Mission Mission

Reader deaddollz wants to know what happened to Ba-Kok:

this kid bombed the mission hard from 06-08 then disappeared. is he/she in jail? moved to a new city? died!? i don’t know, but i do know that i miss this silly shit. ba-kok 4-life. sf misses you!

Indeed! Here’s the official Mission Mission report from way back in March of ’08.

Ariel and I spotted a series of these on Saturday covering a wall on between 18th and 19th on Valencia, all with different messages. I don’t know where this guy got the visionary idea of making something as banal as a soup can into “art”, but I like it! It’s so… so… “popular”. Or, “pop”  if you will.

I’ve also never seen a formal apology on a wheatpaste piece before. Do you forgive them?

Cranky Old Mission guy posted a picture of some street artwork on 17th and Mission. What the hell is that thing, anyway?

As the story goes, it all started as a joke. It was in Florida, 32 years ago, that Chuck and Lou Ann Best adopted a little gray squirrel who had been orphaned by a hurricane. Then they taught it how to waterski. You can read the longer version on Twiggy’s official homepage.

Frickety Fresh (taker of this picture and author of this post’s title) wants to know.

I love this picture, and this picture wouldn’t exist had someone not tagged this plant, so……….. GREY AREA!!

That what exactly?

I tried Google to no avail:

Many Machines saw this tagger slapping a sticker on a bus somewhere, took action, and then wrote an open letter to the kid explaining why:

It is very important that you understand that I didn’t do this because of some sort of anti-sticker philosophy.  (My views on the matter are fairly fluid.)

I pulled your sticker down because it sucks.  Really, it’s terrible.

Read on for the whole story and pics of the sucky sticker.

It’s been a while since the Mission has seen any street art quite so thought-provoking as this. What gives? Can I get a SARAH SILVERMAN’S MUSTACHE up in here?

Photo by T.L. Geo.

If you were walking by Clarion Alley at Valencia Saturday afternoon a very friendly guy with a can of spray paint in one hand and a Flip camera in the other may have excitedly encouraged you to paint your name on the wall. Chor Boogie was getting tourists and locals alike, most skeptical at first, to grab a can of paint and throw-up.

Chor has been collaborating with the San Francisco Arts Commission for the Free Wall Program, giving people a legal space to paint on to discourage them from painting . . . anywhere else. Little kids can get started early by painting with cops. He hosted a free wall at the last Sunday Streets in the Western Addition, and will host another for the October 24th Sunday Streets at Civic Center.

It’s definitely fun to have a bunch of random strangers collaborate on a large piece, but I’m not sure how you make a product that can be enjoyed once the process is finished. The Clarion wall as it ended up (directly above) is cool in a chaotic way, but is ultimately a mess. You could say it reflects the overlapping thoughts and voices that is life in a neighborhood as dense as The Mission. Or something like that. But it’s still too much for me to really want to look at.

That’s not really the point here, I know. People were enjoying being able to paint without rules or structure. (though etiquette was still enforced, Chor reminded a man not to spray upwind of another artist) So the process is engaging and inspiring and freeing, but once it’s done what are we supposed to do with what’s left? I wonder if they’d be able to impose a loose structure that allows people to feel empowered to create what they want, but gives them enough framework to produce something cohesive. Exquisite Corpse? Paint by numbers? Maybe everyone gets assigned a piece of a known painting that gets recreated as you go.

In any case I like the idea and the $150,000 program also pays for commissioned murals and arts in schools, which is rad.