lumpy bronzes and rusty cor-ten steel whatzits. (Alhough as far as I've been able to tell, said art world consisted of at most a dozen people at any given time, so having a niche to oneself isn't really that surprising.) The Portland Public Art blog liked Garden Gate too, and that blog's anonymous author was hard to please. I suppose the takeaway here is that while I may have uninformed opinions about art, they aren't always unusual opinions. Take that however you will.

If I ever wanted to sound more informed and insider-ish, I suppose I could start adapting text from the Arty Bollocks artist's statement generator. I'm also tempted to adapt the Git manpage generator for documentation in my day job. In both cases I'm not sure anyone would notice. I'm occasionally tempted to throw together a Markov chain generator that consumes the last 8+ years of this humble blog, and see what it spits out. I'm kind of afraid to see the results of that, to be honest. An auto-generated blog post would probably start with "Here are some photos of..." and ramble on for 2-to-5 unmemorable paragraphs before ending rather abruptly. And now that I've mentioned Markov chains, I'm kind of afraid of the generator becoming self-aware, or at least of it simulating self-awareness as well as I do. Heck, as far as you know this may have happened already.

American Hop Museum

Here are a few Instagram photos from the American Hop Museum in Toppenish, WA. The town is in the middle of the Yakima Valley hop-growing region, which produces much of the world's hop supply, and the museum claims to be the only one in America dedicated to the industry. I can believe that, since Oregon's Willamette Valley is the only other big hop-growing area in the country, and I'm fairly sure we don't have a museum.

It's your basic agricultural museum, with exhibits on growing, harvesting, drying, packaging, and brewing. Lots of vintage farm equipment to look at, old displays from the state fair, vintage brewery signs and beer taps, etcetera. Oh, and there's a gift shop at the end, which sells just about every hops item you could imagine, except beer. This sort of place may bore a lot of people, but I love a good small-town museum. I'm sure it also helps if you're a fan of the end product, which I am.

I'm not sure they could legally sell beer in the gift shop even if they wanted to. It seems the town of Toppenish is also home to the Yakama Nation tribal offices, the headquarters for a reservation nearly the size of Delaware, and the Yakama tribe has had an alcohol ban in place for about the last 150 years. In 2000, citing problems with alcohol abuse, the tribe attempted to enforce the ban across the reservation, which soon led to conflict with the state attorney general. The problem here is that the reservation is a patchwork of tribal and non-tribal lands, and a majority of residents within the legal boundary are not tribal members. In 2001, the local US Attorney threw cold water on the idea, stating the ban would probably not be enforceable against non-tribal members, and apparently that was the end of the proposal, although the ban remains on the books. In any event, I suppose having a hop museum on a (legally) dry reservation is no more strange than having the Jack Daniels distillery in a dry county in Tennessee.

More recently, the tribe has also refused to recognize Initiative 502, Washington's 2012 ballot measure legalizing recreational marijuana, due to substance-abuse concerns. In January 2014, the tribe announced it would try to enforce this ban on all lands covered by the 1855 treaty with the US Government, covering about a fifth of the entire state. I'm not a lawyer, and I'm generally very sympathetic to tribal sovereignty claims, but I can't really see this idea going anywhere..

Enchanting Garden

Today's adventure takes us back to downtown Honolulu again, once again to the intersection of Bishop & King Streets. This is the heart of Honolulu's financial district, and on each corner of the intersection a big bank or insurance company has installed some prestige art. It always seems kind of silly when CEOs compete over who's got the biggest, uh, sculpture, but all things considered I'd rather have them compete over art than over how many jobs they can offshore to Bangladesh or something. In any case, I've already covered Sun Disc, Upright Motive #9, and Na Manu Nu Oli, and today's post completes the set. Enchanting Garden is yet another sculpture-fountain combo, this time outside the First Hawaiian Center office block. It's by local sculptor Satoru Abe and -- surprisingly -- only dates to 1997, same as the building itself. They really fit in with the 1960s modernist look the rest of the area has. I don't know if this was deliberate, or whether the Jet Age International Style is the local vernacular and creating more of it is just automatic at this point.

I unfortunately don't have a lot of material to share about Enchanting Garden. It seems there's an entirely different Enchanting Garden at Honolulu's McKinley High School, also by Abe but dating to 1983. They don't even look all that similar. Pretty much all the search results I can find are for the 1983 one and not the one pictured here. So artists, a plea from a humble blogger: Could you try not reusing titles? Or if you really have to, could you at least maybe number them or something? That would be great.

Thea Foss Waterway Bridges

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So here's a photo of a couple of bridges in Tacoma, neither of which is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, for once. Instead, here are the two bridges over the Thea Foss Waterway: The SR 509 bridge (1996), the cable-stayed one in the background; and the older Murray Morgan Bridge (1913), a lift-span bridge that you can't really get a good look at in this photo, unfortunately.

In most cities (i.e. those without a famous suspension bridge across town) the SR 509 bridge would be a major local landmark. At the very least it would have a proper name to it, maybe a retired mayor or influential congressman or something, but as far as I can tell this isn't officially called anything except the SR 509 cable-stayed bridge. Not long ago I rashly said something about Eastern Washington's Cable Bridge being the only cable-stayed bridge in the Northwest, other than the pedestrian one at OHSU. So yeah, I was kind of wrong about that, it turns out. It wouldn't surprise me if there are others besides the Tacoma one. I don't know of any others, but it wouldn't surprise me.

The Bridgehunter page for the Murray Morgan Bridge is livelier than usual, with reader-contributed anecdotes about it and the contentious politics of bridges versus ships in Tacoma. The Port of Tacoma occupies the low-lying tideflats where the Puyallup River flows into Commencement Bay, which is inconveniently right in the middle of the city of Tacoma. The fastest way between downtown and the Dash Point area would be on elevated bridges over the port, but that creates a height and width limit for container ships, which the port finds intolerable. In 1997 they arranged to have the outdated Blair Bridge demolished and not replaced (unless you count SR-509, which detours around the south end of the port), cutting what used to be a significant road link in the area. The nearby Hylebos Bridge reopened in 2012 after being closed for eleven years. Its drawbridge became stuck in the open position, and there was talk of demolishing it as well. Eventually the port realized the bridge was a critical evacuation route (in case of tsunamis, earthquakes, or lahars from Mt. Rainier erupting), and repairs were belatedly made.

Savannah Rapids Park, Augusta GA

Here are a few old photos of Savannah Rapids Park on the Savannah River, in suburban Augusta, GA. This is the point where the river crosses the Fall Line, and the headgates for the historic Augusta Canal are here. These photos were taken around the headgates area, although it's a fairly large park and there's more to it than this. The website mentions something about a waterfall, although I don't recall ever seeing it. If I had, I'm fairly certain I would have taken a photo or two.

The main thing I do remember is looking around for alligators. I'd heard they showed up here now and then, and there were signs warning people to please leave the alligators alone, dammit. Ok, the signs didn't say "dammit", this being the South and all, but the point was conveyed. I didn't see any gators, though, and I was both relieved and disappointed. I'd seen alligators before, during a family vacation to Florida in the mid-80s. They were swimming around in a canal at Cape Canaveral, in fact. Somehow that didn't really count because it happened in Florida, though. Anyway, I finally saw a wild non-Floridian alligator at Hunting Island, on the South Carolina coast, and somehow managed not to get any photos of it. I told coworkers about it later and they weren't that impressed. I think the best analogy is with bears in the western US: Not something you see every day, and a real nuisance when they do show up.

Going back through these old photos, I'm struck by how few photos I have of the Augusta area, despite having lived there for several years. I'm not sure why not; the old historic downtown was quite photogenic, at least if you ignored all the empty storefronts. The Augusta Canal took a very scenic route from the headgates into downtown, past historic cotton mills and under historic bridges, before petering out in weeds and neglect in a bad part of town. I haven't been back in the last decade and maybe it's changed since then, but it wasn't exactly the most economically vibrant city, other than the one week every year when it became the center of the golf universe, and the locals all left town for the duration. Savannah and Charleston had it beat in the tourism department, it was too close to Atlanta to be much of a business hub on its own, and any business that didn't gravitate to Atlanta likely ended up in Columbia or Greenville-Spartanburg, SC instead. Locals seemed to regard this with a mix of puzzlement and resignation. Grand development schemes came and went without rousing the city from its economic doldrums -- a riverfront condo tower in a city that shunned condos and avoided downtown after dark; big new history and science museums the local government couldn't afford to actually operate or maintain; minor league baseball and even hockey(!) teams that came and went; even a riverfront "Georgia Golf Hall of Fame" full of cheesy (and often vandalized) statues of famous golfers. Nothing ever seemed to pan out, and nobody could figure out why. Augusta would make a lot more sense if there was some sort of centuries-old curse on the place, a curse where nothing really terrible ever happens, but the city's forever doomed to watch enviously as nearby cities get all the goodies and it doesn't. But, as usual, Savannah and Charleston ended up with all the cool ghost stories.

Untitled, Macleay Park

NW Portland's Macleay Park is one of my favorite places in town, and I've never really done it justice here. An early blog post only covered one obscure corner of the park. I've also posted a boring video of a creek in the park, and a photo of a local slug. I've also done a post about the Thurman St. Bridge, which stretches over the park's lower entrance in dramatic fashion. Unfortunately this isn't a proper post about the place either; you might have noticed I've been doing a sort of public art thing lately, and Macleay Park is home to today's stop on this ongoing tour. The lower entrance to the park includes a meadow and group picnic area stretching out beneath the Thurman St. Bridge, and the popular hiking trail along Balch Creek begins at the far end of the meadow. In the middle of the meadow is an incongruous trio of bright red abstract sculptures, collectively known as Untitled. Their RACC page gives the rest of the story:

Three geometric abstract steel sculptures are placed in a raised landscaped area in and located directly south of the Thurman Street Bridge. In siting the work, the artist wanted the sculptures to respond both to the surrounding greenspace (thus, the bright red color) and to the broad horizontal expanse of the Thurman Street bridge (thus, the vertical nature of the sculptures). At the time the pieces were installed, Vern Luce lived near Lower MacLeay Park and selected the site both for its visual beauty and its proximity to his home.

The date on it says 1983, but the design was originally selected in 1979, and funded with a chunk of federal CETA money, along with Silver Dawn in Wallace Park, and the untitled ring whatzit in Couch Park. I've actually added a blog tag for CETA-funded art; other than Silver Dawn most of it isn't that great or memorable, and it's by people you've never heard of, and it's all in the same groovy chunky 70s style. It's not trying to communicate an environmental message, or define a neighborhood identity, or serve as a local landmark, or harmonize with its surroundings or anything like that. It just sort of exists, period, plunked down wherever the movers thought was easiest and left to confuse future generations. Or, more likely, be ignored by future generations, and marked as territory by their dogs.

Fremont Rocket

So here's a photo of Seattle's "Fremont Rocket", in the Fremont neighborhood not far from the Troll, the Lenin Statue, and Seattle's little Fremont Bridge (which is positively puny compared to ours). Fremont as a whole kind of grabs you by the lapel and demands you acknowledge its infinite quirkiness. There are even signs from the neighborhood chamber of commerce, explaining just how awesomely quirky and alternative everyone and everything is:

I will allow that Fremont (and Seattle as a whole) has an excellent marketing operation, way more slick than anything Portland could ever dream of. It's enough to make you forget this is the same city that gave the world Clippy and Kenny G.

As the story goes, this is supposedly a real, live government-surplus rocket, rescued from the facade of a defunct government surplus store. That's not quite true; it's actually a tail boom from a Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar, a twin-tailed USAF cargo plane of the 1950s, which the old surplus store had fashioned into a sort of cartoon rocketship. It would obviously be cooler if it was a real rocket, but it's not. If you want to see an actual real rocket, there are various places around the country with rockets on display. I think Seattle's Museum of Flight may have a few, but I haven't been there in many years. Rocket launches are fun too, if you ever get a chance to watch one in person.

In any case, there is sort of a space connection here. The C-119 aircraft was used for many years for midair recovery of film capsules ejected by Corona spy satellites. Seriously, that's what they used to do. Electronic camera sensors weren't advanced enough at the time, so a spy satellite would take a batch of film photos, and return them by dropping a recovery capsule with the film inside. A plane would snag the capsule's parachute in midair and reel it in, instead of having it land or splashdown somewhere where the Rooskies might find it first. The early spy satellites were publicly called "Discoverer", which was supposedly just an Air Force engineering test and research program. "Discoverer 14" was the first successful recovery, which resulted in some fun vintage newsreel footage:

white rhododendron

red tulips

new leaves

Naga Stand

Here's today's item from outside the Portland art museum, Naga Stand by James Lee Hansen, which is part of a larger series titled Guardian. If Naga Stand looks oddly familiar, you might be thinking of Hansen's Talos No. 2 and Winter Rider No. 2, both on Portland's downtown transit mall. Hansen's website includes a 1970 article about his work up to that point, with a brief and opaque description of the Guardian series:

Here we find that the first “Guardian” image--in which evolved organic masses create a cohesive environment around a vertical axis, the whole suggesting a ceremonial watchfulness recalling mythological soldiery. Craft-object and organic relationships fuse to create a language of form.

Transcending the visual aesthetic, the ‘Guardian” series exhibits the “intensity of feeling compressed into rigid form” that Herbert Read labels “iconographic.” Behind the polished surface of sculptural technique is an indicator pointing to the archetypal realm.

In any case, I imagine Talos No. 2 is part of this series too, since frankly I can't tell it and Naga Stand apart. Call me an uncultured philistine if you like.

As for the name, "Naga" could mean any number of things; the Wikipedia disambiguation page is one of the larger ones I've seen. The 1970-1971 date means it's too early to be inspired by the Dungeons & Dragons monster (which is in turn inspired by a Sanskrit deity). Apparently there's a circa-1969 comic book villain named "Naga" though, and that's exactly the right time period. So in lieu of any further information or research, I'm going to assume this thing's named after the evil merman-turned-serpent-god king of the Lemurians. The true story is almost certainly far less interesting.

Untitled, Pettygrove St.

So here's a fun lost & found story. I was rummaging through the Smithsonian's art inventory database and saw a mention of an Untitled sculpture by the prominent Portland artist Michele Russo, dated 1957, at an apartment complex at 2745 NW Pettygrove. That was the only mention I could find of it, but I made a note to see if it still existed the next time I was in the area. So here it is, slightly worse for almost 60 years of wear. Ok, a bit more than slightly worse. It needs serious help. I wonder if the building's management even knows what it is?

A May 1957 Oregonian story mentions Russo winning a design contest for this piece:

Sculptors have the spotlight this week with Frederic Littman elected as president of the Northwest Institute of Sculpture and Michele Russo named as winner of Portland's first competition for an architectural sculpture.

Serving as vice president will be Portland sculptor Manuel Izquierdo. Institute membership draws from Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, with Oregon having 14 members. At the exhibition arranged to coincide with the recent annual meeting of the group in Seattle 14 members had entries. At the meeting Littman spoke on architectural sculpture and related problems and James Hansen, Vancouver sculptor, demonstrated his lost wax method of bronze casting. Plans are under way for a meeting in Portland next year and an all-sculpture show.

Portland's first competition for architectural sculpture was offered by Mr. and Mrs. Daniel W. Creary who were searching for a suitable accent for their modern apartment house going up at 27th and Pettygrove. The problem was submitted to William Fletcher, architect in charge, and to Don Blair and John Reese, associated with Fletcher on the project. It was decided by the architects to open the competition to members of Artists Equity of Oregon. Six entered the competition and Russo won with an abstract design of metal tubes and highly colored metal plates fashioned in open arrangement which will allow for a play of shadows on the surface of the building, enriching the pattern provided by the sculpture. The design as a whole suggests a pattern of giant leaves and stems intertwined.

Picador

Here's a slideshow about Picador, the second Manuel Izquierdo sculpture outside the Portland Art Museum, on the Jefferson St. side of the building near Split Ring. Unlike Eye of Orion (the other Izquierdo), it doesn't appear that anyone's started a Doomsday cult about Picador yet, but then it's a relatively new acquisition and doesn't show up in a lot of Portland art guides, so it's possible any prospective cultists simply haven't found it yet. I had a bit of trouble figuring out what this was, actually. There doesn't seem to be a museum sign for it anywhere nearby. I ended up just guessing it was one of his and rifling through the museum's online collection to see if they had any photos that looked right.

Once I knew the title I still couldn't dig up a lot of info to share about this one. The search results are swamped with Spanish-language bullfighting links. Apparently there's another unrelated Manuel Izquierdo out there who has something to do with bullfights, though I'm not sure whether he's an actual picador or not. And no, I'm not going to link to any bullfighting websites, because this is a civilized blog, for the most part.

You might recall I did a "Hey, I know who did that" with the museum's Mistral No. 2 as well; this sounds like an impressive skill until you realize that Portland's official arts world (i.e. people who made a living creating "serious" art, whatever that is) was about twelve people (nearly 100% of them old white men) from WWII through 1990 or so. Their work is found all over Portland and around the Northwest, so in a way they're important in the "Who created that?" sense. But if they were really so amazing and talented, what were they doing in a podunk Republican timber town like 1950s Portland, instead of Manhattan where all the serious action was? (Or at least where all the serious money was?) That's a question I can never seem to get a straight answer to.

Jekyll Island, GA

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Here are a few old photos from Jekyll Island, Georgia, a barrier island on the Atlantic coast near the town of Brunswick. The island was developed in the late 1880s as a resort for northern robber barons -- J.P Morgan, various Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Goulds, and their ilk. The island's fortunes waned (so to speak) after the stock market crash of 1929, and the state of Georgia has owned and operated it since 1947. A number of the original "cottages" (i.e. vacation mansions) still survive, as does the central clubhouse building, now a hotel.

You may have gathered this is not a comprehensive photoset about the place; I took these in the late 90s, and I had no idea at the time that I might need a bunch of photos for the internet someday. In any case, I could never muster a lot of enthusiasm for the extravagant lifestyles of ultra-rich oligarchs, so if I did have a bunch of interior photos I'd probably just snark about them anyway. The island's beaches were beautiful, though. It's worth a visit just for the beaches.

Madrina

The next item on our random walk outside the art museum is Mark Calderon's Madrina. Like his smaller Floribunda on Portland's transit mall, it takes inspiration from elaborate hairstyles. Madrina appears to be a full human figure, and seen from any angle it looks like you're seeing the statue from behind. Until you realize it's an identical hairstyle all the way around, and the joke's on you. I don't know if that makes it great art for the ages or not, but it has entertainment value, I guess.

A Seattle gallery website mentions that this is one of a series of five (another is at the art museum in Bellevue, WA), and the page offers a brief description:

Each work in this edition will be hand finished with a unique patina. A rich reddish brown appears in the crevices of this work.

The image is a reflection on the female figure. Her mystery is evident in the realization that, as the viewer moves around her, a face never appears. Instead, she is shrouded in 360 degrees with long tendrils of curled hair and a gown that is fluted with a scalloped bottom edge. She can be viewed as an abstraction of a Madonna figure but her curls also suggest the Buddhas of the Far East with their pin curls or topknots, and Grecian caryatids with their plaited hair.

"Madrina" is the Spanish word for godmother.

Lions

Our wander around the outdoor part of the Portland Art Museum (i.e the free part) continues with Alexander Phimister Proctor's Lions, a large bronze plaque mounted on an exterior wall. Proctor also created the Theodore Roosevelt equestrian statue in the South Park Blocks nearby.

A 2003 paper in the Oregon Historical Quarterly about Proctor's work in Oregon explains the winding history of Lions. It was originally commissioned for the home of Wilson B. Ayer, a museum trustee, circa 1911, where it hung over a fireplace for many years. Ayers willed Lions to the museum in 1935. Aesthetic tastes changed, and the museum eventually lost interest in Lions, and loaned it to the Oregon Zoo in May 1962 (the same week the zoo train opened for business, as it turns out). The zoo mounted it on a wall in the big cat section, in an awkward location where it was hard to see; sometimes it even had bushes growing in front of it. It eventually fell into neglect and disrepair. I remember seeing it there as a kid and thinking it was a strange thing to find lurking behind a stand of bamboo. The museum finally took it back in 1998, restored it, and put it on display in its current location.

Proctor's 1950 obit in the Oregonian referred to him as a "famed western sculptor" and continued with a rather disturbing bit: "An enthusiastic hunter as well as an artist, he often boasted he had killed every species of wildlife in North America 'except a buffalo and an Indian.'" If you ever want to know what 1950 America was like, it was a place where it was ok to say that as a boast, and ok to print it in the newspaper as a heartwarming anecdote. Yeesh.

Mistral No. 2

Here's another object from the Portland Art Museum's free outdoor section, Frederic Littman's Mistral No. 2 (1961). Littman was a prolific local artist of the mid-20th Century, so his work shows up all over town. I've covered three other creations of his: Joy (Pioneer Woman) on Council Crest; Farewell to Orpheus in the South Park Blocks at PSU; and The Flogger at ESCO in industrial NW Portland. As I've said before, his style is generally not my cup of tea (though it works in The Flogger). Still, it was kind of fun to look around the museum's sculpture garden, see Mistral No. 2 and immediately know who had created it, even before I looked at the sign. I'm starting to feel as if I've actually learned something in this little project. It's not exactly a marketable job skill, but hey.

Meanwhile Mistral No. 3 is somewhere at Keller Auditorium, apparently. The interwebs don't seem to know where Mistral No. 1 is, or how many Mistrals there were in the series.

Hunting Island, SC

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Here are a couple of beach photos from South Carolina's Hunting Island State Park, a barrier island on the coast about 15 miles from the town of Beaufort. The island's dense palmetto-filled forest comes right up to the beach, like something you'd see in a movie about remote South Pacific islands. I would have liked to have better photos of the forest, and the rest of the park, but I only have these two photos. I think I may have run out of film after this pair of photos, come to think of it. I also had a crappy camera at the time, and (more importantly) I had no idea what I was doing. I realize I keep trotting that out as an excuse when I post old photos, but it's true. I ran across a forum thread with some great photos, if you want a better look at the area.

I wish I'd still had some film left when we ran across an alligator, asleep and sunning itself at an inland pond. Not an enclosure, not an exhibit, just a pond with a wild alligator. At the time, we lived a couple of hours north and inland, and while alligators were known to exist in our area, there were far more rumors than sightings. And of course coming from the Northwest we weren't used to even that degree of alligator-ness. So stumbling across one here, out of the blue, was kind of a big deal. Any locals who saw us gawking and pointing must have found it hilarious. It probably wasn't even that big of an alligator, thinking back. Still, I could have walked over and touched it if I'd wanted to, which I didn't. Nobody else seemed to want to pet the gator either.

Vanport Wetlands

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Here's a slideshow from the Vanport Wetlands natural area, just south of the Portland Expo Center. I'd ridden MAX to the end of the line to get some photos of the Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge (as one does) and I had some time to burn while waiting for the train back. So I figured I'd go take a look at the nearby lake. At first glance it looks like your standard run-of-the-mill wetland area near the Columbia, like Smith & Bybee Lakes, Whitaker Ponds, and many others. While that's basically true, there's an interesting story behind this place and how it got this way.

The first thing to know is that this isn't a regular city park, or even a Metro natural area. Instead, the Port of Portland owns and maintains it. Which is strange because their main business is running the Portland Airport and various shipping terminals, not creating duck habitat. It seems they needed to fill in about 14 acres of wetlands at the airport, so they had to create wetlands elsewhere as mitigation, and thus Vanport Wetlands was born. This is how the US Army Corps of Engineers wetland process works, more or less: They'll generally give you a permit to fill and build on wetlands, so long as you create or maintain some other wetlands elsewhere. The theory is that the new wetlands are supposed to be at least as good as the old ones. I suspect that's often not the reality; certainly the little fenced mitigation areas next to suburban minimalls don't look anything like real wetlands, for instance. I'm not a wetland biologist and I can't speak to how good of a job the Port did here, but at 90 acres the Vanport Wetlands are at least larger than the filled area they're supposed to replace.

Back in 2002, toward the end of the Port's restoration effort, they decided to embrace modern technology and they put up a website about the area, its history, and its future, rather than installing the usual interpretive signs at the lake itself. That website has unfortunately been defunct for several years now, but it turns out that the (usually) trusty Wayback Machine has a copy. So I can fill in a few details about the place's unusual history.

Prior to the wetland restoration project, this site had been home to KGW radio towers since the mid-1920s. A pair of 625' towers stood near the center of today's lake. A nearby creepy-looking multistory transmitter building apparently dated to before the 1948 Vanport Flood, which devastated the once-populated surrounding area. The rest of the tower site was a forest of guywires supporting the two antennas. Less visibly, the towers were connected to a grid of buried copper grounding wires, I suppose in case of thunderstorms or something. All of this had to be removed as part of the restoration project, so it wasn't just a matter of taking down the towers and flooding the place. The towers were toppled in December 2000. It's a shame the one online video clip of the toppling is a pre-YouTube, postage-stamp-sized Windows Media file, but that was the state of the art back then. Frankly, I have no idea how we got by in those days.

I couldn't get very far during my brief visit because the Vanport Wetlands are surrounded by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire, and the only gate is closed and locked. The old website explains that this is intentional:

Until 2001, access to the site was restricted to a gate on the eastern boundary of the property off N. Expo Road. Following mitigation construction, a second gate, along the northern boundary of the property, was installed. Due to the conservation restrictions placed on the property, there is presently no public access to the site.

A chain-link fence now surrounds the site, with the only vehicle entrance being a gate at the northern end of North Expo Road. Visitors must receive Port of Portland permission to enter the property due to the sensitivity of the wetlands restoration effort underway there. Once native wetland vegetation is firmly established, the Port anticipates some public use of the property for passive recreation and educational activities.

To my untrained eye the wetlands certainly look established at this point, but clearly this maybe-someday public access hasn't come to pass yet. I can see it not being a high priority for the Port; It's not exactly their core business, after all. They do operate a couple of other public parks, though, although none of them are nature areas: McCarthy Park on Swan Island, and the Stanley Park Blocks and much of the Marine Drive Trail near the airport.

The closure may not be that big of a deal, though, since (as far as the general public goes) the Vanport Wetlands are mostly of interest to birdwatchers. If you're serious about birding, you presumably already have gear for observing from a distance -- binoculars, monster telephoto lenses, etc., and I suppose the fence isn't that big of a deal in that case, so long as you can get an unobstructed view over it from somewhere.

The water comes right up to the property line (at least on the east side of the lake), so it's not like they could put in an extensive trail system here, and I think the lake's too shallow for canoes most of the year, but I imagine a boardwalk or observation deck would be doable at some point.

For what it's worth, there seems to be a minor geographic dispute about just what the lake is called. The Port's old website says it's called "Force Lake", but Google and the Friends of Force Lake say the real Force Lake is just northwest of here, on the other side of Force Avenue. Which I think would make this lake Not The Lake You're Looking For. I'm sorry, that was lame and I apologize.

Pics: Beaufort, SC

Here are a few old scanned photos from Beaufort, SC. These few photos don't really give a full picture of the place; taking photos was expensive back in the 90s, and remember 36 shots per roll? Oh, the good old days, or not. The city, or town really, is like a tiny copy of Charleston, SC. You'll be able to see this better once I get around to scanning my Charleston photos. Or you could just Google Charleston; that will work too. Or Bing, I guess. Anyway, we lived in Augusta at the time, about a 2 hour drive inland, and Beaufort was a bit shorter drive than going to Charleston. There's much more to do in Charleston, of course, but Beaufort and nearby beaches were worth an occasional day trip.

The unusual thing about the place is that the surrounding salt marshes often stretch right up to the edge of town. There could be a row of gaudy 19th century mansions, and then what looks like howling wilderness right at the end of the street. I've always liked salt marshes (and you can probably tell that since most of the photos here are salt marshes), so I thought having them next door was a very cool aspect of the town. It may also be a reason Beaufort stayed small though; up until the late 1940s, malaria was still endemic to this part of the South. Living next to a mosquito-filled swamp maybe wasn't always the best plan back then. By the time the threat of disease abated (thanks to a massive federal public health and aerial spraying campaign) the town was old and historic, ready to be rediscovered & preserved for posterity. I hate to say it, but it's possible we have DDT to thank for this quaint little place.

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Eleven Very Small Sculptures

Not long ago, I dropped by NW Portland's Wallace Park to take some photos of Silver Dawn, the park's big shiny abstract sculpture over near the off-leash dog area. While I was putting that blog post together, I realized the park was home to a second, much smaller sculpture that I didn't notice during the original visit. Or rather, the park was home to a collection of tiny sculptures scattered all about the place, titled Eleven Very Small Sculptures. The RACC page describes it:

Artist: Bill Will, American, born 1951
...
A curious collection of eleven life-size bronze sculptures of common objects can be found tucked away in unexpected places throughout the park. The artist's goal for this piece was to provide artwork that would be subtle and integral to the environment, but would not compete with or obscure the elements that have already made the park an urban oasis.

Will also co-created Street Wise, the whimsical words-in-the-sidewalk thing near Pioneer Place, on the same block as the Human Comedy faces. His website doesn't seem to mention Eleven Very Small Sculptures anywhere; I suppose it counts as one of his minor works, at least size-wise.

I'm afraid I only have photos of one of the very small sculptures here, namely the book attached to a bench near the park's playground. This is because that was the only one of them I could find during a cursory look around the park. The RACC page has photos of several others: A flip-flop attached to a chain link fence (probably at one of the baseball diamonds); a coffee cup and scattered silverware somewhere I can't make out; small objects in the rafters of the park's picnic shelter; sunglasses atop a lamppost; and a milk carton atop a second lamppost. If I'm counting correctly, that comes to ten sculptures, assuming you count each piece of silverware separately. Finding these (and the mysterious eleventh one) is left as an exercise for the reader.

Eye of Orion

Some photos of Eye of Orion, a Manuel Izquierdo piece in the Portland Art Museum's outdoor sculpture court. It's not my favorite among the works of his that I've seen, but at least one random person has been spotted worshipping it, so reasonable people can disagree, I guess.

It also had a cameo role in QR/ART, a 2011 digital exhibition pairing the museum's traditional artworks with online digital remixes through the magic of QR codes. Yeah, QR codes. Which, in 2014, already seems more dated than any of the traditional works on display. What's more, Eye of Orion was paired with a page on weird-fiction.net that now comes up as a 404 (conceptual art not found).

Luckily(?) the Wayback Machine archived the page before it went away. That page turns out to be some incomprehensible yapping about the sculpture's supposed astrological significance. Or something. I"m not entirely sure what the author was getting at, other than the fact that Eye of Orion is somehow Very Very Important to the cosmos at large. Naturally the page mentions the former Masonic temple next door, because of course it would. The archived 'About' and 'Blog' pages are just spammy pages for various erectile dysfunction pills. Overall I'd rate it at about 350 to 400 milli-Timecubes. Maybe the whole thing's supposed to be deliberately loony, Subgenius-style. Or maybe we've found ourselves a second Eye of Orion cultist.

It seems like a dumb thing to start a cult about, if you ask me. I mean, worshiping a tower topped by a great lidless eye, wreathed in flame? Or at least wreathed in sorta-flame-shaped bronze bits? C'mon, guys, it's been done already. There were movies and everything. Although come to think of it, Orion and Sauron have never actually been seen at the same place at the same time, as far as I know. Waiiiit a minute...

Totem Pole, SW Terwilliger

SW Portland's Terwilliger Boulevard was designed as a winding road of scenic views, and there deliberately aren't a lot of structures right along the street, to avoid obstructing these views. One of the few exceptions is the Chart House restaurant, just north of the Beaverton-Hillsdale intersection. Next to the restaurant is a rather large totem pole; the idiosyncratic RACC guidelines say it qualifies as public art, and their database has this to say about it:

“Totem Pole” was carved by Chief Lelooska of Ariel Washington from red cedar harvested from the base of Mt. Adams. This totem pole is one of the most massive in existence measuring fifty feet high and four feet wide. The carved figures depict a beaver surmounted by a grizzly bear next to a raven topped by four watchmen. The totem was carved during Oregon's Centennial in 1959, to celebrate the state's role in Operation Deep Freeze, which established a scientific station at the geographic South Pole.

Born Cherokee, Lelooska (1933-1996) was adopted into the Kwakwaka'wakw, and was known for his mastery of storytelling and carving. As a scholar and educator, Lelooska was an authority on the Indians of North America with a particular emphasis on the tribes of the Northwest coastal region. He was known for his versatility in wood sculpting, creating artwork that ranged in size from hand-held rattles and feast bowls to large-scale totem poles. This piece serves as an excellent example of Lelooska’s work and is a prized part of Portland’s public art collection.

So that's the RACC account; it didn't answer all of my questions, so I dug into the Oregonian database to see what contemporary accounts had to say about it. The first thing to note is that there have been restaurants at this site (known as "Elk Point") for a very long time, stretching back to the early days of Terwilliger Boulevard. Before it became today's Chart House, for many decades it was Palaske's Hillvilla restaurant. It seems Palaske was an Indian art collector, so the idea of adding a totem pole next to his restaurant must have seemed like second nature.

Incidentally, Kenton's Paul Bunyan statue was created for the same centennial exposition, an event that's otherwise been all but forgotten. Based on the surviving art from 1959, we seem to have had sort of derpy and juvenile notions of how to commemorate the state's 100th birthday. (Lost Oregon, Vintage Portland, & Oregon Encyclopedia have interesting posts about the exposition). A totem pole is a weird way to mark the anniversary, at any rate, since it's not as if the Oregon Trail and then statehood were exactly beneficial to local tribes.

The one thing I can't confirm is the story about Antarctic exploration. It may very well be true, but I haven't found anything in the newspaper database to corroborate it.

So here's a brief timeline of the totem pole's creation and later history:

• The log arrived March 25th 1959. The pole's design was described as a scaled up copy of one from British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands, more commonly known as Haida Gwaii these days.
• A construction photo dated April 7th 1959
• A May 14th, 1959 front page photo of the pole under construction, wit the caption "Heap Big Totem Pole". In case you were wondering just how racist the Oregonian was back then. I checked briefly and didn't see any letters to the editor calling them out about this headline, which makes me think the paper's white readers of 1959 were ok with this too.
• Story to go with the previous photo, "Totem pole paint dries" . The article notes this pole had a concrete base, and steel bracing on the back. I didn't think to look at the back, so I don't know if that's still there or not..
• Raising ceremony June 4th. 27 tons. quoted: "It's an artistic triumph", reports Eddie Palaske. "It's almost half as tall as Meier & Frank's. This will be here long after the Centennial exposition is torn down, perhaps right up to the time the atom bombs strike."
• June 9th brought a story about Lelooska's indian encampment on the South Park Blocks, part of the Rose Festival Center. I can imagine an Indian encampment there, but try as I might, I can't picture carnival rides on the Park Blocks. I just can't see it.
• August 25th brought a mention of the inconvenient fact that tribes this far south didn't really do totem poles . It's couched in the usual mocking racial terms, being 1959 and all, but the underlying claim is factually accurate.
• A tall photo of the pole, dated October 6th . The caption mentions a pond at the base, which isn't there now.
• January 30th, 1961: A pair of visitors from Finland marveled at the totem pole. The wife mentioned that Finland has no totems because it has no indians. Husband: "No, but we have Swedes".
• The previous article got an indignant letter to the editor. Bigotry against Indians was still perfectly socially acceptable then, but prejudice against Swedes was on the wane on this side of the Atlantic. I suppose that may count as a form of progress, sort of.
• A photo of it being repainted for rose festival , June 2nd 1961. The article mentions it has (or had) a gas burner on top to light on special occasions. I don't know whether that still works, and if so, what constitutes a special occasion these days.
• A 1966 profile of Lelooska & a wider discussion about NW indian art
• Also a 1983 profile of Lelooska (Don Smith).
• Palaske's Hillvilla became the Chart House in 1985, and the totem pole underwent restoration at that point.
• A followup article about the changeover gave a brief history of the place

Waterfront Flagpole

Visitors to Portland's Waterfront Park are bound to notice the giant flagpole sooner or later, north of the Morrison Bridge and near the Battleship Oregon memorial. It seems like a strange thing to have in the middle of the hip, ironic, occasionally-war-protesting Portland of 2014, but there's an interesting historical story behind it. It seems that for a large part of 20th century, Portland prided itself on having the world's largest US flag, or at least the largest one that could be flown from a flagpole. In retrospect this seems sort of like the way tiny Midwestern towns are thrilled to have the world's largest ball of twine, except far more patriotic, somehow. But back in the day this was a great source of civic pride.

The story starts with a ship. From 1925 to 1942, Portland's waterfront was home to the old battleship USS Oregon, which played a key role in the Spanish-American War, and then was loaned (not given) to the city as a museum. When World War II broke out, the Navy decided the the old ship was more valuable as wartime scrap metal than as a historical monument, and it was towed away for dismantling. So as a super-patriotic (and non-metal-using) wartime replacement, the city decided to put up a giant 100' wooden flagpole, with a giant flag to go with it. It was first proposed in 1941, but wasn't completed until 1944 because people were kind of busy with WWII at the time.

The flagpole didn't always fly the giant flag, and the flag sometimes made guest appearances elsewhere. It showed up at the 1950 Shrine game (the all-star game for local high school football players) where it was referred to as the largest American flag in existence. I haven't seen any mention of that original flag's dimensions, but a larger one was acquired in 1956, with dimensions 15' by 10'.

Then in 1960, Hawaii became the 50th state, and a new 50 star flag was needed. Naturally this was a chance to go for an even larger flag, this time 36.5' by 24.5'. Which is a huge flag by any standard, and it was already too big to fly safely during stormy winter months, but there was already talk of creating an even larger one.

So in 1969 they got a truly gigantic flag, 62' by 42'. Which presented a problem, because the new flag was too large for the current flagpole, and it was obvious that it would become entangled with the Battleship Oregon mast or nearby oak trees if the wind ever happened to blow in the wrong direction. The article mentions it superseded a 45' by 30' flag from 1960, which I assume is the larger replacement mentioned in the earlier article. The article mentions the previous flag had rivals for the "World's Largest" title, but only mentions the Meier & Frank flag. That flag is bigger (60' by 48', pre-shrinkage) but it's never flown from a flagpole; they used to hang it over 6th Avenue during the Rose Festival, and in recent years it's occasionally been hung on the SW Morrison side of the Meier & Frank store (now Macy's) during major national events, most recently in the weeks after 9/11.

The new flag rarely flew, for safety reasons, and to make matters worse a 1972 letter to the editor pointed out that the flag's dimensions were all wrong. This may seem nitpicky and unimportant to anyone who was never a Boy Scout, but let me assure you the dimensions are very, very important. If the flag isn't shaped right, you can't fold it correctly in the official manner. Which is a problem because you also can't just set it down in a big pile somewhere; that would be disrespectful and you'd probably have to burn it then. So if it's the wrong dimensions, you're stuck carrying it around with you forever, pretty much. And as desirable as that is from a patriotism standpoint, it isn't always the most convenient thing when going about one's everyday life. So yeah, misshapen flags are the worst, basically.

In any case, 1980 rolled around, and City Hall (lobbied by the Rose Festival and veterans' groups) wanted a way to fly the giant flag safely. The American Legion had wanted to fly the big flag the previous year, but the usual safety concerns had cropped up again, and since this was the cusp of the Reagan era, the city couldn't simply tell them it wasn't practical, end of story; a way had to be found to accommodate the flag. Still, chopping down nearby oak trees wasn't an option, because it was 1980 and not 1944, so they decided to go for a taller flagpole instead, 135' this time instead of 100'. This caused delays, because finding a single 135' tree suitable for a flagpole takes a while, and the flagpole wasn't ready in time for that year's Veterans Day. The kinks were sorted out eventually and the flag flew on the following 4th of July.

If you look closely at the plaque on the flagpole, you'll see a mention of Gene Autry, the famous singing movie cowboy. It turns out there's a very prosaic reason for this: The flagpole was funded in part by donations from Golden West Broadcasting, the then-owner of KGW-AM and a couple of other local radio stations, and Autry was the company's chairman. So he was involved in the project to some degree, just not in a singing movie cowboy capacity.

The glory of the new flag and flagpole combo was short-lived, however, as a new contender disputed the city's "World's Largest" claim. In 1981, a larger 82' by 43.7' flag was raised at the offices of a Long Beach, CA bumper sticker magnate, of all places. Portland was still able to claim the largest flag on a wooden flagpole, which I guess is a sort of consolation prize, but the title of overall world's largest was gone for good. There was talk at the time of creating an even larger flag for Portland, but that doesn't seem to have gotten any traction. Portland quietly bowed out of the escalating vexillological arms race at that point, perhaps realizing giant flags had become the province of whackaloons and there's no competing with those people, and since then we haven't looked back. Cultural shifts here since 1980 make it unlikely that we're going to invest in a new record-setting flag or flagpole anytime soon. Portland has far more upscale and cosmopolitan things to burn money on these days, and we've consigned the entire monster flag phenomenon to the civic memory hole.

The arms race continued on without us, though. The bumper sticker king went on to invent "Superflag", which is much too big to actually fly from a flagpole, or to hang anywhere. Instead they just unfurl it at football stadiums, NASCAR races, etc., anywhere this sort of display would be welcome. There are actually several Superflags, available for rental in 3 sizes, up to 505' x 255'. If it's impossible to unfurl in a vertical position, there's a reasonable argument that it doesn't even count as a flag at that point. It's a very large something, but not a flag.

As for other large contenders, there's a 90' x 60' one that's been hung vertically on occasion on the George Washington Bridge in NY-NJ on occasion. As for flagpole-based flags, the largest seems to be a 114' x 65' one in Gastonia, NC, which weighs only 180 lbs, which is amazingly light if that's an accurate number. That flag seems to have a steel flagpole, though. So it's possible we still have a claim to the on-a-wooden-flagpole consolation prize, if anybody out there cares to pursue it for some reason.

Surfer on a Wave

Toward the Diamond Head end of Waikiki, near the Honolulu Zoo, is a big bronze statue of a guy surfing, atop a pedestal of breaking waves. This is Surfer on a Wave, which the city describes as:

A Sculpture by Robert Pashby. The piece consists of a life-size young man riding a surfboard on the top of a pedestal representing waves. Located on Kuhio Beach near Monsarrat Avenue.

That page also points out this is a recent addition to Kuhio Beach Park, only arriving in 2001. It's already needed restoration work due to some sort of design issue with the base of the statue.

The leis around the guy's neck aren't part of the design. They're real leis with real flowers. Apparently this is just something people like to do with statues around the city. And not in a mocking sort of way, like other cities tend to do with their statues. From what I've seen, Honolulu is quite possibly the least ironic place on earth. I'm sure they've heard of irony; I think maybe they just thought it over and considered it, and decided it wasn't for them. It just wouldn't be very nice, you know? It would be a rough place to try to be a hipster. Sneering and making air quotes about everything wouldn't go over too well in Hawaii, and those fancy beards would be really hot and itchy in this climate. The lack of hipsters is a huge plus, if you ask me. I've practically got my bags packed already.

Misty of Chincoteague Statue

When I visited Virginia last fall for the LADEE rocket launch, I stayed at a hotel on neighboring Chincoteague Island, and I managed a little bit of exploring while I was there. Chincoteague and nearby Assateague Island are famous for the herds of wild horses, and particulary for Misty, the star of a long-running series of children's books. Apparently the books are enough of a tourist draw that the city put up a statue of Misty in 2006. People who are bigger horse experts than I would need to weigh in on whether it's an accurate likeness, or whether it might be a statue of some entirely different horse, and whether horses typically chase ducks like this, and what they do when they catch them. In any case, it's just one of your tourist options here. You can look at the statue, or if you're feeling a bit morbid you could go to the island's Beebe Ranch and see the actual Misty, all taxidermied up and preserved for posterity.

I actually think this is a great idea, and more cities should do this with their most prominent citizens. Imagine if Memphis had a taxidermied Elvis to show off. It would really cut down on all those conspiracy theories about aliens and so forth. They could even continue making Elvis movies that way, since being taxidermied wouldn't really cut into Elvis's acting skills. Furthermore, I see that Southern Pines, NC is home to the one and only Taxidermy Hall of Fame (which exists, and doubles as a creationism museum). It seems only fitting that deceased famous taxidermists should be, you know, inducted there, so people from far and wide could come and pay their respects properly. I mean, I personally wouldn't pay to see that, but I'm pretty sure somebody out there would.

Bulloch County Courthouse

Here's an old photo, snapped from a moving car, of the historic Bulloch County Courthouse, in Statesboro, Georgia. Or most of it; I had an old point & shoot 35mm camera back then and my aim wasn't that great, as you can probably tell here. A few years after I took this, the courthouse was restored and the exterior white plaster was either removed or painted over, so it's mostly a red brick building now. I think I liked it better before the restoration, to be honest. I thought it was kind of an interesting building, though not quite interesting enough for us to stop and look around the town. I know it's a college town and supposedly is a bit more culturally lively than your average county seat in rural Georgia. Which admittedly isn't saying a lot.

If the name of the town sounds familiar at all, it might be due to the classic blues song "Statesboro Blues" by Blind Willie McTell. If you aren't familiar with it, his original version and the famous Allman Brothers cover are out there on the youtubes. Though I admit that after listening carefully to both, I'm still not sure if it's good or bad when somebody has a case of the Statesboro Blues, or maybe if it's a little of both.

Pics: Brunswick, GA

Here's another slideshow of old 1990s travel photos, this time from Brunswick, GA. That Wikipedia article makes the place sound practically bustling, which is not really how I remember it. We sort of stopped and wandered around a bit, and it was weirdly quiet and nothing was open. It might have been a Sunday, come to think of it. Plus I'm trying to remember a period of about hour or two from close to 15 years ago. And I may be misremembering it, because I remember a weird dreamlike place of enormous live oak trees and Spanish moss and tumbledown gothic buildings and 300% humidity and ghosts and pirates and time not quite flowing in a straight line, exactly. If I hadn't taken any photos, I'm not sure I'd believe the place was real. Even with photos I'm still not 100% sure.

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Flying Salmon

So, a while back I ran into a list the city put together titled "Landscapes for Rain: The Art of Stormwater". Which is exactly what it sounds like: Art that does something with rain, or sends some sort of positive message about rain. Those of you who follow the TV show "Portlandia" will find nothing surprising or unusual about this. It's a little, I dunno, twee, if you ask me, but nobody ever asks me.

One item on the list leaped out at me: Flying Salmon isn't just part of this weird stormwater art genre; it's also yet another example of Heroic Salmon Swimming Upstream, an endlessly overused and abused motif around here that local public art buyers can't seem to get their fill of. Flying Salmon is not just any set of random downspouts, either; it's part of a swanky New Seasons grocery store in rapidly gentrifying North Portland, right along Interstate Avenue. The snark practically writes itself. Here's how the city describes it:

Flying Salmon, New Seasons Arbor Lodge -
Ivan McLean, Sculptor; Richard Brown Architects AIA;
Lango Hansen, Lanscape Architects; 2005
The highlight of the sustainable approach to rain water collection at this New Seasons Market is the rooftop garden above the entry vestibule. 6400 N Interstate Ave., Portland Oregon. More information on the architects at www.langohansen.com.

I actually took these photos from a southbound MAX train. I'd just been to the Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge, where I'd been rained on quite a bit, and I was cold, and didn't feel like it was worth getting off the train for another damn photo of salmon art. It would be hard to beat the top photo anyway; maybe in picture quality if I'd brought the DSLR along, but composition-wise... well, it's heroic salmon atop an upscale grocery store, and there's a freakin' Subaru parked out front. I couldn't beat that if I tried. Incidentally, last December was the 45th anniversary of Subaru arriving in Portland. Back in 1968, nobody could have guessed what a big deal Subaru would become here. Of course they probably figured we'd be flying atomic jetpacks around the moon colonies by now, but I digress.

It turns out that Flying Salmon was created by the same guy who did Rational Exuberance, a big bright yellow sculpture that temporarily sat outside the Pearl District's Encore condo tower. That title, of course, is a play on a famous phrase by Alan Greenspan about the overheated real estate market, and the sculpture sat outside the last condo tower built before the real estate bubble popped in 2008. I'm still not clear on how much of the irony here was intentional, and how much was a fortuitous accident. In any case, I rather liked the art itself, it was just the title I was all snarky about. And to be honest I don't actually dislike Flying Salmon either. I'm sure it's a great set of downspouts and that it's exactly what New Seasons wanted. It's just that it exists in a larger milieu of rich white hipster preciousness, and that's what I keep rolling my eyes about. I've been rolling my eyes about it for years, actually, and so far it doesn't seem to be helping.

Pi, Harbor Steps

Several years ago, Seattle's Harbor Steps temporarily hosted a giant sculpture of the letter/number pi. I think it was connected to the nearby Seattle Art Museum somehow, but I haven't been able to figure out much of anything else about it: Who created it, what it was officially called, where it went, etc. Anyway, I was going to post this on March 14th (3/14, in the US date format) for Pi Day, but I was on a tough work deadline & totally forgot about Pi Day. So then I figured, hey, I can use it for April Fool's Day instead and say it's because pi actually equals 4. I can't seem to figure out how to make the joke work, though, probably because it's a dumb joke. It's barely a joke at all, to be honest. Besides, "pi equals 4" is a longstanding cheesy internet gag, and there's a nice VIHart video that explains how it works: