A selection of some of the street art to be found currently on or around North Mississippi Ave.

PS: "honest" gets the Rose City Prolific Graffiti Award for the month of July. In fact, City Commissioner Randy Leonard will be personally presenting the award at City Hall this coming First Thursday.

Another grey summer morning. I'd chalk it up to the famed "June Gloom", except that it's July. Either way, it's a gentle way to begin a day, and this one turned sunny and glorious soon after my walk around the West End*.























*I actually think this Dwell piece is somewhat (typically) grating for a variety of reasons. Most frustrating to me is the misleadingly optimistic reference to the "derelict hotel" transformed into a "park". The Danmoore was a historic fabric building that should have been renovated rather than demolished and then replaced by a greedy church's private quasi-park. The demolition meant the loss of over a hundred units of subsidized housing for the not-so-up-and-coming people rendered invisible and expendable by this article, pandering away as it does to the trendy sensibilities of the disposable-income demographic that Dwell sells to its advertisers. I do think Kovel's renovation of the Skylab building is masterful, though, and --yeah-- I agree with his preference for "West End".
Just don't call it "SoBu", or I might have to kill you.

Yeah?

This has been some disconcerting weather. Last Friday, roaming around after Sam Adams' lecture at the Governor Hotel, I kept swearing to myself that it smelled just like October.

A few table shots from the patio at Rontoms the other night.
It's kinda pretty out there.

Oh shit, I guess I'm back now.



Aaah, anarcho-hipsters and their hyper-nuanced (well, ok, possibly unintentional) sense of irony... and on a nearby stretch of wall, I found a slightly less arch, but equally hip, statement:



To my annoyance, I recently read that City Commissioner Leonard is planning to go after the "growing epidemic" of graffiti. As much as I enjoy his unvarnished style, and believe his heart to be in the right place most of the time, I find it disheartening to hear him engaging in this sort of Giuliani-esque posturing. I seriously doubt that regulating spraypaint will put so much as a dent in the amount of graffiti in PDX. At least I hope not. Imagine our beautiful, vibrant, engaging, and ever-contested city with nothing but blank walls and advertising. Impossible.