Trying to get in the face of the bourgeoisie, perhaps. If so, the odd thing is both graffiti are in the extreme north end of the Pearl District, the part that’s only incompletely gentrified, and both are on still-ungentrified warehouses.
If the goal is to get in others’ face with a message (which is pretty much the whole point of political graffiti), one would have expected to see some (more, even) similar messages in the gentrified parts of the Pearl. Yet I didn’t notice any.
Perhaps it already got effaced there, and only lingers in the still-gritty parts of that neighborhood. Or perhaps the graffitists started on those warehouses, and got caught when they tried to paint further south; the gentrified areas also tend to be busier at all hours. Or maybe it’s someone trying to make young anarchists look like evil lawless destroyers of property in establishment eyes. Anyone can paint a circle-A, after all.
My favorite Warner Brothers cartoon is in the public domain and freely available on the Internet.
As I was leaving the dentist’s, the vintage brass letter box in the building lobby caught my attention, so I whipped out the new Panasonic DMC-LX3 that’s become my carry-everywhere camera and took a picture of it using available light (I generally dislike flash).
I noticed I was only getting 1/8th of a second, which I thought was pushing the envelope a little even with image stabilization. So I removed the ASA 200 limit I normally have configured and reshot the image, resulting in 1/15th at ASA 400. Actually, I shot the image several times at both settings, trying to minimize camera shake as much as possible.
This evening, I picked the best of both the ASA 200 and ASA 400 shots, then looked at 100% crops of each, and was a little surprised. Camera shake or no, the picture shot at 1/8th was definitely better quality. What benefits less camera shake had were swamped by the greater noise at the more sensitive setting:
100% crop at ASA 400
100% crop at ASA 200
So with my ability to hold a camera steady, slower and less noisy is definitely better at this light level. It also makes me pleased with my decision to buy the DMC-LX3, as its Leica-designed f/2.0 lens (pretty much the fastest lens in a compact digicam) allowed that image to be shot at the lower sensitivity setting. (Maybe I’m wrong, but I highly doubt I could have handheld that shot at 1/4 of a second.)
Crappy lenses, in fact, were part of the reason I didn’t rush to replace my old Canon Powershot A80 when it bit the dust several years ago. (And so far as SLR cameras goes, I’m still a hard-core film holdout.)
Well, I’m going slightly out on a limb, because I haven’t listened to them recently, but based on their level of sycophancy to the criminally negligent state and local governments in Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina, it’s pretty obvious what their general attitude towards the incoming administration will be.
Coming Home
I’ve never seen the move I made back to Portland to take the job I currently have as a long-term one. Being able to be outdoors in the natural world is just too important to me to live in a place where my allergies dictate I spend an entire month or two indoors. Especially since that month is the very time of year in which the plant world is at its most active.
If it wasn’t for that, I’d simply love Portland, and would be happy to settle down. After all, when I had been unaware of how bad the grass pollen can get here, I had decided to move here, after having lived in Seattle (too dysfunctional) and the Bay Area (too big and not enough seasonal variation).
At the same time, I do know that my home is the Pacific Coast between northernmost California and Southeast Alaska. I’ve known that ever since I described the kind of place I’d like to live in to another student in my college years, and he suggested the Pacific Northwest to me. I was right, even though I had never been here at the time.
I also really enjoy living in immediate surroundings much like where my current home is. Every time I’m heading back home on my bicycle, I look up as I’m heading up Raleigh St. towards the West Hills. There’s a hillside full of trophy homes of the rich, then to its right and behind it, a wild hillside, full of trees. I live at the base of that wild hill, on the edge of the urban and the rural.
Suburbia? Not quite. The wildness is a large public park, and it adjoins some of Portland’s older inner-city neighborhoods. I live in an apartment, not a detached single-family house. I’m under three miles from my job in the downtown core, and I can live without having to rely on a nature-destroying private automobile for my daily mobility.
That’s also good for my own personal well-being. I don’t have to cope with the stress of daily driving in urban-area traffic. The local wind pattern tends to come from the nearby forested canyon, so the air I breathe at home as fewer urban pollutants in it. Probably as a result, I get ill significantly less often now. During summer heat waves, it is usually dramatically cooler here, thanks to those same canyon breezes.
It’s the first time I’ve ever lived in a home that’s more than just another place. When I see that wild hill appear above the city around me, I know I’m coming home.
Which all just makes it that much harder when the pollen from the grass seed farms — growing a product that caters to overconsuming suburbanites aping a fashion trend first set by the oppressor class in feudal England — confines me to a sealed, air-conditioned apartment.
So it’s not home. Not really. It’s more an exercise in verifying some aspects of what a place to genuinely call home would be like.
Interesting how that graffitist deliberately avoided painting over the load ratings on that boxcar. Or maybe s/he didn’t; note the piece of reflective tape affixed over the letter i. It’s obviously seen attention since it was painted. Perhaps the same railroad workers that applied the tape also cleaned the paint off the ratings figures. Then again, probably not: notice how the left stem of the initial F overlaps a bit of the 6. That kind of compromise in favor of the graffito would not have been made by those cleaning it off.
It’s a picture that I could have never taken with my earlier compact digicam, which had too much delay between pushing the button and tripping the shutter to be able to photograph moving subjects. (I took that shot at a railroad crossing as the train went past.)
Although it will never surpass an SLR, my newly-bought Panasonic DMC-LX3 makes it clear just how much difference there is between today’s high-end compact digicam and the mid-range ones of six years ago. Every aspect of it blows what my deceased PowerShot A80 could do out of the water. And it’s almost always with me, so I’ve ended up using it an awful lot because my schedule doesn’t leave much time for dedicated photography.
Now I just need to make that time to spend with my mostly used Pentax film equipment which has a simply incredible ability to capture quality images in relation to its price. I’m sure that will happen as spring comes and the plants awaken.
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