banyan, kapiolani park

A few photos of an enormous banyan tree in Honolulu's Kapiolani Park. I probably ought to have used the wide angle lens here, or at least taken a few photos from further away, since I never managed to fit the whole tree into a shot. I was more interested in the crazy vine-like details of the tree anyway, but it would have helped to have a sort of establishing shot to start with. Oh well. You can probably find photos of complete banyan trees somewhere on the interwebs, if you really need an establishing shot.



Until just now I had no idea banyan trees and strangler figs are one and the same thing. I vaguely remember reading some sort of "life in the jungle" nature book as a kid that went on about the strangler fig, presenting it as a sort of shadowy, sinister jungle plant. The author seemed especially incensed that the strangler fig tended to benefit from the hard work of honest upstanding trees, and generally lacked a proper Protestant work ethic. The book failed to mention the fact that it grows into an even bigger tree, one whose English name comes from the Gujarati word for "merchant" (as a large banyan provides enough shade that you can set up shop beneath it). You'd think that would have been a point in the tree's favor, but it would have been an inconvenient detail in the simple tale of good straight-n-tall trees vs. evil freeloading commie trees.



I kept thinking that the name "Banyan" had geek connotations too but I couldn't place it immediately. What I was thinking of was the old Banyan VINES network operating system from the mid 1980s & early 1990s, which apparently was a set of file & directory services running on top of a mutant flavor of SVR3 Unix (which you the customer weren't allowed to touch directly). I never saw it firsthand; conventional wisdom held that it was superior to whatever flavor of NetWare was current back then, but everyone bought NetWare anyway. It was supposed to be the "standard", and it was a lot easier to find & hire Novell CNEs than whatever the Banyan equivalent was. And then Windows NT and the interwebs came along and killed off the whole NOS market. So a little bit of obscure retrotech history here, with no relation to the rest of this post except for the name. FWIW. Mostly because I can't think of much of anything else to say about the actual tree.

pink (honolulu zoo)

traveller's tree

More tree photos from Hawaii, this time of what I'm fairly sure is the strangest tree I've ever seen. This is a Traveller's Tree (Ravenala madagascariensis), which hails from Madagascar. That's probably the only unsurprising thing about it; the only tree I know of that might top this one for sheer weirdness is the baobab, which also hails from Madagascar.

I haven't yet seen a convincing explanation for the odd foliage. An urban myth among gardeners suggests that these trees always orient themselves east to west, so they serve as a directional aid for travellers, hence the name. It sounds like something that could potentially be true, and it would be kind of cool if it was, but I found a couple of forum threads full of people pointing out that the trees in their yard do no such thing. So don't toss out that GPS unit just yet.



The most common hypothesis about the name is that rainwater supposedly collects in the foliage and the trees serve as a water source for travellers. Again, it sounds entirely possible, but I ran across one brief account of someone repeatedly trying and failing to actually do this, and he goes on to note that there is no shortage of available water in these trees' native environment anyway. Another account points out that the collected water tends to be full of dead insects and "other not so nice and smelly stuff". So maybe this story is true and maybe it isn't. Traveller's trees seem to be a natural, renewable source of mythology, if nothing else.



The reader will not be surprised to learn that the traveller's tree's main pollinator is not an insect, or a bat, or even a bird. Nope, these trees are pollinated by lemurs, specifically the Black and White Ruffed Lemur. There are other, less exotic, ways to propagate traveller's trees, so the home gardener is not required to keep a troop of lemurs around. You have to admit that would be kind of awesome, though.



One additional legend, as related here, is that wishes made in front of a traveller's tree are sure to come true. That sounds just as testable as the previous two notions, but I haven't found any accounts of anyone doing so. I'm fairly sure I didn't wish for anything when I was standing in front of this one. I was too busy taking photos and saying useless things like "Huh" and "Never seen anything like it".

ironwood

A couple of photos of Ironwood ( Casuarina equisetifolia ) trees in Honolulu. These tall and quite striking trees seem to be everywhere; several streets are lined with them in the area around Kapiolani Park, for example. So I was surprised to learn they're considered a highly invasive pest species that spreads easily and crowds out everything in its path, including threatened or endangered native species. The current status seems to be similar to that of English ivy in the Northwest: It's not actually illegal (yet) to plant or own ironwood trees, but many people vehemently wish you wouldn't.

reflected, 1000 broadway

A few photos of downtown Portland's 1000 Broadway building, mostly reflections of other buildings nearby, plus a couple of normal photos for context.

There are two things you're supposed to know about this building to be a "real" Portlander. First, it looks vaguely like a roll-on deodorant stick, due to the rounded dome on top. Curiously, I've noticed it's common for people to say it's called the "Ban Roll-On Building", but much less common for people to actually use that name themselves, I suppose because it's kind of a silly nickname. Or at least this is true of people I know, but most of them are engineers, and it's possible they're mystified by the deodorant reference.

The second thing is that there was a historic movie theater here before the current skyscraper went in. This is usually the cue for a historic preservation rant about the nostalgic glories of old movie theaters. I have to say, however, that I have no recollection of this particular theater or of its fondly-remembered marquee. As people tend to get all misty-eyed about old movie theaters, there's no shortage of stuff on the interwebs about it, including:

• Vintage Portland has a color photo and a few interesting user comments about the place.
• A long discussion thread about it at Cinema Treasures, with a lot of links to photos and other sources of info.
• Old Oregon has a few photos, with prints for sale.
• The theater seems to have had an organ at one point, so the Puget Sound Theater Organ Society has a page about the theater with a bunch of old photos. Apparently the organ now graces the equally historic roller rink at Oaks Park.

Even after looking at those photos, I still have no memory of the place. I do recall, quite clearly, once going to the nearby Fox Theater (also now demolished) to see Airplane!; the main thing I recall about it was the brief but memorable, uh, cameo by Kitten Natividad. I was young and impressionable, you understand.

For the most part, though, we went to theaters in Aloha & Beaverton. All of which are gone now, just like the Broadway & the Fox, but as far as I can tell none of them have fansites dedicated in their memory.

• I saw a lot of really awful (i.e. great) B movies at the old Aloha Theater, which was built from an old surplus Quonset hut, and mostly held together with duct tape. It finally went out of business in the late 1990s (I think the last film it showed was Jurassic Park in Spanish, if I remember right), and the building was converted into retail space, including a really excellent donut shop.
• The Westgate, in Beaverton, was part of the first generation of suburban multiplexes. It didn't have any particular charm about it, but I do remember waiting for hours in the hot sun to see both Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. The Westgate was demolished a few years ago as part of the ongoing Beaverton Central urban renewal project. The site was still empty the last time I checked.
• The Washington Square Theater was similar to Westgate. Sometimes you had to make the drive out to the mall to see a movie, because both theaters had just a handful of screens (by today's standards). Closed a few years before the Westgate, I think, and the building was still empty last time I checked.
• The Beaverton Drive In was the local drive in theater, which is now part of TriMet's Merlo Road bus garage. Didn't go very often, and I wasn't fond of the bad sound quality or the long hike to the restrooms and snack bar. On the other hand, I remember, quite clearly, going there once to see some boring grownup movie, noticing that Airplane! was playing on the next screen over, and glancing over just in time to catch Ms. Natividad's brief cameo again. Which was even more impressive on the big drive-in screen. Like I said, I was rather young and impressionable.

february sunset

Or to be more precise, the maximum amount of sunset I can see from my cubicle in February, assuming the weather cooperates, which rarely happens.

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.