Category: Uncategorized

It wasn’t a whole lot, and it melted pretty quick, but… YAA-aaY!

 This one was taken from the porch in my stocking feet. …

 

Overlooking Highways 99 & 26 and the Willamette River.

 

This year was the best Thanksgiving in a LONG time. I spent it with the (newly wedded) Leddys (and family) in St. Helens. Apparently it is a family tradition to name the bird. This year, his name was “Mitt”.

…

This is son Jameson, presiding over the ceremonial Stuffing of the Mushrooms:

The calm before the carnage:

 

So I’m reading somewhere that the Pearl District in Portland has been named the 5th Hippest Neighborhood in America by Forbes Magazine. And OK… we’ve all been regaled with Steve Forbes’ stories about how He & Kurt ‘n’ Courtney used to hang out Back in The Day,  so we know that Forbes Magazine is the Final Arbiter of Hip, but let’s look at this a little more closely…

 

Now, while I do not profess to be an expert on the perennial question of “What is Hip?“, by my reckoning, the Pearl District doesn’t even seem to me to be the second hippest neighborhood in Portland! For example, both the Hawthorne/Tabor/Sunnyside and the Alberta Arts Districts strike me as having much more vibrant arts and club scenes but, of course, that could be just because artists and scenesters can afford to live there. I’m sure the Pearl District just has a Service Entrance somewhere…

Let’s see what the Forbes article has to say about the Pearl District:

Portland, Oregon’s Pearl District, which has been undergoing urban renewal since the 2000s, [and is] currently hosting MTV’s latest edition of “The Real World,” is No. 5 on our list thanks to its intense caffeination (it has the second-highest concentration of coffee shops of neighborhoods on our list)…

…

If you exclude Starbucks, I believe it drops to 8th…

[As] gentrification progresses, some hipsters are fleeing the rising costs of new high-rise condos and warehouse-to-loft conversions for the less established (and less pricey) Mississippi Ave and the Alberta Arts District neighborhoods. (Probably the MTV reality show doesn’t help either.)

There goes the neighborhood. Anyway… Let’s take a look at the methodology:

While what exactly qualifies someone as a hipster may be up for debate, to compile our list, we took a quantitative approach to determining the 20 places in which hipsterdom is most likely to flourish…

A “quantitative approach?” Do go on…

The San Francisco-based startup Nextdoor.com helped us dig through data on more than 250 neighborhoods in the biggest U.S. cities… [We] factored in Nextdoor’s Neighborhood “Hipness” Index, which is based on how often words associated with hipness (for example art, gallery…

designer, musician) appeared on each Nextdoor neighborhood’s site pages

And who IS this Nextdoor.com?

What can you do with Nextdoor?

It’s the easiest way for you and your neighbors to bring back a sense of community to your neighborhood.

Safety seemed to be a recurring motif. One bullet point was the following:

Of course safety doesn’t seem to be a problem in the Pearl District. For one thing, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen any of its inhabitants actually walking on the sidewalks. And the only individuals I’ve actually witnessed entering or leaving any buildings other than to enter a commercial establishment, is via one of the many garage doors that seem to populate the district– five of which could be viewed from just one street corner.

 
Bottom Right: A Pearl District resident evacuates without securing an armed escort.

I don’t mean to give the impression that it’s all bad. I think the best examples of this program of Urban Renewal is in the re-purposing of old industrial buildings…

Like this converted armory:

…which has enjoyed a much happier fate as an Arts Center than, say… the San Francisco Armory, which was finally leased by a film studio, specializing in… rough-trade “adult” films…

One possible definition of “hipness” (I was unable to locate Nextdoor.com’s “Hipness” index using a cursory Google search. Sorry…) is “forward thinking” (from avant garde, French for “advance guard), which would presumably include access to Public Transportation, which Portland has. The Pearl District is served by a streetcar line, which recently opened a loop serving NW Portland (another up and coming trend-setter neighborhood). One unsettling facet of this otherwise fine example of Urban Transport is the fact that all the stops in “The Pearl” seemed to have commercial sponsors, which are announced over the intercom at each stop. This corner…

…is sponsored by HOYT Pearl District Real Estate (for example). Seems there’s a lot of Real Estate marketing going on.

So, what sort of people will we find in The Pearl? It’s kind of hard to tell. Strangely enough for a residential district, the sidewalks seem to roll up after 6 p.m. And although its reputation is that of a hip place to live I don’t see many artists’ studios, and even Portland hipsters (I saw only one fitting that description in three photo expeditions there, pictured at right) didn’t seem to venture there. And, as I mentioned before, the only people I saw moving in or out of buildings seemed to be entering or exiting in vehicles through automatic garage doors.

 

Those (presumed) inhabitants I did see struck me as the offspring of some unholy miscegenation between yuppies and hipsters, which I dubbed yupsters— a name which I subsequently discovered to be hardly original (great minds thinking alike, or something…).

 

For the budding yupster, a job at Yankelovich means plane tickets to Coachella and no more worries about getting that root canal.

Above: Two views of the historic Blitz-Weinhard Brewery, converted to office and commercial spaces.

In the best cases, residences consisted of converted industrial buildings, real or imagined. Not sure which this one is:

But the worst case scenario usually involved blocks and blocks of identical pre-fab “contemporary” apartment buildings…

This eminently fashionable District features the sort of trendy, upscale chain stores one might expect to find in any similarly fashionable Districts elsewhere in the United States

I guess the long ‘n’ short of it is this: How can the Pearl District be one of the five hippest neighborhoods in the Country when it’s not even the second hippest neighborhood in the City of Portland? A lot has been made of the relative trendiness of Portland in the National Press, but the fact remains that the best thing about Portland is just…

..it’s just a very pleasant place to live! And, although I am not really a pet person myself, I’ve often noticed that the most livable places tend to be the most pet-friendly. And I’m not really sure that “The Pearl” really fits this description:

 

Poetry…

All lack of seriousness not withstanding, this is an actual petition to the President of the United States:

We petition the Obama Administration to:
say Hi to those of us who have demonstrated it is possible to successfully pass a petition for any reason whatsoever

Due to the recent proliferation of trite and silly petitions, it is hereby declared that yet another petition be submitted to the effect that a petition can be passed, and ratified with the requisite number of signatures, virtual or otherwise, for any, all– or even NO reason(s) whatsoever.
Created: Nov 14, 2012

“We” still need 29,000ish more signatures by December 14, 2012 to reach “our” goal of 25,000

See? Real!

Saw this little vignette in Director Square on Friday:

 

Saturday, after I was done working on my computer at the Bagdad Theatre Pub, I was planning on taking a quick trip back home to drop off my “office”, and then head back out to the Willamette River waterfront at the Powell Street (Ross Island) Bridge to take photos. But with the 102° heat, and a movie starting in an air-conditioned theatre right next to the bus stop, I decided to watch the movie (see previous article), and then maybe take some photos with the remaining daylight. But because there was no pedestrian access to the bridge, I snapped a couple of shots, and thought I’d try again on Sunday.

Which I did. This time I went downtown, and tried to catch to MAX to the South Waterfront. The MAX only took me a couple of stops to Portland State University, then I had to walk a quarter mile east to the not-quite-South waterfront, where I snapped a couple of photos, including this one where I was taking a photo of some kayakers on the other side of the river– and when I looked through my viewfinder I realized: Hey! It that a frickin’ submarine?

It’s the USS Blueback (SS-581), berthed at Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) on the East Bank of the Willamette River. It was the submarine that appeared as the USS Dallas in the movie Hunt for Red October. I then found a streetcar I didn’t even know existed which ran further south.

A few stops down, I realized the streetcar stopped at the South Waterfront campus of Oregon Health & Science University, the largest employer in the State of Oregon, and which operates a sky tram from this location up to the OHSU Hospital campus at the top of the hill.

At the hospital I snapped some photos of the view

 

and went downstairs to drink some coffee and relax in the “Fine Dining” cafeteria, before returning back down the hill. There I caught the streetcar back to the Portland State (PSU) campus, where I transferred to the MAX Clackamas Green line, making one last stop at the Lloyd Center Mall, and picked up some new underwear (which I can never seem to find in my size, but then again, who could be expected to carry Medium?) & plain white t-shirts. The mall isn’t bad (as malls go), and they even had this nice little ice skating rink for the kiddies..

 

And… I finally decided to bring my big adventure to a close, and wandered back to the MAX line to head home.

 

Portland’s weather forecast for Saturday was for the first 90 degree temperature of 2012. What I wasn’t prepared for was the initial blast of hot air that hit my face as I walked outside to catch the bus. As I found out later, the temperature reached 102°, hottest day in Portland in three years, and all-time record for the date. I decided, rather than go to my usual wireless & coffee destination, I would go to the Bagdad Theatre & Pub where I knew they had coffee, wireless AND air conditioning. I did my thang for a couple (3-4) hours or so, and decided to head back home, put my laptop away, and head back out toward the Willamette River waterfront to take some photographs of a couple of bridges south of my previous locations.

As I was waiting to take the bus back to my house, I looked at the marquee on the Bagdad Theatre

 
and saw two provocative titles, “Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter” and “Snow White and the Huntsman”

 

I had seen the ads for the Snow White flick, and wanted to see it, but didn’t have the spare change to see it when it came out a month ago. It was playing at 5:15, and my watch read 5:16, so I decided to pop inside to see if the movie had started already (sometimes they’ll show a reel of previews first), and also ask how much it would cost me. The guy wasn’t sure if it had started yet (it had, but just barely…) and it would only cost 3 bucks. I thought: I wanted to see the movie, it was only $3.00, I wouldn’t have to wait around– and there was Air Conditioning!
Kismet! (or something…)

Meh… The two best things about the movie were the air conditioning, and the 3 dollar admission. The movie began almost perfunctorily, with the exception of some gratuitous & derivative CGI F/X (like a mirror that melted into a being of reflective metallic goo, lifted from Terminator II)

 

I couldn’t help thinking they should have taken $50 our of the special effects budget and just gone ahead & hired a screenwriter. The dialog was purely cut ‘n’ paste, and the acting didn’t help matters. Charlize Theron (surely one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood) chewed the scenery as the Ravenna, the Wicked Queen. The guy that played the Huntsman looked a lot like a guy who just won second runner-up in a Brad Pitt look-alike contest.

 And I have absolutely NO idea who thought it would be a good idea to cast the actress (I forget her name) who played the ingénue in that Silly Teen Vampire Romance™ franchise. Setting aside the question of an utter lack of acting skills– the one scene where she took a bite of the poisoned apple, and all she had to do was lie there looking dead and beautiful— and she couldn’t pull that off! She seems to have a grand total of one facial expression– that of someone who just stepped into a pile of something that smells very very bad.

The movie didn’t get going until the Seven Dwarves made their appearance, providing some comic momentum, and actually featured the best acting in the whole flick (led by veteran actor, Bob Hoskins). And anytime thereafter, when the dwarves were not on screen, the movie dragged back into its accustomed torpor. It was actually an OK waste of time, again, especially considering the heat outside and the air conditioning inside. It was also the first movie I’ve gone to in 2012 (although I went to see The Met’s production of La Traviata on IMAX at the Lloyd Center in May).

Had a visit from my favorite peeps who came down from St. Helens to take Karen’s Mom (you remember Karen) to a doctor’s appointment.

And although the visit was short, it was really nice to see them again. After they dropped me off near Samaritan Hospital, I decided to jump off the streetcar in the Pearl District to take a few photos. First, I hiked a few blocks north to an industrial district which is evidently undergoing some rapid redevelopment.

 …

I took a shot of the Fremont Bridge, which carries Interstate 405 over the Willamette River

 

then I walked south through the Pearl District (forgot to take a picture of one of their fancy-schmanzy signs that say “Pearl District”– but this‘ll do…)

Then I went south to Director Park

 

and over to Pioneer Square, before catching the bus home.