Filed under: Art, Phoenix | Tags: Art, Downtown Phoenix, El Mac, Lalo Cota, Luster Kaboom, Murals, Phoenix
Luster Kaboom, that is, aka David Quan. He is a comic book artist from Phoenix who has now moved back to New York, where he went to art school, in the hopes of fulfilling his dream of making comics. You can read more about him here.
The blue ooze surrounding this El Mac mural, below, that I wrote about a few weeks ago, is also by Luster Kaboom. There used to be a Lalo Cota next door but it’s been removed.
He won the Phoenix New Times‘ Best Mural of 2011 for this.
Filed under: Arizona, Music | Tags: Arizona, imagine, Music, Photoshop, Travels, vacation
One of the original U.S. Highways, Route 66 was established on November 11, 1926—with road signs erected the following year. The highway, which became one of the most famous roads in America, originally ran from Chicago, Illinois, through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, before ending at Los Angeles, covering a total of 2,448 miles (3,940 km).
It was officially removed from the United States Highway System on June 27, 1985 after it had been decided the route was no longer relevant and had been replaced by the Interstate Highway System. Portions of the road that passed through Illinois, Missouri, New Mexico, and Arizona have been designated a National Scenic Byway of the name Historic Route 66, which is returning to official maps and Google Maps (Wikipedia).
Maybe this 1937 Terraplane traveled on The Mother Road, its most enduring nickname, during its glory days.
And doesn’t this Vette make you want to hit the open road and have a few adventures?
It’s summer, the time for roadtrips…
I’m ready, let’s go…
Filed under: Art, Phoenix | Tags: Art, Downtown Phoenix, Eric Cox, Murals, Phoenix
This mural was done by Coxy (also known as ArtsyCoxy), Eric Cox, in spring of 2012. He had a studio in Garfield Galleria but has now moved to a different location in Phoenix. This was a parting gift to the gallery. Called Old Man Phoenix, Cox says the large-scale work has a message~the word “embrace,” which you can find hidden in the mural, is what he’d like to see a little more of (figuratively) in Phoenix. If you click on the photo and then further enlarge it, you can see the word. Read more here.
In the alley behind the gallery, I noticed this mural, practically hidden by bushes and the parking structure:
And this door, which I think leads to a house on the other side of the alley, is kind of magical, I thought:
All of this is next to the tattoo shop where El Mac’s Nuestra Señora del Desierto is located, which I wrote about here.
As is always the case when I’m in Sedona, I can’t whittle my photos down to a manageable size for the blog. Some of them are taken a mere few feet apart but every view when you are in Sedona is amazing and majestic, and it’s just impossible to narrow them down too much. I selected only 21 but that seems like too much to make you look through so I’ve inserted them in a slideshow at the end of this post, if you want to take a look, and just highlighted a few of them individually. Again, they look much better enlarged.
Bell Rock
We drove through Sedona on our way back from Munds Park a few days ago, to avoid as much of the traffic as possible on I-17. It didn’t work that well, we should have detoured a little longer, but at least we got to experience the beauty of Sedona once again.
Cathedral Rock
We were on the Mystic Trail, named, no doubt, for all the vortices in the area.
Even though I’ve lived in Arizona for 38 years and have been to Sedona countless times, I am always awed when I see it again. The other thing that I know about Sedona but conveniently always sort of forget is that it’s basically as hot as Phoenix in the summer. You can’t really go to Sedona to cool off even though it’s higher in elevation~the temperature difference is about 5 degrees, at best, and when it’s 115 in Phoenix, 110 doesn’t feel that much better. So my frequent dream of a simple multi-million dollar summer home there will probably never come to pass.
Courthouse Butte
Chapel of the Holy Cross in the distance
Storm’s a brewin’
See my shots of Sedona last summer here and here.
Bye, Sedona, hope to see you again very soon…(shot through the windshield)
The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experiences. ~Eleanor Roosevelt
I read that quote today on Lesley Carter’s blog, Bucket List Publications. Lesley is always out searching for the next adventure and she also helps others’ dreams come true (check her blog out). But I sure don’t live life that way…wish I did, but I’m not much of a risk taker; it was ingrained into me during my childhood to be stable, cautious, secure. Therefore, I feel like a lot of life has passed me by and it’s my own fault.
Geez, how depressing, huh? Sorry…I do have fun and I like many things about my life but it’s more of a contentment than “living life to the fullest.” I have to trudge off to work everyday just to keep what I have and I don’t feel like I’m making the most of my time. It could be far worse I know, and I’m not complaining…I just wish I would take a few more chances.
Maybe it’s the gloomy weather that has me down but I know we need the rain really badly and we are getting some now. It’s rained a few times in the last couple days and I know it’s raining up in northern Arizona, too, so the spindly little pine trees I showed in my last post might be getting some needed relief now.
My next post will be more up 
…really.
*Kim Klassen textures on the first three photos (and they look better if you click on them).
Just added~rain in Phoenix for the 3rd time in the last few days…yay!
