With the new progressive Independent, the Review writes, there will now be “two left leaning papers on campus” — the other one being the Daily. Ouch, that was harsh. That is, to poor Critical Moment, which doesn’t even merit a mention. This must be one of those acts of epistemic violence that the Review is so renowned for practicing.
Vintage to Vogue Home will now be known as “V2V,” the Observer reports, and will offer clothing as well as home furnishings. “You can find your look,” the owner says. “‘This is me on the weekend,’ or, ‘Totally me at the cottage.’” Or, she might want to add, “Totally me at the LoFT.”
What makes the new lofts at LoFT 322 so darn hip (via Suds and Soliloquies)? Is it the lower case “o”? No, it’s the 26 adjectives that describe the building and the randomly placed semicolons that separate them: “Progressive, contemporary, comfortable, affordable, innovative, edgy, smart and unique; functional, purposeful, practical, daring, decisive and distinct; new, clean, open, sleek, high-quality, high-tech and high-touch; simple, different, luxurious, original and imaginative — that’s hip!” (It would be 27, but they appear to be using “hip” as a noun.) And more than that, it’s you. “[I]t’s your creative stroke and inspired taste that makes hip truly hip.” Emphasis theirs. “At LoFT 322, your home is your canvas and your masterpiece is imminent.”
But they sell themselves short; it’s the creativity of their advertising team that’s given us the most inspired cropping of an Ann Arbor photo ever: the right side of Zingerman’s sign behind a prominent ad for the U of M Museum of Art. It’s almost enough to make us want to walk over to Kingsley and Detroit, cup our hands near our eyes and enjoy the three-square-foot field of vision with the highest density of Urban Hip in all of A2.
You know your doom and gloom prediction is bad when the only bright spot is Ann Arbor. After the oil runs out and we’re forced to abandon our Wal-Marts and Home Depots, the Peak Oil News blog says, “Borders Books, long since driven out of the big-box economy because of its insistence on carrying liberal and progressive titles, will have been reduced to its original store in Ann Arbor, which will remain one of the few old style college towns in the country.” Don’t they realize that the demolition of the Frieze Building makes this scenario impossible by obliterating our memories and link to the past?
In what’s probably the first instance of the Daily calling a blog prognosticator out on a failed prediction, Jeremy Berkowitz writes about FCB House of Flavors, still around a year and a half after “Rob Goodspeed, a University alum[,] predicted its quick demise on his blog.”
This is Ann Arbor — we don’t need to wait to protest something until it actually happens, or appears to have any conceivable chance of happening at any time in the future. That’s what some GEO members must have been thinking when they decided to protest the hypothetical situation of a department that requires female GSIs to wear skirts. Requiring grad students to wear clean clothes would be enough of a struggle.
Now the Michigan Review purports to “expose” GEO by leaking a series of internal e-mails among its organizers on why they won’t talk to the Review. A Romance languages GSI accuses the conservative publication of “practic[ing] epistemic violence every day.” A philosophy grad student characterizes it as an “offensive homophobic, misogynist, racist publication.” The Review writer concludes that “the graduate department” is controlled by the left, but they should have just talked to some of us in engineering. “The Review? Is that the one that always rips off the Onion?”
Just when we were getting used to the uniquely Michigan tradition of “coney islands,” we find out that in upstate New York, these establishments and the style of hot dog they’re known for serving are known as “michigans”. The archive of stories about michigans in the Plattsburgh Press-Republican is almost like something out of a bizarro-world Ann Arbor News, with a folksy local columnist, “Cheers and Jeers” column on the editorial page and laments about a past that’s slipping away (when a local baker stops making the “michigan rolls” on which the delicacy is usually served, citizens contact their state senator.) Except instead of a Michigan paper writing about something with a name that alludes to something in New York, it’s a New York paper writing about the same thing with a name that alludes to Michigan. We need to go lie down or something.
The News letters page publishes a batch of some of the most hilarious letters on the Frieze that we’ve seen. Ann Arbor High memories not a convincing argument for keeping the structure? How about memories from “the short-lived Masters in Telecommunication Arts (1983) program”? “Like Rome, this building took on many roles in its time,” writes a graduate of this program. “Everything now must be new, expensive and exclusive.”
“Now” in general gets a rather poor reception here. A Pinckney woman blames some unspecified “derogatory remarks from students” on “what the Now Age is teaching.” She suggests building the new dorm on “the Diag that holds all the demonstrations and annual pot burning.” Sure, the rooms would be a little narrow, but that’s okay since “housing is not that hard to find. There are for-rent signs everywhere.”
“I’m surprised more of our famous alumni haven’t come to the defense of the Carnegie Library and this historic tragedy.” Well, we are neither famous nor an alum, but we’re more than willing to come to the defense of this historic tragedy.
Well, we’re not making any plans Friday night — not when we can watch the City Council and the U face off over student housing on CTN. We’ve never really thought of the university as “a reluctant bride,” but we’ve never thought of the students who pay sky-high rents to A2 landlords as “a burden on the community” either. (And “Melrose Suites”? Really.)
Murph makes a commendable attempt to find some common ground between student and non-student residents of A2.
Discussion over development within Ann Arbor is often a battle of straw men. On the one hand, we supposedly have wealthy NIMBY homeowners who want to freeze the city in amber, and preserve it exactly as it is forever. On the other side are marauding developers and their cronies–student “temporary” residents longing for Manhattan who support “development for development’s sake” and would see Ann Arbor razed to the ground and rebuilt completely out of modernist high-rises.
Yeah, we think it’s about time to put that caricature to rest as well. Some of us are longing for Boston, not Manhattan. Get it straight.