The Green Man of Portland

So, here's the latest installment in our ongoing tour of public art on the Portland transit mall. This time we're visiting my new least favorite piece, "The Legend of the Green Man of Portland". It's a collection of various ugly items strewn along 5th & 6th avenues between Burnside and Glisan. They're supposed to fill you in on the details of a bit of fake mythology the artist made up, heavily inspired by (or maybe freeloading off of) actual mythology. Two big clumsy ceramic-looking pedestals with little statues on top, which I suppose are supposed to be "gateways" to the thing. Plus a series of art panels, one per block, filling the avid viewer in on more exciting details of this dumb legend, executed in a properly hipsterish graphic novel look. I took photos of several of them; I missed at least one because there was a drug dealer leaning against it, and I didn't feel like disturbing him.

I probably should have taken that photo anyway, since it was a great juxtaposition: The official vision for the area, in which hip artistic types move in and gentrify Old Town and make it safe for upscale condo towers; and the Skid Row reality on the ground, which essentially hasn't changed since Portland's lusty seaport years of the late 1800s. That would have been a great photo, if only I was a braver street photographer, and/or owned more bulletproof items.

When I do an art post, I usually try to find out more about the artist and understand what their motivations and influences are and so forth. But I can't say I'm intrigued to learn any of that this time. If I had to speculate, I'd call it a typical example of the "Lumpy Little Dudes on Posts" movement of the mid-2000s, of which we have several new (& unattractive) examples in the new batch of transit mall art (and I'll get around to the others later).

Every time I see any part of "The Green Man", I just think "Oh, gawwwd" and roll my eyes and think it was a damn fool waste of money. Which I realize is a perfectly Philistine response, but an appropriate one, I think. The fact that we celebrate (and publicly fund) amateurish hipster art like this is one of the many reasons non-Portlanders keep making fun of us.

La Ventana Arch, El Malpais

More photos from the El Malpais area in New Mexico, this time not of lava flows but of the nearby La Ventana Arch, a sandstone natural arch near the park road just north of The Narrows. If I'm reading the map right, the road is roughly the boundary between the National Monument and the BLM-administered El Malpais National Conservation Area, and the arch lies just over the line in BLM territory. This bureaucratic division has no practical implications for you as a casual visitor, as far as I know.

The Narrows, El Malpais

[View Larger Map] <0>A few old photos from El Malpais National Monument in western New Mexico, just south of the town of Grants. Much of the monument consists of an enormous, rugged lava flow (hence the name), and these photos were taken from the Narrows viewpoint, looking out over the dark expanse.

I realize giant lava flows aren't everyone's cup of tea, and it's not like there's a shortage of dramatic scenery in this corner of the world, but it's still kind of a remarkable sight. So I'm always a bit surprised when people inevitably say they've never heard of the place. Well, now you have.

Pololū Valley

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Another set of old Big Island photos, this time from Pololū Valley up toward the northern tip of the island. I stopped here and hiked down to the beach, and because it was the era of film photography (and 36 shots per roll), I took exactly eight photos of this amazing place, and just one at the beach on the valley floor. I seem to recall it's a short but fairly steep hike, but it's been 12 years and I didn't take any photos on the trail, so I might be mistaken about that part.

empire state building, july 2000

A few photos of and from the Empire State Building, taken when I was in NYC for a trade show back in July 2000. These photos had the same color issues as the Hawaii photos in the previous post, but even more so; I imagine I had both rolls developed at the same time (I was always bad about getting film developed in a timely way), so the same junior trainee probably dinked around with both rolls. In any case, I played around a little and decided I liked these photos highly desaturated, with just a touch of the cyan shading remaining.

I have one other photo I'm not posting here. Someone else took it for me, and it shows me standing there on the Empire State Building observation deck, a goofy grin on my face, with the Twin Towers over one shoulder. Looking at it really weirds me out. Which is strange since WTC photos I'm not in don't affect me that way, but there you have it. So don't expect to see that photo anytime soon.

'Akaka Falls, Fall 2000

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Today's adventure involves a trip deep into the archives, i.e shuffling through a box of old film photos I retrieved from a high shelf in a closet in the spare room. In order to explain the place these rather crappy photos were taken and what I was doing there, I need to relate a quick tale from another life in the distant past. If it's too boring, feel free to jump ahead to the last couple of paragraphs if you want.

Back in the fall of 2000, I worked at a tech company with "Dot Com" in the name. Our story was similar to most companies of that sort: We'd gone public some months earlier and were both stupidly flush with cash, and losing money at an extraordinary rate. Which led to a lot of decisions that seemed perfectly normal at the time and look bizarre in retrospect.

The company was also a little light in the new ideas department, so when I dreamed up a random concept for a new product, Marketing latched on and ran wild with it. The resulting product got marquee billing at a big trade show which I got to attend, and I got a few patents out of the adventure. The product hit some key industry buzzwords, and analysts seemed to like it, and it boosted our inexorably declining stock a bit, temporarily, and it was great fun to work on. But it also wasn't a terribly useful product, it turned out. That would've been ok if we'd had the sort of marketing people who could sell things people didn't actually need or want, but we didn't. In short, the thing made roughly zero dollars over the course of its short life.

In short, this little app of ours that had somehow escaped the lab was doomed from the start, and we knew it, and it's not like the company had any other profitable products that could subsidize ours while we waited for it to "gain traction". So it was just a question of when and how the end came.

This being, as I've noted, the Dot Com era, the only logical way to break the sad but unsurprising news to the team was to fly us all to the Big Island of Hawaii for a few all-expense-paid days of fun, and break the news to us at dinner the day before we flew back, after a few rounds of swanky drinks. It actually kind of worked; everybody just sort of shrugged at the news, and it bought a few solid weeks of apathy before the mass exodus began.

In any case, I had one of the rental cars and I'd struck out on my own that day before dinner, driving all the way across the island over to Hilo, stopping at a few points of interest along the way. In 2012 I'd be posting Instagram or Tumblr photos at each stop so friends across the globe could follow along as I had Various Exciting Adventures. But in 2000 I didn't even have a mobile phone, just a PalmPilot with a primitive CDPD wireless connection, and it turned out to be useless on the trip since the Big Island only had analog voice service back then. Truly, it was a dark and primitive time.

So this is 'Akaka Falls, a picturesque 422 foot waterfall a few miles outside of Hilo. These photos really don't do the falls justice. I knew basically nothing about photography at the time and owned a cheap fixed-focus point and shoot camera someone had given me for Christmas many years earlier. And that was compounded by my using cheap film and a cheap photo lab, such that the prints picked up a peculiar greenish-cyan tint over the years. So I scanned them earlier today and tried to fix the colors a bit, with limited success. My color correction skills aren't the best, but I really don't think there's a lot that anyone could have done to turn these into quality photos. I even tried desaturating them to see if they'd look better in black-and-white, but they really didn't.

tanner springs, october 2012 (vi)

tanner springs, october 2012 (v)

tanner springs, october 2012 (iv)

tanner springs, october 2012 (iii)