Still stranded on Alberta Street
There it was an empty gallon of Umpqua Chocolate Peanut Butter ice cream right smack in the middle on my kitchen counter. No wonder my head was spinning like a DJ’s turn table scratching its thoughts slowly across my memory bank not ready yet to jump onto the intellectual highway.
What had happened? Oh yeah I went to a nice soiree at the Portland Art Museum at the Fred & Suzanne Fields Ballroom in the Mark Building, to be very specific ,for a welcoming reception for the new Curator of photography Julia Dolan.
It was one of those free food and drinks & mix & mingle, which I have no clue how I was so lucky to get on the guest list of the who is who in photography of Portland and I could do some name dropping like from Christopher Rauschenberg up and down.
I chatted up Eva Lake, Seth Nehil and the lovely Kelly Rauer and the famous Lady Collector with the big glasses and the big white hair whose name I can’t recall right now but my low self esteem told me that I felt that uptown was to down town for me and that I needed a little reality check of where I belong.
I went on to Last Thursday on Alberta Street which might have been more reality than I was ready for to handle all at one place and space at the same time.
This is the real Happening where the future is cooked up in small pipes of pot where I get my mojo flowing and catch fire flies with my shutterbug. My big fat Nikon had just burned out, probably one of these newish huge sun flares and of course there was no more warranty even on the camera body even though I had thought that I had a life time on it.
I had a memory flash of a commercial that said “Everything is built to last” but I was wrong it was “Lasts only until it breaks”.
Anyway the picturesque scene was worth the price I had just doled out for a the quick shot Kodak that was all I could afford and I was handling now like a toy camera to capture life as it unfolds in the hope that these shots would end up one day in the faults of the big Museum looked and watched over by Julia Dolan if she can handle the Portland rain for that long.
I mean as long as it will take until someone realizes my amazing talents and stops ignoring them like my last show at Blue Sky Gallery on that wall you are not allowed to talk about where I presented my photographical historical document of the changes and developments on Alberta Street but I guess it was not exotic enough not a slum in the Philippines or a reportage on the life of midgets.
Anyway I don’t want to sound bitter because I am not.
To make a story of a long night short Alberta was cooking up a human stew and I was feeling the vibe of the street that bursts now with vibrant creativity and had come such a long way from the City blight, the Ghetto it once was before the gays and the artists and the anarchist or all of the above had seen its potential, before the hipster came out of the wood works of Smalls Ville to take it over as if it was created for them.
Friends that helped it along like Chris Haberman and Jonny Tragedy where still hanging out on this curious night trying to recapture the olden days from 5 years ago when we were all worried that Starbucks would come in and make a generic wasteland out of a vital neighborhood.
And then there she was the Goddess of Alberta Street, the mouth piece that believed in change and commanded it, Harriet Hasenfest and it almost was like the good old times. We hugged knowingly in the middle of thousands who didn’t know who we were and didn’t care about that it was us that made this spectacle possible, it was us that seeded it and now they can walk for 20 plus blocks without worrying for being shot at or robbed.
All they have to do now is enjoy a stroll into the future on the road that was paved by others Like Donna and Alan, the less ignorant but the ones with a vision and I wondered if these kids have had a chance yet to contemplate what their vision of the world was and if they were willing to put out for it not just take what others had provided.
Look what you’ve created I said smiling and proud to Harriet but she just said that’s not what I had in mind I might be partly responsible but they took it and ran off with it dragged it to the other side of commercialism but never the less commercialism.
They are like kids I said that found the perfect playground and they come and they ravage it and then they leave as if life had handed them something on a silver platter that spelled “Entitlement”.
We went on the reminiscing which makes you always feel old and it is an age old story that the new blood trows out the old blood with the bath water.
The crowd was still growing starting to become a blur, a blob of humanity and the sounds reverberated into a night less night.
At home I must have needed something to comfort me, something like a gallon of ice cream that always does the trick and makes you feel good about this world which still has such potential to become a better place.
Richard Schemmerer
on Alberta
xoxo
@
