corner

I pass this corner every day on my way home, and every day I'm reminded - just for a second, but I guess it's now become a routine piece of association - of a French street corner.  Oh, of course, it needs a mansard window or two; and a sign saying Tabac, and (if we're going full nineteenth-century - say, from an Atget photo) some advertisements peeling from the walls.  But it does have that strange wedge-like corner; the orange and ochre of continental wall paint; the naked winter tree ... although, come to think of it, the tree might very well be dead, since it's late April.  (It's lucky to be still standing - someone went round downtown LA on a bicycle with a chain saw - no, not Elon Musk - this weekend, senselessly chopping down small trees.). And it does have what, surely, in a nineteenth century French view would be a chiffonier, or rag-picker, or whatever one might call the bundled person wheeling a trolley on the right.  They are passing some graffiti - there seems, over the last few weeks, to be a nightly rash of very bad, very crudely executed graffiti, quite a lot of it celebrating MS 13.  I don't know what to make of this: bravado? Or, more likely, copy-catting? Provocation?  A questionable form of protest?  Every day, now, on my way in, I seem to be passing men with brushes on poles and large buckets of paint, obliterating it again.  I live in hope of traffic being stopped, one of these days, under the 10 underpass on S. Hoover, where my favorite new graffiti has appeared: the one word, APOCOLYPSE.  I need to take its photo.