Gird your eyeballs, don your rubber gloves, or, better yet, run to your nearest incinerator and throw this wad of trash directly inside. Really, the important thing is to in some way or another protect yourselves this week, because within these pages lies one of the most poisonous of The Stranger's annual offerings, the SIFF Guide. In which wayward-teen-cum-film-editor LINDY WEST sleeps through hundreds of iterations of the same liberal claptrap and then, in all capital letters and curse words, pronounces them cinematic successes of the first order (unless they are deemed exhibits of what she—of all people—terms bad taste, in which case she will, also in all-caps, denounce them as crimes against humanity that must be publicly stomped into bloody pulps).

What is going on here is, once again, the regrettable promotion of something that should instead be completely ignored or, preferably, brought up on treason charges. My friends, there is nothing wrong with American cinema that more productions like The Guns of Navarone cannot fix, and we certainly do not need some sort of "Seattle International Film Festival" taking over this city every spring to tell us what should be run through our celluloid projectors. Nor do we appreciate someone like Miss West calling attention to such endeavors just so that she can get a free pass to the "afterparty"—as if her entire waking (and sleeping) existence is not already lived in an alarming after-the-party state.

I have found that sometimes one can simply reach into the center of The Stranger, extract the most offending pages, and be left with this page, the front cover, the back cover, the easily ignored Savage Love, and some indecipherable comic strips. If you are capable of performing that operation, do so at once (or recall my words about the incinerator).

But if you insist, against all wise advice, on proceeding further, then I grudgingly recommend that you note the worthless piece by CIENNA MADRID and DOMINIC HOLDEN about whom they think the new Seattle police chief should be. (Note it simply so you can know what an illegal immigrant and a homeless drug addict think and, naturally, take the opposite position.) I also recommend the work of JEN GRAVES, merely as another data point in what I consider to be our ongoing study of her bold use of random word generation in the creation of her articles. (I have not yet decided whether to applaud this style as a potential cost-saving measure or to punish it as insubordination—"merits further study" is my official position as of now.) And, finally, though I would not say the words "ERICA GRANDY" and "genius" should necessarily be shoved together as they are in this issue, I am always willing to scan over her latest offerings, both to remind myself what a real woman looks like after being visually assaulted by PAUL CONSTANT's ghastly column picture, and also to get some idea of where Miss Grandy and I might have the Scotch she has assented to if, in her words, "we ever run into each other at a club or something."

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