I really enjoy this mural, El Monsrto, the monster! It is photo realistic and playful and I can remember my kids pretending and playing when I see it. I enjoy this for what I think and for how I feel when I appreciate it.
Technically impressive is that this was done with spray paint. The artist painted this as part of the Pow! Wow! San Jose 2019 event when numerous artists put up public art works in one week in collaboration with property owners and sponsors. The three years we have had this event have brought a lot of art to our city.
Above is a close up of the painting. Like analog-pixels of the art, up close you can see individual paints that went into the photo realistic effect that you get from stepping back. Wonderful!
The trees above El Monstro capturing the light as the sun drops on the horizon.
Public art under the overpass and a public art-puzzle high in the building.
If you look at the top of the Adobe headquarters building in San Jose you will see four yellow circles with lines across them, each 10 feet in diameter and made of LED lights. That is the San Jose Semaphore , a puzzle and art piece. If you watch, the four wheels you will see that they spin every few seconds, each independently and to a different degree to relay an encrypted message.
The first puzzle was programmed into the spinning semaphores in 2006 and was solved by Mark Snesrud and Bob Mayo in 2007 to be the full text of the 1966 novel, The Crying of Lot 49.
This second semaphore puzzle went up in 2012 and eluded all code breakers until 2017 when Tennessee high school teacher Jimmy Waters broke the code. Once the spinning wheels were decoded he found that they appeared to represent an audio wave. Feeding that audio wave into software that converts it to sound resulted in the code breaker listening to the Neil Armstrong broadcast from the moon, the famous one that ended with “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
How cool is that?
What will the third puzzle solution be?
As a lover of murals, I find this interesting. On the pictured tower of the Adobe headquarters, look in the nook where the building sides meet. A giant mural is way up there. I wonder how many years it was up there before I noticed it one day as a passenger in a car traveling down highway 87. Maybe some day I’ll find a way to see it up close.
This sculpture, Camaraderie, is striking in its shape and presentation. The artists collected the words that make up large portions of its surface from the words veterans used, in person or as recorded in Library of Congress documents, when telling stories of friendship and solidarity.
A familiar site in San Jose is Chuck E. Cheese smiling at those driving by on highway 101.
Nolan Bushnell started Atari in 1972, making video games with a partner in the bay area. In 1977 he opened the first Chuck E. Cheese in what is now the Santana Row shopping center in San Jose. The second opened on Blossom Hill in San Jose and the third was this huge and locally famous one off of 101. Since then this giant Chuck E. Cheese has been smiling at us all as we have driven by. Before the giant smiling rat, this large restaurant and video game arcade building had once been a toy store with giant toy soldiers facing the highway. The location realized its great potential, however, when it opened up as a two story Chuck E. Cheese restaurant with seemingly hidden worlds and passageways for kids to discover between playing what appeared to be infinite video games, structures to climb in, time for loosing and finding staircases again and the miniature Chuck E. Cheese apartment that kids could crawl through. Then, of course, there were the animatronic stage shows. The place was mind blowing for a kid.
It has changed quite a bit in the decades since it oppened. The animatronics and stage are gone; replaced with a wall projecting a video of Chuck E. Cheese. The miniature apartment is no longer there. Well, if it is, it’s not open to the public. The play structures are gone. There is still food, plenty of space, and a whole lot of video games; more games than even there were when the place first opened. You could say Chuck E. Cheese accomplished its mission. Nolan Bushnell conceived of and opened the business as a way to make video games accessible to families and ultimately, to build video game customers. At the time, when video games were just starting out and Atari was just building its fame, video games were found in pool halls and bars where future customers, kids, were not able to get to them. Nolan wanted to mix a family restaurant with a little Disneyland together as a backdrop to providing video games to future generations. The model was copied often and expanded far and wide, spreading the connections of kids and video games.
The first video game I ever really really wanted to own was Super Mario Brothers. I had played Mario Brothers in the local pizza shop and suddenly found out that I could actually own it and bring it home. Yes, I think Nolan’s plan worked.
The California Theatre, with the entrance pictured, was built in 1927 in downtown San Jose. You will find it on first street with it’s various painted details and architectural styles blended throughout. This is where the Silicon Valley Symphony performs.
Looking up offers much to appreciate in the various spaces of the theater.
