For several months now I've wondered around Culver City on lunch breaks looking for graffiti. There's not a lot, though the construction along the 405 and Sepulveda has sprouted an on-going paint/sandblast cycle. But here are a few I've seen.

All photos by Mark Mauer

At the time I took these, some genius had decided to splash black gunk all over one section of this cool piece painted on a wooden fence in Hollywood. Much of it had been removed though and it still looks good.

Also as many of Lurker's readers are no doubt aware, there is a large-scale crackdown going on against graffiti artists, and some of the cases against the writers are using YouTube clips as evidence. Therefore, unfortunately, we're not going to be using names anymore on Lurker -- not real names, not writer names.

If we're talking about work that is appearing in galleries, we will still use the names, but no longer can we do it for street art, even if it's been commissioned by the owner of the property.

We just don't want to take the chance that something on this blog might actually be used against an artist in court.

As usual, more photos after the jump. All photos by Mark Mauer.

This wall was a jumble of tags and terrible stuff until Augor and Nekst got a hold of it.

So hey - it looks like L.A. graffiti is now a national story, and pretty much every commenter on the LA Times website wants every street artist locked up or shot.

Read it here:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/politics/cal/la-me-graffiti31-2008jul31,0,5228059.story

It's ludicrous. But it looks like the comments for the story have been taken down.

Also here:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i_8TdtT-dKmt79vgyJLuWwP4a6hwD929LGMO4

and here:
http://www.mercurynews.com/crime/ci_10073352

SANTA ROSA — Graffiti tends to tick people off, but for John Rose it goes much deeper.

The Aussie bird-dogs it everywhere his eyes land — on soundwalls, traffic signs, the side of a building far across a shopping center parking lot.

"I cannot go anywhere without seeing graffiti. It's an illness. It's incurable," he said. "I hate graffiti with a vengeance. I'll do anything to get rid of this waste of time and blight that's devaluing our properties."

Just substitute the word billboard or advertisement for the word graffiti in the story above, and there I am. How many horrible ads are you exposed to every day? They're selling you crap you don't want and don't need and in many cases the billboards themselves are illegal.

So who's worse? Who would you rather fight?

One of the best pieces I've seen in ages is the Por Es Suelo Pachamama wall on Virgil that went up earlier this year. You can see posts on it here and here.

In the second link there's some footage of DAME working on his section of the wall (Retna did much of the rest alsong with AWR and Werc).

Here's what it used to look like:

Then someone splashed the piece with red and white paint.

Dame promised that the mural would be redone, and true to his word, there was a note from him over the weekend to that effect. It's not like it was, but true to the art form, it's morphed, evolved, grown into something else entirely.

He's posted a picture on the Known Gallery website, and I've borrowed it here:

Visit that site to see a larger version of the image as well as a lot more footage of the original process of the work (click 05.08).

Another stunner of a DAME piece I saw on their site is this one from South Korea.

Thanks to Dame for alerting us to the retooled wall, and for going back to it in the first place. The above two photos owned by Dame, and www.knowngallery.com.

On Sunset near Parkman. This area has seen a lot of terrible stuff going on, not only with street art but beyond that. See Christine Pelisek's story about Raven for one tragic story that took place across the street from here.

One mural along the underpass of Silver Lake and Sunset was dedicated to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and got terribly defaced a couple of years ago. It's been a mess since then.

So it was nice to see this new work going up on the wall surrounding Jose Roque's long-time auto body business.

One vintage part of the wall is the portrait of "Michelle." It's been on the site for years, and has even popped up in music videos over the years by Joe Strummer and (I think...) The Transplants.

All photos by Mark Mauer. More after the jump.

Some beautiful Asian-inspired green and orange work in an alley south of Melrose that's filled with CBS crew work.

These pieces are tucked into a narrow area, so I couldn't find a way to get a large full-size shot of the three pieces together. The dragon is on the outside part of the alley.

All photos by Mark Mauer. More after the jump.

All photos by Mark Mauer

A heavenly George Carlin, which he might have found amusing.

One of my favorite lines of Carlin's:
"You can't fight City Hall, but you can goddamn sure blow it up."

(Most likely said before September, 2001.)

Photo by Mark Mauer

Here's an excellent piece on Fountain: Beautiful, unusual, educational and local.

From Elk Pen's website:

"A lot of my work is about birds.
Living in the city, birds are the wildlife I see most often. When I watch a bird hopping around on the sidewalk, or cocking it’s head from the phone wire I am struck by how personable he, or she, is. I hope that in making pictures about birds the livingness and individuality of birds becomes more apparent."

It would have been easy enough for the market owners to just put up a bunch of garish Budweiser ads covering his store, women in bikinis holding wet bottles of beer. More ads, more selling of more junk. Instead: This. With its wonderful muted colors,and bilingual descriptions of all of the birds, this is something useful and even inspiring.

All photos by Mark Mauer. More after the jump.

Space Invader is easily one of the most unusual street artists working today. His tile mosaics based on 8-bit video games can be found in cities across the globe, but Los Angeles is one of his favorites.

At one point L.A. had more Invader pieces than any other city except one. My guess is that may no longer be the case, since so much f his work has been destroyed or picked away here. Over the past 9 years (He's been working for 10, and first "invaded L.A. in 1999) Invader has installed pieces on each of the letters of the Hollywood sign, around LAX (terminals 1 and 3), Venice, downtown, Los Feliz and beyond.

One of his most recent LA pieces, and one of my favorites, playing off of not only video game nostalgia, but classic Mac love.

Rocket Video on LA Brea. This one has been destroyed. the mosaics are frequently just a few inches square and many are at ground level. So it's tempting to remove them, though dismantled and taken out of context, it just becomes a bunch of used tile... Maybe it's the property owners who are removing them.

Laundry on Sunset in Silver Lake. Large, high up and easily visible. Still there.

Close-up of Sunset and Cahuenga laundry

Know where this one is? It's somewhere on Melrose Ave. I took the picture about a year ago, and I lost the location.

"The Big One: as Invader refers to it in his book Invasion Los Angeles. The book is way out of print expensive: www.space-invaders.com/shop/index.php . Thanks to Shelley Leopold for letting me borrow her copy.

A lot of tiles have been pulled off, and ugly suit ads are in front of it, but you can still make it out.

From the alley behind Melrose you can still get a pretty good view of this one. This was installed in December 2002.

All photos by Mark Mauer. More after the jump.