Seattle In Pastel Tones

Tags

Fall Season, Kerry Park, Seattle, Seattle World's Fair, Space Needle, Upper Queen Anne, Washington State

The Space Needle At Fifty – Kerry Park – 259 West Highland Drive – Seattle, WA

I don’t have much commentary about this image as it is another quick generic snapshot and was taken with the same general purpose as the Seattle As Fall Begins posting. However the image in this case is quite good as it captures that unique feeling of nostalgia and transition I feel at the onset of the fall season.

Kerry Park, where this image was taken, is my “go to” spot when I am being rather lazy about finding subjects or I know, from experience, when the light will be perfect. On this night it was beautiful with a thick pastel feeling. The park is quite small and the cameras are often lined up from one end of the viewpoint to the other with iPhones and Canon DSLRs being the most common types on this evening.

While I am shooting, people often approach me take a few snaps of them with the Seattle skyline in the background. There is something very human about this desire to have a visual record and I always take the time to accommodate these requests for a couple of cave paintings. Quite often we do not speak the same language so this small courtesy is accomplished with a few finger points and head nods. I have actually been at park when I was the only English speaker out of 25 or 30 people. If a park can be an international rock star this place makes the cut for that glory.

I have never figured out why I get picked out to take these snapshots but I suspect it is because I have fairly nice equipment and somehow manage to project that I have a clue how to use it. Then again, maybe, because I make eye contact and say hello as people pass by me they feel comfortable asking, pointing, or grunting at me to take their picture.

The top of the Space Needle, to honor the 50th Anniversary of Seattle’s 1962 World’s Fair, was painted in the original orange color. I don’t recall it ever being that color over the decades but memories are frail about such details. When I first saw it after being painted, I thought “Wow, road barrel orange – how special.” Some months later I have changed my mind completely and have come to realize it is a perfect color for the late afternoon sun, especially at the beginning of Fall. Then again maybe I waxing nostalgic for orange toned shag carpet that were so common at the time. That is a scary idea if true as it can only be interpreted as me being consumed with full-blown dementia.

For somebody that didn’t have much to say, I somehow managed to say something even if it is about nothing in particular.

Copyright 2012 By Katherine Johnson – All Rights Reserved

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Seattle As Fall Begins

Tags

Alki Beach, Cityscape, Fall, Seattle, Washington State, West Seattle

Seattle From Alki Beach – West Seattle – Seattle, WA

Yesterday was a spectacular fall day here in Seattle with perfect summer temperatures during the day that quickly cool at dusk while the sunlight, a gorgeous saturated yellow, pulls feelings of nostalgia from my deepest memories about new clothes, pencils and 4th grade. There has been quietness in the city for the last several weeks as our visitors have returned home, while us who live here are now focused on life closer to home. The quiet makes me feel lonely, lonelier than I do most of time.

Seattle, being a very picturesque city, has numerous locations that make for perfect postcards pictures. The accompanying image of the Seattle, shot looking east from Alki Beach in West Seattle, is one the more classic shots. To be clear the location is a classic shot; this image is anything but classic.

On far left is lower Queen Anne and the Space Needle capped in the orange color it sported 50 years ago while immediately to the right is Belltown defined by its low buildings. Moving right again, the core downtown area begins and continues rising until the black monolith that is the Columbia Tower is reached. The core downtown area ends abruptly with Smith Tower and its peaked roof. Today it looks overwhelmed by the modern buildings, however in 1915 the Smith Tower was the tallest building west of the Mississippi River. In the foreground is Elliot Bay our gateway to world.

Though I tend to stay away from the postcard shots most of time on occasion I will post one. I think it a courtesy to you, my readers, to share some of these places to help you appreciate the larger landscapes that define this area. This notion is particularly true for me when the city was as beautiful as it was yesterday. Somehow doing this makes me feel less lonely.

Copyright 2012 By Katherine Johnson – All Rights Reserved

Tank Farm

Tags

Aesthetics, Functionality, Grant County, Industrial Sites, Tank Farm, Washington State

Dodson Road South Tank Farm – Dodson South Road – Grant County, WA

Purpose expectation often drives how we perceive and evaluate the objects that fill up our lives.

For example, I find that I immediately accept public sculptures as art and once that threshold is reached I then judge them from a refined aesthetic point of view.

In the case of abstract sculptures this often rises to the level of such commentary as “wow, that is butt ugly.” For statues of public figures I often find that I drop all pretext of aesthetic judgement and go right to things like “why on earth did we erect a statue to him? He was nothing but a friggin’ pompous crook.”

For the most part I cease to consider if these sculptures have functional aspects, and if they do, how well they work. Pigeons, on the other hand, are keen judges of the functional aspects of public art and are well-known to heap layer upon layer of commentary on the statues for all to see. What is not clear to me is if these evaluations are positive or negative in nature.

For more personal objects, such as cars, jewelry, or iPhones (these I view as being a modern version of the fire water traders used to destroy the locals in the 19th century), we have a much more balanced sensibilities between the aesthetic and functional.

I find jewelry a fascinating example of these judgement axes. A quick route to understanding how valuable jewelry’s aesthetics are to people is to visit a great museum and have one’s breath taken by an object’s beauty that is several thousand years old. In that beauty I see some universal human traits such as a desire to establish social status through public displays of wealth and exclusivity. I also see a universal trait of men to behave badly and then be willing to do just about anything to get out of the doghouse.

Industrial places or equipment are primarily evaluated along the functional axis only with the aesthetics being defined in a withered dimension; they are valuable only as long as they produce the materials we use to create the aesthetic places and objects in our lives.

An open-pit mine is a giant hole in the ground except when you spent your life working in them. In that latter situation a person, who has spent big portion of his or her’s life (mostly his’ are found here) down in them has seen those moments when the light transforms the cut earth into striations of reveled color. The rest of us pretty much go, “Yuck, its looks like a muddy mess. Let’s go have lunch at that place by the statues in the park and later we can go shopping for some jewelry. That sounds like fun, doesn’t it dear?”

Copyright 2012 By Katherine Johnson – All Rights Reserved

Wind Power

Tags

Economic Change, Kittitas County, Taylor Bridge Fire, Washington State, Wind Farm, Wind Turbines

Horizon Energy Wind Farm Turbines – Near Highway 97 & Bettas Road – Kittitas County, WA

Note that the ground in this image is brunt over. In fact, this spot and another 36 square miles was ablaze for nearly the entire month of August. Known as the Taylor Bridge Fire, it raged from the deepest canyons, then up a couple of thousand feet over these ridge tops and then down into the canyons again.

Over and over it went, and in the process it wiped around 100 homes and out buildings. When I drove through, less than a week after the fire was contained, the ground, the air, and one’s senses were filled with visions of blackened land, the smell of fire gone cold, and how randomly the fire changed lives and the land.

The Pacific winds blow over the Cascade Mountains and nearly incessantly across these ridge tops in Kittitas County. From this point heading east to the Vantage Gorge on the Columbia River, some 40 miles away, all the major ridge tops are filling up with wind turbines.

My relationship with the land is rather complicated and some days I find myself despising these towers because they have permanently destroyed the pristine horizon between the land and the sky; a line I value you greatly. Then there are days where I find myself up in the horizon, my senses filled with the smell of a fire once goaded by those Pacific winds, but now pushing the clouds and light around to revel the slender, cylindrical beauty of these towers.

In a very odd way this same conflicted emotion, reveled here by the winds and the turbines, also shows up when I am in small town and I find myself needing a new pair of reading glasses at 9:00 AM on a Sunday morning. It is then I am damn glad that Wal-Mart came to town and just as depressed by the burned out businesses I drive by to get there, destroyed by economic winds no less powerful than those Pacific winds that pushed fire across the land.

2012.09.18 Update:

A new fire erupted today in the general area where this photograph was taken and from the early reports the Taylor Mountain fire could be good sized. The chances of it running for an entire month are not as great as the Taylor Bridge fire because the Pacific Northwest weather is beginning to transition to the wetter fall season. The poor people that live along Highway 97 between Ellensburg and Cle Elum are having a summer of devastation.

Copyright 2012 By Katherine Johnson – All Rights Reserved

September 11, 2012

Tags

9/11, Blaine, Washington State

A Quiet Resolve 10 Years On (September 11, 2011) – 1240 Peace Portal Drive – Blaine, WA

A Meditation on Lightness and Darkness

Thursday, May 5, 2011

I came across this passage the day after hearing that Osama bin Laden had been executed in a rather spectacular commando raid:

“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Since then I been mulling over why I had such a visceral and negative reaction to it. At last, I am now able to express, just a portion, of why this quote made me feel that my sense of what is fair and just was being smugly dismissed. Let’s be clear: I am damn satisfied, even glad, that bin Laden was finally executed after a 10 year manhunt.

I don’t like anything about this passage, not even the commas, because it implies that my anger over September 11, 2001 is a blood lust. I would much prefer that bin Laden was still alive because that would mean 3000 people would not have been crushed to death, burned alive, or slammed head first into a sidewalk after leaping to their death hundreds of feet below. We can only imagine the terror they all felt while waiting, knowing, that the light of their lives was about to extinguished and be forever made dark.

I don’t rejoice, not even for a moment, about any of this but I am damn relieved he was executed for his actions. Some acts are so evil that they must be challenged without exception. If this is seen as retribution, so be it. Further, I certainly cannot let stand without challenge the implication, that because of my sense of satisfaction that I am somehow metaphorically, adding to the darkness and subtracting from the light. This clearly lumps me in with him, an assertion that is utterly and profoundly absurd. I reject this notion in the strongest terms possible.

To use another tired metaphor, fire, full of violence and destruction, is also cleansing. I only need to point to the total destruction of Europe in World War II. That was one of the darkest periods in human history and the violence of total war cleansed the world of one of the blackest and purest sources of evil ever to exist. If you doubt this assertion even for a moment, I would ask you to find the nearest person of European Jewish decent and go give him or her a hug. If Hitler had not been challenged you would not be able to do that. Further, unless willful denial is in play, I fail to see how anyone could assert that a healthy dose of anger, and yes, even hatred, was not a necessary component of the effort that preserved Europe for its current bright and free existence. The alternative world where Hitler would have prevailed is beyond grim.

Sometimes violence serves a moral and just purpose and is not simply returning hate for hate’s sake. Now, tell me, where do lightness and darkness, hatred and love, war and peace, begin and end? It should be obvious that fire can drive out darkness when yielded carefully. To make sure we are clear here, I don’t think bin Laden remotely rose to the level of the great murderers of the 20th century: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. He was a mere amateur when deeds and outcomes are compared.

Still he made a point to declare war, a rather legal and technical state of affairs, on the United States of America and then act upon that declaration. And more germane to the current situation is he never terminated that state by concluding a peace treaty. Frankly he made himself a fair and valid target as the head of al-Qaeda when he declared war. A far more valid target than the innocent and quite international community he repeatedly attacked and murdered in New York, London, and Madrid to name a few. To claim that pacifism and love is the answer to such evil is simply idealism at its most naive.

As for a night sky full of endless darkness – I see a sky full of fiery stars illuminating my sense of awe at the mystery of life and potential of a brilliant morning. If you doubt this all I would ask you to do is to spend a night out in a rural place and see first hand how bright our universe is and then face east as the sun rises in the sky. Sometimes all it takes to get through the darkness is to hold onto hope, faith and the comfort that comes from knowing that the bogyman just got his ass kicked.

A few notes 16 months later:

The quote attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr. that I cited in this essay was used by a younger person on a social media web to assail the retribution delivered to Osama bin Laden during the night of May 2, 2011.

Soon after the original was posted the response comments quickly followed and soon a long list of very predictable replies were posted that displayed a great deal of smug superiority in opposition to this use of force, how brave they all were for stating these views, that America is an evil empire, how much they disliked and blamed Re-Puke-Licans for 9/11, and that killing Osama bin Laden was exactly the same as murder. To say I found my becoming increasingly irritated by the haughtiness and the complete lack of historical perspective on display is an understatement.

Then a few days later the news broke that the quote was a complete fabrication. A fake. A lie. After finding, this out I went back to this web page to see if any further comments or honest reassessment had been posted referencing this new information. The answer sadly is nothing. One of the downsides to belief is that it does not like to be destabilized.

The actual Martin Luther King, Jr. quote is from “Loving Your Enemies” (source: Stanford University’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute):

“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.”

I have no problem with his thinking, in fact, I agree with him. I also have a keen sense that holding love, as the center of your life, does not translate into a demand that one must passively acquiesces to any evil that comes along. Love is not a suicide pact. And justice is a very different thing than murder.

With this in mind, I drafted this essay which I am now finally publishing.

Copyright 2012 By Katherine Johnson – All Rights Reserved.