There are few things I enjoy more than music. In fact, there is no greater balm on this dreaded day of the week when I must provide my critical overview of this slimy periodical than the pop and hiss of a record on my phonograph. Often I will calm my bursitis with the soothing sounds of polka maestro Harold Loeffelmacher, preferably from the time when he was making music with his compatriots the Six Fat Dutchmen. On those days when I am especially beleaguered by some even-more-illiterate-than-usual Stranger essay or another, I will redouble my efforts to sooth myself by bringing out the wax cylinders of my youth. Their sound quality has never been improved upon.

So foolishly I thought that I could perhaps find some semblance of comfort in ERIC GRANDY's feature this week, about a Popular Music Conference at that eyesore of a "museum" that hoboes and scalawags refer to as "The Experience Music Project." (Never mind that those words are completely meaningless when juxtaposed in that order—I still cannot move beyond the bitter truth that my old friend Frank Lloyd Wright would crumple in tears if he ever saw the exterior of that monstrous building.) Though the music discussed at this conference is described as "popular," I have never heard of any of these musicians—indeed, some of the nomenclatures are better suited for circus performers or carny freaks—and to hear Mr. Grandy tell it, polka music was never once discussed. Surely that cannot be. The fault no doubt lies with Mr. Grandy, who most likely was refused entry to the conference in question, instead choosing to mingle with buskers and singing prostitutes and other grotesques outside the gates of Seattle Center, then reporting back on his experiences drinking bathtub gin with these limbless freaks as though they somehow were the conference.

We turn our ears away from that wastrel's caterwauling only to find JONAH SPANGENTHAL-LEE, in the "news" section, giggling at an alleged pervert who has been discovered in the midst of our thespian community. Mr. Spangenthal-Lee, who apparently has never met a deviant who didn't inspire a thousand-word love letter, clearly takes great joy wallowing in the sordid filth of unspeakable criminal allegations. I shall not give him the pleasure of sinking down to his level; instead, I will close my eyes and once more turn away.

Alas, the problem with recoiling in disgust from one section of this smarmy publication is that you are likely to avert your eyes onto something even more unspeakably hideous. Case in point: DOMINIC HOLDEN scribbles a vile hate letter to the good and decent Christians who are trying to protect the sacred bonds of opposite matrimony from the nefarious clutches of homosexuals. Only in a publication that considers DAN SAVAGE's parade of human shame (which he refers to as an "advice column") as the north on its moral compass would these sorts of monstrous acts go unpunished.