A few random photos from recent meanderings about town.

The Broadway Bridge one I just noticed as I was going back through my Memorial Coliseum sets. I took it on the fly from the top of one of the parking garages just north of the Coliseum. Those parking garages need to go, no matter how much money they bring in for the city, as part of any plan to revamp the lifeless Rose Quarter. Back in the day, not so very long ago, there was a nice block or two of retail frontages there along Broadway. Burying the garages and constructing some mixed-use buildings with street-level activity would go a long way towards restoring a sense of human scale to both that section of Broadway (especially with the Eastside Streetcar about to start construction) and the adjacent Rose Quarter. Do I think it is likely? No. I like that shot of the bridge, though. I wish it was more of a panorama because that view of downtown offers a nice sense of the lilliputian and fleeting grandeur of the city on a drowsy Spring day.





The class war poster below, glued to the side of one of the renovated warehouses along N Williams Ave, gave me the usual mixed feelings. On the one hand, I have my sympathies. And I appreciate the wheat-pasted gesture and its noise. (And that orange wall, isn't it beautiful?) The poster itself, on the other hand, seems almost like self-parody and reveals the out-of-touch irrelevancy of the left and most anarchists these days. Where is the sense of irreverent imagination that once gave anarchism its cultural moxie? I'd much rather gaze at one of Public Wondering's beautiful and intriguing posters because they always challenge me to slow down and take a look. No circle A's or ideological turgidity there. This kind of rote, regurgitated pablum just seems empty, and I doubt anyone is listening.