| A N N A R B O R I S O V E R R A T E D . (a blog.) |
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LiveJournal user jdryznar questioned his assessment. "FUCK YOU!" he explained. "Don't insult those Bang dudes. Those dudes are fucking sweet." (Got this link from rya, who denounced jdsalmon as someone who has been criticized by "several folks in (great) Detroit bands.") In response to inquiries: Ann Arbor Sucks does not know where to find these shirts, although it's not unreasonable to assume that the mention of them here implied at least a partial endorsement. Ann Arbor Sucks does sell anti-A2 shirts, but they are unrelated. Ann Arbor Sucks finally switched desktop backgrounds today, from a bad photograph of Cambridge, Massachusetts chosen to evoke sloppy-sad nostalgia, to the chilly, computer-generated "Kraftwurm" graphic that came with the window manager. No longer missing Boston doesn't equate to warming to Ann Arbor in the slightest, by the way. If you think ann arbor sucks so much, then why don't you LEAVE???I'm just confused as to why you'd spend so much time and energy explaining why your lameass thinks it sucks instead of doign something about it (to make it better) or moving away. ????? please explain. When Ann Arbor Sucks (all right, "I") started my CafePress store, the site asked "What's your passion?" It seemed a little sad to admit that my passion was hating Ann Arbor. But I wanted to start a weblog about something both a little more specific and, I hoped, a little more interesting, than my life. As far as I knew, there was no other blog on this topic. Ann Arbor seemed like the perfect mix of aspiring cultural mecca and Midwestern cow town to make it a target for satire. And I'll be in grad school for a while. So it's unlikely that you'll be getting rid of me any time soon. In "Thatch," one of my favorite comics, policy wonk Thatch is dating a woman completely indifferent to anything political. "Don't worry," she says when he worries that they have nothing in common. "You have your thing, and I have my thing." "What is your thing?" he asks. "Hating politics," is the response. So maybe that's what I have in common with my readers. And this is why I don't do a personal journal! Back to criticizing Daily headlines tomorrow. Well, that could be...let's see, Champaign, Madison or maybe even Columbus. But "Spinning My Wheels"'s complaints fit just a little too well. He's "tried the bar scene, but they come in two categories: massive sports bars crammed with binge-drinking undergraduates, or smaller, pub-style places where grad students huddle around a table and discuss their classes and professors and don't talk to anyone else except their waitperson." He laments that "people come here to go to school, they associate primarily with people they meet in class, and then leave when they've got their degree," which would seem to leave out Madison and its frenzied Wisconsin state government social whirl. And the clincher: he "took a yoga class last year hoping to meet some women." Oh, and Tennis' advice? Move to Chicago, "the windy city of broad shoulders and blues and graduate students in economics." Sigh. Okay, he didn't tell any female readers that they could offer him a "different perspective" on breast implants if only they offered some visual aids, as Greene has been said to. But Seibert's parting shot offers enough name-naming detail to keep A2 media watchers away from Media News for a while. The Arts editors, according to Seibert, constitute a "fascist regime." The editor-in-chief believed the Arts section to be "all fucked up." Luke Smith and Jeff Dickerson, he writes, "the two managing Arts editors...I hold most directly responsible for all this, expressed that they used to be 'intimidated' by me as the 'black kid who wore the big leather jacket'", being, as they were, "two extremely Caucasian kids from Traverse City whose experiences with black men were probably limited to Carter from Spin City." And Smith, whose column has come up in this weblog before, was apparently annoyed because Seibert "would not spit-polish his cock like his other writers." Maybe conservative publications really do have more fun. Also, Merrie of mythoslogos has this to say about the "Coney Island" thing: Coney-Island-ism is a hideous Detroit Metro area thing that has seeped into Ann Arbor...One would think Coney-Island-ism began in New York, where there is a place called Coney Island. But one is not certain. However, it was a "big thing" in the 50's, 60's and 70's to get your hot dogs and fries smothered in vomit-like chili sauce in Metro Detroit. There are few cities in the Midwest that measure up to Ann Arbor. Aside from Madison, our fair city, compared to any other Big Ten college town, is the best around. Um. Does "hog-butcher to the world" ring any bells? Or, in the case of Big Ten college towns, "suburb, that while overrun with Lake Forest sorority girls in their Mercedes Jeeps, is directly contiguous to the hog-butcher to the world." Our critics say that we're stuck-up, arrogant and trapped in six square miles surrounded by reality. Ann Arbor Sucks, considered by some to be a critic, says something quite different. New York is arrogant. Ann Arbor's relentlessly upbeat civic boosterism doesn't even come close. It's six square miles of Michigan surrounded by Michigan. One of Ann Arbor's greatest fans, public radio personality, Midwestern icon and writer Garrison Keillor... This one's pretty self-explanatory. "Doing one's time in the Midwest" as one out-of-state friend once told me, is probably one of the most important things for an East Coaster. A2 as gulag. Yes, there are better places than Ann Arbor. No doubt. But it is places like Ann Arbor that prepare people to appreciate those better places and the finer things in life. Try this one out sometime. "Your stuffed eggplant hors d'oeuvre prepares me to appreciate better stuffed eggplants that I will come across in my lifetime." As we see from this piece, Ann Arbor can be thought of as a kind of thin gruel. To those who haven't tried solid food yet, it's a step toward the big-kid stuff. To those who have grown complacent on their steady diet of chewables, it's a character-building experience. Slurp. And the best thing about Ann Arbor? "The people" narrowly beat out "diversity." Awwww. Today's Ann Arbor News contains a very alarming little column about the state of engineering in Ann Arbor. It seems that MichCon employees are deciding where buried gas lines are by dowsing. That's right, the ancient folk method of locating buried items with a forked stick that dowsers believe moves mysteriously when it is above the item in question. This method, as the appalled engineer who wrote the column points out, is also known as "divining" or "witching." Ann Arbor Sucks has been doing a lot of snarky eighteenth- and nineteenth-century references lately, but this is just too easy. We hear that after a MichCon employee searched for a gas line by Goody Crandall's barn, her cow refused to give milk for three days. Also, it turns out that Andrew W.K. is an Ann Arbor native. We can only hope that the revelry didn't get as out of hand as that Flemish peasant wedding described in the Onion, in which Mies the Swineherd tore his codpiece and the town's butter churn was overturned. I'll try to work up some distaste for Ann Arbor tomorrow. Like, maybe The Ann Arbor News is running a story that makes us look like a hick town, and I could make some snide comment about that. Wouldn't that be a new departure for this weblog? Or maybe I could make a trenchant observation about some disagreeable aspect of big city life that's replicated here, without the corresponding good quality. Wry and understated! I guess what I'm saying is that I'll try to find something about dogs and needlework samples, and blog it tomorrow. |