I got to meet up with Sir Jon again yesterday. I'd seen him briefly upon is moving onto the campus, near Mt. Tabor, but this time we had a longer visit. I brought my iPad and jumped on campus WiFi so we could reminisce. I had quite a few pictures of Jon, that I'd bothered to label. A lot of my 80K pix lack captions beyond the camera stamp. Sometimes I go back and add verbiage.
Jon features often going back through these journals, but without any meetups for almost a decade I believe, as we stopped doing the coffee fund at Linus Pauling House and that was Jon's deal: he tracked contributions, purchased, and made coffee for our morning meetings. We also met alternate weeks in the evenings. Jon was not a night guy as I recall.
When we spoke yesterday he reminded me that the house I remember visiting him in, at one time a grocery story I'm guessing, given its shape, in the East Moreland area, on Harold, had not been his residence for long. He'd been on the west side before that, around 2nd, and after that he'd had another place built, and that's the one I never got to see, given we stopped doing the coffee fund or meeting weekly.
We'd become a meet-four-times-a-year group even prior to covid as I recall. Jon would come to those gatherings, which we did even when we still met weekly. He overlapped with Doug Strain, Eve Menger, and many others in these blogs.
Jon's dad had been a major canvas artist, a painter who was conversant with cubism and abstract non-representational painting more generally. At one point he was regularly on public television, interpreting modern art to Portland audiences. I've seen snippets. He also had a large mural at the Portland airport (shown above).
I brought up the painting yesterday, saying my best information, which was maybe not that good, is that the painting was preserved in storage and there were plans to bring it back in the newly remodeled airport. Portland's PDX has undergone a major overhaul, not the first, but one of the most major.
The luggage collection floor is mostly the same, the the 2nd floor departure area is completely different, with ticket counters perpendicular to instead of facing the front of the terminal, with much more relative floorspace devoted thereto.
Random shopping by non-passengers might not be so encouraged anymore. There's already lots of shopping right nearby (Best Buy, Ikea...), where loved ones might say their goodbyes before those leaving head for the terminal. Once checked in, you might as well go through to the passengers-only concourse areas. But maybe there will be more pre-security stores than I realize; the remodel is not done yet.
Jon at first didn't remember the "cube" he had 3D printed per his instructions. Each face contains a funnel to the cube's center, where the funnel tips touch.
Although a professional musician, I'd say Jon was also a visual artist, in terms of his artifacts (polyhedrons sometimes) and in terms of taste. His home was museum quality one might say, in terms of what he'd curated over the years. One felt in the presence of culture.
He'd gone to Catlin Gabel before it was called that, and then attended an east coast school, so lets say he had an elite education, in the sense of first class, what we'd wish more could avail of (by choice, if desirous), not fewer, although what counts as "first class" is a moving target, like I'm not saying we should always stay stuck in the same mud, like fossils.
Bracketing our visit with Jon: we dipped into the campus theater a couple times, where the movie De-Lovely was playing, about Cole Porter. I was pretty much entirely ignorant of this story. Now I have some more culture too (it rubs off).
