LA - Skateboarding, Googie, Bernie's, And More

 

If you walk the path along Venice Beach, you'll come across the skateboard park.  

Skateboards first appeared along the beaches of Southern California, particularly Venice.  As a junior high student back then, I joined the others nailing half a roller skate to one end of a 2x4 and the other half to the other end.  We didn't have a lot of control. My street was one of the better hills.  One block to the south wasn't steep enough.  One block to the north was too steep for most.  I survived the steep one a couple of times. This was in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  You can read more about the history of skateboards from the Hermoso Beach Museum site.

Skate boarding has come a long way since then as have the places people ride them.  

Tuesday it got up to 75˚F and we spent a couple of hours at Venice Beach near the end of Rose Avenue.

Friday, when I biked down there, the fog blocked the view of the ocean from the bike trail.

 We went to the LA County Museum of Art on Thursday.  And passed this bit of graffiti on the way.  We also passed an Indian grocery store.  

This is just a part of the loooooooong spice shelf.  One of the reasons that Indian food is so good - lots of spices and thousands of years experimenting how to prepare them.  

We also passed Johnie's Coffee Shop.  It's an example of Googie architecture - but I didn't know that when I took the picture or I would have taken a better picture of the whole place.  My interest was that this coffee shop had been turned into Bernie's Coffee Shop. LAist has a January 31, 2019 story by Jessica P. Ogilvie about this transformation:

"Johnie's Coffee Shop was built in 1956 by architects Louis Armet and Eldon Davis, masters of the space-age Googie style. The restaurant came to be known for its striking design and by the 1980s, began making appearances in films like Miracle Mile, The Big Lebowski, American History X, Reservoir Dogs and City of Angels. In 1994, it was purchased by the Gold family, an entrepreneurial L.A. clan whose patriarch, David Gold, founded the 99 Cents Only Stores.

In 2013, Johnie's was designated an historic cultural monument, and for a short while, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority debated turning it into a Metro stop for the purple line."

That Metro stop is still being built kitty-corner from Johnie's/Bernie's.  The article goes on to tell the history of how it became Bernie's.  

This is at Fairfax and Wilshire.  Across the street is the old May Company department store - about 

2 1/2 blocks from where I lived as a kid.  Now it's the Academy of Motion Pictures Museum.  Fortunately the kept the historic facade of the building.  They used to have elaborate Christmas display windows right at that corner.  

We ended up checking out the Motion Picture Museum, but passing for now.  Instead we went to the Art Museum that is on the (now, there used to be a street between them) adjoining block.  But I'll save the museum for another post.  

Some of the apartment buildings on the street where I used to live.  Ours didn't have such fancy entrances.  

It was a hazy day which gave these buildings in Century City a surreal look as we drove home.  (None of the pictures in this post were edited except cropping.)

And I'm adding on this picture (below) of the LA airport.  I commented in an earlier post about the unsatisfactory taxi/Uber/Lyft parking lot that's a distance from the terminals.  The whole terminal traffic situation is beyond awful.  There are places where you can pick up arriving passengers.  But during Christmas vacation the three to four lanes are jammed.  You aren't supposed to be stopped unless you are actively picking up a passenger.  But it's near impossible to time when the car gets to the terminal to match when the passenger gets to the curb.  I pulled over at Terminal 5 with the expectation I'd move up to Terminal 6 when my daughter and family got out.  If a cop told me to move on, I could stop again at Terminal 6.  (I have been told to move on at LAX in the past, but no cops were sighted Saturday.)  If I got told to move on at Terminal 6, I'd have to go around the whole airport again.  I'm not sure what the solution is.  They're building a skytrain (which i assume will be similar to what they have in San Francisco) to get passengers out of terminal area.  I'm not sure it's just bad design.  More, just that LA's population grew so much.  They do have a target date to do something - the 2028 Olympics will be in LA.  The Metro line is also supposed to be all the way out to the airport.  The problem has been the taxis and other interests didn't want the Metro to get to the airport, I'm told.  

The airport was much easier to navigate back in 1967 when I drove a Yellow Cab out of the airport for several months between graduating from UCLA and returning to the second summer of Peace Corps training.  Those were good times - mornings at the beach playing volley ball and body surfing, evenings driving a cab.  I learned a lot about LA.  I'd never realized how many bars there were until I drove a cab.  

To the left us at this spot is the Los Angeles Airport (LAX) 'theme building."

"To truly immerse oneself in the world of Googie, a visit to the "Theme Building" at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is an absolute must. Completed in 1961, this architectural marvel resembles a futuristic flying saucer perched upon four curving legs. With its observation deck, it was once a popular spot for locals and travelers to admire the planes taking off and landing at LAX. The Theme Building perfectly encapsulates Googie's out-of-this-world charm and stands as a testament to an era when the skies were no longer the limit."  from LA Explained Blog

I had a high school graduation dinner there with a dozen or more friends.  The restaurant is long gone.  

Destroying Cities And Killing Civilians - Post-War Berlin Photos By Roman Vishniac

We met long time friends in Berkeley Wednesday at the Magnes Collection.  While looking at the pictures in the current exhibit, I couldn't help but think about Gaza and Ukraine.  

The photographer was: 

"Roman Vishniac (1897–1990), a Russian-Jewish modernist photographer, [who] lived and worked in Berlin from 1920 to 1939. On the eve of the Second World War, he extensively documented Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe. After fleeing Nazi Germany, he found safety in New York City and became a US citizen in 1946. The Roman Vishniac Archive, which The Magnes acquired in 2018, also includes thousands of photographs taken after World War II in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East." [From the Exhibit and also the Magnes Collection website]

Some of the pre-war pictures were up, but the main exhibit was of pictures Vishniac took in Berlin in 1947.  That's two years after the war in Germany ended.  Much of the debris has been swept up and carted away, though some still likes in piles.  People walk, seemingly calmly, in front of bombed out buildings.  

 Berlin and Dresden were both bombed heavily in WWII by the US and British air forces.

On the 1943-44 Berlin bombing raids from Wikipedia:

"On February 15–16, important war industries were hit, including the large Siemensstadt area, with the centre and south-western districts sustaining most of the damage. This was the largest raid by the RAF on Berlin. Raids continued until March 1944.[25][26][27]

These raids caused immense devastation and loss of life in Berlin. The November 22, 1943 raid killed 2,000 Berliners and rendered 175,000 homeless. The following night, 1,000 were killed and 100,000 made homeless. During December and January regular raids killed hundreds of people each night and rendered between 20,000 and 80,000 homeless each time.[28] Overall nearly 4,000 were killed, 10,000 injured and 450,000 made homeless.[29]"

From Wikipedia:

"The bombing of Dresden was a joint British and American aerial bombing attack on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, during World War II. In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 772 heavy bombers of the Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city.[3] The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed more than 1,600 acres (6.5 km2) of the city centre.[4] Up to 25,000 people were killed.[1][2][a] Three more USAAF air raids followed, two occurring on 2 March aimed at the city's railway marshalling yard and one smaller raid on 17 April aimed at industrial areas."

We could add to this the atomic bomb in Japan, and stories about Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.  There were/are battles and massacres in the former Yugoslavia, in various parts of Africa, in South America.  

The United Nations was supposed to help end such wars, but it's structured so that the large powers have veto power over crucial decisions.  Certainly the arms dealers play a huge role in all these wars, though there were wars before capitalist corporations took over the technology of killing.  

We also have to figure out how and why psychopaths find their way to power and control of militaries and the budgets to arm them.  Is there a way to overcome this?  

Is all this simply embedded in our DNA?  

[This post fits into the series I'm doing on the Israeli-Gaza war, though it's not part of 'plan' I had for those posts.  You can link to those posts at the Israel-Gaza war tab just below the orange header above.  Here's the same link.]

Seattle Outing - Food And Art

Our grand parenting duties shrink back as our granddaughter gets older and has more autonomy and more activities to fill up her time.  That's not a bad thing.  We still get to spend lots of time with our daughter and granddaughter, but I also have plenty of time to read, think, write, and delete emails  that never seem to slow down.  Even as I unsubscribe to emailers I never subscribed to, new ones seem to find me.  

But we had an anniversary yesterday and we decided to take the ferry and wander around downtown Seattle.  

It's been pretty rainy, but the sun made itself known as we approached the ferry terminal.  

We tried the post office on 1st Street, but it was closed for lunch.  

So we made our way to Pike Place Market for some clam chowder.  The seats weren't that comfy, but the chowder was hot and the guy with the red sleeves kept up a constant entertaining chatter.  

We wandered a bit through the market.  Then across the street to a kitchen ware shop where we found a gift for our granddaughter and her dad.  We stopped in at H-Market for a look around.  Then made it to another post office where I was able to send my package.  I had the book in an envelope I'd received a different book in, but the clerk immediately told me I should buy a new envelope which would be cheaper than buying a roll of tape for the envelope.  While we waited, another customer asked another clerk if he could tape the address label on and was told to buy a roll of tape ($3.99).  This is new.  Post office personnel used to be helpful.  I guess Trump's postmaster who's apparently still in charge, thinks saving pennies is better than making customers feel like coming back.  

Then to the Seattle Art Museum.  I'm always taken aback by how much it costs to enter major museums these days.  I know it costs money to run things, but art is a major expression of a culture and museums are a serious part of public education.  If we can pay to be the most armed country in the world, we ought to pay even a percent of that for public art museums.  But I quickly got over that as we interacted with what was on the walls, the floors, and even the ceiling in places.  

There's clearly a change in how museums display items.  There's a lot of obviously intentional diversity.  There's mixing up of pieces of different eras and cultures to find (or at least claim to find) commonalities.  

And I was particularly struck by the universality of human art - both geographically and in terms of time.  We tend to think that we are smarter and more skilled than people who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago.  Certainly a fair chunk of today's US population (like those who believe their cult leader is going to improve their lives) aren't nearly as wise as the brightest people in past generations.  

On the left is Charles d'Amboise.  The painting was done about 1505 (just over 500 years ago) by Bernardine de'Conti who lived in Milan about 1470 -1522.  

The description says:

"The French nobleman Charles d'Amboise became the governor of the Duchy of Milan after it was conquered by France.  The collar of scallop shells and knots denotes the Order of SaintMichael, granted to him about 1505, perhaps the occasion for commissioning this portrait. 

D'Amboise was a friend and patron of Leonardo da Vinci, but he hired a more conservative artist for his portrait and chose to be portrayed in a classic profile view, which records his features but provides no psychological insight.  He most likely wanted to link his image with the great rulers of the ancient past, depicted in side views on coins and medals like those shown in the case nearby  D'Ambroise himself was an avid coin collector as he proudly demonstrates here."

I'm going to assume the curator knows a lot more than I do about art and this painting.  But I'm not sure why a side view can't provide psychological insight, or that a full face portrait can.  But what little we learn tells us a great deal.  With a different haircut, or maybe just a baseball cap, he could fit in walking down the street today.  There was a hierarchy of which he was in an upper level, and he collected coins.  And the painter could easily get work in today's world.  Both could probably fit into 2024 fairly easily with a little bit of coaching on the advances of science.  

The one on the right is not as old (about 1699), painted by French artist  Nicolas Colombel who lived from 1644-1717.  He died fifteen years before George Washington was born.  He was a year younger than Isaac Newton, but died ten years before Newton.  Nevertheless, the story of Cupid (Eros) and Psyche is much older.  Wikipedia tells us:

"Eros and Psyche appear in Greek art as early as the 4th century BC"

The curator wrote the following to accompany this painting:

"The jealous goddess Venus sent her son Cupid to make Psyche fall in love with a horrible monster.  Instead, Cupid became enamored himself and installed Psyche in a palace where he visited her at night so that she couldn't learn his identity.  One night she stole a peek at his beautiful face.  Startled awake, Cupid left immediately, and his palace vanished.  Psyche wandered the earth search for her lover, performing impossible tasks set by Venus in hopes of winning him back.  Finally, Jupiter intervened:  he made Psyche a goddess and reunited her with Cupid, giving their story a happy ending.  Here Cupid has just abandoned Psyche, who chases him as he hovers out of reach.  This moment allows Colombel, a French artist who was trained in Rome, to show the Roman countryside - the appropriate setting for this classical myth." 

So this story goes back 2500 years, yet we have the same human emotions and conflicts: a woman possibly falling in love with a monster (how many battered wives are there today?);  a forbidden young love;  a jealous and vengeful mother-in-law (no they aren't married, but Venus was Cupid's mother).  I'm not sure why the curator thinks the Roman woods to be the appropriate background, perhaps because the Romans appropriated much of Greek culture including their myths.  

I knew from the beginning this post was going to be much too long, so let me jump to another exhibit - this of Ausralian aboriginal artists.  

These large detailed paintings speak to me in a language I can't identify.  They tell stories of people and worlds I do not know.  Yet they move me a great deal.  This is a beauty and a visual language that still exists, outside of Western culture.   

Here's detail of a painting called Kalipinypa Rockhole (2003) painted by Elizabeth Marks Nakamara.  The curator writes:

"Lightning bolts that ignite the sky are the source for this striking white maze.  Kalipinypa is an important site where ancestral forces swept in with a huge storm that caused lightning to flash and water to rush across the country.  They left behind a rock hole surrounded with sandhills that are seen here as vibrant patterns created by dotting that fuses into lines that wiggle ever so slightly.  Elizabeth Marks Nakamara was married to the renowned artist Mick Namarari.  She watched his painting for years but did not begin to paint herself until after his death in 1998."

One more from that collection.  There's no story with the description - just the facts: 

" Marapinti, 2016

Acrylic on canvas

Nanyuma Napangati

Australian Aboriginal, Pintupi people,

Papunya, Western Desert, Northern Territory,

born 1940"

Most of what I know about Australian Aboriginal culture comes from Bruce Chatwin's book Songlines, which I wrote about here.  And songlines (check the link, really!) are clearly part of this art.  Truly a book worth reading.  

Another descriptor at this exhibit read:

"'Dreaming is an all-embracing concept that provides rules for living, a moral code, as well as rules for interacting withthenatural environment' - Jeannie Herbert Nungwarrayi(Walpiri speaker) 2000

Dreaming is known by Pintupi speakers as Tjukurrpa.  Tjukurrpa is called a template for a dynamic duty or way of observing laws passed down by ancestors - the powerful shape-shifting creators who formulated the earth's features, people, and culture.  Dreamings stimulate intellectual and emotional life, as people recall extensive genealogies and ceremonial song cycles that describe the ancestors' adventures.  No country - the lands, waters, flora, and fauna of an area - is without a trail of their presence, which offers a living continuum of wisdom for all to learn from.

Dotting was a biodegradable at for for centuries - on ceremonial objects, in sand paintings, and on painted and adorned bodies.  Dots of ochres, down, feathers, and leaves could at times totally overcome a human form, enabling dancers to enter a mythic envelope as they enacted ceremonies. Dots began appearing in painting as a echo of this sacred significance.  Some contend they help conceal sacred knowledge, and others suggest they express the flash of ancestral power.'

Surely, there's nothing here more supernatural than believers of Western religions embrace.  

There was so much more reshaping edges of my brain and heart.  The ways of human beings haven't really changed all that much since homo sapiens appeared.  When politicians call for STEM education that leaves out art and music and humanities, we leave students with a huge hole.  Science has given us a way to tinker with nature, but without a study of the human spirit and behavior and morality, we leave out the part that helps us make decisions about what technology is worth pursuing and what is likely to give us more pain than joy.  

We are reminded about this daily - from the movie Oppenheimer, to politicians' inability to pass gun reform that would significantly reduce the loss of life, to the onset of AI as a profit making venture that has the possibility of eliminating people's ability to discern truth.  

1000 Years Of Joys And Sorrows - Ai Weiwei/ Japan Invades China 1937

As Russia moves into Ukraine, it seems that Ai Weiwei's description of the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 seems an appropriate reading.  Not just for the people of Ukraine, but for the people
of the world.  If Putin is able to 'take' Ukraine, what's next?  And what does this foretell about future relations between Europe, Russia, and the US, not to mention China, and the rest of the world?  

In July 1937.  Ai Weiwei's father Ai Qing was a young poet who had started getting noticed.  Three months earlier, the wife had their first baby on the day the Japanese began their invasion of China.  They are trying to keep ahead of the Japanese army and have arrived at Hangzhou.  Hangzhou is a little west of Shanghai and is known for its beautiful West Lake which is now a World Heritage Site.

Ai Weiwei writes:  

"The West Lake was unchanged, hazy and indistinct.  It seemed to him that the locals were drifting through life, still clinging to an illusory notion of leisure.  The onset of war had failed to shock Hangzhou;  while the fate of the nation hung in the balance, people simply continue with their routines. 'I cannot pretend to love Hangzhou," Father would soon confess.  'Like so many cities in China, it is crammed with narrow-minded, selfish residents,  with complacent and vulgar office workers, low-level officials accustomed to currying favor, and cultural types who make a hobby of hyping things up. They commonly think of themselves as living in unparalleled happiness, as though lounging in their mother's lap.'  He would write these words at the end of the year, when news came to him that Hangzhou had fallen, after he and his family had escaped to Wuhan." (p. 51)

Sound familiar?  

Ai Qing, who had moved his family further west, was once again faced with an advancing army.  This is surely happening right now in parts of Ukraine.

"When they arrived at Jinhua Railway Station at eight o'clock in the morning, wounded soldiers, freshly evacuated from battlefield, lay strewn along the platform.  One of the soldiers, a faint gray light shining in his eyes, told Father that hospitals in the area were no longer taking in casualties.  Some had covered themselves with straw for warmth, while others threw straw in a heap and set fire to it to warm up inside dirty bedrolls.  The fight had disrupted the normal train schedule, and in the confusion it was unclear whether rail service would even continue.  Ticket sales had been halted, and if a train came in everyone simply piled in,whether they had tickets or not."(pp 51-52)

Later, he writes about poetry and democracy.  Ideas to contemplate as those in power aim to abolish truth with mistruths.  

"'Poetry today ought to be a bold experiment in the democratic spirit,' he declared, ' and the future of poetry is inseparable from the future of democratic politics.  A constitution matters even more to poets than to others, because only when the right to expression guaranteed can one give voice to the hopes of people at large, and only then is progress possible.  To suppress the voices of the people is the cruelest form of violence.'  Eighty years later, his faith in poetry's freedom's ambassador has yet to find vindication in China."

For those of you unfamiliar with Ai Weiwei, he's probably modern China's best known artist, though he's living in exile now.  Here's a short bio.

I haven't seen much of Ai Weiwei's art in person.  But I did see this tree at an exhibition of modern Chinese artists at the Louis Vuitton museum in Paris five or six years ago. The link describes it somewhat.  

The Trevor Noah interview below doesn't tell you much about his art or life, but it's worth watching as we deal with an increasingly oppressive takeover of the Republican party.   

I have to add, reading a good book is so much more satisfying that scanning Twitter or other online collections of alarmism and distraction.  

Lots Of Kid Time

We went to the Cayton Children's Museum in the Santa Monica Mall.  It was crowded and noisy and I'd say that museum is a pretentious name for this indoor playground.

A recently refined definition of 'museum'  from the International Councils of Museums

"Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people.
Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing."

Well, that certainly sounds like a definition created by a committee.  I imagine that many of the great museums of the world wouldn't qualify as museums under that definition.  I think the intention is good, but I'd probably separate those things that have been traditionally considered the basic of a museum  "hold artifacts and specimens in trust for society" etc. as the broad definition.  Then I would have listed the aspirational democratic standards (not for profit, participatory, diverse, transparent, etc.) as qualifications for museums that want to be members of the International Council of Museums.

I didn't notice any artifacts and specimens in this museum, unless they were thinking of this as a museum of children's play spaces.  I didn't notice too much addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present.  OK, I don't want to belabor the point.

There were great net tunnels hanging from the ceiling with kids climbing through.  And other fun spaces to navigate, but it wasn't much more than a glorified playground.  I didn't see any conflicts between kids, they all seemed to have enough to keep them busy.  And there was a diverse array of people enjoying the play space.

I've got lots of pictures, but most have my grandkids in them and I don't post their images on the blog.  Here's a picture of my son and myself as rendered in some sort of electronic wall.  I'm on the left.

And the quietest room had low tables with water colors and papers.

Car seat rules make life much more difficult than it was when I was a kid.  Even when my kids were kids.  Some of us drove home and some of us took the bus which had a pretty direct route for us and the SF kids are very used to riding the bus and we had lots of fun.

The weather has been kind.  The two rainy periods this week were during the night.  It was another sunny day, though the temperature only got up into the low 50s.

Gramping Trumps Blogging

Grandkids are a great source of energy.  LA has defied the weather predictions.  Yesterday there was just the slightest drizzles.  Today there were ominous clouds off on the horizon as we set out for the Page Museum at La Brea Tar Pits.

This is one of those places I spent a lot of time as a kid.  Before the museum and the other neighboring museums.  Before most of the big buildings along Wilshire.  When there were just a few fenced off tar pits and concrete replicas of giant sloths, saber tooth tigers, and other critters.

For those who don't know, these tar pits, smack in the middle of Los Angeles, trapped many, many Pleistocene Era animals.   Here's a the largest tar pit there with a replica of three mastodons, one trapped in the tar.

 From Live Science:

The Pleistocene Epoch is typically defined as the time period that began about 2.6 million years ago and lasted until about 11,700 years ago. The most recent Ice Age occurred then, as glaciers covered huge parts of the planet Earth.

I guess those folks who believe in a literal bible and that the earth is only 6000-15,000 years old just don't take their kids to places like this where their beliefs will be challenged.


Dinosaurs went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period.  From the Natural History Museum (London):

". . .  66 million years ago, over a relatively short time, dinosaurs disappeared completely (except for birds). Many other animals also died out, including pterosaurs, large marine reptiles, and ammonites."

So this was after dinosaurs were gone and there's no dinosaur bones at the La Brea Tar Pits.

I was very skeptical about them messing up "my park" when they began the Page Museum, but they hid most of the building under this build up grass hill that kids can climb up.  And the frieze on top depicts the various large animals found here.









It's hard to pick favorites.  The saber tooth tigers have to be up there.

This is still a very active excavation and you can see workers meticulously cleaning bones that come out of the hard asphalt.  They also find insects and even seeds of plants.










Then we regrouped at Santa Monica Beach so the kids could play at the sandy playground near the Santa Monica pier.  Unfortunately the carousel was closed for a private party.

The clouds were moving in and the wind was blowing, but the kids had a good time.  It still hasn't begun to rain, but it's coming surely.

I remember Christmas Eve being a day of horrible traffic in LA, but today it was almost a ghost town.

Buenos Aires Tour With Small Start Up

Our host when we first came to Buenos Aires, Carolina, and her friend Belen have a small business for helping people who visit Buenos Aires and Argentina.  I wouldn’t call it a travel agency or a tour company - it’s more personal than that.  It’s like having a friend in Buenos Aires who will do what is necessary to help you make your trip perfect - even if you don’t even know what you want to do.  

And when we left Buenos Aires a couple of weeks ago, we agreed on a tour of some places we’d missed earlier.  

For yesterday’s tour we jumped into the car and drove to La Boca, one of the oldest parts of Buenos Aires.  

La Boca is the home of La Bombonera stadium, the home of Buenos Aires’ football (soccer) team - Boca Juniors.  This was, and still is, a poor neighborhood.  Lots of port workers lived and worked here.          

 These are low rise living space  compared to the more affluent neighborhoods.  This was the neighborhood that the tango was created in the brothels.






 



And this is part of the famous stadium.  Part of the scoreboard is on the upper right.

And you can see the shape of the stadium better here on the left.  There’s a line for people waiting to tour the museum and stadium.  

There are also lots of tourist shops here.  

Then we walked down to the key streets that lure tourists to La Boca and to the museum created by the famous artist Benito Quelquena Martìn.  

This sign was pointed out as an example of the kind of script that dominated this area in the past.  And then I started noticing it everywhere.

 This one below shows the building above in the past.  The date on it says 1959.  Well before it became a tourist destination.   The picture was in the artist Martín’s museum

    

Martin’s home is at the top of the museum with great views of the port - where he did a lot of his paintings - as well as of Buenos Aires. 

  

These two photos go together.  They’re from the roof of the museum and show the area.  (You can see the colorful  narrow house in the upper right of the picture above and then going to the left of the picture you get to the port.  That loop in the water is made up of recycled plastic bottles and is being used for some sort of water recovery program, but I didn’t get the details.  There are some water plants growing on the right side.

Benito Quinquela Martin is in this picture - I assumed he’s the one on the left.  The picture is from 1909.

And below is one of his pictures of workers in the port.  First a close-up, and then you can see the whole picture below it.   You can learn more about him at this Wikipedia page.  He was an orphan and adopted when he was 8.

 

I was going crazy with my camera - everything was begging to be photographed.  

I  think this is getting to be a very long post, so I’ll end here and  break up the day into two posts.  But here’s a link to ChoiceBuenosAires - the website Carolina and Belin are working on to help publicize their business.  As you can see, it’s a work in progress still.  But we can vouch for these two women’s ability help visitors to Buenos Aires make the best use of their time here.  

Santiago Murals And Other Street Art

We flew to Mendoza last night and then to Cordoba this morning.  Airbnb got us a two bedroom apartment (condo?) on the 8th floor with a balcony that’s been in the warm (about 70˚F) (I know, Anchorage that’s cool to you this week, but it’s winter here and after Santiago and Mendoza, this is warm) sun.

We also learned today that I misled you.  The SUBE card which I thought was good all over Argentina for public buses (collectivos) is NOT good in Cordova.  We had to buy a REDBUS card here.  The SUBE was good in Buenos Aires and San Juan.  A Dazzler posts mentions a SUBE is good in 12 other provinces (besides Buenos Aires.)

But this post is about street art - particularly murals in Santiago.  We were only in a small part of the city so this is just a sample by someone who doesn’t know all that much about the topic.  
 

       
   

 
OK, the one above isn’t ‘street’ art.  We went to a Turner exhibit on loan from the Tate at t he Moneda Cultural Center.  It slipped in so I’ll just leave it here.

 

These next photos are on Bandera Street, one of a number of downtown steets that are pedestrian only.  You can read this report on how it became a street of public art.

And then there are these other forms of art.

I’m guessing that this last one is a memorial of some sort, though it looks like it’s been a while.