Nordlinger’s Going To Love This One

Anyone find a Communist coat button by the North Campus co-op?

41 Responses to “Nordlinger’s Going To Love This One”


  1. I would have suggested e-bay for the person. Soviet era stuff is not all that rare yet. Especially since they were selling pretty much anything that wasn’t nailed down.


  2. I would suggest that this undergrad get a friggin life. Communism is dead, and it certainly won’t return because this dude is wearing a button.

    Current mood: I don’t give a rat’s ass.


  3. Without going into the elaborate (and, to my mind, entirely unnecessary) “the Nazis were worse than the Soviets” apologia, I’ve definitely no time to look for a button celebrating totalitarianism. And as you can probably imagine, I’ve got a LOT of time…


  4. Lazaro- Yeah, but totalitarianism has given us the best graphic design ever.
    I mean, say what you will about the Nazis, but can you get better than the black swastica in a white circle on a red field?
    The Maoists are right up there too, with about the greatest example ever of a single person becoming a symbol for an ideology. Political is the personal? Yeah! Inversion of individual identity for mass identity? Yeah! Hannah Arendt’s all there!
    (And that’s leaving alone the Empire in the Star Wars movies. Or COBRA from GI Joe…)
    It’s unfortunate that fundementalist Muslims don’t believe in representational art, otherwise I think Al Qaeda would be more popular. Their propoganda sucks!


  5. js, I gotta disagree about the Muslim artwork. Have you seen Hezbollah’s logo?* It features a fist holding an AK-47 worked into the group’s name (in Arabic of course)

    You can see it here: http://www.rotten.com/library/history/terrorist-organizations/hezbollah/hezbollah_logo.gif

    *Some Arab Guy does not endorse Hezbollah, or Terrorism, Communism or Fascism. A person should not believe in an ism - he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon: “I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.”


  6. Don’t forget Che!


  7. Nowadays everybody wanna talk like they got something to say
    But nothin comes out when they move they lips
    Just a buncha gibberish
    And muthafuckas act like they forgot about Che*

    *probably the first and last time you’ll ever see me parody a hip-hop lyric.


  8. Way to go Brandon.

    What I found even more humorous is clicking on rockchick357’s livejournal - she is the one that made the helpful ebay comment, and she is one of the geniuses that go to the University of Michigan.

    Lines I love from her site:

    “anyway, i photoshopped my head on ashlee simpson’s body and ed’s on ryan cabrera. it took up a greater part of my evening. but it was way worth it.”

    Are you fucking kidding me? I’m sure your photoshop skills will come in very handy once you graduate and stand in line at the unemployment office.

    “in other news, after watching america’s next top model and realizing we are not reaching to our potential, my mother and i went tanning and bought a 6 seconds abs workout thing. it has been probably 923483 seconds since, and i don’t have abs. i do seem to have pain, cramping, and some minor swelling though. ”

    Have you thought about, well, maybe checking out a VD clinic for that?

    “so i always walk by that harmonica player by the ugli and i always think, wow…that’s what i like to see, bums working for their money. kind of like the michael jackson alley dancing bum.”

    HE’S A FUCKING POSTDOC YOU NIMWIT.

    “i think everyone kind of has random moments where they’re one second being all normal, just fucking reading a book, or thinking about homework, or watching lame-ass television (or sweetass reality television) and then all of a sudden they just realize that they’re alive. and you kind of feel like you’re exploding, like really fucking exploding. and you sort of want to make-out, or maybe, for some, punch people in the faces.”

    I know that feeling. Reading your journal really got me close to going outside and decking the first undergraduate I saw. Wow. Harvard’s really the Michigan of the east, huh?


  9. who’s a postdoc? “michael jackson” or the harmonica man?


  10. Mandrake, your generalized hatred of undergrads makes me wince. And question your overall credibility…


  11. Credibility, meg? What credibility whatsoever do I have to begin with that you can possibly question? As if I matter.


  12. The credibility of all the other ranting that you do on this blog, maybe…


  13. As I was reading these comments, it just hit me that I was alive. Really fucking alive.


  14. Which amounts to….blogshit.


  15. I’m just sayin’, man, that it seems that the term ‘undergrad’ is tossed out there pretty often in a lot of people’s posts, associated with some pretty derisive comments. Is it really true that ALL undergrads are retarded/uncool/fake/unlikable/etc.? Is it really true that no undergrad could ever mingle and/or be friends with a — ooh, here comes coolness and REAL people — GRAD student?? Have you ever considered the possibility of some grad students acting the equivalent of undergrads, and vice versa? Were none of you ultra-perfect grad students ever undergrads yourself? It just all seems so high-schoolish, and I would have expected more from people complaining about the lameness of Ann Arbor and the U-M. I guess my initial expectations were wrong (that people dissatisfied with AA would be on here talking about how to make our situation better), yet the reality of some of the ppl in this town (and on this blog) is starting to sink in. Instead of seeking to enrich oneself by giving people a chance to show who they really are by talking to them or considering things relatively, some people choose to go the narrow and judgemental route. How disappointing. How petty. I’m sorry if I’m taking some of your satirical shit or generalizations too seriously, but you rant, and so can I. So have at me, I’m an undergrad.


  16. If it makes you feel any better, in my opinion, it’s not just the undergrads who are overrated, it is everyone in this town. And if you take me seriously, you are missing the point. Why do you think I have chosen a name from the movie Dr. Strangelove? Because I am not being serious. But you gotta visit that girl’s website - the photo of her and her boy disproportionately photomontaged on Ashley Simpson’s body is a CLASSIC! You gotta find the funny in that, or you won’t find the funny anywhere.


  17. Meg, think of Mandrake as an annoying but loveable yapping chihuahua. Just don’t let him hump your leg.


  18. Mandrake gets buzz for the “deck an undergrad” comment.

    Meg — not all undies are bad, but striking out at any random one means you might get the blogger in question. Also, your labeling of high school as immature and factional is about as thoughtful as Mandrake’s faux rant. Go back to the shallow end of the pool.


  19. //Are you fucking kidding me? I’m sure your photoshop skills will come in very handy once you graduate and stand in line at the unemployment office.//

    Uh, hey now. We had a Photoshop class back when we were freshmen in the art school… (not that 6/7ths of the class even needed it).

    Photoshop- educatin’ cornerstone of the Michigan art school.


  20. Art Student - I’m sure a chimpanzee could do a better job using photoshop to place a head onto a body than that girl. Maybe she needs that Michigan fine arts education you’re talking about.

    And NoHu Insurgent - You better watch your back, biatch, because when you least expect it you’ll find some crazy postdoc humping your leg. I know where you live, after all. The OFW ain’t so large, and with my mafia connections at the house of flavor…you better just grow eyes on the back of your head.


  21. Mandrake, it is possible that she has not had the felicity of learning Photoshop from the U of M art school. Honestly, I’m not sure how anyone could ever operate the program without it.

    “OK guys, this is the BURN tool. I know it looks like a hand, but that’s what it is. I know this is hard for you guys, but just try and follow along.”

    /14 students immediately close Photoshop and begin mucking around online

    /2 students painstakingly take notes


  22. Naw, I did find funny in that girl’s website, Mandrake. But I did have to step up and defend my under-graduateness, and the fact that I don’t relate to a quarter of the shit that undergrads are blamed for. Had to speak my piece, dudes. No big deal…


  23. Man, Arab guy, that Hezbollah shit doesn’t look scary— it looks like a fuckin’ soft drink. They need to ditch the yellow (I understand the green) and toss in a black field (not red, the natural contrast, because then they’d be the Santa Brigade), turn the angle up on the rifle (full bleed would make it more monumental) and lose the goofy-ass globe— it looks like cover art from a 1971 Worldbook Encyclopedia. I mean, hell, even the former Burmese Army of God (with the chainsmoking 12-year-old) would laugh at that shit.
    Jesus, you’d think that a quasi-statist militia would want to look a little more established and a little less like an ironic hipster t-shirt.
    Now, I will give the Zapatistas and Sandanistas mad props for their incorporation of grafitti into their propoganda, but they were always too artsy to have a real, strong uniform design concept. Which is why the Sandanistas lost to the Contras.
    QED.


  24. Oh, and the photo program at U-M is bullshit (as is most of the “reforms” that Brian Rogers has brought. The same ones they’ve painstakenly undone at Carnegie).


  25. js, you wanna see a scary ass logo, check out Office of Information Awareness (fomer Admiral Poindexter’s pet project in the Bush Jr. Pentagon before he was found out and had to disband). Now THAT was scary.

    Mandrake if you hump my leg it will force me to activate your shock collar, again.


  26. This? No, that’s gotta be a hoax, right? They were seriously like, “Yeah, let’s use that all-seeing Masonic symbol to view the globe. That’ll make people feel safer!”
    What, was Winston Smith’s wallscreen too hard to render?


  27. Nope, that was the one. Their Orwellian tendencies border on the absurd.


  28. On another note, if you like Soviet era propaganda art, I have an excellent original poster (given to me by my ancient Latvian neighbor when I was in college) that advertises the Red Hand and the Five Year Plan. It features a capitalist pig with a diamond cravat and top hat poo-pooing the concept as fantasy and in the next frame his top hat is all wrinkled and he has turned green as triumphant symbols of USSR industry loom in the background.


  29. Yeah js, I’m not a photography major so quite frankly I couldn’t give a crap, but a lot of people are ripshit about the whole ‘we’ve gone entirely over to digital, there shall be wet photography no more’ thing.

    As for the rest of the new art school curriculum… oh boy. Let’s just say that there isn’t room in this comment box to contain the amount of ranting I can do on that subject.


  30. Nobody does wet anymore around here. You have to go to Oakland Community College to learn how to use wet color film processing (which blows, because the point of shooting film is printing it yourself, and digital looks nothing like real film).


  31. DEATH TO THE REVISIONISTS!!!


  32. Mandrake, don’t you have work to do?


  33. Alex(andra) -

    Work is dumb.


  34. To the good Dr:

    “she is one of the geniuses that go to the University of Michigan.”

    This place really never ceases to amaze me. My dad and I were listening to this horrible conversation of these four girls behind us at the hockey game… I know it’s a hockey game, but it was bad even for that. My dad just turned to me, said “Athens of the East, remember” and went back to watching Score-O (sold out version).

    By the way, shameless plug, if you want a oldschool darkroom, there’s one at Lloyd Hall, and I run it (ooh, look, there goes my anonymity). It’s literally in-a-converted-closet, but cheap as hell to join and the more people in, the more likely we get a better space. You’re welcome to join if you have any UM affiliation, student, staff, whateva.

    Photoclub@umich.edu for info and all that goodness. Somehow that email deleted itself, but I grabbed the name before the East Quad kids noticed… and it should go to me.


  35. Jen- While that might do some people some good (there are also darkrooms all throughout West Quad that just need chemicals), the darkroom stuff that I need is for color film. I can do my own b&w at home or at my mom’s house (mostly because she teaches photo at U-M and has the full enlarger setup at her place. I can’t really print at mine, though I can develop).


  36. Thanks Jen - you’ll be hearing from me. Mandrake


  37. js-

    Markley used to have a huge setup, color and black and white, over three rooms. They tore it down for a janitor’s lounge. I have all the equipment, rather, what I could salvage. So in theory, yes, we could do a color darkroom. However, there’s no space and I’m not well versed in it.

    All the dorms, probably, have some darkroom equipment lurking around. I think they’re slowly moving it off. Markley’s was in three huge… I don’t know how to put this, um, “a bucket on wheels that could fit five people comfortably”. The stuff looked like it was just thrown in there. Pathetic, honestly.

    At any rate, most dorms don’t bother finding someone to manage it. When I was at Bursley, they had equipment, I had chemicals - but due to liability or some nonsense, I couldn’t use the enlarger. LHSP runs the darkroom I work at, and when I found it my freshman year after being turned away at Bursley and East Quad (only for residents!) and the Art School (even though I had plenty of experience, they made it hard enough for me to get into Photo II to the point where I gave up)… well, I was quite the happy girl.

    Dr-

    Sounds good!


  38. Well, Jen, I’ll talk to my mom then, as I believe she knows how to set up a color darkroom…


  39. Hey now, ladies. Why all the hate on this weblog? I am just a girl looking for a lost coat button so as I can sew it on and actually be able to button my coat up again. It is not the kind of button I can get a reasonable match for at Meijer. I do not see as how that indicates that I need to “get a life” or even that I am expecting communism to have some kind of triumphant return, with Lenin flying down from the heavens and punching all the top hat-wearing capitalists in their fat, stupid faces.

    I own a Soviet military greatcoat because said coat is fucking sweet (also classier and probably warmer than DrMandrake’s THE NORTH FACE gear). No other reason.

    Just thought I would offer clarifications and corrections where necessary. Many thanks to the Ann Arbor Is Overrated weblog for advertising my cause (on the internet).

    Love and smoochies,
    Singing Circus Dog
    XOXOXOXOXOXO


  40. Singing circus dog - Will you hump my leg?

    By the way, I’m more of a J Crew kind of guy.


  41. Apologies, SCD–I do tend to fly off the handle about that sort of thing (maybe I should be living somewhere else… and once I get the lolly, I will).