Double Rainbow

Today on my lunch at work, I sat in the park and took pictures. I work every Sunday at Patagonia, which is in the Pearl District, a former warehouse district now redeveloped with Yuppy lofts. Very shiny.

Almost always, I first walk to Whole Foods to get a granola bar, then eat it while walking back towards work, leaving a trail of crumbs and seeds in my wake. In the hottest part of the summer, I would sit in Jamison Square, actually a new-ish park, which is catercorner from our block. I would lie on a bench and nap and then rise with the alarm on my cellphone.

 Jamison Square

The main attraction of that locale, however, was always the men. There’s a fountain that’s a popular place for kids to play, and they are often joined by their hunky shirtless dads. They would preen and strut and stretch and show off their muscle tone (and high sperm count) for the crowd of moms. I refer to the park as DILF Island.

 Tanner Creek

To get away from the throngs of screaming children, I sometimes walk two blocks further to Tanner Creek Park. It’s internationally notable for being an actual restored, functioning, one-block marsh in the middle of a city. Dogs are not allowed, and neither is playing in the “marsh.” So it is quiet and clean.

 Readers in Tanner Creek Park

 Double rainbow

Today, it was in the 80s. So beautiful. I took off my shoes and sat in the grass at Tanner Creek and snapped pictures. Shiny condos, a bride and groom, garage door, exaust vents. Whatever.

Tower

I was downtown shopping tonight (REI, of course), and I stopped to snap a picture of the Union Bank of California Tower, one of the better buildings in Portland, architecturally speaking, and also one of my personal favorites. It has a companion tower of sorts in San Francisco, and I always liked that one. So when I moved here, I noticed ours right away.

Like all distinctive things in Portland, the building is controversial, or in any case people like to complain about it. Their main beef seems to be the tower’s air of superiority, the prideful refusal to fit in with its neighbors, but I think the real issue is something else entirely. As much as the folks here congratulate themselves on being liberal, open-minded and progressive, the reality is less noble. Fact is, they’re insecure comfort whores. They want pretty; they want cosy; they want nice. And they want traditional, unchallenging architecture, which this building quite plainly is not. There is no evidence of humility, no attempt to pander to the local yokels and help them feel okay about themselves. So a friendly building it ain’t, and that’s the ultimate taboo in a town obsessed with huggy affirmation.

Critics of the Union Bank tower complain that it is rigid, austere and self-important, and it is. But then, it’s a bank, and not just a bank, but a bank tower. A display of power and pride is exactly what you’d expect, and I think that that is appropriate for an important edifice. In fact, I think it’s a civic responsibility to make just such a display. It’s like wearing a suit to the office: That may be overdressed for blue-collar Portland, but sometimes it’s the right thing to do.

Besides, as arrogant and aspirational as the building is, it is also intellectual, sensual and sculptural, with high quality materials and attention to detail that suggest, if not overt friendliness, then at least a certain respect for Portland’s people. It’s relatively sophisticated for a generic office tower in a second tier city. I don’t mean to say it’s a masterpiece. For one thing, it’s painfully dated, and for another, it’s entirely formulaic. (… but then so is the classical architecture everyone loves so much. Formula is the result of trial and error, after all. It’s what you get when you’ve perfected a style, and it helps to avoid past mistakes, of which there are many in Modern architecture.) But the Union Bank tower is something in a town where there’s not a lot of anything. In fact, that may be it’s main disctinction.

Last year, Andy made a lovely little short film about this very building, and his friend Brian Libby, an architecture journalist, provided commentary. It’s an interesting acknowledgment of a minor gem that might have gone unrecognized in a larger, more glittering metropolis. At under three minutes, there’s no reason not to watch it. So go to shoeintheroad.com and click on “Union Tower.” Then you can judge for yourself.

Purple & Green

I’ve been picture happy lately. Nice weather has gotten me out of the house and looking around, and I’m finally acting on an idea that’s been on my mind for years. I’m “documenting” Portland’s dizzying array of purple and green houses.

 Fresh paint. Purple & green house in Southeast Portland.

Not purple or green houses, but houses that are both purple and green. Yes, at the same time. Yes, intentionally.

Almost as soon as I drove into town, I noticed them. Green houses are practically infinite here, and purple ones are also quite numerous. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised then that purple and green houses are so common. What’s more, purple with green seems to be the city’s unofficial color sceme. Even the carpet at the airport is, you guessed it, purple & green.

  Purple & green carpet at Portland’s airport, PDX

How did this happen? What about those two particular colors represents the very essence of Portland? Vermont, for me, is sky blue and forest green, like a drawing on a Ben & Jerry’s carton. Mexico is blood red and warm gold, right off an old bullfighting poster. So where do we get purple & green?

I think it’s all around us here, the green is obvious and everywhere in the Northwest. Purple, though, is here too. The blackberries, marionberries, blueberries and plums. The rosemary and lavender flowers. The grapes and the wine they make. Flower, fruit and foliage: Purple and green. Whether you’re a family farmer or a yuppie oenophile or a back-to-the-Earth hippy, the generous fertility of the Willamette Valley is at the very heart of life and culture here.

 Purple & green Portland: Flowers & foliage, foundation & clapboard.

Speaking of granola types, might as well admit that purple and green are also hippie classics. No question that the persistence of the colors together carries with it the faint whif of patchouli, of keeping the psychedelic faith. The children of Gaia are still saving the planet… one paint swatch at a time. Namaste.

Funny that, because at one of the first houses where I was taking pictures, the owner came up to me and talked. Her husband was on a ladder in the backyard at that very moment, still painting on the new hues. “Honey,” she yelled, “there’s a guy here taking pictures of purple and green houses.”

“He would appreciate that.” she said after turning back to me, and we discussed how bright the new colors were turning out. She was hoping for something more subdued, more gray. She was awfully concerned about good taste, and thus she could not have been less of a hippy. In fact, she was as yuppie as they come, but here she was painting her house purple and green. So it looks like the Gaians may have won.

At flickr:
Check out this (as yet tiny) collection of purple & green houses at the new photostream I’ve dedicated to Portland’s “built environment.”

Containerization

Back around 1993, I was studying architecture at an art school in Savannah, Georgia, and I was fortunate enough to live on one of the world-famous squares. Directly opposite my windows, across a small sidestreet, was the Owens-Thomas House, “the finest example of English Regency architecture in America,” and I had the great pleasure of looking at it every single day. Savannah, with its wealth of gracious old buildings and a skyline still largely dominated by the bell towers of churches, was a beautiful and truly civilized place to live. (It has since been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Centre.)

 Owens-Thomas House with my old apartment in the background.

Though the Historic District is little more than one square mile, I took a long walk almost every night and never ran out of new things to see. Still, it wasn’t long before living in such a small place took its toll, and somewhat inevitably I began to get a little bored. Life was pleasant and sweet, but even la dolce vita can leave a person wanting for more after a while.

Luckily, I also lived near the river, which was just a few blocks away. Standing on the nearest corner from my place, I could look straight down Abercorn Street and see open sky beyond the low buildings, old cotton warehouses, that lined the banks. Every once in a while, I would turn that corner and find myself awestruck. Where there was usually sky, I could see the superstructure of a monstrous container ship, a behemoth looming many times larger than even the tallest building, as it was gliding smoothly past on the invisible water. It put my little city and my little life into stark perspective.

 ”I lived right there” on Oglethorpe Square near the river in Savannah.

Mundane though they may seem, those container ships always gave me a thrill because I thought of them as direct connections to exotic lands on the other side of the Earth. When I was next to the river, I could look up at the ship’s bridge and see the brown-skinned sailors looking down at me, or out at little Savannah. I wondered what they were thinking. I wondered if they despaired at the thought of spending the night in such a backwater after all of the teeming, neon-lit cities they must have seen around the world.

In that way, I was very much part of a tradition stretching back to antiquity. How many other people throughout history, bored with their little corner of nowhere, saw the arrival of a foreign ship in their harbor as a lifeline to the busier currents of humanity and all of its enticements? How many of them wondered about what was at the other end of those voyages, and how many (or few) ever found out?

Ship Nerds
And so it was in Savannah that I became interested in container ships, a curiosity that remains mostly intact after all these years. In this, I am far from alone, as the thousands of results from a flickr search will attest, and some people get quite obsessive. Here’s some Danish guy’s website that contains an extraordinary collection of organized ship photos taken in his home port of Fredericia. It’s like a nautical version of trainspotting and just as stupefyingly dull. And here’s an interesting post at The Waterlog blog (tagline: “Ocean Tech, Sail Tech, And All Things In The Marine Layer”) with a startling graphic of worldwide shipping traffic at one moment last December. It shows the location of almost four thousand container ships at sea, which the author counted himself off of the image.

  Container ship. Large even compared to the Golden Gate Bridge

Obviously, as ship nerds go I’m seriously minor league. Nonetheless, I found myself genuinely fascinated by all of the reading — all the facts, figures, and photos I dug up for this entry. For example:

• Containerization accounts for 90% of all non-bulk shipping worldwide.
• Shipping produces 4% of global carbon dioxide emissions — twice the total of all aviation and more than all African nations combined — and is expected to increase by 75% within 20 years.
• The global shipping fleet is around 70,000 ships, with some 20,000 more currently on order.
• It costs more to transport a standard shipping container 100 kilometers (62 miles) by truck than it does to move it by sea from China to Europe.

All of those facts are on a global scale, but few people give shipping a second thought. It goes on more or less invisibly, and yet virtually everything you’ve ever bought has spent time in a container that traveled onboard a ship. The world as we know it — from clothes to food, to cars, to your job, and even the whole global economy — truly depends on containerization. And that’s really very interesting.

Malaccamax
In the course of researching this entry, I discovered that the world’s largest container ship is called the Emma Maersk. At 1,302 feet, it’s 419 feet longer than the Titanic. See an excellent graphic comparison here in this article from the Wall Street Journal.

I found this interesting for two unrelated reasons. One is that I simply like the Mærsk company logo. I used to see it all the time in Savannah and though it was for some small, obscure Scandinavian shipping line. I always wanted a hat with the seven pointed star on it. Now I’ve come to find out that Mærsk is the world’s largest shipping company. I would be disappointed, except that they are based in Denmark, which I like to think of it as providing jobs for the blond.

The other reason I found the Emma Maersk interesting is because it is approaching what is called the Malaccamax, which despite the sound of it is not something you take to increase the size of your Malacca. Rather it is the largest size a ship can be and still fit through the Straits of Malacca, one of the world’s busiest shipping channels. The very idea that we could have ships that are too big for major geographic features is mindboggling.

 The Emma Maersk, world’s largest container ship. Note boats alongside.

The Outlaw Sea
A few years back I read a book on various aspects of international shipping, which I admit sounds excruciatingly dull, but was actually quite fascinating and quite troubling.

“From the panic-stricken bridge of a sinking oil tanker to the filth-clogged beaches resulting from a destroyed ship in India, Langewiesche vividly describes a global cabal of unscrupulous ship owners, well-intentioned but overmatched regulators, and poorly trained and poorly paid seamen who risk their lives every day to make this new global economy function.”

It was The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime by William Langewiesche, and I recommend it. Believe me, you’ll never look at a ship the same way again.

Portland
So here I am again, living in another easy-going, human-scaled city, which also happens to be a major port, just like Savannah. Life is even sweeter here; there’s a very high “quality of life,” but I’m still having those same longings for… what? excitement? challenges? struggle (and eventual success)? Maybe I’d just like to play a more signifcant role in the great big world out there.

From time to time, there’s a cargo vessel docked next to the Steel Bridge, which I often cross on my bike, and I’ll stand up high on my pedals to peer over at the ship’s mammoth hindquarters. I’m still awed by the sheer size, which still puts my little life in a little city into a global perspective. It’s a visible connection to the energetic hustle of foreign lands and a reminder of all there is to see out there, and it underscores (yet again) how my day today was the same as yesterday and the day before.

Sad to say, but pleasantness and ease get dull after a while; and happiness is often unsatisfying unless it is hard-won. What’s a person to do about that? What do you do when life is good, but you still want more? Or I guess I’m really asking “What do I do?”

Templo de San Pedro

I was looking around the web for photos of my various ancestral homelands, and I came across this ruined church in the town of Villaldama in northern Mexico.

The old Templo de San Pedro (built in 1690) has been gutted, but they’re making the most of it. The innards are now used as a volleyball court. Seems like a cool place for a game.

Five Words in Orange Neon

Just for the air conditioning, more or less, I began to volunteer at the Portland Art Museum some time around last July. Every Friday, I had to iron a white dress shirt, fold it neatly with my black dress pants, Argyll socks, and square toe slip-on loafers. Then I would assemble it very carefully in my messenger bag, sling it on my back, and bike downtown in the summer heat to unpack and change into it all for my shift. Despite my efforts, I was always noticeably disheveled.

And it was all for nothing, really. I would sit for an hour at the coat check desk staring into space (did I mention it was summer?) then walk around the museum for two hours looking at the art. That part was nice. That part was why I wanted to volunteer, but there’s only so much browsing you can do in PAM’s very limited collection. Still, I had my favorite galleries, and the works gave me a lot of ideas.

There’s no reason anyone should know it, but I am an inveterate sketcher. I make little drawings and schematics constantly. Often as not, I will even sketch things I need to buy rather than write them down. There are little pictures floating around every horizontal surface in my bedroom and office, and they’re stuffed in between the pages of my real sketchbooks too. I can’t get an idea out of my head until it’s on paper; so after a few weeks at the museum, I bought a small Moleskin notebook (at the gift shop) to carry in my back pocket while I wandered.

What flashes of brilliance did I capture? Well, Five Words in Orange Neon for one. (See above.) My planned artistic response will be called “Six Words in Orange Neon.”

Two things got me thinking about all my little sketches. First, I saw a documentary about the artist Andy Goldsworthy, much of whose work simply disappears and exists solely in photographs or video of the process of making it. In a sense, the documentation itself is the work. (A similar phenomenon is practically the norm in architecture, where very few of the imagined projects ever get realized, yet certain architects become known for the presentation of their often unbuildable ideas.) Process is part of the art these days, and thus doodling may actually have some value beyond the mere practical.

The other thing that made me think about my sketches was a fashion article in the New York Times on the recent popularity of antler imagery. That rang a bell for me because I had sketched out an idea for a craftsy project back in my museum days. Specifically, I wanted to make wall-mounted “antlers” out of bike rims and old stripped down seats, similar to Picasso’s bike seat bull’s head (and to this person’s idea, which I just now discovered).

It was interesting that the sneaky antler meme had gotten into my head too, and it made me want to more fully realize the whole project; unfortunately, I can’t weld. But whatever. The point for me was that I should have a more public process; it’s part of the art, as I said before, and most of the labor. Besides, the (theoretical) interest of others is a good prod. So I think I’m going to start a projects in progress blog, or maybe just make static pages at my personal website, where there are already some snapshots of finished work.

I’ve read that it’s actually beneficial to be braggadocious. So I think it’s time for me to stop hiding my light under a bushel. As the song goes, “I’m gonna let is shine.”

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Here are a few more random sketches that I’ll probably never use for anything:

Left to right above:
-My foot from when I was sitting in the park with Michael
-Roughing out some sculpture ideas
-Planning to rearrange the furniture in my Savannah apartment

Left to right above:
-Figuring out Mt Tabor’s streets, trails, and access points
-Just working out some quilt patterns