Immortality Assured Via Apple Look Around

3949

Look at what the Brown Eyed Girl peeped and pointed me at yesterday, on NW 11th Avenue adjacent to Powell's: 

 

She saw it from back in the Orange Room approaching the checkout; from a distance it looked like a Google Maps Street View car. This is what I found when I got out there though: note the text on the rear door.

It had California plates, which is appropriate.

I learned that Apple is rolling out a feature for Apple Maps, similar to Google's Street View, called Look Around. Unlike Google Maps, Apple Maps doesn't have a web portal though, so if you want to see me taking a picture of them taking a picture of me taking a picture of them, you'll have to employ your mobile device.

I don't know when to expect my image to show up on Apple Maps, as I don't recall how long it takes digital pictures to be developed these days. 

And so it goes.

21st Century Man, or: My Future, And Welcome To It

3947

This missive, and this picture, document (or attempt to) a singular emotion. 

Life moves past you at an odd clip. It's not constant. And it seems gradual, until that moment it's not. 

I'm aging. I don't make an issue of what my exact age is; if you read enough of my rattling, I'm sure you can reason it out. But it's sunk in that I've been around a while, and despite being born in Silverton and spending my teens and twenties around Salem and Corvallis, I've been a Portlander the majority of my life now (the implications vis a vis lifespan I'll not dwell on for the moment, if it's alright with y'all).

I've seen changes, is what I'm saying. The town I fell in love with as a kid and commenced a long process of killing myself to become a local in has become, fulsomely, a fundamentally different place.

Dig, if you will, this picture.

If you go to the riverside esplanade just the other side from Naito Parkway of the Waterfront Pearl condos, you go to the north end of that walk, which is as far as it goes (for now), and you look southwest, you see the above view. 

The street intersection is NW Naito Parkway and NW 9th Av.

I spoke of changes. I used to work in this area at a building that still stands where NW 15th and Thurman merge and cross the railroad tracks, just across from where NW Naito Parkway reverts to its seminal name, NW Front Av. I doubt that anyone living now in the condo tower forest that has spread from the Main Post Office building to that point can even envision that it was once a rather vacant urban wasteland; a big rail yard. I still remember. My office left that area around 2005; from our offices windows we watched the steady encroachment of development. Not even I figured it would get that far but there it is, now.

There were comics when I was a kid, where the protagonist would be projected into the future. They'd look around, gobstopped in wonder, as they viewed great glittering futuristic towers, sided in glass and shining steel, some with curving, sculpted sides and they'd stare agape at architectures they could only just comprehend.

As I looked at those buildings from that point on that day, a certain emotion started in my head and reached down and took hold of my heart, and I realized that I was that guy. This was still Portland. I still grokked the geography. But something that was, within my adult memory, acres of vacant lots and rail yard had become this hulking, crowded thing.

Same planet, but a different world. And I was aware of it, as though it was, for a moment, a palpable thing, a thing that could be held in my hand.

Parents have had this feeling, in their times and ways. Our collective descendants will have the same experience, Anthropogenically-induced environment change-willing. 

And now, I guess, it's my turn.

Another Sort of Portland Loo

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Some years ago, the City engineered a public bathroom solution called the "Portland Loo" which is a built thing and can be seen across the city in some parks and in the Old Town area of inner NW Portland.

There is, though, another sort of Portland loo, and it's much more portable.

It's much more forthright about the reason it's there, too.

IMSO, this City has stumbled on a number of issues over the last several years. This, however, is not one of them. This is a positive public good and extraordinarily humane, and, sometimes, just the thing you need when you need it.

Just Another Photo Of Downtown PDX, Part 2

3855

In the last episode, I published an angle on downtown PDX taken from a certain vantage point in the Lloyd District near the Metro HQ. It appeals because of the way the buildings cluster upon one another and the way they huddle against the West Hills (this an aspect I've always enjoyed about downtown, that the tallest buildings in the State of Oregon are still dwarfed by the hills just west of that. You can't ask for better backgrounds, really).

Portland, though, tells many stories these days, and instead of the idyll that draws so many new moderns here, some of those stories, that you really can't ignore, tell of stresses that some promotionalists would rather leave off.

All you have to do is zoom out a bit.

Sure, it's a trite expression I make here, and not exactly original. But it is the reality. And it's in places where success is supposed to be the order of the day where it speaks particularly of the lack of justice that are the weft of the fabric of our modern times.

Latterly the homeless camp has become an ubiquitous and longer-lived part of the Portland urban experience. This one, at NE Lloyd Blvd and Grand Ave, has existed for a number of months, perhaps closing in on a year. Undoubtedly the pandemic has allowed for a lower frequency of the periodic law-enforcement sweeps that would keep these in motion. 

One wonders what those whose fortune hasn't routed them into one of these places thinks as they go past them. The tension between this and the mumbledy-million-dollar retail and condo towers dominating less than a half-mile away is palpable enough that you can almost reach out into the air and pluck it like an over-taut string. 

There are good people in this town who are working without enough tools and support to fix this. There are indifferent people in this town who are thankful that this isn't them. There's the money, who goes where it will and will probably miss these people altogether. 

And that's Portland, 2021; a story if you frame it just right ... and another one if you change the frame just a little. I have no solutions myself nor do I have suggestions, so, I guess I offer all this banal stream-of-consciousness to say there's a story here each one of us should tune in to, and not forget about.

It's about them, I guess. Those people in the photo that call those tents home. In a city brimming with opportunity, they have none. That's not the Portland I was hoping to see, at this time in my life.

LOLEconomics: The Dow at 8579.19.

1810.

 Or, as Atrios might say, Wheeeeee!

(Base chart nicked from Yahoo.com)

Tags: dow jones, credit crisis, mortgage crisis, photoshoppery, LOLrecession, LOLspeak, LOLDown

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[liff, modern_times] Used Sport Utes = The New Confederate Shin Plaster

1535 Stumbled on via Calculated Risk, another sign of These Modren Times™: Used SUV prices falling faster than the average fraternity IQ during a beer blast:

Webb's figures show wholesale prices on big SUVs such as Chevrolet Tahoes, Ford Expeditions and Toyota Sequoias are down 17% from a year ago. Full-size pickups have fallen as much as 15%, Webb says.

"It's a challenge," says Adam Lee, president of the Lee Auto Malls dealerships in Maine. "How do you tell a good customer, 'You paid $32,000 and now it's only worth $17,000?' "

Full story here.

Yeah, I know. Nobody could have predicted, &c, &c.

Tags: modern_times, liff, US Economy On The Skids

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[lolz] Meanwhile, In The Nation's Capital ...

 1440.

He's no Jimmy Stewart, but who is these days?

If you don't want to break your fingers googling pooka, here ya go.

(photo insolently ripped off from the Merc!)

Tags: lolz, lolprez, lolbush, satire

[logo_design] The Three Stages of Wickes Furniture

1345. Safe to say this caught a lot of us by surprise (clicky the illo at right to embiggen if you could be so kind, thankyou!).

Not nececelery, mind, that Wickes had hit a rough patch – that was public knowledge. What was a surprise (unless you were some kind of insider) was that Wickes was so close to its end. Now, it's might be winding everything up and going away.

On the Portland Housing Blog the proprietor made the remark "We won't be hearing 'It's a Wickes House' anymore". Of course, since I try to pay attention to logo evolution, I noted that that wasn't quite the case (it's germane to the housing discussion because Clint8200 correctly noted that it's due to the slow housing market – this is one of those ripples that are spreading throughout the economy now that so many fewer people can get loans for houses now). Actually, Wickes moved off the "It's A Wickes House" campaign already.

Sometime during the last year, they began promoting "The New Wickes" with a change in logo – dumping the pastel pink and teal, and the flowing script W in the circle – and going to a palette of earth tones and a decided change in font, a new completely-typographical solution with no abstract graphic elements – not even the two parallel bars that framed the word "Furniture" (which also recieved a typographic facelift). Even the taglines were jettisoned; Wickes was now "creating new ideas" and the aural hook was the Roxetteish "We've Got The Look". They'd even rolled out a new value-priced line – Cindy Crawford Home.

As far as I know, this rebranding and "warm" relaunching of the brand is a strategy that can succeed. It's hard to tell at first blush if it's a last-ditch attempt to save a company that's down for the count. Certainly, though la Crawford's name and face doesn't exactly have the pull it did in the 80's or the 90's, it's still a powerful draw and any company that can afford to hire her certainly doesn't look like it's in the last stages of tenability.

So, looking at it from a brand-evolution perspective, it was kind of hard to be sure that Wickes was that far along. Of course, the tale of history is much more emphatic.

Tags: wickes furniture, housing bubble, housing slowdown, us economy