The Basin Weekly

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STREET LEVEL | later: Person dies in fall from mid-city building (March 2007)

Somebody Keeps Putting These Up

by our columnist | from the print edition

The posters show up overnight on plywood, on the backs of signs, on the roll-down gates of shops that closed years ago. A seal. A lightning bolt. A man with a pipe. Three words, usually, that sound like a slogan until you read them twice.

The city removes them within days. A crew supervisor told this column his men have scraped the same corner eleven times. He asked not to be named, which puts him in good company, because nobody connected to the posters will give a name either.

A clerk at a T-shirt shop that sells the designs says boxes arrive and he has never seen who leaves them. A gallery showed the work for one night; the artists may or may not have been in the room. A zine devoted sixteen pages to the question and came up empty.

What the posters want is less clear than how many there are. They don't sell anything. They don't endorse anybody. In a year when every surface is asking you to be afraid of something, they seem to be asking who is doing the asking.

One reader wrote to say none of it is real and the photographs are fakes. I walked to the corner she named. The poster was there. By the time the photographer arrived, it was gone.