Survived the fire

Russo-Lee Art Gallery, on my One Street, is open again. A fire last August in the restaurant next door filled the gallery with smoke and caused it to shut down for months. Insurance covered all the art that was damaged and paid for a complete re-build, and the gallery is open again. The restaurant, however, is still boarded up.

I wandered through the gallery, enjoying the oil on canvas works of a young man named Roll Hardy. He made his fortune as a tattoo artist but is now  represented by this gallery and asking $11,000 for the canvas in my blip. His work depicts my neighborhood in Portland as it was when I first moved here and started blipping. It was an industrial area with miles of dereliction. I wish I had made more photographs. Now the industrial lots have been bulldozed and replaced with luxury apartments, two-thirds of which remain vacant, providing landlords with tax write-offs.

As an extra I offer an example of sidewalk resistance: a notice, purportedly made by an FBI agent, assuring us that “hidden assets” are “in command and solving the problem” of Trump’s Nazism. I wish I could believe that. Unfortunately the new head of the FBI is a Trump loyalist.