Princesa De Las Aguas

A horrific murder took place in an upscale locale; one brother allegedly bludgeoning another to death with a baseball bat. Columnist Maggie Downs is at work interpreting the sad, ephemeral meanings that might be suggested by the public graffiti she discovered nearby in the neighborhood where the tragedy took place.

Graffiti is a weapon of contraband expression in what the blathering postmodernists call the "contested sites" of public discourse. It can be sacred, offensive, mysterious, profane - and most often a mixture of those elements.

Which brings to my memory El Tamarindo restaurant in Northwest Washington DC. For a period of time in the late 80s it was one of a few joints that didn't seem to mind serving Dos Equis to gawky and obviously underage kids in black Joy Division shirts. It was little more than a dive. But on a wall in the men's room was a large diagram, rendered very carefully in colored magic markers. It was a lady, drawn in lines with loving, incredible precision. It's was one part Trans Am airbrushed hood art, and one part Gray's Anatomy, and all of the parts (and I mean all of them) were conveniently labeled in Spanish.

Crass? Maybe. But now we live in a society saturated with structured information and electronic data. Hand-made folk expressions are rare, and when we can find them they can sometimes lead us back to our essential humanity.