Want to see an endless stream of garbage and graffiti on San Francisco streets and walls without getting anywhere near it? Just go on Twitter and follow @SF311Reports, where you can get an alert, usually with a charming photo, whenever there's a service request update. It's nice to see, mixed up the metaphorical garbage of Twitter, some actual, honest to god shit and trash, in my opinion.
Opened Graffiti request via android at 163 Tiffany Ave https://t.co/6GKG7HllL5. Tagged mailbox, 29th st and tiffany. pic.twitter.com/Of4rIRQUgU
— SF311 Reports (@SF311Reports) January 20, 2017
Closed Street or Sidewalk Cleaning request at 4075 17th St https://t.co/OC5z212f1a. Case closed. case resolved. pic.twitter.com/IXDCI3zUzl
— SF311 Reports (@SF311Reports) January 20, 2017
Real estate website Trulia has crunched the numbers on 311 complaints during 2016 to learn that more than 70,00 of them were logged about tagging and graffiti. That was nearly 16 percent of the complaints overall. Bulky items like furniture, boxes, or mattresses left on the ground generated 67,000 complaints, or 15 percent of them.
Meanwhile, Hoodline has the related story of one serial vandal responsible for generating god knows how many 311 complaints with tags about a mysterious website. These tags are confined mostly to the Upper Haight, but they're numerous there, and they all say "Olevau.com." But why? The mystery is not very deep, but here it is:
The tags aren't sanctioned by the website itself, Hoodline learns, speaking to its administrative manager named Olivia Lang. "Olevau was built with All-of-You (pronunciation) in mind," Lang wrote in an email to Hoodline. "Olevau is simply a blank sheet of paper. A clean slate. A tool for communication. ... Olevau is strictly anonymous, allowing people to post with the freedom and the protection of an invisibility cloak."
Given anonymity and the sheet of paper that is the Upper Haight neighborhood, at least one Olevau.com fan is not very creative and made nothing but a stupid mess.
To get another perspective on Olevau, here's what one commenter on the bare-bones site wrote "So this is an imageboard but uglier and with less features!""The fucking revolution is here."
Asked about the tagging, Lang wrote that "The Founders of Olevau do not support, promote or condone Destruction & Violence within the community," she wrote. "Period. How the users of Olevau decide to express their love for the website is beyond our control. Olevau = Creation."
Extremely deep. On the site, the tags themselves were met with a mixed response. "which one of you spray painted shit all over sf" asks one commenter, who encourages the tagger to "keep it up."
Another counters: "STOP TAGGING THE HAIGHT. WE DON'T WANT TO SEE YOUR SELF-PROMOTING BULLSHIT. FUCK OFF."
It's a tie, I guess? And, Oliveau guy, I'm gonna let you finish, but let me just say that Cryst was the greatest SF tagger of all time.
Related: Alleged 'Cryst' Tagger Faces 29 Counts Of Vandalism, Might Be Defending His Tags In SFist Comments