Un dimanche après-midi à l'Parc des Donnezsur

Hmmm. I think I wanted to take a moment from all the angst and provide a post with no meaning beyond the sensual;

That, and every so often I take a genuinely good picture; I just love this snapshot of our Overlook Park on a sunny Sunday.

For all our troubles and toil, the world is often a lovely place. It is unfortunate that we are often to harried and busy to stop and notice that. I hope you have a moment today to do so.

A look back from overhead

The photo below is of the neighborhood I live in taken from an Army Air Corps aircraft recording the conditions of the Willamette River channel and Swan Island in 1936.One of the things I get paid for is looking at these old photographs. I'm usually looking for evidence of past landslides, or long-lost grading. But this was pure indulgence, culled from the files of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers files during a long day of researching a nearby site.

Our little house is under the orange circle. Here's the same neighborhood today:Stop for a moment and compare the two images. That's okay, I'll wait a while.

The modern image is just what you'd expect; little brick (or in our case, wood) houses for you and me, right? That's my University Park neighborhood in a sentence, no different from any other urban Portland neighborhood. The big white-roofed building to the east? That's Astor Elementary, where the kiddos go to school. Go, Astor Eagles!

But look at the top image for a bit. Here; I'll give you a little bigger view of a portion of the southwest corner of the same photo:Our house (built only about fourteen years before the photo was flown) is still under the orange circle. We understand that the little building at the corner to the west was some sort of mom-and-pop corner store, selling Coke in bottles, and penny soap to the good working-class folks of Depression-era North Portland. And note a couple of other things; the big pale farm fields down a block to the west, with some sort of long white barn or shed along McKenna Street at the southeast corner. And notice all the little footpaths and tracks that meander through the center of the blocks; in a lot of ways this part of NoPo was still pretty rural in '36 - rural enough for folks to follow the old cowpaths rather than stay on the sidewalks.

OK, now here's an enlargement of the next Corps photo flown, from 1940:One thing I picked out here was the garage - that's inside the orange box. See it? The thing is, Portland City code requires you have a garage. No shit. Seriously. If you park your car on the street more than 48 hours you can be cited for something called "in lieu of garage" and that's a fineable offense.

Really.

So back in the day all Portland houses had garages. Ours did. But at some point prior to the 1960's the thing either burnt or rotted away and fell over. I've found bits of it under the backyard sod. But there it is in 1940, keeping the summer sun off someone's 1938 Ford Twodoor.

Here's the larger 1940 image. One thing - look at the color of the streets. See how dark they are? Now look back at 1936. See the difference?The thing is that the 1936 sidewalks look about the same color as the streets, and the streets themselves look too regular to be unpaved. See that curvy line above the farm field in both 1936 and 1940? That's N. Yale Street between McKenna and Wall, dirt then and dirt now. But the regular street grid looks paved - just not paved with asphalt. Y'know what I think happened?

I think the streets were paved in the late Teens and Twenties (when this portion of U-Park was first really developed) with concrete.That's surprisingly common for Portland; in many of the older neighborhoods in the inner East side you can still find some of those old concrete pavements exposed. But they're brittle, and usually end up covered with asphalt before too long. I think by 1940 the City had decided that they weren't going to pay for any more concrete and laid down the macadam on top.The funny thing is that when I started doing this sort of overhead window-peeping in the early Nineties there really wasn't any other way to do it; the information was either in the files at places like the Corps or proprietary to private aerial photo companies. But Google Earth and similar applications have changed all that dramatically. The image above is a larger-scale view of my home from GE, circa 1952.

Note that you can barely see Astor School, the larger H-shaped dark block east of the circle that marks our house, but the long arc of Mock's (or Waud's) Bluff, the steep cut bank of the old meander of the Willamette River that encloses Swan Island is easily seen.In the old photo you can see the "island" - the rectangular peninsula that projects up to the northwest. This had been used as Portland's airport in the earlies, and was just then beginning to be developed as the industrial area it is today - here it is in 1925, probably not long after Lindbergh visited.Note that in the aerial photo the Union Pacific line running towards the long tunnel under North Portland is still an embankment surrounded by wetlands. And here is the same view today;A little busier, isn't it?

The wetlands are gone, the swans are gone, the concrete streets are gone, the old farm fields, the cowpaths, the garages...all gone but where they remain crystallized forever in silver salts and black.

Потерянный мир

This is Pinkhus Karlinskii, the supervisor of the Chernigov floodgate, who was 84 years old in 1909, which would make him 187 years old today.He lived and worked the width of Asia away from these unfortunateslocked in their zindan, a hole in the ground with a door and a adobe roof over it, described as a "traditional Central Asian prison" in the Library of Congress website devoted to the work of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who roamed pre-Revolutionary Russia in the first decade of the Twentieth Century.And none of them were aware of these people, a family-mining operation in the Urals.

Fascinating, lovely images more than a hundred years old, of a place and a time as unrecognizable and vanished as the dark side of the Moon. And yet, the same roof in Bukhara probably still roosts the same stork, or another so like it that the picture might have been taken yesterday rather than one hundred and three years ago.Lovely, fascinating exhibit; well worth a moment to look.

(h/t to Ed at Gin and Tacos for the link...)

Save the date

Barbie and Ken's wedding album.Perfect.



Worth a moment or two to enjoy the absurdity.And, Jesus, Ken, what? You can't wait for the wedding night at the Dream House? The least you could do is keep your hand off the poor woman's ass in public. You horndog; if I didn't know you weren't anatomically correct...



(h/t to Glamour mag for the sense of humor...)

The Sex Goddess' Thumb

While researching the preceding post (on the Battle of Chipyong-ni, 1951), I spent some time scrounging the Internets for illustrations. While doing that I found this, a snapshot taken of the three-day USO tour Marilyn Monroe did in February, 1954.As I was looking over the picture (and, quite unexpectedly, oogling La Monroe in a sadly goatish fashion of a man of my age and weight) I noticed an odd little thing.

Her right thumb is bandaged.

Enlarge the picture and look for it. See it?

I don't know why that struck me as so odd and interesting. Possibly because I'm accustomed to the current seamless ability of the entertainment industry to make boo-boos like that disappear. Have you ever seen a current star, or even a starlet, with band-aids, bruises, bad hair (seen outside of the paparazzi sections of the checkstand rags, I mean)?

I was fascinated. What had happened? Fight with new hubby Joltin' Joe? Slipped on a microphone cable? So I went back to the 'Net, and...

Turns out that the Sex Goddess of the Fifties was cutting a cake for some soldiers when the knife slipped and she cut herself, quite badly, by the look of it.But no matter - the show went on and, apparently, went like free beer. Both the troopers, and the star, loved each other. It's kind of a nice story.

And Heaven knows if anyone needed a nice story it was Norma Jean, whose short life contains entirely too much unhappy drama.Nothing deeper than that; just a tiny bit of trivia for a Thursday evening.

Dance for joy

I've never really "gotten" dance the way I get music or drama or film. Stories told by Terpsichore have just never worked for me. And, yes, the "Nutcracker" is very pretty, yes, thank you. I do have a four-year-old who loves princesses and ballerinas.So while I don't get the princessy part what I do get is the dancer as athlete. Which is why I wanted to repost this photograph of the dancer Naiomi Goldberg's battered feet.

Often the price of knowing the truth, or attaining beauty, or achieving mastery in anything, is pain.

And often the pain must be given freely for to attain the true mastery, the true beauty, the requisite suffering must be a gift that does not count the cost.

(h/t to Kevin Rolly, whose image this is)