The other day my job led me to a place I’d never been before - the alley right next to the State Theater entrance. Some graffiti on the wall there announced a free concert at another alley in Ann Arbor, an alley with a name: Tripper’s Alley.
Tripper’s Alley is supposedly named for the longtime presence of brightly colored graffiti adorning almost every surface there and the habit psychotropic drug users may or may not actually have of walking around there while under the influence. It also echoes the name of Detroit’s famous Trapper’s Alley.
The alley mural began as a one-man project in the 1980s and became a popular spot for graffiti artists. The city took the spot over in 1999 by hiring artist Katherine Tombeau Cost to paint over the original mural and graffiti with a new 5,000-square-foot mural. The graffiti artists haven’t entirely relinquished their claim to it, meaning that Cost’s mural has been partially defaced…be sure to seek out the “trippers’” bubble gum wall toward the back.
Here’s what my friendly acquaintance and one-time poker competitor Josh had to say over at AnnArborIsOverrated:
…The mural alley was much, much cooler when it was graffiti murals instead of the commissioned bullshit that replaced it. Over the years, what had started as one guy’s graf had turned into a collaborative gallery, with no one painting over each other’s stuff- instead, they’d extend it further and further, like an exquisite corpse made of spray paint. To turn it into cartoon fun land really took a lot of the art out of it.
Anyway, I don’t really want to get too far into the merits of the current mural at that particular alley. What interests me is the general embracing of alleys as distinct places, or what it takes for alleys to have names.
What are some other alleys with names? Or what names should be given to other notable alleys in Ann Arbor? Off the top of my head, I can think of a few possible candidates: the Borders alley, with all those cover-less magazines to be found in the dumpsters and the big ant murals on the Maynard side; that alley - I can’t remember where exactly - with the horse stable mural painted over the garage door; the alley with the entrance to the 8 Ball; etc etc. Anyone care to chime in?
While you’re thinking, watch this video of someone doing fire poi in Tripper’s Alley:
Next week (Dec 1-9) is buy local week. Read this blurb from Think Local First:
“Where you spend your money is a reflection of what you want your community to look like. If each member of our community spent just 10% more of their purchasing dollars at locally owned businesses, it would make a huge difference in the viability of many of our independent businesses this holiday season. But best yet, you’ll be able to find unique, interesting gifts that your family and friends will love.”
One great way to start is by coming to visit us at the Shadow Art Fair this Saturday. You can find Tim selling his Sappycards, a new run of Great Lakes Shirts, and our record.
Shadow Art Fair
Saturday December 1st
Noon to Midnight
Corner Brewery in Ypsilanti.
One day, 40+ artists, 9,000 gallons of beer! www.shadowartfair.com
Here are a few of my more successful local holiday gift purchases:
1. Buy unique papers to assemble your own books at Hollander’s. Last year, I made a great “princessey” journal for a five year old I know, and also assembled a collection of security envelope screens for a friend of mine who likes patterns.
2. Encore records. Make a pack of records for cheap - i.e. bundle 15 zither records for your favorite Ruth Welcome fan.
3. Campus Jewelers has an awesome collection of antique watches and pocket watches, for your loved ones who love analog.
Where do you shop? What do you recommend? Keep it local & Post it here!
Living at a busy intersection, overlooking Main Street, we hear a lot of traffic noise - people singing in their cars, near-accident honks, weird smooth jazz tunes leaking out of SUVs.
The traffic is nice. I grew up near a busy intersection, have lived in big cities, and have learned to like hearing the constant wash of cars passing. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, Tim tells me to picture the cars passing, guess how big they are and which way they are going.
A few Saturdays ago, game day, I was sitting at a table looking our our second-story bedroom window, and a near accident occurred: A screech of brakes, 2 horns, and the distinct yell:
“Nice turn signal, ASSHOLE!”
Tim yelled from the other room “What did you say?” Apparently we’re not used to the noise (and my voice sounds like an angry man’s road rage.)
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Sticking with today’s traffic theme, I also have a great Googalone from one of our readers (remember you can send yours to googalones@twofellswoops.com)
The Googalone is from a teacher of the visually impaired, who writes:
“Some of us snarkier teachers have this bumper sticker or license plate holder on our cars.
You should see the looks we get!”
Whenever I go by, these two houses and their respective detached garages appear solitary and stately, set back from the road on a large empty lot just east of Platt on the north side of Packard. They’ve been abandoned for years - their exteriors unmaintained - to the point that the paint and siding has weathered in a way that makes it look almost like grayed Cape Cod-style cedar shingles at a glance. Except for their exterior surfaces, the houses are remarkably pristine and free of more of the structural damage typical of abandoned/vandalized houses. Potential graffiti writers might be deterred by the prospect of their paint just chipping off like the rest. But the overall course of this dilapidation - the preponderance of paint-chipping - is somewhat of a miracle, and visually it is quite stunning.
Developers Hyun and Jason Bang of Troy-based B&K Investment Group Inc. are planning construction next year for a “complex” (read: strip mall) with a neighborhood grocery store and a coffee shop among the tenants they hope to attract. Their site plan has already been approved by City Council. The architect Michael Van Goor told the Ann Arbor Business Review that the developers want to make the site “a destination”.
I say it already is a destination, for anyone who wants to see a great example of the “shingle effect” of badly chipped paint before these buildings are demolished.
Last summer, the Swoops took a trip to South Dakota and recorded music. We just pressed our first installment of this project, a 4-song 7″ record that you can buy exclusively on December 1st at the Shadow Art Fair!
Here’s the blurb Tim wrote about the project:
In the Summer of 2007, we packed our car full of instruments and drove to an old one-room schoolhouse nestled in a remote corner of South Dakota’s Black Hills.
We spent a week recording music. The noises we couldn’t make with what we brought were provided to us – by the curiosities buried in local secondhand shops and the howls echoing across the valley at night.
We had never even talked about making music together before.
I’d driven by the sign a thousand times and always wondered what Putt N Glow was. I pictured all the little hills and faux-greenery of a typical miniature golf course, except inside, under bright florescent lights. But when I finally resolved to go there last week - with my fellow Swoop in tow - what we found was something entirely different.
The “Glow” in the name refers to how things look when lit not by florescent lights, but by blacklight. Entirely lit by blacklight:
The walls of the place are covered with a mesmerizing pastiche of G-rated head-shop style murals. Or, as one visitor was quoted to say (according to the current cache of the official website) “It is like walking through a museum with all the beautiful artwork.” Since it was the late shift on a weeknight, we had the place all to ourselves. We played slowly and a little recklessly and snapped some pictures along the way.
Here’s Andrea standing in front of an underwater scene. The entire opposite wall seems devoted to some kind of aliens-crashing-the-fair tableau, which you really have to see in person to appreciate.
A sign next to a door promised “Interactive Dark Rides” but the only thing nearby was a little group party room, so we surmised that this was just part of the aliens storyline.
As someone who enjoys a challenging round of min-golf, I was disappointed at first by the flatness and repetitiveness of the course. Ann Arbor’s Putt N Glow will never be a stop on the PMGA circuit. This is a place for groups and parties and people so young they can barely manage to hit the ball. But as soon as I stopped hoping for this place to be something it wasn’t, I could start appreciating it for what it was.
To end the night, Andrea got a hole-in-one on the last hole #18 and won us a free pizza. And even better, the attendant, who was kind enough to coach us a little just before, told us that by sinking the hole-in-one, we ended his night on a positive note. Thanks for a good time, Putt N Glow.
Walking home from work one day, I thought the Washtenaw County Courthouse was broadcasting a nature tape outside their building on Huron between Main and Fourth.
Upon closer inspection, we discovered a gigantic host of sparrows and a murmuration of starlings, chirping and hopping from tree to tree. Put on a hat, and go see for yourself before all the leaves are gone. (note - they are tough to see, both in person and on this lo-fi video clip.)
Usually the emails from the U-M Dean of Students pass quickly through my email inbox with little to note. But as I skimmed one the other day, just before hitting the ‘delete’ button, a phrase caught my attention:
We are happy to share with you the reports we have had of great [U-M football] fan behavior so far this season, unmarred by rude behavior, offensive language or the tossing of objects.
“The tossing of objects?” Curious to know what kind of past excitements might have elicited the mention in the Dean’s email, I did some research on object tossing at UofM football games. I discovered that the University Board of Regents actually has an ordinance (backed by a fine up to $50 and a misdemeanor charge) prohibiting spectators at University sporting events from throwing stuff. A story about a recent challenge to this ordinance - the tossing of one particular kind of object by senior engineer Jay Trzkinski, aka “Hot Dog Man” - led me to another interesting phrase:
The issue at the tightly packed Big House isn’t as much about a hot dog inflicting pain as it is keeping students from knocking people over, [Athletic Dept facilities manager Rob] Rademacher said.
A hot dog inflicting pain. When I forwarded the Michigan Daily article to Tim, he immediately responded the same way I did. Somewhat miraculously, we both independently performed Google searches for the exact phrase “hot dog inflicting pain.”
Which brings us to the real point of this post. All of this hot-dog-tossing nonsense is just a lead-in to what we both discovered by searching for that phrase: that in Google’s index of billions of websites - which Tim the Linguist reminds me represents a vast corpus of written English - the exact phrase “hot dog inflicting pain” appears once and only once. (That is, until the Google spiders find this website.) In this, we discovered another thing to collect on this blog.
We call it a Googalone. (No Google, I did not mean google.) A phrase that yields only one site match in a Google search.
We’d like to encourage you to help us find Googalones (No Google, I did not mean goggles.) The rules of our scavenger hunt:
1. Googalones must be submitted by email (not as a comment) to protect their innocence until officially recognized here.
2. They can’t be random spam, they must have a discernible author (for us to, um, credit.) I like them better if they have a complete noun phrase and verb phrase.
3. You can’t make your own page with a fake one just to impress us. That’s stupid.
4. Please email submissions to googalones at [name of this blog] dot com.
We like to walk around town and take pictures of surfaces that are weathered or aged or decaying or distressed or whatever you want to call it. And we want to archive some of those pictures here on our blog. So I thought it would be appropriate for the first post to feature one of Ann Arbor’s most recognizable exterior walls:
Sorry, it’s not the greatest picture. I was operating under bad light conditions with a preservationist mentality. We were walking by the other day and I saw the proprietor of the business outside painting the front. I got scared and asked him, “You’re not painting over the Vernors wall, are you?”
“No way,” he replied. “My landlord would kill me.”
So apparently this wall - a familiar, welcoming landmark to all southbound, incoming traffic from M-14 to Ann Arbor -is safe, as long as its ownership doesn’t change. Which brings me to a point…
Yes, we know Ann Arbor is not the greatest place to document the kind of weathering and urban decay we’re calling “patina”. But that’s why we do it. Because it’s rare and disappearing around here - and too beautiful to be dismissed as conceptual/photographic cliche and forgotten.
