Winter, Powell Butte

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I wandered out to Powell Butte a couple of weeks ago, during the post-Ultra-Snowpocalypse thaw. I had the day off, so I thought it might be fun to go out and wander around the place and maybe take a few photos, as is my way. I used to go there a lot, years ago, for the mountain bike trails, but it'd been a very long time since I'd gone. As I walked around, I got to thinking and realized it'd been close to 15 years. That (plus a recent birthday) kind of got me down. The cold, windy, bleak landscape didn't help a lot either. When you're 23 or so, it's only natural to feel like an insignificant part of a pointless universe. It can even feel kind of artistic and sophisticated, and you can get a lot of mileage out of wandering around this sort of landscape, brooding, wearing black if possible. It's like walking through an indie rock album cover. Any photos you take just might end up as your next album cover. Add another 15 years or so, and feeling pointless and insignificant is no longer quite so much fun.

I quickly realized I would've been happier if I'd done something completely different that day.



But enough about me. At least I got some photos out of the excursion, and some of them even turned out ok, I think, maybe.

Powell Butte used to be one of my favorite spots in the city. I'm not sure it still is, but there certainly isn't anything like it in the area. There are quite a few other volcanic hills around town, mostly around the eastside -- Mt. Tabor, Rocky Butte, Kelly Butte, etc., and Mount Sylvania and maybe a couple of others on the westside. The whole thing's a city park, the second largest in town after Forest Park. Or more precisely, there's a middling-sized park here surrounded by a vast chunk of land owned by the Water Bureau. Somewhere around here there's a vast underground water reservoir, and much of Powell Butte is reserved for future expansion. Above ground, most of the park is kind of an open, gently rolling grassland, very much unlike the densely forested other buttes around town. Nice place to walk around, or bike, or even ride your horse, assuming you have a horse, which I don't. It's maybe not as dramatic and photogenic as some other places around town, though. You might've noticed how many of these photos incude wide swaths of sky, full of low, fast, black clouds. I really tried to be inspired by all that vast brown grass, but I just wasn't feeling it for some reason. Beats me.



More about Powell Butte, from all across the intertubes:

• Wikipedia
• Portland Water Bureau
• everything2
• Friends Of Powell Butte
• The city's Powell Butte Project mostly focuses on potential fire hazards here.
• US Geological Survey. They say Powell Butte is a cinder cone, versus most of the other mini-volcanic bits around town which are "lava domes". A lava dome is where the earth sort of expands into a big festering zit, without actually exploding. With a cinder cone, it's all-out Clearasil time. It's funny, though, Powell Butte seems to have a much gentler landscape than the mere lava domes around town. If anything, the open grassland parts remind me a little, just a little, of the slopes of one of the big shield volcanoes on the Big Island of Hawaii. Except obviously much smaller, and with less desirable weather.
• A recent post at Neig
hborhoodNotes about new trail construction on Powell Butte.
• Portland Ground (with better photos than mine, as usual)
• John Rakestraw has more photos, again far superior to my humble offerings. Photos of Mt. Hood, birds, and even a coyote. I don't have any of those here, I'm afraid.

sundog, riverplace

anamorphic cat

I don't feel up to tackling the Drafts backlog right now, so here's another batch of cat photos instead. This time taken with the latest toy from Goodwill, an Optivision XW 5000 anamorphic lens. I understand these are typically used for film & video work, for doing widescreen stuff on normal-width film. One anamorphic lens to squeeze the wide stuff onto the film, another anamorphic lens on the projector to reverse the process. So that's the intended purpose, but I just got it to do funko-groovish special effects using actual optics, rather than GIMP/Photoshop. It sounded like fun, and it was cheap, so hey.

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As an added, extra, ultra-bonus, a couple of non-anamorphic photos.

Portland's WWII Memorial

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A few photos of Portland's hidden and all-but-forgotten World War II memorial. It's by the main entrance to Memorial Coliseum, but to the right and down an inconspicuous flight of stairs, so the passing crowds don't notice it's there. Unless you go down those stairs, there's nothing else at the Coliseum to indicate who or what it's supposed to be a memorial to. Below, there's a courtyard with a small fountain, a couple of benches, and a black stone wall with the names of Oregonians killed in the war. The wall looks a lot like the Vietnam Memorial in DC, but it's several decades older.



There's kind of a semantic argument about whether this area or the entire Coliseum is the memorial. It's not just idle hairsplitting; various Powers That Be keep broaching the idea of "redeveloping" the old Coliseum, which involves tearing it down and replacing it with various pet projects (a major league baseball stadium, more condo towers, etc.). They say it's obsolete and falling apart, and furthermore it competes with the Rose Garden next door, and get a load of that 60's ugliness -- eek! Those plans get a bit more complicated if the whole building is a war memorial. Some people are likely to object to tearing it down, if that's the case.



There's nothing particularly memorial-like about the Coliseum itself. The memorial part was basically tacked on by that era's Powers That Be to get the public to cough up the cash for it. "Veterans" was society's root password back then. Say it, and the public will let you have whatever you want. Today's root password is "sustainable". A few years ago, it was "homeland", and I think it was "the children" before that. Further back, it was "war on drugs" for quite a while. At any time, in any era, there's always a root password. In any case, the city fathers felt we needed a shiny new sports arena, so they said "veterans", and the citizens dutifully opened their wallets. So after an ugly bit of urban renewal (which involved tearing out the historic core of Portland's black community, but that's another story), our fair city ended up with a big new Coliseum, with an inconspicuous little Memorial tacked on the side.



So wrapping the Coliseum in the flag was a great way to get it funded back in the 50's, but now we've run up against the Law of Unintended Consequences. It's commonly thought that the Coliseum is hopelessly obsolete these days, and only partly because it lacks the luxury skyboxes required in these less-egalitarian times. Cities around the country have spent the last 15 years or so tearing out grey 60's concrete sports venues and replacing them with glitzy new venues, but the Coliseum has to stay, because tearing it out would be an insult to the nation's veterans, even if the "memorial" bit was originally stuck in for somewhat-less-than-sincere reasons.



Now, I'm not a big war afficionado. Society glorifies war far too much already, and we've spent a huge pile of money in recent years building increasingly grandiose memorials to various wars and other Important People And Events (see for example the big new WWII memorial in DC). I don't exactly see the recent memorial-building frenzy as a sign of a healthy, forward-looking society. But that said, the current state of affairs is quite sad. There's nothing more forlorn than a forgotten memorial. I've argued before that society should think carefuly before going around throwing up monuments, naming things after people, living or dead, etc. I won't bore you with the full argument again, but I will say this WWII memorial is a great illustration of my point.



I'm tempted to argue that the memorial, or at least the walls with names, should be moved somewhere less obscure and more accessible. But I worry that just plays into the hands of the city's greedy developers. If the memorial is the one thing that keeps the Coliseum from being torn down, and you move the memorial, a heartbeat later the Coliseum will be gone, and our tax dollars will go to build even more "market rate" condo towers in its place, for those rich Californian empty-nesters the city inexplicably loves so much. A post on BlueOregon advocates moving the Coliseum to save it, but tearing it down would be cheaper, so that's probably what they'd do -- unless maybe you came up with a really upscale-Portland use for the building, like making it the world's largest doggie day spa / yoga studio / swanky martini bar megaplex.



I feel like I have to kind of tiptoe around this and reiterate that I'm not actually accusing any particular person of doing this, because it wouldn't be nice to accuse someone of this -- but it does seem to me that, if one wanted to blow up the Coliseum, it would be in one's vested interest to neglect the memorial. Not do anything to damage it intentionally, of course, but simply devote as few resources as possible to its upkeep, in classic Portland passive-aggressive fashion. Eventually -- hopefully -- the public will get outraged about it and demand action, and one can then propose a solution that involves condo towers. As I said, I'm not accusing anyone in particular of doing this. I'm not a mindreader, and I can't speak to people's inner motives. I'm just saying that if one wanted what the Powers That Be appear to want, one's coldly logical best course of action would be indistinguishable from what's actually been happening for years now. Although perhaps that's just a remarkable coincidence. I really couldn't begin to speculate about that. I mean that. Honest.

a red pepper

Umbrella Man

A few photos of the "Umbrella Man" statue in Pioneer Courthouse Square. He's a local icon, and people seem to like him, for the most part. I think it's that he sort of captures the "everyday civic virtue" aspect of Portland's self-image. Just a regular guy in a suit, seeing someone in need and trying to be helpful. I guess that's what it's about. The central location probably helps too.


I didn't really know anything about the Umbrella Man, so being who I am, I thought I'd dig around a bit, see what I could find out, and do a post about it, since that's what I always do. The strange thing this time is that I think I liked the Umbrella Man better before I started researching him.



Everybody just calls him the Umbrella Man, but his real name is "Allow Me", and he's by the sculptor J. Seward Johnson, Jr., who we'll get to in a bit.

But first, I was surprised to discover that our Umbrella Man is just one of several Umbrella Men scattered here and there. There's one in Philadelphia -- although being in Philadelphia, his gesture is less of an "Allow Me", and more of a "Stop, Thief!", I think. Philadelphia's Umbrella Man was moved a few years back, the article saying:

But in late May the oft-maligned statue, a J. Seward Johnson work titled Allow Me, disappeared. And to the chagrin of those who routinely molested the immovable man by placing cigarette butts, onion rings or trash between his open fingers, he won't be returning to his shady sidewalk spot.

They trash theirs, we make ours a civic icon. This shows that either they, or we, are uncultured philistines. But I'm not sure which is which right now. I do have a sudden hankering for onion rings, though. Mmm... onion rings... Anyway, the article goes on to note:

Philly's work is just one in a series of seven casts. Chicago, Portland, Ore., and Bath, N.Y., all have copies of Allow Me on public display; the remaining three are in private collections in Los Angeles, Port Smith, Ark., and Hamilton, Ohio.

Here's a photo of the Chicago Umbrella Man. The Waymarking page about our guy suggests there's at least one more out there, somewhere in New England, although that may be the Bath, NY one.

Updated: We now have linky-linky from this story about Philadelphia's Umbrella Man. Seems he's just returned to his new home after being damaged in post-World Series drunken rioting. Portland has many sterling qualities and all that, but we do have an unfortunate lack of drunken rioting. Even on Fat Tuesday and St. Patrick's Day, when drunken rioting is practically a patriotic duty. Ok, and we also have an unfortunate lack of a major league baseball team. And an NHL team, more importantly. But I digress.



It seems Mr. Johnson happens to be a disinherited (but still very, very rich) heir to the Johnson & Johnson family fortune. I gather he's sort of your basic wealthy, generous patron of the arts, who does a bit of sculpting of his own on the side.

Thing is, though, I gather his work isn't everyone's cup of tea. Art critics, in particular, seem to generally look down their noses at Johnson's works. This is the part that sort of makes me unhappy. I just thought of our statue as the Umbrella Man, a well-known piece of local public art. I never stopped to consider whether he might be ...gasp... bad art! I guess the painted shirt and tie ought to have been a big kitsch alert, but things only start to sink in once you've looked at some of his other stuff.

Johnson may be best known (outside Portland, anyway) for "Beyond the Frame", a controversial (but popular) show at the Corcoran Gallery in DC. "Beyond the Frame" showcased a series of Johnson's sculptures based on famous impressionist paintings. The Washington Post's art critic hated it with a passion. His review's worth a read -- you don't often encounter quite this degree of invective in a family newspaper, and when you do, it's rarely as entertaining as this. There's also an interesting (and much calmer) discussion of the show in this post on IONARTS, a DC art blog.

On the other hand, the National Review loved it, or they say they loved it, for solid ideological culture-war reasons. It was a golden opportunity for conservative elite types to once again trot out their pretend allegiance to the unrefined tastes of the common man. When they're not busy sending the common man off to die in the Middle East, or exporting his job to China, I mean.



I also ran across a 1989 article about Johnson's works in Interior Design magazine, titled "Norman Rockwell in 3-D". Unfortunately the article's only available on HighBeam, which I don't subscribe to, but it begins with the sentence "Seward Johnson, Jr., is not the worst sculptor in the U.S., though he may be trying."

I get the impression Johnson remains unfazed by the critics. I think it's like what George Lucas said when the Star Wars prequel trilogy came out, something to the effect that his stuff is critic-proof, and he can afford not to care what they think.

I see the Umbrella Man kind of like how I see the aforementioned onion rings. I know I'm not supposed to like onion rings. Educated, civilized, cultured persons such as myself shouldn't like such things. It simply isn't done. But I still sort of do anyway.





Not a big "from the interwebs" section this time, but a few items

A About.com page insists he can't be a real Portlander, because he's wearing a suit and using an umbrella. I've never gotten the no-umbrella thing some people have here. I've lived here most of my life, and umbrellas are a basic quality-of-life amenity. Nobody gives you points for getting rained on when you don't have to. You do know that, right?

Ricardo's Blog also has a post about Umbrella Man, with a couple of photos.

On Indymedia, a photo of the Umbrella Man during a war protest, looking as if he's joined in.

And, lastly, someone's poem about him.