Walking PDX ORE

I (we) spent a holiday weekend walking downtown Portland, Oregon. Most of the urban core area can be navigated on foot, with some help from the occasional buses and street cars. The central area is made up of blocks that are 200' x 200' with 60' wide street rights-of-way. Portland is not the Capital - that's Salem - but it is Oregon's largest city, with 585,000 people - about the same as Seattle. Still, it has solid local institutions, like the Portland Art Museum (now showing an excellent collection of Ellsworth Kelly prints) recently expanded into the Masons Hall next door, the Oregon History Museum (now showing a retrospective on architect Pietro Belluschi) and a handful of public and private colleges, like PCC, PSU, OHSU, U of P, and Lewis & Clark. 

Portland Art Museum

I walked much of the Pearl district, which was hosting their annual Labor Day arts and crafts fair. There's a great local arts scene especially in Chinatown and the Pearl District. My favorite spot in the city is undoubtedly Powell's Books, a huge and popular bookstore something like the Strand in NYC but way bigger. I was in a little piece of heaven.

The streetcar connects to a new district called the South Waterfront (http://www.southwaterfront.com/), a mini Vancouver, or to my eyes very much like San Francisco's King Street and Mission Bay areas. It was all new, mostly residential, glassy and middle class. In the South Waterfront we inquired about rental rates at one of the recently completed buildings. They were similar to many parts of San Francisco at $1799 for a 1BR and $2699 for a 2BR, monthly. Happily, we were assured that the building was "pet-friendly". Pet rent was an additional $40 per month for one and $70 for two, plus the initial $250 deposit. Parking was an additional $99 for one space or $150 for a tandem pair. The building was a rental not a condo, so there were no HOA fees. But it was designed as a condo, so it’s got a full set of amenities, should the inflated for-sale real estate market return.

South Waterfront District

Portland is a strange city. It refers to itself by its airport handle - PDX - with affection. It has a memorable series of bridges spanning the Willamette River. I loved the small size and scale of the city - with its tiny blocks you can walk through 4 districts in 20 minutes. Temperate weather (my favorite), pleasant and livable, but not too stimulating. Very white and very undiverse. The only less diverse American city is Salt Lake City! It has an eerie similarity to other unspectacular urban places of the American West, like Denver, San Jose, and Sacramento.

Nevertheless, Fall in the Northwest is beautiful, not quite stunningly arresting like fall in New England, but still endearing. On the rural route back to the city from Mt. Angel Abbey, we had yummy Burger Baskets at the Big Burger Drive-In (across the arterial from a McDonald’s), down the road from where we picked up fresh berries on the honor system from a farm stand. The food is wonderful and local, if not all nutritious.

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Busiest Weekend Ever

 

 

This weekend San Francisco had a perfect storm of public social activity. The San Francisco Giants and the Forty-Niners. Columbus Day parade. Castro Street Fair. America's Cup series racing. Fleet week with air show. Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival. There were over a dozen big public events in town. Plus all if the normal things that bring people to this city: temperate weather, nice tree-lined streets to walk along, coherent urbanism, interesting architecture, and dramatic hills topped with neighborhood parks. And the cultural stuff, like art museums, theatre and performing arts, mural-covered alleys, Coit Tower, Union Square.

 

From the Presidio to China Basin, the city's necklace of waterfront parks and promenades became an appropriated front yard for all of the activity. It's estimated that this city of 800,000 hosted an additional 1,000,000 visitors. They're calling it the busiest weekend in San Francisco history!

Reading For Fun, From Hersey To Hornby To Haring

I read very few books in junior high and high school. I didn't supplement this poor habit by reading magazines or newspapers either, except the comics, sports section, and occasional secondhand Sports Illustrated lent from my best friend Steve Baril, who had a subscription. I watched lots of television.

I got by with skimming and Master Plots, and still managed to be an A student in a small town public school system. Pleasure reading was not on my radar. The first book I ever read and enjoyed was A Bell For Adano, a book hand-selected for me from a list of required tomes in eleventh grade by the wise teacher Mr. D'Andrea. He presumed it would appeal to my Italian roots, and he was right. Of course it was also an acknowledged classic, winning the Pulitzer Prize for its author, John Hersey, in 1945. Thanks to Amazon, I was able to reread it last year.

 

This opened a window: reading could be pleasurable if it was something you were interested in. I read a series of sports books, including Bo Knows Bo by Bo Jackson and Drive by Larry Bird. And in the last few years more books on New England sports, Now I can Die In Peace, Moving the Chains, and Wicked Good Year. I recommend them all. Sports reading might not qualify as literature, but it's a start. And the gap is bridged with Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, about his relationship with London football squad Arsenal, the team that was my local while living in Islington 7 years ago.

 

 

My pleasure reading, or voluntary reading, didn't really resume until after college, when I found that reading helped me stay calm while riding the New York City subways during the rush hour commutes. I've been an avid book buyer and a moderate reader ever since.

I just finished reading Keith Haring's Journals, which took me over a year. I've finished a bunch of other books in the meantime. I was really savoring his meteoric life. Haring was one of the most prolific artists ever. He created a hybrid drawing-painting style that was marginalized by the serious museums by embraced but galleries, collectors, non-profits, hospitals, and pretty much anyone who needed a mural or has a good cause. It'd be fascinating to imagine how his work might have progressed had he not died of AIDS at age 31.

 

More Lichtenstein than Warhol, Haring bridged the gap between high and low art, between museum culture and street culture. But I think it was his embrace of commercial dissemination - his pop shops, t-shits, and general willingness to lend his art to massive commercial reproduction, that led to his work becoming part of the popular consciousness, and its related dispersal into the minds of suburban kids like me. His Journals opened an intimate window into his tumultuous decade of creativity, collaboration, production, hectic travel, sex, popular success, and relationship strife.

I've seen lots of his work over the years - mostly reproductions - but the one that stands out the most is the "Murale di Keith Haring," a building-sized mural he did in Pisa that I saw in 1994. Happily for me, the mural's creation is described in his Journals.