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Review: Here There Nowhere

2008-07-10T15:50:00.000-07:00

Here There Nowhere
Paintings by Michael Brophy with essays by Jonathan Raban and William L. Lang. OSU Press, 121 The Valley Library, Corvallis, OR 97331-4501; http://oregonstate.edu/dept/press; 12.0 x 12.0 x 0.25 in; paperbound; 60 pages, 20 color images; $25.00

The landscape of the Pacific Northwest is an ever-changing one, and so it should be no surprise that artistic views on that landscape have also changed radically over time. By the close of the last century, Oregon, once labelled the "Pacific Wonderland" on the state's automobile license plates, had become a battlefield of ideas and ideals. Portland artist Michael Brophy has been trying to capture that essence of division and change over his career as a painter, with his most recent expression taking place in a series of large canvases all painted in 2007. Brophy calls this series Here There Nowhere, and it is the subject of a recent book by the same name produced by Oregon State University Press.

The beginning of the book form of Here There Nowhere is heralded with an essay about the history of landscape painting in the Pacific Northwest, written by Jonathan Raban. The essay, titled Battleground of the Eye, may seem familiar to readers; it was adapted from the introduction Raban wrote for 2001's The Pacific Northwest Landscape: A Painted History, printed by Sasquatch Books. Although this is not new material, it helps to ground the painting series into the wider context of the artistic representation of the landscape of the Pacific Northwest. The only error I noted was that the Northern Pacific that entered Tacoma in 1883 was not the creation of the legendary James J. Hill, but of industrialist Henry Villard; a minor esoteric quibble perhaps, but it would not have taken much to fact check the essay one more time.

Following Raban's essay come the paintings themselves. Brophy delivers us images on a heroic scale, reminiscent of revolutionary art from South America or Russia during the last century. These are grand canvases with grand ideas. And yet, the content chosen to express those ideas is inherently anti-heroic, mundane, dull. Brophy likes repeating patterns and vast expanses of subtleties over the boldness of an up-front statement. It doesn't look like he's trying to be pretty. Darkened fields, broad skies, blank cliff faces; they are all empty landscapes, and rarely is a human figure seen.

Michael Brophy, Crack of Dawn. 2007, oil on canvas, 74 by 80 inches.
Image courtesy Laura Russo Gallery.

It is perhaps the night images that stand out the most. Night Truck and Meadow both are evocative. The strongest of these is perhaps Crack of Dawn, a canvas with a deep wet cloud cover and a thin strip of dawn that any local will immediately recognize as the aggregate of countless mornings. Here we see how subtlety and muted color choices are key to understanding Brophy's take on the landscape. Not all the night images work in the book, however: Full Dark is a study in subtleties that sadly does not translate well to print at all.

There is also an odd disjointed feel to the series. Some of the images have a dark, painterly, brooding approach, like Blowdown or Aftermath; the palette of the former reminds me of something from Carl Hall. On the flipside are strong traditionalist images such as Ruin, which feels sentimental in nature, or Day, with a painterly realism of something very tangible, in this case the rear of a semi-tractor driving some two-lane road to nowhere in the vast inland Pacific Northwest.

Michael Brophy, Ruin. 2007, oil on canvas, 74 by 80 inches.
Image courtesy Laura Russo Gallery.

If anything rescues the disjointedness, it is a common theme of nearly cinematic ideas; every time I flip through the images of the series I start feeling like I am looking at a storyboard for a movie about life in the forgotten flyover corners of the much over-hyped PNW paradise. What is amazing is that Brophy offers us a social commentary, a critique even, of how we view the world, and yet he does not choose the traditional route of painting scarred industrial landscapes or denuded forests or the like. Instead, he simply shows us that this is how we usually view the world, through mundane eyes that see only the same boring monotony. In a way, his critique runs deeper than the typical environmental or social commentary, pointing that the problem isn't the clear-cut or the junk-pile, but instead it is our viewpoint. It is internal, it is within us.

Reproduction and presentation get fair marks. Brophy's paintings are all very large works, standing at 74 by 80 inches. To stand before one is to be dwarfed, even for a tall person, and any attempt to depict this series with any justice on paper must be admired for audacity if nothing else. I don't quite think that the publisher managed to pull this off; one square foot just can't give you the sense of scale that standing before the real thing can. Further, I feel that some of the subtlety of the originals has been lost in the reproduction.

Following the images comes an essay by William L. Lang. Lang brings us back to the subject rather than the medium, concentrating not on Brophy's paintings so much as on the story they are a part of. He ably discusses the relationship of humanity to the land of the region, with occasional examples pulled from Brophy's work. Although a short and interesting read, I feel that Lang's comments are in some ways duplicative of Raban's text, while at the same time weaker and not relying enough on how an artist such as Brophy sees this world. What I wish had been included was a short piece by the artist himself, but such is not included in the book.

Overall, Here There Nowhere is a slim but important volume that highlights how landscape painting in the Pacific Northwest is evolving. For artists or students of art in the region, it would make a valuable addition to the bookshelf.

Here There Everywhere is available from Powell's or Amazon, as well as directly from the publisher. Thanks to Laura Russo Gallery for supplying images and other assistance with this review.

The Ephemeral 'Net

2008-07-05T14:12:00.000-07:00

I can still remember, as a child, my mother's big oaken desk. It was sturdy, if a little worn, with a black blotter top and drawers that were heavy and deep. It was always a cornucopia of sensations: sticky translucent yellow glue, a Swingline stapler in a very 1970s dusky pink, stamps with perforated edges from back in the day when you had to lick the backs to make them stick to anything. There were tons of multicolored pens lurking in the lap drawer, most dry and useless. There was almost always a bottle of ink, with an acrid, new-rain smell and a color somewhere south of violet and north of blue sky blue. When I think back to that desk it is no wonder that I became a nut about ephemera.

The desk serves on today, but with slightly less pizazz. While it still holds checkbooks and postage and envelopes and the like, it also serves as a stand for a three year old iMac. I'm reminded of my own "desk" a bit, and the war that always goes on between the space my computer takes up and the space I need to spread out my eight-and-a-half-by-eleven redundant memory aides. (They used to call that paper in the 20th century.)

Earlier today I used my computer and the incredible power of the Internet for a very non-technical purpose: to find labels. You know the type: gum backed, with a little foil edge, the kind that used to go on the marbled covers of composition books, the kind that used to lurk n my mother's desk. I didn't find any, but much like when I go searching Wikipedia, I ended up making what a friend calls a "wiki-tree" of strange ephemeral goodness. Follow along, all you fellow paper geeks!

First up is Donovan Beeson, who makes various handmade stationery products and sells them on her Etsy page. Handmade envelopes, custom journals, shipping labels. All very cool stuff. Donovan also has a blog, Murmurs and Musings, which focuses naturally enough on the lost world of paper. While browsing through her archives, I found a post point towards sarcastic stationer 16 Sparrows, who had begun a campaign known as the "Letter Writer's Alliance". (You can buy LWA stationery here.) The LWA mission is, and I quote:

"In this era of instantaneous communication, a handwritten letter is a rare and wondrous item. The Letter Writers Alliance is dedicated to preserving this art form; neither long lines, nor late deliveries, nor increasing postal rates will keep us from our mission. As a member of the Letter Writers Alliance, you will carry on the glorious cultural tradition of letter writing. You will take advantage of every opportunity to send tangible correspondence. Prepare your pen and paper, moisten your tongue, and get ready to write more letters!"

I always find it amusing to see the net used for these sorts of projects. Paper hasn't died, it's just become a fashion symbol! It's probably no surprise this kind of thing is up my alley, after all I do shop a Blue Moon Camera and Machine.

Another source for ephemeral goodness is PodPost. Sadly, their "Pod Post Mail Art Bento" is out of stock. Too bad, too, it combines all my love of ephemera and otakuness in one convenient bundle. Drat!

As I skipped along, I also ran into busynest cards. Busynest focuses on a very lost art -- the calling card. There's some really nice graphic design work here. These cards really do drive home the odd mixture the Internet has brought about: an out-of-date practice (calling cards) married to a very sleek and modern graphic design and sold worldwide over the 'Net. The 21st century is a strange place.

As for calling cards themselves? This page has the scoop on what they were and why. Interesting tidbits: a calling card doesn't include where you work, and includes your profession only if it gives you a title (M.D., General, etc...), as including your place of work or firm makes the card a business card, and therefore socially inappropriate to leave as a calling card:

"it was considered to be in very poor taste to use a business card when making a social call. A business card, left with the servants, could imply that you had called to collect a bill."

Interestingly, what we consider today to be a business card -- flashy pictures, promotional saying, establishment name displayed prominently, and so forth -- was not at that time considered a business card at all, but a "trade card".

Now, where did I put my Fedora?

Meet the G9

2008-04-21T22:31:00.000-07:00

Although I am a die-hard film shooter, I've been pondering buying a digital camera for some time now. Top on my list has been the Canon Powershot G9. (Canon info here, Digital Photography Review thoughts here.) Part of Canon's extremely well made G series of point-and-shoots, it is a top of the line machine: slim, sleek, and extremely capable.

The Canon Powershot G9, courtesy khedra @ flickr

So I went out and bought one. As a friend of mine said to me when he heard the news, "it's a sign of the apocalypse!"

Now that I've had it a few weeks, I thought I'd put up a few images and share a few thoughts.

All of the following images have been resized and tweaked in Photoshop Elements 3.0; none required more than some levels adjustments and a light use of the unsharp mask. Overall I like my images more contrasty, so the tonal range is a bit more limited here than what the camera produces straight up. All were shot at ISO 400; this is the typical ISO I favor for film, so I felt it was a good starting point to evaluate the camera.

A petition gatherer on a westbound MAX Blue Line train on April 8th, 2008. Shooting people shots, street photography, and the like was the focus of this purchase. Using the G9 was far less intrusive than the n80 with its massive battery grip. Composing from the view screen, however, means I'm still a bit slower.

The driver's side headlamp from a Triumph Spitfire. This was an attempt at a macro shot, and I used the camera's manual focus mode to fine tune a shallow depth-of-field image. Here I felt the LCD panel was helping a lot. Additionally this was using the camera's built in "black and white mode". I haven't yet compared this to channel mixing and the like.

Another shot using the camera's built in black and white mode: here, detail from the truck of a flatcar in Roy, Oregon. The original had far more tonal range; I've taken my usual contrast upping method to it.

One of TriMet's 200 series MAX cars, waiting at the Hatfield Government Center in Hillsboro, Oregon, on the afternoon of April 11th. I was very happy with the good tone and smoothness in this image.

A burnt out building in Portland's Central Eastside Industrial District. Note that even at f/7.1 -- near to the cameras maximum f/8.0 f-stop -- there is some sun flare from shooting towards a bright object.

Posters advertising a PBS special in part of Portland's Central Eastside Industrial District. The light was rather poor, and the camera didn't fix that. It also didn't make me breakfast the next morning. I better talk to my shrink about this.

A stairwell from the B. P. John Building on the campus of Marylhurst University. This was handheld at 1/30th, not all that shocking really. What was more shocking is that I also got decent, usable images shot at 1/8th of a second. So far the minimal light performance on the camera is pleasing me.

None of these images is part of a real test of the camera's limits. As Summer progresses I'm sure I"ll put the G9 through more trying circumstances and see how it fares. Initial reactions, however, is that the camera performs very very well -- but it's not a professional camera. When I'm really pushing the limits, the n80 with its elegant control layout and its proven, known responses is still the winner. And when I think of making long-term, serious images, its still my first choice.

However -- and this is a big however -- the world is more and more digital. When it comes to sharing photos of your latest project, or wanting a snapshot camera for a day trip, or needing to get an image shot and emailed in short order and still have it be useable for print, the G9 is awful hard to beat. Plus the camera allows me to keep shooting without cost or equipment concerns, keeping my skills sharpened. No, it's not one of the four horsemen, but it is a useful addition to my photographic toolbox.

Portland Streetcar Obamamania

2008-03-28T19:14:00.000-07:00

Can we have a time-out on the whole streetcar expansion thing?

Recently, the Oregonian printed a story on the impending Portland Streetcar System Plan. What's really interesting is to compare the system's proposed map, (as shown here in a Big O rendering,) with historic maps of the Portland Traction system, such as this one from 1924. They are amazingly similar.

The historian/nostalgist in me thinks this is really really cool. The pragmatist in me has a warning. One of the -- if not the primary -- goals of streetcar construction is development. This is nothing new really. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, streetcar lines were built to areas like Sunnyside or Council Crest specifically with development in mind. They opened up farmland to become subdivision stock, making fast commutes from outlying areas possible for the first time. In many cases lines were "aimed" into areas where land was empty and cheap.

And this puts the first hurdle in the way of the Streetcar System Plan: by largely copying the old Portland Traction alignments, it is adhering to a development pattern of a century ago, and not necessarily of today. This puts redevelopment smack in the middle of some of Portland's more vital neighborhoods. Do we really want or need to tear up Hawthorne or Belmont to install multi-story condo developments? Because that's one of the likely results of putting a streetcar in on these streets.

* * *
There's another problem too, and it also requires a brief history lesson.

Portland's now lamented streetcar system morphed into today's TriMet bus system. Most of the areas that Portland Traction's trolly lines established are the primary neighborhoods of today. Due to this, TriMet's bus routes mimic to an amazing degree the former streetcar lines, and in many cases can directly trace their existence to them, having evolved from streetcar to trolly-bus to diesel bus.

If the streetcar were about transportation, and not development, it might make a lot of sense to build these lines. It is, after all, where a lot of people are going to and from today.

But... uh... what about the buses?

By replicating the old Portland Traction routes, the Portland Streetcar is making a financial stab at the heart of TriMet's territory. Until now, the streetcar served primarily as a people mover in the downtown area, where most of the TriMet service is free anyway. The eastside streetcar loop is starting to get into TriMet's transportation territory, but could be considered as no more than a downtown extension over to the central eastside. There is no question that installing a second transit alternative on the exact same corridors as frequent service TriMet buses will effect bus boardings, and as a result TriMet farebox revenues.

It's the transit equivalent of Julius Ceaser's 49 BC march across the Rubicon river. It might be speculated that TriMet doesn't look too kindly on this streetcar plan, and I can't blame them. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the workers on S.E. 17th found themselves voting for Sho Dozono over streetcar guru Sam Adams for mayor.

* * *
There's another issue of course, and it's just a small one: financing.

Although streetcars are far cheaper than light rail to build, they are far less popular with the Federal Transit Administration. One of the main reasons behind this is that streetcars just don't carry that many people. They serve as people movers or local pedestrian circulators, but they don't serve commute functions to any significant degree.

What streetcars do well is bring in economic development. It's one of the reasons I greatly admire the mode, and think they are good things to build. However, it's also something that is hard to quantify, and the FTA currently does not use economic development indicators as a significant tool in deciding how to make expenditures of federal funds.

The current 8-mile streetcar loop (4 miles each way) weighs in at a total construction cost of approximately $87 million. To establish bidirectional service, then, each mile would cost around $22 million. It doesn't take much staring at the proposed system map to see that the extensions outweigh the current system by many times. If there is no federal money, where will the financing come from? Local Improvement Districts (LIDs) cannot raise the money all on their own.

* * *
These are hardly the only issues. How, for example, will the streetcar fare against congestion? They can't weave around traffic impediments like buses can. The cars themselves cost about the same as three standard TriMet buses -- and for the money that means TriMet buses can offer more frequent service at a higher passenger capacity for the same money -- and without the need to tear up city streets.

But is this all academic? Does Adams really intend to build this many streetcar lines? Or is he applying his Machiavellian brand of politics to Portland, by making campaign promises he has no intention of keeping? It should be noted that by proposing streetcars for all the historic routes, he touches on Portland's brand of self-involved nostalgia while also promising "a streetcar in every pot" for nearly every neighborhood in the city.

Does any of this plan make sense? Perhaps. Certainly the peninsula of North Portland is under-served by transit, but I suspect that a better approach would be a spur line of Expo MAX, perhaps to a transit center in St. Johns or even beyond in Rivergate.

A better idea would be to install the streetcar along Sandy out to Parkrose. Sandy Boulevard is in many places well behind the times, and ripe for redevelopment. Its diagonal route cuts across so many neighborhoods that it would spread the economic impact of the project more than any other single proposal on the system plan map. It would still have impacts on TriMet service, however the 12 bus that serves Sandy is already over capacity and slow; any additional service here would be welcome. Most of all, it would help to turn over a strip of road that desperately needs public attention, which means that it's a relevant redevelopment for 21st century Portland. The fact that it's also someplace Portland Traction once ran would be a nice symmetry, but no more.

Most of all, however, what I feel we need is a breather. Streetcar building is not an end-all answer to every need the city has, and we need to stop giving it a Barack Obama-like mania. Yes, it's cool. But transportation should be designed with a clear and level head.

Bachelor's Special #1: Instant Noodles Review

2008-03-22T00:54:00.000-07:00

The bachelor's kitchen can be a lonely lonely place. Recently, this predicament came up in conversations with some of my fellow bachelor friends, and I hit upon the idea of trying to solve it.

The goal, of course, would be to produce a good quality meal in 30 minutes or less, with little mess and few ingredients. This is a challenge I'm still working to solve.

In the meanwhile, how about something simpler to tide you by? A long time staple of the college student is the good old Nissen Cup [of] Noodles. Just add boiling water to these foam cups, and three minutes later, you have an Asian-styled take on the TV dinner.

One of my favorite places to shop is Uwajimaya, the Asian grocery supermarket with locations in the Portland and Seattle metro areas. Normally I shop there for some of the best produce anywhere, as well as exotic seasonings and a wide variety of noodles. One aisle, though -- one entire aisle -- is lined with instant noodle selections. Lined with them! Might there be something more exciting lurking behind the cryptic labels?

This is no Michael Pollan whole foods meal we'll be experiencing here. But it's okay to be bad now and then, and everything here is probably a heck of a lot better for you than the average McBurger.

Let the tests begin!

* * *
Nissen Cup [of] Noodles

We can't really undertake this sort of comparison without a base to start from. What to choose? This was the easiest decision: the iconic Nissen Cup [of] Noodles. These little foam cups are the the most popular and most commonly known of the instant noodle world. They're cheap, too: my chicken-flavored cup cost me a whopping 49 cents.

Pluses: The price of the Cup [of] Noodles would lead one to believe that the quality would be low as well, yet the resulting product isn't really all that bad. The noodles have a curling tendency that makes them easy to eat with either fork or chopsticks. The tall, narrow cup shape helps to hold in heat for the product for a long time.

Minuses: If there is any major fault with this old staple, it's that it's forgettable. The flavor is bland, and the ingredients can hardly be called authentic for a ramen soup; corn, peas and carrots seems to speak to sourcing common American agricultural products if anything.

Bottom line: For 49 cents, it's hard to beat the value, but surely noodles can be better than this.

* * *
"Kung Fu" Szechuan Pork Bowl

Next up: an entry made in Taiwan, the rather comically named "Kung Fu" Szechuan Pork Bowl. This is a typical offering from the instant noodles aisle at Uwajimaya, coming in a foam container shaped like a bowl. Flavor choices tend to be based on form of meat used; I chose the Szechuan pork flavor for its apparent position middle-of-the-pack. Unlike the Cup [of] Noodles, this noodle bowl comes with two packets inside that much be opened and added to the noodles, one containing dried vegetables and seasonings, the other containing a dried soup base that looks a bit like dried caulking. $0.79 of yummy goodness.

Pluses: The foam bowl on the Kung Fu offering is particularly thick, making it easy to hold. Although the flavor is not stellar, it is more pronounced than the standard old Nissen offering.

Minuses: The dried vegetables and other ingredients tend to stay rather firm, and the noodles, being round, tend to be harder to grasp with chopsticks than the good-old 49 cent standard.

Bottom line: While marginally better than the standard in flavor, with hard, difficult to identify vegetables this is a forgettable bowl of noodles.

* * *
Nong Shim Bowl Noodle Soup Spicy Chicken Flavor

Our next challenger is from Nong Shim, and is made in the exotic far-eastern locale of Rancho Cucamonga, California. Again we have a bowl-style package. Nong Shim only has one packet inside -- an envelope of seasonings -- rather than two. The resulting product is a Ramen style soup. It's pretty boring looking when made, nothing like the pretty picture on the label. $1.09 at Uwajimaya.

Pluses: The Nong Shim has a nice spicy kick that is quite appetizing. The noodles are no larger than the others, yet it seems a more substantial meal.

Minuses: The broth seems a bit cheesy at first; the vegetables are almost nonexistent.

Bottom line: Twice the price of the standard, the Nong Shim offering is also more the twice the flavor. Cheesy, but a good buy.

* * *
Thai Kitchen Noodle Cart Pad Thai

The Thai Kitchen line of products is fairly easy to find these days, being in most major supermarkets; I grabbed one anyway just to round out the test. The product comes in a different format, this time in a square plastic box similar to a Rubbermaid sandwich container. Inside is a packet of noodles, a packet of oil, a packet of seasonings, and a plastic fork. To prepare, you empty the noodle packet in the container and pour in boiling water, then lid it. When done, the water gets poured out of handy slits in the lid, the lid is removed, and then the oil and seasoning are tossed with the noodles. The price is $1.99, a full four times the Nissen standard.

Pluses: The final product is tasty and decent. While, as usual, it's not as nice as the package photo, this did at least produce something that would look good on a plate. The inclusion of a plastic fork makes this ideal for an on the go meal.

Minuses: The container can get quite hot while cooking, making it harder to remove the water. Similarly, be careful not to overfill it; the lid doesn't feel the most secure at times.

Bottom line: This feels more like a real meal than the other options, and the tacky factor is restricted to the plastic container and utensil.

* * *
Nissen Donbei Tempura Soba

Like the standard, this -- our most expensive option at $2.69 -- is made by Nissen. Preparation is similar to the other bowl-shaped entries, with a seasoning packet that is poured onto the dried noodles before boiling water is added. Unlike the others, this one comes with what looks like a giant coin shaped cookie -- a cake of tempura batter which gets unwrapped and added like a floating crouton on top of the soup.

Unlike the standard, this product is attempting to simulate an authentic Japanese dish -- it is, after all, made in and primarily marketed to Japan. The noodles are square cut buckweat soba noodles with a decent texture and more flavor than any of the others. Upon opening, the strong yet appetizing seafood aroma emanates from the noodles.

Pluses: Toothsome and tasty noodles, good flavor, exotic without being overpowering.

Minuses: Tempura cake seems odd -- what actually has been fried in it? It appears to be no more than a hunk of batter with no filling, and soon gets soggy in the soup.

Bottom line: A nice treat and a welcome break from monotony, but not worth it if you have a real kitchen and a far cheaper package of noodles.

* * *
The winner is a hard call. This is, after all, a "bachelor's special", designed as a quick and cheap meal on a night when you just don't feel like cooking. It's not a gourmet meal, so authenticity -- however nice -- isn't all that important. Fill and taste, however, are.

So, the winner?

The nod goes to Nong Shim. Although not the most authentic of the choices, their noodle bowls are by far the strongest flavored and most stomach-satisfying. They're also one of the simpler preparations, with a single packet to open and dump in.

Both the Thai Kitchen and Nissen Donbei offerings were worthy attempts at something better than a throw-away Cup [of] Noodles, and might make a good once-in-a-while addition to the cupboard, but it would be just as easy to stock some dried soba noodles and some bonito, or some rice noodles and peanut sauce if you felt like that sort of thing.

And of course, don't forget the humble Cup [of] Noodles standard; at $0.49, it remains the bargain basement champ.

Week in Review... in review.

2008-03-04T23:40:00.000-08:00

Since December, I've pumped out 11 weeks of Week In Review, but I just don't think I can put out a 12th.

I've learned a few things. First off, it's still too blog-centric. When I began The Addendum it was meant to be just that, an addendum for things that didn't have place in the regular route99west web site, but which were still begging for an outlet. Casual efforts, off-topic items, rants and raves, and the like. WIR was an attempt to introduce some regularity to the mix.

I have discovered I don't like regularity.

Once you start going down the "true" blog road, it becomes a kind of obligation. "What will I write about now?" That kind of thing. It can quickly become a contest to see who can write about something soonest, and with as many blogs as there are our there, why bother? You'll never be first.

Nor will you be original. The vast majority of blogs -- including my own WIR posts -- are basically responses to the work of others, most often the old media. It's all too much a mix of incestuousness and parasitic journalism.

Not everyone is like this though. More recently, I have been inspired by KAB's Good Stuff NW (who recently celebrated her 400th post by-the-way, congratulations!) to do some food writing. This is a topic I've wanted to get into for some time, but I just never quite got an idea of where I could begin.

Now, however, I do: the plight of the bachelor chef. I'm working on a few original content posts (wow, what a novel idea on the Blogosphere!) including solutions from the gourmet (cook it yourself in under 30 minutes with no canned, frozen, or packaged ingredients) to the not-so-gourmet (cup-o-noodles reviews, anyone?). And more importantly, I'm having fun writing them!

Now this is what the Addendum was for.

So, changes are coming to the blog. No more WIR. Instead? Less frequent but more original content, and maybe even a bit of firsthand journalism. One feature that's not going away are the book reviews, probably one of the more enjoyable features I write for The Addendum. In fact, I may have some news about those in the near future. And I'll still have thoughts and observations about journalism, local current events, government, and transportation topics too when appropriate.

But right now, can I just say, I can't wait until strawberry season?

Week in Review, Vol. XI

2008-02-22T18:42:00.000-08:00

Pronouncements of doom for various car styles have always amused me. Some time ago, my mother covered a screen with newspaper clippings of British sports cars -- the covers of magazines, newspaper articles, even classified advertisements. One of the articles is written in the late 1970s, and predicted the doom of the convertible. New U.S. safety standards, you see, made them inherently unsafe, and therefore it was only a matter of time before they would be gone from the market, a memory from the past.

Yeah. Right.

Well, now it's the muscle car's turn.

* * *
While in the world of transportation, it appears the Washington State Ferries sytem is in trouble. WS-DOT is even proposing a restructuring.

The mess gave me one of those "what ever happened to" moments regarding Mike Thorne. You might recall that Thorne used to be director of Port of Portland and quit to run for governor. When he dropped out of the race, he went to run the ferries in Washington.

So what's become of Mike? And can he be blamed (rightly or wrongly) for any of Washington's water-borne mess? Well he quit the ferry job in 2004 and returneed to Pendleton. As Seattle Times staff writer Susan Gilmore put it in 2004,

"He said he came into the job with huge expectations, that he'd be able to achieve financial footing with no plan how to get there. Raising ferry fares drove away customers, voters rejected Referendum 51, which would have dumped billions of dollars into state transportation projects, and there were no plans how to replace the aging state ferries, some 70 years old."

And now? Notice that "Big Look" land use review that the legislature wants to fund? Thorne's a member. That may or may not mean anything -- put your tinfoil conspiracy hats on now if you wish -- but I find it an interesting path for someone who thought themselves a gubernatorial contender.

Which brings up another question: what ever happened to Ron Saxton?

* * *
Also up in Seattle, the Big O reports that it may only be a matter of time before the Sonics move to Oklahoma. The single commenter on the Big O's story says "who cares".

I have a question for you, ladies and gentleman. Who owns the Blazers? Where does he live? And what might he do if Seattle no longer had a pro basketball team?

* * *
Lastly, a food related story. Author Michael Pollan has been making the local circuit here lately, sending parts of the Portland food blogosphere into titters. Why? Pollan has written a book that dares to suggest that we should eat food, not "food substitutes".

Pollan has some interesting things to say, and Edible Portland sat down and did a video interview with him. The first part is here. I found Pollan's comments about Sour Cream and tofu-based meat substitutes to be so common-sense based that I had to pinch myself that I was hearing these words at all. Can it be? Might sugar and butter be... acceptable? It's so sad to think that Julia Child -- who seemed to improve any recipe by adding either butter or "booze" to it -- didn't live to see this day.

That's all for now.

Week in Review, Vol. X

2008-02-15T00:02:00.000-08:00

First up this week: the saga of railroad service in Southern Oregon continued this week. RailAmerica, owner of the Central Oregon & Pacific, sent a response back to Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski stating that the company would undertake repairs to the currently shuttered Coos Bay line on its own dime. The hitch? The railroad conglomerate wants a commitment from the state that they will receive assistance for both repair costs and operating expenses on the route.

The Governor wasted no time crafting a response, which said in no uncertain terms "no deal". As it sits now, it appears the state is still on track to pursue a forced transfer of the line to public ownership. That said, the fact that RailAmerica was willing to change their proposal at all suggests to this observer that they have "blinked", and can likely be moved further with the right amount of pressure.

* * *
The Seattle Times printed an op-ed this week highlighting the conundrum freight transportation is in: it's just not that sexy.

"Interestingly enough, the same representatives who want tax dollars to supplement ferry service to Vashon and Maury islands are not arguing that Puget Sound would be harmed by increasing ferry traffic.

These representatives also do not seem to be taking into account that transporting sand and gravel by barge, instead of by truck, saves fuel, reduces heavy truck traffic on area roads, reduces greenhouse-gas emissions and helps keep down the cost of state-(taxpayer-)funded transportation projects that benefit the entire region. One average barge keeps 186 heavy trucks and trailers off the road."

In short, passenger services are considered worthy projects, while freight mobility gets the short shrift. Yet freight mobility is often responsible for vast amounts of the economy, and improvements there can make huge impacts on pollution and congestion.

* * *
Two industrial stories of note this week. First up, the Willamette Week has a neat story on Oregon City's Blue Heron Paper. The company is one of the few independent paper companies left in the region. Less satisfying news comes via the Statesman Journal, who notes that the old Steinfeld Pickles plant is closing. Wonder where the pickles are made now?

* * *
Odd news roundup: the Albany Fire Department has gone retro; Stumptown Confidential brings us mod churches; LEGO hits the classroom; and a postcard mailed in 1929 arrives at last.

* * *
A quick hat-tip to VanPortlander for pointing out this tour of Interstate Avenue's neon. Cool stuff.

* * *
Lastly, a big loud amen to Katlheen Bauer over at Good Stuff NW for her post on foodie terminology addiction:

"Then this morning I'm reading a seemingly harmless Valentines Day article in the NYT about couples who have different food preferences, and one woman says that she's been able to tolerate her husband's occasional need for animal flesh because she's not a "vegangelical." What?"

Kathleen, don't tell me you haven't heard about vegansexuality yet?

On that very sketchy note, I think I should leave now, quietly!

Week in Review, Vol. IX

2008-02-09T11:53:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the good old viral hokey-pokey, this installment of Week in Review is a tad late. It seems everybody has caught it, or some variant of it, this week. Ugh. I'm still recovering but I'm at least functional again. I also managed to donate a significant amount of money to the "keep Ricola making cough-drops" fund. Thank you, Switzerland!

* * *
A lot of streetcar noise this week. Portland Transport on Monday broke news that the new loop for the Eastside had made the President's budget. Metro is now seeking public comment on the project.

The AP story, however, has not gone down well with some:

"But the federal agency said that the Portland transit agency, TriMet, has to develop better ridership models and show the benefits of the streetcar system to get past the last hurdle for funding in 2009."

The Portland Streetcar, Inc., is not a division or affiliation of TriMet. Although TriMet has handled making federal funding applications for them, they are not responsible for planning decisions on the streetcar.

Meanwhile I can't help but feel that the grand expansionist visions of the streetcar system are eventually going to come into direct conflict with TriMet's extensive bus system. Why would the agency view streetcars on their bus routes, taking their riders and their fares, with anything other than alarm and anger? It makes no sense to build a competing system in the city; neither TriMet nor PSI will be healthier for it.

* * *
The remaining transportation roundup jumps all over the place. Also on Monday, a MAX train struck a TriMet bus downtown. Thankfully there were only minor injuries to one person on the bus, and no injuries to anyone else.

On Tuesday the Oregonian published a story on the design of the Columbia Crossing project. The story laments how plain the new bridge will be. At $4.2 billion, I'm not sure if all this debate will be moot anyway.

On Wednesday the Roseburg News Review put up a rather amusing Op-Ed on the closure of the Central Oregon & Pacific's Coos Bay line. The name "Snidely Whiplash" is used. Why do I feel that I need the voice of Edward Everett Horton to read the story out loud?

Friday brought an amusing story in the Big O about the TriMet hearings in Salem.

"One senator read a constituent's e-mail message.... [suggesting] replacing MAX with express buses that have drivers who can monitor riders."

It's nice to see the politicos are now being blatant asses by reading ludicrous comments such as that. After investing how many hundreds of millions -- its probably over a billion -- in federal and state funds, we should abandon our investment and convert back to buses? All so we can have a false appearance of safety? Or, well, you know, we could add, uh... enforcement?

Lastly, my friend Dan the history man should be happy to see that the Figo House will be saved after all.

* * *
A few other odds and ends of news. The Seattle P-I will have to treat online reporters the same as paper ones, which amounts to a victory for their unionized workers. Also in the Emerald City, some artists have created custom audio tours of the Seattle Art Museum. I wonder if we could do one for a walking tour of Portland? And in an "only in Portland" story, we now have a Vegan stripper joint.

* * *
In the photography world, Whiskey Texas has a lot of new stuff. Grain elevators, buZ blurr, and anti-sagging-pants billboards. Strange combinations, Wes.

There's also another essay up from Martin Burwash. Nice stuff as always.

That's all for now. Take care, folks, and if you catch what I've got, I recommend a lot of green tea and miso soup.

Review: Vanishing Point

2008-01-31T13:46:00.000-08:00

David Plowden: Vanishing Point: Fifty Years of Photography
By David Plowden, forward by Richard Snow, introduction by Steve Edwards. W. W. Norton & Company, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110; http://www.wwnorton.com/; 11.3 x 12.5 in; hardbound; 340 pages, 237 b/w photos; $100.00

A trip to the photography section of a well-stocked bookstore will yield shelves full of photographer's monographs. Countless spines arrest the eyes, each one vying to be the stylish work that convinces you that this photographer is the American Master.

And then there is David Plowden.

Plowden is one of the few living links between today and the greats of documentarian photography, the geniuses of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and others who participated in the Farm Services Administration's photography project during the Great Depression. Their work, seminal to the documentary style, was paradoxically emotive, evoking a minimalistic visual poetry. Plowden -- who struck up a friendship with Evans in the late '50s -- built upon this tradition, mixing a lyric style of photography with a documentary sensibility.

Over the course of his career, Plowden has published numerous books, almost always organized along topical lines: great lakes steam boats, great bridges of North America, vanishing small towns. He also has a fascination for railroads, the first love on which he lavished his camera -- indeed his first published photo was in TRAINS Magazine in 1954. This love expanded to encompass all manner of industrial subjects, from steamships and tugboats to steel mills and grain elevators. Now 76 years old, Plowden is at the end of his career, and it seems natural that he would publish a retrospective volume of his photography. Vanishing Point is that work.

The book opens -- after two images and a table of contents-- with a forward by Richard Snow, formerly the editor of American Heritage. Here Snow ably pens a brief discussion of Plowden's career. The brush strokes are light, and those familiar with Plowden's work might criticize it as being repetitive or unnecessary, but it provides a valuable taste of the text and photos to follow, almost as if it were a kind of abstract of the remaining book. A gentle start: so far, so good.

All this changes changes with the turn of the page and a remarkable 14-page introductory essay by Steve Edwards. Edwards brings his journalist sensibilities to the fore as he spins the story of the life and career of David Plowden. In so many ways, the story the journalist tells seems almost cinematic: a troubled childhood in New England, a youth amongst railroad men, a struggle to study a discipline he hated (economics) at Yale in hopes of making himself a better railroad employee following graduation. The reader is treated to the full transit of the photographer's disillusionment with the railroad world and with more common paths of life that would eventually bring him to photography. And here he works for Winston Link, studies under Minor White, and becomes fast friends with Walker Evans.

Edward's portrait is deftly penned with a light touch and a sensitivity to emotions and motives that makes the reader feel they can get inside -- if only for a brief moment -- the heart and mind of the photographer. He is sympathetic, but candid too; Plowden's single-minded devotion to his art often came at the expense of a relationship with his children and eventually cost him his first marriage. The event is part of a repeating pattern of loss that seems endemic to Plowden's drive. Edwards relates a point in 1960, after Plowden had left the studio of Minor White, feeling he had made a great mistake to study photography. The scene is rural Maine, and the photographer is standing the the cab of a steam locomotive on the very last steam-powered run on the line.

"'While that engine died, I sat in the cab in Brownsville Junction and watched the gauge drop to zero,' [Plowden] says. The loss was palpable; the very thing that had provided so much joy and escape during his troubled childhood had vanished."

In the space of a few short sentences, Edwards gets to the burning core of Plowden's modus operandi.

After this come the photographs themselves. Plowden was once scoffed at for being a "topical" photographer; here he wears this on his sleeve, dividing the book into seven thematic chapters of plates. Each is designated by only a roman numeral, with no title, no explanatory text, no attempt at interpretation. It is only the chapter divider, the plates, and in tiny text at the bottom, a plate number and very cursory caption.

Although railroads were Plowden's first love, they are not the focus of the work, and indeed the images of railroads he presents here are not the strongest images in the book. The most amusing thing about these images is the first plate, a photo of a Great Northern steam-powered freight near Wilmar, Minnesota: it violates nearly every rule of railroad photography convention, with no light on the nose of the locomotive, a broad foreground space of snow and haphazard weeds, and a line of poles and wires directly in front of the engine!

In addition to the train-centric images are more domestic moments, with the engines getting washed, maintained, and fueled by engine terminal crews. These images display a cinematic quality that is similar to Link, and indeed many of the plates date from 1959-1960, around the time of Plowden's association with that famous photographic dramatist. There is, however, one key element that is notably different; while Link resorted to everything short of building a personal hydrogen-powered sun to light his subjects with Hitchcockian precision, Plowden has worked only with available light. The result? His images seem fresher and more natural than Link's, as if the events in them had taken place but a few days ago, rather than decades hence.

Far more stunning than the railroad plates are the nautical images, such as plate 31, "Tugboat Julia C. Moran Undocking Liner, Hudson River, New York City (1975)". We are on the forward deck of a Hudson tug, barely seeing more than a few inches of the con. Out forward is a single man -- one of the few humans that Plowden has included in his Hopperesque de-peopled world -- unwrapping one of the ropes that holds the liner to the tug. And behind hims soars the great silver rivet-speckled bow of the hull of an ocean liner, so massive that her decks and superstructure are lost somewhere in an Olympian height beyond the view of the camera.

Bridges are, of course, one of David Plowden's greatest loves, and with boyish glee he gives us great hulking massive flying piles of steel. My favorite is probably one of the closest to me, an image of Newport, Oregon's Yaquina Bay Bridge shown in plate 61. The photo looks down the empty length of the span, and flanked between two gothic concrete spires curves the steel arch of the main bridge. The top nearly disappears into coastal fog, and the far end is barely even there at all. Beyond, there is no world, no ocean, no hills.

Next comes a chapter on industrial subjects, lead by a large set of photographs of the steel making process. Giant metal buckets, glowing molten steel, flashing dancing sparks. After a tour of this mechanical Hades, Plowden takes us on a journey through a litany of "back end" jobs, a hidden world of industry and commerce that few get to see. We see the great ore docks. We meet the solitary men who work in the bellies of steamships. We walk among lunar piles of coal and of iron ore. We get lost amongst the clinical inhumanity of a nuclear power plant.

The fifth chapter could be best described as wastelands. The images here are perhaps the most complex and most postmodern of the book. This America is one that is decaying, where every house hasn't been painted since FDR was president and each car looks like only Richard Roundtree would want to drive it, if it were still 1975 anyway. The bleakness, the desolation, the emptiness here is almost disturbing. Every now and then, I catch a sensation that reminds me of the empty highway-spaces of Jeff Brouws. There is a vague notion of social commentary emerging here, especially in the few plates here that show people; what is the future of the freckle-faced boy from rural West Virginia in plate 132? What kind of life awaits the girl staring out the window in plate 136? The state of paint and repair of her Pennsylvania home doesn't give much hope of stewardship for the world she is about to inherit. And in plate 143, shot in 1967, even the iconic form of the Statue of Liberty is framed by power poles and trash.

Love re-enters the picture in chapter six. Here is rural America, and rural Americana: the small town main street, the general store, the hardware store. This is the world that is fast fleeting, a victim of a rural populace mystified at the decline of tradition and Main Street while they push their shopping carts down the aisles of Wal-Mart. The shop-keepers -- when they appear at all -- are old, their faces as cracked as the paint of their wooden floorboards. And now and then we get children, too, and an old couple in Iowa who keep a clapboard house with Swiss net curtains, and we get the silence of over-furnished empty front parlors from houses that were built when people knew what the heck the word "parlor" even meant.

Storm clouds on the plains of New Mexico opens up the seventh and final chapter of Vanishing Point. It is the same image that is used on the dust jacket, a powerful, sweeping metaphor for the elegy that is the remainder of the book. From here out, there will be no more people, not a single solitary one. Indeed the only identifiable living creature is a single horse -- pale like that ridden by Death in the Four Horseman of the Book of Revelations. It stares out at us kindly from a single small square window in the side of a barn in plate 221. We are alone now, in the plains, navigating by grain elevators. We walk freely amongst barns and inside of feed mills. It seems that dust still hangs in the air, as if someone was just here, just working, but where have they gone? There is a profound solemnity, as if in church, and each successive image shows us less and tells us more.

The final image -- plate 235 -- returns us back to where we and Plowden both began. It is a railroad track. Frost once wrote of two roads that diverged in a wood, one well taken, and one rarely so. Plowden, like the poet, took the one "less travelled by". Here, though, we see the mainline -- the path well worn -- and the diverging route merging towards a switch that unites them. Are we looking backwards from the diverging route of Plowden's life, to see what has gone now collectively behind us? Or are we looking ahead, and seeing that even the route less taken eventually winds to the same common end? Take care and note: there are no buildings. There are no people. There is not even a train. There is only a track that crests over a small rise and disappears, and beyond that, empty hills bearing no promises. It is an evocative image on which to end the collection of photographic plates, especially considering that the book is meant as a retrospective of an entire career.

The closing text of the work is from Plowden himself, and his voice crackles with energy. Here he is full of humor and wit, buoyant in a way that is natural to those who have such a keen sense of loss and of the fleeting nature of time. Here we are imbued in a world of technical geekdom but told in such a loving fashion that, like the sometimes nonsensical phrasing of a T.S. Elliot poem, the reader is enthralled. He tells a hilarious narrative of his bad luck in camera choices, contraptions that seemed bent on being too bulky, too complicated, or too delicate to stand up to the demands he would place on them. The notes read like a letter from a favorite grandfather that you rarely see. It is perhaps the most valuable text in the book, and as precious as any of the photographic plates bound within the book's pages.

This is a heavy book, weighing in at over five pounds. The binding is stout but never gets in the way of viewing the photographic plates, even in the middle of this thick volume. The paper is strong and bright and feels good under the hand. Reproduction on the photos is outstanding with fine tonal range. The design work on the book tends towards minimalist, with subtle tones, simple font choices, and bold charcoal-hued chapter dividers bearing stark roman numerals and nothing more. All the plates are produced in a nearly full-page format, with white margins neither distractingly thin nor drastically wide. Image grouping is carefully planned; where images face each other across pages (which is most of the time), the images act as a kind of diptych, reflecting some common graphic value or subject theme, while images that are strongest on their own are displayed solitary against a blank page. The book looks and feels like every penny of its $100 price.

Vanishing Point is a monumental volume befitting the lifetime's work of one of America's greatest photographers. There is no question that this is one of the finest books I have had the pleasure of adding to my collection in years. It is a shame that some in the world of high art have derided Plowden as a "topical" artist. For every avant-guard photographer the art schools crank out, few will ever achieve the richness and depth of the American soul that David Plowden has. His work stands alongside the paintings of Edward Hopper and the literature of Mark Twain as essential to understanding the uniqueness of American culture. With an outstanding introduction, a collection of stunning plates, and a precious gem of an afterward from Plowden himself, Vanishing Point proves itself the definitive work of Plowden's life. No serious photographer of American culture should be without it. Photography books this fine are rarely printed en-masse; when this book finally sells out, it will likely begin to appreciate in price steadily. Buy it while it's new, before you have to pay twice as much for a used copy.

Vanishing Point is available from Amazon or Powell's.

Week in Review, Vol. VIII

2008-01-31T13:24:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of infrastructure news this week. First up, Seattle's Sound Transit might get an expanded authority to oversee general road projects in the region. I'm not sure if this idea is a boon of synergy or a monopolistic boondoggle.

Rail has been front and center in a lot of the news. In Oregon, Governor Kulongowski has told the Central Oregon and Pacific that there will be no discussion of helping out with maintenance or rehabilitation costs unless the company reopens the Coos Bay line first. (Good for Ted!) Meanwhile, the Port of Tillamook Bay's coastal line has until February 7th to get their FEMA request in. I don't know if this means they need their 25% share by then, or just a pledge towards it, or what, but I can hear a loud ticking reminiscent of the intro to 60 Minutes. Lastly, a proposal to restore the Amtrak Pioneer continues to drag along.

Then there's the continuing saga of the bridges. Of note: Salem wants $680 million for a new one, while the Portland metro area's new Columbia River crossing just may not pencil out.

At the rate that infrastructure costs are climbing, we'd either better start flooding the market with steel to bring prices down, or face the possibility of reduced weight capacities and a reduced flow of people and commerce.

* * *
Meanwhile developments in cellulosic ethanol may make this plan obsolete before it's finished. Hat tip to Bojack.

In related auto news, Autoblog gets a first drive of the Tesla, and reports that speed bumps aren't green! Finally, a PC reason to get rid of those bone-shakers!

Oh, and one more via Autoblog: the strangest cooking contraption ever. If George Foreman endorses it, watch out America.

Lastly, news that Jaguar may be planning a hard-core sportscar. I'm drooling already.

* * *
Lewis County was hit pretty hard by the flooding on December 5th. Among the victims of the rising waters was the Black Sheep Creamery. Irony of ironies, while the local residents hand-wring over the reopening of the local Wal-Mart, the creamery is relying on rebuild money from a fundraiser in -- guess where? -- Portland.

Am I the only one who finds it strange that it's the cities of the region that may be the salvation of small family farms?

* * *
Speaking of food, Good Stuff NW reports of the rebirth of a local grocery store. My only question, can I have one in my neighborhood? Please?

And in Seattle, things aren't all they are cracked up to be. Says Portland Food & Drink's "Food Dude", "No wonder our washed up restaurateurs are ending up in Seattle."

Ouch.

* * *
Before I go, a two photographic notables around the web this week include a photo essay by Martin Burwash the decline of rural Washington, and a nice collection of images from Elrond Lawrence on the vintage signs of Salinas. Love the neon, El.

Take care, all.

Review: Jumptown

2008-01-29T21:29:00.000-08:00

Jumptown: The Golden Years of Portland Jazz, 1942-1957
By Robert Dietsche. Oregon State University Press, 500 Kerr Administration, Corvallis OR 97331; http://oregonstate.edu/dept/press/; 9.7 x 6.9 in; trade paperback; 229 pages, 160 b/w photos, 48 illustrations, 1 map; $24.95

A visitor to Portland today might not realize that the city has a rich history in jazz. Fueled by the shipbuilding boom of World War Two, the city's black population grew rapidly throughout the 40's, creating a vibrant community on the east bank of the Willamette. This was a land of wild nightclubs, neighborhood bars, shady speakeasies that were open all night. Big names came to play, artists like Duke Ellington, Dizzie Gillespie, and Louis Armstrong, but the city also produced a number of local talents, like Wardell Gray and Doc Severinsen. It was not, however, to last; the construction of the Memorial Coliseum wiped out much of the jazz scene, and much of its history was lost. Dietsche's Jumptown: The Golden Years of Portland Jazz sets out to record that lost history.

Jumptown is by-and-large a narrative prose history. The story of the Portland jazz scene flows generally in a chronological line from the 1940s through to the 1980s, with each chapter focusing on a particular location that was key to the jazz of the time. The text relies heavily on direct research, consisting primarily of interviews with direct participants; many quotes and extended passages are included verbatim. Supporting this are numerous photos, many culled from those individuals. There are also reproductions of numerous LPs including recordings of local talents.

This work contains a wealth of information on the history of Portland music and Portland's black neighborhoods. The book is not written for jazz neophytes however; many portions seem to be a stream of name-dropping, as if the book is a bop version of the Chronicles in the King James' Bible. Without this context, many passages will feel confusing or dense, and even with it, it seems to be more a who's who list than a story. The book does yield up some gems of local history, however, including the locations of most of the big clubs and some entertaining anecdotes in the words of witnesses and participants themselves.

The book is printed in the dimensions of a typical hardbound book, but is in a softcover trade paperback binding. Paper weight is smooth and the photos are reproduced adequately. The back of the book contains a discography of Portland-related music that proves handy.

Though a bit thin, the book is the only work I am aware of dedicated specifically to Portland jazz culture. Jazz lovers will no doubt understand the laundry list of names better than the average reader, and there is enough obscure history of the city that it will prove a worthy edition for Portland historians wishing for a truly broad library.

Jumptown is available from Amazon, Powell's Books as well as directly from the publisher.

Trimet Publicizes Security Increase

2008-01-25T18:29:00.000-08:00

As I opened iTunes tonight, I noticed a new TriMet TV podcast. TriMet TV has been rather absent of late, the last episode having been put out prior to New Year's. So what prompted the transit agency to issue another episode?

That's right. Security:

"We recently hired 16 new security guards, for a total of 36.... The number of officers has increased by 10 percent, and will expand by another 10 percent when the new MAX Green Line opens in 2009."

Interesting to see them taking a more assertive role about their security public relations profile. Is it enough? Some yokel police chief somewhere thought TriMet needs another 150 or more officers to really get a handle on crime. Me, I think that's a case of a police officer trying to shove his work on another agency.

Regardless, it's good to see another 16 officers on the system. Video and transcript -- including some Fred Hansen tough-talk, heh -- at TriMet's webpage.

Four from the Gorge

2008-01-25T17:29:00.000-08:00

I've always been a bit of a procrastinator, and developing film is no exception for me. I tend to let rolls pile up until I realize I'm nearing a three-figure processing bill, and only then do I hit the lab. It could be better if I had lab space at home, but laziness combined with a lack of time tend to prevent me from getting there. Instead the rolls fill the fridge and eventually I end up taking them to Blue Moon. Such an event happened this week.

I'm still sorting through the images, but here are four, all from May in the Columbia River Gorge.

The Portland section of Amtrak's storied Empire Builder heads west towards Portland in the morning light, east of Goodnoe, WA.

Goodnoe, WA. An eastbound BNSF Railway stack train heads through the scrub and gloom of mid-day.

A westbound BNSF Railway manifest freight at Maryhill, WA.

Near Lyle, WA, an eastbound manifest passes by in rather grim afternoon light.

The versatility of the black-and-white film once more impressed me. The days these were shot was not all that blessed by weather, and I hadn't expected any images to turn out as well as these. None of them break the bank in any compositional way, but I think they all turned out solid. I would like to hand-print a few, however. I miss the darkroom so much....

American Graffiti

2008-01-25T16:54:00.000-08:00

2: Inside and OutGraffiti has been a subject of debate a lot in the Portland area last year, thanks partly to Randy Leonard's anti-graffiti measures. I want to touch on the topic a bit, but from a different perspective, from the standpoint of a photographer making images of it.

Graffiti seems to trouble some photographers, especially railfan photographers. The "big question" seems to be if its legitimate art, and most seem to say no. Yet some photographers can't help but take pictures of it. How many photographers of railroad subjects wouldn't recognize the cigar-smoking mug of the Colossoss of Roads? (Sidenote, he reminds me a bit of General Alcazar in TinTin). Jeff Bass, amongst others, has made many compelling "captures" (as he likes to say) of graffiti, images I can't help but admire.

Truth be told, graffiti is there. It's part of the real world we live in. To pretend that freight cars in LA ought to be shiny and sparkle is to live in a fantasy land inside our heads, not in reality. There is at least a little bit of photojournalism in railroad photography, isn't there?

Yet it does tear at me. I'm a big believer in order. Which isn't to say my desk doesn't look like a war zone. It's more that I feel that we need more respect in the world, not less. Humor is fine, farce is fine, sarcasm is fine. We're adults, we should be tough enough to stand that. But graffiti... isn't that basically vandalism?

And so I'm stuck taking photos of things I don't approve of.

In 2006 I took a traditional photography course at a community college, in order to get some training in basic darkroom technique. (I'm a wannabe dinosaur, forgive me my strange habits). For my finals project, I concentrated on railroad graffiti. It was on my mind a lot as I traded emails with Jeff and with my friend Scott Lothes on the subject, trying to make sense of it all. In the end, the correspondence and the project ended up merging late last year.

At the end of the project, my attitude is still ambiguous. I feel that if I'm really trying to do something meaningful about understanding the railroad landscape, I can't ignore graffiti. Yet in a way it's a glorification of it to photograph it. I'm still searching for an answer. Perhaps I will never find it.

Check out the essay here and see if you can find any answers of your own.

Thanks to Jeff and Scott for helping out with this project, and thanks to Martin Burwash for his candid critique.

Week in Review, Vol. VII

2008-01-24T13:29:00.000-08:00

Well can anyone remember a stretch of cold weather thats lasted as long as this? Sure, we've had colder winters, and more snow, and more ice. However, I cannot recall a winter in my (relatively short) lifetime thats been as cold for as long. It's enough to make me want to stock up on things like scarves, gloves, and flannel-lined pants. What is this... Ohio?

* * *
Let's dig right into the big stuff: OHSU. Following a ruling that removed indemnification for OHSU employees, the educational hospital announced closures and major service cuts.

Local blogger extraordinaire Jack Bogdanski doesn't buy it, and he's not alone. Big O columnist Steve Duin more-or-less agrees.

* * *
The TriMet security saga continues. Following a rather botched public hearing on their proposal to reduce Fareless Square hours of operation, the agency withdrew the plan. (See the Trib's take here).

Of course the proposal is not quite dead yet. Instead it's going to be "studied" more. Some, however, are of the opinion that the supposed link between farebox recovery and violent crime is a farce.

I must agree. The crime problem on TriMet is real, but it's more widespread than MAX and it's not primarily downtown!!. Indeed I had a discussion with a friend at one of the major newspapers in town, and he did a bit of research on the MAX attacks. Guess what? Most of the criminals involved in the crimes lived within 1-2 miles of where the crimes had been committed.

We need to have a serious discussion about security -- system-wide and in all modes -- not about Fareless Square. This isn't to say we won't be looking at fares as part of a solution, after all security must be funded, and costs are not going down for the bus system. But our first concern needs to be security personnel on the ground, and probably station redesigns to eliminate security hazards like brick walls people can hide behind.

TriMet's Mary Fetsch on today's Lars Larson show has mentioned that the agency is re-adjusting its security to put security officers on transit vehicles at least 75% of the time. Yet the agency is still proposing that Fareless Square's elimination is a tool towards increasing security. To be fair, she did mention the disconnect with the Fareless proposal and the large number of incidents occurring in Gresham.

* * *
Sam Adam's street maintenance plan won't be split into three proposals after all. The reason offered: advice of legal counsel to the City. Willamette Week, however, reports a different take: it's all about a deal with the Oregon Petroleum Association that gives them a lower rate.

"They didn't get what they wanted, but we compromised on their rate," Adams said.... "Now that they've agreed not to pursue a referral, I feel comfortable moving forward with one ordinance," said Adams, who's running for mayor."

Gotta love Portland politics.

* * *
Meanwhile, the Columbia River Crossing is in the midst of proposing a toll for the new Interstate 5 bridge. (Hat tip to Portland Transport).

I am actually, amazingly, in favor of tolling on freeways. However, I can't see how tolling just this bridge will work. And I am highly skeptical of all these electronic tolling systems. One of the points of this project was supposed to be to remove an alleged choke-point on I-5. As the project proceeds further and further, it's becoming more and more apparent that the new bridge will itself be a choke point, and a highly overpriced one at that.

I think we have now reached the point where the law of diminishing returns kicks in. Lets just maintain the current, perfectly safe bridge, and forget it. I won't dare mention the idea of a supplemental bridge cutting across Sauvie's Island to connect Washington County to Clark County, of course....

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Rounding out the news, the Daily Astorian has an update on the Port of Tillamook Bay Railroad. The line, which links rural Tillamook with national markets, experienced major damage during early December 2007, and remains out of service. Reading the tea leaves, it's really starting to look like the Tillamook Branch may be gone for good.

This is a major challenge for how the state addresses the needs of low-volume rural areas. If the rail line is not rebuilt, it will have a major impact on Tillamook County's economy. And if the state does not provide some alternate solution, it will be telling rural areas across Oregon that they are not a priority in Salem -- a mixed message at a time when ODOT is promoting the Connect Oregon project.

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I have a soft spot for British automobiles, having grown up in the back seat of a 1959 Triumph TR3. Thus the future of the Jaguar marquee has been of great interest, which is why this report about difficulties between current owner Ford and future owner Tata Motors is slightly disturbing. Lets hope this doesn't mean the deal falls off.

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Strange things amuse me, and perhaps this is too obscure. However, it appears Union Pacific does have a sense of humor about itself.

Heh.

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Once upon a time in Public-Broadcasting-Land, there was a show called Masterpiece Theater. It was a variety drama show, much like the old "Carnation Milk Presents" shows that aired on broadcast television in the U.S. throughout the '50s. (In fact, oil giant Mobile used to sponsor Masterpiece, and it was known as "Mobile Masterpiece Theater"). Each week the host -- first Alistair Cook, later New York Times columnist Russell Baker -- would introduce a classic work of literature (and occasionally an original screenplay) that had been made into a film. In some ways this series was the ultimate intellectual feather-in-the-cap for PBS.

Apparently that's not so much the case anymore. PBS has re-branded the series as "Masterpiece Classics" -- a case of painfully obvious duplicative phrasing if ever there was one -- and has replaced Baker with actress Gillian Anderson. The move is reminiscent of NBC's recent decision to use the actor Micheal Douglas as voice talent for the NBC Nightly News. As the Ellen & Jim blog put it:

"The appearance and demeanor of the introducer, Gillian Anderson, her talks and inset commercials (if we needed more evidence) show how little respect the PBS stations now have for their audience. Their original goal which was to have an alternative place for intelligent talk and decent art. Anderson is made up grotesquely; she leers at the audience; I expect she knows little of Austen for real or the 18th century, but the people who wrote the speeches clearly also know little. I didn’t stay for her closing one -- it actually comes after a commercial. PBS now puts commercials inside their shows. They assume the audience will sit through the commercial for the sake of watching and listening to this woman again."

Ouch.

They're also getting heat for having cut up the recent Jane Austen film adaptations so much to have made a joke of the original material. (Hat tip via the Chronicle Blog).

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Kevin Scanlon sends along notice of an interview on Public Radio International's Studio 360 with the photographer David Plowden. Plowden has recently published a retrospective book titled David Plowden: Vanishing Point: Fifty Years of Photography. (I will be reviewing it sometime next week). Studio 360 took the time to visit with Plowden in New York and has made their interview available in audio format. The interview is about 12 minutes long, and in it you can hear Plowden's sense of wonder and personal curiosity shining through. For an admirer of Plowden's work, I found the interview informative and inspiring:

In addition to the main interview, Studio 360 has made available a 4-minute bonus interview with Plowden on his fascination with bridges:

If the embedded players do not work for you, the interviews are available as downloadable .mp3 formats from their issue archive page. (It's on the right).

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One last note before I go. While we're discussing photography, Martin Burwash has another photo essay up. Check it out.

Have a great weekend, and look for some book reviews before the next Week in Review.