Glendale Blvd: Geometric Fields and Strange Symbols

In LA, and I suppose in many other cities, a freeway can act like a canyon or a river, dividing the landscape so that two distinct ecosystems grow up on either side of it. For Silver Lake and Echo Park, that dividing element is the 2 Freeway. Once you go under the 2, you leave the storybook land of quaint little churches and Art Nouveau houses, and you enter, for lack of a better term, Shitsville.

Now this stretch of Glendale Blvd. isn't all bad. For example, right when you go under the 2 you are met by these two cryptic murals.

First is this geometric field mural. I think this mural is really cool, particularly how it is overlapped with the dangling plants, so it really hacks me off that it was tagged. I guess someone was driving by and said:

"Shit, you know what would be cool? What if we got a couple of gallons of turquoise paint, went over to that really cool mural, and threw the paint straight out of the can?"

"What if we did exactly what you said, but used the paint to spell wop?"

"Yes! Wop! That's brilliant! Let's go!"

And this was born:



Just past the tagged-geo-mural, is this smaller piece on an embankment.





I like to think of this mural as a flash board of awesome tattoo ideas. All you need to do is put a grid behind any of these images and they would be great to have on your ankle forever.

Thinking of bad/awesome tattoos on your ankle: In Houston where I grew up there was this tattoo parlor that had a policy of giving girls a free tattoo if their boyfriend got one. The only catch was that you had to pick from one of six dinky designs. There was a mushroom, a four-leaf clover, and some other such crap. Now this place was frequented by a bunch of underage punk-rock kids, and what happened is all these punk-rock girls ended up getting one of these six tattoos. So you'd go to a punk show and there would be ten girls with the same crappy mushroom tattoo on their ankle. I had a good friends who was one of those girls. She also had the misfortune of getting her boyfriend's name tattooed under the mushroom, which she had to carve out later with an Xacto knife.





Mixed in with all these random symbols was the equally cryptic markings of LA DWP on the sidewalk. I know both the mural and the DWP markings mean something to someone, but for the rest of us, we can only speculate. It's like hieroglyphics from two different dynasties.




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