So it turns out I have a few unfinished draft posts about murals left over from when I was doing a lot of those, and coincidentally the couple of posts I'd meant to finish this month are running long and almost certainly won't be done by midnight tomorrow. Which is important because I have this longstanding rule that I need to post something here at least once a month, and I've somehow managed it every month since 2005. So without further ado, here are some photos of the very large mural on one side of inner SE Portland's Redd building. The mural is dominated by the huge multistory words "Hey! You're Part Of It" looming over the viewer, and I started out figuring that was also the title of the thing, but apparently the actual title is American Hearts, I guess as a reproach to the sort of American who insists they are not in fact Part Of It.
This was created by artists David Rice & Zach Yarrington as part of the 2016 Forest for the Trees festival, and I took these photos in June 2017, probably on my way to or from a nearby brewpub, and honestly the whole thing feels like something that happened several lifetimes ago, in a parallel timeline, in a galaxy far, far away, and I don't have the words to convey how much I miss the pre-pandemic Before Times.
Um... so... anyway, elsewhere on interwebs I bumped into photos of the mural at Portland Wild, Simmer Down, Man, and Daniel's Treks, and it figures in blog posts at/by Serendipitous Wonder, Alluvial Farms (one of the small ag businesses that has worked with the Redd's Ecotrust business incubator) and fronttowardenemy.
For whatever it's worth, that last link goes to a post on Steemit, a social media site/app I'd never heard of before which claims to be blockchain-based, somehow, with its own cryptocurrency, somehow; my eyes glazed over partway through their very complicated guide for n00bs. So all I can really tell you is that most of the active users at the moment seem to be in Korea, and there's at least one cat photo there, and honestly the main reason this paragraph exists is to see what happens if I do a blog post containing the words "blockchain" and "cryptocurrency". Maybe I'll be inundated with spam, maybe a bunch of bots will link here and this humble blog will skyrocket up the search result rankings, or possibly skyrocket downward, or maybe we're finally past the initial frenzy around those two particular keywords and nothing at all will happen, who knows.
Getting back to the subject at hand, and speaking of links and search results and so forth, American Hearts is one stop of many on the OregonHikers Field Guide's Portland Street Art Loop Hike, which is based on someone's earlier forum post. Which I guess diversifies their field guide offerings beyond the usual rugged backcountry stuff. I mention this because the hike description cites this here humble blog as a source a couple of times, and it feels like linking back is only fair and probably brings good luck or positive mojo or rad karma or something, and come to think of it I should probably go over the other stops on their tour to see if there's anything I haven't visited. And with that, I'm covered for the month of January, 2021 AD, and I'll see y'all again next month. Unless maybe a fit of extreme inspiration overtakes me tomorrow and I finish another post sometime in the next 29 hours, which seems unlikely.
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