My Harlan Ellison Story

3545.

Harlan Ellison, it has been reported, has died, two days ago as of this writing. It shouldn't be a surprise that on the intarweb, whose existence he might not have speculated on in the exact but is certainly there in the gestalt if you look hard enough at his writing, there is much mourning. A great majority of the people I know online and are solid with are a result of my habitual visitations, back around 2008-2013 or so, of Harlan Ellison's website, the forum boards, and his legendary corner of the 'net called the Art Deco Dining Pavilion.

A handful of people I'm privileged to be connected with on the virutal plane are very admirable writers who knew him personally and/or were connected in a sort of informal mentorship role. But just about everyone of the hard core of online Friends of Ellison, of which I count myself one, has a Harlan story. Herewith, mine.

Actually, it has very little actual Harlan in it. I was never fortunate enough to clasp hands with him, and now that'll never happen; so it goes. But being an active part of the community on his website meant he would occasionally see what you had to say, and a good thing could happen.

It centers on this book, Paingod and Other Delusions. It's renowned because it contains Our Pal's iconic short "Repent, Harlequin! Said The Ticktockman", and that enough is reason to have it, but there is a less-starring member of the ensemble therein is a story called "The Crackpots". As awkward a member of humanity as I am, this story not only spoke to me, it yelled right into my heart Hey, fellah, I know it's tough being you, but you're not alone. You have value, even if you don't have an obvious place to be. Ironically, it's set amongst the Kyben, his space-operatic Human antagonist race, but society is society, and what does fiction do but hold up a mirror to the Human condition?

I subsequently wrote a love letter about this story on Harlan's site ... originally I recalled it was a posting in the forums, but the more I think about it it must have been on the Pav, because that's where Harlan would check in from time to time.

I get an email from the webmaster (whom I believe was named Rick Wyatt). Could I please send him my address? And I replied in kind. In medium order, I got a mailing from Harlan, and this is what it contained:

The Ace SF paperback edition, printed in 1983. And, for your further delectation, the title page.:

I didn't ask him to send me an autographed copy, but he saw my words and that's just what he did. I've been a lifelong fan of Ellison, and this was, and still remains a peak moment: having heard that he'd touched me that way, he gave me a tip-of-the-cap, a salute: the world is a lonely place, but you're not alone in it. I see your struggle.

Harlan was known for a multifaceted personality and in it, you can find any kind of Harlan you want. But the one people know best is perhaps a little moment of human respect, where you heard what he said and he heard you, and gave you a kind of thumbs up.

This was always special to me. Now, its incredibly dear.

He was my pal, too.

The Daily Paint By Number: The Last Of Indian Summer, and The New Project

3544.

The last daub of acrylic was placed on the last of the eight panels of the set dubbed Paint By Number Kit that I got a Powell's sometime last year. Here, for your delectation, via the crappy camera in my tablet, is the result:

The Paint by Number Kit works were fun, a challenge, something of an endurance test. As I mentioned more than once, the panels were lightly and microscopically printed; as an owner of a substandard set of eyes from childhood I found that I could not actually paint them with my glasses on. I had to take them off and bent down with my nose very nearly on the panel. And in the end, I went off-palette a bit; so the results are a little strange in a place or two. But art is, a little bit, about interpretation, and that substitution makes my programmed creation one of a kind.

There's always another subject to do. Here's the next:

Royal & Langnickel's PAL 21, Flying Fortress. Three majestic WWII-era warplanes in stately formation. It comes with the standard equipment; a well-marked (and much less eye-strain-y) panel, eight acrylic paint pots logically numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 10, 11, and 45, another cheapo brush to add to the collection, and the genius of the thing, which you can see above the paint pots: a reference illustration, printed on a standard-size sheet of paper.

It happens that when painting one area you wind up painting over a number that you'll need to know. That was a problem with Paint by Number Kit; in this product one as lazy as I need never make a mental note of what that color's number was.

Onward, ever upward!

The Daily Paint By Number: All That Orange

3543A.

The title says it all, but it's a sure sign that I'm on the downhill side of the effort here when the addition of just one more color makes the piece start to feel complete.

This orange isn't the orange in the OM kit, it's the aftermarket set's. Close enough. PBN at this level is rather forgiving, as long as you get it close.

The Daily Paint By Number: Autumn's Coming-Prepare Yourself

3542A.

Today on The Daily PBN, we have autumn winding up and getting ready to go:

Those little yellow areas ("Yellow" is know by PBN insiders as #2) took a loooong time to do. Much longer than anticipated.

I'm also going off-palette a bit. Using the acrylic craft paints I got from Craft Warehouse a few weeks back. They're fine for run-of-the-mill product. Glad we bought them.

Considering Bridgman's Complete Guide To Drawing From Life

3541A.

I, very recently, under the aegis of Powell's, acquired Bridgman's Complete Guide to Drawing From Life to bolster an already-groaning shelf loaded with books on drawing practice and technique.

As an older work, it attracts. George Bridgman was an artist and illustrator who lived from 1865-1943. He was trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and made the practical part of his fame teaching anatomy at the legendary Art Students' League of New York; he's said to have taught thousands of art students the subject, and amongst his more famous students were Will Eisner and Norman Rockwell.

He taught a method of anatomy that involved grouping the large masses into blocks and connecting them with gestural curves and 'wedges' to simplify drawing the human form.

The book itself has remained popular over the years, remaining in print in many editions. It's a meaty book, weighing in at 300 pages and generously laid-out with a legion of simple yet communicative drawings and patiently-worded text.

I've not been all the way through this yet, but it appears to be a worthy reference book for any artist's shelf.

Busking With Strings, SW Broadway And Main, Portland

3540A.

Yesterday night, before the Ekumenical meeting, on the way into The Schnitz, we saw this fellow.

As appropriate for the dignity of the surrounding venues, he played adept classical violin.

He was quite adept and pleasant to listen to. Sadly, we didn't have any cash to tip. Hopefully sharing him on a blog will suffice.

He really was delightful, and in just the right place: SW Broadway and Main, in front of Oregon's finest performance space.

He is Tomoki the Violinist, in case the photo isn't of sufficient rez to peep his business card in his case there. There's a Twitter and and Instagram feed there too, I see.

The Ekumen Convene: Portland And The World Celebrate Urusla K. LeGuin

3539A.

On Wednesday, 13 June 2018, here in Portland, the city she called her own, a group of people devoted to her writing and her life of art convened to celebrate the legacy, still present in our minds and breasts, of Ursula Kroeber LeGuin.

We started out in order to get there at a propitous time and found a parking spot scarcely a block away from the venue, The Schnitz, and within view of the back door of the theatre. As far as omens go, which I don't believe in, this was a good one, so maybe there's something to that.

My life typically does not extend the opportunity for venturing out into such a place. I've lived in Portland for a very long time now, and I tell you truthfully that I have not had the chance to step into the legendary Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. It was a happy thing that Literary Arts made this a free event and that I was able to score two admissions to it.

We wuz there.

The evening was a two hour program which interleaved visual media featuring Ursula and brief monologues by artist who had worked with her, been inspired by her, called her friend. It is now a truth that I can say that for a brief, brilliant time I shared a room with China Miéville, Jonathan Lethem, and Portland City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly, all of whom I'm fans of.

Follows a retrospective impression, strained through a cronically faulty memory:

The speakers whom I'd not as of yet heard of, for a variety of reasons, spoke warmly and deeply and affectionately of her. The writer Molly Gloss spoke of an adventure in friendship beginning as a writer's workshop. Walidah Imarisha spoke of the debt visionary fiction has to Ursula and the disappointment (and dissent from Ursula) when the TV version of Earthsea gave us a Ged who was white ... not red-brown, as per the text. Kelly Link told of her experience editing and publishing Ursula for her small press and how her daughter got to be her namesake, and brought the house down with an anecdote where Ursula compared a pissed-off bantam rooser with a Fox News Republican. Daniel José Older spoke with much wit and sass about how Ursula invited us to make peace with, not repudiate, our own dark side, to make ourselves whole. Julie Phillips, Ursula's biography, spoke of her sharp and dry wit. Andrea Shulz, her editor at Harcourt, told of the role she had in brining Ursula's last novel, Lavinia, to print.

Margaret Atwood was there in recorded form, hailing us from the distant planet of Canada. Seems more distant every day.

The stars for me were, of course, Jonathan Lethem, author of Gun, With Occiasional Music, a book I loved, and he spoke of Ursula's power to be a bridge between here and there, between genre and mainstream, between people who didn't necessarily live on the same page; and China Miéville let us all in on a little secret; the incarnation of darkness that Ged released in Earthsea was inspired by the ... of all things ... tardigrade.

Yeah. That cute little nigh-indestructible water bear.

You learn things.

The above photo was taken during the intermission. I didn't snap any photos during the event (that's just rude, and they asked us not to) and on the screen, during the lull and before the event, were a succession of quotations and book covers over the career. I made sure to snap on that included The Lathe of Heaven, and that's what you see above.

The evening ended, after China's monologue, with the quote about how those who deny the existence of dragons are frequently eaten by dragons, which served as the cue for the entry of a troupe of dragon dancers, which will exist in my memory as a happy thing.

Some of my Ekumenical compatriots produced recording devices and used them. Gentle shame on you folks.

The dragon danced its way back out the door and a message on the screen invited us to follow it out to Main Street. I stopped on the way to sign a board where a number of us fans signed, and I paused for a minute, and then something that had apparently been forming for a long time in me catalystically gelled and compelled itself through my arm into the Sharpie pen:

The Lathe of Heaven is my Bible, and George Orr is my savior.

And so a gathering of the Ekumen, with a full house at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, Oregon, my town, Ursula's town, town of dreams that if you push hard enough you might change at will (though sometimes that pushing seems of Sisyphean proportion), along with thousands who came in by ansible from locations scattered across the continent and perhaps across the globe, went our separate ways into the night.

We all take a little bit of Urusla with us, of course, in our own ways, in our own minds and hearts.

Downtown Portland: Urban Mural, South Park Blocks

3538A.

Yesterday we were fortunate enough to attend the Ursula K. LeGuin tribute at the Schnitz, and we were lucky enough to score a parking spot on the west side of SW Park Avenue about thirty feet north of SW Main St; it was across the park block from the back of the hall.

If you know anything about finding street parking in downtown Portland you know what kind of a lottery ticket that is.

Looking north, on the same side of the street, on the back of the Roosevelt Apartments, we saw this, which is the kind of mural we grow downtown these days. Looks to me like the artist was channelling Codex Seraphinianus. 

 

The Daily Paint By Number: The First of Indian Summer

3537A.

Today we embarked on the very last piece in that eight-piece pack we've been nursing since last year. The title of this is Indian Summer, and it's a rather banal-yet-pleasant fall scene in the woods complete with cabin, pond, and trees exuberant in "the color".

It is, of course, deep winter as we start our painting, and the snow is thick upon the ground, and when the fall stops it inexplicably develops light blue lines and almost-illegibly-tiny numerals.

Why it does not stick to brown, red, and off-green areas is a question we leave to science.

The Daily Paint By Number: The Floral Still-Life, Complete

3536A.

This is the latest production from the PBN easel, a floral still-life.
There were numerous small regions on it and I anticipated it taking longer than it did.

Most of those small regions are the same color, though, so when I mix one color up, it goes a long way.

In every piece there is a point that's halfway, and it's actually a little more like paying off a loan; for most of the first part, you're financing the interest,and then you're financing the principal and the rest of it falls fairly quickly.

Also part of this is being done with the new acrylics I got at Craft Warehouse two weeks back. That's the reason behind the slightly different pink shade in some parts; clearly they're mixing these colors differently.

In the last two PBNs, this one and the tugboat one, I actually am feeling like I picked up a couple of insights about making art, the physical effort, in general. The detail of them turned into a kind of meditation. Also, noting that using up all the paint from some of the original pots seeming strange, my Facebook friend Bruce Miller pointed out that heavy impasto look in the pink areas.

I think he has a point. But boy, doesn't it look gorgeous?

There are some sorts of folk art and art making that I used to look down on a little. I don't do that so much anymore.

Portland: Like It Or Not, A City Of Sextants

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As of yesterday, they finally went and did it, they did, did they.

As a charter member of the Address Nerd club (or, as I like to call myself, a cartesiaphile), I hold my adoration of Portland's neat, well-ordered and pleasing address system as second to nobody's ... well, maybe Michael Long's of Portland and Ben Lukoff's of Seattle.

I will fight you on this.

A short while ago I reported on an approaching revision to the city's address grid; that of the conversion of the area between the river and Naito Parkway, including the South Waterfront area, Johns Landing, and areas including Dunthorpe and Riverdale, on whose east-west streets addresses increase as you approach the river and include a zero on the front, were going to become a new address district.

I traveled the district in prose in this missive, committed to the aether back in the salad days of 2005 on this blog (http://zehnkatzen.blogspot.com/2005/07/geography-address-nerd-on-zero-hundred.html) I called them 'zero-hundreds'; it's developed that the official city nomenclature on those are 'leading-zero' streets. The most common example is the address of the Old Spaghetti Factory, a favorite place of many hardcore Portlanders (including Your Humble Interlocutor and wife, whose birthday dinner tends to happen there), which is, in the common rubric, 0715 SW Bancroft St; seven blocks east of the Naito Meridian yet located west of the Willamette.

Yesterday was the city council's vote to change the face of Portland just a bit, but remarkably so, and the city council approved. So, as of May 2020 (I'm born in that month, so what a coincidence!) the leading zeroes disappear from this area, and the SW is dropped in favor of simply ... S, giving us the most consequential Portland geography revision since the Great Renaming itself, nearly 90 years ago.

This was the layout of Portland before:

The east-west baseline being Burnside, of course, and the straight line going north is N. Williams Avenue. This is then, now; as of May 2020, this will be now, then:

Welcome, South Portland, to the family of Northeast, Northwest, North, Southwest, and Southeast Portland. The city, who keeps liking to call it a sextant, holds that the change was needed to facilitate wayfinding for emergency dispatch services. Those I know who aren't all that thrilled about it find it specious, pointing out that modern wayfinding technology is plenty sophisticated enough to make sense of leading-zero addresses and it's just plain lazy not to bother to learn it, not to mention the cost of manufacturing hundreds of street signs to replace the old.

6 of these = 1 PDX

I agree with those amongst us who say it's a problem that wasn't really demanding a solution that hard. I'm also sad to see a most unique Portlandism, and perhaps the most satsifying local geography quirk that exists pretty much anywhere, evaporate so. And it's such an absurdly small sliver of land to go on about!

The timeline as thus: in May, 2020, the new street blades go up in the South area. They remain up until 2025, after which leading-zero address will officially become a a Thing Of The Past, going into the hazy demesne of nostalgia that holds Ramblin' Rod, Barney Keep, Tri Met Service Sectors, and my ability to hear Lars Larson's voice without gagging.

Although, as the article at https://www.opb.org/news/article/portland-south-new-address-area/ explains, the USPS will still deliver to leading-zero addresses after the year 2025. That article, done by OPB's Amelia Templeton, also links my 2005 Address Nerd entry on zero-hundreds as explanation, and you'd better believe I'm flattered by that!

The Daily Paint By Number: Moar Boat

3534A.

The actual title of this objet d'art is Tugboat's Passage. 

For those who wish to know.

The Daily Paint By Number: Liberty and Boat

3533A.

Moar paint (as acquired two days ago) means, of course, moar painting.

The Statue of Liberty is completed. Now ... well, it's the fishing boat, now.

The Wife™ has procured frames for just about everything.

In Which We Recreate The Colossus/Guardian Sticker As A Vector Drawing

3532A.

Just very recently I had another absolutely satisfying interaction with the people at Living Computers in Seattle, who wanted to use the Colossus/Guardian 2020 campaign sticker design for stickers meant to be sold in the gift shop.

This is always a good thing. I really adore the LC people, who are some of the most straight-up ethical people you'll encounter when it comes to creatives.

The original design was a quick one-off done in JPG format in Adobe Photoshop CS4. They wanted to release a limited edition sticker in a bigger size, and more durable - appropriate for a car's bumper, for example. But the trouble with the pixel image is ... well, I'll be everyone reading this knows. You size up, and the jagged edges show. So, a vector version was called for.

Break out the old Illustrator CS4 and hit the old iMac.

Was it fun? Yes, it was fun. Also, since I'd gotten to see Colossus: The Forbin Project a couple-three times since, I'd noticed that the Guardian logo, which I'd recreated from memory, was a bit 'off'; the starbucks on the red star were a bit squat, which gave room for a larger capital G letterform in it. I rectified that in the vector file, and, because AI has layers you can turn on and off, I included the original version as well as the updated version, so Living Computers can, as the President said Colossus can do with its weapons, select and deliver whatever they consider apprpriate.

The updated version looks like this. The Guardian logo is much closer to the film version now.

Zob Loves The Library. Of Course.

3531A.

Where ever we go, that friendly little guy, Zob the Glob, tends to tag along.  And, like us, he adores the Multnomah County Library.

Zob's interested in everything. But he's easily distracted. He was keen on American history ...

... but then noticed we were interested in something ourselves.

... and he couldn't resist checking it out.

(NB: Zob is copyright my wife, who created him. Used with permission).

So, I Needed More Acrylic Paint For My Paint-By-Number Habit ...

3530A.

I've been playing about with Paint-by-number again. The set I bought last year at Powell's has eight panels in it, and I'm on number five, which is the Statue of Liberty, here:

The set was produced to leverage the popularity of the book Paint by Number: The How-to Craze That Swept The Nation by William L. Bird (and published by Princeton Archtectural Press) into some art kit sales. There's a small book on the projects with text by Dan Robbins, the OG of Paint-by-number, the man who helped start it all with the Craft Master series by Palmer Paints, back in the day. It's not a bad set, and the pieces in it have been quite fun (I don't recommend it for anyone with significant visual impairment, as the lines and numbers are very small and very dimly printed - I have to take my glasses up and almost put my nose down to see the lines and numbers clearly).

But, perhaps it's my long time away from painting but of the twelve standard-sized paint-pots included, more than one of them are nearly out of paint. Maybe I used too much, I don't know.

However! The Craft Warehouse in Gresham to the rescue! It's at 687 NW 12th Street in the Gresham Station development. The Wife™ dotes on this store, and it's not hard to see why; if they don't have it, you probably don't need it, as far as craft supplies go. There is a section devoted to acrylic craft paints and more brushes than you can shake a mahl stick at, and it was there that I found a whole card of 16 acrylic colors, several of which correspond pretty well to the colors I'm running down on.

Behind you can see the twelve original paint pots in the box that the kit came in. The sixteen colors on the card, below, are beautifully fresh and pretty much the quality I need to do the rest of the PBN pictures (one hardly needs artist-quality acrylics to do these). And ... on sale for $5.44! Yes, such a deal.

Another boon I found was the Fine Art department of Craft Warehouse. Simply put, it's a fully-stocked, well-inventoried section; it could stand on its own as a small full-service fine-art supply store on its own! That's above-and-beyond for a craft-supply store, which usually has a small selection of rather pedestrian art supplies; this has graphite, oils, watercolors, acrylics, pretty much everything. So, it'll stay on our radar for certain. For an art-supply needer living east of 148th in The Numbers or anyone in the Gresham area, it's certainly a stop you'd want to make if you couldn't get in to Blick or Artist and Craftsman or I've Been Framed down in Portland.

Now, I'll move on to completing the other PBNs in that little kit you see behind it there.

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.

Wy'east: The Sun Rising From Behind Larch Mountain

3528A.

Now, on Friday morning, we return to this blog's national pastime: photographing Wy'east from the Rossi Farms, now having moved our POV to NE Shaver Street east of 122nd. A massive rethink of the bike lane situation on 122nd between Fremont and Shaver has eliminated all parking in that segment, including the spot where I parked Olivia, just by the entry to the Rossi driveway.

But it's still a good view.

The most entrancing feature of an atmosphere like this is the way the clouds form such a solid ceiling, seeming both to absorb the light streaming in from the east and to defliect it down. Also, the sunrise brings unexpected features out; note that some of the foothills are dark and seem to screen the sunrise light back toward the volcano itself, like a sort of divider.

This gives the vista. The bright flare behind the rise on the left - Larch Mountain - heralds the rising sun. The way the foothills screen out the sunlight and redirect it to a glow that subsumes Wy'east is quite clear, as is the delightful low clouds in front of all the foot hills, which is visible in front of Larch Mountain.

The mountain sits bathed in dawn sunlight that the foothills in front are going to get, just not yet.

Red-Tinged Sunrise, 122nd and Stark

3527A.

On the 13th, I was on the way home from working overnight as I do.

The sunrise was particularly wonderful. There were clouds, and they were catching the long rays of the rising sun in that way that never fails to get my attention.

That's looking east down Stark, of course. The next one, looking south down 122nd, up the rise just before the Library.

The first photo was unretouched. I bumped the color on the second one.

Burning Auto Wrecking Lot, NE Portland

3526A.

Been quiet around here of late, but about 1/2 mile west of where I work, there was a BIG fire. Old auto boneyard near NE 75th and Killingsworth. FIVE alarms.

Killingsworth closed west of 82nd. I took this picture from just east of 82nd.

As of now, the Portland Fire Bureau has a 1-mile 'shelter-in-place' zone centered on that wrecking lot. Mayhap I got out of there just in time.

Manga Explains: Why Ink On Bristol Board?

3525A.

A couple of weeks ago prior to Book Church we stopped in at the Portland Blick Art Supply store, located and NW 10th and Glisan, and had a look-see.

While there, I had to get a photo of this inspired explanation of why Bristol is good for ink, because it uses a whole lotta manga tropes to explain it plain and clear, and is just plain fun to look at.

When I do draw, I adore Bristol, for whatever that's worth.

If you looked real close, you could see the pink lines of the rough layout. There's not too invisible here.

The Return of South Portland: Welcoming the Proposed Sixth Sextant

3524A.

Don't look now, but Portland may be about to grow a sixth address area.

Actually, it already exists. Anyone familiar with the map of Portland knows that the Willamette River and Burnside Street makes a basic division of the address grid into NW, NE, SW, and SE quadrants; the veering to the northwest of the river north of the Burnside crossing creates an ample area on the North Portland Peninsula which is named, simply, N, and these areas form the directional part of every street name in town.

South of the city center, though, starting at about SW Jefferson St, the river dawdles more south-southeast rather than straight south. This is a topic I wrote about here back in 2005; and while the addresses increase southward in accordance with the southward address trend, you reach a point at which the zero-line ... then, SW Front Avenue, now SW Naito Parkway ... is actually several blocks east of the river. Rather than dubbing a new address district, back during the Great Renaming in 1930-33, the address planners counter-intuitively called for addresses to increase 100 to the block again, as you traveled toward the river, but with a leading zero affixed. These addresses I termed the zero-hundreds, but the term of art in the City is leading-zero addresses. Why they decided to take this approach rather than a mirror-image of the North Portland scheme is not recorded and presumably forgotten.

As an example, the home base of Portland's legendary The Old Spaghetti Factory, at the end of SW Bancroft Street, on the river, is 0715 SW Bancroft St, effectively seven blocks east of Naito but on the west side of the river, so SW.

Image: PBOT

It seems incredibly likely that that's all about to change in a local geography edit that, while is not as major as the original Great Renumbering, is quite remarkable and unprecedented in Portland's post-renaming street rationale. If approved by the City (and judging by the amount of work already done it looks quite likely), in 2020, the slender wedge of land with leading-zero addresses beginning just south of the Hawthorne Bridge and expanding to about a mile's width by the time you cross the Clackamas County line will lose the W in the directional and the leading zero in the address number. The Old Spaghetti Factory's address will become 715 S. Bancroft; Johns Landing's main drag will be known thenceforth as S. Macadam Ave, and SW Terwilliger blvd south of Lewis and Clark College will be S. Terwilliger Blvd. The PBOT 'Sixth Sextant' logo schematically summarizes the change, which was apparently catalyzed by the growth of a major urban neighborhood in the South Waterfront area and the collateral issues of city service and emergency service provision in an area where a caller will say "300 SW Whitaker" when they meant "0300 SW Whitaker".

If and when (let's be frank, or at least Meier & Frank ... when, this looks like a done deal) the change is applied, the new South sextant will come into being affecting 258 of Portland's estimated 19,502 street intersections (interestingly, I found that my home 'sextant', SE, has more than 6,600 of those intersections, about double that of the second-largest, intersection-wise ... SW).

I expect I'll embrace it with some excitement, though I'll have to admit that "South Macadam Avenue" doesn't have quite the ring "SW Macadam Avenue" did. And, though blander in character (the originally-named area was something of a center of lower-income and poor European immigrant communities) there is the thing that there will be, at long last, a real South Portland in Portland, Oregon.

Now for the info! Follow this link to the Portland Bureau of Transportation's (PBOT) South Portland Addressing Project: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/75814. Maps, tables of street name changes and address changes, FAQ's, the works!

Also, a tip of the hat to my incomparable friend Friday, who knows what I like and how to get my attention about it: she pointed me to this The Oregonian article and the rest, as they say, is Address Nerd history: http://www.oregonlive.com/roadreport/index.ssf/2018/02/sixth_sextant_city_considering.html

Might Could Draw Today ... For Artistic Motivation

3523A.

Christine Nishiyama is an illustrator who is the foundation of Might Could Studios, and believes in community, accountability and consistent practices. This last week, she's debuted an Instagram community that may be just the note some of us under-motivated aspirers need to at least draw something every day.

As detailed in this article on Medium, Might Could Draw Today is a program of drawing prompts and sharing that offer a reason to draw through a different approach to drawing prompts, a community of friends you have yet to make, and small prizes as encouragement.

It has a few simple moving parts. Each Monday, participants are emailed a single drawing prompt. Every day for the next week, do one drawing based on that prompt and post it to Instagram under the hashtag #MightCouldDrawToday. These drawings can be dashed-off in a hurry or lingered over, in whatever style the artist cares and whatever level of care the artist deems appropriate.

That's all there is to it. Oh, and the inducement: Christine awards an art material prize each week to one lucky player. Could be a pen, or a drawing pad, or a marker.

The aim is simple: just do a drawing each day. And there is more than one mutual-encouragement based drawing community on line, but not every one has the right note for everyone. The objectives are direct: just drawing something every day, regardless of skill.

From my personal experience, you can have any level of skill, and you can be neck-deep in inspiration, but if you don't have motivation, you don't have a thing. For those needing motivation, this may just be the thing.

Visit the Might Could Draw Today main page at mightcouldstudios.com/mightcoulddrawtoday/, where signup for the challenge can be accomplished.

How To Draw By E.G. Lutz: The Man Who Enabled Disney

3522A.

Earlier tonight, at Powell's during Book Church, I stumbled on a couple of books by a man whose work was instrumental in giving us Disney via the public library.

Edwin George Lutz was a commercial artist and illustrator who authored several books on art and how to draw between 1913 and 1933. In 1913, the first of his books, What To Draw And How To Draw It, taught common-sense ways to render birds, houses, animals, people, and expressions in simple, cartoonish style. His 1921 work, Drawing Made Easy, showed the learner how to draw more realistic images of people and animals.

Latterly, facsimile editions of those books were produced by (respectively) LomArt and North Light Books and look like this:

The illustrations are charming, whimsical and very straightforward, clearly showing how, by breaking down natural shapes into shapes the beginner could draw, more complex forms could be built. This is a common concept that the beginning artist is introduced to; the genius of Lutz was his warm, accessable style.

The connection to Disney comes from a book published in 1920, Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development. This particular volume passed into the hands of one Walt Disney, who was at the time making his living in the commercial art trade in Kansas City during the 1920s, under the aegis of the Kansas City Public Library. Legend has it that Disney learned his animation technique from this very book.

The result is a lesson in two things: that the chancest exposure to literature can lead to absolute wonder (what if Walt hadn't seen the book?), and the importance a public library can have in self-education at large (what if KC had an inadequate (or no) public library).

If you love Disney, thank the E.G. Lutz ... and the public library.

This article at Print magazine's website has more information on the Lutz/KC Public Library/Disney connection. 

That Moment When You Realize Your Ice Scraper Has A More Dramatic and Heroic Life Than You Do

3521A.

The sticker was probably designed by Michael Bay, and its script was written by J.J. Abrams.

(cue sufficiently dramatic music)

Ice scraper? More like ice hero, amirite?

Hoo-ah!!!!

Harvey Milk Comes To Portland

3520A.

This rather snuck up on me and took me by surprise, I'm abashed to say, but a rather historically-named street in downtown Portland is about to change its colors, rainbow-ward.

As reported by KPTV and other news outlets, on Wednesday, the Portland City Council voted unanimously to support the renaming of the 13 blocks of SW Stark Street, from Naito Parkway to where it merges into West Burnside at SW 13th Avenue, to "SW Harvey Milk St".

It's a change that's appropriately placed. For a very long time, the three-sided area bounded by SW 11th, SW Stark, and West Burnside was the hub of Portland's gay culture with popular nightspots like the Fish Grotto, the Red Cap Garage, Boxxes, and the Club Portland. Back in the day, some of those I knew called it the Pink Triangle, and it was gritty old-Portland. Today, it's the West End, the Fish Grotto's gone, the Club Portland has been McMenamized, and the old Ben Stark hotel is the modern-friendly boutique Ace Hotel. But the one axis all these had in common was SW Stark Street.

The change isn't yet quite in the bag, but it's very likely to happen. It has the support of the full City Council, as well as endorsement by more than 75 per cent of the businesses along the street. The rest, apparently, is all process.

My feelings are mixed about this, of course. The words I heard used on the radio and in the news defined Portland for me long before I lived here; geographically, the phrase "Southwest Stark Street" has a resonance that means purest Portland to me. But I'm not afraid of the name change, and expect to welcome it; and, as I said before, there's no place in Portland more apt for such a memorial.

Best of all, for those who would that a pillar of early Portland not be forgotten, this change applies only to Southwest Stark Street. There will still be more than fifteen miles of Southeast Stark Street, and the bits of West Stark that extend out into Washington County.

The Harvey Milk Street Project has a web page here (https://harveymilkpdx.org/), which may be read.

 

The Campaign Stickers For Colossus/Guardian 2020 Have Arrived ...

3519A.

... and they look pretty spiffy.

As any designer or artist I imagine would tell you, it's one thing putting together a work of art, commercial or otherwise. But to have someone produce it so slickly, especially since you love pop culture and being a part of it is a real high - well, that's truly something other than else.

A few missives ago I explained how the Living Computers: Museum + Labs, in Seattle, was having a First Thursday free showing of one of my favorite movies, Colossus: The Forbin Project, and wanted a free giveaway and stumbled on my Colossus/Guardian 2020 campaign sticker design and offered to buy rights. And they did. And they gave it out at that First Thursday showing.

I asked for a handful of the stickers, and they said okay. And yesterday, they showed up.

I got about ten of them. The actual sticker itself breaks out of the backing as an oval 3 and 1/3 inches long by two inches high. And don't they look subversively cool?

As can be seen I didn't just get that. A little promotional collateral came with, including a handout that illustrated some trivia pertinent to the movie. And do you know what else is cool here?

I got credit there for designing it. I'll tell you, I was lucky that LCM+L stumbled on me. They believe in paying for your design, they believe in dealing on the level, and they believe in also giving credit for what you did. 

They do things the way they should be done.

Oh, and vote Guardian/Colossus 2020, because they'll do a better job than humans. Though I understand that the conservatives will be running on an MCP/Sark ticket, though that's just a rumor at this point.

Washboard Clouds in the Outer East Portland Sky.

3518A.

Seen very recently, on  morning commute home from work. Location: Southbound offramp from I-205 to the Washington-Stark couplet:

A nearly-perfectly-regularly rippled sky, almost like a washboard.

The weather wasn't particularly turbulent, although it's been cool and quite cloudly lately.