i m h o

two weeks ago, i was late for work because a video was taking so long to compress. i was late for work, so when i saw two wonderful new line drawings on the north wall of the Franklin Garage, i had to pass up shooting them until the next morning. the Franklin Garage is friendly to street painting, so i wasn't afraid they'd paint over it. so, the next morning, i had just pulled out the Flip Mino when i saw that somebody had scribbled over the drawings - not even tagged them, just scribbled like two-year olds. i am only a fan and the politics of street art are none of my business. but deleting somebody else's work is deleting somebody else's work in my humble opinion, whether it's the City, a property owner or just a person with bad manners and a Sharpie who's in a bad mood.

- sylvia

this post is shared with Do You Want To Buy My Brain.

Madonna (still from 'Our Lady of the Golden Automatics'), circa late February-March 2012

I shot video of this painting while my husband were on our way to Market Street Safeway in San Francisco. The Madonna was on a wall in the Lower Haight on Laguna Street where street painting is permitted. My husband came home a few days later and told me the painting was gone. I've lived in America for 60 years and grew up like everyone else with all our culture's ambiguous triangular relationship with religion and censorship. There are plenty of taggers (usually no-talents) who deface, erase and paint over serious artists' work. The paint job over the Madonna was an institutional color - that means it was an official act of censorship. That makes me sad.