A letter from San francisco....S

Stencils

Stenciled Graffiti.

Like every big city, and many smaller ones, San Francisco has its share of graffiti. Some appears aimless some visionary.

For the first time here though I noticed that people were also using the pavement as their surface. Many people don’t look at their feet as they walk, but here, once you do, you begin to see another world unfolding. At first it just appeared to be artist signatures but then I started noticing the stenciled work. Someone was cutting stencils and spraying onto the paving stones. A foot in a high heel shoe, a butterfly, a cheeky butler, a woman’s face with the text “evil has a sweet side” and a pair of angels wings with the letters DS.

I started to photograph them and this morning whilst looking around the Lower Haight section of town I saw stenciled the words “walk with me” and an arrow. So I did.

Laugh with me, share with me, smile with me, believe with me, grow with me, trust with me...

It continued and I followed each turn, each road crossed, and I wove my way through the streets to the Mission District and Dolores Park. And there I found the stenciled love story of which I had heard and had in fact left the house with the vague intention of finding.

The stenciled love story is a series of graffited text that can be read in a 4-mile area of the city, and read in different order and towards one of four endings. It was a beautiful day; the sky was a crisp blue with just an occasional lost thread of mist drifting over so I set off, backwards at first trying to recreate the story.

“She tells him about the dream journals that she’s kept since she was 12, filled with watercolor sketches and the lyrics of subconsciously composed songs.”

That was an extract.

However graffiti, even when artistic and well planned, remains a criminal activity. Here in San Francisco damage up to 400 dollars is punishable by a 10 000 dollar fine and/or a year in jail. Above 400 dollar damage can be a felony, up to 3 years away and a 50,000 fine.

And then there are the vigilantes to contend with.

Peter bray a volunteer with Graffiti watch reportedly gets up two hours before work every day to paint over graffiti he finds in the mission district where he lives.

I would blame him as being responsible for the fact that I never found the beginning of the story, though he claims in an interview in this week’s free newspaper that he doesn’t bother with sidewalks, because no one looks.

Which means I will go out again and try to find the beginning of “She loves the moon”