Got a little bit of Christmas shopping done last night… Mostly it involved looking around some of the boutique shops near the Michigan Theatre and seeing what they had that might be cool to get for people, then going somewhere less trendy that has the same thing for half the price. One of the perils of a college town is that the shops nearest to campus tend to inflate prices astronomically, mostly because they know that they’ve got a captive audience with little experience in handling a personal budget.
One of the other hazards is graffiti. Not that you’re likely to get randomly spraypainted while walking around, but if you hold still too long there is the possibility that someone will slap a stencil on you and put a shadow bunny on your back. Someone going by the name of Jose over at monkey.org has put together a decent gallery of some of the Ann Arbor stencil graffiti. We spotted a bunch of them in the alleys between the stores and the parking garage. Fortunately, there didn’t seem to be any on the more public parts of the shopping district… Tagging on a private home or a store front would really have bothered me. It’s disrespectful and destructive.
On the other hand, graffiti in an alley or on the back of a commercial building seems to be par for the course. Just a part of the cost of doing business, no point cleaning it up. It’s in the alley, the only people who will see it are the delivery guys and the garbage collectors… What’s the point in trying to make a spotless shrine out of the place where the trash gets dumped? A little bit of color relieves the monotony… Some of it can be quite creative too.
Depending on how things go, I may have some pictures to post in addition to the collection I linked to…