Home Again

Anonymous, One of the many jets, 1970  [via]

A little break is needed in my attempt to make up for blogging ineptitude the first seven months of this year. Until next week.

A Sneak Peek at Chris Toalson's Postcard Collective Challenge

Hopefully this task will be completed over Winter Break. Details upon completion of all ten prompts.

Westward Ho

Columbia Memorial Hospital Offices, Astoria, OR


Mississippi Street, Portland, OR


Surprising Jeannette the day before her birthday at my old job... (with Porter & Ruby), Washington State University Vancouver, Vancouver, WA


Officially in the NW at the 14th Street Coffee House, Astoria, OR


Twice a year hot chocolate at the 14th Street Coffee House, Astoria, OR


Do I ever love the lobby at the Commodore Hotel, Astoria, OR


Another Marilyn Monroe for good measure, Astoria, OR


The walk of doom... sinkholes, fires and voids, Astoria, OR


A cat photo! MC (Moon Child), Astoria, OR


My bicycle as carcass, YMCA, Astoria, OR


View from the Cannery Pier Hotel of the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean, Astoria, OR


The imposing Astoria Megler Bridge the day before the Great Columbia River Crossing, Astoria, OR


Damn that bridge is far away, Dismal Nitch, WA


My cousin Donna, sister in law Shauna and moi at Dismal Nitch, WA minutes before the walk at sunrise (!)


Crossing into Oregon from Washington over the Columbia River


View of Astoria, OR from the highest point of the Astoria Megler Bridge


View from the top of the Astoria Megler Bridge looking back into Washington


Nearing the end (1 mile to go), Astoria, OR


Hungry? YES! Blue Scorcher after the 6.2 mile crossing, Astoria, OR

Heading Home

Garry Winogrand, Los Angeles, 1964

First time in Portland in September in five years. Until next week...

One of the Other Things I Miss about Portland: Part 2

The last two Septembers in Portland also featured watching the Vaux Swifts roost in the Chapman Elementary School chimney with the Altmans. Thousands and thousands of birds would circle the school yard and slowly drop into the chimney until they were all inside. Sometimes hawks would swoop inside the swarm and steal a swift away. That was usually met with gasps and boos from the audience below that gathered on blankets to watch them. Sometimes nothing is as beautiful as flocks of birds in flight.



Marc Silver, There are No Others, There is Only Us


Catherine Ulitsky, Hadley Starlings Flock #9, 2006

From Robert Adams: “There are so many astonishing encounters with mystery. I remember one foggy October evening, just after we had moved to Oregon, when we were sitting in the living room and Kerstin looked up from her reading and asked if I’d heard something. I hadn’t. I listened and still couldn’t be sure. She said is seemed to be coming from outside, so we opened the front door and went onto the porch, out into dense, dimly glowing fog. The sounds, we came to realize, were the voices of small birds migrating south over the hilltop on which we live, just out of sight up in the fog. They were perhaps no more than thirty of forty feet above us, but completely invisible. Their passage went on for a long time. How many thousands of birds must there have been? We never saw any of them but we could almost touch them. It was an event from which Charles Burchfield would have made a painting.”

One of the Things I Miss about Portland: Part 1

As September rolls to a close... for two years in a row, Alexis and I (along with her son Justice) walked with the elephants from their last performance at the circus in the Rose Garden at dusk as far as we could to the train that would take them away to the next city. There was something magical about strolling alongside of these animals as they held each other trunk to tail kicking up the dust that surrounded us. When I encountered Bruce Davidson's photographs earlier this year, I knew they had to memorialize this event that was so special to do my last two Septembers in Portland. These images are for that memory that unfortunately seems like so long ago.


Bruce Davidson, Clyde Beatty Circus, 1958


Bruce Davidson, Clyde Beatty Circus, 1958


Bruce Davidson, Clyde Beatty Circus, 1958


Bruce Davidson, Ringling Bros Circus, 1965
[This image above most reminds me of our experience given that we were walking with the elephants under the interstate. No one was riding them though.]


Bruce Davidson, Ringling Bros. Circus, 1965

VB Assignment: Braydee's Key

VB Assignment: The every single factor ... in the manner of Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari... Photograph every doughnut and swimming pool I see and try Braydee’s key at every place I am staying.

My quest to find home in California with Braydee's key ended in failure (as most things I tried last month were bound to do).* Before the trip, I thought about sending her key off in a grand fashion - hurling it into the sea or building it a small styrofoam pie to float away in the Pacific. None of these options were appropriate (if it had been my key that would have been a different story). It returned to Muncie and its rightful owner after residing on my kitchen table for a week. The best part of its tour of the Pacific coast is that it gave me several ideas on how to contend with the ring of keys I recently found from the house on Stewart Island that my family no longer owns. Throw that into the growing pile of what to work on this fall.


San Marcos, California


Los Angeles, California


San Luis Obispo, California


Monterey, California

*Failure to find home, failure to meet Ed Ruscha, and failure to find a keyhole any size that would hold Braydee's into place just for the photograph.



This image is not part of the sequence though I should have brought the flash... a low light/shallow depth of field photograph of how I left it on Braydee's front porch two days ago. Ironically, the key didn't even come close to fitting in her lock so I failed at taking the photograph of it not resting in my hand.

YMCA Untouched Round 3: May 2011

A rare documentary moment.... 2008 and 2009 as previously viewed in this post. I avoided home in 2010 and chose to wander around the country floating fake cakes instead. I didn't have a tripod this year so there are far more details than environmental views.


Father's Day card from Javy & Jacinda, c. 1982

My old bed frame for sale in the gym (previous owner was Aunt Eleanor)

Boise State is the missing pennant.





The red and green towels I bought at Macy's in Tucson, Arizona in 1998.


The scale that was in every house where I grew up. It was the last scale I intentionally stepped about 20 years ago.

Piles and the painting that once hung above the sink in Dad's studio.

The mannequin on the right was one of the very first images that I ever photographed in my Intro to Photo class at Boise State (in the front seat of the Studebaker truck).





My old pillow (and the very first photograph in the Wunderkammer.)

Thoughts on Trees, Clear-cut, Devastation

[All quotes & the first two images are from Along Some Rivers: Photographs and Conversation by Robert Adams]

“Trees smell good, feel good, sound good, and look good. And as if that weren’t enough, they point beyond themselves.”

“What we’re after is what the writer Frank Waters said he found at his home in the Sangre de Cristo mountains north of Taos. ‘There,’ he wrote, ‘I have a speaking acquaintance with the trees.’”



“Human beings and trees share some qualities. One quality that we do not share with trees, however, is our periodic inclination to gratuitous killing. Witness what we do to trees.”




“When I’m photographing in clear-cuts, I know what has brought me there is a sense of the world coming apart. But after I’ve been there long enough to get over my shock at the violence, after I’ve been working an hour or two and am absorbed in the structure of things as they appear in the finder, I’m not thinking only about the disaster. I’m discovering things in sunlight. You can stand in the most hopeless place and if it’s in daylight you can experience moments that are right, that are whole."

"That’s not to say that working in clear-cuts has been easy. So much effort has had to go to trying not to do certain things. Not to use the sky, on those rare occasion where there is one here in the Northwest, to rescue the land. Not to be seduced into celebrating the power of man and machines, which can have a Satanic beauty and the heroism about it. And not to aestheticize the carnage.”

****

One of my favorite trees died in the winter storm of 2007. It was a Sitka Spruce, 700 years old, 206 feet tall, and it snapped 75' from the ground during a horrible windstrom. The "new" largest Sitka Spruce is 144' tall and is located in Cape Meares. On my second to last visit home (eight months after the giant windstorm), my brother and I walked to the Cathedral tree and were amazed at how many trees were knocked down in what was once dense forest. It managed to survive but took a beating in the process.



When returning home, I often think of the similarities and the differences between "harvesting" and natural destruction. They are both tragic yet a windstorm is infinitely more acceptable. Last month, the standard 10-20 feet of trees that usually remain alongside of Highway 30 to disguise the clear-cut were gone. I saw towns I was never able to see because the facade was missing. Longview, Washington, home of paper mills & logging yards where trees, in their stripped from the land form, are piled onto ships heading to the Far East, looked like it had reached capacity & had spread along the shores of the Columbia River in areas more vast than I remembered. It's startling how many aspects of home are about loss. This is the only thing I do not miss about moving from the NW.

New Town, New Piles

The story of my week (after Round 1):


YMCA


Burn Pile


Astoria Dump


Final after the first round to be retrieved in the not so far future.