A Critical Overview of The Stranger

We’re in our editorial meeting from 9 to 11 a.m., so we’ll be observing Slog silence, but look—we made an entire paper’s worth of stuff for you! Here’s what Birch has to say.

I was just informed that, due to various “boring” Labor Day—related scheduling mishaps, CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE’s feature is unavailable for my review before press time. I’m sure the problem has less to do with scheduling mishaps and more to do with authorial inebriation. I also suspect that Mr. Frizzelle’s delicate sense of self-worth would be unable to withstand a surely withering critical analysis. However, as this is The Stranger, and as Charles Mudede has already set a scurrilous precedent for reviewing work he has not seen, I will follow suit, and pre-review Mr. Frizzelle’s feature based upon the little I know of it.

Due to the unfortunate accident of his birth, Mr. Frizzelle has come to believe that the attacks of September 11, 2001, concern him and him alone. He has conjointly exhibited an unhealthy preoccupation with his brother, who joined the army to fight for the United States in the war on terror. In this feature, Mr. Frizzelle will attempt to tie this solipsistic coincidence to this quotidian fact to create something resembling coherence. (The fact of the enlistment is, indeed, quotidian, though brave on his brother’s part; Freud would have much to say about a homosexual from a military family dithering at such great length on the topic of his manly, honorable sibling.) The piece will be a failure, of course: To turn the worst attacks ever to take place on American soil into a memoir of a West Coast cultural dilettante, known drug user, and leader of the country’s most un-American editorial staff is sheer arrogance. Worse still, as a piece of writing, it will be an incoherent puddle of drivel which, even in the center of the lake of dross known as The Stranger, will appear especially myopic and forgettable—exactly the opposite of the piece Mr. Frizzelle undoubtedly set out to write.

On to things that were available for me to peruse: The arts section has undergone a redesign that is no doubt intended to disguise the fading relevance and growing inattention of The Stranger‘s arts staff by combining all the stories into a single “well.” The end result is that all the arts pieces—JEN GRAVES, incoherent as usual, on a road race that failed to garner the proper permits; bitchy gossip queen BRENDAN KILEY attempting to make a theater conference interesting by sexing up the events with promises of a conflict that never pan out; and the stone-dumb cretinous boob who shills under the obvious pseudonym of PAUL CONSTANT inadvertently revealing an unhealthy sexual fetish for tall women in the guise of a “review” of a book I am fairly certain he never read—are in one giant, forgettable lump that is even more easily dismissed than the stand-alone sections of the past. For this, we may be slightly grateful.

Elsewhere, briefly: NEWS: Apparently, the news team took the week off and decided to fill space with treacle… CHOW: Much hand-wringing about the march of capitalist progress in our city, with no sign of an actual restaurant review; didn’t finish… FILM: Didn’t read… MUSIC: Didn’t read… SAVAGE LOVE: Still, always, too gay. Isn’t Mr. Savage nearing retirement age?