Friday, May 25, 2007
This post NOT titled "Photo Friday"...
I didn't feel like going for a hike today, or doing a lot of research, or coming up with intelligent opinions about the issues of the day, or anything difficult like that, because it's a 3-day weekend. Expending any more effort than absolutely necessary would be unpatriotic. Everyone knows that. So instead, here are a few more photos from the archives.
Top two photos are from Skidmore Fountain, at 1st & Ankeny downtown, in the middle of where Saturday Market runs on the weekend. Yes, I realize you knew that already, but I get a lot of out-of-town visitors here, and I like to give 'em a helping hand. They might decide to come and visit and spend tourist dollars (or euros) or something. So let's try to create a positive impression, shall we?
You in the back, stop picking your nose. Yes, you. You didn't realize this thing is two-way, did you? Serves you right.
Some pink flowers from last month. It's been long enough that I've totally forgotten what they are or where they're from, but I thought I'd share the photos anyway. Enjoy.
A seagull in Lincoln City. You can't really tell from this photo, but it's perched on a ledge 10 stories above the ocean. Although I suppose that's less of a concern if you have wings, which I don't.
And a shark from the aquarium in Newport. Photographing fish in low light is harder than I thought. Everything comes out green, or not at all. This is one of the few that I thought turned out ok. FWIW.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
stairs x 5
I couldn't find an existing map on the net with the stairs marked, since the city doesn't yet have a NW Portland walking map like it has for the rest of town. The stairs are shown in red, although their positions are sort of approximate. It's the best I can do in MS Paint, I'm afraid.
Writing walking directions from scratch can be kind of tedious, so let me start by quoting a couple of the sources I relied on. A piece about Forest Park at Walk About Magazine covered the stairs, albeit going in the opposite direction than I went:
From here you will walk to the left and downhill, following NW Luray Terrace for about 10 to 5 minutes, then branching right and uphill at the Y in the road onto NW Luray Circus. On the left, almost at the end of this cul-de-sac, is the first set of stairs. (All of the entrances to the stairwells are tough to see as they are covered with foliage and blend with the surrounding houses, so look closely for them.) Go right at the bottom of these stairs, which puts you back on NW Luray Terrace, then when you hit Cumberland Road go left, staying on the left-hand sidewalk. In about 15 yards you’ll cross over Shenandoah Terrace and then — on the left-hand side, just in the crook of the road where it breaks right — the next set of stairs will plunge steeply down to Fairfax Street. From here you want to cross Fairfax, and then cross over to Westover Street, walking about 20 yards to the right where between two houses the next set of stairs waits. At the bottom of these stairs turn left, and follow NW Summit Street downhill to NW Cornell. Turn left up Cornell, walk about 25 yards, cross the crosswalk, and then descend the stairs immediately on the other side of the crosswalk. At the bottom of these stairs take a right down Pettygrove Street, and at the stop sign at 26th Avenue go left onto the paved path. This path cuts between the school and the park and will lead you back to Raleigh Street and your car.
A recent forum post has a similar description, this time going the right way:
Pettygrove Street near 26th there's a stairway to NW Cornell, then take right to NW Summit Street and turn right to next set of stairs, this leads to Westover Street that you cross over and up to Fairfax Street to just up to next stairs that climb to Shenandoah Terrace, then right to Cumberland Rd. and to NW Luray Terrace and turn left till next stairs that go up to NW Luray Circus (a cul-de-sac), this meets again with NW Luray Terrace that you follow up to a pathway that's to Cumberland Road that meets there with the Tunnel Trail on right but keep going along the Wildwood Trail ... till it crosses NW Cornell Road past the parking lot and restrooms and Forest Park's 5000 acre wood... I remember a stone house down along the trail where the name changes to the Lower Macleay Trail.... that can take you back down to the Lower Macleay Park Trailhead on Upshur Street and it's about three blocks to NW 28th Avenue just a few blocks from where you started in Northwest/Nob Hill around trendy-third, I mean 23rd Ave. ... 'PORTLAND'S LITTLE RED BOOK OF STAIRS' by Stefana Young has the guide but I've yet to look for and find it.
Ah, the ever-elusive Little Red Book of Stairs. I still can't find a copy for sale anywhere, dammit. Anyway, there's also a description at NW Portland Neighborhoods, but you probably get the gist by now.
[Updated 5/25/07: Until just now, I'd forgotten to go look for stairs stories in the library's Oregonian database. Nothing about these particular stairs in the O dating back to 1987, but a few stories did crop up:
- A piece from last October, profiling a guy who developed an interest in the city's public stairs. He was taking photos and notes and had no idea what he was going to do with them. That's easy, if you ask me. Put it on the net. Share information, don't hoard it.
- From 1998, a walking tour of the numerous stairs in the Alameda neighborhood. I don't know Alameda too well, so this is unexplored territory for me so far. If I get around to checking it out, it would be safe to bet there'll be photos here.
- A '99 article about the Elevator Stairs, which mentions the Little Red Book. They were one of the author's faves, and they're one of mine too. I've already covered them in a previous post.
- And a '97 bit about the stairs in Mt. Tabor Park.
There are a few other old articles out there, but these are the most informative & useful ones.] The hardest part to any stair excursion is finding the stairs. They're unmarked, so you have to look a bit, and you want to avoid mistaking someone's front steps for a public staircase. It's easier to do than you might think. That's where this post comes in, I hope: I've got photos of each staircase from the top and the bottom, to make them easier to locate out in the field. Or that's the plan, anyway. As you might've guessed, our trip begins at the stairs from NW Pettygrove up to Cornell, although you could just as easily start off with the stairs on Quimby, Overton, Northrup, or Marshall, if you prefer, since they all end up on Cornell. So here's the Pettygrove side:
And the Cornell side:
Looks pretty steep, huh? Well, that's just the beginning. A short walk uphill gets you to the next set, from Summit Ave. up to Westover Rd. The Summit side:
These stairs have seen some maintenance recently. Here's a post all about stairs from last June over on jgaiser's blog, and he's got a photo of the Summit-Westover stairs caked in moss. He also includes an envy-inducing photo of his copy of the Little Red Book. So ascend those newly cleaned and maintained steps, and this is what you'll see on the Westover side:
Ok, so far so good. We're already getting a decent view from up here. If you look off in the distance you can see Mt. St. Helens on the horizon. Just below it you'll see a water tower, which looks like the one next to Going St. up in North Portland. Which means that just to the right of it, and not visible to us, is tiny Stanich Park. But that's a different expedition, and I do hate to digress. Honest. Anyway, those last stairs put you close to one corner of a four-way intersection, where Westover, Fairfax, and Cumberland all join together. The next set of stairs is diagonally across the intersection, from Fairfax Terrace up to Cumberland Road. (Cumberland loops around, see?) Here's the Fairfax side:
If you're like me, these stairs may start to feel like entirely too many stairs right about now. Sometimes you just have to stop and take photos of the flowers... if you're like me, anyway, which you probably aren't:
Ok, so here's the (vertigo-inducing) Cumberland side of the steps, finally:
Moving right along, walking a bit uphill (and west), we get to the stairs from Luray Terrace up to Luray Circus. The base:
And the top:
So you're at a cul-de-sac here, and all you can do is walk downhill until you're back on Luray Terrace. Which begs the question: What's the point of these stairs, if you can just as easily walk around the block? Beats me. At least there's a decent view:
You probably get a better view if you own a house up here, or know someone who does, which I don't. Still, you get a wide vista of the Willamette, with the BNSF railroad bridge and part of the St. Johns Bridge in the distance. Not bad. From here, the hike directions usually send you up Luray Terrace and into Macleay Park, from where you loop back around down into NW Portland. That's sort of what I did too, but I'm trying to keep this post reasonably focused on stairs, if I can. I've got park photos too, but we'll save those for another post, ok? So from here you can either follow the directions from one of the sources given above, or turn around and go back down the stairs, or I guess you could take the sidewalk down if you're feeling mundane, or go by street luge if you're a little more adventurous. It just so happens that I looped around through the park, and ended up back on Cornell, where I ran across the stairs connecting Cornell & Quimby St., right at a steep corner on Cornell. Unlike the other stairs, I was heading downhill at this point, so here's the top first:
And the Quimby side. This is right at the corner of Quimby & 29th Ave.
If you're doing this for the sake of completeness, the Overton, Northrup, and Marshall steps are nearby. Or you can be like me, and declare Mission Accomplished and go locate a frosty beverage of some sort instead.
indegree
Today's batch:
- At PortlandArt.net, a user comment about the tram tower, back when it was going up.
- An autolink to a comment of mine, not sure if this counts as proper linkage or not.
- A few links to my widely-read Kelly Butte post from July '06:
- "Thank You For Not Wearing Lycra" at Yamabushi Mon Amour
- "Random Links Lack of Content Edition" at Welcome to Blog.
- "Kelly Butte" at Sellwood Street
- "Thank You For Not Wearing Lycra" at Yamabushi Mon Amour
- Two links to my post about the erstwhile Bridge Diner.
- My recent Willamette Stone post got linkage at ZehnKatzen Times, and my post linked to an earlier one of his about the stone. Because we're totally postmodern like that.
- A bemused link to "Twenty Thousand", my mother-of-all-referrer-pages post. I haven't done a referrer-page post in ages. Maybe that last one finally got it out of my system. At least for now.
- Silflay Hraka links my mini-roadtrip beer post, in his(?)/her(?)/its(?) "A Carnival of Beer". Mmmm..... Beeeeeer.....
- Something called "Kids Picture Contest" linked to my Bonnie Lure State Park piece, according to Technorati, but that site seems to have disappeared now. So I'm not sure if this counts as linkage either.
- Neighborhood Notes links to my bit about the film "Portland Expose".
- I've even gotten a few links ( [1] [2] [3] ) directly to photos of mine on Flickr, credited and everything. Creative Commons rocks.
an evening out
I can never get the hang of this fashionable lateness thing. No matter how late I think I am, no matter how fashionable I try to be, I'm always there way freakin early. Stupid law-abidingness, assuming rules are observed, and things are as they're said to be. Silly me.
It's not that I'm always punctual. I'm not at the office at the crack of 9 each day. Hell, usually it isn't the crack of 10 either. But get me outside my comfort zone and I become mr. On the dot. Here I am at the doug fir again, waiting on another dahlia show. Doors open at 8, I got here half an hour in, and... Nobody. This is what comes from being a non-inveterate concertgoer. I just don't grok the local folkways.
Doesn't help that there's no BB reception here, so I can't mess around on the net or anything. I'm such a nerd. So I'm dinking away on the gadget anyway, sipping a vodka tonic, trying to look tres chic for all the people who aren't here. And yes, I realize smartphones aren't a universal status symbol. At least w/o reception I won't get sucked into any office email threads. Lecturing about the usefulness of GetProcAddress is not my idea of a good time. At the moment, I mean. During office hours, playing guru is great fun (and much easier than doing real work). Did I mention I'm a total nerd? It's true.
This isn't the first time I've done this. Here's an earlier Doug Fir-based moblog attempt, which I looked at later and decided it wasn't worth posting, what with babbling on about politics and all. It's more sort of notes for a moblog post really. I include it here primarily so that I can do a fun post-within-a-post-within-a-post thing, with another layer of nested blockquotes:
Ok, so I still got here way early. I swear I'll never get the hang of this club thing.
Had a great time regaling all and sundry about the outsourcing fiasco. I think I got geek points yesterday. Also, spent part of today explaining the thing with windows file access times I blogged about a while back. I may not be the world's greatest buzzword engineer, but I am the king, the one true king, of domain knowledge.
Someday I'm going to have to post about unix auditing. Talk about domain knowledge.
Why don't I post about tech topics more often?
North korea, that I've threatened to post about for days: the fundamental issue here is that it's always a poor idea to make threats you aren't in a position to follow through on. Don't put someone in your axis of evil, and then give them 4+ years lead time to get ready for your plans, if you have any. I'm not saying dubya's policy is the only failed policy; the be-nice policy of s. Korea, china, and russia hasn't gotten results either. Other than possibly keeping someone in nk from starving. But it also doesn't aggravate the situation.
All W did was tip our hand years in advance. Scaring the baddies shouldn't be an end in itself. Always plan for how they might actually respond, don't just assume bullying them is bound to succeed.
Look at sco. They made all sorts of claims and threats against the linux world, and where are they now? They couldn't back it up when their target didn't back down, and there was no plan b. And even if there was a plan b, no matter how great it sounds, people remember it wasn't plan a. Democracy in iraq was plan b, after the wmd thing fell through. Plan b never gets as much credibility, or as wide a constituency. It's a fact of life.
See what I mean? Someone obviously needed to chill out and relax a little.
The WW had a big expose piece today alerting us that p-town is full of cokeheads. Not a "something should be done" piece like the O did with meth or anything. As far as I can tell, the point was partly to give us a knowing, lurid giggle, and partly so they could put a nagel print on the cover, and partly to coin the term "snortland", which you have to admit is kind of clever. I mention this because the piece mentions a bust going down in the doug fir's mens room a couple years ago. Greeeeeatttt. I'm not a judgmental person, generally, but this is one of the rare things that make me think less of someone. I've seen plenty of bad hollywood movies, and read about how they came to be. I'm pretty sure the coca plant is not a net benefit to humanity, just from that. We've already got quite enough arrogance and selfishness and greed going around already, thanks. I'm not saying put anyone in jail. I'm just saying cokeheads shouldn't be suprised when people make fun of 'em.
I did a blog post earlier today with even more photos. I never get a lot of orblogs visitors from those. And yet, they're easy, and it still never ceases to surprise me when I come up with photos that look good. I tend to be self-deprecating about it and credit the idiot-proof camera. And to a degree I'm right; I can get good results without having to know all that much about cameras, optics, etc. It's also nice to get good results w/o spending lots of money, because I'm cheap. I already have a camera - why buy another, until this one breaks?
It's also true, though, that I've always sort of wanted to be good at this. I had an old 110 camera as a kid and tried "artsy" shots even then. Not all that successfully, but I tried. It's the lack of instant feedback, and the cost of film, that held me back, I think. No more "make the shot count". Just take lots of pics, try lots of stuff, and eventually something may turn out ok.
[short break]
Again I wasn't too lucky getting anyone else within my orbit to come this time, but it's about the music, not the socializing with those who orbit me, really, so whatever.
There's a bunch of teachers sitting behind me, gossiping. They're all the same.
I swear I won't touch this thing when the music starts. I'm not quite that much of a nerd. I think.
Vodka tonic #2 now. Not great really, but cheap & inoffensive, & they come in cheap plastic cups. Awesome.
I sort of left off with the political posts the last few days. I at least ought to gloat about the election, but I haven't yet. Or gloat about Wolfie. At least Falwell's still dead, the bastard.
That'd be a good movie plot come to think of it: the rapture happens, separating souls from still-living bodies, which become the undead. Zombies? Vamps? Rapture is either magical, or corporate (enslaved zombies)
I'm full of genre movie plots. Did I ever tell you about my s&s plot? All those classic s&s pix were filmed in argentina during the dictatorship, in the runup to the falklands. Film crew has usual unheroic type characters, but has to save their people from the junta. Local creative types exactly the people who'd be under suspicion and get "disappeared". Juxtapose against film's hackneyed script (spoof?).
It's starting to fill in now. I've been here about an hour, so it's about time. Past showtime and no show yet. Bastards. I did *my* part, dammit. I'm not just a nerd, I'm a freakin' calvinist. Part-time, about some things, I mean.
For lunch today I tried Ziba's Pitas, the Bosnian cart up on Park by the Galleria. Yes, Bosnian. And I'm sold. Tomorrow, will it be Bosnian again, or the Peruvian joint a few carts down? I'm spoiled for choice, honestly. I lean towards Bosnian, because of the feta cheese thing. Mmmm...
Tptb tell me I'm working on Solaris again, which is awesome. My Sun box is relevant again, although I still need to get its damn video card issues worked out.
It'd be fair to wonder why I do this. I don't go to that many concerts, but I keep going to dahlia. A friend dragged me to the first one, and it was more than fun. It was *cathartic*, as silly as that sounds. That's rare. Then the vocal half went to nyc to seek her fortune, and I figured, never again will I experience that. Now she's back, and they've got all new material, and... Yeah. I've missed the last few monthly gigs, first because of the weather, and then that damn sore toe. It still isn't better exactly, but I'm doing this anyway, dammit.
So I'm perhaps not the most high-value fan a group could have. I admit that. But I think I do ok at it, anyway. It's not like 7th grade, it's not about impressing anyone, or getting societal approval or whatever. It's all about letting go for a while. Perhaps you don't realize how hard that is?
[opening act begins]
...
Sophe Lux, opening act. Show fine, music awesome. Maybe not dance -> 3/4 time often. Waltz, I dunno how. Bought 2 cds. Yes, typing on BB again, but no music right now. Gimme a break, already. I'm doing this for *you*, dammit. Show some luv.
...
[Show ensues]
...
Ok. Home now. Very tired. Happy. Did I say "tired" yet?
Zzzzzzzzz.....
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
3rd avenue commute
The soldier statue in Lownsdale Square, one of several Spanish-American War memorials around town. If alien archaeologists ever dig up the city, someday in the distant future, they'll assume that the war was a really big deal, or at least that it somehow affected us in a significant way. I've really never seen a good explanation about why our forebears thought we needed so many memorials back then. But then, society is on sort of a memorial-building kick right now, too. And, sadly, a memorial-generating kick as well.
A rose next to Keller Fountain, since it just wouldn't do to post without including at least one flower. I'd lose my street cred, or whatever.
A bit of Keller Fountain itself. You probably haven't noticed, but I don't post a lot of photos of the thing. It's not for lack of trying. I just don't seem to have the knack of photographing it in a reasonably pleasing way. Even this one isn't all that great of a photo, but I kind of like what the water's doing.
A fern on a stone wall in Pettygrove Park, the often-overlooked little green spot behind the horrible black 200 Market St. building. The park's full of little grassy hillocks, with paths winding around them. In the sunshine, when the light's just right, you half-expect to see doors and chimneys and hobbits gamboling about. When the weather's bleaker, you fully expect barrow-wights.
Monday, May 21, 2007
photo monday rides again
The sky, a couple of hours ago.
The sky, a couple of weeks ago.
Detail of the Steel Bridge, with a bit of steel showing.
The tram, from SW Water Avenue & Lane St. I like this: An unreasonable number of wires snaking off in all directions, and one has a tram full of people hanging off of it.
Construction in the Pearl. It's all about framing the shot, you know.
Sun & leaves, "Unnamed Park" @ SW 14th & Hall, downtown Portland.
Gate at the old St. Mary's Academy block on 4th Ave., downtown. It's just a parking lot now, but with a really amazing old stone wall around it.
Ok, sure it's graffiti. But at least it's graffiti by someone who (maybe) is familiar with Pierre Proudhon. I suppose that's an encouraging sign.
More graffiti, this time opining about the city. This building is the former "Psycho Burger King", at Burnside & Broadway downtown. Spend a lot of time here and you might start to agree with the sentiment expressed here.
photo monday: sneeze-inducing edition
The #1 problem with taking photos of grass is that nobody will ever believe you. You can explain all you like that grass tassels are actually flowers, and that nothing else really looks like it, long, thin, angular and whatnot, and once you get to looking at it it's really kind of striking. Say that all you want. It won't help. People see you taking a photo, and they'll always assume you're doing something illegal, probably immoral, and possibly fattening too.
The #2 problem with taking photos of grass is hay fever. It's not quite peak pollen season just yet, but my, uh, detector keeps going off. I always claim I go to the mat for you guys, O Gentle Reader(s), and this is yet another example. Ok, sure, you didn't actually ask me to nuzzle up to pollen-spewing grass stems of doom, and chances are you don't care now that I've gone through with it. But still.
In case you're curious, photo #1 is from Tanner Springs, #2 is from Frank L. Knight Park, and #3 is in Lovejoy Fountain Plaza.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
roses, mostly
Roses around SW 14th & Montgomery, downtown Portland. ODOT plants a lot of roses and other flowers around freeways, I guess to make them a little less ugly. So these are your tax dollars (and mine) at work. I don't drive all that much, so the only way to really get my money's worth here is with a camera, I guess.
The chunk of open space you see in the second photo is not a park, it's ODOT land connected with the freeway, and it's fenced off, No Admittance. I had to peek my camera through a chain link fence to take this. As you can see on this map, it's a fairly good-sized chunk of land just sitting there fenced off, which is kind of a shame. Although I'm not entirely sure what else you could do with it, either.
This one's in what the city refers to as the "Unnamed Park at SW 14th and Hall", a triangle-shaped nook next to I-405, a few blocks south from the last batch of roses.
Wildflowers at Frank L. Knight Park, near the Vista Tunnels.
Flowers in an old stone wall on 4th Ave. The wall's all that remains of the original St. Mary's Academy building. It's been nothing but picturesque ruins for as long as I can remember.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
flowers, finally
Assorted wildflowers in Tanner Springs Park, in the Pearl.
Spring leaves, somewhere near PSU (I think).
A rose on SW Broadway near Burnside, downtown Portland.
Clusters of unobtrusive little white flowers. They're actually pretty cool, if you take the time and look closely enough.
Ding, Dong, Falwell's dead
I don't want to hear any of the usual "A Nation United in Mourning" crap from the media about today's blessed event. So here are some fun Falwell links, just so we're all crystal clear on what kind of person he was:
- TheocracyWatch mentions Falwell's unusual views on nuclear war in a piece on Dispensationalism
- A selection of jawdropping Falwell quotes
- One Peoples Project: JERRY FALWELL (DECEASED). [Seems they've already updated their piece.] Covers some of Falwell's rather, uh, unreconstructed racial opinions, among other things.
- HufPo on his 2006 comments comparing Hillary Clinton to Lucifer. I mean, I'm not Hillary fan myself, but really. Fundies say the darndest things.
- NYT, from 1985: " Falwell Appearance Canceled Over South Africa Remarks".
- Wash. Post, right after 9/11: "God Gave U.S. 'What We Deserve,' Falwell Says". You know, because of the ACLU, feminists, gays, etc. The wingnuts always strut around lecturing us about how they're so much more patriotic than everyone else, and then they turn around and say stuff like this. I don't get it.
There's a GOP presidential debate this evening, and the candidates are scrambling over each other to heap praise on Falwell. No big surprise there. And Pat Robertson offers his public condolences as well. At least we've still got ol' Pat to kick around.
Oh, and here's a rich one, a post whining that "Liberal Blogs Spew Hate on Jerry Falwell Death". To which I can only say, hell yeah. What goes around, comes around, after all.
Meanwhile, here among the living, the US Attorney thing gets even uglier. Everyone keeps saying Gonzo's job is doomed, for real this time, definitely, but the Glorious Leader continues to stand by him, just like he's standing by Wolfie. At this point it seems every single personnel issue is the Alamo all over again, so far as the White House is concerned. And like I said before, that's fine with me. I'd rather they stayed around in their current jobs, scorned by all and sundry. I'd like to see Dubya and the R's in Congress keep going to the mat to defend these clowns, further tarnishing their own reputations in the process. It pains me to say this, but a USDOJ that's effectively paralyzed until 2009 is the best outcome we can reasonably hope for so long as Bush rules the roost. It's not a good outcome, by any means, but all the other possibilities are even worse. A new AG with a functioning staff would mean a fresh assault on basic civil liberties, whereas Gonzo & Co. aren't in a position to do much more in that direction right now.
Updated: A short bit ago, I got an abusive comment from some anonymous visitor, calling me all sorts of names because I won't pretend Falwell's demise is some kind of horrible national tragedy. Sure, I could say all that stuff purely for the sake of politeness. I could be all sanctimonious and say I'm taking the high road, and pretend to mourn the death of someone who would've welcomed mine. But I've always believed honesty is the best policy. We're all better off without the guy. If that offends you, tough. Send flowers to the funeral if it makes you feel any better.
(And in case you're wondering, yes, I do delete personally abusive comments. Them's always been the house rules around these parts. If you can't handle that, if you think I'm being unfair somehow, feel free to go get your own blog and swear at me and yell and scream all you want over there, for all I care. Getting a blog is incredibly easy these days. It's so easy even a fundie can do it.)
Monday, May 14, 2007
an enigma wrapped in a blog
So I was tagged the other day by Samuel, proprietor of the ZehnKatzen Times. Here's his Bloggy Tag post, in which he refers to this humble blog as "an enigma wrapped in a blog", which I rather like, hence the title. (His blogroll also lists this blog under "They have seen the fnords". Which is 100% true, incidentally.)
I don't intend to be a leaf node in the great Bloggy Tag tree, so I really will tag my 5 bloggers, honest... although I haven't quite done so just yet. It seems to me it'd be a bit of a faux pas to tag someone who's already been tagged before, since that suggests one hasn't been reading the taggee's blog very closely, and didn't do one's homework. So let's just mark that part as a TODO and move on to the main event.
I'd been thinking about starting a blog for quite a while before I gave in to temptation. I'd spent a lot of time in mostly tech-related discussion forums, and over time I found that I got sidetracked quite easily by off-topic subjects. Often it was political stuff, and nothing tears a forum apart like an unwanted political thread. At the same time, every so often I'd be thinking about something and I'd find myself itching to write about it, but not knowing how or where to do it. Eventually I got to thinking, you know, a blog would be a good way to do that, and I could go off on my usual 50 different directions however I pleased, without getting in anyone else's way, or them getting in mine. I held off for a while, because everyone who doesn't have a blog knows for a fact that all bloggers are preening, self-important losers, and I certainly didn't want to become one of those. Eventually I figured out it was way too late for me to start worrying about that, so I might as well take the plunge. So I did.
I also had the idea that blogging would be a good writing exercise, in a way that office email rarely is. I have a tendency to use longwinded run-on sentences full of commas, and to switch back and forth between past and present tense in a rather random and awkward way. I also overuse certain words and phrases if I'm not careful, such as "rather", "basically", "of course", and "for example", for example. I say these things in the present tense not out of linguistic incompetence (for once), but because I'm not certain I've gotten any better over the past 16+ months. In the larger scheme of things that really isn't all that long, I suppose. So there may be hope for me yet. Although if I'd been going to the gym as religiously as I've done this over the last 16 months, I might have those six-pack abs by now. And to think I was briefly an English major, back in my long-departed college days. It occurs to me that if blogging truly is an art, affecting a really singular style might be a Good Thing. If blogs had existed decades ago, I'm convinced certain writers would've found the medium irresistable. Faulkner, for one, and probably Thomas Wolfe as well. Hemingway might've been more of a Twitter user, texting in "IM HNTNG RHINO" and then "IM 8 RHINO 4 BRKFST UR NOT LOL". But I digress.
So the jury's still out on stylistic tics and such, but I've found that writing ideas down in a blog, knowing that someone might eventually wander by and read them, is a good way to crystallize and capture what you're thinking about. Much better than just sitting around daydreaming, at any rate.
In the beginning I really thought this would be more of a political blog than it's turned out to be. After a post or two explaining in great detail precisely what is wrong with Dick Cheney, for example, I tend to feel I've addressed the issue to my own satisfaction, and I move on to something else. It's the curse of having eclectic interests, I guess. I'd probably have far more regular readers if I picked a topic and stuck to it. Come to think of it, that's exactly what I've done on SNR, this blog's nerdy and utterly single-minded sibling. More about which in a moment.
So there was an initial rush of pent-up opinions, and I tend to think those posts don't rank among my most immortal prose, relatively speaking. After that, I started in with the photos. I really didn't anticipate I'd be posting all these photos of flowers. I figured I'd occasionally post a photo or two just to illustrate some point I was trying to make. From there, the photo side of things grew like kudzu. It wasn't something I contemplated when I started the blog, but it's a big reason why I keep doing it. Some of the credit has to go to the nice folks at Canon, for making a camera that delivers good results on a consistent basis, even though I'm the one using it. That had to take a fair bit of engineering skill.
After a while, I began to realize that there was a lot of stuff that didn't work here, despite this blog's eclectic subject matter (or lack thereof). I'd sort of gotten wrapped up in the SCO vs. Universe situation, toiling on the side of the Universe, i.e. the good guys. I'd occasionally post things of interest to the anti-SCO community here, but then they'd come back a week later and the top story here would be about some photos of roses I took the other day, or a terrible sword-n-sorcery movie I just saw, or something stupid the president just said. Conversely, I imagine that the majority of this blog's nano-cadre of Gentle Reader(s) don't care too much about my techie obsessions. So I started a second blog, the aforementioned SNR, dedicated to ending the SCO menace, and salting the earth from which it arose, and having fun in the process. SNR actually gets far more visits than the main page here ever does, with regular readers from all over the world (although the majority of my hits are Google Image searches leading to this blog.) But low readership or not, this blog is the firstborn, and it's always been the more rewarding of the two to work on.
I didn't anticipate the photo thing, and I don't know what to anticipate next. So I guess you could also say I keep doing this just to see where (if anywhere) it leads me next. Or not. Or whatever. Because in the end, it's just a geme.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Collins Circle
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A few photos of Collins Circle, the weird traffic circle at 18th & Jefferson in downtown Portland, next to the Goose Hollow MAX stop. We are not, generally speaking, a city of grand traffic circles. There's Coe Circle in Laurelhurst, with the famous Joan of Arc statue. There's Ladd Circle in the heart of Ladd's Addition, with a nice little garden full of roses, if you go in season and can find your way around Ladd's Addition. (But hey, wandering around lost there is half the fun.) Here and there around town you'll find a number of mini-circles, which exist to slow traffic down in residential neighborhoods. And then there's Collins Circle, which contains the large and rather puzzling stone sculpture you see here.
People generally don't even notice the thing, which may be just as well. I'm not a big fan of it myself, although you can get some (mildly) interesting photos out of it, and it might be fun spending a few minutes speculating about what it's supposed to be, or what it's supposed to evoke. It looks sort of like an old, forgotten stone wall, sort of like an arid talus slope, and I'm not sure what the shape of it is supposed to indicate. (You can get a better idea of the shape from this overhead view) Is it supposed to shaped like a pizza missing a slice, due to the nearby student housing for PSU? Is it Pac-Man? To me, it gives the strong sense that something's missing here. There really ought to be a fountain, with water running over the rocks, or at least a reflecting pool around it. Or it's a sundial without the bits that tell time. Or it's the base of a missing statue. Or there's a door on one side, leading to the fabulous underground tomb of a cruel pagan king of yore. It could be lots of things, but sadly isn't any of them.
If you want to see more (and better) photos of the thing, Art on File has a few here. The University of Oregon has a fairly large collection of photos, but they are apparently Classified and not to be seen by mere mortals. So if you happen not to be a mere mortal, you might check those photos out as well.
The Oregonian's Randy Gragg was a friend of the circle's architect/designer, the late Robert Murase. When Murase died in 2005, Gragg wrote an article about his life and career, and mentioned Collins Circle in passing:
Like most architects, who deal with clients and budgets out of their control, Murase's projects weren't always successful. Maybe most tragic was the truly excellent work he did in setting the stage for architecture that ultimately failed to rise to the challenge his landscapes made. Chief among these works is one of the most assertive works Murase ever did: the stout, basalt Japanese infinity design he created for TriMet to fill Collins Circle at the Southwest 18th and Jefferson Westside MAX station.
The piece only "met its context halfway," according to Greg Baldwin, a prominent local architect with ZGF Partnership. The subsequent designs around it have failed to hold up their side of the bargain in the form, materials and ideas.
"I look at his work in a lot of places, and I wish the architects had done more -- that I had done more," Baldwin said. "There's an intellectual contribution he made with his work that is more profound than its aesthetic contribution. There are deep polemics, but he never imposed them. It's up to the observer to discover them."
It's nice to speak well of the dead, of course, and it's nice to speak well of one's friends, certainly. But that passage is just rich. It really is. Admit the thing is unsuccessful, but lay all the blame on subsequent nearby buildings that didn't measure up to the "challenge". At the time the article was written, the only subsequent nearby building was the adjacent Collins Circle Apartments, so I figure this is what they have in mind. And it's true, the building is a fairly generic, inoffensive affair, a six story red brick apartment building with retail on the bottom. It's not the work of internationally renowned architects, but perhaps because of that, it's also affordable enough that university students can live there. That's not a point to be dismissed out of hand.
Gragg once referred to the circle as "one of the boldest pieces of public art since [Lawrence Halprin's] Lovejoy Fountain.". Which, again, is rich. Longtime readers know I'm a big fan of Lovejoy Fountain, and photos of it show up here all the time. Collins Circle, you're no Lovejoy Fountain.
A 1998 piece about the then-new westside MAX line's public art describes the circle:
Collins Circle, across the street from Goose Hollow Station, was designed as "a gateway to the city." Murase sees the stone-studded traffic circle as a representation of ancient, evolving Oregon landscapes, the boxy stones reminiscent of burial mounds and symbolic of volcanic activity that shaped Eastern Oregon.
"It's a thoughtful place," he said. "It will cause a lot of questions. I like to have people think about it."
In a 1997 overview of the year's "interesting" architecture of the year, the Graggmeister wrote:
The gateway as art
Thought we were just talking about architecture here? Well, an architect wins this category, hands down: Robert Murase for his bracing design of Collins Circle at the crossroads of Southwest 18th Avenue and Jefferson Street and the westside light-rail line. Rendering a spiraling Japanese brush-painting symbol called enso in fractured chunks of basalt, the circle has enough spirituality to lure New Age worshipers on summer mornings. But it has the scale to function as a gateway to the city -- the one of the future rather than the present.
Call me deficient in New Age spirituality if you like (and you'd be right), but a mound of mute stones just doesn't stir my soul much. I look at it, and what I see is a missed opportunity. Somewhere near here, during westside MAX construction, workers uncovered a huge pulley that was once part of Portland's short-lived cable car line. Cable cars once ran from this very spot up into the West Hills, on a long and very steep trestle. The pulley operated a turntable to rotate cars for their next trip up the hill. I wonder if the circle was the site of the turntable, way back when? The story doesn't say exactly, but it seems like a reasonable guess. So some sort of historical, transit-related theme would've been a good fit here.
If you just can't get enough of Gragg's design-junkie blather, he also wrote a whole feature article about the circle back in '97, "The Power of the Graceful Contrast". Towards the bottom, he discloses a controversy about the place:
No less controversial for some was Murase's design for Collins Circle, which had been planted with trees and rhododendrons paid for by local benefactor Mary Beth Collins. Like many recent changes in the city, it was not greeted warmly by many longtime locals.
``The old circle was a nice landscape that Tri Met just scraped away without any public talking to anyone in the neighborhood,'' Portland planner Richard Brainard says. ``You used to come down Canyon Road and the circle marked the beginning of downtown with something green. Now it's just rocks. Bob is a great landscape architect, but the way this was done and the result is just not right.''
Read enough of this and you'll conclude what I concluded a long time ago, that architecture is nothing but the art of creative BS. Master that, and people will let you build anything. You want to sculpt a centaur that looks like Elvis, made out of pure, glowing plutonium? Just memorize a few stock art-world phrases, schmooze with the right movers and shakers, and you'll be good to go. You'll have to design an addition to your house just to hold all the awards your fellow architects will bestow on you. If possible, you'll want to work in a self-conscious small city like Portland, where everyone's been taught that only ignorant Bible-thumping rubes criticize capital-A Art. But I digress.
People who noticed the circle were calling BS on it from the beginning, as you can tell from a 1995 article titled "That Sloping Basalt Feature Will Come Full Circle . . . Eventually". The piece pleaded for patience, at least until MAX construction was completed:
Some people who have glimpsed the sloping basalt feature in the intersection are puzzled: What is it? What is a fortress doing in the middle of the street?
Patience, friends.
When the roadwork is done and the design completed, the image may be more evocative.
The article says the previous landscaping at the circle had been paid for by the Collins Foundation, a local nonprofit, hence the name.
The article also mentions that the sculpture is Not For Climbing. Pedestrians are not wanted here. Or more to the point, I've seen homeless people sleeping among the landscaping in both Ladd Circle and Coe Circle, but not here. Skateboarders are out of luck here, too, come to think of it. You never even see kids playing on it, using it as a play fort or anything. It's entirely uninviting for all of these purposes. I don't know if that was intentional or not, but either way it does a heckuva job.
In fairness, traffic circles are a tough nut, designwise. They tend to be surrounded by a snarl of traffic, so you can't really create them for pedestrians. The Joan of Arc in Coe Circle works - you can see it at a distance, and tell what it is with a glance as you drive by. Likewise with the roses in Ladd Circle. Ladd Circle isn't quite so busy, so you could also walk over to it and look at the roses if you wanted to.
At Collins Circle, half of the circle is busy and half isn't. It wasn't designed for people, but people cut across it all the time anyway, since it's the shortest path between the MAX stop and the sidewalk on SW Jefferson St. You're not really supposed to, but it seems everyone does, and I did when I was taking the photos. It doesn't really catch the eye when you drive past, or ride by on the train. I used to ride right past the thing on the train every day for years and never gave it a second thought. I really never thought about until a week or two ago, while I was searching for anything convenient to add to my ongoing city parks series. It kind of pushes the definition a little, but at least it's conveniently located.
Art people look at the thing and wonder, is it a park, or a sculpture? There's just no end to the art-theory fun you could get out of that question, if you're that sort of person. I wonder the same thing, actually, but for a more mundane, PoliSci-geek reason: Who's in charge of the thing? If some punk kid tags it, which bureaucracy's budget pays to fix it? Some maps, like the city's SW Walking Map, list it as a "Jefferson Street Park", but there's no sign and it's not on the parks bureau's website. The Regional Arts & Culture Council normally takes care of public art, but it's not on their website either. Likewise, TriMet and the city's transportation department also don't claim it.
I tend to focus on parks, historic places and things, local urban legends, social conventions and mores, and such because I'm interested in the shared fabric of the city, the things that make Portland what it is. Why we're not just like L.A. or Atlanta, for instance. I'm not that interested in the official, approved history of the place, and I also shy away from boosterism, whether of the Visitors' Center or "Keep Portland Weird" varieties. I'll make up my own mind, thanks. I occasionally get visitors who freak out when I call BS on some local institution or make snide remarks about the Pearl District or something. But really, how can people say they care about the place but refuse to acknowledge the warts when they crop up? You ignore the warts, you get more warts, and the city you care about loses a little more of what makes it special.
When I see a bungled opportunity like this, it offends me because we really don't have that much common space here, places you can sit and read a book without having to buy a crappy $5 latte, or go for a walk without paying admission. On the very rare occasion that we're creating a park close to the downtown core, the effort ought to be taken a little more seriously than this one was. You don't just pick a well-connected architect and let them have a wank at taxpayer expense, which is basically what the circle is, if you ask me. Somehow we keep ending up with one perplexing conceptual piece after another, while pretending it's all so very sophisticated. As if mystifying the general public was somehow difficult or something. To make it worse, one of the core tenets of the design/architecture world is that once something like this is in place, you can never, ever change anything about it. It's literally set in stone, forever. If you think it'd look better with a reflecting pool at the base, too bad. It wasn't part of the holy original vision, so you're out of luck. Forever. In practice, things do get changed around sometimes, but it's often a long and arduous process. So what you really want to do is get it right the first time. This time we didn't, and now we're stuck with it. Blechhhh.