Do you like ghost stories?
Do you like riding trains?
Answer yes to either question, and you might enjoy a new short story that I published this morning. It’s titled Backward Man.
Is it possible to see the future by looking backward? That seems like a reasonable assertion, right?
If a little strangeness and horror are your cup of tea, you can read the story by clicking here!
Fiesta del Sol has returned to Solana Beach! The big event is bringing the community together this weekend on the streets above Fletcher Cove!
The annual spring festival always attracts huge crowds. There’s plenty of food, music, arts and crafts to keep families and fun lovers plenty busy.
I swung by in the afternoon to enjoy some of the experience!
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
You can easily explore Cool San Diego Sights by using the search box on my blog’s sidebar. Or click a tag! There are thousands upon thousands of photos for you to enjoy!
The UC San Diego 2022 Powwow began late this morning with Bird Singers from the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians.
As people slowly arrived at Marshall College Field, the singers sang ancient stories of the world’s creation. Traditional dancers and shaken gourd rattles moved in rhythm with the words.
In the San Diego sunshine, the culture and history of the Kumeyaay was alive, passing from heart to heart, from generation to generation.
One of the bird singers explained how culture and spirituality live together hand in hand. The singing takes much time and sacrifice. It is for the people. It brought him and others happiness, enriching life in many ways.
Bringing this beautiful music to our world helps many to thrive in this day and time.
I listened. Took some photos. I stretched my legs and ate some Kumeyaay fry bread with powdered sugar and drizzled honey. Yum!
Bird Singers were followed by Gourd Dancers.
After a little while, I felt the urge to move forward through this amazing world, and I walked again down my path.
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
A large new mural was finished several days ago in San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter!
The permanent mural, which can be seen from Fifth Avenue, decorates the north side of the luxury, seven story AC Hotel by Marriott Gaslamp San Diego, which is presently under construction.
The image is inspired by historical photographs and represents the nearby stretch of Fifth Avenue as it appeared in the 1890s.
The tall building depicted on the left side of the mural is the Louis Bank of Commerce Building, which in the late 1800’s became home to the Oyster Bar, one of four saloons and gambling halls operated by Wyatt Earp when he lived in San Diego
The mural’s artists are Swank, Asylm and Vogue, from I.C.U. Art out of Los Angeles.
Awesome!
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A futuristic car–a new form of wearable machine–is presently on display at the San Diego Automotive Museum in Balboa Park.
The Nissan GT-R 2050 is a full-size prototype made at Nissan Design America, San Diego. It was designed by student intern Jaebum “JB” Choi to be an autonomous, human-connected vehicle of the far future!
According to the Nissan website, The completed project runs just under 10 feet long and sits just over two feet high. The single occupant, the driver, rests horizontally in a “prone” position with limbs extended in an X-shape. The driver wears a futuristic, form-fitting suit and helmet that resembles a superbike riders’ protective helmets and leathers.
Does it come with a Bat Cave, too?
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
What in the world are Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison doing in North Park?
They’re decorating the exterior of the very unique San Diego Gas & Electric Company’s Substation F!
I happened to look up and see the two historical figures as I walked along the El Cajon Boulevard sidewalk just east of Iowa Street.
These gentleman made groundbreaking discoveries and inventions that remain important in our electricity dependent world. Both esteemed men, in North Park, are busts made of cast stone!
Learn more about SDG&E’s beautifully restored Station F, originally built in 1926, at this web page.
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
You can easily explore Cool San Diego Sights by using the search box on my blog’s sidebar. Or click a tag! There are thousands upon thousands of photos for you to enjoy!
Art is often a stir of moods and strange contradictions, like life itself.
I saw this complexity during a fun visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla. A major exhibit in the recently reopened, beautifully renovated museum concerns the often experimental artwork of world-renowned artist Niki de Saint Phalle, who spent her last years living in La Jolla. The exhibition is titled Niki de Saint Phalle in the 1960s. It will be on view through July 17, 2022.
As I walked around several spacious gallery spaces, observing the artist’s sensuous sculptures, and fantastic drawings, and paintings created by shooting guns, I saw joyful, fertile, exuberant life displayed side-by-side with bleak, shattered, debris-filled pessimism. It seemed that positivity was associated with female experience, negativity with modernity. As if the two are absolutely separate.
Niki de Saint Phalle’s female sculpture Nanas dance everywhere one turns, bursting with life. Her large Tirs, or performance art “shooting paintings,” looked to my eye like dead junkyards: rigid, punctured, streaked, drained.
As I gazed at the various artworks, whose elements often seem primordial or mythical, I wondered how seemingly opposed ideas could tangle in the mind of an artist–how paint and gunshots could so easily coexist. Oh, wait. Life and death is the prime subject of art.
Go visit this amazing exhibition of rampant creativity and form your own conclusions!
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
Are the above chairs awesome or what? I bet you’d like to sit in one!
When I visited the Mingei International Museum last weekend, I set my astonished eyes on this furniture. I then admired other fantastic furnishings, all designed by world-renowned French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle!
The many sculptures she created during her lifetime are widely known. But chairs and tables and vases and mirrors? Yes!
You’ll discover all sorts of crazily colorful objects when you visit the Niki and Mingei exhibition at the Mingei International Museum!
You’ll see an exuberant, irrepressible love of life.
Did I mention Niki became well known for her sculptures?
She has many around San Diego!
Should you walk outside the Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park, you’ll likely see two of her sculptures: Nikigator and Poet and Muse. And during your travels you might observe her sculptures at Waterfront Park, or UC San Diego, or by the San Diego Convention Center, or at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido. If you haven’t stepped into Queen Califia’s Magical Circle at Kit Carson Park, you’re missing a mind-blowing, incredible experience.
Niki de Saint Phalle was closely connected with San Diego and the Mingei International Museum. She spent the later years of her life in La Jolla.
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
Students from the 8th Grade Culture Class at Barona Indian Charter School have created a Heritage Project concerning Kumeyaay culture and history. Their work will be displayed in an upcoming exhibition at the Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park!
The exhibition is titled Kum ‘Enyaawapch Ewuupch which is in the northern dialect of the Kumeyaay language. Translated to English, it means The Way We See It.
The exhibition has its big opening celebration on May 26, 2022. See all the details here!
I learned about this exhibition as I walked past the entrance of the Mingei International Museum last weekend. Photos of students filled one window, near an informative sign.
You can hear introductions by the participating students on the Barona Cultural Center & Museum website here!
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
Whoa! Check it out!
Look at the huge multi-level playground structure that’s being built for Children’s Park in downtown San Diego! The park is undergoing a major redesign, which will make it more . . . children friendly!
Children’s Park is located north of Harbor Drive, adjacent to Martin Luther King Jr. Promenade. That circular pool with its unique fountain between Front Street and 1st Avenue is part of it. The two-acre city park, with its many shady trees, is a very short walk from both The New Children’s Museum and the San Diego Convention Center.
The park has often been used as a convenient offsite location during Comic-Con. Evidently not this year!
You might remember how, years ago, Children’s Park was filled with numerous large rounded mounds that unfortunately concealed drug and other illegal activity. Those mounds were removed in phases.
Now this important downtown open space is being completely revitalized, with the addition of a playground, an interactive water feature, and a new vendor building.
If you’d like to learn more about the project, you can visit this web page.
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
Cool San Diego Sights! 