Puzzle Tower I

Our occasional tour of Portland bus mall art leads us to Puzzle Tower I, at the corner of 5th Avenue & Salmon St. It's one of the new crop of public artworks that arrived along with the MAX Green Line. Overall those are quite an uneven bunch, but I do like this one. If you're following this occasional tour and you've looked at the photos in this post you probably just went "Duh", I mean, it's abstract and stainless steel, obviously I'm going to be favorably inclined toward it. Ok, so it's a bit small and skinny for a public art piece, but hey.

TriMet's Green Line Public Art Tour describes it thusly:

Puzzle Tower 1, 2007

ARTIST

Chris Gander

LOCATION

On 5th Avenue, between Salmon and Main streets

DESCRIPTION

Puzzle Tower, by Chris Gander, consists of five basic geometric forms designed as an exploration of symmetry and visual balance. These structural and architectural forms invite viewers to speculate and find meaningful personal references from something unknown or unfamiliar.

An article in Pacific Northwest College of Art's Untitled magazine mentions it briefly:

...contemporary artists like current faculty Chris Gander continue to deploy in increasingly formal and astute geometric forms. These works belly an approachable humor and resilience, as in his abiding stainless steel Puzzle Tower on Southwest Fifth Avenue, between Main and Salmon Streets.

(And yes, the original text uses "belly" instead of "belie". Sometimes spell check is the death of the English language. Other times it just makes it more surreal.)

Via PNCA's Flickr stream, here's a photo of the artist standing next to it at the official dedication, for scale. Also ran across an interesting article about a 2008 show at Linfield showcasing other works of his. And as the name suggests, this isn't the only Puzzle Tower out there; here are pics of Puzzle Towers II and III, via the Laura Russo Gallery.

So anyway, I usually don't burn any time speculating about what a given artwork is "supposed to be". I mean, that's kind of missing the point when you're talking about anything abstract. But this time we've apparently been invited to not just speculate but also develop "meaningful personal references". I'm going to leave the latter part alone for now, but speculation I can do.

When I was a kid, someone gave me a 3D wooden puzzle that had pieces that looked a lot like this. I took it apart and for the life of me I could never get it back together again. So that's what it reminds me of. And that was, in fact, a puzzle. And... well, that's all I've got, actually. A 3D wooden puzzle piece, but blown up by several orders of magnitude, and made of stainless steel, possibly forming part of a larger... something... if it's ever reunited with the other puzzle pieces and reassembled correctly. Maybe at that point it activates and you get a giant robot, and the giant robot lets you ride on his shoulder as he strides the earth seeking a secret buried treasure. Make of that what you will.

lunch of champions

This, o Gentle Reader(s), is a Pork Hammer sandwich from Big-Ass Sandwiches. Ham, bacon, sausage, fries, and cole slaw, and I had them add some grilled onions. Oh, and a side of fries to go with the fries already on the sandwich.



This isn't what I usually have for lunch, but I was in a good mood & felt like indulging a little. I'd finally convinced the Pointy Haired Bosses to let me fix a pet peeve bug I've wanted to sort out for, oh, at least a year and a half now. It's actually one of a nest of related bugs I'd like to fix, so the hope is that this one is just the thin end of the wedge and they'll go for the others soon. So yeah, in short, I have a really super-exciting thrills-a-minute life in RL.

Yankee Champion

Today's adventure takes us to the corner of SW Broadway & Montgomery, on the Portland State University campus, where we encounter Yankee Champion, a big stainless steel abstract sculpture next to the university's business school building. Gentle Readers may recall that I'm generally fond of this sort of thing. This one is a bit more... medical-looking than most, but hey. Or possibly dental. Or perhaps it's a very intricate and expensive German auto part.

I've been able to discover very little about it from the interwebs; here are the few morsels I've come across:

• Two photos on the artist's website. His site notes that he switched from abstract to figurative sculpture in 1988. I like the abstract stuff better, but that's really a general personal preference rather than a comment on any particular work.
• PSU's flickr stream has an artsy photo, and the UO Library has the same photo plus more info, and mentions that the artist is a prof at OSU.
• A Scientific Commons page (which appears to be broken right now) describes it as: "A large, outdoor, shiny metal sculpture uniting a conglomerate of shapes supported by three irregularly shaped legs." Cached page here.

current gruntwork

When I refreshed the layout of this humble blog a few months ago, one of my main goals was to be able to post larger photos. Flickr added a new "Medium - 640" size as part of their site redesign last year, so I widened the blog's post widget to accommodate photos that size (typically 640 x 427 for DSLR photos, 640 x 480 for the old point-n-shoot, roughly 640 x 640 for square-format Holga pics).

I still think the new design's great and I'm really happy about it and so forth, but it introduced a new problem: I now had 5 years of old posts with photos that were too damn small, thus introducing new ugliness where it didn't exist before. So there's nothing for it except to go back and swap all the photos out for bigger ones. Oh, and update embedded Google Maps, Flickr slideshows, YouTube videos, etc., while I'm at it, because now all of those are too small as well.

As you can imagine, this is a long and tedious search-n-replace job, and I'm nowhere near done yet. I started by updating the posts that get the most traffic, and then began updating less popular posts when they got occasional search hits. Now I'm slogging through roughly in reverse chronological order, updating anything I haven't touched yet. I've done most of 2010 now, and plus big chunks of 2006 (when I got tired of looking at 2010), plus the aforementioned demand-driven ones here and there in between.

I have a nagging feeling that it would be faster if I cooked up something using Perl and the Blogger API, but I do kind of enjoy going back and looking at old posts now and then.

So, in short, I apologize for the dearth of posts with actual words in them of late. Feel free to go wander through the archives. It's possible that your favorite post here (and you do have one, right?) has been updated and is all shiny and new-looking now. And if not, I'll probably see the visit in my blog stats and go update it, so feel free to check back in a couple of days, assuming you're really that interested. Or hey, go ahead and leave a comment if you prefer, and nominate something to be updated. Technically I suppose you could suggest switching something back to puny 2006-looking photos, although I have to say I'm probably not going to act on that.

crocuses number one and two

Continuing with the first-flowers-of-the-year theme, here are a couple of crocuses. This year we've got crocuses in a pot on the balcony, which is convenient. So it would be a safe bet to assume more crocus photos are in the offing. Hopefully a bit better than these.



For reference, here are previous crocus photo posts from 2010, 2009, and two posts from 2007. I took some photos in 2008 too but apparently I never posted them here. I did, however, tag them with the date, 2/25/08, which I usually don't bother doing. I don't recall what (if anything) the rationale behind that might have been.

cherry blossom number one

So it's time for our annual pilgrimage to the corner of NW 19th & Lovejoy, home to a handful of cherry trees that bloom absurdly early year after year. There was exactly one cherry blossom this time (that I noticed), so I'm going to go ahead and declare it the first one of the year.

I mean, it's not even February yet, and I haven't seen any bees flying around, so I'm not sure it makes any logical sense at all to bloom right now. But it's exactly the right time of year for a little act of reckless optimism.

january fog

As seen yesterday near Lovejoy Fountain Plaza.

You've undoubtedly seen shots just like this in any number of movies, except here we've got students & office workers instead of ringwraiths or headless horsemen or vampires or Jack the Ripper or whatever. So, not so much in the freaky supernatural drama department here. On the bright side, these photos are costing you absolutely nothing to look at, so compared to the cost of a movie ticket, mega-sized popcorn, 128 oz. Coke, dubious-looking "hot dog", and a tub of Raisinets, it's really quite a good deal.

mythic mosaic

A mosaic, or at least I think it's a mosaic, on the outside of a Waikiki hotel. I neglected to note at the time which hotel it was, and there are more than a few hotels there. It's on the makai side of Kuhio Ave., toward the Diamond Head end of Waikiki. I realize that doesn't narrow it down very much. I'm also not sure what mythological or historical people or events are being depicted here. If you happen to know or you have any plausible ideas, and you happened to stumble across this humble blog for some reason, feel free to post a comment and let me know what's going on here.

Thx. Mgmt.

plumeria

Couple of quick plumeria snapshots, taken while waiting for our shuttle back to the airport and our flight back to cold rainy Portland...

yellow hibiscus

Yellow hibiscus flowers in Honolulu. The wet ones are at the zoo, the others are from... somewhere else I don't recall at the moment. If I was taking flower photos here in Portland I'm not sure these would make the cut for this humble blog, due to various framing, depth-of-field, and exposure issues. But these are pretty much all of the ones I've got right now, so here they are. If you're desperate for better hibiscus photos, and you can't seem to find any on the internet for some reason, you could always foot the bill and send me back to Hawaii for another go at it.



Well, except that I'm not in this for cash or freebies. My philosophy is that it's important to have at least one thing in your life that you're passably good at and you won't do for money. Otherwise you become just a creature of economics, and that's no way to live.

So that's the high-minded philosophical reason. The second reason is that I really don't want to know just how little money I'd make if I tried to run this humble blog as a business. I think that would be more than a little depressing. And I don't want to be in a position where I'd do anything different, posting more about X or avoiding talk of Y, to keep readers and advertisers happy.

Chimney Fountain

This post probably counts as overkill. I've got a Flickr slideshow, an embedded Google map, and a Twitvid clip in this post, just to tell you about a small fountain in an obscure spot on the edge of downtown Portland. The Chimney Fountain is, as the name suggests, shaped more or less like an old brick chimney, with water bubbling up from the center and spilling down its sides. It's located next to SW Lincoln St., along the pedestrian-only 2nd Avenue walkway, in the 60's-era South Auditorium urban renewal district.

View Larger Map

It doesn't look particularly special or important if you don't know the backstory behind it. The chimney shape supposedly symbolizes the area before the urban renewal bulldozers arrived, a working class neighborhood of Jewish and Italian immigrants, with small houses, family businesses (including the deli with reputedly the best bagels in town), several synagogues, etc. For more about the old neighborhood, there's a Portland Jewish Review story and a Daily Kos essay you might be interested in. I wish I had a more concrete reference for the fountain-as-historical-marker part. I know I've read that before, but I haven't found a link to share yet. I'll update the post if I can document that, but until then don't cite this notion as a fact in your term paper, or wager large sums of money on it or anything.

The fountain does double symbolic duty, in fact, since it also serves as the "Source Fountain" in the Halprin plan for the area. The idea is that water bubbles up at a little spring here. Then, flowing north, it becomes a rushing mountain stream at Lovejoy Fountain, and finally a majestic waterfall at Keller Fountain. Symbolically, I mean. The water actually recirculates separately at each fountain, but no matter.

The fountain occasionally does triple duty, as a sort of jetted bathtub for the homeless. I'm sure that wasn't a design goal behind the fountain, but it appears to do the job. I didn't actually go and ask for a user review, I mean, if I was taking a bath and minding my own business, and a stranger came up and wanted to interview me, I'd take it rather badly. Wouldn't you?

city reflections

Our occasional tour of art on the Portland Transit Mall continues with "City Reflections", one of the new crop of sculptures that went in along with the recent MAX construction.

So, ok, it's shiny and whimsical and harlequinesque, and it includes a cute dog, and that's all great and everything. But it also looks strangely dated, like something you'd have seen in a trendy housewares store in 1996, on the shelf next to the gargoyles and the chile pepper margarita glasses.

On the the bright side, if you buy it when it already looks dated, it slides over into "retro" that much quicker, and then everyone's bound to love it and see it as a local icon. So there's that. I give it another 6-8 years, 10 tops.



Additional info from across the interwebs:

• The artist's website
• A profile
by the Seattle P-I.
• Smithsonian oral history
• An interview with the UW alumni magazine.
• Craft in America story

New Frontier / Las Vegas Plaza

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Just south of the Echelon site, across Desert Inn Road, is another huge vacant lot. This one was once home to the New Frontier casino, which was imploded to make way for a super-sized Vegas edition of New York's famous Plaza Hotel. No, seriously. This seemed like a fabulous idea during the real estate bubble years, but the dream never got off the drawing board. Now, instead of an aging, down-market -- but profitable -- casino, they've got a nice big patch of empty desert. Which reminds me of a certain famous poem.