Just when you thought it would be impossible for The Stranger to squeeze another few thousand words out of the hippies and hoboes of the Occupy movement, the writers (such as they are) manage to heave up one more wretched collection of pieces intended to cash in on the urban tent-erecting fad before it completely fizzles out. This week's feature—and I use the word entirely untethered, as it is technically impossible to feature something that has no substance at all—is a guide to the state capital for the tiny band of rocket-scientist occupiers who have decided to harass their own elected officials to the point where the necessary work of legislating cannot be carried out. Geniuses, they.
Accordingly, their intellectual equals on The Stranger staff pen these (cowardly, uncredited) pieces with utter incompetence, accompanied by the bemused, belittling tone that always floats to the surface when they take it upon themselves to grace a part of the world that is not Capitol Hill with their presence. So we have work that is too smug for its intended audience of earnest yet pointless protesters, and too self-involved to function as a guide to the city it purports to cover. In a word: useless.
Elsewhere, we have another pathetic attempt by CIENNA MADRID to milk the brittle roots of her family tree for comedy. Miss Madrid no doubt intends for us to laugh at the pack of alcoholics and ne'er-do-wells from which she descends, but the reader can only gape in slack-jawed horror as she mocks her own family—her flesh and blood!—for some vaguely holiday-themed yuks. There is nothing funny here, only a desperate plea for help from a woman whose DNA has betrayed her from the very moment of conception.
BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT pens an overheated ode to a restaurant located—surprise, surprise!—on Capitol Hill. Miss Clement has apparently contracted an ailment I call Mudede's disease, the symptoms of which include idiotic philosophizing and pseudo-intellectualizing—for no reason at all, she proffers a quote from hippie poet Rainer Maria Rilke about terror, then assures us: "There's no terror at Altura, but there is an almost intimidating level of transcendence."
Fascinating! Thank heaven there is no terror at a restaurant! I was highly concerned about what might lurk beneath my sirloin. Further, I had no idea that the mere fact of transcendence—one thing being ranked in importance above another—could be intimidating. But do tell me, Miss Clement: How is the food? Nobody reads restaurant reviews for displays of codswallop and frippery; one reads them to ascertain whether one's hunger will be satiated in a satisfactory manner. All that I can safely assume after reading Miss Clement's ornately decorated drivel is that she owns a book of quotations. This publication must be stopped before Mudede's disease spreads even further into the staff and, from there, into the general populace.
