Do Not Ignore the Humanity in Front of Your Eyes

The next stop on the ongoing mural tour is at N. Albina & Killingsworth, where a building bears the inscription "Do Not Ignore the Humanity in Front of Your Eyes". I've found a lot of photos of this on the interwebs (see [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]), but nobody (myself included) seems to know who painted this or why. Though I suspect that if this sort of sentiment has to be spelled out for people, the struggle is not going well.

SE 76th & Mitchell

Ok, the next post up is something I debated whether I was going to post at all. There's a guy on Flickr who posts a lot of Portland mural photos, and he geotags his photos religiously so they're easy to track down. (I used to tag and geotag my Flickr photos too, but it's kind of a hassle, and I stopped several years ago.) A while ago he posted several photos of elaborate graffiti on the back of a warehouse at SE 76th & Mitchell, just north of Foster Road and a short walk from the Firland Parkway blocks. I wasn't sure it was really blog material, but I put it on my great big TODO map just in case, and eventually I was in the area and tracked it down. Sure enough, graffiti wall. I don't usually do graffiti walls, but since I'd gone to all this trouble already, I figured maybe I should go ahead and post the photos anyway. So I went back and forth, and this post sank down into my vast Drafts folder, never to be seen again, until now. Anyway, just to be clear, this isn't a precedent. If all you do is tag buildings with your initials, you almost certainly won't get a post here, or receive the international fame and fortune that comes along with being posted about here.

Hawthorne Ink murals

Next up are a couple of murals outside the Hawthorne Ink tattoo place at SE 34th & Hawthorne. One mural's by Hunter Armstrong, who also did the giant snail mural at SE 22nd & Ankeny. The other one is by Jason Prouty of Garage31. I've said this before, I think, but I just want to thank artists who include a web address, Twitter handle, etc., in their work. This blog business is so much easier when people do that, and it helps me sound like I sorta-know what I'm talking about, which is nice.

Don Pancho murals, NE Alberta

Ok, our first stop today is the set of murals outside the Don Pancho Market & Taqueria, at NE 20th & Alberta. I don't know anything else about the murals, and I also haven't tried the tacos here, so I don't have a lot of material for a proper blog post. That's sort of the problem with a lot of stuff I have in drafts right now. I feel like I ought to say something and not just post photos, and I sort of hit a wall at that point. I could probably fill a few paragraphs snarking about Alberta St. gentrification, but I feel like I've covered that topic a lot already. So anyway, enjoy the photos, I guess.

ok, let's try this again...

It's been ages since I've done a real post here. I got tied up with Real Work, and sort of got out of the habit of posting. I'd occasionally look at my Drafts folder and get sort of discouraged; at one point I had a goal of zero drafts by New Years, and that's not looking very likely at this point. Anyway, I thought about doing another lame "keepalive" post just so I'd post something this month, but I don't have anything better to do this weekend, and there's a huge storm outside, so I'll see if I can put a few actual posts together for once.