Although my daughter's roses and their companion flowers live in a genteel suburb of the East Bay, her apartment in San Francisco is in a reasonably safe but densely urban neighborhood dubbed by real estate agents as the "Tender-Nob" – halfway between the grand hotels and mansions at the top of Nob Hill and the down-and-out grittiness of the Tenderloin at the bottom of that same hill. Walking home from her apartment through the Tenderloin the other day, I took the photos of the skull posters, already halfway toward obliteration by more recent layers of impoverished self-expression.