Television City

There’s a woman in Pacoima who’s found a way to get sex removed from TV. No network had anything to do with the offending image; the picture of a bare-breasted young woman modestly covering herself with her hands appeared in a painting of a TV on a wall outside of Su Casa de Descuento (Your House of Discounts), at the intersection of Laurel Canyon and Van Nuys boulevards. It was a composition--bikini-wearing swimmer, ocean, clouds and sea gulls--framed inside the chassis of a sleek Magnavox.

Immigrant commercial muralists, who decorate neighborhoods with everything from painted tostadas to painted toasters, have given L.A. a truckload of painted TVs tuned to programs featuring sports or nature, or sports in nature. A little too much nature, it turned out, for the freelance censor in Pacoima. She complained directly to the muralist, who gave the bather a bikini top.