[PDX_Photos] Hillsdale Center … Shopping Center, Old School.

2969.On Saturday this weekend, The Wife™ and myself struck out for Hillsdale Art Supply Company. That was a good thing to do, but more on that in the next missive.

I was smitten at once by the charming, well-kept, and dated (in the good way) architecture I saw there. It really is a genteel gem, and it hasn't been covered over with a layer of development cruft accompanied by how some things 'just need to be updated'.

I like having old things about that are well-kept and sweet in that way. Living in a place that gets stamped out of a die every five years as the moods change leads to that evil of evils … tedium, monotony. Portland has history and lets it hang out.

I give you the Hillsdale Center, which may be found on the north side of Southwest Capitol Highway just west of Southwest Sunset Boulevard, in what amounts to downtown Hillsdale.

The thing that cued me of the vintage of the place was that lovely, sublime roof line. Accented in teal, I was all of a sudden called back to when I was a kid, a time when the American ideal was a dapper fellow at work, all suit-n-tie, and his well-attired wife was going to the shops, stopping in at a beauty salon here, a stationer's shop there, and the post office … and there's still a post office station here in this little shopping center.

I remember being a kid in Silverton, going to the JCPenney store downtown (hard to believe there was ever one in Silverton, but there was), and the hardware store, and the pharmacy.

It was a gentle time.

The thing I noticed the most about Hillsdale Center was just how neat and trim everything was. Oh, it's in a tony (yeah, I said it, Onion, and I say it regularly!) part of town where the incomes are rather high-middling to just-plain-high, so maybe they have the throw-weight to demand the rents that keep if spiffy, but it is nice.

And old-school, as I said. Submitted for your approval, the Jade Dragon Chinese Restaurant. Old school, and proud of it.

It anchors the building closest to the corner of Cap Highway and Sunset Boulevard with massive authority. I adore this edifice. I love the way the corner looks like a hinged wall of LEGOs, and I love the way the paint job accentuates the entry. Do I need to also mention that I'm absolutely smitten with the two huge ideograms centered up near the roof line there?

Reviews of the restaurant on Google+ et alia suggest that the food quality is mediocre. We apparently all consider ourselves such foodies that only the most sublime restaurant experiences garner even the most tepid approbation from us. Bull. Those of use who live in the actual world know that mediocre food in just the right context can be sublime.

We shall therefore, perforce, be visiting there for lunch one Saturday when next we pay a visit to Hillsdale Art Supply. We expect to enjoy this. The rest of you can shut up and enjoy your P.F. Chang's and be all pretentious and locavore-y.

And one amusing aspect of the layout is the sheer topography of it. As witness:

The slope you see here is looking down from near the entry to the rear parking lot off Sunset Boulevard. This slope is, as in many photos, much steeper than it looks. I'm no civil engineer (if I was an engineer I'd make quite a nifty nasty and obnoxious one, I just know) but that slope has got to be more than the mythical 6% that's so popular on the road signs. Immediately to my left in that building is a liquor store, just over from that, the post office, and the art supply store just beyond that.

I find it utterly charming that the solution to having a walking path at the side of the building that doesn't include steps, which would be inaccessible to anyone without a perfectly operable pair of legs, is to delineate it on the street with that red line fimbriated in white. One can see that it opens into a crosswalk extending across the walkway to the line of parking spaces.

Indeed, it seems like parts of this would be suitable for Italian mountain goats to shop in.

Never mind. We are smitten with this cute shopping complex never the less.

I mean, they call it the West Hills, not the West Plains.

[liff in PDX] Undocumented Immigrant Discovered In SE Portland Parking Lot!!!

2968.… and we found him ourselves. This is what what he looked like:

Now, before you go all nuh-uh!!!! on me, that goose was a Canada goose, and Canada's a foreign country (unless we've annexed it yet), and I didn't get a chance to search him, but I'll bet ya that handsome fella hasn't got one stick of ID on him.

Well, come to think of it, he's probably more of an undocumented migrant. 

Here's some footage of him stealing bread from good old, American red-white-n-blue geese:



Seriously, though, that is kind of a handsome guy, isn't he? He was hanging around the Franz bread outlet store, out on SE Foster Rd between 111th and 122nd, because bread, yo, and there were locals perfectly willing to throw him some food.

I've said the life is wild out here in outer SE Portland.

Case closed.

[logo] KINK-FM: True To The Logo

2967.I don't know if anyone else noticed, but Portland's legendary FM, KINK, has evolved its logo a bit.

Before:

… and after.

True to the Music has been the bywords for a long, long time now. And I've been a KINK listener for a long time. I've always liked the approach that KINK had to music … explore it, take your time to enjoy it. It's not the frenetic pace of most music stations. And you always heard something unexpected if you listened long enough.

Today's KINK is much the same as the 1980s version. But they've ventured more into live acts and similar promotions. The new logo, which boasts the terrestrial frequency as well as the legendary tagline, encourages you to think of KINK the way a lot of stations do these days - frequency-name, so it's going with the fashion in a fashion, but in some ways you gotta change with the times, even if your content stays timeless … as the script logo, which I've always enjoyed, does.

H/T +Ben Rippel.

[liff] A Pre-Cold Snap Sunrise

2966.Sunrises, to me, always seem more vivid as the weather changes.

Those orance/buff/salmon tones I don't see too often about here. It seems a whisper of the frosty hand that's about to lay itself upon the land.

Third-shift work has some compensations.

[art] The Kind Of Art Store Landscaping We Grow Around Here

2965.What would be more perfect outside of Muse Art and Design …

… than a color wheel?

The white gravel in the center tells you it's additive.

SE 42nd and Hawthorne.

[liff] Goodbye, Mysterious Warrior Archie

2964.Our mysterious sojourner, Archie, left us this week.

Here was an oddball feline – well, none of our cats were ever particularly 'normal', but we likes 'em quirky.

Archie came to my mother-in-law, a long time ago, battered and in need of care. He was a tough guy, with a single snaggly ear, who had apparently emerged from a battle with some opponent and, seeing my mom-in-law nearby, figured he'd go for help, going 'You think I look bad? You shoulda see'd the other guy!"

He was the strong, silent type for years, but recently he became talkative. He had a miaow as smoky as his coat. He was a sweet, loyal guy whose ambition in life was apparently to be The Wife™'s fur hat while she slept.

To the best of our guessing, he was 18 years old. He had started to take on that old-cat spindliness that old cats will do, his coat lost his lustre, and he began to slow. He was more susceptible to infections, contracting an intractable one above his nose that affected his rugged, handsome visage, but he never let it stop him. He stayed by Wife like bodyguard, trailing her through the house.

Dr Behrends, at Montavilla, pronounced the sentence. Archie was, in that inscrutable way that animals do, choosing his time and getting his affairs in order. He was at the end of his life and knew it. And so, he turned off the lights in the rooms of his life, one by one, in the most dignified way. And then, two Saturdays ago, he spent 14 hours in Wife's arms. And then he was gone.

He was a sweet guy, old before we knew him, tougher than most because someone thought declawing was the thing to do.

He gave us his best. I hope he left us thinking we did same.

[comics] It's Comics! It's in a Spiral Notebook! IT'S SPIRAL NOTEBOOK COMICS!

2963.John E. Williams, a man of whom I admire for having much ilk, just took existential comedy and fast creativity to a new high with the low tech.

How funny can spiral notebook paper and plain black ballpoint can be?

Just ask John.

Claude directs traffic … but of course, nobody listens to him. And, hey, free coupon! At the end! Such a deal! Whatever the NJ Palisades are and sadly, it's after 1963 but it's the thought.

Seriously, I enjoy John's dry wit and his existential touch, which proves that traffic rage can even be funny if you contextualize it just right … and sketch it out in ballpoint on notebook paper (two art media which, I can see, are vastly  underrated).

See the rest (including his recap of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) here:
http://spiralnotebookcomics.blogspot.com/

[art] Here's Your Space Dragon

2962.Well, because space dragon, I guess. Do we need a reason?

Looks like Tintin made a fast escape there too.

[logo] Lloyd Llogo: The Most Portlandest Of Malls Gets A New Graphic Llook

2961.Portland's Mall is re-imagining itself.

The Lloyd Center is pretty much the point of entry of the Mall into the culture of Oregon. Built in 1960, once opened, Oregon shopping joined the national scene in as much as the modern shopping mall is concerned.

It's had its ups and downs; it went from a 100-store mall with an open courtyard to a completely-enclosed mall with two levels of shopping and one of offices. It's really going strong, and considering how some malls have died, are dying, or have re-imagined their own selves into sere multi-acre parking lots surrounded by big boxes, that's no small feat.

For many years, now, its logo looked like this:

… and this wasn't too bad. The rose-as-an-O was very appropriate design, and I always thought the type was rather restrained and refined.

The center has undergone a change of ownership, and the new owners have deemed a logo refresh is in order. Delving back into its 60s-past, here's what they came up with:

A report by KATU-Channel 2 relates that the new owners feel as though the design harkens back to the Center's original 'retro charm'. I can see this. The design would tessellate very nicely into one of those latticework dividers so popular in the hip, upscale pads of the 60s.

I must admit, it didn't take off with me right away. I didn't much care for the asymmetry, though once I pictured it as a wall texture, it clicked right there and then. It was a quirky inspiration, to be sure, that caused the designer to link three of the open circles with the L, leaving the one bolded into a C to stand outside, but after sifting the design in my head for a while, it works.

At least it does succeed in evoking a retro feel, and as far as that goes, it's a success.

[tech] Print: It's Sensual.

2960.Now, I can't afford a Kindle or whatever's au courant right now. But this article spells out, quite succinctly, why I'm not really craving one.

Turning the pages of a paper book is like leaving one footprint after another on the trail—there's a rhythm to it and a visible record of how far one has traveled. All these features not only make text in a paper book easily navigable, they also make it easier to form a coherent mental map of the text."

Paper books and magazines are always where it will be at for me.

Read (yes, it's electronic, savor the irony) all about it here: http://www.notechmagazine.com/2013/10/why-the-brain-prefers-to-read-on-paper.html

[liff in OR] Marionberry Pie: They See Us Rollin', They Hatin'.

2959.Found on the Deadspin website, a list of 50 signature state dishes, rated in order of how much they loved them, from 1st and nommiest (Chicago-style Deep Dish Pizza) to 50th and atrocious-est (Cincinnati "chili").

Our wonderful Marionberry pie comes in at a respectable 10th place, the top of the 2nd decade, pretty high up, with the following bon mot:

Mmmmmmm, pie. Oh man. Nobody tell any Oregonians how high their state food is ranked, though. They can't fit any more self-congratulation into their busy schedules.

Yeah, well, oh-snap, you.

The whole list is here (http://deadspin.com/the-great-american-menu-foods-of-the-states-ranked-an-1349137024). It's worth reading at least for the snark.

But don't go dissin' us Oregonians, yo. 

[art] Three Beginners' Lessons

2958.Dipping once again into the wonderfulness that is this season's Drawing Magazine.

Claire Watson Garcia's "First Marks" article for the month are three exercises every aspiring drawing artist should do. I touch on them now because I've done two of the three. The first one I haven't done, but it's very brilliant. They're all out there, but the article is valuable because she identified them and, in one article, tied them all together and put them in one place. This can be a valuable first-stop right here (and since the column is a continuing feature, yet another reason to check in there. But, enough idolatry).

1. Wire Drawing: This was the one I never did. Take about 15" of wire and creatively bend it into any shape, but keep it abstract … don't make anything recognizable. To me, this says introduce interesting curves, make parts cross, make this part roughly parallel with that part. Having a love of city maps, I have long experience in getting lost in apparently-meaningless patterns. Lay this bent wire on a sheet of paper, then very slowly, draw it with one, careful stroke. Try to copy as many of the little kinks and bends. Take your time. Do it first in pencil, then in roller-ball pen (she strives to tell you to avoid ball-point).

2. Draw Upside-Down: This have have done, and it's very useful. One of the problems one experiences in drawing is something I think of as an iconic-library approach, and why it's important to learn to 'see as an artist does'. An artist views true, or at least as true as possible. When we're not 'arting' around, we see what we see. As an inexperienced artist, we might draw, instead of the true form, shape, and light-and-shade pattern of, say, the human eye, we might reach into the icon-library we all carry with us and dash down an almond-shape with a circle and a big black dot in the middle.

Drawing upside-down begins the process of breaking this strong symbol-reality link we have, which may be of benefit in day-to-day living as a survival skill, but as an point of artistic practice, kill any hope we have of making realistic drawings. Inverting any drawing renders away some of the meaning and breaks those strong links. A chair right-side-up is a chair. A chair upside-down … well, that's more a random-seeming collection of light, shadow and line, and submits to copying.

3. Contour Drawing: This is one of the classic original art lessons, and builds on the previous two. Take any object you would want to draw. Then take yourself, a clean sheet of paper, and a little time. Consider the object, turning its shapes, light, shadows, and all into contour lines. From your starting point, draw the outline shapes. For the beginning, choose an object you enjoy looking at, because you're going to take your time with this, too.

Draw every part as a simple collection of lines and shapes, few details. The author does not say they should be done as one, single continuous line, but the contour drawing I learned directed me to render the object as one continuous line. Our author does say one should take one's time, but does not seem to insist that you not look at your line as you draw it. The point is to just draw the simple line, take your time doing it, and come as close to a likeness as you can, and not to criticize yourself if you can't get it straight on. This is, after all a beginning.

The core idea I can draw out of all this is the development of spacial perception and the awareness of drawing what one sees instead of what one thinks one sees. One of the essential truths of drawing is that you depict reality by viewing it in its essentials and recording them as truly as one can.

I'm nowhere near the artist I want to be, but I know I can get there, because I took the time to learn to see. I don't think anyone can truly aspire to drawing without learning this skill.

But don't be afraid. Since I've done so, the world has never looked more lively. It's a good goal.

[art] In The Beginning, One Must Copy

2957.The current issue of Drawing magazine seems to suggest a trend.

Originality is to be striven for. No matter what one does as an artist, I think we all, accomplished as well as tyro or aspiring, reach for a unique expression of what is our own voice, no matter how we do it.

But in the beginning, as one of the keynote articles say, you can learn a lot from a master, and since you have no access to the master, you can at least draw what they have drawn and, in so doing, grasp eye-hand coordination and get a taste of how they understood form and shape.

Dan Gheno's article demonstrates how to draw from multiple sources - from as 'mundane' as comic books and film images and as rarefied as sculpture and the great masterpieces - to learn basic lessons of art and composition. You can gain facility on drawing certain body parts (I know few artists who don't approach hands, for instance, with some trepidation … even the wonderful artists at OryCon we saw, some of them mentioned this). The idealized and refined ideas of classical sculpture can impart a unique challenge of anatomy lessons to the hand and the eye. Sketching the old masters can teach ineffable lessons about composition.

And, as always, draw, draw, draw.

One may not have access to a live teacher. Fortunately, teachers live all around us. We just have to learn how to look, which is another artists' sine qua non.

[art] Drawing Magazine: A Periodical Paradise

2956.

A new-to-me magazine has been thrown across my path.

Drawing magazine has actually, as the copy I have in my hands saith, 10 years. Well, better late than never. There is a ton of inspiration to be had here, and this month has classic basics, some of which I've heard of, some of which I haven't.

Picture a quarterly magazine that's essentially art tutorials. Like an new art how-to book once every three months.

I might just pick up a subscription. Wife says it's okay, and you get five-for-three if you subscribe for a year (the subscription price is about the same as buying three of them off the stand, and if you subscribe via credit card, you get a bonus fifth issue).

http://thedrawingmagazine.com.

[art] Learning Website of The Moment: Learning to See

2955.

Learning to See, whose title is evidently inspired by the one thing anyone must learn to do to do realistic art, is a site whose author is a self-taught artist who has stumbled on a lot of the verities about learning how to draw on his own.

It's got a lot of solid advice. His idea about how to become more creative?

Show up and practice.
Every day.
Whether you feel like it or not.
I hope that's not too disappointing. I also hope it doesn't sound glib. I mean it sincerely and I really want to help you by passing on what I manage to glean from my own work in the trenches.
I really do believe that this idea will not only enhance your creativity, but rescue your artistic self esteem, help you through procrastination and eventually help you become the artist you know you have inside you, if you could only find a way to bring her out.

It's really a bunch of common-sense like that.

He also mentions a drawing-a-day 'all-in' challenge, but he doesn't seem to have one open at the moment. Worth checking back for.

http://www.learning-to-see.co.uk/

[PDX] Carl Wolfson, Friend To All Animals, Yes, Squirrels Too.

2954.

Carl Wolfson has a new special friend.

The whole story is here. If, however, Carl should ever want to contact this fellah again, I humbly proffer this circular free for his use.

Ya gotta have friends, man. Yes, we can all get along.

(extended in gentle jest. I am a Wolfson fan, and can't wait for XRAY.FM to get its signal goin')

[PDX_liff] Oregon and California, meet Mason and Dixon

2953.

Seen outside of the Powell's Books coffee room, about a week back, was this game fellow with a point to make, outside the Brewery Blocks building, at the corner of NW 11th and West Burnside:

He didn't seem to be cadging for a ride. The sign reads: CALIFORNIA & OREGON 21ST CENTURY MASON DIXON LINE.

I think I know what point he was trying to make. I'd be more interested in what other people thought he was trying to say here. Probably make more impact on a streetcorner than he will on the pages of Soylent News™ anyway.

[PDX] Lloyd 700 Superblock: The Difference 2 Years And A Ton O' Money Make

2952.

One more photo pair from the OryCon 35 Crow's Nest, a/k/a The View From The 15th (promise, though they have been rather good).

Two years ago, in the superblock (actually 4 standard Portland city blocks bounded by (clockwise) NE Multnomah Street, NE 9th Avenue, NE Holladay Street, and NE 7th Avenue there was only one building - at 700 NE Multnomah, the aptly-named Lloyd 700 building, the rest of the block taken up by parking, which see:

Well, what a difference two years and a metric ass-ton of money will make. There's more building still going on in Portland than you can shake a crane at, and the acres of parking that occupied that block are going to be subsumed into a group of towers than may or may not fill up - who knows, they said that the South Waterfront was the Next Big Thing but the place is a real ghost-town, let me tell you:

In making room for the foundations and underpinnings and the underground parking and the flavins they have actually exposed the plinth that the 16-story Lloyd 700 tower sits on. Now I'm a bit savvy about these things. I know they know that that is not nearly as precarious as it looks, but the illogical part of me says chee, I hope a strong northwest wind doesn't come along before they can get that block filled back in.

Funny thing? If we applied this sort of thing to an alien planet, we'd call it terraforming.

Fascinating, never the less.

[liff] More Views From the OryCon Crow's Nest

2951.
A couple of days ago, in this post here, I shared a view I snapped of downtown Portland from the 15th Floor of the Doubletree Hotel, site of OryCon.

I'm addicted to the downtown Portland cityscape and skyline, so this, of course, isn't the only one. The Hospitality level is a great crow's next, as shall be demonstrated.

Two years ago, during that OryCon, and this was when +Occupy Portland was about to be broken up down in the Plaza Blocks (a/k/a Chapman and Lownsdale Squares, between the Federal Courthouse, City Hall, the Multnomah County courthouse, and the Justice Center), the weather was a bit more unstable and chaotic than your usual Oregon November. The view from the 15th was a bit more exotic:

The clouds over the West Hills were directly southwest of city center. The semicircular building you see in the bottom center is the south end of the +Oregon Convention Center , the twin glass spires hiding behind the building at stage left there.

I don't think I have to point this out, but the clouds seemingly held back by the bulk of the hills backing up the west side of town are exquisite and speak eloquently of Oregon weather (well, most of the time, anyway) as a beast who's just too darn mellow to mess with anyone much.

The Tualatin Mountains form the physical western barrier to the city, and extend northwestward from just west of the center of town all the way toward the town of Saint Helens where they more or less merge into the Coast Range. This is the home of our world-famous Forest Park. And the clouds were trying to get round that rampart too … and just weren't getting the job done. To a very beautiful effect.

The bow in the center-left distance is the arch to the Fremont Bridge. The short tower in the middle distance is a retirement community called Calaroga Terrace; that tower on the left is the Lloyd 700 building (7th and NE Holladay) and the one on the right is the even-more-functionally-named Lloyd Center Tower.

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody takes pictures of it, except with digital photography, everyone does now. And even though we are there for OryCon, this causes us pauses and we think outside ourselves for just a moment.

Of course, there are snacks to be had just down the hall. So we come out of that reverie perforce.

[liff] Mere Character Flaws

2950.
Over the past year your humble correspondent has been coping with some issues that have become, if not too large, but to intractable to ignore, himself.

Some of the peril and pitfall can be illustrated by this post by a most dear acquaintance, T.A. Barnhart, on his very intense personal blog, Carpe Bucko. 

And that’s the problem: because my life could be worse, and because it’s been a decent life, I’ve been fooled into thinking that my mental health has been good enough. Yes, I’ve suffered from depression since my pre-teen years; I came to understand this quite a while ago. But I told myself, it was a “shallow” depression. A not-too-bad depression. I didn’t need drugs; I was able to live my life pretty well. Depression was a problem for me, but not that bad.

I may reveal more of my own struggle in future posts; for now, this is needful. His details are not my details, however, the nut of the thing is pretty close to identical.

Suffice it to say for now that, all else being equal, T.A. is a good deal more courageous than I am, in many many ways.

[liff] PDX On The Day Of OryCon 35

2948.
If OryCon ever leaves the DoubleTree, I'll miss that, because this:

The hospitality suite is usually on the top floor of the tower, and this is the scene we are always treated with upon disembarking from the elevator.

It's even better at night.

[liff] It's A Good Thing Ogden Nash Didn't Use A Computer

2947.
… because if he did, there probably would have been more than this:

My problem is, I never know what Untitled I'm in the mood for.

[writing] As Far As You Know, I Wrote Earthsea

2946.According to an idiot online expert system, I come off in print like one of my idols:

I write like
Ursula K. Le Guin

I Write Like. Analyze your writing!

I was thinking of putting this in my sidebar but I'm leaning toward not doing this thing. It's an interesting thing, kind of like getting a lottery scratch ticket and finding I won a grand, but it's a distraction, really. The decision is governed by rules of which I'm not aware, which are coded by human developers who layer their own assumptions thereunto. Also it's crufted over by advertising, so the ulterior motive is maybe the profit one and not all that hidden.

It's kind of easy to have an algorithm tell you your writing has Ursula K. LeGuin's voice and figure you've achieved something.

The object of my writing is maybe to be inspired by UKL, but not to be a clone of that.

My diary calls. 

[liff, logo] Reagan Busted The Air Traffic Controllers Union and All I Got Was This Used License Plate Frame

2945.Here's a delightful yet bittersweet find. Got this from the Salvation Army over at NE 122nd  and Halsey (it used to be a Goodwill before the Goodwill got schmancy new digs just south of there) yesterday.

It's a bit of organized labor history, tho' the provenance must be, for the time being, in doubt:

It's a license plate frame from … PATCO. The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization.

Those of you who are not enlightened as to recent labor history (and that's just about everyone these days) probably don't know from PATCO. Sherman, let's set the Wayback Machine to 1981. Reagan had been in office about a year and a half, and PATCO, in an effort to improve working conditions, struck.

Now, to be complete about it, there were a lot of centrifugal forces in play. Reagan and his team were busy hammering the anti-union key on the Mighty Wurlitzer, and PATCO made some miscued moves on its own … for instance, in the 1980 campaign they supported Reagan over Carter, in dissatisfaction with the way that the Carter-era FCC was treating them (to be fair here, Reagan endorsed the union and expressed support for their struggle, so maybe being a little to credulous was their real sin here. Coulda-shoulda-woulda).

They got what they wanted, and they were about to get it good and hard, as they found out. It may have been Morning in America, but for PATCO, it was about to strike midnight. When PATCO went on strike on August of '81, they did it illegally; there was (and probably still is) a provision in Federal law outlawing strikes by such organizations.

I guess they felt pretty confident. In reality, they overplayed their hand; on the 3rd of August, they struck, and on the 5th of August, they were unemployed. This left a mark on civil aviation that took the best part of a decade to erase, and a mark on labor in America that survives … tragically … to this day.

So it was ironic that I should find such at artifact at the Salvation Army Thrift Store, for a surfeit of reasons. But there it was. Priced to move at $2.99 (but with an earlier sticker that says someone once charged fifty cents for it … good thing I got it before the price went up any more).

The PATCO logo:

is a pretty faithful adaptation of the famous standard logo treatment:

… and the giveaway is the style of the plane, which is dead on target.

As I said, the provenance of this artifact is a matter of debate. The bare metal areas are fairly shiny and well-kept. The paint on the detail has suffered some flaking, though, which indicates age; I'd be willing to bet there's a significant chance that this was from the 70s-80s, when the Long Dark Night of American Labor was getting underway.

Some form of successor to PATCO seems to exist.

And so it goes.

[pdx_liff] If Portland Was Powered By The Clapper

2944.Clap on … clap off …

Click.

[art] Gakyō Rōjin Manji Microsoft Excel

2943.… or, The Old Man Mad About Art with Microsoft Excel.

Seriously? He did this:

With MS Excel?

Yep. As quoted, the 73-year old artist, Tatsuo Horiuchi, remarked "Graphics software is expensive but Excel comes pre-installed in most computers. And it has more functions and is easier to use than [Microsoft] Paint."

I didn't even know Excel had drawing tools!

A more complete gallery is viewable at Spoon & Tamago: http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2013/05/28/tatsuo-horiuchi-excel-spreadsheet-artist/

Hat tip to Carla Axtman at the Book of Face.

[pdx_photo] Parklane Park, In Black and White

2943.When I was out pitcher-takin' yesterday, I explored a few features of my camera that I didn't use often. One of them is black-and-white.

Parklane Park is a little triangular park where SE 155th Avenue and Main Street meet: it's bracketed on the south and west by Main St, on the south and east by a curve of the interestingly-named SE Millmain Drive, and on the north by a vacant lot that was at one time a private airport (Trohs Airstrip) and was subsequently a sand and gravel quarry. It's a nice little - but not too little - park embedded in one of those secluded southeast neighborhoods where, if you're lucky, you'll come by and see a league game of baseball or soccer, and kids are always playing.

The camera I own is a used Kodak EasyShare. Even though the supporting company has largely abandoned this, it's rich in features and performs the champ for me and, just for fun, I took a couple of black and white pictures.

One (above) was predominantly light, and I let the shadows frame the picture in the second one, below.

When you live in a world of color, you tend to forget what drama a monotone brings to even the most mundane scenes, and you realize why black and white photography still has a place in artistic photography. When I look at such a picture, the brain gets active in a different way; it begins to work at exploring the light and dark spaces, and fills in color based on whim, whimsy, and memory. Color photos do it all for you - it's all layed out, nothing left to guess at. Black and white, though, draws one into the frame.

There's dramatic tone in the darks and lights, mystery and intrigue in the way the world has paradoxically been reduced to a shadow of itself while somehow becoming sharper and more defined. Details not noticed before leap out.

An ordinary suburban park becomes an extraordinary parallel world.

[pdx_photo] Mt Hood and Division Street and The Hood and The Camera Thereunto

2942.I'm very happy with the area of Portland I live in, even if it's not the fashionable, Portlandiable part.

As a matter of fact, I think I'm happy with it because it's not fashionable.

Recently I took advantage of a view point that I'd actually not visited before. At SE 136th Avenue and Division Street in outer East Portland, there's a pedestrian overpass. Its south end is located square between the Dairy Queen on the corner and the Dutch Bros of which we have much custom. We had decided to go it rough, get our coffee from Da Broze and our lunch from the shabby but so very good Cruiser's Cafe and pack it off to Parklane Park and enjoy the sunshine and fresh air. The Wife™ handled the coffee-purchasing duties and I ascended to the apex of the overpass to catch the view.

It was so nice, the camera came out.

Division Street in Portland runs, from the river out through Gresham, and if you don't count the part calling itself SE Division Dr just beyond Gresham, about fifteen miles. That's a long, straight piece of pavement; when I was a kid and growing up in Silverton, Salem was fifteen miles down the road.

I've always been impressed with streets that run that long

The thing about Division is that it's unabashedly suburban. It's rode hard and put away wet and it's still got a sort of grace. In the above picture there, the little blue-gray apartment complex called the "Swan Court"? Back when this was how you got from city to city, that was a shabby little motel called the Swanee. That's been quite a while.

The division it's named after isn't obvious, but I've wrote of it before. This street runs parallel to, and exactly one mile south of, Stark Street, which is on the Willamette Base Line.  Division Street is laid out along the first section line south of that base line; that's the division it refers to. It was, before it was urbanized, called Section Line Road.

It, of course, beckons one to Mount Hood, which is my other fetish.

The hood I speak of is perhaps a bit of a lazy coinage these days, and I'm a little sorry for it, but it's hard to avoid using it when speaking of the peak. I've lived in its shadow all my life, and it's kind of a lodestone for me. When I see it, I know I'm where I should be. Home ground.

The challenge with my meagre equipment is to frame and choose the perspectives. I don't have the luxury of attaching a telephoto lens when I want to get a perspective that highlights the way Mount Hood seems to loom on the horizon in subjective view; I have to stand and look and then crop the result.

I use in-camera effects.

But it's not entirely bad. I think it makes me work more creatively. When you don't have fancy devices to support your artistic vision, you have to be nimble. Still, I'm always surprised; Hood always comes out so much smaller in my photos than the impression I get simply looking at it.

Cities in Oregon usually impress the visitor because there are so many trees. I remember as a kid in Salem going up to the Chemeketa Parkade, that garage that overbounds Chemeketa Street; you look north and you can't see the city for the trees. Outer East Portland, with so much green, is the same way. As urbanized as it is, the urban gets lost in the urban forest pretty quickly.

And if I take another POV, I arrange more of humankind's works, such as they be, power towers and power lines and transformers and plastic signage and roofing and insurance offices in front of that great mountain and, well, it's something I've been able always to find some sort of odd beauty in.

It's our world. It is what it is.

And so it goes.

[diary] The Business Journal Of Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

2941.From the world of letters and diaries, we have this gem: the ledger of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In a business ledger, between the years of 1919 and 1938, he laid it all out; what he earned since his leaving the Army, a record of his published fiction, the money he earned by other writings, a biographical "Outline of My Life", and the money Zelda earned from her writing.

It's fascinating to me because of two things it reveals; first, that a writer on their own is not necessarily a poor record-keeper, keeping track of some minutiae for their own records if not posterity, and, second, FSF was quite a neat penman, keeping orderly records in a meticulous hand.

View it at http://library.sc.edu/digital/collections/fitzledger.html.

[art] Yes, They Still Give Out Handwriting Awards

2940.Who says good handwriting counts for nothing any more?

Whether you call it handwriting or the more archaic (and perhaps sexist) penmanship, handwriting seems to be a dying thing; we hear the dirges played constantly.

This is unfortunate. Not only does handwriting develop motor and reasoning skills that typing simply can't, it connects the author to the text in an indelibly undeniable way. Your writing becomes more you.  I'm convinced that the more you write by hand the more you think about what you're saying; typing is speedy, and most people … at least it seems that way, by the writing I read … don't think much about what it is they're saying.

According to a story by the Associated Press posting on KOIN TV's website, though, gives hope, if only because there is at least one 6th-grader out there who takes the time to write the way we all used to have to.

It's here at http://www.koin.com/2013/06/10/wash-6th-grader-honored-for-her-handwriting/. It was promoted by Zaner-Bloser, and I've made my italic-over-cursive partisanship known by now I should hope, but still, it's nicer to see that there's adept cursive writers than to know that there's nobody who cares at all.

[logo] Dagen H, or, The Day Sweden Went From Left-to-Right

2939.There are some things that seem such commonplace verities that I at one time personally took them as read, permanent, non-changing, understood.

Like driving on the right. The rule of the road.

Not that such things are unchangeable (I once thought national boundaries were set in stone as well, then started reading, as a neat thing, about the great World War 2) but they are glacially slow to change. And the rule of the road would be one. Americans drive on the right; Americans have always driven on the right.

Well, yes, and no. When America was a British colony, as it happens, the Rule of the Road was stay on the left. This was the rule until sometime in the 1780s. So, things do change, but I didn't think this happened in the modern times, and certainly not during my lifetime … but then, I just found out I was wrong about that, too. Up until September 1967, Swedes drove on the left - in contrast to their sister nations on the Scandinavian peninsula, which drove on the right, which tended to cause confusion and the occasional accident at Sweden's land borders with Finland and Norway.

I'll not at this time explore why the Swedes resisted the change for so long or whether or not this was an improvement in safety over historial ways; I'll leave that to someone else. Suffice it to say that it took four years of public relations and one memorable Sunday in late 1967 to synch Sweden with her neighbors. For what its worth, it happened, and the Kingdom exists today, still cranking out Volvos and bland Europop and whatever else it is that Swedes do. They seem fine. Cracked (strange to think that, in the latter day, I'd be learning my history from the website descended from the poor relation to Mad Magazine, but these are interesting times) displays the merry chaos on this page, which published a photo from the 3rd of September 1967, a day known as Dagen H.

Dagen H translates to H-Day, and the H is short for Hogertrafikomlaggningen, or Swede for right-hand traffic driving. And, to communicate the change, a suitable logo - appearing on everything, reportedly, from t-shirts to coffee mugs to cute ladies' undies, went public. Here it is

This piece of clever design speaks for itself. The way the letter H is recast as a sort of expressway diagram I find particularly impressive. The date is expressed in the style we Americans have come to interpret as a typically European one: day-month-day, with a period delimiter rather than a slash (we would write that 9/3/1967, they, 3.9.1967).

The type is particularly beguiling, with a hand-constructed look to it.

It's a clear lesson in clever communication, and, as such things are wont to do, works on multiple levels without being too proud about it. Definitely a win.

(H/T to Scott Sanford who showed this to me over on the Book'o'Face)

[diary] Reading About Diaries 2: The Books

2938.In missive the last I mentioned reading three books about keeping diaries or journals. I'll list those out now. I haven't completed them all; but I have a ver solid sense of the three. Either one of these three books will give an aspiring diarist the inspiration to start, but each speak with a slightly different voice, and one may speak to one louder or with more coherence than the other.

Thus said, to the shelf.

Samara O'Shea

The first one I read was Note To Self: On Keeping A Journal and Other Dangerous Pursuits, by author and Huffington Post blogger Samara O'Shea. This is a very personal account of her diary-keeping over the years, and goes into such deep personal territory that at times I felt as though I were reading Into The Author's Bedroom With Gun And Camera. I'm torn about that. But she had a whole range of useful insights into starting, stopping, how frequent, inspriations, and sharing your diaries with others, and how to look into your own life for diary subjects - including hopes, aspirations, writing when happy as well as when sad, and, of course, sex. She specifically bares her journaling soul by including several excerpts from her various diaries as kept over the years, which are as small gems scattered throughout the book

This book, while well-done generally and thorough, spoke to me the least of all the others. The author gave me a valuable POV on her urban, sophisticated lifestyle, but at times I felt like I was out of place trying to make sense of her narrative. But then, she's the kind of writer who'd worked for magazines like O, Harpers Bazaar, and Esquire, whereas I'm more of a Parade, TV Guide, and Time sort, though I have Utne Reader pretensions. De gustibus non disputandum, and all that.

So, in short, upsides: Unafraid, frank, sophisticated, well-written. Downsides: A little too unafraid for the beginner, a little too urban for the non-HuffPo reader. If you're the fashionable sort, this would be a good starting book; if you're not the fashionable sort, this would be more of an advanced study.

Recommendation: Go in ready to be amused and a little surprised and a little unsettled, if you're a tyro.

I do indeed notice that O'Shea is also famous for trying to bring back the art of letter writing to a wide audience. As someone who used to write letters ceaselessly, I have some idea of what we've lost, so she's indeed doing the Lord's work here, so to speak.

Sheila Bender

Sheila's book is Keeping A Journal You Love. This, the most densely-written of the three books, dives right in with what she calles the 'Seven Sisters'; writing tactics that are writerly explorations of the world around you. This is a book rich in technique, expressed as a writing teacher might do it. This book supplants this with examples of the journaling and diary techniques of other diarists. The result is almost a manual, a shelf-reference that you can go to again and again, with ideas of how others do it so one can either copy a style until they find their own feet, or combine into something new or useful. Overall it encourages the sort of introspection that diaries are famous for being a laboratory for, with the writerly approach incredibly useful.

Upsides: Thoroughly written, wide-angle field of vision provides for a range of viewpoints and inputs for inspiration, encouraging a writerly approach to the diary. Downsides: might encourage too much introspection, the multiplicity of voices could encourage too much copying and masking of one's own voice.

Recommendation: Better for the absolute tyro than the O'Shea work, but might come off as too dry and intimidating for the newbie. Good to go with as a beginner, but one might find oneself working a bit too hard to find ones own voice amongst all the excellent examples.

Alexandra Johnson

Lastly we come to the humbly-titled Leaving A Trace: The Art of Transforming A Life Into Stories, by Alexandra Johnson. This takes a seriously deep approach to the art of the diary by drilling down, finding patterns hidden in all journals, and identifying what she calls the 'through line' to your life. The objective is to coax a story from your life, and is useful if you're the kind of journal writer, as I am, who fancies themselves a fiction writer.

The book draws several lines that I'm deeply impressed with. It draws the line between brief and thorough  between short and containing multitudes, and between direct and gentle. It delivers techniques with a breezy air that is still informational, an easy read with a definite message. The techniques come quickly but are friendly, and one can apply them quickly.

Upsides: to me, this book is all upside. Small yet large, simply-written yet informative, it gifts the reader with tactics to create a diary or journal that goes just as far as you want it. If you want to keep it introspective you could; if you want to knit a narrative out of your life and use the lessons to create a more compleat writer out of yourself, it'll take you there too. Downsides: I love this book! I've not stumbled on a real downside yet.

Recommendation: This is the book you should start with if you want to really come up with a diary that will mean something to you. The above two are good, but they're the sort that I think the experienced diarist will want to use to kick it up to the next level. This book is the beginner's book of the three.

[diary] Reading About Diaries, Collecting Notebooks

2937.I'm currently reading (or have gone through) three books on diary writing by three different authors. I have nothing to say about the now, but will anon.

In the meantime, here's a nifty article by Marie at the blog Presents of Mind that tells of her obsession with collecting notebooks, which is something I do, just a little, myself. A taste:

Three hand-made notebooks. The one on the left is bound with real leaves with a wooden spine and hand-made paper. The other two have covers made of waxed, brown paper shopping bags and ordinary bond copy paper. You can see the name of the market bleeding through its cover. The one on the right is decorated with pen and ink filigree. I bought it at a street fair, then went home and duplicated the process. Different and fun to use and only costs pennies to make.

And here's the link: http://presentsofmind.wordpress.com/2011/08/27/my-notebook-obsession/

[design] Dept Of War Math Posters Now For Sale

2936.In the previous missive, the remark was remarked that Plus3 should be sellin' them Dept of War Math graphics as posters. Unless you were a very silly person, you agreed with me.

Well, Brad Clark and Plus3 have heard and delivered.

Hie thee hence:

http://plus3video.com/store

You'll be glad you did.

[design] Dept Of War Math - Propaganda for Geniuses

2935.
So there's a trending topic these days (that I hope does more than trend), and its name is survivorship bias. You'll all want to write that down, because it'll become a serious bit of discussion in the months to come … or should. If it doesn't, that'll be unjust, and I think I'll be coming back to it here.

Surviviorship bias. Learn about it, courtesy of David McRaney, at the blog You Are Not So Smart.

But it started me on this road, a great riff on a classic style. And it has to do with the wartime Department of War Math.

War Math?

A little-known, unsung department that helped us carry the great World War II?

Well, yes … and no. It's like this:

During the war, math and science played a very large role, of course, and a role that extended into things like the post-war Race for Space and the very large role also that scientists played in giving us the shiny technological world to follow.

But during the early 1940s the USA was running up against problems requiring extensive mathematical modeling … and the computers that could do that modeling didn't really exist yet. The most powerful number-crunchers of the time, as the article says, ran on toast and coffee.

There was a time that 'calculator' was a human job title, do take note.

The Applied Mathematics Panel, made up of groups of human mainframes ensconced in various spaces hither and yon, was, or should have been, our Department of War Math. Commanders in the field brought them problems, and they solved them. Pretty much just like that. They came up with a way to figure out how to best fire torpedoes based solely the ripple pattern left behind by a ship … if it turns, you see, the ripples are different in a way, and if they're cruising evasively, you can't predict which way they're going to turn, but if you analyze the waves, you didn't have to.

Actually, they were kind of Mentats, really.

McRaney's article on survivorship bias goes into great detail about how these amazing people would not only use their technical knowledge but superior analytical and logical minds to finesse the unobvious but crucial details out of any situation. He went to Dave Clark, of the video and animation design studio Plus3, who brought the notional Department of War Math to virtual life, with pitch-perfect propaganda graphics. This one is my favorite:

Illustration by Brad Clark of Plus3. Used with permission.

The heroic math geek spirits the downed Allied pilot away from the crashed plane. "Carry the one?" Indeed. Containing clever wordplay with a multiple meaning, pitched with just the right patriotic enthusiasm - and a deft eye for the war-poster style, we have a completely convincing poster for a war department that wasn't - but it should have been.

This next one is a rather darker, but none the less on-target:

Illustration by Brad Clark of Plus3. Used with permission.

That Nazi swastika never saw it coming. With a palette that reminds me of those sinister, silhouetted "Hun comin' to get ya" posters, the heroes work unseen in the background, Mentating an Allied victory for sure. That compass means business, man! And again the adroit multiple-meaning word play; We're counting on you goes more than one direction, when it comes to the math the sharp pencil brains at the Dept of War Math did.

If I were them, I'd be selling posters of this. Great satire like this comes along so infrequently.

Plus3 Video is at http://plus3video.com.

Again, these illustrations used are by Brad Clark, to whom I express grateful thanks.