The Return of SUSPISH! to Stark Street

4081

We have, out here in 122nd Land, the occasional recurring cartoon character in the form of graffiti.

Today, one came back. He's SUSPISH, and he's on the back of a building on the south side of Stark just east of 122nd that's exposed to the big north parking lot that still surrounds the former Fabric Depot:

I don't know who his friend is, but it looks like he's been in a scrape or two.

SUSPISH has formerly surfaced along Stark at 146th by the Franz Bakery Thrift store, either in a former anglerfish or perhaps it's a cousin, in April of 2021. We also sustained a very small invasion by friendly aliens back in April (coincidentally) of 2016). 

I do wonder if they are all done by the same local Banksy? 

The Very Last Day Of A Very Good Library (Well, This Version Of It, Anway)

4080

This is, as Jerry Clower once said, a momentum occiasion.

I've got a couple of photos to share with you all, as I usually do. They come with a story, as they usually do. It's better sweet.

This is the interior of the Mighty Mighty Midland Branch of the Multnomah County Library as I took mere minutes ago. This is the last time I'll ever see it, at least this way.

The Multnomah County Library is going on a buildng initiative. This will include making the Gresham branch the east side flagship and updating neighborhood branches into something resembling true community centers.

First two up are Holgate and Midland. This means that Midland will be closed for the next year and a half while the revisions are being made and, so, I'm pretty torn about this. Firstly, I've seen the diagrams and artist's conceptions of what Midland will look like as of the middle of 2024, and it's going to be a library user's paradise, straight up. Big wide areas for sitting and meeting, a big patio extension so you can enjoy the library outside when the weather is fine, big meeting areas. Really lovely. But we have grown so very accustomed to Midland-the-way-it-is, the comfort and familiarity, that we are feeling like a cornerstone of our lives is being taken away.

I mean, this building itself is scarcely 25 years old. Hardly even broken in, as buildings go. And it has the most lovely them, that of "Talking Leaves" ... there are leaves in the ceiling, as one can see. That was part of the design. The delightful and huge painting anchoring the east end, near the main entry is a landmark of life. 

The work itself is called Talking Leaves. I don't know the name of the artist but I'll have it before I leave the building. 

There's poetry on the outside of the building and I imagine it'll go. I do hope the painting is in the next edition of this building.

We want to honor the memory of Midland-that-was. We have had more than 15 happy years coming and going from here, and I'm sure we'll have a number happy years after the new version opens, but the interregnum will be a bit of an ordeal. We'll probably be visting Rockwood, or Gresham if Rockwood's too busy. Rockwood is definitely where we're going to be picking up our holds. It's on the way to things, in this new life.

Abysinnia, Midland-that-was. 

I'll miss the clock tower. 

A Mushroom In Midland

4050

Exploring the small and mundane but somehow still wondrous, earlier this year, when it was cooler and moister (do you remember, nah, neither do we) there were several of these mycological beasties near the curb in Midland Park

Seeing as it's been an oven here in the Willamette Valley for the past two months, it's probably gone.

The spore thing. 

A History-laden Bookmark

4046

This is a Christmas gift given me my the Brown Eyed Girl that will have meaning for a great long while.

Anyone who knows me knows my deep affection for Oregon, the place I was born in. You can always get me by showing my something deeply Oregon, and this is Oregon AF, as they say today.

A simple bookmark, gotten by my spouse at the David Douglas Holiday Bazaar, which she was able to hit after a pandemic year off:

The art was no doubt inspired by the work cited on the obverse ... this is an upcycled library card catalog card, you see:

This makes me think of Oregon history, its highs, its lows, its promise and its problematical sides. Numerous conflicting thoughts pertain, and this card as the bookmark of my diary will, I think, make me be more thoughtful about a great deal.

It represents a great deal about time and events that are complicated and ineffable at times. As such, it's a dear treasure already. 

The Shabby Quick Shop At Stark Firs

3880

There's this throwback of a trailer court on the south side of SE Stark Street, just east of the entrance to Floyd Light Middle School* at approximately 108th Avenue. 

It's called Stark Firs, and the old structures and manufactured homes are vintage and arranged like dominoes, at fairly close quarters. It is prole as hell and I love it. I've lived temporarily in places like it and have known people who've grown up in such places. It has a piece of my heart.

No actual firs seem to be in it, but a great deal of asphalt.

There is a shabby quick-shop at the front of it. Here it is, as taken through the just-washed windshield of Olivia earlier today:

Save for rearranging of the fractal confetti of beer ads and various retail poster ads on the outside, it's looked more or less like this ever since we moved out this was some 15-more years ago. It's seen a lot of life, there's been a gun crime or two over the years, no more than you'd expect for a big town, but still it soldiers on, too stubborn to die.

And that is one reason I love it so. It's beautiful, not shi-shi enough for the region of Portland east of I-205, but perfectly at home out here, where the people are still quite real.

It is adorable. I love this.

A Mural Befitting The David Douglas Community

3774

There's this building on SE 122nd, a little south of the Midland Branch Library, on the west side of the street between Main and Market, its address is 1245, and it tends to be a county home for services for various disadvantaged populations. Its held state offices and county offices and been home to correctional functions such as a work-release and more recently has housed the Wy'east Men's Shelter. 

It's a two-story brick edifice about the length of a city block. 

It's been doing a little evolution over the past year and that evolution is mostly finished. And, in a niche in the building's east front, formerly bare brick veneer, now exists this wondrous bit of art:

I'm happy to live in one of the most, if not the most, economically and ethnically diverse areas in all of Oregon. I don't mean this as a brag; it just makes me happier to see a whole lot of different people. You can get whitebread anywhere you want in Oregon, and Portland west of 82nd is blanding out at an amazing rate. Out here, in what the kids call the Numbers, you get a rainbow of skin colors. There are a great many African immigrants. There is the most amazing and delightful mercado next to the Plaid Pantry that's a 10-minute walk from my house. There are two halal groceries down at 122nd and Division. 

And the faces on that mural perfectly reflect that. The rest of the kaleidoscopically-wondrous picture invites you into a universe of wonders which asks you to engage and explore, and make sense of it all. 

Like life, really.

I'm not world-travelled, but I've lived in more than a few places in my life and I've never felt as joyously at home as I have in my years out near 122nd in the David Douglas neighborhoods. It may not be the perfect place, but it comes close. 

A Glimpse Of Washington From NE Portland

3769

John Luby Park is a lovely place to have a lunch. A brilliant bit of thick forest, an island in the relentless post-WWII subdivision spreading eastward from I-205 out to the Gresham city line. That day we were there, it was sunny and light but not too uncomfortable; once under the canopy it was dusky and at least 10 degrees cooler than the sunlit areas.

Portland's terrain offers these treats. From this spot, on NE Brazee St between 127th and 130th Avenues, we look northeast through this gap in the trees over the houses just to the east of Russell Elementary School, and see the bluffs just on the outskirts of Camas, between five and six miles away.

A Long View Down Market St With Low Clouds

3767

This view was taken two days ago; I was pointing Olivia east down SE Market St at 113th, same place (more or less) as the wildfire smoke photos but this time I was entranced by the way the overcast (scattered fog the order of the day) broke in the distance and gave a glimpse of the sunrise sky.

The red light in the middle distance is the flashing red over the intersection of 117th and the smaller red light in the farther distance is the traffic signal over 122nd and Market. The angle and the zoom communicate one thing I love about my corner of town ... even though it's near everything, it seems cozy and just a little bit remote.

It's comfortable, here.

Same Street, Two Different Wildfire Days

3756

Today in wildfire news, we've learnt that conditions for the endangered towns along the Cascade Piedmont have improved greatly. Some of the Level 3 evacuations have been reduced to Level 2; Level 2 to Level 1, and Level 1 to Level None. This is due in no small part to shifting weather; there's been cooling and the winds, which fanned the originally-small fires into the mega-infernos they became, have largely abated. 

What this means for towns like Oregon City down the Cascade Highway corridor through Silverton, Mt. Angel, and Sublimity-Stayton is that evacuation is no longer imminent at any moment and, since we expect rain starting tonight and into tomorrow, a comcomitant reduction in wildfire smoke pollution. It's still historically bad at this point, but the AQI, which was in the 500s and thus officially off-the-chart (the AQI's Hazardous designation runs from 400-500, above that, it's undefined) recently dipped to around 330.

In terms of peanut butter, the air quality has gone from chunk-style to creamy.

So far, from my personal point of view, the worst of it was yesterday, the 13th. I thought the 12th was pretty heinous, but the 13th kind of rewrote the book on that. What follows is a side-by-side of SE Market Street at about 113th Avenue looking east toward 117th, the same spot in both photos (give or take fifty feet), where things went from bad to holy freaking moly ...

 

On the 12th, AQI counts were in the 300s-400s. On the 13th, they were over 500. Any more stuff in the air after that and we drivers would have had to carry shovels to dig our way through, if we wanted to get anywhere. At least here in Multnomah County we didn't have to worry about the flames actually getting to us.

Things stand to improve, but for many of us, they can't get better fast enough.

Stop And Go Market, SE 122nd and Lincoln

3714Nothing profound to say about this, except it's just a charming quick-shop that's been along SE 122nd Avenue at Lincoln since, chee, I donno, Pontius was a pilot, or something. They've recently replaced the big sign on top, and that caught my eye, I suppose.

It has a little open-air tacqueria along the left side of the building, because that's how we roll out here in DavidDouglaslandia.

Echoes of Country Along Citified Division Street

3713Outer East Portlandia is still studded with hints of an authentic past that goes beyond the lamented demise of "Old Portland". Out here, in The Numbers, they come in glimpses obscured by trees embedded in the polyglot proletarian atmosphere one only seems to find these days east of I-205, and, as opposed to the old urban areas west of I-205, they tend to carry a decidedly rural aura to them.

On SE Division Street, just west of the light at SE 130th Avenue on the north side of the street, are two such glimpses. I'll not publicize the addresses, but if you were here and driving down Division and just looked, you'd see them, sure enough. Their unforgettability etches them indelibly on the memory.

This house is particularly remarkable for its architectural touch, which I shouldn't have to point out:

I've long admired this house, and how could you not, with that askew corner and the pointed peak? The detail over the front porch is nifty enough on its own and then it gives you this visual jackpot.

It's quite a semi-hidden gem.

This other one, above, is the next-door neighbor. Modest and unremarkable when framed this way, just a small cottage located in a remote wood ... though, of course, it's on one of Portland's most thronging arterials, the road between Oregon's largest city and its fourth-largest, both of which hold more than 100,000 people.

And it's this aspect of it that really lodges in the mind and memory. All this suburban urbanity around it, and here are these two small places that haven't forgotten that they were once outside of town and solidly in the country, the country that once filled the space between Portland and Gresham.

Back when there was space between Portland and Gresham.

Signs Of The Mill Park Times

3704My home neighborhood in Portland, Mill Park, is a pretty sedate and banal place. Or it seems that way. Below that we're just a hotbed of punk, I'll tell you.

Near my house there's this Lutheran church, Gethsemane by name, which has been communicating gentle messages during the emergency time. This was what they had today:

Now, I'll cop out an confession here; religion, as we practice it in America, despite the dogged efforts of those who would work for kindness, continues to bend toward rebuke and performative cruelty. This is not just blithe opinion on my part either; anyone of equitable view seeing the news these days must surely agree. However, this message, in this age of performative cruelty?

That's punk AF, my friends. And those Lutherans are pretty neat people.

Just down Market street, there's a big house on a big piece of land on the corner of Market and SE 113th. It may have been a farmhouse when the land out this way was farms, who knows. It's certainly old enough. And the property itself could be some sort of arboretum. And they usually have signs in their amazingly big front yard. And this is what they had when I drove past today:

Head and heart on the right place, and hands? They sure won't be voting GOP in November. These signs are bright and visible and they've changed over time, and nobody ever hassles them or steals them.

Punk AF.

And, on two stop signs, one at the corner of SE 117th and Market and 117th and Hawthorne Blvd, there are Trump stickers. Now, I react negatively to such things, and told the Brown Eyed Girl, but she pointed out that they actually read STOP TRUMP in that way.

Indeed.

So, if you come out 122nd and Market way, Mill Park, remember, we only look sedate and banal. But, just below that bland exterior, we're kind people who generally wish you well

Yeah, we're punk AF that way. Can you handle us?

Even The David Douglas BurgerVille's Sign is Gone Now

3697After a couple of weeks of going, going the BurgerVille organization makes it going, gone.

The familiar sign on the corner of SE 122nd and Stark is, also, no more.

Out 122nd Way: Tonkin, For The Love Of Vintage Signs

3646

Well, be honest, I've posted Ron Tonkin's sign before. But boy, how I love that edifice.

This is what it looked like today. A tiny little bit of the past proudly defying the march of time.

It's scarcely changed in the five-or-so years it's been up in front of Ron Tonkin's old place.

122nd belonged to the Tonkin family, in a way; Ron's brother Marv had the spot at NE 122nd and Halsey that's Courtesy Ford today; it had a distinctive architecture with roof supports that reminded one of the towers on the Saint Johns Bridge, in a reductionist-abstract sort of way (a photo of that plus stationery showing the design's use as a logo can be seen at this page: http://www.thecoralsnake.com/Tonkin). And it was the Tonkins' coinage in ads that supply the tag for this and commonly-themed posts here as well as how I think of my favorite road: Out 122nd Way, as they said.

Marv Tonkin also gave us a jingle that rings in the heads of Portlanders of A Certain Age (Keep honkin'/For Marv Tonkin/That's Maaarv Ton-kin Ford!) which remains memorable decades after Marv went out of business.

Ron sold Chevies, and Marv sold Fords. I'll bet family gatherings had a certain quality betimes.

But, Ron Tonkin remains and stands proud along 122nd between Burnside and Glisan, where it always was and, through evolution in automobile technology as we move toward the terminal phase of the internal combustion engine, likely always will be; a true Portland cultural artifact, one foot in the present, and one foot solidly in the past.

I'll always have time to snap a picture of this.

One Mile of 122nd With No Traffic

3644

This is a view of SE 122nd looking south from Market Street at approximately 7:30 AM today. Now, yes, I know Sunday morning and all, but Portland was always a bit busier than this even on Sunday morning: East 122nd Avenue being the traffic artery it is, almost never sleeps.

And yet, this view fades into the distance near Division Street, about a mile out from there. And it's highly unusual to see a mile of 122nd with no detectable traffic on during the day ... any day. Including any given Sunday.

Lonely Sunday morning. Very lonely.

Multnomah County's Only Covered Bridge: Cedar Crossing

3586Oregon has many covered bridges, but up until historically recently, none of them were in Multnomah County.

In 1982, though, the county deemed that we deserved to join the party. So a secluded spot was selected where a back road that connected the SE 134th and Foster neighborhood (almost-but-not-quite-Pleasant Valley) to the backside of the then-still-small-and-charming backroad burg of Happy Valley crossed the upper reaches of Johnson Creek.

The road becomes SE Deardorff Road in an unsigned change as you round a sharp bend and dive into the gully there, then you turn a corner ... and there suddenly, is this:

If it seems a little new looking for a covered bridge that's because it is: as I noted, it was built in the 1980s to make up for the fact that Multnomah County had no covered bridges within its boundaries; it was dedicated, in part, by County Executive Don Clark (a political titan back in the day when MultCo only had three commissioners), and its name was selected from a naming contest held amongst David Douglas High students.

This bridge is as East County AF.

It's also pleasant, secluded without being too far out, and there's a turnout on the south side of the bridge where you can chill and listen to the forest and the flowing creek below.

Music, Food, and Dancing in East Portland: Portlanders Stand With Immigrants and Refugees

3529A.

[Update, 19 Mar 2017: I have names to put to the Afghani dancer now and also the lady leading the Peruvian trio, for which thanks go to the lovely Sitara Razaqi Lones, who indeed happens to be the Afghani dancer. TA MUCHLY!]
[Update, 20 Mar 2017] Thanks also to Claudia Cuentas Oviedo, who shared the name of the other two thirds of her trio (see below)

Statistics show, or so I've heard, that my area of Portland, DavidDouglasLandia, Out 122nd Way, Portland's Heavy Eastside and That Part Of Portland East Of I-205, is the most diverse area of, probably, the whole state.

I think it likely. Of the places I have lived in Oregon, one seems more likely to see east Africans, Asians (eastern and western), than anywhere else. It's a real rainbow out here, and I'm pleased with this every day.

It's perhaps the ideal thing, then, that an evening celebration promoted by the City of Portland called Portland Stands with Immigrants and Refugees happened out here, at the East Portland Community Center, which stands just off SE Washington St on SE 106th Avenue. It was a simple thing, really: some great authentic food, dancing and singing by immigrant groups, and plays. It ran from 6PM to 9PM on Friday, and with only three hours there was a lot to cram in there. We didn't see everything but what we did see was delightful.

We enjoyed the food there (the wife had a chicken shawarma wrap and I had a beef burrito and both were immaculate) but there was a wait, but we couldn't be too sore; I knew the event was probably going to be popular but I had no idea it would be thronged.

The strawberry horchata? Superb.

The main event for us was the signing and dancing in the gym. I was at the end of a long day myself, but there was much happy energy and it kept me interested. Me and The Wife™ were both enchanted.

The first performer we saw was a lovely Afghani woman, Sitara Razaqi Lones, who did a passionate folk dance.

As the dance progressed she really got into the zone. The costume only added to the positive energy.

After that, a trio, led by Claudia Cuentas Oviedo, played Peruvian music, accompanied by Tanya Abernathy and Otto Gygax. The support system, a Mac laptop, was reluctant to come on board (at least that's what it looked like), so, when you're a creative performer, what do you do?

You get out the pretty flute and play. It worked.

But when they got underway, they were on. 

After that, we were treated to some really energizing Bollywood style dance. I was remiss in that, due to acoustics, I couldn't get a clear idea of who the other performers were, but thanks to the book of Face, I was able to figure that the dancers were led by Prashant Kakad, supported by dancers including Blake Schrein, Brittany Newton, Jasmine Jaramillo, and Kathy Nordskog.

Prashant is that stylish fellow in the ballcap in the middle. They had an energy that was infectious, and I can only speak for myself here, but watching a group of dancers like that doing such enthusiastic moves in such great synchronization is infectious, inflecting the spirit with happiness and causing even the most weary spectator to at least, at least, tap the foot and move while seated.

They looked great, they made one feel great, and when they got the crowd involved ...

... they really got involved. Everyone on the floor, regardless of who they were or what they looked like, looked good, looked beautiful. Art really connects.

And when they finish on a high note, everyone else gets to be there with them. I couldn't not feel glad I was there.

DavidDoulglaslandia's Favorite Son

3537.

Oregon's Junior Senator, Jeff Merkley, is a person in whom I find much to admire and inspire. He's "Bedrock" through and through, and as long as we have him as part of Oregon's congressional delegation, I feel as though there's still a significant chance that things will stop going the wrong way and go the right way again.

From 1998 to 2008, he was State Representative from District 47, the area in which I live; in 2008, he became our junior US Senator. Doing good work, all the way.

But, something I shouldn't have been surprised at, I found out when we attended this hears David Douglas Holiday Bazaar, where we load up on home-crafted artisanal soap for the year, in the gallery of past student body presidents:

Jeff Merkely was DDHS student body president in 1974 because of course he was.

DavidDouglaslandia grows some notable people. As noted in another entry, some time ago, this 'dude' was also student body president.

You may have seen him in a movie or two.




I do wonder if Jeff thought, when he was student body president in '74, if it would end up with him on the floor of the US Senate during one of the most remarkable times of modern American history.

Me and The Wife™ are actually come-latelys to Douglasland. But we couldn't be happier here. Best part of Portland by far.