Graffiti to Love

I'm not one of those people who likes graffiti. It's cultural currency has been dead for years, and I'm such a sucker for craft that it is difficult for me to like things done quickly, furtively, in avoidance of arrest. Oh, and living in Rome it would drive me mad, all of these ancient monuments being permanently damaged, and in such pathetic ways: Latinized spellings of "Compton," as if any of these regazzi even knew where or what Compton is.

But ... well, these ...



have been showing up in my neighborhood ...



and speak another language alltogether. I'll admit I have no idea what they say, if anything, but I find them very beautiful in the way that they fade at the edges and somehow possess a certain dimensional quality, though formed from only one color.



They remind me of decorative writing in Arabic that you sometimes find on the sides of mosques, or of colliding pattern in fine old Portuguese tilework: