route99west.com | The Addendum

Liquidated

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:41:00 +0000

Liquidated, 2009; watercolor on paper, approximately 16 x 25 inches.

Well that took a bit longer than expected.

Liquidated is the second in my 99W Series of paintings. This is a planned sequence of images using the thread of old Pacific Highway West through Western Oregon as a common theme. The road forms a cross section of the western portion of the state, stretching from urban Portland through to the rural prairies of the Willamette Valley. This latest painting follows the earlier Morning Rush, Portland....

...Earlier by two years.

It is really amusing because Morning Rush, Portland I completed in January 2007, and immediately afterwards began Liquidated. My academic activities, however, quickly took over my time and attention. For the longest time, the painting sat clipped to an oversized Masonite clipboard, 2/3rds done. Every time I looked at it, I felt guilt, as if it were an abandoned child. There was never enough time. There was never enough motivation. Always my calendar had something else to do, some other thing that needed my attention. If the painting had been a garden it would have been growing dandelions.

Now that the 2008-2009 academic year has wound down, I've been playing catch up. There's been lots of cleaning, straightening, book sorting -- scarily enough there are over forty books I have collected over the year that have yet to be read -- and all manner of other reprioritization that is now possible with the additional time on my hands. One of the activities that immediately rose to the top of the to-do list: complete Liquidated.

Monday saw me heading downtown on WES to supplement my disintegrating brush collection. Tuesday morning saw me cleaning out the paintbox, the old dried up palettes, the caked and dead tubes of paint. Tuesday night saw me marathoning until 1:30 in the morning, the smell of wet cotton paper in the air and my fingers stained with viridian green and Prussian blue.

Creating -- be it writing, photography, or watercolors -- is a vital part of me, but somewhere along the way of the last four years, I lost that. I came, somehow, to the conclusion that I had to set that part of me aside to get more important things done. The reality is, however, that that act of creating was what was important all along. The ground is familiar now, and it feels good.

G9: One Year Later

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Tue, 26 May 2009 01:00:00 +0000

(If you hear Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson reading this to you in your head, don't be surprised.)

Nearly one year ago, I, a dedicated film photographer, did something unthinkable: I bought a digital camera. No, I hadn't eaten one too many happy pills. No, I hadn't drank my fixer one too many times. (Mmm, fixer!) No, rather, I had come to the conclusion that I needed to stop burning film on snapshots and marginal images, and a digital camera would help me fix that.

For the last decade, the Canon G series have been amongst the best performing digital cameras in the world. These little machines have been the backbone of advanced amateur photographers, especially photographers shooting candid images -- you know, street photographers, wannabe pornographers, and stalkers. Over the years, though, the G series has wandered. As Canon introduced more and cheaper and better digital SLR cameras, the company began intentionally crippling the G series, to reduce in-house competition. Things came to a head when, with the introduction of the G7, RAW file format capabilities went the way of the 110 instamatic.

So it is with some trepidation that the news of the G7's replacement was greeted in 2007. What would be gone next? No manual controls? No viewfinder? No hotshoe?

But no. The bitch, as Sir Elton would say, is back. Meet the Canon Powershot G9.

The Canon Powershot G9, courtesy khedra @ flickr

Like all its G series forebearers, the G9 is a handsome machine. It has the classic lines of a mid-20th century rangefinder. The body is sleek and matte black. And unlike many of the competing cameras in the G9's market segment, it isn't made of the same material as Jacko's nose; the G9 is metal bodied with only a small plastic piece closing in the top of the camera. The result is a body that feels solid and rugged. It also makes the camera heavy; unlike, say, a Fuji Finepix S100, if you swung this thing on it's neck strap you could probably kill someone with it. This handy trait should make the G9 quite popular in, say, Detroit, or South Central Los Angeles.

But forget how it looks. What really matters is how the G9 performs as a camera. The first thing you notice when you pick it up is... dials! The G9, like every proper camera ever made, has little round turnable dials! In this case, one controls ISO, while the other scrolls through shooting mode. While the camera does have special "idiot modes", they are mercifully buried under a single dial entry labelled "SCN". The rest of the dial cycles through video, a panorama mode, an all automatic mode, program, shutter priority, aperture priority, manual, and two customizable settings.

The back of the camera sports some buttons, along with a rotating selector, and a truly massive 3" LCD screen. Although bright sunlight can still play havoc with the latter, the LCD is unusually bright and has a wide acceptable viewing angle. Unfortunately the screen is hard attached to the back -- no fold out tilting screen like older G series cameras, meaning that its a bit harder to do those sneaky, creepy candid shots. Those buttons allow the user to customize the camera settings, including --mercifully! -- the ability to turn off those dumb "look at me I'm taking a picture!" system sounds and that absolutely pointless fake shutter mirror sound.

Once you've shed the poser features of the camera, you discover all sorts of other customizable options, like how long the LCD will stay on after no activity is detected, or if you want digital zoom, or enabling advanced features like image stabilization and red eye reduction. And of course, you can also set it to remember whatever settings you are in now via one of those customizable dial entries up top. Be warned that it will not only remember your white balance, color mode, control method, and so on, but also your exact aperture and shutter settings. Be sure to set it when you're in typical conditions for the mode you're saving, or you might find yourself constantly resetting the shutter speed from 1/8th like I was. I didn't bother playing with the idiot modes; they are, after all, for idiots.

Image quality is outstanding. The camera has a whopping 12.1 megapixels. To put that in perspective, when the Nikon D1 came out just about nine years ago and revolutionized newsrooms with digital photography, it had 4.3 megapixels. The G9 has nearly three times that. That's more megapixels than the original digital Rebel, more megapixels than Nikon D80, more megapixels than the Moon. Images shot at ISO 400 came out crisp with only a marginal grain that is comparable to most 400 speed films, and ISO tops out at a stunning (albeit somewhat grainy) 3200!

Basic adjustments like white balance, color modes, and the like is easily accessed via a button on the back, and can be made rapidly on the fly. Intriguingly the camera includes a built-in neutral density filter, three different metering modes, and the ability to fine tune flash output. You can even select auto bracketing, and switching between resolutions, image sizes, and file formats can all be handled in seconds. It's absolutely brilliant.

Of course, not all is perfect with the G9. The manual focusing is accomplished by hitting a button on the camera back and then using a rotating selector to fine tune the focus, which can be monitored on the LCD display. This is fine except that the LCD version of a focus screen is still relatively small and hard to judge by.

In addition, the G9 feels too small. In the typical "how small can we go" digital camera theory, the G9 is a lot smaller in person than in photos. The big screen on the back will within seconds of opening the box begin to collect thumbprints from your left hand. You get the impression that if Canon had stopped trying to make the camera smaller, there would have been room for a slightly more intuitive manual focusing system.

...Or perhaps to fix the viewfinder. Now on a camera in this price point, you'd expect the viewfinder to be sharp and poised. And... you'd be wrong. The image seen though it is on 80% of the visible scene, and what's worse, it's not centered, horizontally or vertically. It's utter rubbish. You could always get used to cropping your images, but what's the point of 12.1 megapixels if you can't use them all? The least they could have done is properly centered the 80% you can see. Ironically, it is equipped with a manually adjustable diopter to accommodate for the user's eyesight. To see what? 80% of a scene with no idea what portion that 80% is of? Totally useless!

Still, the overall feel of holding the G9 in your hand is hard to beat. It feels like a quality product, and despite a totally useless viewfinder and a body size about 20% too small, it quickly becomes very intuitive to shoot with. Putting it through its paces on city streets, the G9 becomes a fast blast for quick images. And its size is also a plus point, as it can easily be tucked into a pocket or under a coat and not attract any attention at all.

There is one more downside, however. After a hard day of shooting, the next morning the G9 will not have your breakfast fixed. This is actually one of the camera's redeeming features. Most camera makers offer machines these days that not only take photographs, but do your washing, balance your checkbook, call your mother, take the dog for a walk, and iron your shirts. And all this before tea time. But does the G9 have any of these extra features? No. The G9 is a photographer's camera. Sure, it has some useless idiot modes, but with the turn of a sleek and very familiar feeling metal dial, the camera becomes a precision image making machine.

The Powershot G9 is simply brilliant. I can't say enough good things about it. Weighing in at nearly $500, it's not a cheap camera. But for the price of a crippled entry level dSLR made of recycled styrofoam coffee cups and cheese, you can have one of the best made, best performing digital point-and-shoot cameras ever. Canon just announced an improved version called the G10 with added megapixels, but really, a good closeout or used G9 is a much better bargain. It's a more than worthy successor to the 35mm rangefinders of the last century.

Biting the hand that "frills" you

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:51:00 +0000

From my cold dead hands, Mr. Bingham.

Opening up today's Oregonian is quite an education sometimes. In today's paper, staff writer Larry Bingham outlines an in and out list, of "how life in the Northwest is shaking out in lean times." The title is "The Frill is Gone."

And the list? The list of outs include microbrews, Powell's Books, New Seasons Market, boutique coffee, the Portland Opera, Oregon wine, and heirloom tomatoes from the local farmer's market. In? Pabst, the library, Grocery Outlet, Folgers, radio broadcasts, California 2-buck-chuck, and home grown tomatoes.

When I first read it, I was shocked at the stupidity behind it. Let's step backwards for a bit of perspective. Yesterday, Moody's down-rated the status of Macy's bonds to junk status. Macy's just happens to be one of the biggest advertisers that the Big O has. Without them, the paper would be in serious revenue trouble.

Now journalism isn't about advertisement, (or at least it shouldn't be,) but I would hardly call a puff piece on trends from the "How We Live" section journalism anyway. Given that, is it smart to be, in essence, insulting potential and actual advertisers in this way? Last I checked, New Seasons inserts their weekly sales ads into the Big O, and in fact they are a partner in one of the paper's promotions on the back side of the very page this story appeared on. Ah, irony.

But this is more than just a matter of keeping advertisers happy. The economy is, indeed, in a dark, dark place. People are being laid off, and markets are shrinking. In this time of all times, our brewers, booksellers, grocers, farmers, and artists do not need to be listed on an "out" list. They do not need the region's largest newspaper advising people that spending money on these things is a poor choice. To suggest that spending on these things is "out" is a cruel blow, is kicking these sectors while they are down.

For all of these reasons, the Oregonian in general, and Larry Bingham in particular owe an apology to everyone on that "out" list, from Apple at the top of the chain (iTunes was ruled as an "out") to the smallest farmer at the local farmer's market.

But it is an even deeper mistake than all of this.

Microbrews, books, good coffee, local and organic produce; these aren't "frills". Bingham writes that "some would even say good riddance to our age of excess." These things are not excess. They are our culture. What Bingham proposes would be akin to asking the French to give up bread and wine, the Carolinas to give up Cheerwine and Q, or Wisconsin to give up grilled bratwurst and beer. And for the sake of what? Saving money? Yes, money is tighter now than it was, but to suggest that we would give up our culture for the sake of our wallets is preposterous and insulting. Mr. Bingham, you will have to pry the heirloom tomato from my cold dead hand.

I, for one, know the perfect protest. I am going to Powell's this afternoon to buy a book.

The Seattle Bus Challenge

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 05:52:00 +0000

It began with, as usual, a Monday lunch. Dan, Portland blogger, avowed transit geek, and ideas guy, had a question: were transit systems in the northwest well developed enough that a person could ride from Portland to Seattle, purely by using local busses? No Greyhound, Gray line, Amtrak, or charter systems. True, public busses.

For a long time, the answer seemed to be no. But some intensive Google digging turned up the critical gem: a rural transit program out of Longview. It was not only possible to get to Seattle using local busses, but plausible that it could be done in one day, and in time to return to Portland via Amtrak!

It had to be tested. It was begging to be tested.

Leg One: TriMet No. 12, 5:19 A.M., Tigard, OR

TriMet No. 12 at about 5:25 A.M.

This was the second 12 of the day according to the schedule. I was unsure how popular the bus would be. Empty? Jam packed? In the end it was neither, yet it was about as busy as it was on a typical normal (non commuter) hour of the day, which surprised me. There truly are some early risers in the P-town region.

With almost no traffic and in the light rain, the ride went very smooth and fast. Before I knew it, I was being dumped off at 4th & Hall near PSU, where I was to make my first connection of the morning. The city was dark, quiet, empty. I had once had a theory that the lack of nightlife in Portland was because the city was a morning town. Now? Now I'm not so sure. The cafe behind me was almost clinical in its absence of life, with vinyl letters on the door stating that it did not open until 7 A.M. Useless.

Busses stopped about every five minutes, with sporadic passengers. I was ever watchful for my quarry, C-Tran 134, the Salmon Creek Express. I had time, fortunately. There were at least two of these expresses I could catch and still make the following connection, but where were they? As I stood eagerly looking at my watch, along came a C-Tran bus. It was close to the right time, and I didn't have my schedule out. The reader board said I-5 express, but there was no mention of Salmon Creek. Was this the right bus?

"You go to Salmon Creek?" I asked the driver through the open door. He seemed not to notice, so I repeated my question hesitatingly.

"Yeah, eventually," he replied. I climbed aboard.

Inside, the bus was clean and neat. The layout felt a tad more open than a TriMet bus, and it had that bright, Shell-station-at-2am quality to the illumination. Aboard were a smattering of people, including some elderly women. I took my seat and we charged off. The bus had one more stop to make in Portland, down at 2nd and Alder, and there the elderly women left. The driver announced "next stop, Vancouver!" and we charged over the Morrison Bridge and onto the interstate. I glanced around me. Who was he announcing to? Me? There was nobody else left on the bus, and I certainly didn't need loudspeaker announcements to hear the driver.

Leg Two: C-Tran 105, ~6:10 A.M., Portland, OR

Backhaul commuting apparently isn't too popular.

We crossed over the river, and in Vancouver, picked up a couple more passengers, including an elderly man with a massive backpack, a long gray beard, and a walking stick. Then back on the freeway we went. About this time, it occurred to me that I was not on the bus I had wanted to be on. Outside the window, in the fast lane, a 134 Salmon Creek Express passed us by at such speed that I feared we'd never see it again in our lifetimes. If that bus, headed to Salmon Creek, had been one of the ones I had needed to make my connection, just how slow were we? How long did the driver really mean when he said that we would "eventually" get to Salmon Creek?

I fretted, and the minutes passed slowly in the rainy darkness. Then, we were once more pulling off the freeway. Shortly after, we turned into a large transit center with great sweeping wood-rooved shelters lit artistically from below. I had seen the place before, from the freeway back when I had a car still, and always recalled it as being attractive. It was rather large, too. Surely, this must be Salmon Creek. Saved! There was plenty of time left before my scheduled connection.

Or not. The driver: "99th Street Transit Center!"

99th Street? Where the heck is 99th Street? My ignorance of Clark County was not helping me any here. I dug out a C-Tran map and sure enough, we were only on the outskirts of Vancouver proper, but not yet at Salmon Creek. With the map not to scale, it was hard to know just how much farther that really was, much less what it looked like.

Back on the freeway we went. Outside, the sky was getting a bit lighter, turning from black to shades of deep larkspur. Dawn was approaching, and this was bad. It simply reinforced what I knew: that time was moving onwards, and I was still not at my connection. If I missed it, the challenge would fail. I would still be able to reach Seattle, but not return the same day, meaning that I would have to cut my trip short no later than Tacoma at best, and Olympia at worst.

We began to sidle off of Interstate 5 again. A couple of turns, and we entered a rather sketchy parking lot. Another stop along the way? Must be. And yet... we stopped. Here, in this dull parking lot, with almost no architectural form whatsoever, we stopped. Yes, this, this was Salmon Creek.

Leg Three: Salmon Creek Park & Ride at dawn

Salmon Creek, landmark of the masses.

On the bright side, I was well within my target time. It was 6:45 or thereabouts, and my next connection was at 7:05. I cannot stress what elation I felt. If I had missed this connection, failure would have been certain. Making it was the first and, really, the most critical of the narrow gateways I had needed to pass.

At seven, a little van-bus pulled into the lot, the kind that are often used for paratransit services, complete with the massive side door to accommodate wheelchair access. Welcome to the Lower Columbia Community Action Program Rural Transit line. Open to the public for $1 each way.

I once recall reading legislator (and future governor of Oregon) Theodore Geer's account of riding a ramshackle narrow-gauge railway in Oregon's Willamette Valley during the 1880s. He recounted the horrendous ride, the slowness of the pace, the utter uselessness of the employees. I felt much in sympathy with Governor Geer, and believe I have found a spiritual successor to that railway line. The seats felt as if they had been trampled on by a heard of bison, and smelt like it too. The driver was sterner looking than an Easter Island carving and about as taciturn, with his only utterances being to curse under his breath at fellow drivers. With no interior light, I huddled against one of the windows to try and read my book and forget. Sadly, though, the ride had more texture than Joan Rivers' face, and half the time my eyes bounced a few inches northward on the page, forcing me to reread the same sentence over and over until we got to smoother road.

The interior signage was rather amusing. "No food / or drink / allowed", in red letters, with not one but two exclamation marks at the end. A second sign read "Please" (underlined) "do not ask the / driver to make / unauthorized stops." Another: "Absolutely / No food or drink / " (last three words underlined) "you will be put off the van / immediately and permanently / (last three words in red letters) "if you do" (one exclamation mark). Lastly, "if you vandalize the can / the appropriate police agency / will be called and you will / be prosecuted" (one exclamation mark). One is glad for their sake that punctuation is free.

Longview could not come quickly enough, and nor could I wait to leave it again. The transit center was amazingly busy, with every stall filled with a clean if dated looking bus. Passengers stood around in fair number, smoking and waiting for their departures. I could see why the system was busy. Looking about me, I saw more twenty-year-old domestic automobiles than I had seen since a trip to West Virginia years back. Probably none of them ran, or even if they did, it was widely agreed that it was preferable to be seen in a bus. Beyond the transit center, it was the typical sad sight of former lumber towns like Longview: Meth alley. Cinder blocks, badly painted buildings, decay, gambling parlors that had the effrontery to claim to share a professional tradition with the likes of The Sands.

Leg Four: Longview Transit Center at 8:00 A.M.

And by here I knew how T. T. Geer felt.

Then Longview surprised me. At 8 A.M., sharp, every bus in the lot started up their engines. People scattered, and then each of the vehicles departed. All at once. At the same time. It made me wonder if their schedules had been planned by someone who had worked in school transportation in their past.

Once they had gone, about five of us were left at the very, very empty transit center. Our "bus" from Salmon Creek had left us here and drive off, perhaps back to the Hades from whence it had come. I hoped, likely in vain, that it had not simply gone off to refuel before returning for us. Please, please, please, be a different vehicle, or at least a different driver!

Another van-bus pulled into the lot, looking much as the other had done, and stopped before us. The doors opened, and prayers were answered. Not only was the driver different, but so was the van. This one was clean, and did not smell, and had a driver who actually asked a friendly question or two, remarked on the coldness of the weather, and cranked up the heat. It was 8:05, and we were off.

The ride from here was a long one, one that would take me from the waters of the Columbia River and its tributaries, to those of Puget Sound. Along the way, we would pass through the heart of Washington's timber country, a land that was once a cash cow for the state but has sadly turned sour. Environmental restrictions and international trade have conspired to make logging in the region less and less attractive. While protectionists had and have good intentions, the communities that once depended on the timber monies have, like Longview, declined rapidly. The ride filled me with bittersweet thoughts. Sure the forests are beautiful, but humanity here? Perhaps it's unfair, but it's hard to ignore the meth houses, the abandoned trailer houses, the closed mills, the empty storefronts. Centralia has, perhaps, fared the best, as it tries to convert itself into a tourist center. Antique stores have settled like a benign rash on it's main streets. But even here, you have the distinct feeling that anyone who wants a better life for themselves and their families goes to seek their fortunes elsewhere. For many it's a place to be from, but no longer one to call home.

This long ride was scheduled to terminate in Tumwater, just south of Olympia, where I would be able to transfer to the local transit agency, Intercity Transit. The point of embarkation: Tumwater Square. I wondered what it would look like. For a time, I had lived in Olympia, but I had rarely had occasion to visit Tumwater. Would Tumwater Square be some kind of transit center? Perhaps it was a suburban mall of some kind. Maybe, just maybe it was some kind of transit oriented development? The Olympia region does have a progressive streak, it was possible. It was surely, however, a very impressive name.

Too impressive, by half. Tumwater Square consisted of a pair of bus shelters on either side of a road, amongst the swanky delights of two gas stations and a Safeway.

Leg Five: Tumwater Square at around Ten A.M.

Is it square because the streets are at right angles?

Shortly afterwards, IT No. 13 rescued me from oblivion, and we charged into downtown Olympia. The route followed Capitol Boulevard, whose streetcar era bones show through today in the gentle curves and continuous lines of bungalows. Past these residences, the road and the bus route begin the slow descent through downtown Olympia. Not far after this descent begins, the dome of the capitol building pops into sight to the left, but even before then you can tell you are in a seat of state power. There's lots of concrete buildings and a hollow, haunted look to the streets. Subconsciously, you just can't figure out why the city exists. It is large, yet looks poor. It seems to have more importance than other towns, and yet it lacks the bustling air of a city. It is the whiff of futile dreams, suspended in the amber of bureaucracy.

Olympia Transit Center has always impressed me. It is clean, modern, white and glass, and appears by all observances functional and busy. Arrival here was a kind of celebration, really. This was the hump. Here, actually on the waters of Puget Sound, everything suddenly became "downhill." Now the question turned away from if and towards when: when would I reach Seattle? I was hungry, I wanted food, I had not eaten yet and I had been up for nearly six hours. I pondered walking around the harbor, gloating in the waters of the sound, dining beside them at someplace-or-other from years before.

But over at the north edge of the transit center, a Tacoma bus idled.

Leg six: IT 603

Aboard the Tacoma express at 10:30 A.M.

The bus was rather on the full side, and I was lucky to find a seat. Up front, the driver was rather garrulous, chatting with a flight attendant headed to SeaTac International to work a flight to Japan. "If I had my way," the driver noted, "you'd ride free. Transportation people would always be free." Returned the steward, "yeah, and you'd fly free too, right?" The driver rather liked this notion.

I glanced at my private timetable and noted my progress. My original goal had been to be aboard a 603 to Tacoma departing Olympia at noon, and here I was 90 minutes earlier than that. If things continued as planned, and assuming that my connections were available when I got to Tacoma Dome Station, I'd be in Seattle near lunch time. We made an odd circuit of Olympia and Lacey, stopping at park-and-ride lots to pick up people here and there, and then we hit the freeway and sailed down into the Nisqually River Delta. With the crossing of the delta, I had entered Pierce County, and soon after, Tacoma.

Then there was another snag. We pulled off to another nondescript park-and-ride, this one somewhere near the McChord Air Force Base. "This is the SR 512 Park and Ride," yelled the driver. "Transfers here to SeaTac and Seattle!" I puzzled over this. Was not the 603 bound for Tacoma, where I could make my transfer as planned? As nearly the entire bus emptied out, I took a gamble, and got out too, trusting that we couldn't all be wrong.

On reflection, this was likely a mistake. The 603 did indeed touch on Tacoma at Tacoma Dome, where I could have transfered to a Sound Transit bus to Seattle. But no, instead of staying in the warm bus, I got out with the crowd to stand in the cold and await my transfer. It is very, very likely that the bus I had to take -- Sound Transit 594 for Seattle -- was the same exact one I would have caught in Tacoma proper, meaning my wait was no longer. But here, at the SR 512 lot, there was nothingness. Some shelters. Some garbage cans. Freeway exit ramps. Parked cars. No food, no warm drinks. I dug into my stash of snacks for the first time that day, but found little comfort in them. I was cold, I was wondering not for the first time why I hadn't done this in warmer months. But it was too late now.

Twenty minutes passed. Other busses came and went, including those from Pierce Transit, Tacoma's transit provider, and a massive boat of a bus from Sound Transit. This was ST 574, the SeaTac express, a bus very similar to those used by Greyhound, complete with dual rear axles and cushy reclining seats. Ah, the thought of reclining seats! And warmth, too. The moments dripped by slowly. But finally, finally, a blue-and-white bus pulled in the lot with the name SEATTLE on its destination sign, and I stepped aboard.

My stomach was growling, my eyelids were drooping, and I was lulled ever more to sleep by the warmth inside the bus. The seats were nicely cushioned, though annoyingly they did not recline despite the presence of headrests. I checked to be sure multiple times. But it didn't matter. I was down $13.80, and I was nearly there. I only opened my eyes a few times, mostly to note passing through Tacoma. This city has always been my favorite on the sound. It retains a blue collar edge and an honest, industrial vibe. It is no city, and likely never will be, but it is a fine, fine town, the likes that few are fortunate enough to be. The fact that our bus had exited the freeway for a slow and prolonged trip down surface streets, making stops every two or four blocks? That was only mildly annoying, for it gave me time to glance about and try and remember the buildings I had been inside of. And then, we were back on the freeway, and my head was nodding back, and I was asleep.

Leg seven: Fresh off of ST 594

~12:48 P.M., Pike Street at 3rd.

I woke with a jolt as we exited the freeway and traversed Spokane Street, bound for Fourth. Alongside the latter road, to one side were the rails of a BNSF switching line, and along the other side were the tracks of Sound Transit's first light rail line. Shoehorned into an area vastly comprising of light industry and railway yards, I really wasn't sure why they bothered to put stations in so frequently. I counted at least two in the industrial flats, places that by the nature of the constrained rail assets of the region will never be anything other than railroad infrastructure. I shrugged. It's Sound Transit's first light rail line, and this is hardly the biggest lesson they have yet to learn.

Then we ascended the viaduct beside King Street Station, and passed into downtown itself. I kept an eye out for the streets, waiting for the one I wanted. Jackson, no. Cherry, no. Spring, no. Then there it was. Union. I gathered my bags, my stomach growling louder still, and began to plan where I would find my lunch. Outside, the pavement was wet, but it was not raining. I checked my watch, and found that it was 12:45 in Seattle.

New Looks

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 07:08:00 +0000

Spring is here, and after a few days of laborious Photoshop work and HTML composing, the site may look a tad different. Sadly Firefox doesn't render the new design as nicely as does Safari, and I have yet to test it in Explorer. However, it is rather simple so it ought to be okay....

Coming back around

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 01:26:00 +0000

Even when you try and stay away, you just can't.

The last time I shot film in any serious way was in the middle of 2008. At the time, I was in the middle of a number of simultaneous changes in my life, professional, academic, and personal. The end result of that was that I had somehow lost my way when it came to photography. The passion was simply gone, the meaning lost. The idea that I would never make a photograph again struck me, even in the darkest hours, as unlikely. I knew better than that. I knew it wasn't a matter of if I kept making photographs, but when, and what of. In the meanwhile, though, I packed away the Nikons and swore to myself that I was taking a sabbatical. My only tool in the meanwhile would be the G9, a camera I considered to be magnificent but still only a toy, and even that I used only sparingly.

Yet events conspired without my approval. First, a friend picked up a Nikon FG at a garage sale. I, the camera "expert" (heh, got him fooled!) got the honor of testing it to be certain it was fully functional. So sometime in January, I took out the FG and its good old student-standard 50mm lens and ran a roll of TMY through it. Holding a film camera again -- especially a manual like the FG -- felt good. The images produced weren't too bad either, just a random collection of downtown Portland street photos, but still, not a disappointment.

From the test roll: A food cart at S.W. 2nd & Oak, Portland.

The greatest irony, however, struck the following month.

My first real camera -- read SLR -- was a Pentax K-1000. Most anyone shooting film knows these cameras. They were small, solid, fairly light, and pretty durable. They had lenses that were rather small when compared to what we use today. (Their narrow size made them fit inside of chain link, a very handy attribute for urban shooters.) This one cost me $150, used. I didn't have enough, so my mother went halves with me on it. I was 17, and the camera went everywhere with me after that, serving as my "mechanical sketchbook".

Later, I went Nikon, financing the "upgrade" by helping my brother with a mural project for Salvador Molly's on Belmont. (The mural, sadly, has since been painted over with beige paint. Bastards.) The theory behind the switch was that when I finally made the leap to Nikon, I'd have a stock of Nikon lenses to use. It was a logical choice, but it left me with my Pentax gear unused. I lent and then subsequently sold off the K-1000 to a friend, with the promise that if he ever wanted to sell it, I'd have first dibs.

And now, with the Nikon gear sitting idle in a cardboard box, my phone rang.

The rest is self evident. Today, the K-1000 -- complete with the lens strap my father made me still attached -- sits on my workbench, alongside the G9 and my Canonet. I have yet to run film through it, but I have no doubt that I will.

In the meanwhile, you can view the rest of the Nikon FG test roll shots over at flickr.

WES, at last

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:07:00 +0000

One-hundred and one years ago this month, the Oregon Electric Railway opened up between Salem and Portland. The OE offered itnerurban transit service to residents between the two cities, allowing people in rural areas the benefits of urban jobs and educations. More frequent commuter trains worked the line from Portland to Wilsonville, about a third of the way to Salem. More than any other development, the arrival of the Oregon Electric changed the Westside's destiny forever, ushering in the suburban era. Without it, there wouldn't even be a city of Tigard or Wilsonville today. (Although well patronized, growing automobile use, state subsidized roads, and the Great Depression all worked to kill the OE's passenger service, which closed in 1933.)

Today, the Westside once again stands on the brink of a new era, and for much the same reason as it did in 1908: the train has arrived. Yesterday, officials from multiple cities, governments, and agencies met in Wilsonville to commemorate the opening of TriMet's latest rail service expansion, the Westside Express Service, also known as "WES". A multi-agency, public-private project, WES connects Wilsonville, Tualatin, Tigard and Beaverton to the MAX system by using self propelled heavy rail commuter cars (known as diesel multiple units, or "DMUs") running over the tracks of the Portland and Western Railroad. Although commuter rail is common in larger metropolitan areas in the United States, WES is one of the few to use self-propelled cars, and perhaps the only route that connects outer-ring suburbs to each other rather than to the metropolitan core.

The project has had a rocky path to completion. This is TriMet's first major public-private project, and coordination between the railroad, the contractors, and the agency did not always run smoothly. There were multiple teething problems with the state-of-the-art signaling system, and worst of all, the railcar supplier had massive financial difficulties that emerged mid-project, forcing TriMet to essentially take over the manufacturer to see the cars completed. Thus when the ceremonial "first run" car set arrived at Beaverton Transit Center yesterday afternoon, there was a collective sigh of relief from project proponents. Politicians swarmed like bees on the platform while TriMet staffers dashed back and forth trying to manage the crowd of invitees.

The "First Run" set arrives at BTC on January 21.

WES trains, unlike MAX, have conductors on board.

Aboard, the cars were very well done, with a nicer level of finish than the average MAX equipment. Seats recline, and each car has free WiFi. The feel of the ride is smooth, and while the cars don't accelerate as fast as a MAX train, they do spool up to 60 miles per hour. Combined with the system's limited stops, WES feels far faster than MAX, and in fact it is.

The interior of WES is well appointed and clean.

Once at Wilsonville, passengers were treated to a good old fashioned political soiree, complete with Oregon wines and live music. People ooed, ahed, rubbed elbows and shoulders, and all around basked in the glow of what had finally become a successful project. Despite the challenges the project had faced, the mood was not one of relief, but rather joy. There were smiles everywhere, and being that there was a large contingent of political personages, a lot of subdued credit seeking. Washington County Commission Chair Tom Brian -- the so-called "Godfather of WES" -- took the podium early on, noting that since "success has many fathers, [WES} will no doubt bring on the largest paternity suit in history". And when Metro Council President David Bragdon took the podium, you could tell that the self-avowed "transit geek" was one step away from doing a celebratory transit-dance.

Tom Brian addresses the crowd while TriMet General Manager Fred Hansen looks on.

The excitable David Bragdon.

Other officials took turns addressing the crowd, including Kelly Taylor from ODOT's rail division. Taylor was the strongest voice to expound on the primary subject of the cocktail conversations of the evening: where to next? According to Taylor, an extension of WES to Salem is beginning to be studied now, and looks to be likely as the soonest extension. Judging by the size of Wilsonville's park and ride lot, I'd guess they are expecting to get a significant number of commuters driving up the valley as it is, and with a fast 27 minute dash to Beaverton, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see Salem residents making use of the system as it is.

Other extensions mentioned during the evening included a possible cross-town connector between Milwaukie and Sherwood via Tualatin, and an extension to Forest Grove. Although the project had -- in the words of Neil McFarlane, TriMet's executive director of capital projects -- "more headaches per mile than any other", it was clear from the evening that the momentum to expand upon the system has reached critical mass. Taylor mentioned the need to examine the "lessons learned" and the desire to complete system expansions at a much quicker pace.

The ride back from Wilsonville was in the darkness, and gave a much better feel for how the system will be once it opens to revenue service on February 2nd. Getting off at the Tigard stop, I was struck with how different it feels from MAX. The cars are bigger, and more comfortable, and truly feel like rail travel rather than transit. Sure, the Westside still needs additional MAX service -- an idea that Metro is studying now -- but WES brings a more substantial presence to the table. It's a different sensation to stand on the platform listening to the locomotive bells ring on the DMUs and depart rapidly into the darkness.

Members of the public wishing to explore WES will have an opportunity to enjoy a free ride on the system on the ceremonial opening day on January 30th. Fare on WES is a TriMet all-zone ticket at $2.30, and schedules both northbound and southbound are posted on TriMet's website. Additionally, WES will be served with connections from Wilsonville's SMART bus system, which will guarantee a ten minute or less trip from major employers to WES every weekday.

To everyone at TriMet and all the partner entities involved in the project, congratulations on completing a tough job.

Bookmarks update

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 04:03:00 +0000

I was perusing through my traffic stats the other night and discovered a new... err old... err... different blog? Long story short, Stumptown Confidential is now "Lost Oregon". Update your bookmarks, and then check out a new and wider range of nostalgic goodness.

2008: Ten Favorite Images

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 10:41:00 +0000

Some of you may remember last year about this time there was a flurry of "ten favorite shots" posts on various rail themed blogs. So far, this year has been a bit less busy. Probably a lot of things are contributing to that; I know in my case some big changes in my life had (and continue to have) a huge impact on my photography.

This is why it surprised me, in some ways, when I found myself able to pick out ten shots again for this year. (Thanks go to Dave Styffe for the inspiration on this one.)

As with last year, the order is chronological, and clicking on the image will yield the image's Flickr page.

* * *
1.

In February, my friend Scott and I headed into Portland to do some shooting for half a day. Our main targets were transit, including both MAX and the Portland Streetcar. Such shooting is usually a bit like fish in a barrel, but at the same time it can get really boring for the same reason. That said, the effort is worth it, as with this image, one I feel rather proud of. To me, it captures the essence of Portland -- classic 19th century buildings, a modern light rail vehicle, and every completely slicked down from rain.

2.

Graffiti is often considered the railfan's bane, the evil enemy. Maybe it's for precisely those reasons that I am attracted to it? Leaving aside self-examination of my contrarian tendencies, this image stands out to me less for any particular artistic merit than because of the content. It is the first of many images from this year in this post that were selected for emotional reasons as much as artistic ones.

Here is the interior wall of a highly vandalized railroad car. Among all the grunge, the burnt out detritus, and the haphazard spray-painted tags, there were a few poems written in crayon or paint markers. This was one of them. The inscription reads:

"Transit:
lighter than air
than water
than lips
light, light
Your body is the footprint of your body
-- David Paz"

A very random thing to find in such a place.

3.

This was just me, having fun. Scott and I were transit foaming again, and this shot was a "hey hold my beer while I do this" sort of thing. It was the blue hour, after sunset, and I was shooting at ISO 400 but had no 'pod. A bike rack made a good substitute; out of a series of shots, this one stood out as having the right balance of distinguishable features and motion streaks.

Okay, it's a gimmick shot, sue me.

4.

This scrawling was on the side of an abandoned gas station in Dundee, Oregon. This structure was endlessly fascinating to me. Dundee -- once-upon-a-time no more than an old-fashioned road town -- considers itself quite upscale, a sort of Napa of Oregon. This gas station is the perfect microcosm of the town. It was once a traditional gas station. It was then converted to an antique store, and still sports fading Old English signage to that effect. However, it never panned out, and is now abandoned, housing a few old mattresses.

That is the real Dundee, not the WIne Country snootiness.

And yes, there's more than a little Jeff Brouws in this shot.

5.

This is a shot I took on my only day at Chehalis this year. It was a bittersweet weekend. For one, C-Town was hit by massive flooding in December of 2007, and the line was largely out of service -- trains were only mile or so jaunts down the track, backing the other way -- and the future of running remained unclear. For another, changing circumstances in my life were making it quite likely that this would be my last trip as a conductor for a long, long time, maybe ever.

The day is still young, and the 15 is being fired up for the runs. I'm in an old UP CA-7 caboose that we use as a crew car, changing into my uniform. This is a view I have seen off and on for four years, and feeling a bit melancholy, I snapped a frame off.

6.

Factual: this is near Knappa, on the Portland & Western's Astoria District, more commonly known as the "A-Line". The same floods that hit C-Town in December 2007 also packed a wallop on the coast up here, and in this case blew a large hole in the right-of-way. By July, the like is still not fixed. With no shippers beyond the damage, it remains like this today.

Less factual: it's the imagery that makes this work for me. On the macro level, its a metaphor for the situation that a lot of marginal branch lines are facing in today's Pacific Northwest. On a micro level, its a metaphor for something deeper, an interest being drowned by larger powers.

7.

Although I did take a few other images later in the year that had railroad elements in them, this photograph is one of four of what I consider to be my last railroad photographs. How permanent that is I don't know, and certainly I didn't plan that it would be this one.

The location is Salmonberry, Oregon, along the Port of Tillamook Bay Railroad. This is yet another instance of damage from the December 2007 storms that remains unrepaired. More than a year later, the chances that it ever will be grow slimmer by the day. The POTB is truly living up to it's legend as the Northwestern Pacific of Oregon.

I think it's a rather ironic but appropriate subject for closing a chapter.

8.

This is one of those "railroad in the frame but not the subject" shots I mentioned above. Like the first of my ten, it's a shot that appeals because of the visual shorthand it has. Portland, near the north end of the Depot Yard at Portland Union Station, with new condos looming (and mostly empty) in the background.

9.

A very close friend came home one day in quite a mood, and then wrote this on his sandwich box. It then sat on my TV table for the next three months or so rather than going to work with him.

My old photography teacher would probably yell at me for the crumbs and tell me to use a spot brush to remove them, regardless of whether they were there or not. Kinda reminds me of the apocryphal story of Walker Evans and the flees on the bed in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

10.

My last shot is from September, and like many of my images this year, it is both introspective and contains a link to friends and family. In this case, it's my brother's bookshelf at his apartment. I wish I had his organizational tendencies, but it's just not me -- to picture my workspaces you'd need to add lots of random papers with notes scrawled on them that I no longer need.

* * *
And that wraps up 2008. It was quite a year. For me, things will never quite be the same again, and though I look forward to a far brighter 2009, I can't help but look back wistfully on 2008. I lived through a lot of changes, and witnessed many people close to me face similar or greater challenges. Although I did not travel to the Midwest for the first time since 2005, it seems I still travelled as much as ever, and still spent time with good friends. But there is a strong emotional pull the year has for me, a sense of loss, often of things I cannot quite put a name to. I think that shows through in a lot of these images.

I can't make any promises for 2009, but I have a sneaking suspicion there will be some more images about this time of year. Now the question is, where are the 2008 ten favorite from Blair?

Review: Wild Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 01:49:00 +0000

Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957
By Terry Toedtemeier and John Laursen, Eds. Oregon State University Press, 121 The Valley Library, Corvallis, OR 97331; http://oregonstate.edu/dept/press/; 12.4 x 12 x 1.5 in; hardbound; 360 pages, 9 color, 9 hand-tinted, and 116 b/w photos, 2 maps; $75.00

One of the last things the world likely needs is a photo book on the Columbia River Gorge. This scenic area, with its numerous waterfalls, mountains, scenic vistas, and easy freeway access is probably the most over-photographed region of the Pacific Northwest. One might be pressed to say that there is nothing new left to see. And you'd be right -- but there is a lot left to see that is old, as is proved by the release of Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957.

Wild Beauty places the history of photography in the Gorge at the forefront. The compilers have chosen the period of 1867 to 1957 as their focus, the latter being the date when The Dalles Dam flooded Celilo Falls. The book opens with a broad essay on the river's geological and anthropological history, and the subsequent attempts to use tools of the "industrial revolution" such a photography to record those things. It's a good overview of what the book hopes to illustrate, if a bit over-familiar to the Pacific Northwest reader. The most valuable segment of this text is contained in its last two pages, where we meet some of the Gorge's earliest photographers, such as Joseph Bucthel and Carleton Watkins.

While Buchtel's work is considered to be "unimpressive", Watkins' work is the entirety of the first of five sections of plates in the book. It's a wise and fitting choice, as Watkins is a skilled artist, a man who had cut his teeth making the photographs of Yosemite that would convince Congress to save it as the first national park. It is a miracle that as many prints as shown in the book even exist; the authors point out that many of his glass plate negatives were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Watkins brings his skills to bear on the Columbia Gorge, making images at a time of great transition. Sure, the book's title suggests an emphasis on natural beauty, yet what we see even in these, the earliest photographs of the work is the firm hand of man, altering the landscape. While some of the images will prove familiar, but as local historian Dan Haneckow pointed out to me, others are more obscure or bear re-examination. A prime example of this is Plate 6, a moderately familiar image of one of the old portage railroads during the 1860s. Look closely at the back, however, and you discover a flatcar carrying a Conestoga wagon as used on the Oregon Trail. Was this a late part of the great migration, taking advantage of a more modern alternative to risking the rapids or taking the long and rough Barlow Road? If so, it's a rare glimpse indeed.

Watkins brings us these gems of zeitgeist, but he is not simply a documentary man. Many of his images have a sensitivity and an artistic composition that makes them excellent even today. Their sharpness, their haunting familiarity makes them seem recent rather than distant. This is but the first of many times a reader will find themselves staring into the distant past and yet feeling intimate with it, as if what has changed, great as the changes have been, is less than what is the same.

The next section deals with the images of various local commercial photographers who followed in Watkins' footsteps. The subject matter these photographers chose to shoot tended to concentrate on the more intimate scale of the Gorge, and here we see some of the first images of the native population. It is here where we first glimpse Celilo as a force of nature, rather than an impediment to trade. There are surprises here too, like the great sand dunes that used to lurk on the east side of The Dalles, or vast seas of Canadian ice. A few hand-tinted images pop through, but primarily we are still given monochromes of various tints.

Section three concentrates on the rise of a new phenomenon: the amateur. Thanks to the advances of technology, photography by the turn of the twentieth century was becoming almost common. For the first time it was now possible for someone who was not a professional (or a very very eccentric amateur) to make photographs. Most notably, the two amateurs that the compilers show us are different in yet another way: they are Lily White and Sarah Ladd, women. Professionals had been an all male bastion, but the amateur photography movement gave women something more meaningful to do other than paint china plates or embroider. Yet White & Ladd were not just random photographers in the wilds; they were connected enough in the growing intellectual photography circles that they were members of Alfred Stieglitz's inner circle. Their images are peculiarly timeless, feeling not far removed from images made in our own time. The cause is uncertain -- perhaps it is a certain sharpness and a scope that is not nearly so sweeping as the earlier panorama-mania. Perhaps, too, we see here the first technically proficient pedestrian imagery of the Gorge, the great-grandmother of every amateur's weekend snapshots.

Section four deals with perhaps one of the most familiar aspects of Gorge photography, the tourism oriented image. These photographs were made primarily by commercial photographers for the railroads and the highway promoters. Here are the photographic legends of the area, including the iconic views of waterfalls, scenic highway viaducts, and the view from Crown Point. It is during this time that the modern scenic Columbia River Gorge -- thanks largely to the photographers who promoted it -- acquires its classic identity. No longer is the region a somewhat frightening place, a place of hardship and travail, but instead it is a playground, a quick drive from your suburban bungalow at a bracing 35 miles-per-hour in your Model T. Many of the images are further "gilded" through garish hand coloring.

If such boosterism seems to cheapen the river, the next and final section of the book is the most tragic of all. Titled "The Engineered River", this segment delivers to us in stunning visual images the return of the river to a cruder understanding. The water now is no more than an unharnessed power source, something to be exploited for human advancement. In some ways, however, the images we see here of dynamiting channels, the construction of great concrete dams, and the burial of cultural treasures has more in common with than different from each of the previous understandings of the Gorge; each saw it as a resource to be utilized, whether for transportation, tourism dollars, or energy. From a photographic standpoint, this chapter contains two new developments, the first being the use of true color imagery. The second and perhaps more complex development is the aerial photograph, further detaching the viewer from reality on the ground. It is perhaps appropriate for a time when men tried to drastically alter the river that their point-of-view f choice was from the height of a God's eye view.

The book closes with little further commentary. A brief (one page) epilogue is included, and following this are plate listings (but without thumbnails), notes, and acknowledgments. The latter is lengthy: many of the images scene in the book are from private collectors and have never been seen in public or print before.

Visually, the content of this book is exceptionally good. There are many remarkable plates and they are presented in a logical order that makes their context more evident, both as indicators of how the Columbia Gorge was framed and viewed, as well as how landscape photography developed and grew. That said, the book is not without faults. The introduction, although able, is dry and does not give much of a feel for the flavor of the Gorge; an essay by a writer of regional or topical relevance would have been most welcome. This is even more the case for the epilogue, which felt far too short and left me wanting more.

Fit and finish on the book is excellent. Some other reviews have noted missing pages or other assembly problems; this reviewer's copy had no such defects. This book is hefty -- you could use it as a weapon if needed. It is perhaps as large as was practical to make it, but sometimes you do wish it could have been bigger, for yet more detail in the images. That said, image reproduction is high quality.

I'm tempted to simply give this book an outright recommendation and say to you "you must buy it". However, as I alluded to in the beginning of this review, I have qualms about yet another photography book on the Columbia River Gorge. Does the world need another? More importantly, do you need this one? It is against this skepticism that I come out with the answer, yes, you do. If you are a follower of regional landscape photography, then this book, more than any other, is essential to understanding the nature of the medium. The book has the right balance of historical overview, context, and precious images. If you want a discount coffee table book to send your distant relatives, so they can understand where you live, this is not your book. Rather, Wild Beauty is a chronicle of the inter-relationship between photography and the Columbia Gorge, and thus a must-have for the bookshelf of any serious regional landscape photographer, or followers of the same.

Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957. is available from Powells, Amazon as well as directly from the publisher.

Review: Beauty of the City: A. E. Doyle, Portland's Architect

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 10:41:00 +0000

Beauty of the City: A. E. Doyle, Portland's Architect
By Phillip Niles. Oregon State University Press, 121 The Valley Library, Corvallis, OR 97331-4501; http://oregonstate.edu/dept/press; 7 x 10 in; trade paperback; 296 pages, 72 b/w photos, 23 illustrations, 1 map; $29.95

Portland has seen numerous shining towers rise in the past half-century. Beginning with Pietro Belluschi's stylish and ground-breaking Equitable (now Commonwealth) Building of 1948, it seems the architecture of the city's core has been written in steel and glass. And yet, for anyone who admires this city -- whether they be a kindly visitor or a passionate lover -- it is not these buildings that define it. True, they soar. Many are remarkable. Yet the vernacular alphabet of the city is made of richer things, of shining white tiles, cornices high in the breeze, and patterns of warm, handsome brick. The buildings date to the early twentieth century, when Portland was both at both the height and the end of its reign as the most important city of the region. In Phillip Niles' book, Beauty of the City: A. E. Doyle, Portland's Architect, we follow the life and career of one of the most important architects of that era. As Niles himself says, "he did more for Portland as it is today than any other architect before or since."

Niles' book gives us a full biography of Doyle, from his roots as the son of a working-class builder to his rise as one of the most important architects of Portland. Doyle's career begins in the halls of the architects Whidden & Lewis, whose surviving buildings in the city most notably include CIty Hall. Here, young Doyle learned his trade through practical experience, ranging from drafting work to being the firm's go-for boy. Doyle was often sent to find particular builders for his employer, which in those days consisted of running from saloon to saloon until the desired contractor was located. Although architects were enjoying good business from the empire builders of the region's business and social elites, it was still more craft or trade than a profession, and Portland, for all its striving and grasping still had quite a rough edge to it.

With rather improvised and gritty roots, both Portland and Doyle "grew up together", as Niles puts it. Doyle quickly rose to become the primary architect in the city. Major landmarks of modern Portland -- such as the Meier & Frank Building or the Galleria or the Benson Hotel or the American Bank Building -- all were designed and built over the course of the first quarter of the century. Just as Portland was rapidly acquiring its gracious downtown, so too was architecture acquiring its professional veneer. Trained as an office boy, by the time that Doyle's career was winding down at mid-century he was frequently and inaccurately described (in his own lifetime!) as having received a degree in architecture at Columbia University. It is telling that towards the end of his life he did little to correct this misunderstanding, and in some cases actually helped to give it life.

Niles' biography of Doyle is more than a basic who-what-where formula. Contained in the narrative are many gems of the history of the city. One of the more amusing pictures that Niles paints relates to one o the first typists in Portland, whose talent was so exciting and new that she used to have an audience, noses pressed t the glass outside her window.

The biographies of professionals such as architects often stand in great danger of being dry, yet Niles manages to avoid this pitfall for the most part. We are often given generous portions of context on the world about Doyle at any given time, and indeed the book is entertaining reading for this fact alone. The writing is clear and readable, although I sometimes feel that Niles has spent too much time on some aspects of Doyle's life. As an example, his two trips to Europe feel overly long. Although a more than enjoyable read, I also feel a lack of any personality from Doyle: at no point does it feel like Niles "gets under the skin" of the architect. I freely admit, however, that this is too much to ask given the nature of the author's sources and the span of time between the book and Doyle's lifetime.

The book is softcover with inexpensive paper and straightforward production values, nesting within a slick and attractive cover. It feels nice to hold and thumb through, with just the right weight to make a long-term read flow. Supporting the text are numerous photos, primarily of buildings that Doyle designed. While these provide necessary additional information, they are rather small and basic in nature and I would have preferred more and larger images.

Overall, Beauty of the City provides an entertaining and valuable record of the development of some of the most visually important structures of downtown Portland. In addition, its early chapters give a good feel for the Edwardian era city. Anyone interested in the regions architecture or in the development of Portland's downtown would find this book an enjoyable and valuable addition to their library.

Beauty of the City: A. E. Doyle, Portland's Architect is available from Powell's, Amazon as well as directly from the publisher.

Review: Approaching Nowhere

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 01:50:00 +0000

Approaching Nowhere
Photography by Jeff Brouws with essays by William L. Fox and Jeff Brouws. W.W. Norton, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110; http://www.wwnorton.com/; 12.3 x 11.6 x 0.8 in; hardbound; 160 pages, 112 color photos, 1 illustration; $50.00

It is one of the fundamental facts of the 20th century that Americans came to live in their cars. Thanks to cheap gas, a government subsidized highway system, and what seemed like growth without natural limits, the roadside became the face of "modern" America. Much of this has become part of the country's romantic self-image. Big finned steel behemoths cruising small downtowns; throaty muscle cars roaring down stretches of two-lane tarmac in the boonies; drive through everything, from restaurants to coffee stands to banks to liquor stores. As the century ended, however, some of the gloss came off. Car culture always looked ahead, and thus never cared what it left behind it: neglected city centers, unwalkable suburbs, abandoned mom-and-pop retailers, and a cheap attitude of disposable mediocrity. In Approaching Nowhere (published by W. W. Norton in 2006), photographer Jeff Brouws turns his camera on this detritus, and shows us a lonely, haunting, melancholy world.

The book is first and foremost a photographer's monograph. All the images are Brouws', and tellingly at he end of the volume is a curriculum vitae -- one wonders if this isn't jumping the gun considering that Brouws is still very much alive and producing. The photos take up the over-whelming majority of the book, and are divided into three sections. The first, titled "The Highway Landscape", primarily consists of images of roadside America. This section contains the bulk of the photographs in the book. The second is titled "The Franchised Landscape", and concentrates on the corporatized strip-mall and drive through landscape. Lastly is "The Discarded Landscape", concentrating primarily on urban decay. Following the photo sections are two essays, the first by noted writer William L. Fox, and the second by Brouws himself. Both Fox and Brouws write about the American landscape and how the development of "freeway culture" has effected it. Brouws includes a page of footnotes for his essay, and then the aforementioned c.v. and some acknowledgements.

With no preamble, introduction, or preface, the book launches right from the title pages and into the images. One of the most haunting for me is one of the first, Plate 11, Exit 66 off I-80, near Little America, Wyoming, 1995. To the left is a lonely and empty stretch of freeway, dimly lit by alien sodium-vapor streetlights in their sickly metallic orange pall. Above them glow green US-DOT highway signs, while in the distance beyond is a murky, snow-covered landscape of nothingness. It is the blue hour, after twilight, and the sky still glows faintly. The scene is bleak, remote, empty, and yet there is something majestic about it.

This brings up a troubling point. Skimming through the book, or skipping ahead to the essays, (which appear at the back, after one has been deluged in the imagery,) it becomes clear that this work is a critical one in nature. Brouws seems to be holding up to us a mirror, showing us the world we have made for ourselves. A theme of vacancy runs throughout. Many photographers try and find the scenes that make a location unique, the sense of place, but Brouws has done the opposite, photographing the things that make every American place the same. Yet critical tone or not, some images -- like Plate 11 -- are in spite of this moving and beautiful. Not for the first time this brings up the conundrum: how can an artist can apply arts meant to bring visual harmony and pleasure -- composition -- to a scene in which he or she finds folly? That Brouws shows us beauty as well as folly is either a signal that he also has been unable to reconcile this contradiction, or that he finds beauty even in the things that trouble him.

One thing that stands out in this body of work is the lack of people. Not for the first time, Brouws has shown an Hopperesque aversion to the human form. Of the over 100 images in the volume, only eight show signs of humanity in the frame. While Brouws clearly has a point he is trying to convey, is this fair? Sure, all art is biased, but I wonder if the work is slighting the landscape just a little bit by skin-flintingly erasing the human form from it. Who amongst us could love a world unpeopled? We see empty diners, empty sidewalks, empty streets. It should be no wonder that we find the scenes soulless and a little bit scary: we're facing them alone.

The Hopper influence is especially strong with plates 127 and 137, the former of which much resembles Early Sunday Morning, and the latter of which seems to be recalling Approaching a City.

From the more technical side, Brouws likes to clip things off a lot. We see signs, cars, and (more rarely) body parts all clipped off and extended beyond the frame. He seems less interested in the place than the spaces between, often taking images of the voids than the forms that frame them. Most of the plates are richly colored, and when they aren't, they are full of vast tonal ranges of subtle colors; although I am a big fan of black-and-white imagery, I can't imagine any of these frames in monochrome. There's a film noir influence too, with lots of murky, moody night images, with the edges of the picture disappearing into shadow and black.

The overriding sensation of the images in Approaching Nowhere is a sense of void, of nothingness. The decay and the bleakness has a certain beauty at times, but little of it is memorable. Even the most striking images -- the night scenes -- are forgotten once the book is closed. In their place is a sensation, rather than a visual, that sticks in the mind. It's a kind of numbness. It is only then that it becomes evident: there is no single image that sums up Brouws' work in Approaching Nowhere, because there is no single portrait of a place within the book. Rather, the entire book is one single portrait of a nowhere-land -- the "nowhere" of the title.

The first of two essays in the back of the book is penned by William L. Fox. Fox gives us a brief and informative overview of the cultural geography of the book, as well as the photographic history of recording such landscapes.

Fox's essay is followed by a longer one written by Brouws himself. Brouws writes with a knowledge and take on the landscape that places him more into the realm of social critic or urban planner pundit than photographer. He says little or nothing about the image making process, and a lot about his motives or vision. His essay is erudite and moving, although he occasionally slips too far into academia: Brouws may be one of the few writers I know to use the word "simulacrum" in a work meant for general readers. (It means, essentially, a front or a visual fake).

I can't help but compare what Brouws writes here with David Plowden's comments about his photography, and his awe of great machines or great bridges. With Brouws, however, there is little inspiration, little awe and wonder. Instead there is a drive to document a bitter reality. I am reminded, however, of Plowden's reasons for quitting photography, his statement that the world he photographed is no longer there, and that this broke his heart. Perhaps Brouws' bitter determination is but a reflection of this world.

The book is large and square format, so it will be a real pain to fit it on any normal bookshelf. It's also just a tad uncomfortable to hold and flip through, making it more of a table book; this is disappointing, because my first instinct with these lonely images is to sit back and thimb through them in my lap, intimately. The upside of the size, however, is that you can truly get lost in the images, which for the most part are well reproduced. I do feel that some of the more subtle plates have a muddy look to them on closer inspection, but this is not to the point that it ruins the experience.

While I can't state that the volume is a definitive portrait of America at the Millennium, it is without doubt a significant building block of work in the same vein as the photography of Robert Adams or even some of David Plowden's grittier images, and a huge leap forward from Brouws' previous books. Anyone who is serious about photographing the American landscape would be strongly advised to become familiar with this book.

Approaching Nowhere is available from Amazon as well as Powell's Books.

Housekeeping Note

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 08:01:00 +0000

A quick thanks for a shout-out from RailPixCritic, a blog on railroad photography I had not yet encountered. I've added them to the links list to the left. He's got some interesting posts, I encourage anyone interested in railroad or transportation photography to check them out.

Review: The Call of Trains: Railroad Photographs by Jim Shaughnessy

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:27:00 +0000

The Call of Trains: Railroad Photographs by Jim Shaughnessy
Photographs by Jim Shaughnessy with text by Jeff Brouws. W. W. Norton, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110; http://www.wwnorton.com/; 12.1 x 10.9 x 1 in; hardbound; 224 pages, 323 duotone b/w photos, 1 illustration; $65.00

Sequels are always challenging projects to undertake. 2004 saw Jeff Brouws, erudite photography scholar and a photographer in his own right, bring us the definitive volume on the definitive railroad photographer, Richard Steinheimer. Brouws gave us a view of "Stein" through an academic's lens; the result was a book that redefined railroad photography. Now in 2008, Brouws has brought us a new book in the same format and with the same approach: The Call of Trains: Railroad Photographs by Jim Shaughnessy. The question is, does it work this time?

The natural pace of sequels inevitably sets up comparisons between this book and the previous book on "Stein". This may or may not be fair to Shaughnessy, as it seems to beg the question of "is Shaughnessy as good as Stein"? The comparison may be further heightened by the broad similarity between the titles as well: one wonders if Brouws could have found a title that didn't mimic that of the Stein book.

A better question may be, is Shaughnessy's work worth the same level of intellectual exploration as Steinheimer? Brouws certainly thinks so. He gives us a rather long essay (22 pages) about Shaughnessy, revealing to us his origins and vignettes of his development as a railroad photographer. Brouws attempts to take this further, with numerous side trips into the broader world of railroad photography. At one point, for example, he debates whether photographers such as Robert Frank or Walker Evans influenced railroad photography, but then notes that Shaughnessy was not influenced by them. Brouws also takes an extended textual detour to describe the "Milwaukee School", a term he has coined to describe the prevailing 20th century railroad photography style as popularized by the iconic TRAINS Magazine. Yet even here the feeling is that of trying too hard: can one really lump photojournalists like Ted Benson and Richard Steinheimmer into the same stylistic camp as traditionalists such as Phil Hastings or gimmick-artists like O. Winston Link? The result is an introduction that feels overly long and unfocused, as if Brouws wanted to write a piece on the development of railroad photography itself, rather than a coherent narrative about Shaughnessy.

Following the introduction comes the bulk of the book, the photographs themselves. Most of the photographs are printed one to a page with white margins, and in fact only one image is printed full bleed. Unlike Brouws' previous work on Steinheimer, all the plates are displayed against a white page. Few images are shown double truck, with a significant handful being presented across the gutter of the book and partway onto a second, mostly white page. Overall, most of the images laying across the gutter survive the experience.

The images that Brouws has selected greatly support portions of his "Milwaukee School" thesis from the introduction, being on average more conventional in nature and focusing more on documenting things and places over experiences. It is as if Brouws is holding up Shaugnessy as a pinnacle example of what was the mainstream railroad photography style of the 20th century. The book is also distinctively of its region: has Shaughnessy's style absorbed what it means to be in New England and upstate New York, or do those of us who call ourselves railroad photographers simply associate the region so much with his photos that the two are no longer separable?

The most memorable photographs in The Call of Trains are the images containing the people who lived with and made the railroads. An elderly station agent, his head as "old and weary" as his employer, the New York, Ontario and Western. A Nickel Plate Road man, about to hoop up orders to an oncoming train. A Boston and Maine laborer washing the windows of a classic streamlined diesel locomotive in the mid-fifties. Best of all of these, perhaps, is Plate 16, an image taken in 1961 in Watervliet, New York. It is dark, and a switchman of the Delware and Hudson Railroad, electric lantern in one hand, is throwing a switch in a yard, his body lit up presumably by the headlights of his train. It is crisp, and one can almost feel the chill misty air; it is a scene of everyday railroading that is as real today as it was when it was shot. Interestingly, Lucius Beebe was so attracted to the image that he used it on a book about the SP, intentionally misidentifying the railroad and location of the shot.

Interspersed with these human-centered photos are bucolic panoramas, gritty scenes of fading New England industry, and dramatic night scenes. Strangely, though, I find that one of the least typical images of the collection is the finest, Plate 64. The photograph is uncharacteristically stark for a Shaughnessy piece, with a plain sky, minimal scenery, and an empty foreground. We look straight on the side of a train, a single diesel locomotive hauling a single car down the track in late 1980s rural New York state. Little traffic, no people visible, no industry or life; if plate 16 had a timeless quality to it, plate 64 was one of the few images I have ever seen to have captured so well how much the railroad world had changed.

Following the plates, we are treated to a two page essay by the photographer himself. Shaughnessy recounts for us a series of memories, including an intriguing one of assembling a story on a day in a life of a hostler on the D&H in 1957 that strangely was never published, and an amusing anecdote about a railfan tradition, fun with rental cars. The stories are charming, and if any fault could be had with them, it's that there aren't enough of them. After Shaughnessy's too-brief afterward comes a series of extended captions for each of the plates in the book, and the final plate, plate 143.

Overall, the book that Brouws gives us is a valuable insight into a photographer who arguably represents the best of mainstream railroad photography from the last century. Although The Call of Trains could be faulted for over-ambition, the quality of both the content and the reproduction makes the book a standout. Anyone who is interested in the progress of railroad photography or who has an interest in the railroads of the New England region would be well served to purchase this book.

The Call of Trains: Railroad Photographs by Jim Shaughnessy will be released in November 2008, and will be available for purchase from Powell's Books as well as from Amazon.com.

Review: Here There Nowhere

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:50:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 21:12:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 05:31:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 02:14:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 07:54:00 +0000

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.

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 07:40:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 02:42:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 08:02:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (ABC) — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 19:53:00 +0000

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.