I don’t know what I expected when I showed up in Mississippi. I had some vague aspirations about getting out into the legendary Delta to see pieces of the Blues Trail, but I wasn’t sure how realistic it was to cover all of that ground in the short time I had. I thought it would be cool to visit the Crossroads, but everybody I know that has been there told me it’s literally just an intersection in the middle of nowhere. So I wasn’t sure it was worth the drive. This probably doesn’t sound like the beginning of a great article. I really thought of the Blues mostly in the past tense so I wasn’t expecting to find anything in Mississippi but some history. But OHHHHH MAMA! I have never been more wrong in my LIFE!
I got the chance to visit Mississippi recently, and that just so happened to be on the weekend of Juneteenth, 2021. Mississippi is not a place that tends to be high on anybody’s travel bucket list—least of all mine—but the opportunity presented itself, so I went for it! Honestly, I have always been curious.
Today we’re going to talk about the elephant in the room: race in the Deep South. And just like with any other article I write, I don’t claim to be an expert. I’m just a white dude trying his best to understand the world around him and become a better person along the way. And I am, like the rest of us, a work in progress.
St. Louis, Missouri. In the previous article, I opened by talking about how I didn’t have much more than a vague awareness of this place before fate landed me here for a long weekend. And that is true, BUT—since I have become obsessed with doing these articles where I compile collections of murals in a particular place, I have had my antenna up for information about where I can find the best street art. And I had heard that St. Louis was actually one of the street art capitals of America. Who knew!
St. Louis, Missouri: Gateway to the West.
I can’t say that I ever thought much about this place until a wedding landed me here for a long weekend. I think that in the past I had a vague notion that St. Louis wasn’t the nicest city in the world, but I wouldn’t have been able to tell you why. In more recent years, when St. Louis somehow came up in conversation, there was usually somebody there to say “Ya know what—St. Louis is actually pretty ok.” And that’s about all I knew.
Well now that I’ve been here for myself, I have thoughts of my own share. And those thoughts are positive!
Columbus hasn’t historically been quite so colorful as it is today, but now that this is beginning to change, it feels natural. It feels like an actualization of the identity Columbus has always had. Some of the murals you will see in this article have been around long enough to attain “landmark status” in Columbus, but most of them are new… ish.
When you picture LA, what comes to mind?
I’m guessing that most of you didn’t say “mountains.” Or maybe all of you did and I’m the one who wasn’t “hip”. But the following was actually news to me: LA is actually surrounded by some formidable topography! And a lot of it is a lot closer to the city than you might think. The map below shows the terrain in 3D, and you’ll see that there are a number of different mountainous areas to be considered here, but today we’re going to be in the one highlighted in blue. Those are the Santa Monica Mountains.
I’ve gotten to the point with these street art features that I plan my trips around them. If I can get a day to myself, I’m gonna wander around with my camera all day until I find 100 murals I love. And I’m not just doing it “for the ‘gram” anymore! Seriously, these days of wandering are often what makes me feel like I have gotten to know a city at all. That is especially true for a place like Los Angeles.
In a city where most of the time spent between two points is in the back of an Uber, staring at your phone, walking the streets isn’t exactly “normal.” This is a car city. So going through the exercise of walking 10 miles in day, exploring this city street by street, looking in nooks and crannies for murals, poking around small businesses—this can really give you a feel for the DNA of Los Angeles. Of course, whatever I’ve managed to see so far is just a drop in the bucket! But it’s exposed me to a lot. And it helped me internalize the map of this city, so that I started to be able to find my way around without a map.
The observatory was/is equipped with a 12-inch Zeiss refractor telescope that you can actually go look through. Since 1935, an estimated 7 million people have looked through it to catch a glimpse of the stars, which makes it the most used telescope in history by far. In WWII the planetarium was used to train pilots in celestial navigation. Later, in the 1960s, it would be used for that same purpose as a part of the NASA space program. In 2002 this place underwent a major renovation mostly focused on its visitor-facing amenities. Now there’s a café, a gift shop, and a movie theater. I’m sorry to tell you we’re not going into much of this stuff today though. We’re here to catch the sunset!
It was our first full day in Mexico City, and we were sitting in a coffee shop somewhere along the boundary line between Condesa and Roma trying to figure out what we should do with the rest of the time we had. I’m not great at planning my travels in advance, so these sorts of on-the-go brainstorms happen in just about every new city I visit. I wondered aloud if there was any Lucha Libre wrestling to be found here. “I mean, this is the literal center of everything Mexican, so it’s gotta be here somewhere, right?”
At that exact moment, we heard somebody say “Excuse me.” It was the man sitting next to us. He had overheard us talking. In perfect English, he proceeded to tell us everything we could have ever wanted to know about Lucha Libre wrestling in Mexico City. “It’s so fun! I go like every week!” he said emphatically.
Anyway, on the morning of my first day in Mexico City, a friend and I were taking an Uber across the city to get to the bus station, when I started to see bits and pieces of murals tucked away down alleyways, behind cars, over fences, etc. We were clearly passing through some sort of cluster, so I quickly grabbed my phone and dropped a pin on the map. Come hell or high water, I was going to come back to this spot with my camera.
The gallery that follows contains murals from all over Mexico City that we walked past as some point the week we spent there, but probably 50% of them come from that dropped pin on the map. And probably 75% of what are my favorites in this lot come from that dropped pin on the map.
